August 2008

ACT to Come Out against DMCA and Software Patents?

by Tim Lee on August 10, 2008 · 20 comments

I was pleased to see Braden’s excellent new paper on the use of self-serving lobbying tactics to limit competition and promote particular business models at the expense of others. As Braden and his co-author point out, some of the most important competition in the software industry has become less about products than about business models. Some software companies sell the software directly, while others give software away as a means of selling hardware, services, or advertising. And in many cases, public policy debates in the software industry are thinly-veiled attempts to give some business models unfair advantages over others.

Braden produced a chart that gives some helpful examples of policies that tilt the economic playing field toward one business model at the expense of the others:

As you can see, software patents promote proprietary software business models at the expense of business models based on giving software away for free (and, it should be said, at the expense of people who want to give software away for free on a non-commercial basis). Similarly, the DMCA promotes proprietary software business models. They neglected to put it on the chart, but the flip-side is obviously true: the DMCA harms free software, commercial and otherwise, by making unauthorized interoperability with DRMed software a crime.
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20 comments

I would send my kids to this summer camp…

by Adam Thierer on August 10, 2008 · 19 comments

… if I lived in the San Fran area. Gever Tulley’s “Tinkering School” encourages kids to play with pocket knives, power tools, and fire. It also requires that kids take apart various household appliances just to figure out how they work. And, my personal favorite — kids get to drive cars. (Our own Tim Lee will be tickled by the portion of the camp where the kids are encouraged to break the DMCA by learning how to rip and repackage music, although I can’t imagine they really need much encouragement from adults to do that!)

The reason I found this idea for a summer camp so refreshing when I heard about it on NPR this week is because I have spent the better part of the last few months signing endless liability waiver forms for my daughter’s summer camps, including the tennis camp she’s in right now. After all, don’t you know how dangerous flying tennis balls can be!! And my kids like to swim at a local pool that not only has endless waiver forms and rules, but also no high diving boards for fear of liability from scumbag trial lawyers.

We have become a nation of over-protective wusses. As Tulley points out in his great little lecture below on “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do,” we practically wrap our kids in bubble wrap before we send them out the door to play these days — assuming we let them out the door at all. It’s crazy. Our kids need to be experiencing life, the elements, and yes, a little danger. I have already started teaching my kids how to use power tools and they are both under the age of 8. One of my wussy yuppie friends stopped by one day to get something and saw my kids playing with hammers, nails and saws and he thought I was nuts. But it is he who is nuts for shielding his kids to the joys of learning to build something with their own hands (and for denying them the skills to actually do some honest to God manual labor when they get older).

Anyway, enjoy this video. If this guy starts a camp on the East Coast, I am putting my kids on the waiting list.

19 comments

Paper or Plastic?

by Jim Harper on August 9, 2008 · 6 comments

Hit and Run has the story of a patent that should never have been granted.

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Another muni wi-fi failure (Portland), and taxpayers will pick up the tab

by Adam Thierer on August 9, 2008 · 18 comments

Portland’s muni wi-fi experiment has failed. [Add it to the list of failures]. According to Broadband Reports, taxpayers are going to be on the line for $60K:

Portland had high hopes of being one of those cities where citywide wireless networks might actually work but those hopes did not pan out. Earlier this summer, Wi-Fi provider MetroFi announced that the company could not afford to continue operating the network there. Attempts to sell it off failed and the network was shut down. That’s not the end of the story, though. In order to launch the network, MetroFi had to set up 600 (arguably unsightly) antennas throughout the city. The company had claimed that these antennas would be removed by the end of July but they remain up; MetroFi says that they still plan to follow through on removing them but city staff members report fears that the company is too strapped for cash to keep their end of this bargain. Estimates for removal are around $90,000; subtracting out a $30,000 bond for removal that was part of the MetroFi contract would still mean that Portland’s taxpayers could pay up to $60,000 to get those antennas taken down.

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FCC Killing BitTorrent? Not Exactly

by Tim Lee on August 9, 2008 · 42 comments

I’m always interested in stories about the unintended consequences of government regulation, but this story from Valleywag (Via a comment from Richard Bennett) doesn’t make a lot of sense:

The prospect of pay-by-the-bit bandwidth had immediate consequences for BitTorrent’s two main businesses: an online-media store delivered via file sharing, and a content-delivery network which competed with the likes of Akamai and Limelight Networks.

For users who would have to pay bandwidth fees to their ISPs on top of paying the usual charges, BitTorrent’s Torrent Entertainment Network store would soon look uncompetitive with the likes of Apple’s iTunes Store and Microsoft’s Xbox Marketplace — which prompted Best Buy to back out of talks to acquire TEN for $15 million.

As for BitTorrent’s content-delivery network, it was premised on the notion that BitTorrent would negotiate with ISPs to get privileged delivery for their file-sharing packets, while Comcast blocked others. With the FCC forcing Comcast to treat all file-sharing traffic equally, the promise of that business evaporated.

The obvious problem with this is that Apple, Microsoft, Akamai, et al haven’t negotiated privileged bandwidth agreements with ISPs either. If users have to pay their ISPs extra to download a 10 gig HD movie from BitTorrent, they’re going to have to do the same to download HD movies from iTunes or the XBox store. BitTorrent’s big advantage is that they face dramatically lower bandwidth costs on the other side of the pipe, because their users share files with each other rather than everyone getting bandwidth from the server. If bandwidth caps and metering doom BitTorrent, then they doom iTunes and the XBox store too. Somehow, I don’t think we’re about to see the end of video download services.

