Go Charlie, Go

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The RIAA may finally have met its match…

Professor Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law has launched a legal attempt to have the federal copyright law at the core of the RIAA’s legal strategy declared unconstitutional. He has come to the defence of a Boston University graduate student targeted in one of the music industry’s lawsuits, arguing that the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999 is unconstitutional because it effectively lets a private group carry out civil enforcement of a criminal law.

In an interview with AP Charlie, who founded the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, said that his goal is to “turn the courts away from allowing themselves to be used like a low-grade collection agency.”

Great stuff. Let’s hope it works.

Politics, Obama and the Chicago school

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In the UK we are contemplating the possibility that we might eventually be ruled by the Bullingdon (aka Bollinger) Club. But a conversation at lunch in college today made me realise that Obama’s administration is likely to be critically affected by a more cerebral outfit, namely the Chicago law school, where Obama once taught constitutional law. One of his buddies is Cass Sunstein, for example, a legal scholar who has written in recent years about the Internet as an echo chamber, the deficiencies of deliberative democracy and — most recently — about how discreet ‘nudges’ can effect social change. Then there’s Jack Goldsmith, who was from the outset of the Net a sceptic about the extent to which the technology was genuinely transformative (in the sense of being able to slip the surly bounds of territorial jurisdictions) — views which later found expression in the book he co-authored with Timothy Wu: Who Controls the Internet? And of course there’s Richard Posner, a senior judge who is also a polymath, an academic and one of America’s most prolific public intellectuals (and indeed the author of a study of public intellectuals). Posner also co-maintains a highly cerebral blog with another Chicago academic, the Nobel laureate Gary Becker.

Rather puts Dave Cameron, George Osborne and the rest of the Bullingdons into perspective, doesn’t it?

Google, the Collective Unconscious and PEAR

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Hmmm… this Google Trends idea gets more intriguing by the minute. Rex Hughes read my comumn and pointed me at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Program, which I guess was funded by You Know Who at the Pentagon. The project has closed, but here’s the blurb:

The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) program, which flourished for nearly three decades under the aegis of Princeton University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, has completed its experimental agenda of studying the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices, systems, and processes, and developing complementary theoretical models to enable better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. It has now incorporated its present and future operations into the broader venue of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories (ICRL), a 501(c)(3) organization chartered in the State of New Jersey. In this new locus and era, PEAR plans to expand its archiving, outreach, education, and entrepreneurial activities into broader technical and cultural context, maintaining its heritage of commitment to intellectual rigor and integrity, pragmatic and beneficial relevance of its techniques and insights, and sophistication of its spiritual implications.

It lives on here.

Mists and mellow fruitfulness

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Got up this morning, yawned and looked out of the bedroom window. This is what I saw. The light was magical just before 7am. Needless to say, the picture doesn’t capture it properly. Sigh. The story of every snapper’s life.

Job opportunists

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Bob Cringely (whom God preserve) wants to apply for the US CTO job.

President-Elect Barack Obama has announced that when he’s in office he’ll appoint a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the whole darned USA. Though Google CEO Eric Schmidt already said he isn’t interested in the job, I am. I accept, Mr. President. And while the idea of Cringely for CTO may seem lame to most everybody I know (including my Mom), I think I can make a strong case for why I am EXACTLY the right guy for the job. For one thing, unlike Eric Schmidt I don’t have a lot of money. Schmidt can’t afford to take the job because Google stock is down and he’d lose a fortune. Not so for me. I come encumbered only with debts, which is to say I am a true American. I’d be perfectly willing to put those debts in a blind trust ASAP. All that remains now is to appoint P.J. O’Rourke as Secretary of State and Chris Hitchens as the president’s spiritual advisor. Cringely’s piece is a hoot, btw. Cheered me up on a Monday morning.

