August 2009

Rethinking “Sex Crimes” and Sex Offender Registries

by Adam Thierer on August 8, 2009 · 622 comments

The Economist magazine has just released an important feature article entitled, “Sex Laws: Unjust and Ineffective.” In an indirect way, the article makes a point that I have been trying to get across in my work on this issue: If you want to keep your kids safe from real sex offenders, we need to scrap our current sex offender registries and completely rethink the way we define and punish sex offenses in this country. That’s because, currently, a significant percentage of those people listed in sex offender registries pose almost no threat to children, making it difficult for us to know who really does pose a threat to our kids and what we should do about them.

Simply stated, we’ve dumbed-down the notion of “sex crimes” in this country. As a nation, we have foolishly come to equate almost all sex offenses equally. While sex offender registry laws vary from state to state, many basically say that that two teens caught engaging in consensual oral sex in high school belong on the same list alongside child rapists. That is insanity. And it leaves many in the public, especially parents, thinking that the whole world is full of predators lurking on every corner just waiting to snatch, rape, and kill their children. [For the actual facts, see the appendix I have included down below: “Is America Suffering from a National Child Abduction Epidemic”?] In reality, as The Economist feature story points out, the truth is quite different: Continue reading →

622 comments

The Search Wars: With Jingles Like This, Microsoft’s Bing Can’t Lose!

by Berin Szoka on August 7, 2009 · 16 comments

We’ve written a lot lately about Microsoft’s efforts to reinvent itself, first rebranding its Live search engine as the Bing, and then partnering with Yahoo! to make Bing the search engine on Yahoo!’s still-impressive empire of content and services. But if Microsoft is going to beat Google in Search 3.0 and master shifts in the driving paradigms of the Internet from search and browsers to ubiquitous integration of social networking and other paradigms as yet unforeseen, Microsoft will need more than just brilliant engineering: They’ll need clever marketing.

So it seems that the software titan is turning to user-generated advertising, such as this gem:

WARNING: Battlestar Galactica spoiler: Google may well be in danger of losing its monopoly on cool to Microsoft if Bing can get at least four of the Final Five Cylons to volunteer as back-up singers in a promo video contest.

Google clearly considers Microsoft a threat, having recently launched an ad campaign of its own for its Apps services, which compete directly with Microsoft Office.

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Celebrate the TLF’s Fifth Anniversary: D.C. Happy Hour 8/14

by Berin Szoka on August 7, 2009 · 14 comments

Five years ago, we started the TLF to report on—and hopefully help to reverse—this dangerous trend of over-regulation of the Internet, communications, media and high-technology in general. We’ve become a full-service technology policy blog that covers complete gamut of public policy issues affecting the future of the Internet and technology.

Please join us as we celebrate, commiserate and plan for the next five years of fighting the good cyber-libertarian fight. We’ll even through in a free TLF laptop sticker! Just RSVP on Facebook today!

Rocket Bar RocketBar will be offering the following drink specials:

$3 PBR cans,
$5 Rail Cocktails,
$5 House Wine and
$4.50 Miller High Life 16oz cans.

They have a wide variety of games, so you can get your pool/shuffleboard/darts/Risk/Trivial Pursuit on.

Please spread the word about the event to your friends and, if you haven’t already done so, become a fan of our Facebook page!

14 comments

Going Solo

by Tim Lee on August 6, 2009 · 15 comments

Adam Thierer recruited me to contribute to what became the Technology Liberation Front way back in August 2004, when I was fresh out of college and working as a writer at the Cato Institute. My first post was about DRM (I was against it). I remember going back and forth with Adam about whether there was really a demand for a libertarian tech-policy blog. I think the last five years have laid those questions to rest, as both our traffic and our list of contributors have grown steadily. The last year or so has gone especially well, as we’ve been joined by Ryan, Berin, and Alex and Adam inaugurated new features like his annual Best Tech Books series.

At the same time, I’ve been blessed with a steadily growing list of other blogging opportunities. I’m now nominally a regular contributor to at least 6 blogs. In practice, this has meant woefully neglecting all six of them. And at the same time, I’ve had a number of people complain that it’s impossible to follow my writing, scattered as it is in so many places.

So I’ve decided that now is a good time to “go solo.” I’ve launched a new blog called “Bottom-Up,” and I’m going to be ending or scaling back my involvement with all the other blogs to which I nominally contribute. This will be my last post at TLF, and starting tomorrow the vast majority of my blogging activities will be found at the new site.

Some of what I’ll be talking about will be familiar to longtime TLF readers. I did a post today on the decline of newspapers, a topic I’ve weighed in before. But I’ll also be covering some new ground. This post, for example, examines the why Darwin’s theory of evolution remains so controversial after 150 years. I hope you’ll check it out, and if it looks interesting, please subscribe.

