Larry Lessig explains the difference between stealing a laptop and including an out-of-print book in a search engine. Yes, someone really did suggest that suggest those actions were equivalent. No, that person wasn’t very bright.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House subcommittee on telecommunications, wants the Federal Communications Commission to re-regulate “dedicated special access” services (the telephone services provided to businesses and institutions, as opposed to residential customers). He recently sent a letter to the five commissioners, which said:
My concern is that significant concentration in the special access market through mergers and bankruptcies, combined with the [FCC’s] deregulatory pricing regime, has resulted in higher prices and little competitive choice for special access connections. These are also the conclusions of a November 2006 Report by the General [sic] Accountability Office (“GAO”) ….
I respectfully request each of you to respond to me by close of business on June 11, 2007, as to whether you support or oppose completing any review of special access issues necessary to adopt an Order revising such rules by no later than September 15, 2007.
Markey’s facts are wrong and his prescription will harm rather than promote competition.
MikeT is right, this makes me foam at the mouth. Or at least it would if I were sure it wasn’t a parody. I mean, if their business model works, the patent system is obviously broken, right?
1. You submit vulnerabilities you have discovered, without telling anyone else.
2. If we accept them, we work together to develop a fix.
3. We develop intellectual property relating to the fix, and license or enforce it
4. You share in the profits
In particular:
We actively market the IP. Depending on the situation, potential customers may include: the vendor, security providers such as suppliers of intrusion prevention technologies, and competitors of the vendor
We encourage the customers to seek a licence and apply our solution.
We intend to enforce our IP rights if necessary.
Wow. This company would have customers the way the mafia has customers. I sincerely hope this is an elaborate joke rather than a cynical abuse of the patent system.
The podcast is considerably longer than usual this week because it featured an extremely productive discussion with Prof. Tim Wu on the merits of his “wireless Carterfone” proposal. Normally, we try to keep the podcast under half an hour, but one of the great things about podcasting is that here’s no reason we have to stick to the same length for every episode. In this case, the discussion was just too good to truncate. I encourage you to listen in—we’ve got a handy in-browser listening widget—and if you like what you hear you should subscribe.
One point I want to clarify: around minute 11, I observed that forcing unwilling incumbents to open their markets is usually an “expensive and messy procedure.” Wu responded that this amounted to preemptive surrender, and that we shouldn’t shy away from enacting good policy simply because it faces entrenched opposition.
Which is a good point, but let me expand a bit on what I meant. Obviously, if the problem were simply that the carriers don’t like a given proposal and will lobby against it, that’s not a good rationale for opposing it. However, I think two additional considerations are relevant. First, regulatory uncertainty is always bad. When the rules are unclear, existing firms will be reluctant to invest and new firms will be hesitant to enter the market. Moreover, those firms that do enter the market sometimes get the rug pulled out from under them when the regulatory body changes course—think of the way the CLECs got hosed in the 1990s.
Awesome:
Once the natural language processing people get with the program, we’ll be able to build C-3PO. More here.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Prof. Tim Wu of the Columbia University Law School, and Gwen Hinze of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Topics include,
- Tim Wu explains his wireless Carterfone proposal,
- The United States signs a trade agreement with South Korea that includes some controversial copyright provisions, and
- The FCC loses on appeal in an important broadcast decency case.
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!
Over at Ars I discuss Amazon’s new and improved one-click patent, which covers buying something for someone else with one click.
I have been posting a series of essays to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). In today’s installment, I want to discuss the idea of a voluntary code of conduct for online safety.
Yesterday, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) announced an impressive new campaign by its members to offer parents an unprecedented level of assistance in keeping their children safe online. The NCTA’s new effort is called, “Cable Puts You in Control: PointSmart, ClickSafe.”
The NCTA’s new effort closely tracks a proposal outlined in a report that the Progress & Freedom Foundation published last August. In that report, I recommended that:
All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon–and in a collective fashion–calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by the wide variety of operators mentioned above. These principles and policies, which could take the form of a pledge to parents and consumers, must also be workable throughout our new world of converged, cross-platform communications and media.
The cable industry has responded to this challenge in a major way with the announcement of its new “PointSmart, ClickSafe” initiative.
Recently we learned that Apple has begun embedding information in MP3s sold by the iTunes Store that identifies the purchaser of the song. Randy Picker speculated that one motivation for this could be a form of “mistrust-based” DRM: that people would be worried about getting in trouble if a song with their name on it was released into the wild, and so fewer people would share their files.
Ed Felten suggests some reasons that this strategy might not work so well:
Fred von Lohmann responded, suggesting that Apple should have encrypted the information, to protect privacy while still allowing Apple to identify the original buyer if necessary. Randy responded that there was a benefit to letting third parties do enforcement.
More interesting than the lack of encryption is the apparent lack of integrity checks on the data. This makes it pretty easy to change the name in a file. Fred predicts that somebody will make a tool for changing the name to “Steve Jobs” or something. Worse yet, it would be easy to change the data in a file to frame an innocent person – which makes the name information pretty much useless for enforcement.
If you’re not a crypto person, you may not realize that there are different tools for keeping information secret than for detecting tampering – in the lingo, different tools for ensuring confidentiality than for ensuring integrity. Apple could have used crypto to protect the integrity of the data. Done right, this would let Apple detect whether the name information in a file was accurate. (You might worry that somebody could transplant the name header from one file to another, but proper crypto will detect that.) Whether to use this kind of integrity check is a separate question from whether to encrypt the information — you can do either, or both, or neither.
Huh. Someone at the hyperbolically-named “Save the Internet” Coalition screwed up. In celebration of Ed Whitacre’s retirement, they made a satirical cartoon purporting to be his final speech to his management team.
They then linked to this video in a blog post with some of the “quotes” in the video. The only problem is that they didn’t do a very good job of marking it as satire. In fact, they wrote what appears to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Whitacre’s “speech.”
It got picked up by Slashdot this morning, and the comments there demonstrate that hardly any of Slashdot’s readers got the joke.
I’m sure this was an honest mistake on Save the Internet’s part. But so far, there’s no sign of an update more clearly labeling it as a parody. Yes, it’s obvious if you watch the video that it’s a parody, but there’s hardly any hint it’s a parody in the text of the post, and it shouldn’t have been that hard to predict that a lot of people would just read the text and not watch the video.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.