Saturday, March 19, 2005

Study Criticizes Government on Cybersecurity Research. SAN FRANCISCO, March 18 - A report released Friday by a panel of computer experts criticizes the federal government, saying that its financing of research on computer network security is inadequate and that it is making a mistake by focusing on classified research that is inaccessible to the commercial sector. By JOHN MARKOFF. [NYT > Business] 12:48:51 PM    comment []

Russian and European Leaders Discover Common Ground on Lebanon and Iran. The leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Spain issued a joint statement urging Syria to withdraw troops and security services from Lebanon. By CRAIG S. SMITH. [NYT > International] 8:52:39 AM    comment []

Mutual distrust. Unless somebody gives ground soon, the talks next week between Iran and the E.U. could mark the end of negotiations on Tehran's nuclear program. [Salon.com] 8:45:54 AM    comment []

Agence France Presse accuses Google of copyright infringement. Yikes! Agence France Press has sued Google for at least $17.5 million for including its photos and news headlines on Google News. Now if you've ever used Google News, you know the site uses headlines and thumbnail photos from MANY news services, not just AFP. Unless I'm missing something here, I'd assume U.S. courts would consider this a fair use (After all, seeing the full photo or article requires leaving Google to go to the AFP site.) but who knows. Those crazy French... (They're probably feeling all cocky now since Louis Vuitton won a trademark infringement case against Google in Paris last month.) We may criticize IP law in the U.S. but the truth is that it's even worse in Europe. [Stay Free! Daily] 8:45:53 AM    comment []

Thorstein Veblen on the Common Origin of 'Private' Property. Over a century ago, the economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen - famous for his book The Theory of the Leisure Class and coiner of the phrase 'conspicuous consumption' - criticized the natural rights theory of property as a moral claim based on 'creative industry.' I just ran across the following passage in the course of some exploratory research on the theoretical aspects of a conservation policy problem I'm currently working on, and was struck by how relevant his discussion is to today's debates over the proper scope of intellectual property rights. In the accepted economic theories the ground of ownership is commonly conceived to be the productive labor of the owner. This is taken, without reflection or question, to be the legitimate basis of property; he who has produced a useful thing should possess and enjoy it. On this head the socialists and the economists of the classical line - the two extremes of economic speculation - are substantially at one. According to natural rights theory, Veblen observed, [t]he 'natural' owner is the person who has 'produced' an article, or who, by a constructively equivalent expenditure of productive force, has found and appropriated an object.... This natural-rights theory of property makes the creative effort of an isolated, self-sufficing individual the basis of the ownership vested in him. In so doing it overlooks the fact that there is no isolated, self-sufficing individual. All production is, in fact, a production in and by the help of the community, and all wealth is such only in society. Within the human period of the race development, it is safe to say, no individual has fallen into industrial isolation, so as to produce any one useful article by his own independent effort alone. Even where there is no mechanical co-operation, men are always guided by the experience of others. The only possible exceptions to this rule are those instances of lost or cast-off children nourished by wild beasts, of which half-authenticated accounts have gained currency from time to time. But the anomalous, half-hypothetical life of these waifs can scarcely have affected social development to the extent of originating the institution of ownership. Production takes place only in society-only through the co-operation of an industrial community. This industrial community may be large or small; its limits are commonly somewhat vaguely defined; but it always comprises a group large enough to contain and transmit the traditions, tools, technical knowledge, and usages without which there can be no industrial organization and no economic relation of individuals to one another or to their environment. The isolated individual is not a productive agent. What he can do at best is to live from season to season, as the non-gregarious animals do. There can be no production without technical knowledge; hence no accumulation and no wealth to be owned, in severalty or otherwise. And there is no technical knowledge apart from an industrial community. Since there is no individual production and no individual productivity, the natural-rights preconception that ownership rests on the individually productive labor of the owner reduces itself to absurdity, even under the logic of its own assumptions. From 'The Beginning of Ownership' by Thorstein Veblen, in the American Journal of Sociology, vol. 4 (1898-99) - the full text of this and other writings by Veblen available here and here. [Life Tenant] 8:45:12 AM    comment []

Another pass for Gannon. Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee block an investigation into how Gannon/Guckert got daily access to the White House. [Salon.com] 8:35:55 AM    comment []

Felten's Law. Ed Felten has come up with his own variant of Godwin's Law -- this one having to do with the ways that rhetoric about pornography tends to infect discussions about copyright. You wouldn't think the two topics had much to do with each other, except tangentially (pornography makers can claim copyright protection in the works they create, for example). But the reality is a bit more complicated -- basically, content companies increasingly argue that peer-to-peer technology is the work of the devil because it leads to increasing distribution of pornography. This is an ironically puritanical stance, since movie and music companies have themselves been on the other side of censorship fights in the past. Ed's point is that the arguments by P2P critics and by P2P companyies tend to switch when the pornography card is played in the copyright debate: For example, Hollywood argues that filesharing will lead to a shortage of movies, because nobody will make movies they can't sell. But when the topic switches to pornographic movies, suddenly they start arguing that filesharing increases the creation and availability of content. Similarly, some P2P vendors who say they can't possibly filter or block copyrighted content, suddenly decide, when the topic switches to porn, that they can provide effective blocking. Of course, the problem of blocking porn is somewhat different from blocking copyrighted works, because, analytically, what makes something porn is a different question from that of what makes something copyrighted. As I note above, pornography can be copyrighted, and of course it follows that it may also pass into the public domain. Hard to get a computer to make these sorts of distinct judgments, absent some improbably universal (and improbably precise) mandatory labelling scheme. That's the sort of thing that it takes a government to impose, but we've been spared the imposition of such a scheme thus far. Ed may have titled his blog entry "Godwin's Law, Updated," but I think "Felten's Law" has a better ring to it. [Godwin's Law] 8:35:48 AM    comment []

I'm not a computer programmer, but I found parallels to my work experience -- and a potentially valuable moral of the story -- in Mary's post on Extreme Usability. She sez: A month ago I participated in the Open Source Usability Sprint. For me it was revelatory. Something I started doing last August and September with Tantek Celik, at Technorati (I used to work there). We would sit, side-by-side, working on the usability of the site, where we picked through about 50 little niggling problems that I'd found over the previous 9 months (yes, I'd found more.. but fixing 50 was great) to make those little problems go away. We started out deciding just to fix a couple of things, so I took him through the user's perspective about why something might be broken from their perspective, and it was boring, tedious, time-consuming to do this.. and yet.. immediately as we refreshed the changes, we would both see the improvement and understand how users would like the change. So we fixed another and another. These were problems that I knew about, had documented, or had found in several rounds of user testing. I did what is common in usability, documenting these issues. The engineers would read the reports, comment on them in conversation, quote the user's, and generally agree. But then, nothing would change. And that's not to say that these engineers at Technorati, or the ones I've worked with elsewhere, weren't brilliant or personable, or desiring of good usability and user satisfaction. They are. But the reality is, written reports, while read and interesting to engineers, are hard to translate into change. But this extreme usability (we didn't call it that then) actually worked (though I left Technorati just after so it didn't continue there that long).  . . . [Napsterization via unmediated] 8:08:35 AM    comment []