On the podcast this week, Timothy B. Lee, adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute, a contributor to Ars Technica, and blogger at Forbes.com, discusses the recent patent wars and the prospects for reform. Over the last two decades, large software companies like Microsoft and Apple began acquiring a significant number of patents, gaining the power to shut down or demand payment from any software company that might inadvertently infringe those patents. Lee talks about Google’s entry into the patent game, particularly with the acquisition of Motorola. He also discusses the theory behind these patent wars and how the use of patents have been altered from incentives for innovation to a litigation shield. Finally, Lee talks about different proposals for patent reform, including a first to file scheme that is part of the America Invents Act.
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On the podcast this week, Timothy B. Lee, PhD candidate in computer science at Princeton University and fellow at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, discusses a variety of issues. Lee parses new net neutrality nuances, addressing recent debate over prioritization of internet services. He also discusses wireless spectrum policy, comparing and contrasting a strict property rights model to a commons one. Lee concludes by weighing in on potential software patent reform, referencing Paul Allen’s wide-ranging patent-infringement lawsuits and the Oracle-Google tiff over Java patents.
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Do check out the interview, and consider subscribing to the show on iTunes. Past guests have included Clay Shirky on cognitive surplus, Nick Carr on what the internet is doing to our brains, Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on crowdsourcing, James Grimmelman on online harassment and the Google Books case, Michael Geist on ACTA, Tom Hazlett on spectrum reform, and Tyler Cowen on just about everything.
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Are you a tech policy geek who just can’t get enough Internet policy & cyberlaw books in your life? Alternatively, would you just like to hear two such geeks talk about some of the most important tech policy books out there so you don’t have to read them yourself?!
Either way, you might want to join TLF-alum Tim Lee and me for a book chat over at his blog on Wednesday night at 9:00 pm EST. Tim is experimenting with a new tool that his brother has developed called Envolve, which allows real-time user chat within a website or blog. Pretty cool tool, although I hope my increasingly arthritic fingers don’t fail me while I am trying to post rapid-fire responses to Tim or other participants! [Seriously, I am 41 and my fingers already feel like rusty hinges. Sucks.]
Anyway, if you are interested, join us for the chat and let us know what you think. I’ll be discussing some of my early picks for most important info-tech policy book of 2010 and relating them them to previous choices from 2008 and 2009. I’ll also be placing some of them along my Internet “optimist v. pessimist” spectrum.
As I always say, I read books so you don’t have to! All my reviews are here and here’s my Shelfari bookshelf.
Building on this week’s Cato Unbound online debate over the impact of Lawrence Lessig’s Code ten years after it’s release, Tim Lee has posted a terrific essay over at the Freedom to Tinker Blog “Sizing Up “Code” with 20/20 Hindsight.” Tim concludes:
It seems to me that the Internet is rather less malleable than Lessig imagined a decade ago. We would have gotten more or less the Internet we got regardless of what Congress or the FCC did over the last decade. And therefore, Lessig’s urgent call to action — his argument that we must act in 1999 to ensure that we have the kind of Internet we want in 2009 — was misguided. In general, it works pretty well to wait until new technologies emerge and then debate whether to regulate them after the fact, rather than trying to regulate preemptively to shape the kinds of technologies that are developed.
As I wrote a few months back, I think Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It makes the same kind of mistake Lessig made a decade ago: overestimating regulators’ ability to shape the evolution of new technologies and underestimating the robustness of open platforms. The evolution of technology is mostly shaped by engineering and economic constraints. Government policies can sometimes force new technologies underground, but regulators rarely have the kind of fine-grained control they would need to promote “generative” technologies over sterile ones, any more than they could have stopped the emergence of cookies or DPI if they’d made different policy choices a decade ago.
I agree whole-heartedly, of course, and this is the point I was trying to make in my in my first essay in the Cato debate when I argued:
Lessig’s lugubrious predictions proved largely unwarranted. Code has not become the great regulator of markets or enslaver of man; it has been a liberator of both. Indeed, the story of the past digital decade has been the exact opposite of the one Lessig envisioned in Code. Cyberspace has proven far more difficult to “control” or regulate than any of us ever imagined. More importantly, the volume and pace of technological innovation we have witnessed over the past decade has been nothing short of stunning.
Anyway, read Tim’s entire essay.
Tim Lee has been taking some heat here from Richard Bennett and Steve Schultze about various aspects of his new Net neutrality paper. I haven’t had much time this week to jump into these debates, but I did want to mention one important portion of Tim’s paper that is being overlooked. Specifically, I like the way Tim took head-on some of the silly free speech arguments being put forth as a rationale for net neutrality regulation. As Tim notes in the introduction of the paper:
Concerns that network owners will undermine free speech online are particularly misguided. Network owners have neither the technology nor the manpower to effectively filter online content based on the viewpoints being expressed, nor do profit-making businesses have any real incentive to do so. Should a network owner be foolish enough to attempt large-scale censorship of its customers, it would not only fail to suppress the disfavored speech, but the network would actually increase the visibility of the content as the effort at censorship attracted additional coverage of the material being censored.
