Disqus - Latest Comments for binarybits

Re: “Limited and Temporary?”

binarybits — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 14:28:20 -0000

They might be able to, although it would be a little bit tricky to replicate the conditions that led to the Google settlement. But the more important question is why should the AAAP and the Authors' Guild get to decide who gets to index the millions of orphan works that weren't written by their members? I don't think that's an outcome to celebrate even if it doesn't create a literal monopoly.

Re: How Many Competitors Is Enough?

dm — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:30:22 -0000

Thanks, I'd overlooked long-distance service. I'll happily concede the possibility that long-distance service wasn't a natural monopoly. More likely, it was a natural monopoly, but was shorter lived before being made obsolete by technology. As far as I know, ATT lost its monopoly shortly after someone else had a business need that led to having excess long-distance transmission capacity to sell (which was when the Southern Pacific Railroad laid optical fiber for their own internal signalling, and realized they had excess capacity they could sell to people).

Re: How Many Competitors Is Enough?

binarybits — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:45:08 -0000

AT&T pretty clearly enjoyed a monopoly, enforced by the government. For several decades the FCC specifically prohibited anyone from offering competing long distance service, for example.

Re: Are these cell phone jammers available for personal use in cinemas?

ryanradia — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:47:24 -0000

An old gripe of mine, one that I really ought to blog again in light of recent developments. (Again, I strongly support repealing the DMCA anti-circumvention clause, but I don't think doing so would cause content owners to give up on DRM overnight. The FCC should be DRM-neutral, period.)

Re: Are these cell phone jammers available for personal use in cinemas?

binarybits — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:40:12 -0000

Care to elaborate on this?

Re: Media Deconsolidation (Part 24): I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

binarybits — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:22:34 -0000

Adam, I think it's important to remember that when cars replaced horses, the buggy manufacturers didn't all become car manufacturers. Most of them simply went out of business. The reason wasn't that the people running the buggy industry were incompetent or short-sighted, it was simply that buggy companies, as institutions, were not well-suited for manufacturing automobiles.

I suspect the same is true of a lot of "old media" institutions. The optimal media organization in the 20th century was huge and monolithic. Because printing and distribution were centralized and had massive economies of scale, it made sense to have newspapers with hundreds of reporters and thousands of support staff. Now, with the means of distribution radically decentralized, that organizational scheme just doesn't make sense any more. The optimal size for the typical media organization is an order of magnitude smaller than it was last century. And so organizations that were organized around reporting staffs in the hundreds are going to face relentless pressure to downsize. Some of them will disappear entirely. Some of them will undergo radical reorganizations and emerge from bankruptcy as dramatically smaller, leaner organizations. And some may successfully navigate the transition.

But it's a mistake to equate the health of last century's dominant media firms with the health of journalism as an enterprise. The collapse of big companies like the Tribune Company doesn't necessarily mean there will be fewer professional reporters in the future. Rather, what we're likely to see—what we're seeing already—is a proliferation of new business models for news gathering and dissemination. A big chunk of my income over the last year has come from online news sources like Ars Technica and Techdirt. Ars recently hired Julian as a full-time reporter and editor. And I've got numerous friends working for other web-based publications with a dizzying array of business models and editorial.

Now, this is admittedly disconcerting if you're used to a world in which a single organization like the New York Times was in charge of dispatching reporters to collect "all the news that's fit to print." And of course it's wrenching for those reporters who worked at a major newspaper and are now facing layoffs.

But in fact, there's every reason to think that the forces of spontaneous order will work here as well as it does in other markets. If there are readers who want to read about something, chances are there will also be people who want to write about it. If there's a large number of readers interested in a given subject, someone will find a way to make a living writing about that subject. Markets and spontaneous order work.

I can't tell you exactly how any particular sector of the news business will work just as I can't tell you exactly which farmers will grow the food you'll eat next year. But I'm pretty darn sure that thanks to the magic of spontaneous order, there will be food on the shelves when you go to the grocery store. And by the same token, I'm pretty confident that when you fire up your browser next year, there will continue to be plenty of high quality news and entertainment available.

Re: The Lesson of Rod Blagojevich: We Need Better Government!

willwilkinson — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:45:38 -0000

I agree that Blago illustrates that opportunities for corruption produce corruption and we should spot and limit similar opportunities. And, yeah, it's hard to make government work well. The public choice guys are right that its more about structure than public-spiritedeness. It is laughably naive and romantic to think that sufficient public-spiritedness will deliver good government. But it remains that we WANT good government, and public-spiritedness helps. Libertarians seem loathe to admit this, and I think it's a problem for us.

