Software piracy also has ripple effects in local communities. The lost revenues to the wider group of software distributors and service providers ($11.4 billion) would have been enough to hire 54,000 high tech industry workers, while the lost state and local tax revenues ($1.7 billion) would have been enough to build 100 middle schools or 10,800 affordable housing units, or hire nearly 25,000 experienced police officers.
Of course the BSA’s concern for tax revenues is disingenuous, in a totally unsurprising fashion:
I guess any money not paid to BSA members just disappears and is not spent on other things in the economy that also involve jobs and taxes. In the real world we know that money not spent on software will more likely be spent on other things which are taxed the same — or even higher, given how BSA likes to also lobby to get software taxed at a lower rate than other products or services.
McOrmond also makes a slightly surprising claim about the BSA’s studies that I’d love to have verification of:
I know that people choosing legally lower cost software such as FLOSS are included as “piracy” in these studies. I guess my supporting FLOSS (both commercially and as an individual) could be blamed for their not being enough money to adequately equip the Canadian military in Afghanistan. I guess this makes me a terrorist sympathizer, by the BSA “logic”.
Regardless of whether FLOSS is counted as “piracy” in studies, the logic that it doesn’t directly facilitate the collection of taxes to fund military (or state schools, housing, or police) is pretty unassailable. Of course it could reduce costs and increase quality for each of these functions, as for anyone else.
Keith Wolfe, Global Mobility Manager (cool title) writes on the Google Policy Blog:
Google hires employees based on skills and qualifications, not on nationality.
Great, Google doesn’t have an apartheid hiring policy. They aren’t actively doing evil. So they’re in a similar camp with South African businesses who didn’t want to hire based on race, but failed to stop Apartheid. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t mind pandering to neanderthals who think Amurricans deserve some kind of advantage:
Other commenters suggested that Google should fund education for underprivileged American students, to better prepare American students to fill technical jobs. We agree
Underprivileged Americans (by which they certainly and unfortunately mean U.S. citizens)? Please.
Google also says the cap on H-1B visas is “artificially low.” More pandering. Any cap at all is “artificial”, as is any limit at all on the legal ability of any human from working anywhere they’d like to for a willing employer.
Global mobility with no artificial restraints — abolish international apartheid. Surely Google can take a stronger stand than mine owners in South Africa did a century ago.
There are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.
A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware.
The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could also employ programmers.
People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully.
Users with related needs can form users’ groups, and pay dues. A group would contract with programming companies to write programs that the group’s members would like to use.
In the intervening twentysomething years much practical experience has been gained, evidenced by large businesses employing many programmers following these models. Well, except for the last one, which has turned out to be insignificant so far, though perhaps there remains lots of experimentation before it plays out.
What the above misses is that most software is not created for licensing (commercial or public) and most programmers’ jobs do not depend on licensing, much as most musicians are not in the pay of the recorded music distribution business.
As we shift applications to the cloud, do we want our code to remain vendor-neutral? Or would we rather work in silos, where some folks build things to run in the Google cloud, some for the Amazon cloud, and others for the Microsoft cloud? Once an application becomes sufficiently complex, moving it from one cloud to another becomes difficult, placing folks at the mercy of their cloud provider.
I think most would prefer not to be locked-in, that cloud providers instead sold commodity services. But how can we ensure that?
If we develop standard, non-proprietary cloud APIs with open-source implementations, then cloud providers can deploy these and compete on price, availability, performance, etc., giving developers usable alternatives.
That’s exactly right. Cloud providers (selling virtualized cpu and storage) are analogous to hardware vendors. We’re in the pre-PC era, when a developer must write to a proprietary platform, and if one wants to switch vendors, one must port the application.
But such APIs won’t be developed by the cloud providers. They have every incentive to develop proprietary APIs in order to lock folks into their services. Good open-source implementations will only come about if the community makes them a priority and builds them.
I think this is a little too pessimistic. Early leaders may have plenty of incentive to create lockin, but commoditization is another viable business model, one that could even be driven by a heretofore leading proprietary vendor, e.g., the IBM PC, or Microsoft-Yahoo!
