I’ve been thinking a fair amount about software patents the last couple of weeks. I recently attended a Brookings Institution conference that focused pretty heavily on software patents, and since then I’ve interviewed several sharp patent scholars in preparation for a forthcoming article. In those conversations, I noticed the same cultural gulf I blogged about on Techdirt last week. You might say that on the subject of software patents, lawyers are from Mars and programmers are from Venus.
I think there’s a universal human tendency to over-estimate the importance of whatever you happen to be an expert on. I know lots of geeks who believe everyone and their grandmother should use Ubuntu, vi, git, RAID, and so forth. A lot of economists believe that the rest of the social sciences would be better off they all started using the methods of economists to do their jobs. When we develop human capital in some particular field, we tend to get a corresponding emotional investment in that field.
So when a programmer thinks about software patents, he’s interested in improving the software industry. Given how screwed up software patents are, a lot of us go straight for the most direct and elegant way to accomplish that objective: excluding software from patentability. In contrast, when a patent lawyers thinks about software patents, he’s interested in fixing the patent system. From that perspective, abolishing software patents looks like a horrible hack, because the underlying problems that caused software patents to be such a mess are probably responsible for problems in other industries too.
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I can’t believe we’re actually asking whether Obama—the candidate who promised to bring the Federal government (and perhaps everyone else) into the Web 2.0 era whether they like it or not—will have a “personal computer.”
The “webiness” of Obama’s predecessors is just embarrassing:
Clinton famously sent only two e-mails while he was president, one to test whether he could push the “send” button and one to John Glenn, sent while the former Ohio senator was aboard the space shuttle…
During his presidency, George W. Bush didn’t have a personal log-in to the White House Internet server, nor did he have a personal whitehouse.gov e-mail address. (He gave up his private e-mail account, G94B@aol.com, just before his first inauguration.) When he did go online, there were some things he couldn’t access. During Bush’s tenure, the White House’s IT department blocked sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and most of MySpace. The ability to comment on blogs was blocked, as was certain content that was deemed offensive. According to David Almacy, who served as Bush’s director for Internet and e-communications from 2005-07, only two people had access to the iTunes store during that period: Almacy, who had to upload speeches to the site, and the president’s personal aide, so that he could download songs for Bush’s iPod.
Pipes and tubes, pipes and tubes, my friends…
If Obama decides not to implement whatever legal or technical changes would be required for him to do something so simple as having a computer on his desk, I suppose we’ll know that he’s not really all that interested—at least on a personal level—in all his rhetoric about the power of the Internet to make government more transparent and accountable. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.
Those who criticize Google as a “monopoly” usually focus on the search and advertising markets. Google may indeed have a huge lead in those markets, but it is by no means a “monopoly” in the strict sense of the word as the only (“mono-“) seller in that market.
If the critics are concerned about about true “monopoly” or at least something close to it, perhaps they ought to focus on Feedburner, the free service Google acquired back in 2007. If one takes a very narrow definition of the service Feedburner offers, one could argue that there is no real alternative to Feedburner. But on the other hand:
I have a very simple solution. I use my own RSS feed I don’t need some other company providing a enhanced solution. I have never understood why people used feedburner at all.
Getting statistics from a feed is elementary. There are several services out their that provide podcast statistics.
Stupidity in giving someone else control over ones feed is something I will never get. I have no sympathy for those having feedburner issues.
Regardless, some leading bloggers have expressed outrage over Feedburner’s less-than-perfect reliability—see this recent rant by Michael Arrington. But we call in the federales to “fix” the “problem”—if one properly apply that term to a free service beloved by (nearly all) bloggers everywhere just because it’s not absolutely, positively 100% reliable or instantaneous or simply because some people don’t like the idea of using yet another Google product, no matter how good it is—let’s see what Feedsqueezer, a soon-to-be-launched service, will offer.
