DISQUS

Tom, my (admittedly non-expert) reading of DT's patents is that they would effectively give them a 20-year monopoly on the concept of digital check clearing. Is your reading different? If so, how broadly do you think the courts will apply them? If not, do you really think the first person to have thought of the idea of digital check clearing should be able to lock competitors out of the market for 20 years?

Tom, I never claimed anything in your op-ed was "factually wrong or incorrect." In fact, I explicitly acknowledged that I wasn't familiar with the amendment you were writing about, which is why I ended my second paragraph with the question, "Any body know what he might be referring to?"

However, I think my substantive criticism of your argument—that DataTreasury's patent is absurdly broad and that DataTreasury's behavior is extortionate—remains valid. We may actually agree on the policy conclusion—that the Session amendment is a bad idea—but I definitely don't agree with the way you painted DataTreasury as a hapless investor just trying to stop companies from stealing its "technology."

Tom,

I wasn't aware that being the original patent holder precluded you from the label "patent troll." They obtained an absurdly broad patent and they pursued lawsuits rather than developing products of their own. I think the shoe fits.

Thanks for the Washington Post link. I didn't "already know" the information in that story—something I explicitly acknowledged in my post—and I appreciate you bringing it to my attention. I think you'd be a more effective advocate if you spent less time questioning peoples' motives and more time engaging peoples' actual arguments.

Ryan: yes I think it's a small step in the right direction, but only in the sense that the magnitude of the damages being done will be somewhat diminished. Being able to challenge patents doesn't get you very far as long as the rules about what can be patented and how broad the patents can be are screwed up.

Cord, I agree. One thing to keep in mind, though: some of these agreements are loaded up with provisions that have nothing to do with lowering trade barriers. For example, we had Gwen Hinze on the podcast last summer to talk about the copyright-related provisions of the Korean agreement, which required Korea to make various changes to its domestic copyright laws that benefit Hollywood at the expense of Korean consumers. I don't think this is a reason to reject the FTAs, but I do wish more free traders would be more vocal about objecting to this kind of rent-seeking. Building momentum for free trade is hard enough without alienating potential allies over unrelated issues like copyright law.

Adam and Cord: No disagreements here!

Cord: the great thing about the blogosphere is that we get to pick and choose what we read, so each of us gets to decide for ourselves who's trustworthy and who is sheer crap. That's a bit more work for the reader, but in the long run I think it creates a more media-savvy, skeptical reading public.

I see that my real advantage is that I've got lower standards in blog posts.

Adam, that's an interesting point. Code will be 10 years old next year. A tenth-anniversary retrospective would be interesting. If I were in a disrespectful mood, I could title it "What Larry Didn't Get." ;-)

Richard: Wallach and Felten's security research tends to be more in the applied vein--less math and more figuring out how to break stuff. Obviously I'll need to learn some crypto and whatnot if I end up going in that direction, but I don't expect that to be a major focus of my research.

MikeT, I miss using the left-hand side of my brain, and there are already too many lawyers writing about tech policy.

Richard, Creative Commons is about artists voluntarily making content available on less-restrictive terms. Lessig doesn't claim that every artist should license all their work under Creative Commons, and he's certainly not advocating that they be required to do so. Rather he's trying to ensure that those artists who want to make their work more widely available have the opportunity to do so.

Richard, the "free" in "free culture" means the same thing "free" means in "free speech," "free markets" and "free trade": free of legal restrictions.

And Creative Commons doesn't put works in the public domain.

Great post Jim.

The difference is that the primary (indeed, only) purpose of most philanthropic foundations is to hand out money. So if you attract people whose primary interest is in handing out money (note that I did not say anything about self-interest), that's find because that's what the foundation is for.

But the primary purpose of Wikipedia, and by extension the Wikimedia board and staff, is to preserve the integrity of Wikipedia's editing process. To do this well, it's crucial that Wikipedia's senior leadership be closely connected to the Wikipedia editing process. They need to be people who understand how Wikipedia editing works and have strong ties to a lot of prolific Wikipedians.

Right now, that happens automatically because the only real motivation for seeking a seat on Wikimedia's board or staff is out of love for the encyclopedia. But in a world where the Wikimedia Foundation was a non-profit organization with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, there's a much bigger danger of a rift forming between Wikipedia, the encyclopedia, and Wikimedia, the cash cow.

