DISQUS

Having just gone through this myself, I think you'll find that the wedding photography industry if full of options at different price levels and pricing models. A lot of photographers still follow the old practice of charging slightly less per/hour but then retaining all the control over the pictures and their printing of them. Some, like the one I chose, charge you more per hour but are willing to give you DVDs filled with TIFs and RAW images that you have full control over (minus his/her ability to reuse for his/her own marketing usually). You can also usually negotiate with a photographer on the details if you really like his/her work.

In the end, however, there are a lot of choices out there. If you don't like the deal one is giving you...go find a different one. In the end you don't have the right to define your photographer's business model, but you do have the right to choose someone different if you're not happy with their practices.

From a non-IP perspective, however, I highly recommend that you focus first on the quality of work and reputation, and second on the rights you have to the pictures. If you have a thousand blurry, dark, and useless pictures in the end, who cares if you can reprint them in the next Cato corporate brochure??

@whoami - Actually there are MANY compelling arguments for why "that requiring authorization from a single party to
run applications would be a good thing."

1. It increases trust/security of the platform. Individuals DON'T need to decide what applications they feel are trustworthy enough to put on their phones. Apple here acts as a type of gatekeeper that at least gives a basic review of the applications in its store to make ensure that they aren't inherently nefarious in nature...and if they have a hidden problem, Apple reserves the kill switch if they find out the apps are creating problems.

2. It increases the stability of the platform. The vast majority of crashes on systems are not caused by flaws in the operating system, but poorly coded programs that run on top of them. If Apple can certify that the programs in the store properly use the iPhone APIs and don't crash incessantly, then the iPhone users will be able to rely on their phones more than they can rely on their general purpose computers.

As said by many people above, the biggest problem with geek class is assuming that their priorities mirror the priorities of the masses. Most of us would gladly give up a little hackability for stability and security and not having to do an hour of research on a program for potential security concerns before installing it.

PS-Adam, Skyfire is awesome. Still a little buggy, but essentially a clone of the iPhone experience. It even works great with my MotoQ9 without touch capabilities.

Adam: Couldn't agree more with you and David on this issue. To further the case, however, I suggest simply comparing the NYT to Blogger (as I did in a comment to David's original piece):

The NYTimes produces its daily paper by:

1. Paying a set of reporters to follow beats and write stories.
2. Accepting the contributions of unpaid writers (op-eds and LTEs) who are looking to simply express an opinion or raise their profile.
3. Selling the audience for those articles to advertisers

Blogger works essentially the same way:
1. Some bloggers are paid a percentage of ad revenue they bring in via adwords.
2. Some bloggers are just giving away their content to express opinions, etc.
3. Blogger sells the audience for these blogs to its advertisers.

To argue that Google is NOT a media company simply because its model for getting/paying for audience-grabbing content is different than the NYT is completely nonsensical. Google has come up with a model for a media company that drastically reduces its costs for content production and broadcast network are looking to follow suit (see Reality TV). If you were to follow the logic of the dissenters, NBC would cease to be a Media Company if it operated as a public access channel with advertising around the best content...

In the end, Google is an powerful competitor to media companies precisely because it pays so little for its audience attracting content. It doesn’t have to deal with unions, or strikes, or health care, or minimum wage. Essentially, its creative talent are ALL independent contractors that are working either for free or for a portion of the advertising revenue they help Google generate. If the NYT could get away with that, they would be in a lot better financial shape.

Amen. These things are nearly always better handled within the industry rather than by bureaucrats. I need to give more thought as to what kind of body (ad hoc or institutional) would best be able to manage these debates however. The Internet Society could be a good lead. There are a lot of fabulous people over at the Internet Society, like my friend Frederic Donck, who has a lot of experience as negotiator in technology policy areas.

On another note: I'm relative outsider to the NN debate, so this may be a dumb question. Has anyone discussed botnets in the context of NN?

