Rolling Stone has a provocative article speculating that Diebold may have stolen the 2002 election in Georgia for Republican candidates. According to one Diebold employee, the company secretly installed software patches on machines in Democratic areas of the state in the months before the 2002 election:
Diebold insists that the patch was installed “with the approval and oversight of the state.” But after the election, the Georgia secretary of state’s office submitted a “punch list” to Bob Urosevich of “issues and concerns related to the statewide voting system that we would like Diebold to address.” One of the items referenced was” Application/Implication of ‘0808’ Patch.” The state was seeking confirmation that the patch did not require that the system “be recertified at national and state level” as well as “verifiable analysis of overall impact of patch to the voting system.” In a separate letter, Secretary Cox asked Urosevich about Diebold’s use of substitute memory cards and defective equipment as well as widespread problems that caused machines to freeze up and improperly record votes. The state threatened to delay further payments to Diebold until “these punch list items will be corrected and completed.”
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I got an email from Tom Giovanetti chastising me for the tone of my previous post about his organization’s study. And he has a point: the rhetoric of my post was unduly inflammatory, and for that I apologize. I should have thought twice before hitting the “post” button.
Mr. Giovanetti urged me to re-read the study, and I’ve done so. After further reflection, my opinion of the substance of the study remains unchanged: the study is poorly reasoned and its conclusion is misleading. The headline-grabbing $20.5 billion number is meaningless.
Also, this ought to go without saying, but since Mr. Giovaenetti brought it up: I believe that piracy is a serious problem, and I applaud the MPAA’s vigorous action to combat it. What I object to isn’t their anti-piracy agenda, as such, but the use of misleading statistics to promote it.
Derek notes that Congress has adjourned for the year without passing an NSA spying bill. This is good news. It occurs to me that libertarians have reason to cheer this session of Congress, not because anything particularly good happened, but because many bad ideas were floated, and to my knowledge none of them got to the president’s desk:
Back in January, I argued that the best we could hope for on the telecom front was for Congress to leave well enough alone. I got my wish. There were more iterations of the telecom bill than I can recall, but with one exception (franchise reform) all of the ideas were bad. We had game-playing that made the universal service system even more convoluted. We had broadcast flag provisions snuck into the bill under cover of darkness. And of course, we had the big push for network neutrality regulations. Now, those all appear to be dead for the year.
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The Institute for Policy Innovation has released a study on the costs of movie piracy. It’s a truly remarkable exercise in hand-waving. We’ve written before about the shoddy methodology that copyright industries often use in studies purporting to show the costs of piracy. One of the most common tricks is to assume that every person who pirates a work would have otherwise purchased the work at full price–a clearly false assumption. Some infringers would have purchased the work if they’d been unable to get a pirated copy, but a lot of others would have simply done without it. Hence these estimates are invariably inflated, and any such study funded by the affected industry should be taken with a large grain of salt.
But the Institute for Policy Innovation is a Texas think tank, and everything’s bigger in Texas. That includes sophistry. Not content with the MPAA’s official, numbers, which found that worldwide piracy costs the movie industry $6.1 billion, they’ve taken the MPAA study as a baseline, added a heaping helping of fallacious economic reasoning, and concluded that the cost of piracy is, in fact, $20.5 billion. This is complete and utter nonsense, as I’ll explain below the fold.
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Via Patri Friedman, here’s a fascinating article on the people who write Wikipedia:
I purchased some time on a computer cluster and downloaded a copy of the Wikipedia archives. I wrote a little program to go through each edit and count how much of it remained in the latest version. Instead of counting edits, as Wales did, I counted the number of letters a user actually contributed to the present article.
If you just count edits, it appears the biggest contributors to the Alan Alda article (7 of the top 10) are registered users who (all but 2) have made thousands of edits to the site. Indeed, #4 has made over 7,000 edits while #7 has over 25,000. In other words, if you use Wales’s methods, you get Wales’s results: most of the content seems to be written by heavy editors.
But when you count letters, the picture dramatically changes: few of the contributors (2 out of the top 10) are even registered and most (6 out of the top 10) have made less than 25 edits to the entire site. In fact, #9 has made exactly one edit–this one! With the more reasonable metric–indeed, the one Wales himself said he planned to use in the next revision of his study–the result completely reverses.
