Freedom to Tinker

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.

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.

Ernest Miller at CopyFight has an interesting response to my discussion yesterday of the Broadcast Flag. I wrote that the Flag is bad regulation, being poorly targeted at the goal of protecting TV broadcasts from Internet redistribution. Ernie replies that the Flag is actually well-targeted regulation, but for a different purpose:

[Y]ou’d have to be an idiot to think that the broadcast flag would prevent HDTV content from making it onto the internet. Since I don’t believe that the commissioners are that stupid, I can only conclude that the FCC is acting quite cynically in support of an important constituency of theirs, the broadcasters *cough*regulatorycapture*cough*.

In other words, the purported purpose of the broadcast flag (to prevent HDTV from getting onto the internet) is not the real purpose of the broadcast flag, which appears to be to give content providers more control over the average citizen’s ability to make use of media.

Ernie’s theory, that the movie industry and the FCC are using “content protection” as a smokescreen to further a secret agenda of controlling media technology, fits the facts pretty well. And quite a few experienced lobbyists seem to believe it. Still, I don’t think it’s right to argue against the Broadcast Flag on that basis.

First, even if you believe the theory, it’s often a useful debating tactic to pretend that the other side actually believes what they say they believe. It’s hard to prove that someone is lying about their own beliefs and motivations; it can be much easier to prove that their asserted beliefs don’t justify their conclusions. And proving that the official rationale for the Flag is wrong would do some good.

Second, if Ernie’s theory is right, the fix is in and there’s not much we can do about future Broadcast Flag type regulation. If we want to change things, we might as well act on the assumption that it matters whether the official rationale for the Flag is right.

And finally, I am convinced that at least some people in the movie industry, and at least some people at the FCC, actually believe the official rationale. I think this because of what these people say in private, after a few (literal or metaphorical) beers, and because of how they react when the official rationale for the Flag is challenged. Even in private, industry or FCC people often react to criticism of the official rationale with real passion and not just with platitudes. Either these (non-PR) people are extraordinarily good at staying on-message, or they really believe (as individuals) what they are saying.

So although Ernie’s theory is very plausible, I will dare to be na

The Union for the Public Domain is asking for help in surveying national governments about their (the governments’) positions on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty. The UPD is looking for volunteers who are willing to contact the appropriate representatives of their national government, ask the representatives a series of questions provided by the UPD, record the answers, and submit them to the UPD. The UPD will collate the results and create a handy summary of where each government stands on the Treaty.