If ISPs are prohibited from throttling any specific application or type of application, would that unnecessarily limit the ability of ISPs to play an important role in responding to DDOS attacks? Do people think that the current legislative proposals have loopholes big enough to allow ISPs to react to bot net attacks when they see some of the infected machines on their own network? Could a black hat use existing P2P or other technologies to launch an attack that an ISP would be legally bound NOT to stop?

Tim, I think you might want to rethink your argument for Gogo only using traffic shaping techniques that simply carve up the bandwidth into equal portions for every user. While seemingly 'democratic,' it would likely be an incredibly inefficient use of bandwidth. In fact, just read anything Google or NAF has ever written about spectrum, whitespace, and the need for unlicensed spectrum and you'll get the idea.
Unless you're going to create an entire market system for trading spectrum from one passenger to another on flights, this would be an incredibly inefficient use of the spectrum.

I think it is easy to agree with Lessig et al on this, but I am puzzled by Kozinski's suggestion that:

for instance, when you say someone has a Barbie personality, it describes something without having to go into a thousand details. But Mattel, the inventor of Barbie, hates it. People who own those trademarks and copyrights want to control the way people communicate, and they have the ear of Congress right now.

I'm not a lawyer nor a judge, but my understanding is that company's MUST complain and take legal action if people start using their trademarked brands as verbs or as a non-proper noun. If they don't, they can lose their trademark on the term and all of a sudden Hasbro can start shipping "Barbie" dolls. It often seems silly or mean-spirited when Google sends it lawyers to stop "Google" from being used as a verb in a dictionary, but it is side effect of trademark law - not an attempt to "control the way people communicate."
If there are any trademark attorneys in the audience, please let me know if my understanding is correct.

Umm...you guys are kidding, right?

We're talking about China here, and you're debating this as if EFF's analysis of EULAs and "reasonable copyright law" are in any way relevant to the situation. It's an interesting discussion and Carme and Tim make good points (with more software development being supported by advertising, this could be an important issue), but let's be clear about the actual case being discussed.

As the NYT noted recently, China supposedly has Free Speech rights too, but that hasn't stopped them from simply calling it "providing state secrets to foreign entities."

Given the actual situation in China, I doubt very seriously that "this arrest should increase awareness in China of the threats that overly-restrictive copyright law can pose to programmers’ freedom."

To paraphrase the famous line from Chinatown..."Forget it Tim, It's China. It's China."

Tim is also glossing over the most important point. Free software depends on "license agreements" as much if not more than Ballmer and Co. By my reading, if the courts were to fully subscribe to the ideas of Fred VL and Tim, the entire Copy Left movement would be crippled. They would not be able to impose any of the limitations on use/redistribution that are contained in the various versions of the GPL. The proprietary software industry can probably survive without shrinkwrap licensing as Tim suggests, but I don't see how the Open Source/Free Software communities can survive under the legal framework that Tim is espousing.

So, Vyas, Michael, Chris, etc. are saying is that Newtonian Physics are a great way of predicting approximate outcomes, but not really a way of better understanding our universe. So, I guess the real question is what you want physics to do for you. If it is applied science, then you're right. It works... mostly. If you are looking for the true understanding of our universe and how and why it works the way it does... that's where things start falling apart.

Mark Blafkin is confused about my analogy between eminent domain and software patents, which probably means I didn’t explain the analogy very clearly.  So let me see if I can be more explicit.

You made your analogy very clearly the first time, actually.  Rather than make it more explicit this time, you completely changed it.  The first time you tried to put lawyers at the center of your evil patent conspiracy, making it all about their self-importance:

It seems to me that the attitudes of patent lawyers to the software industry are strikingly similar to the attitudes of city council members toward real estate developers. Patent lawyers are absolutely horrified at the idea that we would just let programmers write any kind of software they wanted without hiring a patent lawyer first.

This time, you at least drop the straw man of the lawyer-conspiracy, but create an equally fictitious scenario with a company (in this case Verizon)  at the center:

Now, a company like Verizon will go to the patent office and say, in effect, “We would like to develop a new VoIP application. But we’re only willing to do so if you give us control over all development of VoIP applications like ours. We don’t want to worry about some other company building a competing product that we didn’t plan for.”

