The Wall Street journal has a debate between Fritz Attaway of the MPAA and law professor Wendy Seltzer about digital rights management. Frankly, I think Attaway needs a remedial course in reading comprehension. In her first post, Seltzer points to several examples of video innovations that are stifled by the DMCA: excerpting video content, playing DVDs on Linux computers, and building a video jukebox. Attaway responds by stating that there is “absolutely no evidence to support” the assertion that the DMCA stifles innovation. Well, what about the three examples that Seltzer just offered? Are those not evidence?
Seltzer tries again, pointing out that DRM will prevent consumers from using their legally purchased content in new ways. In the past, she pointed out, the creators of new devices like VCRs and TiVo’s didn’t have to ask permission before they were allowed to deploy their devices.
Attaway responds with a non-sequitur: “I think we are getting to the philosophical heart of the issue. You want to be able to take for free the intellectual property others invested their time, talent and money to create.” Nothing in Seltzer’s post said anything of the sort. She’s plainly talking about the freedom to make creative uses of a DVD or other media that one has legally purchased. Yet Attaway, bizarrely, seems to believe that if we allow people to play DVDs on their Linux computers, that people will stop buying DVDs.
I think the fundamental disagreement here is one about technology, not philosophy. Attaway believes that the flaws and restrictions imposed by DRM are temporary–kinks that will be worked out as more sophisticated technology is developed. If that were true, Attaway’s argument would have some merit. But the reality is just the opposite: as the media world becomes more complex, the flaws of DRM will only become more glaring. DRM is technological central planning. Centrally planned economies become less efficient as they grow more complex. For precisely the same reasons, centrally planned technologies perform worse as they become more complex.
Last month, former labor secretary Robert Reich wrote a funny post about network neutrality:
If the phone and cable companies get their way, it will take you five minutes to download this blog. In fact, you can forget blogs altogether. In fact, you can forget anything put into the Internet by small guys like me (literally and figuratively)…
The phone and cable companies want to charge content providers depending on how fast and reliably their content is delivered–so, say, eBay, Yahoo, and Google pay a bundle for first-class fast service while you and I and the other millions of small guys who want to put stuff up are shoved into the slowest of slow lanes because we can’t afford to pay the freight.
I wonder if Reich realizes his blog is hosted by Google.
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew noted that the usual suspects didn’t have a whole lot to say about the Pirate Bay shutdown. I don’t know anything about Swedish law, so I have no idea if their legal claims are plausible. But it seems at least possible that they are, and I I think the implications of that would be interesting.
A few years back most Americans ridiculed France for trying to tell Yahoo, and American company, not to make Nazi memorabilia available to their citizens. We said–correctly, I think–that France doesn’t have any jurisdiction over American web sites hosted in the United States, and that a French court certainly couldn’t override our First Amendment. Although sadly, Yahoo! ultimately buckled under pressure and banned Nazi memorabilia.
I hope the parallel to the Pirate Bay case is obvious. Now, I do think that in some cases we have a right to expect that other countries respect our copyright law. Russia’s AllOfMP3.com, for example, is plainly making their money by flouting American (and other Western nations’) copyright laws.
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The Wall Street Journal has a write up of Craigslist, the online classified site that is steadily taking over the world. The author seems bewildered by the Craigslist phenomenon, seeming to think there must be some kind of trick or hidden agenda at work:
“The Internet at large, and free classifieds in particular–and even beyond that, Craigslist free classifieds in particular–certainly pose challenges to the newspaper industry as far as being able to raise their profitability over time.” Many in newspaper publishing would consider that an understatement. But Mr. Buckmaster is sanguine: “The demise of the newspaper has been overstated.” Phew. I expel a nervous chuckle of relief. In Mr. Buckmaster’s view, newspapers would be better off being a little more Craigslist-like: Go private, eschew Wall Street’s demands for continually “goosing profitability” and give your readers what they want. Much trouble in the world comes, in Mr. Buckmaster’s view, from losing sight of that essential goal.
After we’ve retired back to the living room for coffee, Mr. Buckmaster allows that the world is perhaps not quite that simple. When asked whether there’s a Craigslist model that other companies could emulate, the unflappable Mr. Buckmaster, his eyes once more fixed firmly on the horizon out the window, waxes lyrical for a moment: “It’s unrealistic to say, but–imagine our entire U.S. workforce deployed in units of 20. Each unit of 20 is running a business that tens of millions of people are getting enormous amounts of value out of each month. What kind of world would that be?”
