While I’m critiquing random aspects of my air travel experience, I have a question: why are airline attendants such control freaks? I’ve gotten used to the “seat backs and tray tables in their upright and locked positions” restrictions, which could have some safety implications in cases of turbulence. And it’s at least conceivable that the ban on cell phones could be necessary to avoid interference with air traffic control systems. But I’m totally baffled by the rule that was in force between the time we landed the plane and the time we reached the gate: cell phones were OK but other portable electronic devices were not. I can’t think of any plausible safety reason—scratch that, any reason at all—for this restriction, especially when the opposite rule is in force while the plane is at cruising altitude. Weirdest of all, the flight attendant announced, and then diligently enforced, the rule that window shades must be up during takeoff and landing. I’ve wracked my brain and I can’t think of any reason it would matter what position the window shade is in. Do flight attendants (or airline executives) get off on making up totally arbitrary rules to impose on their passengers?
I’m stuck in the Charlotte airport, and I wanted to give some kudos to the good people of Charlotte for making WiFi access available in their airport for free. In this case, I’m stranded in Charlotte for a couple of hours, so I probably would have plunked down the requisite $7.99 if they’d asked for it. But in the vast majority of cases, where I’m in the airport for an hour or less before my flight, the fee discourages me from using the connection. This is a pure deadweight loss for the world, denying Internet access to a lot of people in order to squeeze a few dollars out of the handful willing to pay an inflated price for access. It’s good to see Charlotte buck the trend, and I hope my own airport follows Charlotte’s lead.
Bret Swanson had a great post plugging Chris Anderson’s upcoming book Free, which I expect to be every bit as interesting as his first book. But he then concluded his post with what seems to me like a totally gratuitous swipe at Larry Lessig’s brilliant book, Free Culture, which he characterizes as “about the demonization of property and profits” and “imposing a radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda on our imperfect but highly productive and creative capitalist economy.”
This left me wondering if we’d read the same book. Lessig of course criticizes large companies who have lobbied for changes in copyright law that benefit themselves at the expense of consumers. But I would regard that as “criticizing rent-seeking,” not “demonizing profits.” When Cato attacks corporate welfare, nobody thinks that’s anti-capitalist.
And I have absolutely no idea what “radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda” Lessig is advocating, or upon whom Swanson thinks it would be “imposed.” The changes Lessig advocates would mostly undo the changes to copyright law that the content industries have pushed over the last three decades: longer terms, abandonment of formalities, anti-circumvention rights, harsher penalties, erosion of fair use. For the most part, Lessig’s “radical new utopian and quasi-socialist agenda” is also known as “American copyright law circa 1975.”
Now, Lessig certainly has some ideas I disagree with. Some of them might even be characterized as anti-property or anti-profit. But the ideas in Free Culture certainly aren’t among them. To the contrary, as the Wall Street Journal‘s review of Free Culture pointed out, the central theme of Free Culture is something conservatives normally celebrate: reducing the role of government and lawyers into Americans’ ordinary lives. Over the last quarter century, the regulatory regime that is copyright law has intruded on more and more aspects of our daily lives. While there may very well be good policy arguments for some of these changes, as Swanson’s own colleagues have forcefully argued. But there’s certainly nothing unlibertarian about worrying that increased government involvement in peoples’ lives will have negative consequences.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to Milton Friedman, Kenneth Arrow, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, and Thomas W. Hazlett, all of whom weighed in on Lessig’s side in the Eldred decision, a case Lessig discusses extensively in Free Culture. Listen to noted libertarian scholar Richard Epstein, who agrees with Lessig that copyright law has been applied too aggressively to documentary filmmakers. Free culture is about what its title suggests: freedom. One can (and Swanson’s colleagues have) make a coherent argument that the freedoms Lessig champions are less important than the need to create incentives for the production of creative works. But it’s inaccurate to describe a book about freedom as “utopian and quasi-socialist.”
Via Julian, diarist at Daily Kos has repeated the complaint that libertarians have been AWOL on FISA. This is beyond silly. Let me offer a quick timeline:
Feb 1: Cato’s daily podcast features me discussing the FISA debate. And on Cato’s blog, I debunk the idea that telecom immunity is about trial lawyers.
