We mostly focus on computer technology here at TLF, but there are other types of technologies that are arguably more important. For all my railing against the DMCA, I have to concede that, as far as I know, it’s never gotten anybody killed. The same can’t be said, unfortunately, of our organ-donation system. AEI’s Sally Satel writes:
When Rob Haneisen, a reporter at the MetroWest Daily News in Framingham, Mass., who has written about people in situations like hers, asked Lisa if he could interview her for a story, she jumped. Perhaps former colleagues, long lost friends, or a Good Samaritan would read about her and volunteer to donate. Lisa had even begun coordinating with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to prepare for a transplant, should a donor come forward as a result of the News article that ran on April 16.
Enter Dr. Douglas Hanto, head of the transplant division at Beth Israel. He had heard about Lisa’s circumstance when Haneisen called him for an interview as part of the story. Before speaking to the reporter, Hanto had his staff phone Lisa right away to deliver shocking news: Beth Israel would flatly refuse to do her transplant if the only donor she could find was a kind-hearted stranger who responded to the article.
“We are in favor of donors coming forward and donating to the next person on the waiting list,” Hanto told Haneisen. And how many have done that so far over the years, the reporter asked? “Just a couple,” Hanto admitted. Also puzzling is Hanto’s assertion: “We have hundreds of people on the waiting list. If we support some favored status for one patient, how can we really say we are being fair and looking out for all our patients?”
The fact is that Lisa harms nobody if a stranger responds to her story and comes to her aid. In fact, she helps people on the list because she is taken out of the cadaver-waiting queue and others can move up.
Transplants in this country are handled by the United Network for Organ Sharing, a non-profit organization with a government-granted monopoly on the distribution of organs. The “bioethicists” at UNOS are obsessed with ensuring that organs are distributed “fairly,” even if fairness leads to fewer donations and more people dying. The system is arbitrary, it’s stupid, and–most importantly–it’s deadly
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Last month, Corey Doctorow pointed out that by the RIAA’s reckoning, President Bush is a music thief. As part of the DMCA rule-making proceedings, the RIAA said that ripping a CD to your portable music player without authorization is against the law. And since the Beatles haven’t allowed their music on Apple’s iTunes Music Store, the only other ways to get Beatles music onto your iPod is by ripping a CD (illegal) or using a peer-to-peer downloading service (also illegal).
Now Radley points out that Hillary Clinton’s a lawbreaker too.
My old roomie Julian Sanchez and my friend Matt Yglesias go at it over neutrality regulation on Bloggignheads.tv. If you haven’t seen it yet, Bloggingheads.tv is (as its name implies) a site featuring popular bloggers debating the issues of the day on camera. My favorite thing about the Sanchez/Yglesias spot was the fact that Julian was smoking. People haven’t smoked on TV in decades–and especially not talking head pundits! It felt deeply subversive to watch politics being debated in between drags of a cigarette.
Anyway, my sympathies are with Julian’s side of the argument, but I thought Matt’s argument, which he dubbed a vulgar Marxist perspective, is interesting: basically, he doesn’t feel qualified to evaluate the technical merits of the issue, but he figures that given that Google’s interests lie in getting more content to consumers cheaper, their interests are more likely to align with those of consumers. And therefore, for those who aren’t competent to analyze the issue on their merits, it’s best to err on the side of supporting Google and other Internet companies.
In evaluating this argument, I think it’s worth distinguishing the short-term and long-term impacts of regulation. Julian covered the short-term argument pretty well: it might be that without the ability price discriminate, telcos will have less incentive to invest in new infrastructure. That’s clearly bad for consumers, but it might be good for Google if it ensures Google free access to whatever new infrastructrue investment the telcos
do make. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that Google’s interests might diverge from those of consumers on this front.
But I think the long-term implications are more interesting, and ultimately a lot more important. Because what network neutrality does, for the first time, is to give the FCC (or some federal agency) authority over the administration of the networks that comprise the Internet. The debate so far has focused on cable and telephone companies, but there’s no reason to think the extension of authority contemplated by the pro-reguatory side would be limited to those networks. University networks, WiFi hotspots, hotel connections, and any new broadband technologies that arise in the future would also be covered.
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David Berlind defends himself against critics who argue he’s selling us out by endorsing efforts like DReaM:
Here on ZDNet, and in email, I’ve been taking some heat for my idealism, or in this case, my lack thereof, when it comes to DRM: er: CRAP. Follow this thread for an example. Some readers would rather see me stick to the hard line of buying and advocating nothing that includes DRM. In essence, donning a hazmat suit like the CRAP-fighters above (personally, what better metaphor can you ask for.. hazmat suits, crap:get the picture?). So, just to be clear, I haven’t personally purchased any DRM-related material since first figuring out the downside for myself (not being able to play 99 cent songs on a $20K whole home audio system). That said, I’ve had people come up to me and ask which MP3 player they should buy for themselves or someone else as a gift and, invariably, they’re not open to the idea of not buying one at all, buying one that takes a lot of work (circumventing DRM, digitizing music yourself), or breaking the law. I know. They must be from another planet. Freaks.