The "accountable to Wikipedians" part is key. In most non-profits, the primary mechanism for accountability comes from the fact that the members provide most of the revenue. This wouldn't be true in an ad-supported Wikipedia. While in the long run, Wikipedia's revenues would be generated by its members, those members wouldn't have any practical ability to withhold ad revenue if they were unhappy with the way the organization was being run. Which means that if they were unhappy with the way the foundation was being run, their only recourse would be through politics. And rancorous battles over money are the last thing an encyclopedia built on editor goodwill needs.

Oh, you can sign up, you just have to add your friends manually.

Great post Adam.

Bret,

Thanks for the reply. I appreciate the clarification. I would respectfully suggest, however, that "free culture" is not a good shorthand for Lessig's worldview. It refers specifically to Lessig's ideas about the ways that overly-broad copyright laws restrict freedom of expression and stifle the growth of a participatory, many-to-many culture. While certainly many advocates of free culture are also in favor of government regulation of the Internet, there's no necessary connection between the two, and in fact there are a ton of libertarians who support a free culture, myself included.

For example, I don't see anything un-libertarian in the manifesto of Students for Free Culture. Similarly, if you look at the activities of Lessig's organization, Creative Commons, I don't think you'd find any of its activities objectionable from a libertarian point of view.

In my opinion, the fundamental error of left-of-center folks is that they're too quick to assume that there needs to be a government program for every worthwhile goal. The best way to change their minds is not to denigrate their goals, but to help them to see that government coercion is often not an effective way to accomplish those goals. The goals of the free culture movement is fundamentally private and non-coercive. Therefore, our focus as libertarians should be not on attacking the concept of a free culture, but in encouraging them to pursue those goals through non-coercive means. Given that most of what the free culture movement is seeking is a reduction of government coercion, this will not prove to be a tough sell.

Bret, have you read Free Culture? I've read it twice and I don't remember it demonizing either property or profits. If you've got a copy handy I'd be interested in an example.

Gary, no disagreement here!

Hance, maybe I'm missing something, but it looks to me like what Japan is doing is throttling traffic on an application-neutral manner based on a user's total bandwidth consumption. This is generally cited by network neutrality advocates as an alternative to application-focused filtering policies such as Comcast uses with regard to BitTorrent.

Brett, thanks for commenting. I've read your "Reply to Prof. Yoo" paper, and I actually agreed with a lot of it. I'm hoping to do a post on that paper in the near future.

As Barbara and I discuss, the technology exists and the incentives to prioritize (discriminate) exist, and so I am not quite sure what (other than the potential threat of regulation) you think is keeping or will keep networks in check. Competition?

I think that, even leaving competition questions aside, there are more constraints on the owners of open networks than is commonly supposed. In a nutshell, I don't think discrimination would be a profitable business strategy for a big telco like AT&T; or Verizon because it would break a lot of existing applications without creating much in the way of new revenue opportunities. This isn't an argument I can make properly in a comment, but I've got a paper coming out that makes the argument in some detail. If you're interested, I'd love to send you a draft and get your comments.

Brett,

Thanks for commenting. Those are good points. I can certainly see how the information taught in schools could be considered infrastructure, because ideas are non-rivalrous. But the schools themselves are rivalrous over the typical range of usage. Schools do get over-crowded, run out of textbooks, etc. But it probably wasn't fair of me to pick on what was clearly a side point.

EF, this isn't my area, but I beleive that the Coulson book I linked to above has a number of examples of highly educated societies that were mostly privately provided.

There aren't currently any industrialized societies without government schools, so I don't think we can say anything one way or the other about whether such a society would be more or less literate than ours.

Educated work forces do things later with their education; having an educated workforce is critical for business and commerce. I don't understand how the contention that schools don't meet this criteria meets even the straight face test.

I can make the same argument about food, housing, health care, computers, washers and dryers--pretty much every product or service helps workers be more productive in some respect. If that's your definition of infrastructure, then everything is infrastructure.

Right, I think this is a case where a binary division between "the market" and "central planning" is too simple. W3C engage in central planning in roughly the same way that Jimmy Wales and Linux Torvalds do: They're widely respected and as a result have a lot of "soft power" over the direction of high-tech standards. But if W3C makes a stupid decision and everyone decides to ignore them, there isn't a whole lot the W3C can do about it. And part of the reason that W3C (and Linus and Jimbo) retain the influence they have is that they've proven themselves adept at accommodating the competing agendas of various stakeholders.

My favorite part was the cheesy, over-the-top intro graphic.