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 certaincompanies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.
In addition to subscribing to our own podcast, you should also subscribe to Don Marti’s LinuxWorld podcast. It’s definitely more techie and less policy than our podcast, but it has a fair amount of interesting policy stuff as well.
This week’s episode, for example, is an interesting discussion with Brian Aker of MySQL. The first half is a fairly geeky discussion of MySQL features. But in the second half of the podcast, Don asks about the economic motivation for free software. Aker argues that there are fundamentally two motivations, whether the contributions are from an individual or a company: publicity and testing. That is, first, that opening your software up will cause it to be more widely distributed and popular, hopefully leading to more opportunities to sell services in the future. And secondly, if you have more users, and those users have access to your source code, you’re more likely to have unsolicited bug reports and even (if you’re lucky) bug fixes. Aker says that most free software developers—and companies supporting free software—are not doing it out of abstract altruism. Surprisingly for those who think the free software movement is populated entirely by dirty hippies, opening one’s source code can sometimes be a savvy business strategy.
Aker has more interesting things to say, and I bet Don will have more interesting guests in future weeks, so I encourage you to check out the podcast.
I make the case against software patents in the New York Times today. I use Bill Gates’s 1991 memo to his executives (which I discussed in Ars back in March) as a springboard to talk about the Verizon-Vonage dispute:
The Gates memo predicted that a large company would “patent some obvious thing,” and that’s exactly what Verizon has done. Two of its patents cover the concept of translating phone numbers into Internet addresses. It is virtually impossible to create a consumer-friendly Internet telephone product without doing that. So if Verizon prevails on appeal, it will probably be able to drive Vonage out of business. Consumers will suffer from fewer choices and higher prices, and future competitors will be reluctant to enter markets dominated by patents.
But don’t software companies need patent protection? In fact, companies, especially those that are focused on innovation, don’t: software is already protected by copyright law, and there’s no reason any industry needs both types of protection. The rules of copyright are simpler and protection is available to everyone at very low cost. In contrast, the patent system is cumbersome and expensive. Applying for patents and conducting patent searches can cost tens of thousands of dollars. That is not a huge burden for large companies like Microsoft, but it can be a serious burden for the small start-up firms that produce some of the most important software innovations.
Yet, as the Vonage case demonstrates, participating in the patent system is not optional. Independent invention is not a defense to patent infringement, and large software companies now hold so many patents that it is almost impossible to create useful software without infringing some of them. Therefore, the only means of self-defense is the one Mr. Gates identified 16 years ago: stockpile patents to use as bargaining chips in litigation. Vonage didn’t do that, and it’s now paying a very high price.
Larry Lessig explains the difference between stealing a laptop and including an out-of-print book in a search engine. Yes, someone really did suggest that suggest those actions were equivalent. No, that person wasn’t very bright.
MikeT is right, this makes me foam at the mouth. Or at least it would if I were sure it wasn’t a parody. I mean, if their business model works, the patent system is obviously broken, right?
1. You submit vulnerabilities you have discovered, without telling anyone else.
2. If we accept them, we work together to develop a fix.
3. We develop intellectual property relating to the fix, and license or enforce it
4. You share in the profits
In particular:
We actively market the IP. Depending on the situation, potential customers may include: the vendor, security providers such as suppliers of intrusion prevention technologies, and competitors of the vendor
We encourage the customers to seek a licence and apply our solution.
We intend to enforce our IP rights if necessary.
Wow. This company would have customers the way the mafia has customers. I sincerely hope this is an elaborate joke rather than a cynical abuse of the patent system.
The podcast is considerably longer than usual this week because it featured an extremely productive discussion with Prof. Tim Wu on the merits of his “wireless Carterfone” proposal. Normally, we try to keep the podcast under half an hour, but one of the great things about podcasting is that here’s no reason we have to stick to the same length for every episode. In this case, the discussion was just too good to truncate. I encourage you to listen in—we’ve got a handy in-browser listening widget—and if you like what you hear you should subscribe.
One point I want to clarify: around minute 11, I observed that forcing unwilling incumbents to open their markets is usually an “expensive and messy procedure.” Wu responded that this amounted to preemptive surrender, and that we shouldn’t shy away from enacting good policy simply because it faces entrenched opposition.
Which is a good point, but let me expand a bit on what I meant. Obviously, if the problem were simply that the carriers don’t like a given proposal and will lobby against it, that’s not a good rationale for opposing it. However, I think two additional considerations are relevant. First, regulatory uncertainty is always bad. When the rules are unclear, existing firms will be reluctant to invest and new firms will be hesitant to enter the market. Moreover, those firms that do enter the market sometimes get the rug pulled out from under them when the regulatory body changes course—think of the way the CLECs got hosed in the 1990s.
Tech Policy Weekly from the Technology Liberation Front is a weekly podcast about technology policy from TLF’s learned band of contributors. The shows’s panelists this week are Adam Thierer of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Prof. Tim Wu of the Columbia University Law School, and Gwen Hinze of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Topics include,
Tim Wu explains his wireless Carterfone proposal,
The United States signs a trade agreement with South Korea that includes some controversial copyright provisions, and
The FCC loses on appeal in an important broadcast decency case.
There are several ways to listen to the TLF Podcast. You can press play on the player below to listen right now, or download the MP3 file. You can also subscribe to the podcast by clicking on the button for your preferred service. And do us a favor, Digg this podcast!
Recently we learned that Apple has begun embedding information in MP3s sold by the iTunes Store that identifies the purchaser of the song. Randy Picker speculated that one motivation for this could be a form of “mistrust-based” DRM: that people would be worried about getting in trouble if a song with their name on it was released into the wild, and so fewer people would share their files.
Ed Felten suggests some reasons that this strategy might not work so well:
Fred von Lohmann responded, suggesting that Apple should have encrypted the information, to protect privacy while still allowing Apple to identify the original buyer if necessary. Randy responded that there was a benefit to letting third parties do enforcement.
More interesting than the lack of encryption is the apparent lack of integrity checks on the data. This makes it pretty easy to change the name in a file. Fred predicts that somebody will make a tool for changing the name to “Steve Jobs” or something. Worse yet, it would be easy to change the data in a file to frame an innocent person – which makes the name information pretty much useless for enforcement.
If you’re not a crypto person, you may not realize that there are different tools for keeping information secret than for detecting tampering – in the lingo, different tools for ensuring confidentiality than for ensuring integrity. Apple could have used crypto to protect the integrity of the data. Done right, this would let Apple detect whether the name information in a file was accurate. (You might worry that somebody could transplant the name header from one file to another, but proper crypto will detect that.) Whether to use this kind of integrity check is a separate question from whether to encrypt the information — you can do either, or both, or neither.
Huh. Someone at the hyperbolically-named “Save the Internet” Coalition screwed up. In celebration of Ed Whitacre’s retirement, they made a satirical cartoon purporting to be his final speech to his management team.
They then linked to this video in a blog post with some of the “quotes” in the video. The only problem is that they didn’t do a very good job of marking it as satire. In fact, they wrote what appears to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Whitacre’s “speech.”
It got picked up by Slashdot this morning, and the comments there demonstrate that hardly any of Slashdot’s readers got the joke.
I’m sure this was an honest mistake on Save the Internet’s part. But so far, there’s no sign of an update more clearly labeling it as a parody. Yes, it’s obvious if you watch the video that it’s a parody, but there’s hardly any hint it’s a parody in the text of the post, and it shouldn’t have been that hard to predict that a lot of people would just read the text and not watch the video.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.