Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
Ars Technica reports that an amendment to the FY 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act “upholds the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Backed (FISA) as the only means by which to do electronic surveillance—and . . . requires continuous judicial oversight of requests.”
Divided government is a real boon.
Roger Parloff of Forbes Fortune reports that Microsoft is continuing to lay the groundwork to use the patent system as a weapon against the free software movement. Overall, Parloff does a good job of summarizing the dispute, but like most journalists, he lets Microsoft get away with exploiting the public’s ignorance of how the patent system works to create a misleading impression about the conflict:
But now there’s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it’s being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500). The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents…
It’s a breathtaking number. (By comparison, for instance, Verizon’s (Charts, Fortune 500) patent suit against Vonage (Charts), which now threatens to bankrupt the latter, was based on just seven patents, of which only three were found to be infringing.) “This is not a case of some accidental, unknowing infringement,” Gutierrez asserts. “There is an overwhelming number of patents being infringed.”
The impression Microsoft wants to give here is that free software is of high quality because it’s copied from Microsoft’s own software. Of course, that’s not true, and I don’t think Microsoft has ever claimed otherwise. But if free software was developed independently, then i’s a non-sequitur to cite free software’s patent infringement as a reason for its high quality.
The problem is that most readers aren’t aware that software patents often cover broad concepts like “wireless email” and “one-click shopping.” And so when they read that free software infringes Microsoft’s patents, they assume that means that the code has somehow been stolen from Microsoft. And Mr. Gutierrez, of course, deliberately exploits that confusion. To anyone who has actually looked at a significant number of software patents, and who’s aware that there are hundreds of thousands of them on the books, it’s not at all implausible that you could infringe 200 patents by accident. But the general public has a wildly romanticized concept of how the patent system works, and so Gutierrez can get away with those kinds of misleading statements.
His claim that the infringement can’t possibly be accidental is also belied by the fact that Microsoft refuses to disclose which patents free software infringes. If Microsoft’s patents are valid, and if free software developers have been infringing them deliberately, then it’s hard to see what the harm would be in publicly revealing which patents are infringing.
In late March, I hosted a congressional seminar entitled “Age Verification for Social Networking Sites: Is It Possible? And Desirable?” I brought together 5 experts in the field to debate the issue, including:
* John Cardillo, President & CEO, Sentinel
* Jay Chaudhuri, Special Counsel to North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper
* Raye Croghan, Vice President, IDology, Inc.
* Tim Lordan, Executive Director, Internet Education Foundation
* Jeff Schmidt, CEO, Authis
It was an outstanding discussion and I’m happy to report that the transcript is now available online here. Also, you can listen to the audio from the event here. Also, you can find the big study of mine that we discussed that day here.
Here’s Google’s Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer discussing in more detail Google’s recent laudable decision to anonymize its server logs after 18-24 months. The discussion helps illustrate the diverse interests that must be balanced in choosing how long to maintain information.
It’s often easy to disregard the value that deep wells of raw information have for information-based business. Fleischer explains some of how Google makes use of data to improve its services and protect users. These consumer-beneficial activities must be balanced against the background demand for privacy protection.
Of particular note, of course, is his discussion of the emerging government demands for data retention (some of which conflict with government demands for data destruction). Data retention mandates are outsourced government surveillance, neatly shifting the cost of surveillance to the private sector while avoiding limits on government action like the Fourth Amendment and Privacy Act (in the case of the U.S.). Too put a fine point on it, data retention is bad.
This explication of Google’s thinking is a welcome contribution to public understanding. I did get a little chirping on my B.S. detector where Fleischer says he had talked to privacy activists in developing their plans. I’d like to know which ones. It’s a small enough community that I figure I would have known about it (I say at the risk of sounding self-important).
I’ve been aware in the past of government agencies deluding themselves about taking privacy into consideration because they’ve heard from government contractors selling “privacy enhancing technologies” like immutable audit logs and such. As often as not, this stuff is lipstick on a pig – seeking to make bad surveillance programs acceptable by tacking on complex, fallible privacy protections.
I’m sure Google has done better than that in its consultations with privacy experts. At least, I hope I’m sure.
Update: Nate Anderson at Ars is not nearly so sanguine about Google’s data retention practices and its defense of them.
Y’all should watch this Sunday’s 60 Minutes CBS News show (May 13, 7pm EDT) about the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and its campaign to crush internet-based business models that discount commissions. My colleague Steve DelBianco appears in the piece, based on his role at eRealty.com, a startup that was thwarted by new rules at NAR.