Of course the community should care and build the necessary infrastructure so that it is available to enable a potential large cloud provider to pursue the commoditization route and to provide an alternative so long as no such entity steps forward.
Cutting has been working on key parts of the necessary infrastructure; read the rest of his post for more.
The $300 “ultra deluxe edition” of Nine Inch Nails‘ Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2500 copies, sold out in a couple days (I believe released Sunday, no longer available this morning). There are some manufacturing costs, but they don’t appear to be using any precious materials. So if an artist typically makes $1.60 on a $15.99 CD sale, profit from sales of the limited edition already matches profit from a CD selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
Then there are non-limited sales of a $75 merely “deluxe edition”, $10 CD, and $5 download, and whatever other products NIN comes up with around Ghosts.
The ultra deluxe success seems to me to validate the encouragement by some to pursue large revenue from rabid fans and collectors willing and able to pay for personalization, authenticity, embodiment, etc., rather than attempting to suppress zero cost distribution to the masses.
Speaking of distribution, click on the magnet to search for a fully legal P2P download of Ghosts, assuming you have the right filesharing software installed.
At today’s very well produced SanFran MusicTech Summit on a panel called “The Paradise of Infinite Storage” Mike Godwin said that the existence of a recording industry protected by copyright is a very recent phenomenon and conjectured that one could take the position that all of the music created to this point is enough. I don’t recall whether he spelled it out, but the implication being that all music should be available for free and we shouldn’t worry about the creation of more music.
This really upset someone in the audience who identified themselves as representing songwriters for decades. This person righteously stipulated that music has value, musicians must be paid, and that if recording copyright is recent, so was the abolition of slavery. It is really too bad he didn’t make reference to Nazis instead of slavery. Hmm, they did use slave labor.
Unfortunately Godwin said he did not agree with the conjecture and agreed with the vacuous statement that music has value (duh, consumers spend valuable time listening to music). But if the conjecture is not plainly correct, it is at least extremely weighty. Given that a vast amount of music exists and much more will be created regardless of protection, any harms done (e.g. to free speech and innovation) in the name of incentivizing marginal additions to this vast supply must be viewed with extreme skepticism.
There are basically two perspectives in the ‘Music and Technology‘ conversation. One’s priority is to ensure copyright holders are paid, with a strong preference for protecting existing revenue streams, and the other’s priority is to build cool stuff with new technology. Both were present in every part of this conference that I saw.
Probably the most significant example of the latter present was Lucas Gonze demoing the Yahoo! Media Player, which does a great job of playing media linked on a web page, with nice affordances for that environment.
The singer made about $2000 (£1,000) a month from music royalties and live shows with her band Mika Bomb when she lived in London.
But in China, her band Long Kuan Jiu Duan can almost double that by singing just one song at a commercial gig.
At these gigs, artists get paid a set amount by companies or promoters regardless of how many tickets they sell.
I assume a “commercial gig” is some kind of promotional event, but I’d like to read a more in depth look at the economics of pop music in China. (I have little doubt that the economics of music worth listening to is little different than in the U.S. — made for love at a financial loss or sometimes subsidized by grants or academic employment.)
This post is also an excuse to link to Let’s Do Like Them, which expresses one of my top peeves.
Where have the immigrants gone? in the Chicago Tribune on the impact of Oklahoma’s new apartheid law, HB 1804, the Oklahoma Taxpayer and Citizen Protection[ist] Act:
“You really have to work hard at it to destroy our state’s economy, but we found a way,” said state Sen. Harry Coates, the only Republican in the state Legislature to vote against the immigration law. “We ran off the workforce.”
No, they didn’t run off the workforce, they kept the American citizen race pure:
Carol Helm, director of Immigration Reform for Oklahoma Now, says the Oklahoma law was necessary to stop a burgeoning population of illegal immigrants from “multiplying faster than the American citizen race” and overwhelming the state’s social services.
