The story of the telephone industry’s first quarter-century is the story of the Bell patents. Alexander Graham Bell famously filed his telephone patent hours before Elisha Gray filed a competing telephone patent, forming the foundation of what became the AT&T telephone monopoly. The way Brooks tells it—and he gives no hint of having an axe to grind against either AT&T or the patent system—the American Bell company mostly sat back and collected licensing revenues for the 17-year term of its early patents, charging high fees and doing relatively little to improve its technology or aggressively build out its services. What it did do, however, is prosecute hundreds of patent infringement suits against rivals. The book doesn’t go into enough detail to judge how many of those were independent inventions and how many were mere copycats, but it’s clear that at least a handful—including Gray’s—were independent inventions.
The Bell Company is not, in other words, an effective poster child for the patent system. The company’s reaction to the coming of competition in 1894 is interesting:
All through this welter of litigation, and right up to the turn of the century, American Bell chose to compete with the rising independents chiefly in the courts rather than by trying to provide better and cheaper telephone service. But there were now thousands of telephone patents in force other than Berliner’s [a patent that American Bell had unsuccessfully tried to use to perpetuate its monopoly beyond 1894], and in 1897 American Bell for the first time began to lose cases when wwithin a few weeks two other important Bell-held patents—on the switch hook and the automatic switch—were struck down in Chicago. The tide was turning.
Not surprisingly, competition was good for consumers…
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Telephone is just full of fascinating passages:
Western Union had its own corporate troubles; the financial predator Jay Gould was seeking to devour it as he had devoured the Erie a decade earlier. Beginning in the middle 1870s, Gould had launched a characteristically intricate scheme to conquer Western Union by first bringing it to its knees. While attacking Western Union’s stock price in a series of bear raids in which, according to a contemporary observer, he used “every trick and art of Stock Exchange manipulation,” he quietly established a rival telegraph network of his own, the Atlantic and Pacific Company. As a result, Western Union’s business declined by two million dollars in one year. When the combination of stock manipulation and competition had forced Western Union’s price down to rock bottom, Gould secretly bought up its stock, and at last, in 1881, emerged in control of Western Union and of the national telegraph business. During 1877-79, when Western Union was striving to take over the telephone business from Bell, Gould’s Byzantine maneuver was in full cry. Western Union, at that time, was controlled by another notorious financier not noted for gentleness or sensitivity, William H. Vanderbilt. In sum, Western Union was in the thick of battle between jungle titans. If Vanderbilt had been victorious over Bell as Gould eventually was over Vanderbilt, the telephone business would have fallen into the hands of the most sinister and devious of all the beasts in the post-Civil War financial jungle, and one hesitates to think what its subsequent development might have been.
What I find remarkable about this is passage is that it’s almost complete bereft of substance. I learned from this that Gould bought up Western Union stock and obtained a controlling interest in the company. And I know he did some things in the stock exchange the author doesn’t approve of. And I learn that the author really, really dislikes Gould, for reasons that aren’t clear.
It is, again, hard to imagine a modern writer writing like this. We still have bitter power struggles in corporate boardrooms. But it’s hard to imagine a serious journalist or historian writing about “the financial predator Larry Ellison, the most sinister and devious of all the beasts of the Silicon Valley financial jungle.” I suppose that might make business stories more entertaining (and come to think of it, Ellison might enjoy the resulting notoriety), but it would certainly be an abdication of the historian’s obligation to strive for objectivity.
The Department of Homeland Security often invokes the 9/11 Commission when it discusses REAL ID. A recent DHS press release called REAL ID a “core 9/11 Commission finding.”
In fact, the 9/11 Commission dedicated about three-quarters of a page to identification security – out of 400+ pages of substance. See for yourself. Page 390.
Is it appropriate for a student to call a school administrator’s house and petition him to give his classmates a snow day? If the administrator’s wife gets the message, returns the student’s call, and tells the “snotty-nosed little brat” to “get over it, and go to school,” is it acceptable for the student to record that message and post it on the Internet such that it leads to even more harassment of the administrator and his wife at home??
These are just a few of the interesting questions raised by this interesting case study in Information Age ethics / etiquette. [The story has generated almost 500 responses on the Washington Post website with passionate comments being made from both perspectives. Clearly it touches a nerve.]
One of the curiousities of intellectual battles is the ability of the intelligentsia of one school to retrench and come back, using the vocabulary popularized by another set entirely to argue the opposite point. (A curiousity because one would hope that the relatively clever would steer clear of rhetorical devices in favor of clarity and making real progress towards understanding).
Free-marketers in the nineteenth century, then known as “liberals,” became popular with the working classes and the poor because of their support for the abolition of the Corn Laws and other benefits of free trade; economic interventionists tried to capitalize on this popularity by calling themselves “liberals,” and today the original reference of the term is obscured, particularly in the United States.
Another more complicated example: The success of free marketers in demonstrating that competition and choice serves consumers; offering empirical support for the fundamental point that contracts are a basic building block of a prosperous economic order. Today advocates of regulation build on this legacy by borrowing the language of consumer choice to attack the ordinary contract.
The Wall Street Journal Europe explores a variation on this argument concerning the iPhone. Kyle Wingfield notes, “Yes, consumers benefit from economic efficiencies. But it cannot be said that economic efficiencies are gained simply by creating circumstances that are attractive to consumers.” And goes on to make some interesting observations about the leftist allegiance to labor, rather in tension with their stance on consumers.