Feb 3: Reason‘s Julian Sanchez pens a piece for the popular tech news site Ars Technica titled “Unchecked surveillance threatens security as well as privacy.”
Feb 4: Julian criticizes the White House for letting the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board sit empty.
Feb 6: Reason’s Jacob Sullum pens a piece for Reason attacking the Bush administration’s position on FISA.
Feb 7: I have a piece in Reason called “The Surveillance Scam” urging Democrats not to capitulate.
Feb 11: On Cato’s blog I critique a Wall Street Journal editorial on FISA.
Feb 12: Julian attacks the Senate’s bad FISA bill.
Feb 13: Cato president Ed Crane pens a piece titled “No, a President Can’t Do as He Pleases.” The same day, I have a piece in Slate wondering why conservatives are so opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants, but are gung-ho for telecom immunity. And Jacob Sullum asks some pointed questions about the Senate bill.
Feb 14: In a post for Techdirt, Julian praises House Democrats for standing up to Republican fearmongering and letting the Protect America Act expire. The Wall Street Journal‘s Dan Slater quotes my Slate piece.
Feb 15: Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias cites my Slate article.
Feb 16: The Protect American Act expires. The Washington Times runs a story that quotes me saying that the PAA expiration won’t endanger Americans’ safety.
Feb 17: The liberal blog Crooks and Liars cites me saying that the PAA expiration is no big deal. So does The Carpetbagger Report. And Matt Yglesias.
Feb 18: Keith Olberman quotes me on national television saying that the PAA’s expiration is no big deal. Cato’s Daily podcast features me explaining that the expiration of the PAA hasn’t caused the sky to fall. I also discuss FISA with Cato’s WIll Wilkinson on Bloggingheads.tv.
Feb 19: Speaker Pelosi quotes my Slate piece on her blog. Gene Healy and I have a piece in the Orange County Register describing the history of abuses that led to FISA’s original passage.
Feb 20: At Cato’s blog, I criticize a post at NRO defending the White House on FISA.
Feb 21: Julian covers the Republicans’ discharge efforts at Techdirt.
Feb 23: The ACLU cites Cato in a press release related to FISA.
Feb 28: Cato releases a statement by me disagreeing with the president’s statement on FISA.
That’s nowhere close to an exhaustive list, and that was all in February. I’ve been writing about this subject since 2006, and so has Julian. Maybe our friends at Daily Kos could do a little bit of research before making sweeping statements about what libertarians have or haven’t been doing?
Ben Worthen has a post looking at restrictions on the use of consumer technologies in businesses. Apparently, a lot of corporate IT departments have found it necessary to ban a lot of consumer applications like Skype, webmail, and the iPhone from their networks because they’re required to monitor and record all of their employees’ communications, and it’s hard to do that with applications that aren’t specifically designed with employer monitoring in mind. This strikes me as profoundly stupid. If the goal is to prevent employees from leaking confidential information, this kind of ad hoc monitoring isn’t going to get the job done. Employees will always be able to find some application that lets them transfer files (the IT manager Worthen interviewed admits that there are some additional sites she’d like to block but hasn’t yet). And even if the computers are totally locked down, they can still write down confidential information with a pen and paper and carry it out of the office. The bottom line is that an employee determined to violate his employer’s trust will find a way to do so no matter what the IT department does.
Apparently, though, this is what securities law requires. So you can’t really blame the IT departments for complying with the law. But it’s worth noting that this is more a quirk of a few regulated industries (health care is another where information-disclosure is tightly controlled) rather than a general property of American business. If your company isn’t in one of these industries, it probably doesn’t make sense to impose these kinds of draconian restrictions. And Congress might want to re-think regulations that require companies to behave this way.
Tom is absolutely right that the manipulative use of graphical filters has a long (if not exactly proud) pedigree in politics. What he’s forgetting, however, is that hysterical over-reaction to political advertising also has a long pedigree. Does no one remember RATS? Or Michael J. Fox’s exaggerated Parkinsons symptoms? Making mountains over molehills is the whole point of a political campaign. This campaign has had its stupid moments, but they’re no stupider than past contests.
