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Archives for May 2004

House DMCA Reform Hearing Today

May 12, 2004 by

Today a congressional committee will hold a hearing on the Boucher-Doolittle bill (H.R. 107), known as the DMCRA, that would reform the DMCA. The hearing will be webcast, starting at about 10:00 AM Eastern. Look here for a witness list and link to the webcast.

The DMCRA would do four main things: require labeling of copy-protected CDs; allow circumvention of DRM for non-infringing purposes; allow the distribution of DRM-circumvention tools that enable fair use; and create an exemption to the DMCA for legitimate research.

Based on the witness list and other hints I have gotten, it appears that the hearing will focus on the consumer provisions of the bill. There probably won’t be much discussion of the much-needed research exemption.

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DRM as Folding Chair

May 11, 2004 by

Frank Field offers an interesting analogy:

DRM is a folding chair – specifically, it’s one of those folding chairs that people use after shoveling out the snow from a parking space that they use to claim it after they drive away.

For those of you who don’t have to cope with snow, I know that sounds incredible (it was to me when I moved here from South Carolina), but this is a real problem in cities with limited parking and poor snow removal. People who shovel out their cars will have a ratty old folding chair or an old street cone or, if they’re feeling really aggressive, an old kid’s toy that they will plant squarely in the middle of the shoveled-out parking space. This object “marks” the spot, and everyone knows what it means – this is my spot: park here and you will suffer the consequences.

This struck me, in part, because it echoes an example I like to use. When teaching about the theory of property, I start with a class discussion about whether there should be a property right in shoveled-out parking spaces. It’s a helpful example because everybody understands it, few people have a predisposition one way or the other, and it exposes most of the tradeoffs involved in creating a new form of property.

As Frank describes it, “ownership” of a Cambridge parking space is effected not by any legal right but by the threat that noncompliant cars will be vandalized. This is a key distinction. Typically, some of my students end up endorsing a limited property right in shoveled-out parking spaces, but my guess is that they would feel differently about a system created by private decree and “enforced” by vandalism.

This is where the analogy to DRM gets complicated. DRM systems don’t trash the computers of noncompliant users, so they don’t rely on the same kind of intimidation that Frank’s folding-chair owners use.

But Frank’s analogy does work very nicely in one dimension. DRM developers, like Cambridge folding-chair owners, are trying to establish a social norm that people should keep out of the territory they claim. Such claims should be evaluated on their merits, and not just taken for granted.

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Japanese P2P Author Arrested

May 10, 2004 by

Japanese police have arrested the author of Winny, a peer-to-peer application popular in Japan, according to a story on ABC News’s Australian site. (Reportedly, a more detailed article is available in Japanese.) Isamu Kaneko, a 33 year old Computer Engineering “guest research associate” at Tokyo University, was arrested for conspiracy to infringe copyright. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Winny’s author had previously been known only by the online moniker “47,” but police apparently used the records of some kind of online bulletin board to identify him.

UPDATE (10:20 AM): Corrected Mr. Kaneko’s job title. I originally wrote “graduate student” based on the ABC article, but Seth Finkelstein pointed me to an authoritative page at Tokyo University with the accurate title.

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Is the U.S. Losing its Technical Edge?

May 7, 2004 by

The U.S. is losing its dominance in science and technology, according to William J. Broad’s article in the New York Times earlier this week. The article looked at the percentage of awards (such as Nobel Prizes in science), published papers, and issued U.S. patents that go to Americans, and found that the U.S. share had declined significantly.

Although the trend is real, the article does oversell it. For example, the graph that appears at the top shows the number of papers published in physics journals, by the author’s country of origin. Classifying based on country of origin undercounts American scientists, many of whom were born in other countries. Bear in mind, too, that the U.S. lead is smaller in mature fields like physics than it is in developing fields like computer science, so focusing mainly on mature fields will make the U.S. position look worse than it really is.

Yet even by more careful measures, the consensus seems to be that the overall U.S. lead is narrowing. What are the implications of this for Americans?

It all depends on whether you see science and technology as a zero-sum game. If you view science and technology as instruments of national power (both hard military power and soft cultural power), then technical advancement is a zero-sum game and what matters most is how we compare to other countries. But if you see science and technology as creating knowledge and prosperity that diffuse out to the population as a whole, then technical advancement is not a zero-sum game, and you should welcome the flow of knowledge across borders – in both directions. Both views have some validity.

The clash between these two views seems most extreme in immigration policy. As I noted above, immigration has been a big contributor to the quality of U.S. science. But now, more than any time I can remember, U.S. immigration policy is suspicious of foreigners, and especially those who want to work in technical fields. Regardless of the wisdom of this policy – and I think it is tilted too far toward suspicion – we have to recognize the price we pay by adopting it (not to mention the price paid by the overwhelming majority of would-be immigrants from whom we have nothing to fear). Overseas applications to U.S. graduate schools in computer science and other technical fields seem to have dropped sharply this year; and that’s a very bad sign.

I’m glad to see that the health of our technical communities is starting to become more of a national priority. In today’s climate, national competitiveness will be an increasingly effective argument against over-regulation of technology. And after nearly a decade of seeing parts of my technical field turned into legal and regulatory minefields, I would like nothing more than to have the tide turn so that policymakers think about how to make technologists’ jobs easier rather than harder.

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California Decertifies Touch-Screen Voting

May 5, 2004 by

Looks like I missed the significance of this story last week (by Kim Zetter at Wired News). California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley decertified all touch-screen voting machines, not just the Diebold systems whose decertification had been recommended by the state’s voting-systems panel.

Some counties may be able to get their machines recertified if they can meet a set of security requirements: the machines must be certified by the Federal government, provide a voter-verified paper trail, have a security plan that meets certain criteria, have source code disclosed to the Secretary of State and his designees (subject to reasonable confidentiality provisions), have a documented development process, no be modified at the last minute, have no network connections (including Internet, wireless, or phone connections), and a few other requirements.

Shelley condemned Diebold’s actions in California, calling them “despicable” and “deceitful tactics”. He referred evidence of possible fraud by Diebold to the state Attorney General’s office.

In a related story, Ireland recently decided not to use e-voting in their next election, due to security concerns.

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