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I wish I could buy this guy a beer:
A Wisconsin man who wrote “Kip Hawley is an Idiot” on a plastic bag containing toiletries said he was detained at an airport security checkpoint for about 25 minutes before authorities concluded the statement was not a threat.
Ryan Bird, 31, said he wrote the comment about Hawley–head of the Transportation Security Administration–as a political statement. He said he feels the TSA is imposing unreasonable rules on passengers while ignoring bigger threats.
A TSA spokeswoman acknowledged a man was stopped, but likened the incident to cases in which people inappropriately joke about bombs. She said the man was “a little combative” and that he was detained only a few minutes.
Bird’s original account of the incident is here.
I’ve written before that Chris Castle is a technically clueless lawyer whose blog specializes in juvenile and mean-spirited insults of his ideological opponents. He and I clearly don’t see eye to eye on a lot of copyright-related subjects. Yet it seems that even a stopped clock is right once in a while:
I believe there is a good business case that can be made for selling in mp3. At the risk of stating the obvious, I would point out that the iPod, and almost every music player in the market, supports mp3. So the reason to sell in mp3 is not because DRM is bad. I completely disagree with Professor Lessig’s radical fringe that opposes DRM in all forms, and unlike many in the fringe, I support a copyright owner’s decision to sell in any format they wish–DRM or non-DRM.
But the business argument over selling in the unprotected mp3 format shouldn’t have anything to do with how you feel about DRM. The reason you sell in mp3, and the reason you sell in Fairplay, Windows Media and any other common format is because–they are common formats. A lot of people use them. It just happens that more people use mp3 than use Windows Media or Fairplay.
If a copyright owner sold an mp3 file, it could be suitably watermarked to carry identifiers that would allow accounting if an online service wanted to sell the tracks. The point is that if you sell in mp3 you are not giving a fan anything that they couldn’t make themselves if they bought a CD and ripped it.
I think he over-estimates the effectiveness of watermarking technologies.
And Castle is wrong when he says that Lessig is in the “radical fringe” that opposes DRM in all of its forms. He’s not, much to my disappointment. But otherwise, this analysis is dead on. And given that Castle is clearly not an apologist for piracy or a critic of the music industry, maybe the music industry will listen to him.
I wonder if it’s occurred to Castle that it’s not a coincidence that MP3 is more widely deployed than FairPlay and Windows Media. The whole point of DRMed formats is to limit interoperability with third party devices. Hence, we shouldn’t be surprised that DRM is plagued by incompatibilities.
Update: I struck out the bit about Lessig’s attitude toward DRM, which on re-reading Lessig’s post clearly isn’t right. What I should have said is that Lessig is more sympathetic than me to the notion that some DRM is better than others, and that we should therefore settle for the least-bad DRM we can get, rather than focusing on persuading publishers to ditch it altogether.
I’ve finished The Long Tail. Here’s a final point from the book that I liked.
He reminds us that in the early 80s, Hollywood priced the first generation of videotapes at about $75. The theory, he writes, was that this was what a typical family of five would spend on three or four visits to the theater. Obviously, in hindsight this was a stupid pricing strategy. Demand for movies turns out to be highly elastic, and you can sell a lot more movies at $15 or $20 than you can at $75–enough that total revenues go up as a result of the price cuts. Today, the sales and rental of DVDs is on par with movie tickets as a revenue source. Although it’s possible that charging a premium for a new technology made sense, it’s almost certain that the video market would have taken off faster if Hollywood had started out with prices at $30 or $40 instead of $75.
It seems to me that as the movie and music industries move into the digital age, they’re making the same mistakes. The music industry seems to think that 99 cents is unreasonably low. But I think the opposite is probably closer to the truth; demand for music, like the demand for movies, is likely to be highly elastic. If the music industry cut prices to 49 cents a song, a lot of existing customers would buy twice as many songs. Moreover, there are some people who are currently getting their music from illicit file-sharing networks, but would be enticed to buy from an online store at a lower price.
The same seems likely to be true with movies. Apple has priced movies at $10-15, in line with DVD prices. Other movie services seem to be converging on those price points as well. But without the production, distribution, and retail costs associated with shipping a plastic disc around, the marginal cost of getting a movie to consumers via the Internet is far less than $10. It’s likely that here, too, they’d sell a lot more movies for $5 than they would for $10.
I recommend Anderson’s book. It’s an entertaining read that’s packed with insights about the emerging long tail economy.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.