22nd-century scholars are going to find the history of AT&T around the turn of the 21st century absolutely baffling, on par with British schoolchildren having to keep track of Henry VIII’s wives. I’m reading a paper from 2001, and I did a double-take when it talked about AT&T and Time Warner as the major players in the cable industry. Then I remembered that this was the post-breakup, pre-spinoff, pre-merger AT&T–the one that was in the cable and long-distance markets. Which is basically a completely different company from the AT&T that’s now in the local telephone, DSL, and rent-seeking markets. I’m sure in another 20 years there will be a totally different company called AT&T that will be in charge of issuing me my REAL ID card and operating the terrorist surveillance cameras on every street corner.
Don Marti has a great podcast where he interviews a Linux Foundation executive on the patent troll question. Don asks a question that clearly caught the guy by surprise: do efforts to find patent prior art prior to litigation help the patent trolls by making it more likely that the trolls’ remaining patents will stand up in court? The answer was basically that invalidating bad patents will reduce the total number of patents, which will in turn reduce the number of opportunities for patent trolling.
Don seemed skeptical of this response, I have to say I share his skepticism. The number of software patents in the wild is now so astronomical that it’s simply not going to be feasible to invalidate all of them on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, there’s a more fundamental issue here: there is not, on the one hand, “bad” software patents that need to be invalidated and “good” software patents that need to be enforced. Software patents are just a bad idea, even when they’re “good” in the sense that they don’t have obvious prior art. A “good” software patents can be used for trolling purposes just as easily as a “bad” one, with effects that could be just as devastating to the software industry. Hence, even if the Linux Foundation could find every software patent with prior art and get them invalidated, that wouldn’t eliminate the patent trolling problem, it would just cause the trolls to shift their focus to the remaining patents in their portfolios, with a correspondingly greater confidence that they’ll prevail in court.
The solution to the patent trolling problem in the software industry is for the Supreme Court or Congress to overrule the Federal Circuit’s misguided decision to expand patents to the software industry. There are now so many software patents on the books that striking down a few bad patents just won’t make any difference. You can troll with a half-dozen patents almost as easily as you can with a dozen. The Linux World exec was a little bit wishy-washy on this point, first stating vaguely that “meaningful patent reform” was needed, and then conceding when pressed that banning software patents was probably a good idea. I imagine one of the reasons the Linux Foundation hasn’t come out officially against software patents is that its board includes several companies with substantial software patent portfolios of their own. They no doubt would like to find a way to continue collecting royalties for their own patents while giving them new defenses against trolls.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing today on “E-Government 2.0: Improving Innovation, Collaboration, and Access.” Written testimony from the witnesses is available here. Because the Senate doesn’t make available the audio or video of hearings on their own sites, I made sure to capture it and it’s available here as an MP3 for your listening pleasure.
The impetus for the hearing is the reauthorization bill for the E-Government Act that, as I wrote about earlier, includes new requirements on federal websites that would make them more easily indexed by commercial search engines such as Google. Joe Lieberman chaired the hearing and witnesses were Karen Evans, Administrator of the Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology a OMB, John Needham of Google, Ari Schwartz of CDT, and a clean-shaven Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. Here are some highlights from the hearing:
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Do U.S. Internet companies "betray free speech"? A recent New York Times editorial believes so, and calls out Yahoo in particular for having a "gallingly backward understanding of the value of free expression." But the editorial missed the point, as my colleague Steve DelBianco spelled out in a letter-to-the-editor this past weekend:
Leading Internet companies want to do everything possible to
protect their customers, and several are working with human rights advocates to
develop ways to more effectively push back on the demands of repressive
regimes.
Despite your blithe assertion, however, these companies need
to abide by the laws of the land. These companies worry not only about
customers going to jail but also their own employees. For example, the head of
eBay India was arrested when a user posted an objectionable video to an eBay site.
The real question is as Steve asks: In a China
with no American content or online services, will the goals of free speech and
civil rights be better served? The answer should be an obvious and emphatic "No!"
We really don’t want our companies to get up and leave. Rather, we need a "playbook" of realistic
tactics online companies can use to effectively push back on government
demands for removing content or revealing user information.
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Yesterday was “pretend to be a time traveler” day. I particularly like this suggestion, from the distopian future section:
Take some trinket with you (it can be anything really), hand it to some stranger, along with a phone number and say “In thirty years dial this number. You’ll know what to do after that.” Then slip away.
Time travel hypotheticals, along with teleportation, mindreading, and other such exploits are great for thought experiments involving rights theory in a classical liberal tradition. Two treatments of thought: In one, new abilities that create potential new types of conflicts or that upset existing institutions or rule arrangements are best left alone, dealt with by contract; if the old rules don’t cover ’em, it’s inconsistent with freedom to impose any new ones. In another, one takes a step back, more or less leaves things alone, but if conflicts arising in a certain area seem to be creating systemic problems with long-run consequences, try some new rules and institutional arrangements and see how it goes. Or eventually let settled and customary expectations evolve into the default rules. Rather like IP today. Or infanticide in past centuries. Fun to be had by all.
Here’s a very appealing Web video that has enough doom ‘n’ gloom to make your head explode.
It’s interesting to see the anti-everything (-trade, -globalization, -consumerism, etc.) worldview summarized so neatly. I would be very unhappy if that was my ideology. The video’s host obviously has not read (or has dismissed) Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource – to say nothing of Austrian economics.
There are legitimate concerns expresed in the video – with negative externalities in third world countries, for example. But, um, hiring workers in the third world is not a negative externality. And there’s no acknowledgement of how the rule of law and property rights in those countries would empower and enrich people there.
Still, this is good stuff to consider. I could do without giving or getting all that junque at Christmastime.
Visitors to the United States are now being required to share 10 fingerprints on entering the country. Here’s the text of a release the DHS is sending around. (I’ll link to it when I find it online.)
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now collecting additional fingerprints from international visitors arriving at Washington Dulles International Airport (Dulles). The change is part of the department’s upgrade from two- to 10-fingerprint collection in order to enhance security and fingerprint matching accuracy.
“Anyone who’s watched the news or seen crimes solved on television shows can appreciate the power of biometrics,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “They help the legitimate traveler proceed more quickly while protecting their identity and enable our frontline personnel to focus even greater attention on potential security risks. Biometrics tell the story that the unknown terrorist tries to conceal, and it causes them to question whether they’ve ever left a print behind.”
I wonder how visitors from other countries feel being asked to submit fingerprints and go through biometric background checks just to come here and visit. I’m not sure we’re the beacon of liberty we used to be.
I blogged about Greenpeace’s quarterly report on Green-Tech last week, noting that the way they display their data is manipulative, but turns out the data itself is deeply flawed.
John Timmer writes at ArsTechnica on just how poorly this quarterly report is researched:
The research in general appears lazy. Nintendo’s failing grade appears to be based entirely on this entry in the corporate FAQ, which briefly summarizes some of the steps the company has taken to protect the environment. Anything that’s not covered there is simply rated “No Information.” Similarly, all of the information on Microsoft originates from press materials and corporate statements on the company’s web site. Clearly, Greenpeace did not perform an exhaustive evaluation of chemical use through the manufacturing pipeline.
So, even if you think the shifting numbers on the graph aren’t misleading, it turns out that the whole study is pretty worthless. If an eco-friendly rating is based on cursory searches of the manufacturer’s own reports, then the best PR department wins, not the best practices. Greenpeace, along with many other environmental groups, refer to the all-PR approach to going green as”green washing.” Ironic that Greenpeace itself is now doing a bit of the scrubbing.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.