Disqus - Latest Comments for Solveig Singleton

Re: Solveig Singleton is Making Sense

Solveig Singleton — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 10:33:43 -0000

Hi guys. Just time for quick answers to some of the above:

1) I used the term "hacker" rather than "cracker" because "hacker" was the term used in the blindmindseye post. I'm aware of the difference.

2) Re the DMCA: Yes, some of the arguments above apply to the DMCA as well (indeed that was what I was obliquely referencing when I referred to tech bans). The argument with respect to the DMCA would be somewhat different, however. There one of the issues is whether a legal rule of some kind is needed for more basic ground rules about content to be enforceable. If the answer is yes, it is needed, then the question becomes whether any proposed exceptions (including some of those that turn on intent) swallow the rule. I think it is a harder problem than any offending DRM. Indeed I think it is a very hard problem.

2) The question of how damages are distributed between customers and lawyers in class action suits, is, I am afraid, very much *not* a result of the market, but of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure; these were, in fact, deliberately designed to *alter* the outcome of the market, which would simply not support the kinds of suits that we see here.

That's all for now.

Re: Bridge to the 20th Century

Solveig Singleton — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:35:31 -0000

RIM's argument (and I do not mean to side with them, necessarily, as they have been rather naughty) is that NTP's patents contemplate only one-way rather than two-way paging systems. The anonymous work-around blogger claims:

"The NTP patents have (at the very least) a singular weakness. They are all limited to a one-way (push) email systems. At the time the NTP Patents were filed, two-way pagers had yet to be invented and they were not contemplated by the NTP patents. Hence, NTP's inventions do not cover a two-way pager or system that would be required to push only the header (not the actual email message) to the pager and enable retrieval of remotely stored email based on a transmission from the pager -- One-way pagers cannot transmit anything."

In time, all will be revealed. Perhaps I place undue weight on the assurances of the anonymous blogger. Hey, I didn't catch any spelling errors.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » Are Young Libertarians Anti-IP?

Solveig Singleton — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 12:57:10 -0000

Re Tim: As I understand the exchange between Jim and Adam, they were talking about anti-IP young libertarians (i.e. those who don't believe in IP at all), as opposed to those who are concerned about the way in which it has gone in recent years. That is also the focus of my blog series on IP & Liberty.

I'm aware that the mainstream critiques of IP are along different lines. But frankly I either agree with a lot of those critiques or think they relate only to fairly marginal issues, so I'm not particularly interested in refuting them. The main place where I differ with most critics is in thinking that they do not take the underlying problem seriously enough. Example, there are certainly a lot of problems with the DMCA--but, well, ALTERNATIVES, anyone? Having the only boundaries in the digital content world being legal ones (as opposed to technological) does not strike me as being optimal.

In response to the comments, some of which are hilarious:

I can assure that our KSR brief was not some cynical ploy to deflate any and all criticism of the patent system; we're concerned about patent quality. Really.

Mike: If your trackbacks didn't show up, it was, well, who knows, but certainly not a policy response. Trust me, we have NO IDEA who you are.

Re my technical expertise or lack thereof: Free market policy generally can accomodate a wide spectrum of technological developments; indeed, in large part, that's the freakin' point. Nothing in my thinking about DRM depends on the *same* DRM being both interoperable and competitive in the sense you mention. Competition between different DRM systems and systems with no DRM is perfectly fine with me.

And I'm really sorry you are not enjoying the century's creative arts. But I don't think that has much to do with copyright policy, actually.

Re: Is the DMCA a Legal barrier?

Solveig Singleton — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 20:56:49 -0000

The DMCA is certainly a legal barrier. And to some extent, effective DRM, or some of it, relies *indirectly* in turn on some kind of backup by the DMCA, enough to stop the commercial proliferation of cracking tools. But DRM and the DMCA are not the same thing!!! DRM is a *private* mechanism. Its basic operation is physical. Like a lock on a door. The fact that a policeman will bust you if you break a lock doesn't make the lock any less a private mechanism. It has costs, but these are quite different from the costs of a legal mechanism as such.

I find it hard to believe that your answer was typed up so spontaneously that this distinction escaped you. Perhaps it did. Either way, you get a spanking, as follows:

Anyone who wants to admonish libertarians about what they should and should not be skeptical about will need to *earn* some respect first. Listen. Get your facts right (you might want to look into the history of the PDF standard). Figure out how the Blackberry work-around might work *before* you venture to comment on it in public.