Before I have time to object, Mr. Buckmaster comes back to our world. “Now, there’s something wrong in the reasoning there,” he admits. “You can’t run a steel company in the same way that you run an Internet company”–more points for understatement. “But still, it’s a nice kind of fantasy that there are more and more businesses where huge amounts of value can flow to the user for free. I like the idea, just as an end-user, of there being as many businesses like that as possible.” As an end-user, I suppose I do, too. But there are no free lunches, even if Craigslist–and the meal Mr. Buckmaster and Ms. Best provided for me–sometimes seem to come close.
The oft-repeated (especially by libertarians) view that there’s no such thing as a free lunch is actually nonsense. Civilization abounds in free lunches. Social cooperation produces immense surpluses that have allowed us to become as wealthy as we are. Craigslist is just an extreme example of this phenomenon, because it allows social cooperation on a much greater scale at radically reduced cost. Craigslist creates an enormous amount of surplus value (that is, the benefits to users vastly exceed the infrastructure costs of providing the service). For whatever reason, Craigslist itself has chosen to appropriate only a small portion of that value, leaving the vast majority to its users.
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Matt Yglesias channels Adam Thierer:
the media’s become less concentrated. They’re up to six giants from just four–General Electric, Disney, Time Warner, CBS (which I believe is the successor to Westinghouse), plus new entrants Fox, and Viacom. So that’s six.
Six is a reasonably small number, but compared to what? What do the top six American car companies control? Oh, right, there are only two. And only two operating system makers. And so on and so forth. The tendency in any field would be for the top six firms to control a large portion of the aggregate.
What’s more, the curious thing about these six media monopolists is that between them they control
zero of America’s most-influential newspapers. Nobody, I hope, will deny that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are important elements of the media. And yet, they’re owned by three separate companies, each of them apart from the Big Six. Beyond the Big Six electronic media companies and the Big Three newspapers, there’s also Gannett which owns the high-circulation USA Today along with a boatload of smaller newspapers. And then there’s Tribune Media with The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other papers.
He notes that PBS and NPR offer credible alternatives to the mainstream media. And on top of all that, the Internet is rapidly expanding peoples’ access to the world’s media sources. And it’s easy to multiply these examples. Matt doesn’t mention C-SPAN, the
Economist, political magazines like The New Republic, The Nation, The American Prospect and Reason, or radio talk shows–yet these too are all ways for viewers to get access to news and information.
In short, there’s more news and information available, from more different perspectives, in more different formats, than any one person could hope to consume–even if you live in the middle of nowhere. The reason that the Big Six have the market share they do, I suspect, is the same reason that Coke and Pepsi command the lion’s share of the beverage market: they cater toward mainstream tastes and so manage to meet the needs of the vast majority of ordinary viewers. For all the bitching that ordinary voters do about the mainstream media, most of them continue to watch it, despite the availability of many, many alternatives.
Reason‘s Ron Bailey has an interesting review of Al Gore’s new movie:
Gore has won the global warming debate–the world is warming as a consequence of human activity, chiefly the loading up of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Yet he feels that he must exaggerate the dangers by propounding implausible scenarios in which sea levels rise 20 feet by 2100. He pretends that the science is settled with regard to the effect of global warming on hurricanes. And he pushes a scientifically tenuous connection between the spread of diseases and global warming. These are little inconvenient truths that cut against his belief that global warming constitutes a climate emergency. On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we’ll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He’s a global warming exaggerator.
As he points out, the folks who denied the existence of global warming will have a credibility problems when it comes to the policy question about what, if anything, should be done to reverse the trend.
Daniel Markham takes me to task for being one of those “software patents are destroying the world!” types:
Imagine for a minute that I just got off a time machine from the year 5600. I know how to make truly intelligent machines, so I sit down and write a patent on how to make computer intelligence. Now at the heart of my patent will be arrays, indexes, memory cores–all of the usual computer stuff. It’s all just ones and zeros, folks. But obviously my patent has tremendous value to society.
This is a silly example, but since it IS possible to make an example where software patents make sense, the question isn’t whether they are useful or not, the question is how to tell the difference. That’s a big point that a lot of folks miss. Get rid of the bath water, keep the baby.
