Articles by Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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YouTube and Collective Licensing

by Tim Lee on October 16, 2006 · 4 comments

Derek Slater notes an important wrinkle in the recent YouTube news:

Lost in the GooTube shuffle last week was some even bigger news for the scores of YouTube users who already enjoyed lip syncing (and hip shaking) to their favorite songs and posting home videos to the site. Deals worked out with Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner Music suggest that fans will be able to freely remix and share popular sound recordings from those major record labels’ catalogs. When a remix video gets viewed, YouTube will share a cut of the advertising revenue with the rights holder. It’s a simple concept with potentially profound implications. Artists get paid, while fans can keep on sharing remixed tunes on the site and push the boundaries of user generated media even further. No fans or innovators get sued in the process. That raises an important question: why can’t P2P users get a similar deal? EFF has long advocated that the music industry blanket license P2P users to let them keep sharing in a way that gets artists paid. The labels could help Internet users get legal by cutting a deal with an intermediary, whether a P2P company, an ISP, or a collective licensing society like ASCAP.

It’s worth noting that Prof. Picker called this development back in June. The deals announced last week appear to use exactly the model professor Picker predicted:

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Firm, Market, and Social Organization

by Tim Lee on October 16, 2006 · 14 comments

The central insight of Coase’s Penguin was that peer production is form of economic organization on par with the market (first explained by Adam Smith) and the firm (first explained by Ronald Coase). Benkler expands on this tripartite classification of organizational structures in The Wealth of Networks. He spends quite a lot of time pointing out that non-market, non-firm methods of social organization account for a substantial fraction of our economic lives. We carpool, have dinner parties, give directions to strangers, help each other move, etc. These activities generate goods and services (meals, rides to work, information) that could also have been obtained via the market, but for a variety of reasons we sometimes find that non-market organizational methods meet our needs better.

I think this is a point that libertarians tend to under-appreciate. In college, I dated a left-of-center girl who liked to shop at the local grocery co-op rather than a commercial grocery store. It was a topic of frequent argument. I’d point out the relative efficiencies of commercial grocery store organization, she’d stress fuzzier, more community-focused advantages: the sense of community, the superior treatment of workers, the closer connection between customers, employees, and management, etc.

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Norwegian ISP Discriminates, Backs Down after Customer Outcry

by Tim Lee on October 14, 2006

Via EFF, a Norwegian company, NextGenTel, apparently decided to limit the bandwidth of sites that didn’t pay NextGenTel extra for the privilege of offering high-speed content to their customers. After a consumer backlash, however, the ISP backed down:

It seems like the customers won this battle (link, to Norwegian article). Due to bad publicity and reactions from customers NextGenTel have removed the limit and NRK is now back on full speed in their network. What should I say? Thanks to the people contacting NextGenTel and to the blogs and media that understand how this was a serious violation to network neutrality.

A lot of pro-regulatory folks assume that “network neutrality is good” necessarily implies “network neutrality ought to be mandated by the government. But the latter doesn’t automatically follow from the former. Government regulation is a cumbersome process fraught with potentials for unintended consequences. If violations of network neutrality can be dealt with in the marketplace, that strikes me as a far better solution.

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Air America Files for Bankruptcy

by Tim Lee on October 14, 2006

The obvious reaction of libertarians and conservatives to news that the leftist Air America radio has filed for bankruptcy is to claim this means there’s no market for left-of-center political commentary. But that’s obviously not quite right: progressive blogs have plenty of readers, and left-wing books seem to sell about as well as right-wing books.

I think a more plausible explanation for Air America’s poor performance is poor timing. The network came onto the scene at roughly the same time as a number of other media sources that competed directly for the same yuppie demographic that Al Franken appeals to. Left-of-center blogs rose to prominence in 2003 and were a force in Democratic politics for the first time in 2004. By 2004, The Daily Show had become the source for television news and satire among 20- and 30-something professionals. And a lot of young people began relying on their iPods, rather than the radio, for in-car entertainment. In short, Air America was fighting for a bigger piece of a shrinking demographic.

It seems like this flaw was exacerbated by high overhead. The network lost “$8.6 million in 2004 and $19.6 million last year, and has lost $13.1 million so far in 2006.” It’s not clear to me why it costs tens of millions of dollars to produce half a dozen daily talk shows. If those figures are driven by distribution costs–the article mentions that the network owes money to the stations that carry its programming–that seems like a big part of the problem. Their blogging and podcasting competitors are able to reach arbitrarily large audiences for essentially zero cost. Spending a lot of money to break into an over-crowded market for punditry via expensive and declining distribution format seems like a recipe for disaster.