For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it “guided” combined.
I haven’t bothered to verify this, but it doesn’t seem impossible.
As a kid in the late 70s I used the presence of TV Guide in a home as a bozo indicator for the residents, conveniently allowing me to feel superior to nearly everyone. Including my parents, who I felt did not subscribe due to cheapness and religiosity rather than not having poor taste.
Official reaction to the day’s events ranged from dismay to embarrassment to outright anger.
…
For ordinary Gazans, it was a day of joy and plenty.
…
“Freedom is good. We need no border after today,” said Mohammed Abu Ghazal, a 29-year-old out-of-work Gazan.
Of course the Gaza border is atypical in many ways and at least initially this breach will satisfy pent up demand for goods and travel rather than provide opportunity for labor, but the release of this demand paints the ongoing massive cost of borders in vivid fashion (if there were no cost the opening of a border would result in no border crossings).
I like to call this the “purpose-driven voluntary sector,” as distinct from (a) the profit-driven voluntary sector, i.e. the private sector, and (b) the purpose-driven coercive sector, i.e., the public sector.
The most exciting parts of the purpose-driven voluntary sector involve peer production.
Smith also used this terminology in an excellent comment on the nonprofit boom last October:
Some labor economists have distinguished the “intrinsic rewards” (love of the work itself) and the “extrinsic rewards” (money, benefits) from working.
By working for a non-profit, you may sacrifice some extrinsic rewards for some intrinsic rewards. As people get more and more affluent, it makes sense that more and more people will be willing to make that trade-off.
I think of non-profits as the “purpose-driven voluntary sector.” It’s distinct from the pure profit sector, officially dedicated to profits, and the government sector, which is ultimately financed through coercion. If more and more public goods can be provided through the purpose-driven voluntary sector, government can shrink.
I think I’ve only posted about it once, but I’ve long been extremely skeptical of “digital identity” technologies — evil, hopeless, overhyped (no, giving users control of their identities will not save democracy nor make a pony appear, and there are no scare quotes around the preceding words because I haven’t cornered the market on scare quotes), often more than one of these.
OpenID has been the most reasonable identity technology to come along, mostly because it does very little and builds on existing standards. I still think it’s overhyped. Evan Prodromou recently posted an informative essay on OpenID Privacy Concerns. This bit jumped out at me:
The key to mitigating this, of course, is using strong security on the OpenID provider. The good news is that since your authentication is centralized, you can use much stronger authentication than most Web sites support. I really appreciate using browser certificate authentication on certifi.ca — it’s a very strong system that’s (almost) immune to phishing, brute-force attacks, or other password-stealing scams.
The good thing about OpenID is that it moves authentication to parties that are presumably good at that and can offer stronger authentication methods, without the sites and services you want to login to having to know anything about authentication technologies (apart from having implemented OpenID login).
I knew that an OpenID provider could authenticate however they want, but the usefulness of this did not click until reading the above, though I’m sure it’s been pointed out to me before.
I fairly frequently use the total lack of adoption of browser certificates as a negative example to be learned from when people try to solve supposed problems by throwing crypto into a supposed solution. Perhaps in the distant future this example won’t work, because OpenID (or something else that abstracts out authentication method) is widely implemented, making strong authentication relatively useful and usable.
Side notes possibly only of interest to me: The interviewer is Mark Gorton, founder of LimeWire, and the video is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.
Unlike recorded music, parking is a rivalrous good. At first approximation, recorded music should be free and parking very expensive. Of course policy is typically backwards.
So an economically optimal regime would have different rules for different industries, protecting some but not others, based on their exactly supply/demand curves.
“… but don’t forget about enforcement costs.”:
But really, it doesn’t matter. There is just no fucking way that IP protection is worth the police state it would take to enforce it. And unenforced/unenforceable laws poison society by teaching people not to respect the law.
This leads more or less to my understanding of the Pirate Party sentiment, something like “There’s nothing wrong with copyright per se, but any civil liberties infringement in the name of copyright protection is totally unacceptable.”