I think that’s exactly right and, later in his paper (between pgs 22-3), Tim nicely elaborates about the “Herculean task” associated with any attempt by a broadband provider to “manipulate human communication.” Not only is it true, as Tim argues, that “no widescale manipulation would go unnoticed for very long,” but he is also correct in noting that the public and press backlash would be enormous.
Again, I agree wholeheartedly with all these sentiments, but I think Tim missed another important angle here when discussing the unfounded fears about corporate censorship and the misguided attempts to use free speech as a justification for imposing net neutrality regulations.
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Tim Lee’s long anticipated Cato Institute Policy Analysis has been released today.
The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation is a must-read for people on both sides of the debate over network neutrality regulation.
What I like best about this paper is how Tim avoids joining one “team” or another. He evenly gives each side its due – each side is right about some things, after all – and calls out the specific instances where he thinks each is wrong.
Tim makes the case for treating the “end-to-end principle” as an important part of the Internet’s fundamental design. Tim disagrees with the people who argue for a network with “smarter” innards and believes that neutrality advocates seek the best engineering for the network. But they are wrong to believe that the network is fragile or susceptible to control. The Internet’s end-to-end architecture is durable, despite examples where it is not an absolute.
Tim has history lessons for those who believe that regulatory control of network management will have salutary effects. Time and time again, regulatory agencies have fallen into service of the industries they regulate.
“In 1970,” Tim tells us, “a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the [Interstate Commerce Commission] as ‘primarily a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.'” Such is the likely fate of the Internet were management of it given to regulators at the FCC and their lobbyist friends at Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and so on.
This paper has something for everyone, and will be a reference work as the network neutrality discussion continues. Highly recommended: The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.
I haven’t had a chance to interview Tim yet, but I assume he has ceased posting Bea Arthur porn on Usenet (as reported by PJ) because of several major ISPs’ capitulation to the New York Attorney General and agreement to cut off access to Usenet. Declan McCullagh has the most thought-through write-up.
I appeared on the BBC early yesterday morning (BBC-time) to discuss concerns with this. I didn’t know about Tim’s draconian action or I surely would have raised it as an example of the unfortunate fall-out from the preemptive censorship some ISPs have agreed to at the behest of the AG.
But I can – to be the first to link to Mike Masnick’s very interesting post on the “can’t compete with free” meme.
It seems like a genuine problem content producers have, competing with those who would share content without regard to copyright law. But Mike points out that they have the same problem as the producer of any good. Competition drives their profits to zero, forcing them to innovate, which content producers seem reluctant to do.
In the comments, Mike is defending himself against some meritorious challenges, though. The marginal cost of distributing intellectual goods may be (effectively) nothing, but the marginal cost of the goods themselves is something above that. Content producers are looking at competion from those who would offer the same products at below marginal cost.
Yesterday, the Cato Institute issued Tim Lee’s paper, Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reaction has been swift and favorable.
- Blog top-dog BoingBoing says “it takes sharp free-market types like the Cato characters to bust out elegant critiques like this one.”
- Heavyweight SlashDot congratulates Lee and Cato for “putting into words what most of us know already.” (And the discussion threads prove that many slashdotters have trouble putting ideas into words.)
- Our friend Instapundit quotes the money quote but does not say “read the whole thing,” as he does so often. No one ever reads the whole thing – that’s why we read blogs – so Glenn is obviously using reverse psychology.
- Confessing to a personal relationship with the author, Julian Sanchez of Reason’s Hit and Run calls Tim’s a “sharp new paper.” Oh my, do the comments get testy quickly.
- Mike of TechDirt gives the paper a shout. (We’re glad it wasn’t Carlo.)
- Longtime champions EFF welcome the contribution of “free marketeers” to their effort.
- PublicKnowledge welcomes this “voice on the right.” Only Kartoon Kato is “on the right” – Cato is neither left nor right, rather the best of both – but the welcome is welcome all the same.
These, and other examples, show that Tim’s paper, especially coming as it does from the Cato Institute, is enjoying enthusiastic appreciation. It’s a needed addition to the discussion of copyright law, protection, and business in the digital age.
I’m taking bets on when the paper is blogged on IPCentral . . . !
As I write this, it’s 9:33 a.m. Eastern. I bet Tim Lee will have a post up about this (and/or this) by 9:54 a.m.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.