Or teach your grandmother to suck eggs. I've been an IP skeptic, and a hard-core one, for the last twenty years. It took several years of debate to drag me out of that intellectual position. (The difficulty of some of the issues aside, it involves, after all, public and private admissions that my previous views were wrong). But given the effort I have put in on the front lines inside the annoying Beltway far from home, I've earned a thoughtful response to my views. And I get it, from everyone who knows me, even those WAY WAY over on the other side.

My apology for the spanking. A little self-indulgence on my part. It won't happen again. Since I apologized, I expect a good-humored response from my fellow blogger.

Finally, a question, to discuss amongst yourselves:

What does it mean to support the core idea of copyright, and to be opposed to any system that would make it meaningfully enforceable?

Re: Is the DMCA a Legal barrier?

Solveig Singleton — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:11:46 -0000

Well, that was rather bitchy of me. Gosh, now I really am sorry. It's late. Yawn.

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » What About File Sharing?

Solveig Singleton — Mon, 15 May 2006 12:37:06 -0000

I think the interviews with college students may be a bit misleading. Students have a lot of time on their hands compared to normal people. And they often do not pay for their own hardware and software (their parents do, or they use school products). Nor do they have a lot of money to pay for content. So they can afford to mess around with unlicensed P2P; the risk of contracting a nasty virus is worth it, and they have the time to seek out anonymity. And the whole thing is fun for them. Once they get out, on the one hand they will be paying big bucks for their own hardware and software and become more wary of risks to this stuff. And they will have jobs that generate enough money to pay for routine consumption of content. And some of them will be working in fields related to content rights... writing, scientific research, photography, and so on. As with taxes, their opinions on this subject are likely to change as they get older.

The black market in unlicensed tunes is a big one, certainly, but it is small compared to what it would be if we were dealing with a legalized DeCSS and a legalized Napster or Grokster.

I do agree with Mike T that this is to a certain extent Hollywood's big bad businessman villain come back to haunt them. But again, if they are mistaking the market so badly, it is an opportunity for a new breed of creator to come in and do business a different way... and we see some small experiments, but not a lot of well-funded ventures.

I view software developers as being creators along with every other kind of creator. I do not view anyone as expendable; I just do not think all these problems are being cited are on the same scale. Again, I think that trying to come up with boundaries for the market here is in everyone's interest, and it is not going to be easy.

Re: Meatspace vs. Cyberspace

Solveig Singleton — Mon, 15 May 2006 13:31:36 -0000

Several comments in response:

--There is no requirement that one support the DMCA to work at PFF. Adam doesn't, for one. Doug's paper doesn't. Jim and I would like to see alternatives, which so far are weak.

--We accept email comments and post thoughtful ones on our blog. Send us a thoughtful comment and see! Of the comments we have received by email, most are thoughtful. I think they compare very favorably with blog comments.

--I agree with Tim there is a difference between meat space piracy and cyber piracy... but not that it is terribly significant. I do think that DRM inconveniences meat space piracy *more* than it does cyber piracy. But it adds an element of inconvenience to both, and the element of black-marketness adds further inconvenience to both. The Grokster case (an entirely different topic) also addresses cyber piracy, of course, and is a key element. The larger point remains... I believe there is a big different between DeCSS or assorted unlicensed P2P networks as they exist today and what they would look like if they were taken over by, say, IBM or Microsoft and mass-marketed.

Again, if DRM is doing NOTHING, the question, why is the content industry across the board (games, movies, music, photographers, software) putting so much energy into business models based on that? The theory is that they are 1) evil 2) stupid or 3) technologically blind. That strikes me as implausible--we are talking about a LOT of people working in creative fields. But if it were true, again, it would be a huge, gaping opportunity for some good, intellgient, and tech-savvy entrepreneur to come in and beat them at their own game. Investors would be falling all over themselves to fund this person. And it ain't happening. It is still possible that someone will come in and do this, of course, we will have to see.

Finally, alternatives? Still none.

4) One final argument, that content markets do not need DMCA (or DRM) help at all... I will do a separate post on. I think that is a more interesting argument than all the stuff about security research and competition. But also very difficult.

5) Re the intellectual integrity of PFF... Sigh. Yes, PFF has donors, corporate donors. A wide array of them, with differing views. We are very grateful for their support, without which we would not have desks, chairs, phones, or hold conferences, which are expensive. We are grateful for their war stories from the fast-changing world of business--though we have many other sources. But our opinions on the matter of what makes good policy are our own; our views on intellectual property are generally congruent with those of some of our donors (not with others), but our views are not derived from those of our donors. There is an important difference.