What he said:
Personally, I couldn’t care less whether Jimbo is sleeping with Rachel Marsden (other than the fact that she appears to be insane), or what they say to each other in their IM chats. I don’t care whether Jimbo has had marital problems, or whether he’s had disagreements with the foundation over his expenses. All that says to me is that he’s human, and has made mistakes.
But the implication is that because he’s made some mistakes in his personal life, that somehow Wikipedia itself is demeaned or invalidated in some way, as though someone had discovered that Mother Theresa was skimming money, or running drugs through the orphanage. To me, Jimmy Wales is nothing more than the guy who set Wikipedia in motion; it has become much more than a one-man show, if it ever was. What he does in his personal life is of no interest to me, nor do I think it’s particularly relevant to what matters about Wikipedia.
I think this is roughly akin to the argument that because Enron was cooking its books, capitalism is fatally flawed. Wikipedia is a large community of people that’s fundamentally defined by its decentralized decision-making process. Jimmy Wales has more influence than anyone else in that community, but his benevolent dictatorship is sharply constrained by the need to keep the foot soldiers happy. Whether he’s personally corrupt (and just to be clear, none of the dirt that’s been dug up thus far proves anything of the sort) or not is beside the point, he’s grown the site to the point where it could easily carry on without him.
Over at Ars, I have a new piece up that draws a (somewhat provocative, perhaps) parallel between today’s copyright debates and the property rights debates of the 18th and 19th centuries:
The American property system is based on the British common law system, but colonists quickly discovered that British property law was inadequate to the realities of the New World. In England, land was scarce and titles were well established. The American colonies, in contrast, had an abundance of land but poorly-defined boundaries and inadequate record-keeping. As a result, squatting became extremely common. Landless Americans would move to the frontier, clear some land, and begin building on it without first securing a property title.
This was illegal, and governments worked hard to prevent it. The resulting conflicts made today’s battles over file sharing look tame. In 1786, when Massachusetts tried to eject squatters in Maine (a Massachusetts territory at the time) the result was what one historian describes as “something like open warfare.” Squatters refused to pay for their land or vacate it, and the government tried to forcibly evict them. One sheriff was killed trying to evict a squatter, and juries refused to convict the accused murderer.
Copyright maximalists love to draw parallels between property rights and copyrights. But if we take that analogy seriously, I think it actually leads in some places that they aren’t going to like. Our property rights system was not created by Congressional (or state legislative) fiat. Property rights in land is an organic, bottom up exercize. The job of government isn’t to dictate what the property system should look like, but to formalize and reinforce the property arrangements people naturally agree to among themselves.
The fact that our current copyright system is widely ignored and evaded is a sign, I think, that Congress has done a poor job of aligning the copyright system with ordinary individuals’ sense of right and wrong. Just as squatters 200 years ago didn’t think it was right that they be booted off land they cleared and brought under cultivation in favor of an absentee landowner who had written a check to a distant federal government, so a lot of people feel it’s unfair to fine a woman hundreds of thousands of dollars to share a couple of CDs’ worth of music. You might believe (as do I) that file sharing is unethical, just as many people believed that squatting was unethical. But at some point, Congress has no choice but to recognize the realities on the ground, just as it did with real property in the 19th century.
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Awesome:
By loosenut (Seattle, WA)
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed.
Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up. My son said “that’s the worst security ever!”. But it turned out to be okay, because when the passenger got on the Playmobil B757 and tried to hijack it, she was mobbed by a couple of other heroic passengers, who only sustained minor injuries in the scuffle, which were treated at the Playmobil Hospital.
The best thing about this product is that it teaches kids about the realities of living in a high-surveillance society. My son said he wants the Playmobil Neighborhood Surveillance System set for Christmas. I’ve heard that the CCTV cameras on that thing are pretty worthless in terms of quality and motion detection, so I think I’ll get him the Playmobil Abu-Gharib Interrogation Set instead (it comes with a cute little memo from George Bush).
My fianceé wants to know if it comes with miniature plastic baggies for putting your miniature miniature bottles of shampoo in.
They ought to make John Gilmore and Bruce Schneier action figures to go with it.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.