Note: The word “monopoly” is now commonly used to mean “control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.” It’s not obvious what that would mean in the case of those Google services, that are both free to the user and not directly related to any price paid by, say an advertiser—as distinct from, say, Adwords or Adsense, where there are at least prices that might, in theory, be controlled.
Digital video recorders (DVRs) may turn out to be the “last gasp” of cable, satellite and other traditional multichannel subscription video providers. If users can get the same basic functionality (on demand viewing of the shows they want) over the Internet for free or paying for each show rather than a hefty monthly subscription, Who Needs a DVR?, as Nick Wingfield at the WSJ asks:
Among a more narrow band of viewers -– 18- to 34-year-olds -– SRG found that 70% have watched TV online in the past. In contrast, only 36% of that group had watched a show on a TiVo or some other DVR at any time in the past.
That last figure is a fairly remarkable statistic. Remember that DVRs have the advantage of playing video back on a device where the vast majority of television consumption has traditionally occurred –- that is, the TV set. Although it’s also possible to watch shows over the Internet on a TV set through a device like Apple TV and Microsoft’s Xbox 360, most people watch online TV shows through their computers — which have inherent disadvantages, like smaller screens and, in most cases, no remote controls.
Indeed, if users are going to buy a piece of hardware, why buy a DVR when they can buy a Roku box or a game console like the XBox 360 that will put Internet-delivered TV on their programming on their “television” (a term that increasingly simply means the biggest LCD in the house, or the one that faces a couch instead of an office chair)—and save money?
This is precisely the point Adam Thierer and I have been hammering away at in this ongoing series. The availability of TV through the Internet and the ease with which consumers can display that content on a device, and at a time, of their choosing are quickly breaking down the old “gatekeeper” or “bottleneck” power of cable. Let’s see how long it takes Congress and the FCC to realize that the system of cable regulation created in the analog 1990s no longer makes sense in this truly digital age.
Some sensible thinking here about broadband pork stimulus plans from Saul Hansell of the New York Times. In his piece on the NYT Bits blog this week, “Does Broadband Need a Stimulus?” he argues that people should stop grumbling about the “relatively small sum” of $6 billion that the new administration has proposed for wiring rural areas and urban centers. Hansell argues:
This also seems to be a rather sound policy choice because, as I look at it, the noise about a broadband gap is hooey. With new cable modem technology becoming available, 19 out of 20 American homes eventually will be able to have Internet service that is faster than any available now anywhere in the world. And that’s without one new cable being laid.
That fact hasn’t prevented a lot of folks involved in telecommunications policy from calling for a lot of money to be spent on backhoes and cable riggers. For example, the Communications Workers of America and the Telecommunications Industry Association called for $25 billion in subsidies to network providers as well as tax breaks. The Free Press, a group that advocates for media diversity, recommended spending $44 billion, with an emphasis on subsidizing companies to compete with existing cable and phone companies.
Running a new fiber-optic cable to every American home may well increase competition in broadband providers, but it isn’t needed to deliver high-speed Internet service. Current cable modems use just one of the more than 100 channels on a typical cable system and can often offer speeds of 16 megabits per second or more. The next generation of modems, using a technology called Docsis 3, allows several of those video channels to be combined to offer what ultimately can be Internet service as fast as 1 gigabit per second — 10 times faster than is offered in Japan, which generally is regarded as having the fastest broadband infrastructure.
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Many folks are discussing Christopher Ferguson’s latest paper on “The School Shooting / Violent Video Game Link: Causal Relationship or Moral Panic?” And with good reason. It’s an important look at how “moral panics” develop in modern society, in this case around video games. [Moral panics is a subject I have written on at length here many times before. Alice Marwick’s brilliant article on “technopanics” is also worth reading in this regard].
As I’ve noted here before, Ferguson has penned many important articles raising questions about the claims made by some other psychologists (and politicians) that there is causal relationship between exposure to violent video games and youth aggression. Ferguson has shown there are reasons to be skeptical of such claims — both methodologically and practically-speaking. More on that down below.
