Articles by Jim Harper 
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
Self-styled Internet lawyer Ira Rothken has gotten a settlement from software companies and retailers that should reform the shrink-wrap license conundrum.
When the terms of a shrink-wrap license make the license enforceable upon opening the package and include a return policy you don’t accept, how do you decline the terms and return the product? If there ever was a conundrum, this is one, folks.
In Washington, lots of complaints about EULAs (End-User License Agreements) are addressed to regulators and politicians. But EULAs are contracts. The resolution to problems with EULAs lies in contract law – like the doctrine of adhesion contracts, about which I was expert in my law school contracts class. (Um, I’m not any more.) Many terms in EULAs may ultimately be stricken under this doctrine. So, good for you, Ira, and watch out, EULA-writers!
The Federal Trade Commission has issued regulations fleshing out the CAN-SPAM Act. Given the impotence of CAN-SPAM to reduce spam, this weighty document can be regarded as regulation without a reason. Indeed, if, like me, you don’t buy the Supreme Court’s commerial speech doctrine, this is not just regulation without a reason, this is speech regulation without a reason.
There is (or may someday be) an argument that CAN-SPAM has (or will) reduce spam, but the recent successful spam lawsuits I’ve seen have gone off on laws other than CAN-SPAM or at least CAN-SPAM plus other laws. A full study of what laws are actually used against spammers, and perhaps an attempt to measure their deterrent effect, is needed. Volunteers?
It’s essential to understand that the Internet is an agreement among users. That can be a little mind-blowing to everyone who thinks that it is a thing requiring some form of external, top-down, public-law-style regulation.
Here’s an anonymous post inspired by the ICANN meeting now underway, obviously by someone who gets it. There are details on which I differ (like the ITU), but on the whole it’s good enough to declare twangily: “Wish I’da Wrote This.”
A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that artists and musicians are less antagonistic to P2P than their “industry.”
The conclusions of the study, copied here for artistic, literary, scholarly, and news-reportorial purposes, are:
Artists and musicians on all points of the spectrum from superstars to starving singers have embraced the internet as a tool to improve how they make, market, and sell their creative works. They use the internet to gain inspiration, build community with fans and fellow artists, and pursue new commercial activity.
Artists and musicians believe that unauthorized peer-to-peer file-sharing of copyrighted works should be illegal. However, the vast majority do not see online file-sharing as a big threat to creative industries. Across the board, artists and musicians are more likely to say that the internet has made it possible for them to make more money from their art than they are to say it has made it harder to protect their work from piracy or unlawful use.
As with all studies, there are reasons to be skeptical of this one. Pew allowed some of its sample to self-identify as artists. That is, the performer of macrame-related folk tunes who has never left his bedroom may be an “artist” for purposes of this study. (My interpretive dance inspired by The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law might qualify me.)
But the gist of the study is well-taken: Artists benefit from the Internet and see its commercial potential as a benefit to themselves, file-sharing/piracy notwithstanding.
Yet another impediment to rapid worldwide RFID deployment is the lack of qualified people to operate the systems. Yet another reason to retreat from the sci-fi view of RFID as all-encompassing.
Many otherwise nice people are dizzy about RFID, which, they think, will see worldwide pervasiveness in the all-too-near future. Think again.
In a unique essay about the real world, Larry Shutzberg of Rock-Tenn Co. (consumer packaging, promotional displays, and recycled paperboard) notes that the costs of RFID include “tags, readers, printers, middleware, infrastructure, consulting, R & D, system changes, implementation, training, change management, and service provider fees.”
So just settle down, people: ubiquitous RFID will only follow ubiquitous funds to put it there, which is quite a long way off.
There’s a good ol’ political dust-up underway about whether Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum should have educated his children through the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. He owns a house in the district served by the school, but his family’s main residence is in Virginia. He’s taken the kids out of the cyber school in favor of the home-schooling option.
One school board member’s demand that Santorum pay back $100,000 might be a little more revealing than she wants it to be.
It reminds me of a congressional junket I went on one time (sponsored by Qwest, if full disclosure interests you). In Southern Oregon, we visited all these companies that were using broadband to ramp up their efficiency and business processes. Then we visited a public entity – some kind of special school, I honestly can’t remember – that was using technology in similar ways. They went through all the great tech stuff they were doing and concluded with how important it was to be able to get funding for it all.
HOLD IT! Every place in the private sector, technology was bringing down costs while improving services. But in the public sector, technology was a new cost-center. It didn’t pass the smell test. Rather, it stunk. A bit of that aroma is on this story.
Santorum has five kids, and he might have been sending them to this school for a number of years, but cyber-education should be closer to free than $100,000.
The amazing “Mike” from TechDirt has trashed technophobia very nicely in a post about a group calling for regulation of camera phones. Technophobes wanted laws requiring cars to be preceeded by a person walking along waving a red flag. Technophobes want mandates that camera phones should flash or click. As if someone wanting to misuse a camera phone wouldn’t disable the flash or click.
There are a host of ways that society closes in around new technologies to distill their benefits and filter out potential harms. I suppose I tried to describe this in my paper on RFID, linked here so many times in the past. The privacy consequences of camera phones will be ameliorated, just like the privacy consequences of cameras were.
It’s easy to parade around the horribles of new technologies. It’s heavy lifting to ameliorate the harms, but we’re way better if we do so through natural societal processes than by hamstringing technology with government mandates.
Viva TLF!
“The internet is 200,000 private networks linked by private agreement.”
These are the words of ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey, according to a story in Australian News Interactive.
Most people working on “Internet governance” probably don’t realize the profundity of this statement. It’s a message to governments – all governments: “Hands Off!”
I, for one, look forward to the day when “Internet governance” is recognized as an oxymoron.
Now, governments can be extremely sticky. Even the U.S. government, which is one of the better ones, got its mitts on the Internet by just sort of declaring its right to assign governance to ICANN. If Twomey knows the consequence of his statement, he’s setting up a battle with the U.S. Department of Commerce in 2006. A victory there would be good, so long as all other pretenders to the mantle of Internet governor can be fended off, too.
The U.N.’s Working Group on Internet Governance is the careful effort of overpaid international bureaucrats to seize control of the Internet on behalf of have-not countries and drive it into the ground – er, I mean, to create an “open and inclusive” process and “a mechanism for the full and active participation of governments, the private sector and civil society from both developing and developed countries, involving relevant intergovernmental and international organizations and forums.” Or something.
Look through the list of countries represented in the working group, announced today and listed at the bottom of this page. Sure enough, it’s larded up with academics and bureaucrats from backwater foreign countries like Mauritius, China, Kenya, and Rhode Island. In July 2005, they will assuredly report back to the U.N. Secretary-General that international bureaucratic control of the Internet is needed.
Which raises the crucial question about Internet Governance: If the report of a U.N. Working Group is totally irrelevant, does the U.N. Working Group actually exist?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.