In closing, I want to thank my fellow TLFers, with whom I’ve fought the good fight over the last five years. I’m excited to see what they come up with in the next five years.

Viva la (Technology) Revolution!

15 comments

Text messages may be “free,” but the network isn’t

by Jerry Brito on August 6, 2009 · 14 comments

One reason AT&T may not like Google Voice is that it allows you to send and receive text messages for free. This has led many to argue that SMS are free to the carriers and they are overcharging. Congress is considering getting involved. Most recently there’s this from David Pogue in the NY Times:

The whole thing is especially galling since text messages are pure profit for the cell carriers. Text messaging itself was invented when a researcher found “free capacity on the system” in an underused secondary cellphone channel: http://bit.ly/QxtBt. They may cost you and the recipient 20 cents each, but they cost the carriers pretty much zip.

The price of a text message does sound ridiculous when you consider it on a per bit basis. The problem with thinking about it that way, though, is that it neglects the fact that AT&T had to build a network, and it has to maintain that network, before a text message can be “free.” AT&T charges customers so it can recoup its investment. It does so through voice and data service fees, but also through other fees, including for text messages. However it charges customers, it ultimately has to bring in enough to cover its costs or it goes out of business.

Now, if we passed a law today that said carriers could not charge for SMS because, after all, it’s free, we would see a an increase in the fees it charges for voice, data, and other services. The mix of prices for services we have right now is one the market will bear and consumers want, and there’s no reason to think that we could command a better one.

Better yet, if you want a “free” text messaging option, consider Boost Mobile, which offers just that. Of course, they have different voice prices and an older and slower network. In the end, they have to cover their costs, too.

14 comments

Privacy Solutions: Overview, Encryption & Anonymization

by Adam Marcus on August 6, 2009 · 21 comments

By Eric Beach, Adam Marcus & Berin Szoka

In the first entry of the Privacy Solution Series, Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer noted that the goal of the series is “to detail the many ‘technologies of evasion’ (i.e., empowerment or user ‘self-help’ tools) that allow web surfers to better protect their privacy online.” Before outlining a few more such tools, we wanted to step back and provide a brief overview of the need for, goals of, and future scope of this series.

Smokey the Bear with sign We started this series because, to paraphrase Smokey the Bear, “Only you can protect your privacy online!” While the law can play a vital role in giving full effect to the Fourth Amendment’s restraint on government surveillance, privacy is not something that cannot simply be created or enforced by regulation because, as Cato scholar Jim Harper explains, privacy is “the subjective condition that people experience when they have power to control information about themselves.” Thus, when the appropriate technological tools and methods exist and users “exercise that power consistent with their interests and values, government regulation in the name of privacy is based only on politicians’ and bureaucrats’ guesses about what ‘privacy’ should look like.” As Berin has put it:

Debates about online privacy often seem to assume relatively homogeneous privacy preferences among Internet users. But the reality is that users vary widely, with many people demonstrating that they just don’t care who sees what they do, post or say online. Attitudes vary from application to application, of course, but that’s precisely the point: While many reflexively talk about the ‘importance of privacy’ as if a monolith of users held a single opinion, no clear consensus exists for all users, all applications and all situations.

Moreover, privacy and security are both dynamic: The ongoing evolution of the Internet, shifting expectations about online interaction, and the constant revelations of new security vulnerabilities all make it impossible to simply freeze the Internet in place. Instead, users must be actively engaged in the ongoing process of protecting their privacy and security online according to their own preferences.

Our goal is to educate users about the tools that make this task easier. Together, user education and empowerment form a powerful alternative to regulation. That alternative is “less restrictive” because regulatory mandates come with unintended consequences and can never reflect the preferences of all users.

Continue reading →

21 comments

Slate’s Manjoo on Apple iPhone Regulation

by Adam Thierer on August 6, 2009 · 26 comments

Despite my frequent disagreements with his policy conclusions, Farhad Manjooo of Slate is one of the most gifted tech policy pundits around today and everything he writes is worth reading (and I whole-heartedly agreed with his recent article on the high-tech and antitrust). Alas, I find myself again disagreeing with him again today.

In his latest column, “The Great iPhone Lockdown: Should the FCC force Apple to sell Google’s apps?” Manjoo responds to a recent essay by TLF contributor Ryan Radia (“Newsflash to FCC: The iPhone is a Closed Platform, and Consumers Love It“). In that essay, Ryan generally argued that: (a) a lot of people own and love the iPhone despite some silly restrictions on certain apps; and (b) if they don’t like that, there are plenty of other options from which they can choose. Consequently, regulation seems unwarranted and likely highly misguided in light of the potential unitended consequences in might yield. It’s an argument I very much agree with, of course. Anyway, Manjoo responds:

Radia’s argument isn’t crazy. Just the other day, I argued that the government shouldn’t go after Google for antitrust violations because the tech industry is fluid; companies that are on top today can fall tomorrow. So what if Apple rejects apps capriciously? If its actions are so terrible, consumers will eventually abandon it.

