Via the Google Public Policy Blog, the Computer and Communications Industry Association has a study out finding that the “fair use economy” accounted for $4.6 trillion in revenues in 2006 (roughly one-sixth of total U.S. gross domestic product), it employed more than 17 million people, earning $1.2 trillion (one in eight U.S. workers).
This study should get the same scrutiny as studies put forward on the other side of the copyright equation, no? Go to work, study-parsers!
Update: Mike “Radar” Masnick published his take on this study 30 minutes before I invited him too! His conclusion – Mutual Assured Bogosity: “The next time anyone cites the bogus piracy numbers, they should at least be forced to acknowledge these numbers on the value of fair use as well as a counterweight. They may be bogus, but they’re equally bogus to the piracy numbers.”
What is the best way to promote the creation and adoption of new software and communications technologies? That was the weighty second panel of ACT‘s day-long innovation session at the Economic Forum 2007 in Krynica, Poland.
All panelists agreed that the future of software innovation is a mixed one – a combination of both open and proprietary licensing. According to, the panel’s moderator, ACT’s Chairman Mike Sax, we see mixed use today and we’ll see it tomorrow.
Petri Peltonen, (Director General, Technology Department, Ministry of Trade and Industry, Finland) emphasized that innovation performance is crucially dependent on strengthening investment in and the use of new technologies by both the public and private sectors. Information and Communication Technologies provide the backbone for the knowledge economy and account for around half of the productivity growth in modern economies.
As one the open source community’s chief advocates, Larry Rosen was on his game. He called the development of open source software the result of community-driven meritocracy. And in response to a question, he professed that he didn’t see problems with legislation that would mandate procurement preferences.
Should there be a limited or expansive role for government regulation and subsidies of ICT? Government shouldn’t be prescribing fixed mandates in such a dynamic industry, said Piotr Stryszowski, an economist at the OECD (who emphasized he was speaking on his and not his employer’s behalf). Piotr is helping conduct an important OECD study on the drivers for software innovation.
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There are two related articles in today’s papers that – one on technology and the other on yesterday’s Microsoft antitrust hearing. A New York Times article discusses thin client computing, a technological development that will provide new competition to traditional PCs and desktop software. And a Washington Post article describes how a group of six states and the District yesterday asked a judge to extend the terms of Microsoft’s antitrust settlement through 2012.
The more I read about the state AG request for continued oversight of the Microsoft antitrust consent decree, the more I’m convinced that they’re engaging in political grandstanding instead of sound legal principles.
Quoting from the Post:
Kollar-Kotelly said that its [the consent decree’s] effectiveness should not be measured by
Microsoft’s market share, because the 2002 decree did not specifically
set out to reduce Microsoft’s dominance. Its intent was to correct
Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices, she said.
Remember that in the U.S. monopolies are not per se illegal – just the illegal maintenance of a monopoly. But Microsoft’s desktop dominance is far from secure. Quoting from the Times:
The business strategy behind the thin-client push is different than it
was a decade ago. Today, thin computing is not part of an
anti-Microsoft crusade. The technology has “matured, by and large,
around delivering the Microsoft desktop experience remotely,” said Tad
Bodeman, the global director of Hewlett-Packard’s thin-client business.
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Last week I posted another installment in my ongoing series about the possibility of metering bandwidth in the future (“Why Not Meter Broadband Pipes?”) Make sure to read the comments to that post because the essay provoked an interesting discussion and some outstanding suggestions from our savvy TLF readers.
On a related note, Mark Desautels, Vice President of Wireless Internet Development at the CTIA (the wireless industry’s trade association) has an editorial in RCR Wireless News today entitled, “Paying for the Bandwidth We Consume.” Mark poses a question that I have raised in some of my posts on this issue:
Much is made of the fact that consumers prefer flat-rate pricing because they know what it is going to cost each month, and that is understandable. But it also creates (potentially) huge subsidies between users. My question is: If consumers were aware of the amount of the subsidies they might be paying, would they be as opposed to paying for the bandwidth they actually use as is generally believed?
That really is an interesting question and the guys over as DSL Reports point out that there are tools that users can download to help us answer that question. They are also running a poll right now asking people how much bandwidth they use per month.
