So I recently sat down and quickly read through Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This has gotten some good reviews and I generally like this type of history–history of the downtrodden, economic history more than wars and such.
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C. Boyden Gray, a fellow reader of Sir Henry Maine, on chemical regs in Europe, from the WSJ.
I’m back from my every-few-years journey to Nelson, Canada, my hometown. Back to 1970’s levels of technology, too–not that the town isn’t wired, it is, and wirelessed, too, though coverage in the mountains is spotty; I understand there are now people from Vancouver settling there and telecommuting. But my mother’s house has neither computer, nor any kind of Net access, nor a touchtone phone (yes, the phone has an actual dial), no hair dryer, no clothes dryer, no dishwasher, no microwave, and no CD or DVD player, just an old record player and a radio. She does have cable tv, but this is in the last 10 years… before that, no television at all. No car. She likes it this way.
Here’s my blog on ipcentral regarding Nick’s comments on the cleanflicks case, with which I respectfully disagree.
Following a report concluding that research on primates such as monkeys will continue to yield benefits into the future, Spain considers extending “human rights” to apes. Experimentation on apes is restricted in England and New Zealand.
This is very interesting stuff for classical liberal and libertarian rights theorists. On the one hand,
My discussion at the ipcentral blog links to an interesting post by David Friedman on movies, games, DRM, and copyright.
Assorted comments have filtered in concerning my DMCA paper, and I respond here:
SympathyI again underscore that I am sympathetic to Ed Felten and others caught up in litigation. My point was not to trivialize their concerns, but to put them in a larger perspective. The plight of a hungry person arrested for snatching bread is a real plight, but it is not an argument for abolishing the law in question. I am not an “act utilitarian.” I do not believe that every application of a rule needs to be optimal for the rule to do more good than harm. The courts are good at dealing with individual hard cases; forums exists for reform and for exemptions; but, still, in boundary disputes, lines must be drawn somewhere. If one has a strong concept of natural rights, that will be jarring. But I believe that rights need some flexibility or they will not survive the transformation of the economy into one where less value is bound up in physical capital and more in intellectual capital.
Piracy and more Piracy and Less PiracyYes, there is rather a lot of it, isn’t there? Offline, online, and so on. If DRM does nothing to impede it, and if keeping hacker/cracker tools in the realm of black market or grey market does nothing to inconvenience anyone even slightly, then that is certainly a problem. But I do think that there is a vast stretch amount of ground between failing completely and preventing all piracy of any kind. And although there is a great deal of piracy going on, there could easily be a great deal more.
A note about P2P. Of course the DMCA doesn’t do anything about that, the stuff is already decrypted. To address that problem, we have the Grokster case. Different problem, but similar analysis. Markets can contend with black-market P2P, fraught with viruses and other nasty things. The expectations of students are misleading here. Students are used to getting things for free from their parents and others. They generally do not buy the machines or software they use, and have little cash flow to spend on content. So they are not averse to risking giving their machines horrible diseases, and on the other hand “need” to get content for free. They have a great deal of time on their hands. Flash forward a few years; these same people have jobs, many of those jobs (an increasing number) will involve intellectual property (journalism, photography, science, trade secrets). They will be short on time and have more money. They will be much more wary of viruses. Their views are quite likely to evolve.
If DRM itself is all a waste of effort, well, one ought to see investors supporting business models that use something else. But, again, we see only a few small experiments. Very few. Very small. I find it extremely implausible that everyone across a wide range of content developers–games, music, movies, photos, books, and all their investors so on, should be entirely lacking in vision. There is money to be made here.
It remains possible that someone will come forward and discover how it is to be done without relying on any of the types of boundaries that have traditionally been used. The idea of voluntary compliance is attractive, but unrealistic in a large community. People do voluntarily comply with a great many laws. But how these norms came to be internalized is, in part, due to centuries of past enforcement patterns and the gradual evolution of human expectations accordingly.
