There’s nothing to say about this that hasn’t already been said, but boy is this funny:
You can get your own here.
Via PJ, here’s a great joke about programmers by Nathaniel Borenstein:
It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter.
While this is a whimsical example, I think it actually explains why geeks have such strong views on certain issues. For example, on software patents: one of the most common tricks in a programmer’s toolkit is to solve a specific problem by finding a way to solve a more general problem and then treat the particular problem as a special case. For example, VoIP just applies the general data-transmission capabilities of the Internet to one type of data, namely sound. It therefore strikes many programmers as perverse to grant a patent to the first person who happens to file for a patent on applying a widely-understood technology (such as TCP/IP) to a particular application (like voice).
Similarly, geeks tend to be strong support of network neutrality (the concept, if not the regulatory policy) because fundamentally, network neutrality is the principle of abstraction applied to network architecture.
What is the position of the United States government on a proposed treaty, currently before the World Intellectual Property Organization, that would create a copyright-style protection for television broadcasts?
That is the key question that observers want answers for at the public roundtable discussion that will be held today, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., at the Copyright Office in the Library of Congress. The proposed treaty has been rife with controversy from the beginning. One reason is that it is being promoted as an update to the 1961 Treaty of Rome, which the U.S. never ratified.
During negotiations last year at WIPO in Geneva, the U.S. was the most significant government to promote extending the broadcaster treaty to cover webcasters. But the rest of the world balked at that. Failing that modification, the U.S. expressed dissatisfaction with the end-result.
In a column on the subject last September, I quoted PTO officials as follows:
“The U.S. does not believe that [the current treaty] provides a proper basis for going to a diplomatic conference, and intervened to say as much,” PTO spokeswoman Brigid Quinn said September 15. “The U.S. has always envisioned this treaty as one to provide the necessary protections for broadcast signals in the digital age.” As a result, she said, “there is no consensus and alternatives on at least half of the issues.”
A debate is raging over at the Second Life blog about Linden Labs’ (LL) annoucement that the company plans on imposing age verification requirements on its users starting in mid-May. LL says they are making this move “to insure that minors do not inadvertently access Second Life or have access to adult content in-world. In addition, age verification provides an additional layer of trust for in-world businesses and Residents.”
Those are certainly worthy goals. But LL face two very challenging issues in attempting to implement this plan:
The EU continues to issue what one hopes are wild threats against Microsoft. Now EU antitrust authorities have revived the possibility of “structural remedies,” that is, breaking Microsoft up. This apparently because Microsoft is seen to be resisting compliance with earlier orders.
Interesting. What is the theory behind this? The focus of antitrust law is supposed to be consumer welfare (not, say, competitor welfare). So the earlier commission orders were supposed
Crosbie Fitch, Scott Carpenter & Enigma_Foundry.. I don’t know exactly what it is you have against open debate about IP issues, but as someone who both works at PFF and who gave birth to this blog many years ago while at the Cato Institute, let me at least try to briefly dissuade you (and others) of any nonsensical notion that there is some sort of grand conspiracy going on here by PFF / IP Central people to control the Tech Liberation Front.
First, if you’d bother reading the “About Us” note at the top of the TLF, you’d notice that this blog is not a one-man or one-issue show. It’s intended to be a clearinghouse of ideas to give the world a flavor for what various libertarians in a wide assortment of think tanks are thinking and saying about technology policy.
Second, libertarians have deep differences over copyright policy. Obviously, Tim Lee and Solveig Singleton stand on opposite ends of the spectrum. I’m somewhere in between. And everyone else who contributes to this blog has his or her own opinion. As I wrote in a 2002 Cato Institute book I edited on this subject (“CopyFights”), there is no clear “libertarian position” on copyright and IP matters. The movement is all over the board on the issue and this blog features contributions that reflect that intellectual schizophrenia.
Third, I would greatly appreciate it if you would refrain from engaging in vicious personal attacks against those who contribute their views on these matters. Despite the alleged, neo-conspiratorial “strange web” you guys speak of between the TLF and PFF, the reality is that PFF has no control over the TLF. Zero. Zip. Nothing. Nadda. Every scholar and commenter is free to post whatever they want here. Tim’s view’s on copyright, DRM, and DMCA certainly dominate here because he writes the most on the issue and he is the most aggressive of all our bloggers. Nothing that Tim says on the matter is ever edited or censored in any fashion. Nor are the comments you guys and many others make edited or excluded. Then again, neither are the opposing views of Solveig or anyone else. Do you think we’d be better off stifling all debate on this issue and telling Solveig or others with conflicting views to go buzz off? Why can’t we debate these things here on the TLF in a mature, adult fashion?
I hope you guys (and others) will take what I have said seriously because we certainly welcome your contributions to the TLF, but I would hope those contributions would not be done in such poor taste in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee is filing comments on the REAL ID regulations. Comments close today (Tuesday). Instructions for commenting can be found here, and apparently, due to difficulties with the automatic comment system and with receiving faxes, DHS has opened an email address for receiving comments: oscomments@dhs.gov. Emails must have “DHS-2006-0030” in the subject: line.
The Committee took care to offer constructive ideas, but the most important takeaway is summarized by Ryan Singel at Threat Level:
The Department of Homeland Security’s outside privacy advisors explicitly refused to bless proposed federal rules to standardize states’ driver’s licenses Monday, saying the Department’s proposed rules for standardized driver’s licenses — known as Real IDs — do not adequately address concerns about privacy, price, information security, redress, “mission creep”, and national security protections.
“Given that these issues have not received adequate consideration, the Committee feels it is important that the following comments do not constitute an endorsement of REAL ID or the regulations as workable or appropriate,” the committee wrote in the introduction to their comments for the rulemaking record.
I’ll be testifying on REAL ID today in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
My paper critiquing arguments contra copyright from the cumulative nature of knowledge is out.
You should check out the ongoing discussion with Cord Blomquist about the ethics of digging AACS keys. Cord’s core point seems to be this:
Copyright and patents aren’t contracts, they’re codified law, and it’s understandable why we’d prefer a common standard for such things. Imagine we had to sign a contract waving acknowledging that the seller retains the rights to reproduction every time we bought a book or magazine. This would be cumbersome and tedious. Yet even without a contract or another such explicit statement we all know that we can’t just post an article from a magazine on a site and put AdSense ads against it and call ourselves a legitimate web business. This would be copyright infringement and stealing. Take this idea a step further and we see that he 2nd or 3rd person to copy the material is equally liable for the copying if they know that the material is copyrighted.
How is this different from Digg hosting something that is copyrighted? Are we saying DRM and music copyrights don’t deserve the same respect because they are copyrights we don’t like?
The first thing to point out here is that Cord is lumping together two very different rights. I wholeheartedly agree with him that copyright law is a beneficial institution, and it’s entirely appropriate for the state to take action to protect peoples copyrights. If Digg’s users were posting copyrighted songs or films, I would certainly be a lot more critical.
But DRM is not the same thing as traditional copyright. Anti-circumvention rights are a brand new legal right that was invented from whole cloth by Congress in 1998. The question of whether those rights are legitimate are wholly separate from the question of whether the underlying copyright.
Cord continues:
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