IPI’s Third Annual World Intellectual Property Day Event will feature panels on the latest content-conduit problem-solving (Digital Technologies: Emerging Challenges, Evolving Strategies with Mitch Bainwol of the RIAA, Dan Glickman of the MPAA, and Steve Largent of the Wireless Association).
The next considers the benefits and costs of IP (Social and Economic Benefits of IP: Who Wins? Who Loses? with Lien Verbauwhede Koglin of WIPO, Michael A. Gollin of Venable LLP and Public Interest Intellectual Property Advocates (PIIPA) and Mohit Mehrotra of Excel Life Sciences).
We move on to cover the valuation and trade of intellectual capital (The Intellectual Property Marketplace: The Role of IP Valuation & Tech Transfer with Usha Balakrishnan of Collaborative Social Responsibility Solutions, Abha Divine of Techquity, and Robert Cresanti of Ocean Tomo).
The last panel before lunch covers counterfeiting and enforcement (Combating (Dangerous) Counterfeits: How Countries are Policing their Borders) with Michael M. DuBose of the U.S. Department of Justice, Nicholas J. Smith of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and
Charles Williams of Cisco).
Then, lunch!
EVENT DETAILS:
Thursday, April 24, 2008, 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
Reserve Officers Association (ROA) Headquarters Minuteman Memorial Building
Minuteman Ballroom, 5th Floor
One Constitution Ave NE, Washington DC 20002
To register, kindly contact Erin Humiston at erin@ipi.org
Update: Note the change in venue below.
Over the last two years, our Alcohol Liberation Front happy hours have become a venerable DC institution. (See here, here, and here for reports from previous ALF events.) We’re going to have our fifth semi-annual ALF on Monday, and it promises to be our best ever, because we’ll be joined by libertarian hero Brooke Oberwetter. Most of us talk a good talk about defying the state, but on Saturday, Brooke walked the walk, getting arrested by humorless park police for silently (and soberly) dancing in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.
In addition to Brooke, we’ll be joined by the usual TLF gang, James Gattuso’s groupies, and a few interns we’ll bring along to make our turnout look more impressive. Unfortunately, Cord Blomquist has to stay home for a hot date with “Call of Duty 4.” But for the rest of us, it’ll be from 5:30-7:30 at the 18th St. Lounge Science Club on Monday, April 21. Please leave a comment if you’re planning to join us so we know to keep an eye out for you.
Julian has a good write-up of this weekend’s dust-up between the DC libertarian crowd and the DC Park Police. My friend Brooke got arrested because she had the nerve to ask a police officer to explain himself, which makes her guilty of “interfering with an agency function.”
The park police have yet to drop the charges, and seem undeterred by the impending PR fiasco. We’ll all be doing our best to make them look at stupid as possible in the meantime.
Don’t judge a book by its cover (or its title, for that matter). I’m usually faithful to that maxim, but I must admit that when I first saw the title and cover of “Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do,” I rolled my eyes and thought to myself, “here we go again.” I figured that I was in for another tedious anti-gaming screed full of myths and hysteria about games and gamers. Boy, was I wrong. Massively wrong.
Lawrence Kutner, PhD, and Cheryl K. Olson, ScD, cofounders and directors of the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media, have written the most thoroughly balanced and refreshingly open-minded book about video games ever penned. They cut through the stereotypes and fear-mongering that have thus far pervaded the debate over the impact of video games and offer parents and policymakers common-sense advice about how to approach these issues in a more level-headed fashion. They argue that:
Today, an amalgam of politicians, health professionals, religious leaders and children’s advocates are voicing concerns about video games that are identical to the concerns raised one, two and three generations ago with the introduction of other new media. Most of these people have the best of intentions. They really want to protect children from evil influences. As in the past, a few have different agendas and are using the issue manipulatively. Unfortunately, many of their claims are based on scanty evidence, inaccurate assumptions, and pseudoscience. Much of the current research on violent video games is both simplistic and agenda driven. (p. 55)
They note that these groups, “probably worry too much about the wrong things and too little about more subtle issues and complex effects that are much more likely to affect our children.” They continue:
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Adam last month noted the NRO interview with Larry Lessig in which he promised to blow up the FCC. I share Adam’s puzzlement about what Lessig means by this. Most of us would cheer the idea of FCC-demolition, but there are a lot of regulations that are sufficiently complex that they couldn’t be administered without a regulatory bureaucracy.
Part of it, I think, is that Lessig is merely playing to his audience. As a former right-winger himself, Lessig clearly understands what it takes to catch the interest of conservative- and libertarian-minded readers, and he’s not above spinning his arguments to maximize their appeal to the people he’s addressing. Indeed, on issues where I agree with him, such as Free Culture, I’ve appreciated his ability to frame his policy arguments in either libertarian or liberal terms.
