Boyle’s Law

James Boyle (seen here in his fancy hat) is a tower of sense on IP law. He published a terrific essay on the subject in the Financial Times recently. Here’s how he sets the scene:

“So how do we decide the ground-rules of the information age? Representatives of interested industries come to regulators and ask for another heaping slice of monopoly rent in the form of an intellectual property right. They have doom-laden predictions, they have anecdotes, carefully selected to pluck the heartstrings of legislators, they have celebrities who testify – often incoherently, but with palpable charisma – and they have very, very simple economic models. The basic economic model here is ‘If you give me a larger right, I will have a larger incentive to innovate. Thus the bigger the rights, the more innovation we will get. Right?’ Well, not exactly.”

The problem, as Boyle sees it, is that we don’t have evidence-based lawmaking in this area. But then he has a great idea: why not look for an instance where one country has implemented a new IP law and another country has not, and compare the results. Does the strong-IP jurisdiction have more innovation than the weak-IP one? The delicious twist in the piece is that he has found such a case — database rights, where the EU legislated and the US did not. Guess which jurisdiction had more innovation in database development?

There’s only one thing better than a writer who quotes Macaulay, and that’s someone who writes like Macaulay. Jamie comes close to that ideal at times. Give him a white hat, someone.

The trouble with digital cameras…

… is that nobody uses a viewfinder any more!

The Powells that be

Michael Powell is coming up for the fourth anniversary of his appointment as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Larry Lessig has an interesting column in Wired arguing that Powell is quite the most sophisticated policymaker in Washington. What he doesn’t say — though I think it’s true — is that Michael has probably been much more successful than his Dad, the outgoing Secretary of State.

Election 1.0

Very thoughtful article by James Fallows about the voting machine technology used in the US presidential election. He starts from the point that all computer systems have hidden bugs in them when they are first released, and these are only detected and ironed out through relentless testing by coders and, later, users. Here’s the nub of it:

“On the available evidence, I don’t believe that voting-machine irregularities, or other problems on Election Day, determined who would be the next president. The apparent margins for President Bush were too large, in Ohio and nationwide. But if the race had been any closer, we could not have said for sure that the machines hadn’t made the difference. That is because many electronic systems violate the two basic rules of trustworthy computing.

By definition, they have barely been exposed to real-world testing. The kind of thorough workout that Visa’s or Google’s systems receive every hour happens for voting machines on only a few special days a year. By commercial standards, the systems are necessarily still in “beta version” – theoretically debugged, but not yet vetted by extensive, unpredictable experience – when voters show up to choose a president.

Four years ago, about one-eighth of all votes for president were cast electronically. This year, nearly a third were. How the system would handle that large increase in scale could not have been tested until the presidency was at stake. Worse, most of the electronic systems are not accountable. When I voted this year, I fed my paper ballot through an optical scanner and into a storage box. In a recount, those ballots could have been pulled out and run through the scanner again. If I had used the touch screen, I would have had no tangible evidence that the vote counted or was recountable.

Is that a problem because the chief executive of Diebold, the largest maker of such systems, is a prominent Republican partisan? No. It’s a problem because it defies the check-and-balance logic built into every other electronic transaction.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

H C-B died while we were on holiday in Provence. Today, while going through some papers from the trip, I found the Guardian issue which reported his passing. Nice tribute, isn’t it? And since you ask, that’s a Leica M3.

What Nathan did next

Nathan Myhrvold used to be Microsoft’s Chief Technologist. Now he’s spending more time with his money. But he’s also set up a secretive new company, Intellectual Ventures Inc., which doesn’t actually make anything. It simply generates patent applications and buys patents from all over the place. The idea is to harness the insanity of the emerging patent regime — to ensure that, one day, nobody will ever be able to start up a company without first paying some royalties to Nathan or his investors and clients. There’s a fascinating Newsweek piece about this here.

Larry Lessig found a nice quote from Bill Gates about all this in Fred Warshofsky’s book, The Patent Wars. This is what Gates said in 1991:

“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.”

