Tom Coseven left a comment making some good points about last week’s podcast and wireless Carterfone. I also got an email raising some of the same objections, so let me see if I can address them.
First, in response to Tom’s first point, I didn’t mean to give the impression that Carterfone was an antitrust decision. My point was simply that the policy rationale for regulatory intervention is much stronger when you have a single, government-protected monopoly than it is when there are four (relatively) lightly regulated incumbents. Whether or not you want to call them an “oligopoly,” it’s clearly more likely that market competition will discipline network operators in a 4-firm industry than in a 1=firm industry. And on the margin, that makes the case for regulatory intervention weaker.
Here’s Tom again:
On the subject of implementation of an open access requirement, it could be done quite easily. The GSM and CDMA standards allow for very transparent connectivity at the device level with no affect on your visual voice feature you use as an example. Those kind of widgets sit at a higher layer on the phone. Either the phone has the software or it doesn’t (sort of like a downloaded game).
Part of the problem here is that I have yet to see a specific explanation of what a “Wireless Carterfone” rule would actually say. If we’re just talking about a rule that says “network operators must allow any GSM or CDMA (as the case may be) phone to connect to their network,” that’s certainly a pretty clear rule, and it may not lead to any problems. However, I have the impression that two of the four carriers (the GSM ones) already respect this rule. So if that’s all we’re talking about, the rule seems kind of superfluous. Anyone who wants the freedom to attach the phone of their choice can sign up with T-Mobile or AT&T.
Continue reading →
Apparently I can get a Dell Dimension E520N pre-loaded with Ubuntu for $429. That’s with an Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB of memory, and a 250 GB hard drive. The budget machine from Ubuntu hardware vendor System 76 appears to cost $785 if outfitted similarly.
I’m sure I could get an even cheaper system if I put it together myself, but I frankly am not that interested in hardware. I’m perfectly happy to give Dell $50 or $100 to save me the trouble of figuring out which hardware has good Linux support and then comparison shopping for the best deals.
But I’m curious what y’all think: are there other Linux hardware vendors with more competitive prices? Am I likely to have compatibility or other problems with the Dell systems?
Also: Jeremy Reimer at Ars reports that the “Windows tax” appears to be about $50.
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, James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation, and Joe Weisenthal of Techdirt. Topics include,
- Dennis Kucinich wants to bring back the fairness doctrine,
- Tim Wu wants to attach Carterphone-style regulations to the winners next year’s spectrum auction, and
- Nicholas Negroponte, head of the One Laptop Per Child program, wants to be the only one distributing cheap laptops to third-world children.
Continue reading →
I’ve got a new article on e-voting up at the American. The basic argument will be familiar to regular TLF readers:
The fundamental problem with computerized voting machines is their lack of transparency. In order to ensure that elections are conducted fairly and accurately, it is important that election officials, candidates, and members of the general public be able to observe and verify every stage of the election process. Computerized voting machines make independent verification of election procedures extremely difficult because important steps of the election process, including recording, tallying, and reporting votes, occur unseen inside a computer chip.
That’s not the only reason e-voting is dangerous. One of the important safeguards in the traditional election process is that it is extremely labor-intensive. Thousands of people are involved in the process of collecting and counting votes. As a result, stealing an election almost always requires a large, organized conspiracy that would be hard to keep secret. In contrast, e-voting can allow a single, well-placed individual to tamper with the software of numerous voting machines at once, potentially altering the outcome of an election in an entire congressional district or state. Indeed, this is more than a hypothetical scenario. Last fall, Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten obtained a widely-used e-voting machine and created a virus that could be used to steal an election. The virus would spread from machine to machine through the memory cards that install software upgrades…
The safest course of action is to return to a tried and true technology: paper ballots. There are a variety of ways to mark and tally paper ballots, but probably the best choice is optical-scan machines. These have a proven track record, and many state election officials have decades of experience with them.
I go on to discuss the Holt bill, which is certainly less than ideal, but which in my judgment would be a big improvement over the status quo.
My buddy Julian is miffed that the Apple store told him his iPod was a glorified paper weight when, in fact, it took him all of half an hour to fix it:
Well, I was futzing around this evening and pulled it out of that drawer. And I figured: “What the hell, it’s bricked and out of warranty, I’ve got nothing to lose by tinkering with it.” So I grabbed a tiny screwdriver, pried it open, and started sniffing at the innards. It took all of a minute to notice that there was a tiny piece of ribbon circuitry at the base of the thing that had come unmoored from its connector, so I grabbed a tweezer and wedged it back in, then snapped the casing closed again. Voila, good as new!
Once I got over my pleasure at having a working iPod back with so little effort, though, I got a bit annoyed. It had been obvious when the problem first appeared (after I tried resets and other such things) that it was basically sound, but that there was some sort of hardware issue with the clickwheel. I almost just popped it open to check for loose connections back then, but I figured it was better to go ask the experts, on the off chance I could make it worse by poking about. And I suppose, like an ass, I assumed that it couldn’t possibly be that simple, because the experts were talking about sending it back to the plant for costly repairs. But now I find myself thinking: If these guys were remotely competent or informed about their gadgets, surely they must have known that there was a high probability this was a simple loose connection that could be solved with the five-minute surgery I just performed, and would have done for myself a while ago if I hadn’t deferred to the local Genius. So I want to register a minor WTF here: Have they decided that once it’s out of warranty, there’s no reason suggesting incredibly simple and obvious procedures that might fix an expensive piece of gadgetry if you look as though you might be willing to buy another, newer expensive piece of gadgetry?