I recommend Friedman’s essay, but of course the reason I write is to complain … about the second half of the essay’s last sentence:
Therefore I favor accepting the inevitable as soon as possible, so that we can find new ways to compensate content producers.
This closing both gives comfort to producerists (but in the beginning of the essay Friedman says that people love to create — I agree, see paying to create — and Tom W. Bell has a separate argument that should result in less concern for producers that I’ve been meaning to blog about, but should be obvious from the title — Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy) and is a stretch — copyright might make alternatives less pressing and interesting, but it certainly does not prevent experimentation.
The dispute between the U.S. and Antigua jurisdictions over the former’s stupid campaign against online gambling is one of the most interesting happenings of the past few years. I’ve been meaning to write about it for about that long but haven’t had much more to say than what you see in the post title. Antigua correctly sees the U.S. as restraining trade and has obtained favorable rulings at the World Trade Organization.
Antigua (actually the jurisdiction of Antigua and Barbuda) is seeking the right to suspend enforcement of U.S. copyrights as an alternative remedy. Unfortunately this sounds way more interesting than it is, except possibly for its precedent. The latest ruling only allows the suspension of US$21 million worth of intellectual protectionist obligations, a trivial amount that will itself be subject to radically different interpretations considering how difficult and arbitrary the valuation of nonrival goods can be (the RIAA’s ridiculous valuation of shared audio files is exactly a case in point). Even had Antigua’s request for US$3.44 billion not been cut down by about 99.4% the result would have been largely academic.
I have sub-golf level interest in horse racing, poker, or other gaming-oriented gambling activities. So why is this case so interesting? There is The Mouse That Roared or David vs. Goliath aspect, but mostly I really want to see U.S. gambling prohibitions go down in flames, both because they are a tool for arbitrary censorship and control in much the same way copyright is and because they are a barrier to use of prediction markets.
The world will route around this U.S. stupidity, but at great loss, not least to Americans.
The major political issue of today [0] is that music distribution companies based on obsolete physical-media-distribution models (”record labels”) are trying to force owners of new distribution mechanisms, mostly built on the internet, to pay them for the privilege of competing with them; the musical group “The Grateful Dead” used to permit their fans to distribute their music by making copies of taped performances, and most of the money the Dead made came from these performances; it is traditional for performances not to send any revenue to the record label. Long compares the record labels to buggy-whip manufacturers, who are the standard historical symbol for companies who went out of business because of technological change.
This clearly relates to the passage the footnote is attached to, which is about the parallel between Adam Smith’s economic “invisible hand” and the somewhat more visible hand that wrote the king’s doom on the wall in Daniel; in this case, the invisible hand has written the doom of the record companies on the wall, and their tears will not wash out a word of it. What this has to do with Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition on seeking symbolism or morals in the book, I don’t know, although clearly Huckleberry Finn’s prohibition relates to mortals hiding messages in texts.
[0] Yes, this means I think this is more important than the struggle over energy, or the International Criminal Court, or global warming, or nuclear proliferation — the issue is whether people should be permitted to control the machines they use to communicate with one another, in short, whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. (Sorry my politics intrude into this message, but I thought “the major political issue of today” required some justification, but needs to be there to explain the context to people reading this message who don’t know about it.)
That will probably seem a pretty incredible claim, but I often agree, and think Sitaker understates the case. Music distribution companies are only one of the forces for control and censorship. The long term issue is bigger than whether private ownership of 21st-century printing presses should be permitted. The issue is whether individuals of the later 21st-century will have self-ownership.
The Wikimedia Foundation board has passed a resolution that is a step toward Wikipedia migrating to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. I have an uninteresting interest in this due to working at Creative Commons (I do not represent them on this blog), but as someone who wants to see free knowledge “win” and achieve revolutionary impact, I declare this an important step forward. The current fragmentation of the universe of free content along the lines of legally incompatible but similar in spirit copyleft licenses delays and endangers the point at which that universe reaches critical mass — when any given project decides to use a copyleft license merely because then being able to include content from the free copyleft universe makes that decision make sense. This has worked fairly well in the software world with the GPL as the copyleft license.
