The Texas version of the Super-DMCA has been passed by the relevant committees in both the state House and Senate. It will probably come to a vote in the Senate later this week. If you’re a Texas resident, this would be good time to contact your state senator!
iLoo: Joke, Blunder, or Both?
May 13, 2003 by
Business Week reports on the saga of iLoo, the Internet-enabled portable toilet announced last week by a British subsidiary of Microsoft. Microsoft is now claiming that this was just an April Fools’ joke, despite a body of evidence to the contrary.
The ordinary custom is to announce April Fools’ jokes on April 1. This one was announced on May 2. I know missed deadlines are a way of life in the software industry, but this is ridiculous.
You really should read the whole article. But if you can’t, here’s the end:
[An MSN UK spokesman] said that MSN UK, however, has engaged in pranks before. He noted that the group once announced that it had wired up a park bench for Internet access. He then corrected himself, stating that the bench, in fact, was a real demonstration.
New Media: Success or Failure?
May 12, 2003 by
Mary Hodder at bIPlog points to Steve Lohr’s odd piece, “New Media: Ready for the Dustbin of History?” in Sunday’s New York Times. Mary argues that Lohr’s thesis – that the Internet has failed, except as a vehicle for e-commerce – is bunk. I agree.
Lohr makes two errors. First, he mistakes the financial failure of dotcom startups for a lack of social impact. Yes, many people lost money when the dotcom bubble burst. But the Internet kept chugging along, and the pace of real innovation (as opposed to “let’s sell pet food on the Net” pseudo-innovation) didn’t change.
The airlines are a perfect illustration of this profit-as-social-impact fallacy. The airline business has been, at best, a break-even proposition over its entire history. Despite their lack of profitability, the airlines have given us (relatively) cheap and easy air travel, and transformed our lives.
Lohr’s second fallacy is mistake the bad forecasts of a few prognosticators for the failure of an industry. Some of the “new media” visionaries turned out to be wrong in their detailed visions, but that doesn’t mean that online media were irrelevant.
It’s hard to predict the future. We shouldn’t be too surprised that the vision of online magazine Slate, as forecast by editor Michael Kinsley in 1996, hasn’t completely come to pass. Despite its midcourse corrections, Slate has been a cultural success, earning a dedicated readership and publishing a lot of good writing.
Internet pioneers should remember that it’s not always easy being on the cutting edge. Sometimes you lose money. Sometimes you misjudge the future. Even so, you’re creating something that changes the world.
Declan on Spam
May 8, 2003 by
Don’t miss Declan McCullagh’s column this week, in which he offers a particularly astute view of how to address the spam problem. In a nutshell, he argues that we need to change the economic incentives for the spammers, and he discusses some practical ways to do that.
Reputation
May 7, 2003 by
Big copyright owners have apparently had some degree of success in their efforts to flood file-sharing networks with decoy files, thereby frustrating users’ attempts to find copyrighted works. Conventional wisdom is that file-sharing systems will institute some kind of reputation-feedback system to help their users determine which sources tend to offer real files and which tend to offer decoys.
Reputation systems try to mimic the dynamics of real-life reputations, which are a powerful mechanism for inducing cooperative behavior, as anyone who has lived in a small town can attest. The best-known reputation technology is EBay’s, which allows everyone who transacts business with you to give you a score, and which aggregates those scores into a concise summary. EBay users are willing to pay more for an item when it is offered by a seller who has built up a good reputation over time. This system has generally worked pretty well.
If file-sharers had the same incentives as EBay users, we could be pretty confident that reputation systems would work for file-sharing vendors too. But the incentives differ in important ways.
For example, an EBay vendor wants to engage in more transactions, because he profits on each one. A file-sharer, though, doesn’t want to upload too many files, because each upload uses up part of his network resources. A file-sharer suffers if his reputation gets too good, so a reputation system may create a perverse incentive to behave poorly sometimes. Indeed, a group of friends might conspire to trash their own reputations, so as to ensure themselves unimpeded access to each others’ files.
There is also the question of who will do the record-keeping for a file-sharing reputation system. EBay is happy to keep track of the reputation reports for their users, because it boosts EBay’s business. The vendor of a file-sharing system may worry that keeping any kind of record of each transaction between users, and giving any kind of recommendation to users about where to get files, might bring the vendor one step closer to the kind of active participation in infringing transactions that got Napster in trouble.
Despite this, my prediction is that at least some file-sharing vendors will try adopting reputation systems, and that after a few false starts they will find a way to make those systems at least modestly successful to combating decoy tactics. But that’s only a guess – I won’t stake my reputation on it.