PFF is a non-profit. The people who work there have eschewed work in much-better-paying jobs as lawyers or lobbyists for a reason. They believe in free markets. While I have found their ideas of what free markets might look like in futureto be somewhat broader than my former colleagues at CEI and Cato, as befits a think tank focussing on issues at the cutting edge of technology, their commitment to free markets is just as strong.

The ability to function as a "hired gun," to adopt a vision of someone else's self-interest as if it were one's own, and in the general interest, is an extremely valuable skill, and is very well compensated. As a general matter (with a few exceptions) those of us who work in think tanks (left and right) inside the Beltway either do not have this skill at all, or have given it up. I never had it. I was far too fond of my own opinion to function in a law firm. So now I earn perhaps 1/3 or 1/4 of what most of the folks I graduated with earn. But I do have my independence, whatever that is worth.

Most of the folks who comment on the connection between donors and think tanks as if they were shedding some deep light on the motivations of the organization simply do not know anything about how think tanks operate. It is easier, however, to write posts of this sort rather than contending with the substance of the issue.

My experience in Washington DC is that rarely, very rarely, a non-profit ideologically committed to one position will get itself in a position where it depends on just one or two donors, and face losing its independence on one or more issues. But that does *not* happen all that often.

Finally, my own views on IP, DRM and the DMCA have changed over the years chiefly because of the following:

-Having a front row seat when Jim Delong and I were at CEI together, where many, many internal IP debates raged (Fred Smith was another player here).
-Marrying a computer game designer, who comes from a family where the main economic actors have for a couple of generations been research scientists. These are not people who have any difficulty with the idea that taking IP is stealing! Got me thinking about how one's expectations shape what one thinks of as property, morality, rights.
-Watching forensics shows on TV. I used to do this to relax. But it, too, got me thinking how much of my efforts with abstract legal concepts during the day depend on working enforcement mechanisms, and what problems might arise if we take those for granted.

Enough. Will post more tomorrow.

Cheers,
Solveig

Re: The Technology Liberation Front » Archive » On Linux DVD Players

Solveig Singleton — Mon, 15 May 2006 15:48:53 -0000

-Small point: LinDVD was also supposed to be released as software as well as for a box, not sure what came of that.

-Re Linux products, obscure and otherwise.
If open source is inherently incompatible with DRM, well, there are going to be limits to the directions in which it will develop, DRM being but one application of some important security techniques. I don't believe it is, however, or there wouldn't be *any* licensed Linux players.

The larger point is THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE that anyone involved in CSS licensing is suppressing Linux players or neglecting them.

And the really larger point: the fundamental reason that the Linux players need to refer to DeCSS or otherwise illegally decrypted content OR license CSS is that no one is funding the production of unprotected content on a large scale. Anyone is free to do so, but they aren't.
That is the root of the problem. If you have a business model that relies on someone else's content, but can't or won't support payment mechanisms, how fair is it to complain you're being shut out of the market?

-Repeat myself again. If the DRM/DMCA is short-changing customers to shore up failing business models...

WHY are there no investors flocking to develop high-quality content that is not protected by DRM? IF there is another way, this is a HUGE opportunity for someone to make a lot of money. WHERE are the new business models? Grokster is just a distribution technology, it doesn't PRODUCE content.

How is one supposed to tie music or movies to services if anyone with a digital editor can untie them and post the untied content!!!!!

Re: But What Are Software Patents Good For?

Solveig Singleton — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 12:52:07 -0000

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. I note briefly that my paper was not intended as a defense of software patents, which do present some interesting problems. Rather, the paper is an attempt to figure out which of the array of proposed solutions should get top priority.

There's a brief explanatory section at the beginning devoted to tracing the history of how software patents came about and why the attempts to hold back the flood failed. The conceptual underpinnings of the dividing line were just not clear and strong enough. And MOST IMPORTANTLY the institutions that are supposed to mediate those concepts (the PTO, the Federal Circuit) just were not up to the task. Reform of those institutions to sharpen up their accountability and ending the kind of fuzzy thinking that gives us arguments like those in the EU that software is not "physical" needs to come first.

Re software's linguistic characteristics: Even object code would "speak" to a computer that was self-aware. But those linguistic characteristics are there primarily to interface with switches. This point does not end the argument, but suggests how tricky it begins to get. One could go on and on. Perhaps the aspect of a product that possesses linguistic characteristics should not patentable? A keyboard shape but not what is printed on the keys? But what makes "language" as a interface tool different from "shape? What happens to our thinking about other types of patents if we need to distinguish the language that describes a process (a blueprint or chemical formula, say) from the thing that is actually patented? Do we end up arguing by analogy that while software cannot be patented that the underlying product--a series of electrical states in a computing machine--can be patented? Is that even remotely useful? So one ends up depositing a machine endlessly running a program with the patent office, instead of the program?

