In a way, the litigation mentioned in the article is a good thing. A big problem for patent reform is that there is a small group of highly motivated people who benefit from these overbroad patents and a much larger but much more diffuse group of people who are hurt by them. The former exert continual pressure on the system and the latter don't pay much attention -- you see this in firearms politics, where for better or worse a large majority of the country thinks more legislation is needed but the majority will is thwarted (again for better or worse) by a relatively small group of dedicated opponents. (I am ignoring the constitutional arguments here, of course.) The best way to get some money and motivation behind reform is for these patents to start burning enough business interests to create the same kind of interest in this issue on the other side. If eBay, Viacom, Amazon and the like start getting hurt, maybe we'll see some action.
Here's the original press release from NASA. The actual journal article, in Geophysical Research Letters, is not available on the Web to nonsubscribers.
Note, though, an important sentence in the NASA release that is missing from the CNN account:
"Also, summer plankton concentrations rose by over 50 percent in both the Northern Indian and the Equatorial Atlantic Oceans since the mid-80s. Large areas of the Indian Ocean showed substantial increases during all four seasons."
There's still a net loss, but the real phenomenon appears to be a shifting of phytoplankton from north to south.
"I think this article is an attempt to get public opinion stirred up to the point that UCITA laws - which include things like mandated warranties on software products -seem like a reasonable solution, and thus make life more difficult for MS's competition."
As the author of the article, I was astonished to read this. I can tell you that Technology Review, which asked me to write the article (and from which MSNBC reprinted the article) has no connection, financial or otherwise, with Microsoft; that Microsoft was unenthusiastic about the article (but, my hats off to them, made some of their people available for interviews); that UCITA laws explicitly do not make mandated warrantees but instead guarantee the lack of implied warrantees of merchantability now dubiously codified in software licenses; and that the claim in this comment was especially mind-boggling given that I was one of the first mainstream journalists (in a 1998 article in the Atlantic) to warn about the potential consequences of UCITA (then billed as article 2B of the UCC). --Charles C. Mann
"It didn't help that so many of the people quoted had no idea what they were talking about, and the ones who did had their quotes taken so far out of context that they made no sense."
As the author of the piece, I'd be interested to learn a) why Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Neumann, the folks at SEI, and the other people I spoke with don't know what they're talking about; and b) how you know I quoted them out of context. Have you read the transcripts of my interviews?
"It seems a lot of people who never worked at Microsoft know how Microsoft develops software."
I think the people whom I spoke with at Microsoft -- as well as the ex-Microsoft developers -- know how the company develops software. I mean, didn't you read the article?
"It would make more sense to talk about a particular class of software and bug and then discuss why it is there. E.g. why do Microsoft systems products have buffer overflows."
Not in an overview article, which is what this is. This complain reminds me of Dawn Powell's complaint that much criticism boils down to the remark that if you were driving my car you'd go to some other destination. Well, fine, but it's my car -- I wanted to write, and was asked to write, an overview.
I'm the author of the piece, and you're right. I did leave out open source software. The reason was pretty mundane. Bringing in open source software and going into the test data on its relative robustness would have taken more space than was possible in Technology Review. FWIW, as best as I can determine, there are some data indicating that OSS is less crashy and -- maybe --more secure. (I'm thinking of the fuzz tests and so on.) But much of the problem with software comes from usability issues, and there is suggestive evidence that OSS is behind there. In any case, it's not a slam dunk.
As for your other complaint, that this will make average people think "all software systems are going to kill U.S. Marines and crash ambulances into each other" -- well, I guess I have more faith in the readers than you. I don't think a reasonable person would get this impression. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. -- Charles C. Mann
Identity theft may be more difficult with biometrics, but it also would be harder to recover from if it happened.
Biometrics in general has a number of well-known problems, of which the most alarming (to me, anyway) is the question of what happens when, as is inevitable, somebody manages to steal your credentials (not by taking your finger or eye themselves, but hacking the Oracle database that will surely be at the heart of this thing.) From then on you may never be able to use your biometrics again, because now there's two of you out there. When your credit card number is stolen, you can get another one pretty easily. But, unfortunately, there is no easy way to get a new biometric ID -- it's your thumb, right?
Bruce Schneier has some smart remarks about this here.