In his latest piece, however, Ferguson, a professor at Texas A&M’s Department of Behavioral, Applied Sciences and Criminal Justice, is more fully developing moral panic theory, which he describes as follows: “A moral panic occurs when a segment of society believes that the behavior or moral choices of others within that society poses a significant risk to the society as a whole.” To illustrate the various forces at work that drive moral panics, Ferguson uses this “Moral Panic Wheel”:
![Moral Panic Wheel [Ferguson]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3080/3219688961_6d255b309f.jpg)
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Chris Soghoian called out a problem and now takes credit for a fix to the way the Whitehouse.gov Web site delivered third-party cookies – specifically YouTube cookies.
The use of YouTube videos on the President’s site is a Web 2.0-ish improvement, which is welcome, but embedding videos meant that YouTube was placing cookies on the computers of visitors to Whitehouse.gov and – as a natural result – collecting records of people’s visits to that site.
Things got weird when the Whitehouse.gov privacy policy exempted YouTube cookies from the general ban on persistent cookies on federal Web sites.
For videos that are visible on WhiteHouse.gov, a ‘persistent cookie’ is set by third party providers when you click to play a video. . . . This persistent cookie is used by YouTube to help maintain the integrity of video statistics. A waiver has been issued by the White House Counsel’s office to allow for the use of this persistent cookie.
A government entity should not show preference for a particular service provider in a policy like this and the White House should either exempted third-party cookies generally, or not at all.
The federal government’s June, 1999 policy on cookies (formerly found here, but apparently moved) reflects June, 1999 thinking about cookies – as sinister and dastardly. It was a little silly back then, and is more so today.
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Sun Chairman Scott McNealy seemingly wants to shine some light on the benefits of software that is open sourced, but by advocating government mandates he’s calling for the specter of regulatory darkness. Here’s a quote from him in a BBC article:
“The government ought to mandate open source products based on open source reference implementations to improve security, get higher quality software, lower costs, higher reliability – all the benefits that come with open software.”
One could dispute the substance of his comment, but not his motive:
“Open source does not require you to pay a penny to Microsoft or IBM or Oracle or any proprietary vendor any money.”
Ah, so it’s all about some businesses getting a leg up over others, and using government to do so. Even Matt Asay writes that he’s not a supporter of mandates.
The scary thing is that, according to the BBC article, McNealy has been asked to prepare a paper on open source for the Obama administration! As the new administration is touting open government, let’s hope it remains open to the best products that are available, whatever license they may carry, without tech mandates.
Tech policy aficionados should by now be familiar with efforts to reform the patent system. Issues range from fixing the poor quality of granted patents to instituting post-grant review procedural reforms. What you don’t hear much about are efforts to educate judges on patents. Because no matter how much patent law is reformed to increase patent quality on the front-end, we’re still going to see patents being litigated in court.
That’s why I’m happy to see today’s reintroduction of Rep. Adam Schiff’s and Rep. Darrell Issa’s bill, HR 628. The bill creates a pilot program to educate participating judges on patent law and the technical matters underlying patent claims in Federal District Courts (HR 628 is the same as last session’s bill HR 5418). Here’s my analysis of the bill from when it was introduced last session.
Judges have considerable power to affect a trial. They make procedural and evidentiary decisions, and often a judge’s decision at trial can only be overturned on appeal if there was an abuse of discretion (a high burden for an appellant to meet).
HR 5418 is a targeted pilot program and its effect could be substantial, if not immediate. Better informed judges can weed out frivolous claims more quickly while focusing on cases with legitimate claims. As a result, anticipated and actual costs of enforcing and defending lawsuits decrease, reducing the burden on all parties but particularly the budgets of small firms. Less money for lawyers means more money for innovating, so firms can increase their research budgets and returns on investment.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.