Re: The Lesson of Rod Blagojevich: We Need Better Government!

binarybits — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:12:57 -0000

Will, I think you're being too hard on Horwitz. Obviously, given that the government is going to perform a certain task, we should prefer that it do so more rather than less effectively. And obviously at the margin, there there are reforms that can enhance the performance of governments. I don't take Horwitz to be denying this simple and obvious point. Rather, his point is that given that government officials often do behave this way (and it's indisputable that for every Blogojevich and Stevens who blatantly betray the public trust there are a dozen others who do so more subtly and are not caught) we should be skeptical about giving governments new powers that they didn't previously enjoy. We should not, say, give the executive branch unfettered authority to hand out tens of billions of dollars to banks, or to micromanage the auto industry.

I think Munger overstates the case a bit, and does come across as denying that government can ever be made to work better or worse. But surely you'll agree that making government work well is a lot harder than most non-libertarians acknowledge, and that incidents like this one serve as a useful reality check for those who romanticize the workings of government and the public-spiritedness of public servants.

Re: PFF Amicus Brief in Key First Amendment Case: Limits on Audience Size are Unconstitutional

binarybits — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:14:39 -0000

Looks like a great brief. I hope the DC Circuit listens.

Re: The Most Important Tech Policy Books of 2008

binarybits — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:28:02 -0000

Great post Adam, and thanks for the links.

Re: More on Copyright Enforcement and Surveillance

bszoka — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 21:26:49 -0000

Fair enough. Again, my main point was that I didn't question your motives, Tim, and I think other people should be a little more careful not to do so. Incidentally, I'm not sure whether this was just enabled or whether I just noticed it for the first time, but the "reblog" function in Disqus could help out in situations where a new thread is called for for the reason Tim suggests (something to say that would be of interest to people who didn't follow the entire previous comment thread) by allowing TLFers to post a comment that would be automatically reposted as a new blog entry.

Re: More on Copyright Enforcement and Surveillance

binarybits — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:57:19 -0000

I start a new post because I think I have something to say that would be of interest to people who didn't follow the entire previous comment thread. I didn't really view it as a response to Tom at all. You'll notice that I don't mention his name at all in this post. Rather, I thought Timon's comment was worth highlighting and commenting on in its own right.

And I do, in fact, use categories and dividers. I think we have a bit of a difference of opinion about how long posts should be before they get divided, but (for example) you'll notice that the post I linked to above has a divider. I don't use tags because those are a relatively recent addition to the site and I just haven't yet gotten into the habit of using them yet.

Re: More on Copyright Enforcement and Surveillance

binarybits — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:49:16 -0000

Tom, you started your first comment with "your characterizations of my beliefs and those of others at PFF are too obviously wrong to require any response," but couldn't be bothered to elaborate on how I mis-characterized your views. Then you proceeded to knock down a variety of straw men of my views. For example, you imputed to me the view that "we might not need copyrights because the costs and risks inherent in the private production of all major expression could be cross-subsidized in ways that would make them seem "free" to Internet users," which is nowhere close to a fair summary of my views on copyright.

You continue this pattern with your latest comment, bizarrely attributing to me the view that "private property rights are now a threat to liberty because bilateral, consentual, market exchange requires means of identifying persons, and any such means will inevitably turn the Internet into a “panopticon” of pervasive government surveillance." How you derived that conclusion from what I wrote is a mystery to me.

Now look, I'm not the best writer in the world, so when someone interprets my writing in a way I don't expect, I normally take that as a sign that my writing wasn't clear. But you misread peoples' writing so frequently and egregiously that it's hard to escape the conclusion that you're not trying very hard to represent peoples' views accurately. So you can understand why I'm reluctant to invest a lot of time trying to clarify my views.

Re: What Will It Take to Stop File Sharing?

binarybits — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:23:55 -0000

Ryan is exactly right. If the ISP has information that allows it to definitely identify the person in question, it should be required to divulge the information after the proper legal process. I took Tom to be making the stronger claim that ISPs have a legal obligation to architect their networks so that they would always have the ability to identify the user responsible for particular network traffic. And he seemed to be saying that if the network owner doesn't do that, then the network owner itself should be liable for the crime. So if someone goes into a coffee shop and downloads kiddie porn, the FBI would hold the coffee shop owner responsible if they couldn't catch the downloader. That seems crazy to me. If Tom is not saying that then maybe you can straighten me out on exactly what he is saying.