And all this is backwards-looking. One doesn't know, going forward, what the heck sort of thing will be used to activate switches in general-purpose computers with different types of processors, where this all is going to merge with nanotech and biotech. Even if we draw an arbitrary line between copyright and patent for software with the benefit of hindsight (and mess up an awful lot of investment decisions in the process), well, the patent system has to be able to handle the curve balls that the future is going to throw. It doesn't make sense to make tech policy by hindsight. Thus I think solutions of general applicability are far superior to sectoral ones such as abolition.

Happy New Year.

Re: Thoughts on Copyright Policy Methodolgy

Solveig Singleton — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:21:18 -0000

My Dear Enigma, no one has blacklisted your comments from anywhere to my knowledge. You are welcome to rave here, or there, or anywhere, to your heart's content, so long as you make some kind of substantive point and avoid potty language. I have recovered my temper, though I do think that this conversation would be more productive if you would give up on the paranoia.

You are, I am afraid, rather completely missing the point I made in my posts about think tanks and funding. In a nutshell, no one is going to work for peanuts at a nonprofit if they do not believe in what they are doing. Anyone willing to work as a lobbyist or lawyer is going to be working as a lobbyist or lawyer and earning the commensurately huge salaries. For more detail, I encourage you to go back and read my post again.

If you want to do further research, consider the following:

a) Check the amount of money contributed to environment causes (and other causes) by corporations. If you are going to be paranoid, do at least be consistent.

b) The reason that many organizations keep their donors private is because individuals and corporations may hesitate to contribute to controversial causes if they are public. Ask the NAACP.

c) As far as organizational needs go, the amounts of money that you have listed above are actually pretty small. They would cover maybe the organizational costs of one conference, or the salary of one employee for a year.

Cheers,
SS

Re: DRM as Central Planning

Solveig Singleton — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 09:31:27 -0000

May I gently remind you all of the insights of Coase's theory of the firm: It's all socialism, but as long as an enterprise can fail, there is accountability.

-SS

Re: Is Censorship a Trade Barrier?

Solveig Singleton — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 15:04:41 -0000

Apparently our commenter above doesn't get irony. And also confuses an interest in developments in China such as the opening of markets, support for property rights, and the interest of Chinese people in entrepreneurship with sympathy for policies of the Chinese government. And isn't quite understanding the risk that the whole system--reforms and all--is going to collapse, resulting in horrible chaos in which potentially a billion people could die. And furthermore mistakes mild concern for the --somewhat lesser-- vulnerability of India into some sort of anti-Indian conspiracy. I think someone needs a new lens. For his own sake. Because if one sees a bunch of free-marketers with a history of serious attention to free speech issues as supporters of "fascism" --not communism, apparently--, well, now that's gotta be depressing.

Re: iPhone: Innovation to Slavery in 13 Days

Solveig Singleton — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 08:33:56 -0000

Next call will be for iPhone universal service. Just wait.

-SS

Re: You Can’t Compete With Free

Solveig Singleton — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 08:13:00 -0000

-One can make money from "free" by tying or bundling with complementary products. However, the methods that one uses to do so do require exclusion at some level. At concerts one buys tickets, for example, without one you can't get in. The DRM is a physical barrier. One might sell advertising alongside a product--but it had better not be too easy to strip the advertising out and retransmit the product. What is puzzling is why from a copyleft standpoint the primitive means of excluding a non-paying audience with walls, contracts, and so on, are fine, but trying to do something more sophisticated to get enforceable boundaries apparently isn't--apparently just because those boundaries weren't built in to the tech from the beginning, so people just aren't used to them. It's a rather conservative position, and an arbitrary one.

--The coke flowing out of the faucet analogy can be nitpicked, but it still works as a quick-and-dirty one. I think everyone can agree that if Coke did come out of faucets, Coke would face a different business landscape than they are now. Likely it could be worked out--it's tougher with information goods--but it would not be trivial.

And the comparison to water is not necessarily more helpful than Morris' original analogy. Sellers of bottled water may *not* be selling a different product in many cases (there are exceptions i.e. perrier, pellagrino), but people *perceive* it to be different. Hospitals used to give bottled water only to fragile patients, thinking that it would have a lower bacteria count (in fact, it doesn't). Because water has never been as homogenous a product as coke, it isn't surprising that the perception that different sources matter a lot is hard to get rid of and can be marketed to.

-Solveig Singleton