More on Fashion Copyrights

by Tim Lee on October 14, 2006 · 8 comments

Our spam filter caught a comment from my post earlier this week about fashion copyrights. I think it’s worth reproducing verbatim:

There’s an interesting discussion of the issue over at AntitrustProf Blog. If you buy the notion that it’s a good idea to protect boat hull designs, then why not extend protection to fashion? On the other hand, if we protect boat hull designs and dresses, why not patent storylines and plots, or extend copyright to protect a hairdo. Maybe Tyra Banks can gain IP protection for her figure (not just her persona, but her figure). In order to protect himself against infringement, Walter Payton should be able to secure the rights on his running moves, so no NFL rookies will be able to steal from him. Getting back to reality, protection of industrial designs is not new. The Copyright Office prepared an interesting report about proposed protections for fashion design. They conclude with this:
As stated above, the Office does not yet have sufficient information to make any judgment whether fashion design legislation is desirable. Proponents of legislation have come forward with some anecdotal evidence of harm that fashion designers have suffered as a result of copying of their designs, but we have not yet seen sufficient evidence to be persuaded that there is a need for legislation. We look forward to the Subcommittee’s hearing, at which proponents of the legislation will have an opportunity to make their case and at which the voices of other affected parties can be heard.

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Smaller, Cheaper, Better Doesn’t Apply to Nukes

by Tim Lee on October 13, 2006 · 12 comments

It occurs to me that there’s a broader lesson from the suitcase nuke story I linked to earlier. One of the things the article emphasizes is that a nuclear weapon isn’t something you can just type a password into and expect it to explode. It’s a big, complex piece of machinery that requires several people with specialized skills to detonate.

In August, I linked to an article making a similar point about the alleged threat of “binary liquids.” There, too, the threat is theoretically possible, but the obstacles look insurmountable. I’ve read similar critiques of biological weapons: that to acquire, weaponize, and deploy Anthrax, smallpox, and other biological weapons is far more difficult than people realize.

I think that our intuitions about what it’s feasible for a small terrorist band to accomplish are warped by the pace of progress in certain civilian high-tech industries. There were cell phones of a sort in the 1940s, but they were enormous, extremely expensive, and required a lot of specialized training to use. There were computers in the 1940s, but they filled a whole room, cost millions of dollars, and did less than a lot of calculators do today. The reason that today’s cell phones and computers are so much better is that American firms have invested hundreds of billions of dollars developing ways to make these devices smaller, cheaper, and more user friendly.

Fortunately, there hasn’t been any analogous development for nuclear weapons. Sure, governments have spent a lot of money building more powerful nukes, but making nukes smaller, cheaper, or more user friendly hasn’t been on the feature list. So nuclear weapons are probably nearly as big, expensive, and complex as they were in the 1940s.

The same is largely true for chemical and biological weapons. It’s true that private companies have invested a lot of money on new chemical and biological technologies. But the process of producing chemical and biological compounds has remained the domain of large companies. There hasn’t been any reason to invest resources making these devices small or cheap enough for individuals or small groups to obtain or use. Hence, despite the rapid pace of progress in consumer dominated industries like electronics, effective chemical and biological weapons remain nearly as difficult for individuals to obtain as they were 50 years ago.

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The Apocryphal Suitcase Nuke

by Tim Lee on October 13, 2006 · 2 comments

Via Gene Healy, here’s a Wall Street Journal article that offers some perspective on the “suitcase nuke.” In a nutshell, it’s barely more than an urban legend. As Viktor Yesin, former chief of staff of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces, explains:

Let’s start by noting that “nuclear suitcase” is a term coined by journalists. Journalistic parlance, if you wish. The matter concerns special compact nuclear devices of knapsack type. Igor Valynkin, commander of the 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry responsible for nuclear ordnance storage, was absolutely honest when he was saying in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 1997 that “there have never been any nuclear suitcases, grips, handbags or other carryalls.” As for special compact nuclear devices, the Americans were the first to assemble them. They were called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM). As of 1964, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had two models of SADM at their disposal–M-129 and M-159. Each SADM measured 87 x 65 x 67 centimeters [34 by 26 by 26 inches]. A container with the backpack weighed 70 kilograms [154 pounds]. There were about 300 SADMs in all. The foreign media reported that all these devices were dismantled and disposed of within the framework of the unilateral disarmament initiatives declared by the first President Bush in late 1991 and early 1992. The Soviet Union initiated production of special compact nuclear devices in 1967. These munitions were called special mines. There were fewer models of them in the Soviet Union than in the United States. All of these munitions were to be dismantled before 2000 in accordance with the Russian and American commitments concerning reduction of tactical nuclear weapons dated 1991. [When the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin reiterated the commitment in January 1992.] Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said at the conference on the Nuclear Weapons Nonproliferation Treaty in April 2000 that Russia had practically completed dismantling “nuclear mines.” It means that Russia kept the promise Yeltsin once made to the international community.