OK, back on Earth, these people exist. And so, the question is, do you stick to your ideals, walk away, and let them suffer from their own lack of enlightenment. Or, do you at least try to guide them to something that’s a fender bender compared to a fatal accident? I will vote with my dollars. But, at the same time, if there are people out there that refuse to heed the ultimate advice, I can’t let my idealism stand in the way of steering people away from the trainwrecks. That’s why I’ll try to guide people like that to solutions like Navio or Project DReaM, only after giving up on convincing them to not buy any of this CRAP. CRAP is a dirty business and in the end, it’s we, the users, who get dumped on. But there are some things we can do to control the extent to which that happens.
People shouldn’t reject DRMed products because of some kind ideological hippy crusade. They should reject DRMed products because it’s
in their own interests to do so. Right now we’re in the throes of format wars: iTunes vs. Windows Media, BluRay vs. HD-DVD, CinemaNow vs. Google Video, etc. If you buy DRMed content in one of those formats, you’re committing yourself to buying devices compatible with that format for as long as you own that content.
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Nick Carr pronounces the death of Wikipedia. Well, that’s what he suggests in his attention-grabbing headline. What he’s really talking about is the alleged end of Wikipedia as an open encyclopedia:
There was a time when, indeed, pretty much anyone could edit pretty much anything on Wikipedia. But, as eWeek’s Steven Vaughan-Nichols recently observed, “Wikipedia hasn’t been a real ‘wiki’ where anyone can write and edit for quite a while now.” A few months ago, in the wake of controversies about the quality and reliability of the free encyclopedia’s content, the Wikipedian powers-that-be – its “administrators” – abandoned the work’s founding ideal of being the “ULTIMATE ‘open’ format” and tightened the restrictions on editing. In addition to banning some contributors from the site, the administrators adopted an “official policy” of what they called, in good Orwellian fashion, “semi-protection” to prevent “vandals” (also known as people) from messing with their open encyclopedia.
I think this misunderstands what “open” means. Open source projects sometimes get similar criticism for the fact that they’re often organized as tightly-knit groups of core developers led by a “benevolent dictator” who has ultimate control of the code base. Critics claim that this proves that the projects aren’t “really” open and democratic.
But this misunderstands the point of “openness” in this context: it isn’t about the organizational philosophy of a project, it’s about what constraints are placed on the use of the finished product. Or specifically, about the lack of such constraints. What distinguished Wikipedia from Britanica, or MySQL from Oracle, isn’t that one was created “democratically.” Rather, it’s that anyone is free to use, copy, and modify Wikipedia or MySQL for their own use, while the use of Britanica and Oracle are controlled by for-profit companies.
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Last week Ed Felten had the following summary of Larry Lessig’s comments at the Princeton-Microsoft Intellectual Property conference:
He starts by saying that most of his problems are caused by his allies, but his opponents are nicer and more predictable in some ways. Why? (1) Need to unite technologists and lawyers. (2) Need to unite libertarians and liberals. Regarding tech and law, the main conflict is about what constitutes success. He says technologists want 99.99% success, lawyers are happy with 60%. (I don’t think this is quite right.)
I think Lessig is misunderstanding the lawyer-technologist split. It’s not primarily a matter of ideological purity. Rather, I think there are two things going on. First, technologists are less likely to be fooled by “compromises” like Sun’s DReaM that are just the same bad wine poured into new bottles. They understand that because of the way DRM works, most proposals for kinder, gentler DRM won’t turn out to be so kind or gentle in practice. DRM is bad because it requires a central decision maker, be it Apple, Microsoft, Sun, or the DVD CCA, to oversee the design of all devices used with the platform. That’s going to produce lousy technology regardless of the details.
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CNet blithely reports the BSA’s latest study purporting to show that piracy is costing software companies $34 billion.
The Inquirer, on the other hand, is not so credulous:
It says the highest piracy rates are found in Zimbabwe and Vietnam, where it reckons 90 percent of the software in use is illegitimate.
A quick squint at the CIA World Fact Book shows that the unemployment rate in Zimbabwe is 80 percent, as is the estimated proportion of the population living below the poverty line. Other estimates put the average income in the country at around $500 per annum. A further quick squint through the windows of PC World in the UK shows that a copy of Windows Home costs £89 – $168. We’ll let you do the math[s].
While we’re at it, the BSA cobbles together its figures in a manner not wholly approved of by its hired researcher IDC.
IDC says it used “proprietary statistics” for software and hardware shipments, conducted 5,600 surveys and enlisted IDC analysts in 38 countries to confirm software piracy trends.
IDC, however, is on record as suggesting that perhaps one in 10 unauthorized copies might be a lost sale. John Gantz, director of research for IDC, is on record as saying that, in developing nations, many users cannot afford imported software from the West. “I would have preferred to call it the retail value of pirated software,” he said of last year’s BSA report.
