Articles by Solveig Singleton 
Solveig Singleton is a lawyer and writer, with ventures into ceramic sculpture, photography, painting, and animal welfare work. Past venues for her policy work include the Cato Institute (mostly free speech, telecom, and privacy), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (mostly privacy and ecommerce), the Progress and Freedom Foundation (mostly IP). She is presently an adjunct fellow with the Institute for Policy Innovation and is working on a new nonprofit venture, the Convergence Law Institute. She holds degrees from Cornell Law School and Reed College. Favorite Movie: Persuasion. Favorite Books: Dhalgren; Villette; Freedom and the Law. Favorite Art: Kinetic sculpture--especially involving Roombas. Most obsolete current technology deployed: a 30 yr. old Canon AE-1. Music: these days, mostly old blues, classical guitar, Poe, Cowboy Junkies, Ministry. Phobia: Clowns.
From IPcentral.info…
Tony Healy, programmer and Senior Fellow of the Institute for Policy Innovation, has commented before on issues involving the GPL, and particularly on ASPs. (See, e.g., GPLv3 and Web Businesses Is the Free Software Foundation Getting Tricky?)
He sends the following commentary on the ASP issue and the latest draft of GPLv3:
FSF betrays its followers with GPL v3
By Tony Healy — April 23, 2007
Amid the smoke and confusion around GPL v3, one thing is clear. The Free Software Foundation has wimped out of its intention to close the ASP loophole, thus betraying its programmer supporters.
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A very interesting essay from Paul Graham on software patents, including the argument that patents for hardware also constitute patents on algorithms.
By attorney Lars Liebeler, in CNET, a discussion of recent antitrust actions here and abroad, in particular scrutiny of the Novell/Microsoft agreement.
Each generation has its antitrust bogeyman from Standard Oil down to AT&T & IBM. The short-run obsession in policy circles with a single company (when policy properly conceived ought to be anonymous for the best results in the long run) invites gaming the system, and results in exceptions dominating what ought to be the rules to an alarming extent. Principled resistance to this tendency is very weak in the EU, where fines are seized on to feed growing armies of bureaucrats in Brussels and the trend is fueled by anti-Americanism.
Net Loss, from the WSJ, April 5, 2007 …
Europe’s old state telecom monopolies have been broken up, only for competition and consumers to face a new threat: re-regulation by Brussels. Nowhere is this prospect more apparent than in the debate over “Net neutrality.” Like the U.S., the EU can either allow the Internet to develop as rapidly and excitingly as possible, or it can freeze progress in its tracks.
Unfortunately, the latter option looks more and more likely. Draft laws are due in July on the EU’s “standardization policy for the information and communication technology sector.” EU Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding says the goal of the new policy is “to foster content creation and distribution in the multiplatform media business.” That sounds encouraging enough until you view it through the Commission’s promise to “closely monitor attempts to call into question the neutral character of the Internet.”
Again, I quote with permission from Jim on the ipcentral blog:
Obviously, last week’s release of new draft of GPLv3 was a big deal in the software world, but the discussion has taken a strange turn. The tech media all did their job — reporting, interviewing, analyzing. But the discussion boards, both “community” and business, are oddly uninformative.
Some big questions swirl around how GPLv3 would work in the real world, and, above all, how would it affect the customers’ and the whole tech world’s need for both interoperability and transaction costs that are low and predictable.
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I thought this was interesting and with permission I quote in its entirety from ipcentral:
Having examined the latest draft of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) several times, and having looked over the Rationale document, I have come to a diagnosis.
If GPLv3 were a human being, one would say that it has delusions of grandeur. It thinks it is a law rather than a license.
Legally speaking, GPLv3 is a license, which is a form of contract. It specifies the terms on which the holder of copyrights or patents on software will permit others to make use of it. It is a bit of a special case because it is open to the world at large; anyone may use it, without payment, as long as they abide by its terms, which is unusual in contract law. However, there are doctrines of promissory estoppel and third party beneficiaries that take account of such things, and GPLv3 is firmly within the legal genre of contract.
But the GPLv3 was apparently drafted on the assumption that it is something quite different — that it is a regulation controlling a range of general behavior by software users, and that it is being promulgated by a governmental body with law-creating power.
The difference between a contract and a regulation is extremely important.
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From Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games, on DRM and information. From the “creators are getting screwed” genre, but makes some interesting points regarding the need of creators for DRM even if the intermediaries (distributors, marketers) are taken out of the game.
The “creators are getting screwed” genre is a subset of the larger argument that takes the form of “__A___ is doing it all wrong, they just need to __B__,” where A=some person with substantial experience in an immensely complex field (a football coach or the entire recording industry, for example) and B=some simple alternative arrangement that comes to mind in casual conversation. It is usually not nearly that simple, as I suspect Greg has the savvy to recognize (particularly since he notes that his own gameco that is more generous with artists, is operating in the red). Dollars do not lie around on sidewalks for long.
Todd Hollenshead is the CEO of id, the developer of the DOOM and Quake series. He gave a talk at GDC about piracy. Unfortunately no transcript or video are available, but here is a summary of his talk (warning, this page’s color selection is hard on the eyes.)
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.