Copyleft was and is a great hack, and useful in many cases. But practically it is a major barrier to collaboration in some contexts and politically it is still based on censorship. So I’m always extremely pleased by any expansion of the public domain. There could hardly be a more welcome expansion than Daniel J. Bernstein’s release of his code (most notably qmail) into the public domain. Most of the practical benefit (including his code in free software distributions) could have been achieved by released under any free software license, including the GPL. But politically, check out this two minute video of Bernstein pointing out some of the problems of copyright and announcing that his code is in the public domain.
I imagine thousands of bloggers have commented on gOS, a Linux distribution featuring shortcuts to Google web application on the desktop and preloaded on a PC sold (out) for $200 at Wal-Mart. Someone asked me to blog about it and I do find plenty interesting about it, so thus this post.
I started predicting that Linux would take over the desktop in 1994 and stopped predicting that a couple years later. The increasing dominance of web-based applications may have me making that prediction again in a couple more years, and gOS is a harbinger of that. Obviously web apps make users care less about what desktop operating system they’re running — the web browser is the desktop platform of interest, not the OS.
gOS also points to a new and better (safer) take on a PC industry business model — payment for placement of shortcuts to web applications on the desktop (as opposed to preloading a PC with crapware) — although as far as I know Google isn’t currently paying anything to the gOS developers or Everex, which makes the aforementioned cheap PC.
This is highly analogous to the Mozilla business model with a significant difference: distribution is controlled largely by hardware distributors, not the Mozilla/Firefox site, and one would expect end distributors to be the ones in a position to make deals with web application companies. However, this difference could become muted if lots of hardware vendors started shipping Firefox. This model will make the relationship of hardware vendors to software development, and particularly open source, very interesting over the next years.
One irony (long recognized by many) is that while web applications pose a threat to user freedoms gained through desktop free and open source software, they’ve also greatly lowered the barriers to desktop adoption.
Last month another site for aggregating donation pledges to open source software projects launched.
I’m not sure there’s anything significant that sets Cofundos apart from microPledge featurewise. Possibly a step where bidders (pledgers) vote on which developer bid to accept. However I’m not certain how a developer is chosen on microPledge — their FAQ says “A quote will be chosen that delivers the finished and paid product to the pledgers most quickly based on their current pledging rate (not necessarily the shortest quote).” microPledge’s scheme for in progress payments may set it apart.
In terms of marketing and associations, Cofundos comes from the Agile Knowledge Engineering and Semantic Web research group at the University of Leipzig, producers of DBpedia, about which I’ve written. Many of the early proposed projects are directly related to AKSW research. Their copyright policy is appreciated.
Cofundos lists 61 proposed projects after one month, microPledge lists about 160 after about three and a half months. I don’t see any great successes on either site, but both are young, and perhaps I’m not looking hard enough.
Cofundos and microPledge are both welcome experiments, though I don’t expect either to become huge. On the other hand, even modest success would set a valuable precedent. In that vein I’ve been pretty skeptical about the chances of Fundable, they seem to have attracted a steady stream of users. Although most projects seem to be uninteresting (pledges for bulk purchases, group trips, donations to an individual’s college fund, etc), some production of public goods does seem to being funded, including several film projects in the small thousands of dollars range. Indeed, “My short film” is the default project name in their form for starting a project.
It seems to me that creating requirements and getting in front of interested potential donors are the main challenges for sites focused on funding open source software like Cofundos and microPledge (both say they are only starting with software). Requirements are just hard, and there’s little incentive for anyone to visit an aggregator who hasn’t aggregated anything of interest.
I wonder if integrating financial donations into project bug tracking systems would address both challenges? Of course doing so would have risks, both of increasing bureaucracy around processing bugs and feature requests, necessity of implementing new features (and bugs) in the relevant bug tracking software, and altering the incentives of volunteer contributors.