For someone who writes about patents as much as you do, I'm sure you're aware that the above paragraph has no basis in reality.  No patenter goes into the patent office and makes a bargain with the PTO about market competition. In fact, the big flaw in your little example is that Verizon would have already had to INVENT their VOIP technology before they even walked into the doors of the PTO. They can't go into the PTO and threaten NOT to invent it unless they get a patent first.   I know you have a bee in your bonnet about Verizon and its VOIP patents, but if you think they are using it anti-competitively, well that’s what competition law is for.  But, are you seriously suggesting that we should ban all patents simply because some firms may use them to undermine the public good? Should we ban all guns simply because some people may use them to kill innocent children?  If that's your argument, fine... but own up to it. 

You know all this and should be a little more honest about it, rather than trying to simply create a bogeyman out of the patent system.  I'm sure it helps your hit counts, but it does nothing to promote educated dialogue. 

In reality, the decision to invest in new technologies is predicated on a belief that the investor will receive a return on that investment.  That investment can represent the time spent by the individual inventor, 5 million in venture capital, an allocation of corporate/government R&D funds to a specific project, or a $100 million IPO.  Since we live in a capitalistic economy, that return is usually in the form of capital (although in some cases like Free Software it could be "credit" or "community participation," and some inventors are simply just driven).   

So the ability to patent and protect the inventions of a company or an individual (Yes, Jim... people get patents too) often play an important role in whether investment is made in developing them.  That bargain may be with the inventor’s husband or her VC, but the ability to patent and protect the invention in the future(if it turns out to work and be new and nonobvious) is often an important aspect of the decision-making process to invest on the front end.

Is the patent system working optimally to promote inventions in the software space?? Heck no!  You’re right that are serious issues regarding the breadth of some claims and the overlapping nature of others.  But is that really a reason that for scrapping the whole thing as you often suggest?  If so, we should scrap the entire system of land ownership in any town where there are disputes over plot boundaries.  Or any city where the city hall where the records aren’t easily accessible…

“A real estate developer shouldn’t have to consult his city’s “master plan” before renovating an old house.”

However, he should have to consult the owner of the land before he starts building on it.

Tim, I think you have this analogy backwards, sideways, and even a bit upside down. As I wrote over at the The ACT Blog, the real parallel is between your friends in the anti-patent camp and these Soviet-style city planners.

Like the city players, the anti-patent forces also have a vision for a better neighborhood (software industry). It is beautiful: paved in gold, based on sharing and sharing alike, and devoid of any nasty software patents.

It’s such a beautiful vision, and the software industry now is so awful and blighted, they believe it justifies nuking the entire system of software patents.

They chant:

“Who cares about the thousands of companies around the world that own software patents!”

“We are smarter and can use those ideas better! I don’t care who owns them, let’s take them!”

“If we don’t have to worry about the property rights of others, just think of all the amazing things we could create!”

Enigma, please forgive my rhetorical flourish, but it was fun wasn't it? But, come on...

your hysterical denunciations of FSF call your own level headness into question.

says the guy who was calling me a proto-fascist just a few short days ago:-)

I do apologize, however, because I didn't mean to attribute those delusions to the FSF in particular (although the correlation is probably pretty high given their belief that proprietary software is immoral in itself), but many Free Software and Open Source community members. You know the type that fill up the Slashdot with conspiracy theorys and "Bill Gates is a @ss!" rhetoric. Unfortunately there are a lot of them out there. Just follow the responses to Bill Hilf's recent post and this story about how the history of Port 25.

Enigma, I did not call you a raving lunatic. You clearly are not, even when you get all worked up and write things you clearly don't mean. There are many in the Free Software community, however, whose judgement is clouded when the subject of Microsoft is involved.

