Horacio Gutierrez, vice president of intellectual property and licensing at Microsoft, says that interoperability requires licensing agreements like the Novell-Microsoft deal:
“In fact, one makes the other possible, especially at a time like this, when interoperability is so important. Microsoft recognizes the importance of interoperability, which is why we are doing the things we are in our products, why we created the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, and why we are listening to customers,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s vice president of intellectual property and licensing.
Customers did not want to have to solve this problem themselves, they wanted industry leaders, their vendors, to solve the interoperability problem for them, he said.
“The only way that’s possible is for companies to really be open to licensing arrangements and building these bridges that people thought were impossible before, among different providers and among different software development models,” he said…
He felt it “unfortunate that while Microsoft is trying to build bridges wherever possible between the commercial and open-source software industries, some seem intent on tearing down those bridges. We are in the bridge building business, not in the bridge burning business.”
This is, as Luis points out, complete and utter nonsense:
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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 Tim Lee of the Cato Institute, Braden Cox of the Association for Competitive Technology, Prof. Randy Picker of the University of Chicago Law School, and Eric Bangeman of Ars Technica. Topics include,
- Technological progress drives change in copyright law,
- Major League Baseball criticizes Slingbox over its place-shifting technology, and
- states consider new regulations of social networking sites.
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!
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I’m reading Janet Abbate’s Inventing the Internet, an excellent history of the Internet starting with its origins as the ARPANET in the 1960s. The most interesting things I’ve learned about so far is the heated battled between the TCP/IP protocol, which was favored primarily by the computer science research community, and the competing X.25 protocol, which was favored by the telecom industry. Embarrassingly, I didn’t know anything about this argument before I picked up Abbate’s book. What’s striking about it is how similar it sounds to arguments today. From page 161:
The operators of public data networks argued that ARPA’s TCP/IP failed to provide adequate control over network operations. For instance, a Telenet spokesman noted that, whereas X.25 was capable of controlling the flow of packets from each individual connection, TCP could only act on an entire host’s output at once. If one of the network connections from a host malfunctioned and flooded a TCP/IP network with packets, the network’s only defense would be to cut off the entire host, thus unfairly penalizing the others users on that host. Users of the research network might accept the inconvenience with resignation, but paying customers of a public data network would certainly protest. With regard to the business of running a network, the [Post, Telephone, and Telegraph Authorities] pointed out that IP had not been designed to allow networks to exchange the type of information that would be required for access control or cost accounting… TCP/IP had not been designed for a network serving as a public utility, with service guarantees and access charges. X.25 had been.
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In recent years there has been a trend toward the use of trade agreements as a means of bullying smaller nations into adopting copyright and patent policies favored by domestic special interest groups in the United States. Over at the EFF blog, Gwen Hinze has the goods:
In exchange for the promise of increased access to U.S. agricultural and textile markets, , U.S. trading partners are being required to rewrite their IP laws. For instance, the last nine U.S. free trade agreements signed since 2002 have required trading partners to adopt the U.S./ EU copyright term of life of the creator plus 70 years, create laws banning the circumvention of DRM (or technological protection measures) modeled very precisely on the controversial DMCA, and to treat temporary reproductions of copyrighted works (such as in computer memory) as copyright infringement. The FTAs also require trading partners to broaden their patent laws. The Central American Free Trade Agreement also required extended protection of test data, seemingly directed at precluding registration of generic pharmaceuticals.
I agree with James Surowiecki that there’s a symmetry between the “intellectual property standards” in these recent trade agreements and the “labor and environmental standards” that left-wing groups have long demanded be appended to trade deals. Free traders have always argued, correctly, that labor and environmental laws have nothing to do with trade, and that decisions about such laws should be decided by the ordinary political process in each country, not by international pressure.
Precisely the same argument applies to copyright and patent issues. I think there are good policy arguments to oppose longer copyright terms and anti-circumvention rules on their merits. But even if you think those are good policy, they certainly don’t belong in trade negotiations. Trade negotiations should be focusing on trade barriers. Failing to protect the copyright on Mickey Mouse until 2019, or permitting the sale of DVD players that will fast forward through commercials, is not a trade barrier.
We free traders should be just as outraged about these demands as we would be if a Democratic administration demanded changes to other countries’ labor or environmental laws in exchange for a trade agreement. The president and the USTR have only so much political capital in these negotiations. Had they not included the copyright and patent provisions among their demands, they most likely would have been able to obtain larger reductions in genuine trade barriers.
Via Yglesias, Robert Farley thinks that we’re not giving enough attention to economic “cyber war”:
Lots of work has been done on “cyber war”, the promise and vulnerability of networked military organizations. Less attention has been paid to the economic prospects of cyber warfare, and to the ability of states to exert power and coercion through a new set of tools. When Russia tries to coerce its neigbors through threatening to destroy their economic and governmental activity, it becomes a problem for NATO and consequently the United States.
Frankly, I think this is silly. Most of the IT infrastructure that’s really critical for the functioning of a modern economy—power plants, ATM networks, air traffic control, etc—is physically separated from the public Internet. Even semi-critical infrastructure like stock exchanges and supply chain systems tend to be over-engineered for fault tolerance.
And indeed, this is confirmed by the news coverage of the incident. The opening bullets report that “parliament, ministries, banks, media targeted.” But when you get further down the story, you learn that the websites of these institutions were targetted. Now maybe the Estonia is different, but I doubt most people would even notice if Congress’s website were brought down for a few days by a DDOS attack.