Could be considerably better than this post suggests.
The recording industry didn't obtain a copyright on performances until 1972, and it has been often claimed by former label legal people that the labels did not get their acts together and properly register copyrights for years afterward, if ever.
This is important because if the registrations are missing, improper, or erroneous then -- in the best scenario for the labels -- Napster is not liable for statutory damages but actual damages, which are much smaller. In the worst, and more probable scenario, if even a tiny number are missing, improper, or erroneous then these revert back to the musicians, who can sue the labels. A snafu rate of just 1% could spell a fortune in damages against the labels and possibly lead to a major shakeup in the music scene.
Napster was hit for "vicarious" liability, which means (more or less) that they helped somebody infringe copyright, even though they didn't actually infringe copyright themselves. In other words, the company didn't actually have to download or use any copyrighted material itself to be guilty. As I understand it, the liability consisted of operating the service -- not in having a central index -- so that KaZaA could be charged with the same offense. To show that the service itself wasn't vicarious infringement, they had to show substantial noninfringing uses, which in the opinion of the court they didn't (I'm not making this argument, I'm just saying what the court said). KaZaA argues that it can't know what people are trading, because a) it doesn't maintain a central index; and b) the files are encrypted. IP lawyers have told me that these arguments are weak as a matter of law. That the FastTrack crew seem (on the basis of this article and the web posting on the KaZaA site) to be bailing would suggest that they agree.
Very odd. Moving the company to Australia doesn't spare Niklas Zennstrom (the guy who cofounded both KaZaA and FastTrack, the company that provides the software) of any liability for his past actions in Europe, especially given that Australia is a signatory to the same international copyright treaties as everyone else. Nor would selling the company be any help, unless he could hornswoggle somebody into assuming the liabilities. That seems unlikely, given that the vicarious infringement liability that Napster is exposed to -- identical to the one risked by KaZaA -- is in the billions of dollars. An acquirer would have to be crazy to take it on, and would probably have a hard time finding hosting services (they're legally exposed, too). And the service is still up and running exactly as it was before. Very hard to figure out this one.
I am the author of the article that was Slashdotted. Reading these posts, I am amazed by the number of people who apparently felt moved to comment on the piece without reading it. For the record, the article does NOT predict the end of books. Rather, it suggests that the book will evolve because the paper between the covers will be replaced by very thin, very flexible electronic displays with many of the pleasing characteristics of real paper.
Past predictions of paperless offices and the failure of the BookMan and DynaBook are irrelevant. E-paper will be used just like regular paper -- think of it, perhaps, as "paper-plus" -- and so there will be no paperless offices. Similarly, the fact that people don't read long texts on the BookMan or the Palm is irrelevant -- books with e-paper will look and feel like regular books. Regular books will still be around, but, as I suggest in the article, there are many uses for e-books, starting with the replacement of the awful stacks of blurry photocopied course-packs inflicted on students. I'd suggest that huge computer books, which so frequently overwhelm their paper bindings even before they become obsolete, would be another candidate. But -- to reiterate -- these would be replaced by something that looks and feels very much like a... book.
Actually, that's not true. When I looked at the site a week or so ago it was several days after they stopped circulating the bogus "studio version" of the new, unreleased Springsteen song about Amodous Diallo, and hundreds of people still had it on Napster. FWIW, if people want a few details I wrote about this two weeks ago at inside.com.
To add a more general remark about the biology, the article -- like a lot of those worrying about the genome project -- is marked by a naive belief in genetic determinism. Katz talks about people misusing the results to create, for example, "cheerful and pliant" offspring. But this assumes there is some configuration of genes for cheerfulness and pliancy that can be transferred, that those genes do not have other undesirable effects in configurations other than the one in which they were taken from (i.e., that they are not pleiotropic), and that the child's pre-birth uterine environment, diet, schooling, family, and social class will have no countervailing impact on its personality. This seems implausible, to say the least.
Even cloning, which Katz decries in passing, will not duplicate a person. (If done a la Dolly, the genetic information in a clone isn't exactly the same, because the donor cell -- the cell into which the clone's DNA is inserted -- has different mitochrondrial DNA.) But even if the DNA were 100% the same, you will not get the same person. As a thought experiment, imagine cloning an 65-year-old who survived the Holocaust as a child in central Europe. Plunk the new clone into today's USA and let him or her grow up watching Buffy, playing Quake, and ripping Goo Goo Dolls MP3s. It is absurd to imagine that the child will grow into a replica of the man -- even physically, because the child won't have gone through the man's horrific childhood experiences.