Tim, come on...you used the term "people" suggesting individual developers working on the projects at night, for free. It is a nice rhetorical trick, but it is totally innacurate. IBM, RedHat, etc. don't make appealing victims, so it's better to make it seems like Microsoft has poor defenseless individuals and small companies in its sights. Not likely as I'm sure you're aware. There is no incentive for Microsoft to sue them individually. It's not like the RIAA who wants to send a message to individuals.

Oh Tim, don't fall into the FSF FUD machine! You're too smart for that.

No, I actually do not believe that Microsoft is "plainly hinting" or outright saying they will sue "people who develop and use free software." Companies that are raking in cash as a result of free software that infringes on MIcrosofts patents (or MS says infringes),however, would be right to see this as a "hint."

I believe they said that have no intention of suing anyone in the Fortune piece, and they really have no incentive to. As for individual developers, I believe they would be covered by the non-assertion provision that came out of the Novell deal.

It is a clever strategy, however, to gin up the base by saying "Microsoft is going to sue for working on the Samba project at night." The Microsoft paranoids will immediately believe it despite the fact that it makes no logical sense at all.

I would argue that the Free Software and anti-patent partisans have done MORE than Microsoft ever could to spread FUD about Microsoft's patents. Their belief that Microsoft is pure unadulterated evil leads them to wild delusions about the malevolent intentions behind every move Microsoft makes. If MS really has the intention of creating FUD, the FSF and Microsoft conspiracy theorists are enablers and promoters of the cause. For them to then feign resentment and surprise at Microsoft's announcement, reeks of hypocrisy...among other things.

I would argue that the Free Software and anti-patent partisans have done MORE than Microsoft ever could to spread FUD about Microsoft's patents. Their belief that Microsoft is pure unadulterated evil leads them to wild delusions about the malevolent intentions behind every move Microsoft makes. If MS really has the intention of creating FUD, the FSF and Microsoft conspiracy theorists are enablers and promoters of the cause. For them to then feign resentment and surprise at Microsoft's announcement, reeks of hypocrisy...among other things.

Tim, you make an important point, but in an overbroad sort of way. I completely agree that the patent system has some problems particularly in the way that it has handled software and related patents. Restrictions on prior art, limited knowedge among examiners, and a dangerous willfullness standard have created a system that accepts way too many poor quality patents and creates counterproductive incentives. I don't think the system is working correctly today either.

Where we differ is on the solution to the problem. I believe the answer is to improve quality, lower the number of patents, and change the incentive structure to encourage developers to use the system as it was intended. I believe that the patent system can work for the software industry, and will only become more important in a future where open source and proprietary software coexist.

I've started a series of posts on this subject over at the ACT Blog.

Doug, as far as I know MS has not demanded NDAs. Do you know differently? We're talking about patents which are public domain anyway, not trade secrets and copyrighted code, which are often held secret to begin with.

More importantly, if your version holds true then SCO showed IBM the code/etc. and IBM decided to fight it. The difference here is that Microsoft is showing the code to companies and they are choosing to license it.

Agreed Tim. Horacio's comments are definitely an overstatement. Many individual developers may not know what patents they are or are not infringing with the code they write. I am guessing the point he was trying to make, however, was a more confined one. Basically, that many of the commercial developers that are distributing Linux and other FLOSS code probably are aware of the patents (or could be aware if they wanted to be). It's untenable to suggest in the midst of filing thousands of software/hardware patents every year that IBM doesn't have the resources to look into what it may or may not be infringing.

I do think you're overstating the policy problem too. It would never result in an individual developer having to review every patent before writing a single line of code. It's not like BMW reviews every patent before it starts designing a car. Oracle doesn't review every patent before writing a new functionality for its database software. And, most importantly, in the open source world the responsibility wouldn't really fall in the hands of the indidvidual developers but with the companies that distribute the work or use it to due their patent due diligence.

Actually, no Gary. This is not about accusations on the part of PubPat. PubPat is a nonprofit third party, that if anything, is a defender of Linux and gets a lot of its funding from FLOSS sources. So, I would not put them in the realm of accusers.