Update: [28 November]: Rats! Just discovered that Quentin had spotted this before me!

Bringing order to Chaos Manor

My colleague Quentin is a terrific judge of software, so whenever he enthuses about a program I sit up and take notice. Last weekend he extolled an intriguing Mac application with the unlikely name of Delicious Library. What it does is very simple: it provides a slick way of cataloguing collections of books, records etc.

I held out until today, and then ran into the usual problem: I couldn’t locate a book I needed, despite knowing that I possessed it. I’ve been buying books all my life and now have an enormous collection. There are books everywhere in the house, some of them (I am ashamed to say) not shelved but standing in tottering piles round the place. The result is a terrific working library, but one that threatens to become unusable because I can never find stuff when I need it. Sometimes I have even bought a second copy of a book I know I have — somewhere — because the effort of looking for it is greater than the trouble of ordering another one from Amazon or going to the University Library.

This is daft. When Sue was around, she made great headway by filing everything in my study — regardless of content — alphabetically by author. But that still left everything else unfiled, and didn’t address my need to group books according to thematic categories. Sue always said that what we really needed was a decent catalogue. But we both blanched at the labour of creating one.

Anyway, today I decided to see if Quentin’s tip could help, and downloaded Delicious Library. Two hours later, I had catalogued 200 books. It is indeed a beautiful piece of software. It works by harnessing my iSight camera as a barcode scanner. The process goes like this: 1. Scan barcode to extract ISBN. 2. Connect to Amazon using the Amazon API to retrieve bibliographic data, including thumbnail of cover if available. 3. Enter record in database. That’s it!

The interface used to display and access the contents of one’s library owes a lot to iTunes. Books can be displayed by covers (as if they were on display in a shop) or as a sortable list. You can create ‘shelves’ which are analogous to playlists in iTunes. The great thing is that any book can go on multiple virtual shelves (absolutely vital if you’re someone like me who has an untidy mind and lots of overlapping interests). It’s lovely to use. There are some small glitches — I can’t move books to shelves in list view, for example. But overall, it lives up to its name — Delicious. Best $40 I’ve spent in a while. Oh — and it’s not available to Microsofties.

Workhorse of the year

Earlier this year I had some unexpected royalties and decided to blow them on a Nikon D70 digital SLR.

It has turned out to be a fantastic workhorse — the best camera I’ve used since the rangefinder Leica. I’ve taken thousands of photographs and the only failures have been mine, not the camera’s. It’s very light, but amazingly robust and fits naturally but unobtrusively into one’s hand. I take it everywhere with me. The best thing about it, though, is that it functions like a ‘real’ camera with none of the squidgy processing lag of old style digital cameras. Just press the button and hear the familiar clunk of the mirror flipping up and down — no question about whether you’ve actually taken a picture. And you look and focus through the viewfinder rather than via an LCD screen.

There are a few downsides. For example, my existing Nikon Speedlite flashgun won’t work with it: you’re supposed to purchase a special — outrageously expensive — Speedlite (I haven’t); the onboard pop-up flash is hopeless; and the range of indie lenses available is much narrower than what’s available for the Canon 300D. But even so, the D70 has been a revelation to own and use. Interesting, then, that Popular Photography has named it ‘Camera of the Year’. And, if that were not enough, I see that Ben Hammersley wants one! He has such good taste, that lad.

Rip: Mix: Burn: Sue!

If you haven’t already heard or seen it, Ed Felten’s President’s Lecture in Princeton is a must. It’s the best exegesis yet of the collision between digital technology and the copyright industries. Available in all kinds of formats from here.

Camcorders catch up with the iPod

JVC is about to launch a new generation of camcorders which record not onto ye olde videotape but onto the same kind of tiny hard drives (microdrives) used in the iPod.

You can get about an hour of MPEG2 (i.e. DVD quality) movie on a 4GB drive (the same one that’s in my mini iPod). But of course the big gain is that you can delete duff sequences and free up recording space on the fly.