Yes, the genome project will tell us lots about ourselves. And yes this information could be misused. But the chief potential for misuse is caused by the misuser's belief that genetic information means more than it does. The qualities that make humans interesting come from an incredibly complex interaction of nature and nurture that we are far from beginning to understand, let alone control. Oddly, articles like this one reinforce the point of view of the people who would make others miserable by misusing this information.
Slashdot Mirror
In a way, the litigation mentioned in the article is a good thing. A big problem for patent reform is that there is a small group of highly motivated people who benefit from these overbroad patents and a much larger but much more diffuse group of people who are hurt by them. The former exert continual pressure on the system and the latter don't pay much attention -- you see this in firearms politics, where for better or worse a large majority of the country thinks more legislation is needed but the majority will is thwarted (again for better or worse) by a relatively small group of dedicated opponents. (I am ignoring the constitutional arguments here, of course.) The best way to get some money and motivation behind reform is for these patents to start burning enough business interests to create the same kind of interest in this issue on the other side. If eBay, Viacom, Amazon and the like start getting hurt, maybe we'll see some action.
Here's the original press release from NASA. The actual journal article, in Geophysical Research Letters, is not available on the Web to nonsubscribers.
Note, though, an important sentence in the NASA release that is missing from the CNN account:
"Also, summer plankton concentrations rose by over 50 percent in both the Northern Indian and the Equatorial Atlantic Oceans since the mid-80s. Large areas of the Indian Ocean showed substantial increases during all four seasons."
There's still a net loss, but the real phenomenon appears to be a shifting of phytoplankton from north to south.
"I think this article is an attempt to get public opinion stirred up to the point that UCITA laws - which include things like mandated warranties on software products -seem like a reasonable solution, and thus make life more difficult for MS's competition."
As the author of the article, I was astonished to read this. I can tell you that Technology Review, which asked me to write the article (and from which MSNBC reprinted the article) has no connection, financial or otherwise, with Microsoft; that Microsoft was unenthusiastic about the article (but, my hats off to them, made some of their people available for interviews); that UCITA laws explicitly do not make mandated warrantees but instead guarantee the lack of implied warrantees of merchantability now dubiously codified in software licenses; and that the claim in this comment was especially mind-boggling given that I was one of the first mainstream journalists (in a 1998 article in the Atlantic) to warn about the potential consequences of UCITA (then billed as article 2B of the UCC). --Charles C. Mann
"It didn't help that so many of the people quoted had no idea what they were talking about, and the ones who did had their quotes taken so far out of context that they made no sense."
As the author of the piece, I'd be interested to learn a) why Nathan Myhrvold, Peter Neumann, the folks at SEI, and the other people I spoke with don't know what they're talking about; and b) how you know I quoted them out of context. Have you read the transcripts of my interviews?
"It seems a lot of people who never worked at Microsoft know how Microsoft develops software."
I think the people whom I spoke with at Microsoft -- as well as the ex-Microsoft developers -- know how the company develops software. I mean, didn't you read the article?
"It would make more sense to talk about a particular class of software and bug and then discuss why it is there. E.g. why do Microsoft systems products have buffer overflows."
Not in an overview article, which is what this is. This complain reminds me of Dawn Powell's complaint that much criticism boils down to the remark that if you were driving my car you'd go to some other destination. Well, fine, but it's my car -- I wanted to write, and was asked to write, an overview.
--Charles C. Mann
As for your other complaint, that this will make average people think "all software systems are going to kill U.S. Marines and crash ambulances into each other" -- well, I guess I have more faith in the readers than you. I don't think a reasonable person would get this impression. But hey, maybe I'm wrong. -- Charles C. Mann
Biometrics in general has a number of well-known problems, of which the most alarming (to me, anyway) is the question of what happens when, as is inevitable, somebody manages to steal your credentials (not by taking your finger or eye themselves, but hacking the Oracle database that will surely be at the heart of this thing.) From then on you may never be able to use your biometrics again, because now there's two of you out there. When your credit card number is stolen, you can get another one pretty easily. But, unfortunately, there is no easy way to get a new biometric ID -- it's your thumb, right?