But then Manjoo counters that argument and goes completely off-the-rails with several assertions that I find quite perplexing: Continue reading →

26 comments

Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve

by Tom W. Bell on August 6, 2009 · 639 comments

Herewith another recent addition to my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: A Libertarian View of Copyright, (inspired, in part, by Berin Szoka’s recent claim, “I just don’t know what the right balance [for copyright] is! I’m glad there are others patient enough to try to figure it out. This is why we have economists and… yes, even lawyers!”):

As an illustration of the public choice pressures that drive copyright policy, consider the fate of the copyright in Steamboat Willie, a 1928 cartoon that the Walt Disney Company cites as establishing its copyright claim in Mickey Mouse. Scholars have made a surprisingly strong case that, because the requisite formalities of the 1909 Copyright Act were not satisfied, Steamboat Willie has fallen into the public domain. The Walt Disney Company has responded to such claims by threatening to bring suit for “slander of title,” demonstrating how seriously it takes its copyright in Steamboat Willie. Let us take that copyright seriously, too, then, so that we might better understand the public choice effects of the Walt Disney Company’s interests.

The above figure illustrates how the duration of the copyright that the company claims in Steamboat Willie—marked by the solid grey line—has twice approached expiration—a limit marked by the dashed grey line. In both instances, federal lawmakers amended the Copyright Act to extend copyright’s duration, both for copyrighted works generally and works, such as Steamboat Willie, that predated the amendments. The line marking the copyright term in Steamboat Willie jogs upward both on the effective date of the 1976 Act (January 1, 1978) and again on the effective date of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (October 27, 1998). (Steamboat Willie did not receive the maximum possible copyright duration under either extension due to complications arising from the work’s status as a work in its second term under the 1909 Copyright Act.) No one can, of course, say with certainty whether or to what degree lobbying by the Walt Disney Company drove those copyright term extensions, which fortuitously or not saved the (supposed) copyright in Steamboat Willie from falling into the public domain. It does not take a great deal of skepticism, however, to predict that federal lawmakers will extend copyrights again before 2023, at which time Steamboat Willie will once more risk sailing beyond the limits of copyright’s duration.

Given the rough-and-tumble of real world lawmaking, does the rhetoric of “delicate balancing” merit any place in copyright jurisprudence? The Copyright Act does reflect compromises struck between the various parties that lobby congress and the administration for changes to federal law. A truce among special interests does not and cannot delicately balance all the interests affected by copyright law, however. Not even poetry can license the metaphor, which aggravates copyright’s public choice affliction by endowing the legislative process with more legitimacy than it deserves. To claim that copyright policy strikes a “delicate balance” commits not only legal fiction; it aids and abets a statutory tragedy.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, TechLiberation Front.]

639 comments

Sometimes the Truth is More Easily Expressed…through Puppets

by Braden Cox on August 5, 2009 · 12 comments

This video from a puppet maker in Australia has an interesting take on the fear-mongering that often drives public policy for Internet safety. The video does a good job of putting into perspective the real risk to kids of online predation.

For instance, we often hear the scary statistic that “1 in 5 children are sexually solicited online.” This was based on data originally released by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). It’s since been updated to 1 in 7, which still sounds bad, but not so bad in perspective — what does solicitation mean, and by whom? Well, “solicitation” is broadly defined to mean “unwanted contact.” In the study, it encompasses any unwanted discussion of a sexual nature. But the real perspective comes from learning 90% of this unwanted contact comes from other peers or young adults! So, it’s rarely the creepy perverted middle-age man in a wife beater t-shirt — even though the messaging from many policymakers focuses almost entirely on this scenario.

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Google v. Microsoft v. Apple v. Facebook: Nothing Obama Can’t Sort Out Over a Beer

by Berin Szoka on August 4, 2009 · 6 comments

Maybe Obama should invite Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer over to the White House for a beer to settle the two companies’ differences!

While he’s at it, Obama might want to invite Apple CEO Steve Jobs, too, since the common cause Apple and Google once made against Microsoft now seems to be giving way to increased rivalry between the two titans of Internet cool. Or how about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, given Facebook’s growing challenge to Google? Yahoo!’s Carol Bartz seems to get along much better with everyone than the boys in the group, so she’d probably help Obama keep things under control.

The Internet industry’s war-of-all-against-all is reminiscent of Tom Lehrer‘s classic 1960s satire “National Brotherhood Week”:

Continue reading →

6 comments

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