I really wish that the pro-regulatory people would stop scaring musicians with wildly implausible horror stories:
The Rock the Net campaign, made up mostly of musicians who are on smaller record labels or none at all, said they are fearful that if the so-called “Net neutrality” principle is abandoned their music may not be heard because they do not have the financial means to pay for preferential treatment.
Some said they do not want to pay. The Web, they said, has allowed many unknown musicians to put their music online, giving fans instant access to new music and giving bands greater marketing capabilities.
This is implausible on so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin. I’ve argued in the past that ISPs are unlikely to have the bargaining power to extract preferential access fees, that any fees are likely to be bundled with basic connectivity, and that ISPs have little or no control over what appears on a user’s screen.
But let’s say I’m wrong about all that and a dystopian future does materialize in which the Internet is limited to the websites of a handful of deep-pocketed corporations. Then independent artists are screwed, right?
Well, not really. How do artists reach fans now? A lot of them use sites like MySpace, Blogger, and YouTube. Sites, in other words, run by large corporations with deep pockets. Even in the exceedingly unlikely event that the Internet is somehow closed off to all but the largest corporations, it’s likely that Google and News Corp. will pay what’s necessary to ensure that their own properties continue to function.
So to buy the artists’ fears, you not only have to believe that the telcos will succeed in radically transforming the Internet at the logical layer, but you also have to believe that they’ll be able to twist the arms of companies like Google that control the content layer into changing their sites to lock out local artists. Not only does it seem exceedingly unlikely that they’d be able to do that, but it’s not even clear why they’d want to. If News Corp is paying the appropriate bribe to give MySpace preferential access, why would Verizon care what kind of content MySpace is making available?
Another person who testified about HR 811 on Friday was disability access advocate Harold Snider. He makes some good points about how DREs improve the accessibility of elections to disabled voters, and raises concerns that the requirement for a paper trail will delay the arrival of fully accessible voting. But then he veers off into hyperbole:
I am very proud of the fact that I was able to complete a Doctorate at Oxford University in 1974, where I studied 19th Century British History. I learned that in early 19th –Century England, a group of people called Luddites attempted to destroy early industrial production machinery because they perceived it as a threat, and had no confidence in it. I believe that the same is true with those who favor H.R. 811. In the 21st Century there are still people who have no faith in modern technology and in its ability to deliver a secure electronic voting process.
This argument is extremely silly, and the supporters of DREs are only shooting themselves in the foot when they make it. The most vocal critics of DREs are computer geeks. Jon Stokes, for example, writes in-depth reviews of new computer chips for Ars Technica. The idea that computer science professors, free software enthusiasts, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are luddites doesn’t pass the straight face test.
I’ve been reading through last week’s testimony on the Holt bill, and I’m learning that one of the major concerns for designing an election system is ensuring accessibility to non-native voters with limited English skills.
I’m normally pretty hostile to nativist English-only movements. If people want to speak Spanish, or Chinese, or Klingon in their private lives, that’s their business. And if a significant number of citizens are most fluent in a language other than English, I see nothing wrong with the government offering services in other languages. Just today my colleauge Sarah Brodsky did an excellent post about a protectionist effort to require English fluency to be a commercial driver in Missouri.
However, I still have trouble seeing a strong argument for accommodating voting systems for non-native speakers. American politics, at least at the federal level, is overwhelmingly carried out in English. If your grasp of English is so weak that you have difficulty deciphering a ballot, then chances are you’ll have an equally difficult time following contemporary political debates. And if you can’t follow the debate, you’re not likely to make very sensible choices in the ballot box.
I certainly don’t think the federal government should prohibit states from offering multi-lingual voting systems. But I also don’t think it makes sense to require states to accommodate non-English speakers. For states whose politics are carried out almost exclusively in English (which I believe is all of them outside of Florida and the Southwest), I think it’s perfectly reasonable for ballots to be exclusively in English.