Bruce Schneier has some smart remarks about this here.
The recording industry didn't obtain a copyright on performances until 1972, and it has been often claimed by former label legal people that the labels did not get their acts together and properly register copyrights for years afterward, if ever.
This is important because if the registrations are missing, improper, or erroneous then -- in the best scenario for the labels -- Napster is not liable for statutory damages but actual damages, which are much smaller. In the worst, and more probable scenario, if even a tiny number are missing, improper, or erroneous then these revert back to the musicians, who can sue the labels. A snafu rate of just 1% could spell a fortune in damages against the labels and possibly lead to a major shakeup in the music scene.
Napster was hit for "vicarious" liability, which means (more or less) that they helped somebody infringe copyright, even though they didn't actually infringe copyright themselves. In other words, the company didn't actually have to download or use any copyrighted material itself to be guilty. As I understand it, the liability consisted of operating the service -- not in having a central index -- so that KaZaA could be charged with the same offense. To show that the service itself wasn't vicarious infringement, they had to show substantial noninfringing uses, which in the opinion of the court they didn't (I'm not making this argument, I'm just saying what the court said). KaZaA argues that it can't know what people are trading, because a) it doesn't maintain a central index; and b) the files are encrypted. IP lawyers have told me that these arguments are weak as a matter of law. That the FastTrack crew seem (on the basis of this article and the web posting on the KaZaA site) to be bailing would suggest that they agree.
Very odd. Moving the company to Australia doesn't spare Niklas Zennstrom (the guy who cofounded both KaZaA and FastTrack, the company that provides the software) of any liability for his past actions in Europe, especially given that Australia is a signatory to the same international copyright treaties as everyone else. Nor would selling the company be any help, unless he could hornswoggle somebody into assuming the liabilities. That seems unlikely, given that the vicarious infringement liability that Napster is exposed to -- identical to the one risked by KaZaA -- is in the billions of dollars. An acquirer would have to be crazy to take it on, and would probably have a hard time finding hosting services (they're legally exposed, too). And the service is still up and running exactly as it was before. Very hard to figure out this one.
Past predictions of paperless offices and the failure of the BookMan and DynaBook are irrelevant. E-paper will be used just like regular paper -- think of it, perhaps, as "paper-plus" -- and so there will be no paperless offices. Similarly, the fact that people don't read long texts on the BookMan or the Palm is irrelevant -- books with e-paper will look and feel like regular books. Regular books will still be around, but, as I suggest in the article, there are many uses for e-books, starting with the replacement of the awful stacks of blurry photocopied course-packs inflicted on students. I'd suggest that huge computer books, which so frequently overwhelm their paper bindings even before they become obsolete, would be another candidate. But -- to reiterate -- these would be replaced by something that looks and feels very much like a ... book.
Actually, that's not true. When I looked at the site a week or so ago it was several days after they stopped circulating the bogus "studio version" of the new, unreleased Springsteen song about Amodous Diallo, and hundreds of people still had it on Napster. FWIW, if people want a few details I wrote about this two weeks ago at inside.com.
Even cloning, which Katz decries in passing, will not duplicate a person. (If done a la Dolly, the genetic information in a clone isn't exactly the same, because the donor cell -- the cell into which the clone's DNA is inserted -- has different mitochrondrial DNA.) But even if the DNA were 100% the same, you will not get the same person. As a thought experiment, imagine cloning an 65-year-old who survived the Holocaust as a child in central Europe. Plunk the new clone into today's USA and let him or her grow up watching Buffy, playing Quake, and ripping Goo Goo Dolls MP3s. It is absurd to imagine that the child will grow into a replica of the man -- even physically, because the child won't have gone through the man's horrific childhood experiences.
Yes, the genome project will tell us lots about ourselves. And yes this information could be misused. But the chief potential for misuse is caused by the misuser's belief that genetic information means more than it does. The qualities that make humans interesting come from an incredibly complex interaction of nature and nurture that we are far from beginning to understand, let alone control. Oddly, articles like this one reinforce the point of view of the people who would make others miserable by misusing this information.