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Regulatory Models that Promote and Prevent Business Models (Or, Don’t Only Believe the Public Interest Hype!)

by Braden Cox on August 8, 2008 · 2 comments

“Don’t Believe the Hype” — Chuck D, Public Enemy

De Tocqueville is famous for discussing the American way of enlightened self-interest, in which there are mixed elements of private and public goods involved. But when it comes to self-interested lobbying by the tech industry, it’s the words of an American rapper, not a French rapporteur, that I’d like to discuss.

“Innovation!” – “openness” – “jobs” – “choice.” There’s a lot of buzzword hype thrown out by IT companies. Policymakers hear these buzzwords all the time, which are usually connected to how certain regulatory polices can benefit the public interest the most.

So, what does it all mean? Well, a recently released paper of mine tells you absolutely nothing about which IT polices are better than others. That’s right, nada. Zilch. Zippo.

Instead, the paper — Understanding the IT Lobby: An Insider’s Guide — is an explanatory of business models in the Information Technology industry, and the public policies that can help or harm companies over their competitors. It’s not a Scott McClellan tell-all – rather it connects the dots between public policy rhetoric and licensing, service, and ad-based business models.

The gist: the pursuit of one public policy can disadvantage not just one company, but an entire business model. Continue reading →

2 comments

Russian Astro-spam?

by Tim Lee on August 8, 2008 · 16 comments

This is fascinating. A co-blogger on my other blog did a very short post about the Russia-Georgia conflict. Within a few hours, we got 11 comments, not obviously spam, from different IP addresses, all of them pro-Russian. And, it should be noted, my other blog gets even less traffic than this one does, so it’s extremely unlikely that I just happen to have dozens of Russian readers who have never commented before.

I’m really curious why this happened. I can think of three explanations:

The comments were made by distinct, real people. This would be similar to the Ron Paul fiasco, in which a ton of genuine Ron Paul fans apparently Googled for Ron Paul’s name and spent a ton of time promoting his candidacy. This seems to me like the most likely possibility, but it’s pretty impressive if true.

They’re distinct people, but it’s some kind of organized campaign, perhaps funded by the Russian government or some other pro-Russian group. This would make it astro-spam like the ill-conceived anti-network neutrality spam this blog received a couple of years ago.

The comments are automatically generated, using a botnet to give the appearance that the comments originate from different places. This option would suggest some pretty sophisticated software, as at least one is responsive to the post, and there’s not obvious repetition.

I think any of these three options has interesting implications. Perhaps we’ll find out which it is by the response (or absence thereof) to this post.

16 comments

FCC’s Comcast decision was political failure

by Sonia Arrison on August 8, 2008 · 6 comments

There’s been a fair amount of chatter on this blog (here, here, and here) about how to properly view the FCC’s recent Comcast decision. My take is that while everyone is focused on questions of market failure, we are in the midst of a huge government failure. Read my full explanation here.

6 comments

A Debate About Data Confidentiality and the Forthcoming ‘Broadband Census for America’

by Drew Clark on August 8, 2008 · 3 comments

A recent post to Dave Farber’s [IP] list:

WASHINGTON, August 8 – I’d like to take a moment to respond to some of the issues raised by the recent e-mail of Brett Glass.

With respect to the issue data confidentiality, it’s important to separate out several issues here:

(1) The names of carriers and the locations in which they offer services, by ZIP code.

(2) The number of subscribers that carriers have in a particular ZIP code.

The Form 477 of the Federal Communications Commission requires carriers to submit both types of information to the FCC.

I agree that category (2) may well be confidential information. I do not think that category (1) can be considered confidential.

The web site that I run, http://BroadbandCensus.com, is an attempt to combine information about broadband from various sources. In addition to “crowdsourcing” data from internet users, we are combining public information from the FCC’s Form 477, publicly available information about carriers and where they offer services, as well as from states and localities. Since we launched BroadbandCensus.com in January 2008, We have had thousands of internet users tell us the names of their providers, where those providers are offering service, and they’ve taken our beta speed test.

It is important to note that Form 477 data released by the FCC does not include the names of the carriers. The FCC recently ordered carriers to begin to provide information on the census tract level (a unit slightly smaller than a ZIP code). However, unless the FCC changes its policy, consumers will still not be able to obtain carrier information from the agency.

Hence, the data we have from the FCC is extremely limited.

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3 comments

CDT-PFF Supreme Court Brief in FCC v. Fox Case

by Adam Thierer on August 8, 2008 · 20 comments

Along with my friends John Morris and Sophia Cope of the Center for Democracy & Technology, I have just submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the potentially historic free speech case FCC v. Fox, which will be heard in November.

[Reminder: The FCC v. Fox case is the indecency case involving the FCC’s new policy for “fleeting expletives.” I wrote about the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision here. The full decision is here. By contrast, the so-called “Janet Jackson case” — CBS v. FCC — took place in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and that court recently handed down a decision that also went against the FCC. I wrote about the Third Circuit’s decision here.]

The FCC v. Fox case could become the most important First Amendment-related Supreme Court case since FCC v. Pacifica Foundation, which just turned 30 years old last month. Of course, it could be that the Supreme Court simply sticks to the procedural questions regarding whether the FCC moved too far, too fast in reversing it’s long-standing policy of restraint regarding “fleeting expletives.” That’s essentially what the Second Circuit did. On the other hand, the Supremes might reach the substantive First Amendment issues tied up in the Pacifica case. We just won’t know for sure until the case is handed down.

Regardless, in the joint CDT-PFF amicus brief filed today, we argue that the FCC has both gone too far procedurally and that “the time is rapidly approaching for this Court to find that broadcast, like the Internet and other means of mass communication, ‘is entitled to the highest protection from government intrusion’ and that there is no longer a factual ‘basis for qualifying the level of First Amendment scrutiny that should be applied to this medium.'” Citing Reno v. ACLU, 521 U.S. at 863, 870.”

A more detailed summary of our argument follows below.
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