With the release of the most recent discussion draft today, one thing is immediately clear: this third version of the General Public License can be simply written “GPL v.” – where “v” stands not for “version” but for “vendetta.”
There’s little doubt that this GPL 3 draft is a vendetta against the patent non-assertion agreement we saw in the Microsoft and Novell deal. But it is also aimed at the use of technological protection measures like digital rights management. This may not upset the fundamentalists at the Free Software Foundation, but here’s something that I think will concern them: GPL code will become more isolated and less relevant in the technology marketplace.
Turning the Four Freedoms into the Ten Commandments
The GPL 3 draft is no longer just about protecting the four freedoms. Instead, it preaches about what can’t be done with software – thou shall not use DRM, thou shall not partner with proprietary software companies, etc. The draft contains provisions that block the use of anticircumvention technologies and patent non-assertion agreements. It’s the patent provision that attempts to strike a dagger at the heart of the collaboration between Microsoft and Novell.
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Given the sudden rush of interest on patent reform, with two excellent pieces today referencing Irwin Jacobs’ recent talk here at Heritage, I thought I’d provide a link so you can see it for yourself.
Enjoy.
The patent system “has overall worked very well in encouraging innovation and, particularly in our case, in allowing us to grow to a significant company,” remarked Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Mark Jacobs at the Heritage Foundation last week. To many, the patent system works too well. Our present system awarded a patent for a garbage bag that looks like a pumpkin, for example. Someone else patented a method for swinging on a swing. Jacobs acknowledges patent quality is critical and wants Congress to allow the Patent & Trademark Office to retain all of its user fees, but warns that other reforms could have unintended consequences.
Besides ending the diversion of some $90 million in PTO fees to fund other government programs, the chairman of the House subcommittee responsible for intellectual property, Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-CA), also wants to “improve patent quality, deter abusive practices by unscrupulous patent holders, and provide meaningful, low-cost alternatives to litigation for challenging patent validity.”
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In my latest column on GigaOM, I speak to the meteoric rise of “patent reform” as an issue for Washington lobbyists. As Tim Lee points out in his latest entry, it isn’t always clear that patents=innovation. Irony note: it is Verizon — not Vonage — that is a member of the Coalition for Patent Fairness, which aims to reduce the burdens of patent litigation:
When Democrats took control of Congress last election, the lobbyists for all the big technology and telecom companies in Washington pulled out their wish lists, ripped them up, and re-arranged their legislative priorities.
Gone was the push for sweeping telecommunications legislation, hemispheric-wide free-trade agreements and limitations on Internet taxes. Only a Republican Congress and White House could agree upon those.
A new priority has emerged: overhauling the nation’s patent system. Seemingly out of nowhere, it is suddenly all the talk of Washington’s political-corporate machinations.
Links to this Drug Enforcement Administration page are traversing the blogosphere, along with instructions not to submit phony tips.
Submitting phony tips would be improper and unwise, especially if you are doing so from an IP address than can be linked back to you. You wouldn’t want to interfere with the federal government’s ever-growing usurpation of state power and its ever-more-thorough meddling in people’s business.
A very sensible video editorial from Walt Mossberg:
I agree with Mossberg that we need “a law written from the perspective of the consumer and the internet, rather than strictly from the perspective of the copyright holders.” But I think Mossberg is lumping together two things that it might be better to keep clearly distinct: the DMCA’s anti-circumvention language, and its notice-and-takedown provisions. As I’ve said repeatedly on this site, I think the former are bad news from almost every perspective and should be repealed. But I don’t think the latter is so terrible, and I haven’t seen anyone propose an alternative that I can get excited about. Clearly, if copyright is going to mean anything, Viacom has to have some cause of action when people upload non-trivial amounts of its copyrighted materials onto YouTube. For all of their flaws, the notice-and-takedown provisions seem to strike a pretty good balance. I would be hesitant to start lobbying Congress to re-consider that part of the DMCA before we have a clear idea of what ought to replace it.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.