It is also possible that some of the need for liability rules to take up the slack on the enforcement side would lessen if the Internet for other reasons evolves in the direction of being more friendly to enforcement. An infrastructure supporting identification, authentication, and reputation mechanisms might help. But bear in mind that should such an infrastructure develop, so will efforts to crack and spoof, and then we are right back at the problem of the DMCA again.
Beyond Short Papers and Hard Arguments The best response to my paper comes from Fred Von Loehmann at EFF, who brings the argument back to the question of whether the DMCA and/or DRM is needed at all. The larger point of my paper is that if the DMCA is necessary, the hard cases we have seen cannot justify its repeal, but rather call for tinkering or further explication from the courts; I underscore that my paper was not intended as a final or complete defense of the DMCA, it would have had to be much longer. But FVL’s argument takes us beyond the scope of the paper, where I think the debate is more serious.
To justify repeal, one would need to show that the DMCA is not necessary for the viability of markets. This argument can take two forms:
An excerpt from David’s excellent paper on property rights. He’s got to win the award for most awesome former mailman:
According to Martin Bailey (this volume), the pattern observed by Rose and Ellickson also was common among aboriginal tribes. That is, tribes that practiced agriculture treated the land as private during the growing season, and often treated it as a commons after the crops were in. Hunter-gatherer societies did not practice agriculture, but they too tended to leave the land in the commons during the summer when game was plentiful. It was during the winter, when food was most scarce, that they privatized. The rule among hunter-gatherers is that where group hunting’s advantages are considerable, that factor dominates (Bailey, this volume). But in the winter, small game is relatively more abundant, less migratory, and evenly spread. There was no “feast or famine” pattern of the sort one expects to see with big-game hunting. Rather, families tended to gather enough during the course of the day to get themselves through the day, day after day, with little to spare.
Even though this pattern corroborates my own general thesis, I confess to being a bit surprised. I might have predicted that it would be during the harshest part of the year that families would band together and throw everything into the common pot in order to pull through. Not so. It was when the land was nearest its carrying capacity that they recognized the imperative to privatize.
Do you have a working carbon monoxide detector with a digital readout? If not, you might want to consider getting one. A good one. We have one, and yesterday it stopped me from going to sleep and never waking up. (Note: Readers who have any regard for my intellect will find it evaporate upon reading this story. Bear in mind that I have never made any claim to be especially smart, although from time to time someone who knows me will make the mistake of thinking so; I just read too much and ask too many questions).
We’d recently had a new furnace and air conditioner put in to our retro chic 70’s townhouse. There was a lot of wrassling with duct work. I noticed a hole in some of the older pipes, but didn’t think much of it; the hole was right front and center, and I’d assumed that whatever pipes it was in couldn’t possibly be the exhaust pipes… I mean, that would mean that the installers had been insane. Then a handyman working in our basement noticed the same thing, and told me that yes, those were the exhaust pipes, and I really needed to get someone to look at them. I called the furnace guys, who assured me that a small hole wouldn’t be a problem. I made them promise to send someone out anyway. It was Thursday, and they said they would send someone Monday. After all, we weren’t using the furnace…
Friday afternoon, after putting the Grub down for his nap and lying down myself, I was feeling oh so sleeeeepy, very sleeepy, sort of like I’d been hit on the head by a brick. I was just drifting off when the carbon monoxide detector, which is right next to my bed, starts shrieking at me. Furious, because it’s LOUD and immediately wakes up the Grub, I yank it out of the wall, open the windows, and (here’s where the idiocy comes in) I lie back down to take my nap. (Background: over the last couple years we have been plagued by false alarms from our smoke detectors, so that sort of explains my idiocy, but not quite, because it’s obvious when a smoke detector is giving a false alarm, but not at all with a CO detector, which is the whole point of having one). All I can think of is how tired I am, and how annoyed I would be if the Grub won’t fall back to sleep again. Then just by chance my husband calls. Now I’m REALLY annoyed because the phone just stops me from drifting off again and again wakes up the Grub. It’s my husband. We have a short conversation about how our respective days are going. I happen to mention that I’m annoyed because it is too noisy and the Grub isn’t napping. We
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