IEEE’s Spectrum has published an article in defense of patent trolls. Mike Masnick has a good critique of the article here. But I wanted to point out something that I think the article gets right (sort of):
The pejorative label [“patent troll”] itself does harm. Legal decisions, and more notably settlements, in patent cases are affected by the media’s portrayal of the parties. If a company is slapped with a disparaging label by the media and that labeling affects business, sales, cooperative arrangements, and the company’s stock, there is an incentive to settle or withdraw from a litigation that may be the impetus for the label. Limiting or restricting patent protection only to that which is “commercialized” thus inhibits the progress of science. Such inhibition contradicts the principles of the patent system established by the U.S. Constitution.
Against Monopoly points to a YouTube video tracking some history of the “Amen Brother” beat and sampling generally.
The video reminded me again of the upwelling of creativity that occured in the late 80’s before sampling came on the the radar screen of copyright holders.
“Amen Brother” is important, of course, but there are many other beats that contend for top honors. I went looking for James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” beat and came across this list of beats, calling itself “The 30 Greatest Hip Hop Drum Breaks & Samples of All Time.” Well, I’m not so sure, if it doesn’t have Funky Drummer, but listening to the beats connotes the dozens of songs that succeeded them. It’s an exciting window into our culture.
The point? Creative works are not just outputs of creative people – they’re also very much inputs to new creative works, a point made well by Greg Lastowka and Dan Hunter in their Cato Policy Analysis Amateur-to-Amateur: The Rise of a New Creative Culture.
I’m putting the wraps on a big paper on the dangers of mandating age verification for social networking websites. One of the questions I ask in the study is exactly how broadly “social networking sites” will be defined for purposes of regulation? Will chat rooms, hobbyist sites, listservs, instant messaging, video sharing sites, online marketplaces or online multiplayer gaming sites qualify? If so, how will they be policed and how burdensome will age-verification mandates become for smaller sites? Finally, does the government currently have the resources to engage in such policing activities since almost all websites now have a social networking component? I explore these and other questions in my paper.
But now I have another type of site to add to list, and not one that I originally gave much consideration to: online newspapers. Over the weekend, the USA Today relaunched its website, not only to freshen up its look, but also to fundamentally change the ways the site works. According to the editors, the new features of the site will give readers the ability to:
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, law professor Sabrina Safrin is guest blogging about the development of intellectual property law, particularly patents, in light of patent-holder behavior. Her forthcoming law review article
argues that property rights evolve in reaction to each other. The creation of property rights for some engenders the demand for related property rights by others. These demands and resulting recognition of property rights may have little to do with the value of the resource in question or efficiency concerns.
Interesting idea, sort of a game-theoretic explanation for the recent explosion of patents, with an embedded suggestion that things are out of whack. Here’s Eugene’s introduction of her and her first post.
In case you missed it, Paul Kouroupas left a good comment following up on Thursday’s post:
What you (and others) are missing is an appreciation for the havoc the Bell Companies can wreak with regulation. Look at the experience of the VoIP providers. They launched an innovative product that competes well with Bell Company service. Just as they started gaining traction and attracting investment capital the Bell Companies claimed VoIP traffic should be subject to “access charges”. Most industry observers would tell you their argument was specious at best, but they made it anyway because it triggered a regulatory process that continues to this day and leaves a black cloud hanging over VoIP services. This cloud dampens investment enthusiasm and raises the costs of VoIP providers.
As Doug Lay notes, Jimbo Wales has asked Wikipedia user Essjay to step down. He says he didn’t know he was using his fake credentials in content disputes until yesterday.
Nick Carr acknowledges this development and then proceeds to sneeringly compare contributing to Wikipedia to playing Dungeons and Dragons:
In the byzantine world of Wikipedia, with its arcane language, titles, and rules and its multitude of clans, Essjay wore the robes of a wizard. He was allowed to stand beside – and to serve – Jimbo the White. Together, they would bring “knowledge” to the unenlightened masses. But then the Wizard Essjay tried to slip through the gates of the real. Now the game is up.
I don’t understand why “knowledge” is in scare quotes here. Wikipedia really does make knowledge available to the masses in a way that it’s never been available before. They’re performing a valuable public service for which we should all be grateful. Yet inexplicably, he seems to delight in mocking them. (It’s a little bit ambiguous, but in context he seems to be talking about all Wikipedians, not just Essjay.) I wonder if he’ll next do a series of posts about how people who volunteer in public libraries are losers who can’t get laid.
One more point on the comparison of newspapers and blogs. I definitely think this is backwards:
The other side of the problem can happen with the bloggers doing fact gathering that Lee mentions: their main incentive to be fair and balanced is reputation, but how do you track the reputations of millions of amateur reporters in the field around the world?