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A few weeks ago, I outlined the amazing keynote address that Harvard University law professor Laurence H. Tribe delivered at PFF’s annual Aspen Summit. Now you can read it for yourself. PFF has just published the transcript of his speech, which was entitled, “Freedom of Speech and Press in the 21st Century: New Technology Meets Old Constitutionalism.”
Professor Tribe provides a 14-part indictment of new government proposals to regulate “excessively violent” content. But he also speaks more broadly about the importance of defending the First Amendment from attacks on many different platforms, and for many different types of content. Here’s one of my favorite passages from the concluding section of his remarks:
The broad lesson of this discussion of television violence is the centrality of the First Amendment’s opposition to having government as big brother regulate who may provide what information content to whom, whether or not for a price. The large problem that this exposes is that especially in a post-9/11 world, where grownups understandably fear for themselves and for their children and worry about the brave new world of online cyber reality that their kids can navigate more fluently than they can, it is enormously tempting to forget or to subordinate the vital principles of constitutional liberty. Even if, after years of litigation and expenditure, the First Amendment prevails, it can be worn down dramatically by having to wage that fight over and over and over.
Amen to that. And that, in a nutshell, describes what much of my research agenda at PFF has been focused on. It is a pleasure to add Prof. Tribe’s address to our growing body of research on the sanctity of freedom of speech and centrality of the First Amendment to our democratic republic as we continue “to wage that fight over and over and over.”
Brian Deagon’s August 6, 2007 article in Investor’s Business Daily, August 6, 2007, “Technology Doomed To Failure, Some Critics Say,” includes some remarks about filtering worth thinking about. The assurance of the quoted critics is convincing, but they seem to be missing a good part of the picture.
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Today Judge Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge in charge of quarterly reviews of Microsoft’s consent decree compliance will hold a conference in Washington, DC. But remove any visual images you have of a court, with wood paneling and expensive suits – instead, thanks to State AGs and Google, this review process is beginning to look like a three-ring circus.
A new ACT paper describes the changes in the PC software market and why it’s appropriate to let the Consent Decree expire. Microsoft’s largest competitors are now simply using the consent decree process as a way to trip up the company at every turn. Competitors like Google, Symantec, and Adobe have all used the system to file nuisance complaints that have slowed Microsoft’s ability to deliver new features.
It’s time for this review process to end, because this antitrust case is sooooo 1990s.
Innovation and competition—driven by applications that harness the power of the latest technologies—continue to transform the landscape of the software industry. The on-demand model has risen to challenge thick-client desktops from Microsoft, Apple, and Linux.
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Sometimes it takes traveling abroad to remind me of the many good qualities of the U.S, including a wide variety of restaurants, fixed shower heads, and ESPN. But seriously, there is one feature of the U.S. that is the envy of the world – innovativeness.
I’m here at the Economic Forum in Krynica, Poland and it’s very obvious that Europeans see red, white and blue when they think of innovation. And that’s because when it comes to innovation, the world is not flat in the Thomas Friedman sense. There are geographic spikes of innovation – and world leaders all want to erect a Silicon Valley in their nation. As Steve DelBianco and I have written about in our paper on innovation, in today’s global economy, innovation is a key component to economic growth and societal prosperity.
But how does innovation work, and why do some nations like the U.S. and Japan excel at creating innovative products and services? That was the topic of ACT’s first panel (out of four) here at the Krynica economic forum, “Localizing the Lisbon Strategy – How to Cultivate Innovation Ecosystems.” The Lisbon Strategy is the European Union’s innovation strategy to increase European jobs and economic growth.
Olaf Gersemann (Editor at Financial Times Deutschland and author of Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality) moderated the panel. He painted a bleak portrait of European competitiveness. Purchasing power parity, unemployment, productivity growth, R&D investment are all below U.S. levels.
Waldemar Ingdahl (President of a Swedish think tank) echoed Olaf’s pessimism, and said that the EU would need an 8% growth rate over 20+ years to catch up to the U.S. He also mentioned that the EU could do a better job of educating small and medium enterprises (SMEs) about intellectual property and bemoaned the European Commission’s competition policy, which he described as focusing too much on competitor welfare at the expense of consumers.
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.