We’ve talked about muni wi-fi problems here before. (Here, here, here, and here). Here’s another one to add to the list. The Chicago Tribune reports today that:
Chicago is curtailing its digital dreams, deciding to back away from municipal Wi-Fi service after failing to reach agreement with either of two companies that sought to build a wireless Internet network in the city. The move comes as municipal broadband wireless projects around the country face difficulties, and EarthLink Inc., a major player in the field, is re-evaluating its future in municipal Wi-Fi.
And here’s the key line from the piece:
[T]echnology is advancing and the cost of online access for consumers is declining so dramatically that Chicago has other avenues to promote more use of the Internet. As a result, the Wi-Fi deal lost luster when negotiations bogged down, according to sources close to the matter.
In other words, markets are working.
I thought I’d continue the conversation Tim started a few days ago about utility trenching and libertarian property rights theory by starting a new post since this issue is quite interesting to me and I’d like to keep the conversation going.
In response to Tim’s essay I argued that: “Property rights are flexible at the margins… They have to be to ensure a well-functioning society,” and that… “Similar flexibility is necessary to ensure that various types of networks get built (sewage lines, sidewalks, gas and power lines, and even communications systems).” Thus, we allow occasional trenching in people’s yards to ensure that that happens.
In response, Tim says:
I’m having trouble seeing a principled difference between that and the “open access” regimes we libertarians criticized in the 1990s. The only difference I can see is that the open access regulations of the 1990s infringed on the property rights of the ILECs rather than the property rights of millions of homeowners. It’s not clear to me why one would be less objectionable than the other.
My response: There is a world of difference between a utility (or a city) digging up one’s yard, sidewalk, or street corner every once and awhile and the open access regimes of the 1990s and the present, which demand the full-time surrender / confiscation of private property to achieve the hubristic goals of economic central planners. The former (trenching) is a short-term inconvenience with significant long-term benefit. That latter (forced access regulation) gives rise to a massive regulatory regime that requires ongoing policy interventions and price controls. Forced access destroys the incentives to innovate and invest in new networks or network expansion. Trenching–and the momentary inconvenience is causes–does not. It allows for network expansion. Forced access regulation discourages it.
When we were both at Cato, Wayne Crews and I wrote an entire book about these issues entitled “What’s Yours Is Mine: Open Access and the Rise of Infrastructure Socialism.” We go into these issues in greater detail in that book.
Lately I’ve been writing about the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new First Sale Doctrine case, which will consider whether it’s copyright infringement to resell those “promo CDs” that record labels send to DJs, journalists, and others in the hopes of drumming up publicity. Universal Music says that such sales amount to copyright infringement, but EFF’s Fred Von Lohmann charges that UMG’s lawsuit runs afoul of the First Sale Doctrine.
Fred joins us for this week’s podcast along with Prof. Randy Picker of the University of Chicago to discuss the legal and policy implications of the case. In a wide-ranging discussion, they covered the differences between contract and copyright law, the implications for the software industry, and whether the GPL runs afoul of the First Sale Doctrine. TLFer Braden Cox also weighed in, and Adam Thierer hosted.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
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I agree with Jack Shafer about this:
Upon waking, I’m delighted to desack the morning papers, discard the never-read sections—classified, food, home, travel, real estate, health—and arrange the buffet before me. But even if all I’ve pre-read from the Web are the Page One headlines, the print stories don’t really pop out at me unless they’re packaged with a terrific photo I haven’t seen before. Horrible as it may sound, on many days the newsprint front page tastes of already chewed gum.
I’m not the average reader, but anecdotes convince me that the average reader is becoming more like me every day—reading tomorrow’s news today. This time-shift is as historically significant as the great migration of newspaper readers from afternoon to morning dailies, or the adoption of AM news radio by sequestered commuters. Where the newspaper was once considered the day’s complete news, it’s now just all-the-news-that-fits. The genuine news enthusiast trolls the AP wire, foreign news sites, and the usual aggregators for the biggest picture.
I think, however, that Shafer gives newspapers too much credit later in the piece:
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Ars reports on an especially egregious case of patent trolling:
The patent, titled “Automatic message interpretation and routing system,” is unsurprisingly general. It was filed in 1998 and awarded to a company called Brightware, Inc. in 2002, and it basically describes an autoresponder. “The method for automatically interpreting an electronic message may also include the step of retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source,” reads the patent.