I think this is a common problem when thinking about peer-produced institutions like the blogosphere. From the outside, they look totally chaotic, and therefore totally anarchic and unreliable. But the reality is quite different. Yes, there are 10 million bloggers and no one could have even a cursory knowledge of all of them. But any given reader doesn’t read “the blogosphere.” They read 10-100 specific blogs. And they tend to read the same blogs, day in and day out, for months or even years. So every blog with a non-trivial readership does have a significant number of people tracking its reputation.
Here is an interesting critique of the argument I made yesterday concerning blogs and newspapers. Blogger “False Data” suggests two advantages that newspapers have over blogs:
One point Kuttner seems to make, with which I agree, is that depth is expensive. Most of what I write here is opinion, because opinion is cheap. You won’t find many really in-depth articles because I don’t have the time to research them. If you paid me a salary to do it full time, that might change, but as it is I–like many bloggers–am sharply limited in how much time I can devote to this project. While Lee bridles at the term “amateur,” I am exactly that: blogging doesn’t put food on my dinner table, so I have to budget my time accordingly.
Two other points Kuttner raises are civic-mindedness and, implicitly, journalistic integrity. Journalists take classes on journalistic integrity, though there are some cases where I have to wonder whether they’re universally effective. Blogging is a new enough medium, run by people who generally lack journalist training, that it’s still grappling with issues like disclosure. For example, Joel Spolsky writes about being approached to do product reviews and being allowed to keep the product, raising a potential conflict of interest. It’s possible a popular blog could support its author full-time, but that author may quickly find herself at sea and losing credibility without a commitment to integrity, full disclosure, and balance. Similarly, without that commitment, civic-mindedness can quickly become punditry and nothing more. The other side of the problem can happen with the bloggers doing fact gathering that Lee mentions: their main incentive to be fair and balanced is reputation, but how do you track the reputations of millions of amateur reporters in the field around the world?
Seth calls me to task for failing to condemn Jordan’s actions. So just to be clear, I think Jordan deserves condemnation for lying about his credentials. But given that Wikipedia has never claimed to vouch for the credibility of its contributors, I don’t see why Jordan’s actions (or Jimmy Wales’s refusal to condemn them) reflect poorly on Wikipedia, as opposed to just reflecting poorly on Jordan personally.
I think it’s important to keep in mind a fundamental difference between Wikipedia and more traditional reference works. What we really care about is the accuracy of the content. That is: if I open a random page, is the information there more likely to be accurate than the comparable information in other reference works?
With a traditional encyclopedia like Britannica, the credibility of the people who edited the encyclopedia is an important factor in judging the likelihood that the content is accurate, because we’re relying on the judgment and expertise of those. But for Wikipedia, the credibility of any one person—including Jimmy Wales—is almost completely irrelevant, because Wikipedia’s editing process does not rely on any individual’s judgment or expertise.
So even if some of the people who run Wikipedia are liars, that isn’t relevant in judging its reliability as a reference work, because Wikipedia doesn’t ask us to take anything its says on trust.
Update: Luis points out this comment, which changes my perspective a little bit. It appears that Jordan has not only been misrepresenting himself and his credentials, but has been using his supposed expertise to bolster his position in debates over content on the site. I think it does raise more serious questions about the robustness of Wikipedia’s peer production model if people are allowed to continue in positions of authority even after they’re demonstrated to have misused that authority–especially when they pointedly refuse to give a sincere apology.
On the other hand, as Luis notes, there appears to be considerable push-back from other Wikipedians. It will be interesting to see if other users force Wales’ hand in demoting Jordan. If that doesn’t happen, then I think you can make a plausible case that this reflects a serious problem with the site’s governance structure, if one guy has the power to keep people in positions of authority over the objections of the rest of the community.
Via Ezra, Robert Kuttner has a thorough look at the challenges faced by newspapers as they make the transition to the web. The article is packed with interesting information about the economics of print and online journalism, and is worth reading in full.
However, I found the article’s overall thesis kind of puzzling. Here are his contrasting scenarios:
As succeeding generations grow up with the Web and lose the habit of reading print, it seems improbable that newspapers can survive with a cost structure at least 50 percent higher than their nimbler and cheaper Internet competitors. (“No trucks, no trees,” says the former Boston Globe publisher Ben Taylor.) The dire future predicted by the now-classic video, EPIC 2014, in which Google, Amazon, and an army of amateurs eventually drive out even The New York Times, begins to feel like a real risk.
Yet a far more hopeful picture is emerging. In this scenario the mainstream press, though late to the party, figures out how to make serious money from the Internet, uses the Web to enrich traditional journalistic forms, and retains its professionalism—along with a readership that is part print, part Web. Newspapers stay alive as hybrids. The culture and civic mission of daily print journalism endure.
Aside from the semi-pejorative use of “amateur” and “professionalism,” I don’t understand why we’re supposed to consider the first future “dire” and the second one “hopeful.” The premise seems to be that in-depth, civic-minded journalism is something that everybody needs but but no one wants to pay for, and so therefore we need large, bureaucratic organizations like the New York Times to subsidize these activities out of a sense of corporate noblesse oblige.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.