Re: My debate with USA Today about new study on media & kids

binarybits — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:34:15 -0000

Congrats Adam.

Re: Nothing New, of Course

binarybits — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 09:47:28 -0000

I think the idea is that girls are more likely to say yes to boys who say no.

Re: I Only Sleep With Cosmotarians

binarybits — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:23:37 -0000

Great post Will.

Re: Lessig’s call for a “simple blanket license” in Remix

binarybits — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:09:18 -0000

Great post Adam.

Re: Nemertes “Internet Interrupted” study

BubbaDude — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:55:05 -0000

That's one of the problems I have with the study. At the TCP level, demand outstrips supply by design, but at the level of customer tiers, demand is way below supply. The highly dynamic feedback between supply and demand in packet networks has lead to the deification of the end-to-end layer by technically naive commenters such as Lessig and Wu, all the better to ignore this strange dynamic.

Re: Nemertes “Internet Interrupted” study

binarybits — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 19:25:15 -0000

Maybe I need to read the study, but I don't understand what "demand will outstrip capacity" means. Demand and capacity are both sensitive to price, and the Internet has always been subject to congestion during periods of peak usage. So how would an Internet in which demand has "outstripped capacity" look different from the Internet we've got now?

Re: Why Be an Internet Optimist?

MikeRT — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:34:03 -0000

That's very true. One of the best examples that comes to mind is blogging software. WordPress has destroyed the market for closed solutions here, which is part of the reason why Movable Type now has an open source distribution. It's a sad state of affairs, actually, as a quick look through the capabilities shows that WordPress is actually a very, very inferior platform from a developer's perspective. It's like comparing Linux to MacOS X.

Fortunately, working on plugins and such for blog software is just a hobby of mine, but it would be basically impossible for me to make a living writing plugins for either platform because frankly, no one wants to actually buy anything like that anymore. They've grown accustomed to people giving away their work.

Overall, I think open source isn't bad and am firmly in agreement that open platforms are the best way to go, but my experience in the DC area has taught me a lot about the dangers of having an engineering field that relies very heavily on support and contract services. I would hate to see a future where consulting is the main way that people make money off of software development because it would be a future of low investment into R&D (IT contractor corporations make far less profit than product companies of the same size).

Re: Why Be an Internet Optimist?

binarybits — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 13:40:39 -0000

Yeah, i definitely agree that there can be too little central planning as well as too much. However, I do think that once an open platform becomes dominant in a particular market, it's extremely unlikely to get displaced by a closed platform.

Re: Net Neutrality, Free Speech, and Tim Lee’s New Paper

binarybits — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 23:50:17 -0000

Thanks for the plug Adam. And I definitely agree that it's important to remember that the First Amendment is directed at the government, not private firms.

Re: Book Review: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis

Adam_Thierer — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:50:55 -0000

Tim... It's a fair point. All I'm saying is that if one is going to play up the benefits of unrestricted file sharing and repeatedly hammer on copyright protections without offering any indications of how enforcement should work going forward, then, yes, I would think it would only make sense to practice what you preach and put the complete text online for all to download free-of-charge. However, as I mentioned in my review, the authors don't really make it clear in the text how far they want to go, so my quip may have been somewhat unfair.

Regardless, Harry Lewis has just notified me that the book goes to Creative Commons one year from original pub date (sometime in mid-2009). So it will (presumably) all be online eventually.

Re: Book Review: Blown to Bits by Abelson, Ledeen, & Lewis

binarybits — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:46:41 -0000

The authors have a strongly-worded chapter on copyright that generally argues for relaxing copyright protections. Interestingly, however, (unless I am missing something) I notice they don’t offer their book for free download on their site. I’m always intrigued by copyright critics who refuse to put their own content online. Apparently, it’s another case of ‘copying is good for me, but not for thee.’

Adam, this criticism doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Aside from Boldrin and Levin, hardly anyone advocates the abolition of copyright. What a lot of people are opposed to (i haven't read the book but I suspect this describes them) is the ever-more-draconian penalties for consumers and ever-broader scope of copyright protection. There's nothing remotely inconsistent about advocating that copyright be kept within its traditional limits while take advantage of copyright to protect one's own works.

Now, it might be inconsistent if the authors encouraged their publishers to start suing people who shared copies of their books on BitTorrent. But as far as I know they haven't done that.