I'm willing to grant you that many software patents are BS and probably won't hold up in the post KSR-decision world (thankfully), BUT even if 50% the patents in questions are solid... that's a lot of patents. Moreover, it's not like MS is the only one saying that these patents exist and read on aspects of Linux. PubPat did a study a few years ago that listed about 283 patents that were potentially infringed by Linux. So, let's not pretend like we don't think MS has a case here. You can argue around the edges about the number, but you have to admit that there are likely more than one defensible patent that reads on Linux.

As for the "It's just like SCO" claim, you know that's false . See above AND note that MS has shared the exact details of which patents are being infringed with ALL the companies they've approached about the licensing deal. Those companies aren't making deals based simply on FUD, they are making judgements based on the actual code and patents in question.

Amen, Brother.

My question is: if your interpretation is correct, doesn't it bother you that the DMCA—by your own admission—effectively makes Web 2.0-stye businesses illegal? It's not like Digg's users are violating laws left and right. I don't remember seeing pirated content, child pornography, or random peoples' credit card numbers on Digg's front page. So if Digg is making a good-faith effort to comply with the law, and they aren't profiting from piracy, shouldn't that be sufficient to shield it from liability?

Tim, I do not believe the DMCA makes those businesses illegal at all. If Digg was making a good-faith effort to comply with the law, then they should be shielded from liability. That is what they were trying to do (and I think would have been protected based on their actions). However, the DMCA-activist wing of their user base threatened to leave if they didn't stop their "good-faith" efforts.

The interesting aspect of this story is just how fragile Web2.0 businesses really are. When a company's value is based entirely on its userbase (not on its product), they have to do anything they can to protect that asset. Given that Gen X and Gen Y audiences are not slavishly married to brands for life (despite their love of brands) and Web2.0 companies rarely have radically different feature sets from their competitors, they will have to follow every whim of their users. Even if it means effectively breaking the law and opening themselves up to business-ending lawsuits.

Enigma said "digg took a courageous stand, just like 2600 did in the linking to de CSS."

Not really. I'll give you 2600. They were a tiny little hacker pub that stood on principle. Digg, on the other hand, did nothing of the sort. Digg was merely coerced by the activist member base. They had a choice to kill the company on the spot (members threatened to leave the site if the company didn't bow to their demands) or buy a few months and fight it out in court. Like any sensible business, they chose to buy themselves a few months.

And I for one throw the BS flag on your "I'm just like Gary Kasparov" assertion. Give me a break! He is a truly inspiring individual, but I doubt he would agree your efforts are really in the same league.

If you really cared about Free Speech you would be in Egypt protesting the government's detainment of bloggers. You would be in front of Congress protesting every time they bring up aspects of the Patriot Act. Heck I would even respect you more if you were in front of the offices of Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft protesting their relationships with the Chinese government. But instead you're spending your time complaining about the fact you can't make free copies of Legally Blond 2 for all your friends...I'm sorry, but Mr. Kasparov would not be proud.

Tim, Tim, Tim...you really do have a tremendous ability to miss my point. Perhaps it is my fault, I'll try to improve my clarity in future posts, but I'm guessing it has more to do with your need for a straw man to beat.

My point is that the "policy story" related to the DCMA is NOT the real story. The really interesting story here is the "business story" about Web2.0 (although I completely agree with Mike T's point about the lack of a coherent definition for that term). For my purposes, I'm using Web2.0 to refer to sites that rely on user-generated content.

My point is the same one that Richard Komen made over at Silicon Valley Watcher: this episode demonstrates the downsides of the user-generated content business model. For the people at Digg and other Web2.0 companies, this is not about some ivory tower mental masturbation. They have businesses to run, shareholders to protect, and kids to feed.

Ignore the fact that you don't AGREE with the law in question. For the executives running Digg, they spent last week staring into the business end of a gun. They could either risk their business at the hands of lawsuits or pissing off the activists in their user base. They really didn't have a choice in the end. They choose to give in to the mob because that buys them another day...if they hadn't Digg would have already been dead.

This is a lesson that other Web2.0 companies and their investors will have to learn from.