I suppose it would be a bit of a pain if I wasn’t able to check CNN or my bank account balance. But that’s not “cyber war.” It’s petty vandalism. It deserves the attention of network security experts at the companies whose websites were targetted, of course, but it’s ridiculous to get NATO involved or to act as though Russia engaging in this kind of “cyber warfare” is even remotely on par with Russia launching cruise missiles against Estonian targets.
One of the most exciting things about technological progress, from a libertarian perspective, is that as technologies get cheaper, they get harder and harder for the state to regulate. The prolific Chris Anderson has the latest example: he’s built an unmanned aerial vehicle for under $1000. He explains his motivations here:
The main aim of this project is to both make the world’s cheapest full-featured UAV and the first one designed to be within the reach of high school and below kids, as a platform for an aerial robotics contest. Like the Lego FIRST league, but in the air.
But there is another aim, which I ended being asked about a lot at Maker Faire. At the moment the FAA regulations on UAVs are ambiguous (we believe that by staying below 400 feet and within line-of-sight we’re within them). But there is a good deal of concern that as small and cheap UAVs become more common, the FAA will toughen the rules, making activities such as ours illegal. I hope this project will illustrate why that approach won’t work.
By creating a UAV with Lego parts and built in part by kids, we haven’t just created a minimum UAV, we’ve created a reductio ad absurdum one. If children can make UAVs out of toys, the genie is out of the bottle. Clear use guidelines (such as staying below 400 feet and away from tall buildings) would be welcome, but blanket bans or requirements for explicit FAA approval for each launch will be too hard to enforce. The day when there was a limited “UAV industry” that could be regulated are gone.
Government regulation almost always works by controlling intermediaries—usually large companies. As more and more technologies come within reach of individuals, using off-the-shelf parts, it will be harder and harder for the government to control them. I say bring it on.
Randy Barnett mocks George Lucas for his walled garden approach to mash-ups:
According the Wall Street Journal this morning, the fan-created videos will run along with commercials “with Lucasfilm and Eyespot splitting the proceeds.” Asked about why Lucasfilm will allow this use of their images, a spokesman said, “If someone wants to commercialize it, that’s where we’ve drawn the line.” So it’s OK for Lucasfilm to commercialize the creative efforts of Star Wars ™fans, but not the other way around.
But the laugh is really going to be on Lucasfilm because, as we all know, people won’t invest scarce time producing creative works that others want to watch without the financial incentives provided by intellectual “property” rights granted for “limited times” (i.e. in perpetuity). So it is safe to predict that no one will contribute any mashups to the new Starwars.com website. Boy, will that be embarrassing for them!
Randy Picker has been doing an excellent series of posts on the evolution of copying technologies. Today’s installment is particularly good:
In the monk era—the pre-printing press era—all copying was done by hand. These were manuscripts copied one-by-one in the scriptorium. There weren’t strong advantages—economies of scale if we are going to be economists—in producing second copies. All copies were expensive and the author/publisher, having produced one copy of the work, was no better situated to make another copy of the work than would be any holder of the work. To be sure, the technology of copying—the ability to read and write—may not have been widely distributed, so this was a key way in which copies were controlled, but presumably only the literate were much interested in copies anyhow, and for the literate, the costs of producing the second copy were high but roughly identical to the costs of the author.
The printing press changed all of that. The printing press obviously lowered printing costs generally, but note what it did for second-copy costs. Those costs dropped dramatically for publishers but changed very little for someone in possession of a physical copy of the book. Before, in the handcrafted era of the monks, publishers and copy holders faced the same, very high, second-copy costs. In the Gutenberg era, the author/publisher was much better situated than a copy recipient to produce another copy. That cost advantage served as an important way in which the effective rights of the author/publisher to control copies were made meaningful. This is not to say that we didn’t have piracy, but it was of a different sort, say a printer running a secret print runs for a pirate.
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Matthew Ingram does a good job of explaining what’s wrong with this story on how Heinz’s user-generated ad contest didn’t work very well:
” If any of the advertisers quoted in the New York Times story were told by a “Web 2.0? advisor that they could somehow outsource ad production to “the crowd” and wind up with something just as good as what they produce in-house, then they should sue. But I suspect they weren’t told that. They may have wished that was true, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as my mother used to say (actually, she still says that). Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has more on the subject.
As a number of people (including commenters on Scott’s post) have pointed out, however, whether an ad is technically or even creatively as slick and well-crafted as a Madison Avenue spot isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered. In some cases, a quirky, user-created ad like the one Global Nerdy likes, or like the Diet Coke and Mentos video, might actually work better. And getting people to “engage” with the brand may be even more important than the actual technical brilliance of the ad.
I think there are three other factors here that are worth keeping in mind. First, it sounds like part of the problem is that they did too little—not too much—to harness the wisdom of crowds. Users can not only produce ads–they can filter them too. If there were a ton of ads submitted and most of them were crap, why not have the crowd help weed out the bad stuff? Set up a site showing all the submissions (and making it easy to embed them in other sites) and let website visitors vote on the best selections. You probably don’t want to just run whatever the crowd suggests, but you could choose 10 or 20 finalists that way, and then you can pick the best 5 from those.
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