Polaris accuses Google of “actively inducing infringement” on the patent and contributing to the infringement of others by implementing its own automatic e-mail responder within the company. Amazon, Borders, AOL, and all of the other named defendants are accused of the same. “As a result of these Defendants’ infringement of the ‘947 Patent, Polaris has suffered monetary damages in an amount not yet determined, and will continue to suffer damages in the future unless Defendants’ infringing activities are enjoined by this Court,” reads the complaint seen by Ars Technica.
This is ridiculous. Auto-responders have been a common feature of email systems for decades. Here is a Usenet message from 1985 that mentions Sendmail’s “vacation” feature, which provided that functionality. Here is anther guy in 1985 who didn’t have access to sendmail so he wrote his own auto-responder. Both of those programs perform the “step” of “retrieving one or more predetermined responses corresponding to the interpretation of the electronic message from a repository for automatic delivery to the source.”
Those took me 5 minutes to find. It looks like prior art to me (presumably you could find documentation from the relevant version of sendmail detailing its features if the descriptions in these postings are sufficient). So why isn’t there a quick and easy way for Google to get this patent invalidated (or at least the lawsuit dismissed) before thousands of dollars are wasted on lawyering?
I earlier promised some graphs to illustrate a parable about copyright’s future. I’d like to start, here, by offering a picture of the standard economic model of IP. (Attentive readers may recall that whereas other use “IP” for “intellectual property,” I use it to stand for “intellectual privilege“). See figure 1, below:
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Recently I’ve noticed an interesting tension in libertarian theory. As I’ve mentioned before, I just completed work on a new paper on eminent domain abuse in Missouri that will be published by the Show-Me Institute next month. The basic conclusion of my paper is that eminent domain should only be allowed for public use—that the government should have the power to take someone’s property (with compensation) to build a road or a courthouse, but not to build a Wal-Mart or a shopping mall. One of the interesting wrinkles to this issue is what to do about public utilities: railroads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, phone and cable services, etc. Like roads, these facilities are subject to serious holdout problems. And since the mid-19th century, the courts have held that takings for the construction of such infrastructure is a public use, provided that the railroad (or later other service) acted as a common carrier. As I understand it, for precisely this reason railroads were subject to certain common carrier requirements under the common law before the creation of the ICC.
That’s the tack we libertarians tend to take today. For example, here in Missouri I played a small role in drafting this proposed amendment to the Missouri constitution, which reads, in part, “property may be taken for transportation or utility facilities or transmission systems used by a railroad, regulated utility or rural electric cooperative.” When Adam wrote his magnum opus on the installation of FiOS in his neighborhood, he mentioned that Verizon came along and ripped up his yard not once but twice. He didn’t say for sure, but it sounds like they did it without getting his permission first. These comments suggest that the law gives Verizon permission to tear up peoples yards and even install new cabinet cases on their property without their permission. And I got the impression (Adam correct me if I’m wrong) that he wasn’t overly troubled by this invasion of his property rights.
But that brings me to my question: what does the “regulated” in “regulated public utility” mean? If in the ideal libertarian world telecom firms wouldn’t be subject to any regulations at all, how would we distinguish between those that are allowed to rip up Adam’s yard and those that are not? Should anyone who declares himself a public utility have the power to rip up anyone else’s yard? Or should no one be allowed to rip up Adam’s yard without permission?
Conversely, if some regulations are justified by the public use limitations, which regulations are they, and how do we distinguish good regulations from bad ones?
Why is the the Wall Street Journal my favorite paper in the world? Because right there in the middle of page A1 today is a story about the expanding market for Beer Pong equipment and contests! This is important stuff people! And just take a look at the sophisticated graphic they had one of their artists put together to explain the rules of Beer Pong. And there’s a video on the site also that was shot at a recent official Beer Pong tournament. Made me sentimental about my days at Indiana University in the late 80s where I was part of endless Beer Pong tourneys. And to think that now there’s an entire industry being build around this “sport!” God Bless America.
[Source: Wall Street Journal]
Sorry for the Wired-heavy morning, but they’ve had a lot of great stuff on electronic privacy and security lately. Check out this summary of the FBI’s eavesdropping network. This is the network the FBI built after Congress passed CALEA in 1994. The information came to light thanks to a FOIA request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.