This is obviously a borderline case, where the Genius probably could have done what Julian did and fixed the problem. But as a matter of general policy (remember that Apple runs dozens of stores and has to try to treat everyone equally), it’s not obvious that what Julian is suggesting is feasible. Labor is relatively expensive, and in the grand scheme of things, an iPod really isn’t.
Continue reading →
Yglesias notes the heated battle in the 1960s over jukebox piracy. According to his commenters, Congress eventually closed the jukebox loophole so that music publishers would be fairly compensated.
First eMusic, then Yahoo!, then Apple, and now Amazon have joined the anti-DRM camp. This adds momentum to the general perception that DRM-based business models are outdated and on their way out, at least in the music market. It’s only a matter of time before the labels cave.
It’s striking that this announcement is occurring less than a year after the unveiling of Amazon’s Unbox. As I said then, the use of DRM was a major reason the service sucked so much. Thanks to the much larger file sizes, the online movie market is a few years behind the online music market in its evolution. But I think recent developments in the music market presage similar developments in the movie market a few years from now. Ultimately, DRM is a bad business strategy because it doesn’t stop piracy but it does punish your own paying customers. The labels and online music vendors are realizing that now. Hollywood is still in denial, but they’ll figure it out eventually.
I missed this IPI essay when it came out last month. In its opening paragraphs (and its conclusion) the paper purports to be a critique of technologists’ arguments against the DMCA, with my own paper and EFF’s Unintended Consequences as exhibits A and B. There have been relatively few substantive criticisms of my paper (it got little more than a sneer from IPI’s president, for example) so I was excited about the opportunity to read a serious, essay-length critique of my arguments against the DMCA.
Boy was I disappointed.
Continue reading →
Over at Ars, I analyze yesterday’s Perfect 10 decision:
Perfect 10 attempted to distinguish its service from the Kelly precedent in two ways. First, although Google doesn’t typically display advertising on image search result pages, some of the sites containing infringing images participate in Google’s AdSense program. Second, Perfect 10 had licensed its images for sale in thumbnail form to cell phone users, and the company argued that the thumbnails in Google’s search results undermined the market for cell-phone thumbnails. The district court sided with Perfect 10 in 2004, and Google appealed the decision.
Writing for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, judge Sandra Ikuta firmly rejected both of those arguments. She noted that there was no evidence that any mobile phone users had actually used Google’s image search engine to download Perfect 10’s images. And while she acknowledged that Google did generate a small amount of revenue from infringing websites that participated in the AdSense program, she ruled that “the transformative nature of Google’s use is more significant than any incidental superseding use or the minor commercial aspects of Google’s search engine and website.”
Perfect 10 seems to have taken a “kitchen sink” approach in its attack on Google, and the as a result the decision is kind of sprawling, touching on a variety of theories for both direct and indirect liability. As far as I can see, almost all of them worked out in a pro-Google (and in my view, a pro-innovation) direction. The possible trouble spot is the Napster issue, where the Ninth Circuit sent the case back to the district court for further consideration. But as long as Google can make a plausible case that they can’t be expected to police each of the billions of websites they link to, they should be fine.
Good news from the Ninth Circuit, which overturned Google’s loss in last year’s Perfect 10 decision. Here’s what I said about the case back when it was decided:
Google Image Search is a search engine for images. It does not serve ads. AdSense is a third-party ad program whereby any website on the Internet can allow Google to place ads on their site in exchange for a cut of the revenues. The relationship between these programs is… well, there isn’t really a relationship, except they’re both Google products. Sometimes users find infringing pages using Google Image Search that have AdSense ads on them. The court decided this was evidence that Google Image Search was profiting off of infringement.
But that’s ridiculous. Google Image Search doesn’t give any particular preference to web sites that serve up AdSense ads. And AdSense serves up ads regardless of what search engine brought the user to the site. If Google cancelled Google Image Search altogether, there’s little reason to think AdSense would suffer financially—users would likely find the same pages using other search engines.
If this standard is to be taken seriously, search engine companies are going to have to divest themselves of all other online services that might involve infringing copyrights. Yahoo! will have to sell off GeoCities. Microsoft will have to stop selling IIS, its web server.
But Mike at Techdirt warns that the case might not be over:
However, the court ruled that because some of the sites also included Google AdSense ads, Google was directly profiting. Of course, that seems like a totally different issue, so the entire decision was something of a mixed bag, at times saying that thumbnails by themselves aren’t infringing, but there were cases where they were. The latest is that an Appeals Court has overturned the lower court ruling, saying (again) that thumbnails are fair use… but still opening up potential liability if Google could have done a better job to “prevent future damages.” That seems to leave the whole thing wide open for the lower court (which the case is being sent back to) to screw up all over again. So, despite what the headlines might read, this case is far from over.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.