As Jim wrote last time the BSA published a wildly exaggerated report on this subject, a bit of skepticism is called for when reporting a study like this. When an industry trade group funds a study that’s transparently in their self-interest, you would think the reporter would give some thought to the ways it might be exaggerating the result to the benefit of the client. He might even call someone who’s not in the pay of the software industry to get an independent opinion.
Ars profiles eMusic, the world’s number 2 online music retailer. And they don’t use digital rights management, choosing instead to sell their songs in unprotected MP3 format. Yes, you read that right: the world’s #2 music download service doesn’t use DRM technology. Why not? Their focus is on smaller labels:
The majors are terrified of piracy and so insist on strict DRM controls to safeguard their music. The indie labels that eMusic works with generally don’t have that fear. “The indies have always viewed the world differently,” says Pakman. “You know, the indies struggle for attention, for customers, so the notion of someone actually digging a track and e-mailing it to 10 of their best friends–doing self-promotion–that’s music to the ears of the indie record labels. Whereas an RIAA member says, ‘We’ve got to sue that guy.’
This, it seems to me, is the future of the music industry. The large market shares of the major labels is an artifact of 20th century distribution and marketing technologies, which had huge economies of scale. Only a large firm with a national distribution network could hope to compete effectively in a world in which you had massive up-front capital expenditures before you could sell your first record or CD. But that’s no longer true. I can upload an MP3 to my website and I’m a music distributor. Which means that the monolithic structure of the music industry is likely to be under pressure.
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Via Techdirt, there’s fresh evidence that drivers are ignoring cell phone bans:
HUGE numbers of motorists risk causing accidents by driving while using their mobile phones, eating, drinking, smoking, reading maps or even putting on or removing clothing, a survey reveals today.
More than half of motorists still talk and text on their mobile phones while on the move despite a ban on hand-held mobiles in vehicles.
Yet as many as three-quarters of drivers agree with the ban and believe it should carry a fine and penalty points on a licence, the poll from Auto Trader magazine showed.
Now I can’t say I’m a whiz at math, but if half of people drive while using their cell phone, and 75 percent of users think doing so should be illegal, doesn’t that mean that at least 25 percent of the population of the UK are hypocrites?
As I’ve argued before, cell phones aren’t especially dangerous (relative to other distracting things people do in cars), they just happen to make a convenient scapegoat for peoples’ reckless driving. Because they’re so new, and because a lot of people happen to find them intrinsically annoying, it’s easy to whip up populist anti-cell-phone sentiments. The only problem is that most of us have also discovered that being able to make a phone call from your car is incredibly convenient. So many of us apparently do one thing, and tell pollsters another.
There’s a great great post over at the abstract factory about the real issues in the debate over neutrality regulation. He points out that the horror stories trotted out by the pro-regulatory side are mostly bogus:
Political outfits–ranging from MoveOn to the Christian Coalition–are worried that network providers will begin to discriminate based on the political content of messages. This is pretty unlikely. It’s not easy for an algorithm to look at a bag of bytes and classify its political content; and network providers probably can’t pay for the computational power required to apply such an algorithm to the many terabytes of data that flow across their networks daily.
And even if they could, why would they? There’s no percentage there. In fact, I can think of two very strong reasons for them not to start filtering based on political content. First, there would be an enormous consumer backlash. Second, there would be enormous political fallout. The latter would include not only backlash against abuse of quasi-monopoly power, but possibly the imposition of responsibility for the content that flows across the pipes. Once you begin filtering based on political content, lawmakers may poke their heads in and wonder why you aren’t filtering out all that kiddie porn and gambling and such too–and if something gets through your filters, why can’t we hold you liable? The network providers don’t want to open that can of worms.
So, political censorship isn’t the real issue here. Nor, pace Moby et al., is it interconnection with small media providers versus large ones. Verizon’s not terribly likely to block access to your music blog. They might, someday, contract with certain service providers for improved performance. For example, they might strike a deal with iTunes to store songs in a local proxy cache, so that Verizon customers would observe slightly improved performance with iTunes, but not your music blog. That doesn’t strike me as either disastrous or a betrayal of the Internet’s principles. Networking researchers have been proposing schemes like this for years. In fact, Akamai’s basically a third-party version of this scheme: people pay them to store content in caches close to where it’s demanded, so Akamai-cached websites perform better than non-Akamai websites. Akamai’s been operating since 1999, and so far the Internet hasn’t been torn asunder.
He goes on to explain that the more plausible danger is discrimination on the basis of application–phone companies trying to block Skype because it cuts into their landline telephone business, for example. He’s quite right that the pronouncements of telco execs that Google needs to pay more for “my pipes” were assinine. Google pays for its own connection to the Internet. It’s
consumers that pay the Baby Bells for the bandwidth they use. Telcos don’t connect their customers to the Internet out of the goodness of their hearts.
And his conclusion is also spot-on:
So I’m really glad that people are paying attention to network neutrality. But I’m also alarmed that so few of those people seem to understand what’s really going on here, and I’m skeptical that now is the time to make laws about it. So far, the Internet’s still neutral. My bottom-line recommendation would be to watch and wait.
He says other smart and sensible things as well, so go read the whole thing.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.