You’ll be glad to know that Steve doesn’t call for any regulation — just exhorts the Realtors to avoid regulation and litigation by allowing more innovation and price competition in their own ranks.
The show airs at an eventful time for the real estate industry. Earlier this week, the FTC released a report that assessed how the real estate brokerage industry has lobbied for regulation in the name of consumer protection, but has the effect of competition prevention. The report calls for a repeal of real estate laws, rules and regulations that limit choices for consumers, limit competition for new brokerage models and don’t appear to provide any justifiable benefits for consumers. In this report, Steve is quoted multiple times
Finally, the Realtors are holding their mid-year convention next week here in Washington. Add the DoJ antitrust lawsuit against NAR and you have a perfect storm over barriers to e-commerce in the real estate space.
I assume most of TLF’s readers are already reading Ed Felten, but just in case some of you weren’t, I thought today’s post on HBO’s Bob Zitter’s suggestion that we come up with a new euphemism for DRM was particularly good:
The irony here is that “rights management” is itself an industry-sponsored euphemism for what would more straightforwardly be
called “restrictions”. But somehow the public got the idea that DRM is restrictive, hence the need for a name change.Zitter went on to discuss HBO’s strategy. HBO wants to sell shows in HighDef, but the problem is that many consumers are watching HD content using the analog outputs on their set-top boxes — often because their fancy new HD televisions don’t implement HBO’s favorite form of DRM. So what HBO wants is to disable the analog outputs on the set-top box, so consumers have no choice but to adopt HBO’s favored DRM.
Which makes the nature of the “enablement” clear. By enabling your set-top box to be incompatible with your TV, HBO will enable you to buy an expensive new TV. I understand why HBO might want this. But they ought to be honest and admit what they are doing.
I can think of several names for their strategy. “Consumer Enablement” is not one of them.
Over at Ars, I’ve got a story about the version of the Holt e-voting bill that was passed out of committee on Tuesday. In addition to making more money available to comply with the law’s requirements, the legislation significantly weakens the previous strong source code disclosure rules. The original Holt bill required that the source code be available to anyone who asked. Although the new version does make it available to a lot of people—including parties to election litigation and security researchers—it adds some red tape that’s likely to substantially reduce the number of people who are willing and able to jump through the relevant hoops.
Although I’ve said before that open source voting is no panacea, I find it hard to see an argument against requiring the disclosure of the source code for voting machines. It’s essential that all aspects of an election be transparent and accountable, and the source code of a voting machines is as much a part of the election process as the election judges’ handbook or the rules for recounts. Moreover, voting machines are almost entirely purchased by large institutions, so it’s not like there’s any risk of the disclosed source code showing up in someone else’s voting machine. The only reason I can think of to keep the source closed is to protect voting machine vendors from public scrutiny, which is obviously a reason not to allow them to keep it closed.
You might not know it from my frequent ranting about the DMCA and software patents, but generally speaking I’m actually pro-copyright and pro-patent. There are, in fact, some good arguments for both copyright and patent law. (Although I wish people would stop lumping two very different legal regimes under the misleading heading of intellectual property)
But this article from CNet’s Michael Kanellos is full of cringe-worthy (and in some cases unintentionally hilarious) arguments for “intellectual property.” In fact, in a number of places, the arguments wind up coming across as unintentionally hilarious.
Bloomberg is reporting that Vonage is working on a “workaround” for its patent infringement. I put “workaround” in scare quotes because, as I wrote last year about the NTP-RIM battle, the problem in these kinds of cases is that no one has the foggiest idea what the patents cover. So when a judge rules that your current product infringes some patent, you respond by re-configuring aspects of your product at random in the hopes that you can convince the judge that the new configuration does not infringe your adversary’s “technology.”
Now, I should acknowledge that I haven’t been able to get my hands on either Verizon’s complaint or the judge’s ruling. But according to this ZDNet post from a few weeks back, the key claim is this one:
26. A method comprising:
receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;
translating a name included in the request into a destination telephone number associated with a name included in the request; and
transmitting a reply containing both the destination telephone number and a packet data network address of a telephone gateway coupled between the public packet data network and a telephone network through the public packet data network to a calling device.
27. A method as in claim 26, wherein the address is an Internet Protocol address.
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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.