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I originally started studying and writing about privacy policy because I thought the advocates in Washington, and Congress itself, didn’t have a full grasp of the issues. They were treating privacy as a political football, and grinding their political, ideological, and self-interest axes on “the privacy issue.”
Illustrating how that problem may persist, Declan McCullagh has a strong rip on the Electronic Privacy Information Center on his Iconoclast blog. It seems that EPIC and some of its allies recently filed a strongly worded complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about problems with AskEraser that no longer exist.
The AskEraser cookie originally had a time-stamp that could act like a unique identifier, so Ask.com changed it. Nonetheless, in went EPIC’s “Complaint and Request for Injunction, Request for Investigation and for Other Relief.”
The government’s undirected, surveillance-heavy overreaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks brought me together with lots of folks with whom I disagree on lesser issues like private-sector regulation and privacy practices. I often joke that people will know their privacy is pretty well protected when I’m back to fighting with EPIC and the ACLU. Well, I don’t intend to pick a fight now, because there’s still too much to be done, but a privacy advocacy group shouldn’t just be an FTC-complaint mill.
Declan speculates that EPIC files with the FTC rather than suing (there are some arguable causes of action) because courts would sanction them for frivolous filings. Prospectively calling EPIC’s future bluffs, he says: “The next time you see them complaining to the FTC about some alleged wrongdoing, remember these attorneys’ odd reluctance to litigate.”
Back in 2005, I threw away a book I was writing. Well, I didn’t exactly toss it in a garbage can or take a match to the manuscript; I just abandoned the project to work on other things, including a different book and a big law review article. I’m still mad at myself for never finishing it up because I think it put forward a provocative thesis: Censorship is dead. Specifically, as I argued in the first lines of the book, “A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming.” Accordingly, the running title for the book was: “The End of Censorship?: The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”
Anyway, I recently unearthed an old draft of this discarded manuscript and thought I might as well at least throw the introduction online. In it, I outline my thesis and the “5 Reasons Content Controls Will Break Down.” I also highlight how governments will fight back and discuss what alternatives are out there to address concerns about objectionable content. Someone out there might be interested in all this even though much of what I say here is now widely accepted or been said better by others. I’ve stripped out all the footnotes and cut out significant sections to make what follows more readable. So, here it goes…
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“The End of Censorship? The Future of Content Controls in a World of Media Convergence.”
Content regulation–at least as it has been traditionally defined and enforced in the United States–is doomed. A confluence of social, legal and, most importantly, technological developments is slowly undermining the ability of legislators and regulators, at all levels of government, to control the nature or quality of speech or media programming. Specifically, it is the distribution channel-based system of content regulation employed in the U.S. and many other nations that is breaking down. That is, the ability of governments to regulate speech and expression by regulating its distribution channel or provider (such as broadcasting), represents in increasingly ineffective and illogical method of policing content flows.
The demise of traditional content controls may take many years–potentially even decades–to play out, but signs of the impending death of the old regulatory regime are already evident.
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I’m reading Telephone: The First Hundred Years, written in 1975, and I found this passage striking:
The century of invention was at zenith. Robert Fulton’s first commercially successful steamboat dated from 1807, Mcihael Farady’s dynamo from 1831, Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph from 1835, the steam-driven electric generator from 1858; in 1875 Thomas A. Edison’s phonograph was three years ahead, his incandescent lamp four years, the skyscraper about a decade, the automobile and the airplane a generation or less. Behind them all was a persuasive idea; as Alfred North Whitehead would write, “The greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the method of invention.” Moreover, the economic rewards of invention under the U.S. patent system were great and well advertised; Bell and others like him knew well enough that the inventor and original backer of the telegraph had become millionaires, and his passion for secrecy about his experiments, along wit his early and intimate association with the Patent Office through Hubbard, suggest how well he realized he might be onto something commercially big. And he was urged on by both his philosophical background and the current social climate in America. The Scottish Calvinism of the nineteenth century made a primary virtue of material success achieved through hard work, and as an example Bell had his countryman Andrew Carnegie, twelve years his senior, who had come to the United States from Scotland in 1848 and by 1875 was already a millionaire in the process of consolidating the largest steel company in the world. As to the social climate, 1875 was the heyday in America of laissez-faire venture capitalism, when men had a kind of savage fury for fame and fortune that the more jaded twentieth century can scarcely conceive of.
I think that last sentence is fascinating, not so much for what it says about the 19th century as for what it says about the late 20th century. I find it hard to imagine someone writing that sentence today. We certainly don’t consider the pursuit of fame and fortune through invention passé these days.
A new paper from the Stockholm Network on developing countries and pharmaceutical patents. In a review of the empirical literature, the report finds, among other things:
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The patent reform debate continues with commentary on Sen.
According to Hal Wegner, the Intellectual Property Owner’s Association reports that
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) will attempt to pass a revised version of S. 1145 in the Senate in February. Major amendments likely will not be available more than a few days in advance of Senate consideration….If the Senate does pass a bill, it likely will be sent to the House for swift passage by the House without amendments, eliminating the need for a Senate-House conference.
Whether the votes are there is open to question.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.