But this makes his anti-corruption turn all the more bewildering. Surely a former libertarian ideologue and clerk for Justice Scalia has read enough of public choice economics to see the challenges his “Change Congress” movement will encounter. When he’s not talking to NRO, Lessig seems to think there’s some kind of pristine “democratic” process that we could get back to if only we could get the money out of politics. But that’s not the way the world works. As Lessig puts it:
So I don’t want a world where there are no lobbyists — I think lobbyists are essential. I think the message of lobbyists and the training of lobbyists is essential. Just like I think that what lawyers do before the Supreme Court is essential. But just as I think everybody would think it weird if a lawyer before the Supreme Court would send $100,000 to the Justice Roberts Retirement Fund or $100,000 to the Renovate Justice Roberts’s Office Fund, I think we better recognize there’s something perverse about a member of Congress having one of the people who is trying to persuade him what the right answer is raise $100,000 for his campaign. That’s the link we’ve got to break.
The problem with this is that there’s nothing special about the $100k campaign donation. It could just have easily have been a $100k contribution to an independent group aligned with the candidate. Or $100k spent on get-out-the-vote efforts in the candidate’s home state. Or promising to give one of the candidate’s staffers or relative a cushy six-figure job as a thank you. Or distributing a politically helpful message to the company’s employees or customers.
Of course, we can try to make all of those things illegal too, but this is a superficial way of looking at the situation. The problem isn’t that there’s a discrete list of corrupt practices that we can identify and prohibit. The problem is that if politicians are willing to be corrupted, and special interests are willing to spend resources to corrupt them, they’ll find ways to get it done. You can certainly reduce the effect on the margin—by banning overt bribery, for example—but once you’ve banned the really obvious categories of back-scratching, it becomes more and more difficult to make any further progress. What’s going on in Washington is disgusting, to be sure, but it’s not new or unique to the United States. And I think fixing it is going to be a lot more challenging than Lessig imagines.
Tom doesn’t elaborate on why the topic of free makes him angry, but I think the gloss on this article—you might have no free will because your brain makes decisions before you’re aware of them!—is pretty stupid. Obviously, if your brain is the organ that you use to make decisions, you would expect your brain to be engaged in certain kinds of activity before any given decision is made. And obviously if you observed this activity closely enough, you’d find that the process takes a finite amount of time. And obviously you wouldn’t be able to report that the process had completed until it had, in fact, completed. But this doesn’t mean that “your subconscious” is forcing you to do something outside of “your” control. That brain activity was just part of the decision-making process you went through to reach the decision.
As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, the idea that this experiment is creepy comes from what he refers to as the theory of the Cartesian theater: the idea that “you” are really a metaphorical guy sitting at a little control panel inside your brain, telling your brain what to do. Dennett suggests that a lot of people have this view as their implicit model of how the brain works. Hence, people assume that “you” should be able to direct your brain’s decision-making process, which makes it creepy when the brain does something without “your” controlling it. But if examined closely, the notion of a Cartesian Theater doesn’t make a lot of sense. Among other problems, it suffers from the problem of infinite regress: if you’re really a little guy at the control panel of your brain, who’s controlling the little guy? Ultimately, if you want a materialist explanation for human cognition, it’s inevitable that you’ll wind up conceiving human consciousness as an emergent property of the physical system called the brain. And if you’re not interested in a materialist explanation for cognition, then why do you care what a bunch of neuroscientists have to say?
My fiancee relates the following:
I was just listening to one of my knitting podcasts, where the podcaster was interviewing an author of knitting books. They started talking about how they arrange their knitting needles in their luggage to get them on planes. The author puts them next to the seams of her bag so the blend in, or puts them in a pencil case with a bunch of pens and pencils! When middle-aged ladies are scheming how to get their knitting past security, you know things have gotten ridiculous.
I swear I’m not trying to pick on Jonathan Zittrain, but I continue to find examples that create problems for his thesis from The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It that the whole world is going to hell because of the rise of what he contemptuously calls “sterile, tethered devices.” Again, in his provocative book, Zittrain argues that, for a variety of reasons, the glorious days of the generative, open Internet and general-purpose PCs are supposedly giving way to closed networks and closed devices. In my lengthy review of his book, I argued that Zittrain was over-stating things and creating a false choice of possible futures from which we must choose. I see no reason why we can’t have the best of both worlds–a world full of plenty of tethered appliances, but also plenty of generativity and openness. In a follow-up essay, I pointed out how Apple’s products create a particular problem for Zittrain’s thesis because even though they are “sterile and tethered,” there is no doubt that the company’s approach has produced some wonderful results. As I said..
Personally… I prefer all those “general purpose” devices that Zittrain lionizes. But, again, we can have both. Let Steve Jobs be a control freak and keep those walls around Apple’s digital garden high and tight if he wants. There are plenty of other wide open gardens for the rest of us to play in.
In my original review, I briefly mentioned another problem for the Zittrain thesis: old people! I was reminded about this when I was reading this New York Times article today entitled, “At a Certain Age, Simplicity Sells in High-Tech Gadgets,” by Alina Tugend. Tugend argues:
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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.