No one disputes that Osama bin Laden would desperately like to get his hands on a nuclear weapon. But as the article explains, there are three ways to get a nuclear weapon–buy it, steal it, or make it yourself. And luckily, each of these methods appears to be well out of Al Qaeda’s reach. Anti-proliferation efforts are important, of course, but the real nuclear threat comes from states, not terrorists.

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Faulhaber and Farber on Mesh Networks

by Tim Lee on October 13, 2006 · 4 comments

I’m reading through Yochai Benkler’s argument for a spectrum commons in The Wealth of Networks, and so far I’m not impressed. His footnotes pointed to <a href=this”>http://assets.wharton.upenn.edu/~faulhabe/SPECTRUM_MANAGEMENTv51.pdf”>this fantastic working paper by Gerald Faulhaber and David Farber that I think makes the case better than I could:

Establishing property rights in spectrum is often portrayed as eliminating the commons (Benkler (1997), Reed (2002), Ikeda (2002)); this is not the case. Commons (and more generally sharing) can exist within an ownership regime; our recommended ownership regime with an easement for non-interfering uses establishes such a commons via the easement. Should it be necessary to have a commons for potentially interfering uses, the most obvious avenue is for the Federal government can purchase a block of spectrum (which it then owns) and open the band to general use under terms and conditions similar to Part 15 (for example). In fact, any state or local government can do the same thing, establishing a “park” in which users are completely free to use the spectrum without permission provided they follow the rules laid down by the owner of the “park.” This is perfectly analogous to public lands, such as National and State Parks, National and State Forests, and municipal parks. Further, private foundations could establish such “parks;” for example, there are many horticultural parks open to the public that are maintained by private foundations. Local neighborhood cooperatives could achieve the same end, possibly requiring a one-time or monthly fee for use. Similarly, private firms could establish such “parks,” charging a one-time or monthly fee for use. We would expect that manufacturers of mesh network devices, for example, may choose to “prime the pump” by establishing spectrum parks in various localities to increase their equipment sales.

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Alas, a Sleazy Decision

by Tim Lee on October 13, 2006 · 10 comments

Julian Sanchez points out a controversy among the readers of lefty blog Alas, A Blog. Apparently, the domain has been sold to a company that will add some additional pages to the domain that will have links to various porn sites, helping those porn sites increase their rank in Google searches. The commenters are outraged that a feminist blog would use his influence to help promote porn.

Brandon Berg points out that search engine optimization is a negative-sum game, so this strategy mostly just changes the relative rankings of different pornography sites without bringing porn sites in general more exposure. Which is probably true.

I personally don’t see anything wrong with pornography, so I can’t get worked up about that angle. But I think this deal is shady for another reason. Google operates by treating links from one site to another as a vote of confidence by the linker in the linkee. Google piggybacks on this web of trust to provide its users with highly relevant search results.

In a sense, a high PageRank is a position of trust. We would all condemn a professor who gave his best reference to the student who gave him the biggest check. I don’t see a principled difference here. Selling Google’s trust to the highest bidder not only harms Google but more importantly, it harms Google’s customers. If everyone behaved that way, it would lead to a world in which Google search rankings were driven more by money and less by the objective judgments of the online community.

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Software Patent of the Week: Analog-to-Digital Conversion

by Tim Lee on October 12, 2006

Every week, I look at a software patent that’s been in the news. You can see previous installments in the series here. In this week’s software patent adventure, Arbitron has sued competitor IPSOS for violating its patents on its “technologies” relating to collecting audience data from TV viewers and radio listeners. As Arbitron’s press release puts it:

Steve Morris, president and chief executive officer of Arbitron, said, “As a leading innovator of electronic audience measurement technology, we welcome competition as a way to foster the growth of the market. However, we must take action against companies that attempt to profit from our innovation by infringing Arbitron’s patents on the technology that we have worked so long and at such expense to develop. We have invested significant financial and other resources during the last 15 years in the development and testing of our PPM System and we will work aggressively to protect our investment and our intellectual property.”

I put “technology” in scare quotes because I think the word tends to be an obstacle to clear thinking when it comes to patent issues. Here is one of the three patents in question. It covers:

A method and apparatus for automatically identifying a program broadcast by a radio station or by a television channel, or recorded on a medium, by adding an inaudible encoded message to the sound signal of the program, the message identifying the broadcasting channel or station, the program, and/or the exact date.

How does it do this?

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