This is a silly example for a number of reasons, and not just the obvious ones. In the first place, it’s unlikely that somebody’s going to sit down at his computer and come up with a single breakthrough that makes computers instantly intelligent. More likely, there will be a long series of incremental improvements. Each advancement will give its creator a short-term advantage in the marketplace before another firm comes up with another incremental improvement that puts it ahead. This process of incremental improvement and imitation is the way the software industry has worked for decades.
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The New Republic seems to believe that the lack of network neutrality will somehow lead to the end of the blogosphere:
[The Internet] is where Americans can not only search for the best deal on a new digital camera, but also debate the country’s future. Unlike the telephone, it is a medium in which thousands, even millions, of people can participate in the same discussion at the same time. Unlike television, it is interactive. But it can’t function optimally if content is prioritized or filtered by telecom companies. Allowing companies to levy a toll on information providers is not just a blow to consumer choice–it’s a blow to democracy.
Andrew Kantor of
USA Today (who reader Raphy points out recently had a change of heart on the issue) has a column that nicely rebuts this kind of silliness:
I’ve read quotes from bloggers saying their content wouldn’t be delivered as quickly as that from, say, USA TODAY–thus depriving people of information that isn’t from the mainstream media. And people speak of the “little guy” not being able to compete with monster corporations with monster bandwidth.
But that makes no sense. Small information providers like bloggers don’t connect directly to the Internet; they buy space on hosting sites, either maintaining their own or on a shared blogging site (e.g., Blogger.com). It’s those hosts that buy the bandwidth, and they often tout their connection speeds.
Think about it: Google owns Blogger. Do you think Blogger users are going to be deprived of bandwidth for lack of funds?
And Jim Lippard points out that TNR repeats the falsehood that network neutrality rules always applied to the Internet before the evil Bush administration stopped enforcing them.
I’m ordinarily a big fan of the
New Republic‘s articles. It’s sad to see them repeating bogus MoveOn talking points.
Mike Masnick makes a good point about “patent trolls”:
Rep. Lamar Smith… held hearings today to see if Congress could come up with a working definition of a patent troll. While it’s good to see Congress recognizing that patent hoarding can hold back innovation, defining just what a patent troll is doesn’t seem like it’s going to help. The issue isn’t whether or not anyone is a patent troll, but whether the patent system is being used to hold back innovation. Trying to define what a patent troll is will simply confuse the issue, and lead companies to focus on avoiding the specific definitions of a patent troll, while trying to accuse every one they get into a patent lawsuit with of meeting the regulatory definition of patent troll. A much more important issue would be to focus on making sure the patent system is actually encouraging innovation.
I suspect this reflects the distorted view you get when the legislative process is dominated by industry lobbyists. For the most part, big companies don’t mind over-broad patents so much. They have a lot of patents of their own, which they can use as barriers to entry against smaller competitors, while they sign cross-licensing agreements with other big companies to minimize litigation. The only problem comes when a small company dares to sue
them. Then they’re pissed!
In a sense, patent trolls are canaries in the coal mine of our patent system. They’re a signal that certain parts of the patent system is becoming harmful to innovation. But instead of figuring out how to fix the patent system, Rep. Smith seems to think the solution is to shoot the canaries.
This week’s software patent is held by Skyline Software Systems, a “leading provider of network-based 3D Earth visualization software and service.” Naturally, Google Earth is one of its primary competitors. Google Earth was originally developed by Keyhole, which Google acquired in October 2004.
When Google acquired Keyhole, it inherited a legal spat with Skyline as well. Last week, the judge in the case declined to order Google Earth shut down pending the outcome of the litigation. But the case goes on.
According to CNet, the patent in question is this one. It describes:
A method of providing data blocks describing three-dimensional terrain to a renderer. The data blocks belong to a hierarchical structure which includes blocks at a plurality of different resolution levels. The method includes receiving from the renderer one or more coordinates in the terrain along with indication of a respective resolution level, providing the renderer with a first data block which includes data corresponding to the one or more coordinates, from a local memory, and downloading from a remote server one or more additional data blocks which include data corresponding to the one or more coordinates if the provided block from the local memory is not at the indicated resolution level.
Is this an obvious patent?
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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.