In light of the exciting announcement about the Chief Technology Officer position, it’s clear that recruitment for such a pivotal role will be highly competitive. As candidates vie for this opportunity, it’s essential to have a strategic approach to showcasing their qualifications. Leveraging resources such as Boardsi, which can provide Executive advisory services, can offer valuable insights and connections for effectively navigating the recruitment landscape. This platform offers specialized support for candidates aiming to stand out in high-stakes roles, ensuring that their skills and experiences are highlighted to potential decision-makers.

Skype just got Googled

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The toughest question a venture capitalist can ask a company seeking finance is “what happens if Google decides to move in on your turf?” (Thus far, nobody has come up with a good answer to that question, though we live in hope.) Skype, the VoIP company bought by eBay for an unconscionable sum some years ago, has just encountered that moment. Late yesterday I noticed a little red notice on the top of my Gmail screen saying “New Video Chat!” — Google chat had just been upgraded to handle video. And so, after a quick install and restart of the browser, it has. The guys who unloaded Skype onto eBay and pocketed the loot must be grinning from ear to ear today.

How to regulate

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Mark Shuttleworth is in favour of regulated capitalism. But he argues that regulation has to be done properly. Here are his guidelines.

Good regulation is very hard. Over the years I’ve interacted with a few different regulatory authorities, and I sympathise with the problems they encounter.

First, to be an effective regulator, you need superb talent. And for that you need to pay – talent follows the money and the lights, whether we like it or not, so to design a system on other assumptions is to design it for failure. My ideal regulator is an insightful genius working for the common good, but since I’m never likely to meet that person, a practical goal is to encourage regulators to be small but very well funded, with key salaries and performance measures that are just behind the industries they are supposed to regulate. Regulators must be able to be fired – no sense in offering someone a private sector salary and public sector accountability. Unfortunately, most regulators end up going the other way, hiring more and more people of average competence, that they become both expensive and ineffective.

Second, a great regulator needs to be independent. You’re the guy who tells people to stop doing what will hurt society; it’s very hard to do that to your friends. A regulatory job is a lonely job, which is why you hear so many stories of regulators being wined and dined by the industries they regulate only to make sure they don’t look too hard in the back room. A great regulator needs to know a lot about an industry, but be independent of that industry. Again, my ideal is someone who has made a good living in a sector, knows it backwards, can justify their high price, but wants to make a contribution to society.

Third, a great regulator needs to have teeth and muscle. It has been very frustrating for me to watch the South African telecomms regulator get tied up in court by Telkom, and stymied by government department inadequacy. Regulators need to be able to drive things forward, they need to be able to change the way companies behave, and they cannot rely on moral suasion to do so.

And fourth, a regulator has to make very tough decisions about innovation, which amount to venture capital decisions – to make them well, you have to be able to tell the future. For example, when an industry changes, as all industries change, how should the rules evolve? When a new need for society is identified, like the need to address climate change early and systemically, how should the rules evolve? Regulators need to move forward as fast as the industries they regulate, and they need to make decisions about things we don’t yet understand. And even when you regulate, you may not be able to stop an impending crisis. It’s very easy to criticize Greenspan for his light touch regulation on hedge funds and derivatives today, but it’s not at all clear to me that regulation would have made a difference, I think it would simply have moved the shadow global financial system offshore.

So regulation is extremely difficult, but also very much worth investing in if you are trying to run a healthy, vibrant, capitalist society.

Spot on.

Why he blogs

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One of my favourite bloggers is Willem Buiter. He’s just written a lovely post explaining why he blogs.

To all those readers of this blog who have requested shorter, snappier, less technical and abstruse postings, the following. I write this blog for me, not for my readers. Writing things down is the only way for me to communicate effectively with myself about complex issues. By doing this writing in the form of a blog, I gain the option of taking on board the comments and criticism of those who read my scribblings and feel compelled to respond to it. I gain this benefit at the cost of having to plough through a lot of stuff that makes little or no sense, in order to uncover the few pearls hidden among the swine. There are minor vanity/ego rents to having people read what I write, and my consulting income may receive an indeterminate boost from these activities. But all that is secondary to my need to write. I don’t know something unless I have written it down.

I started this blog quite independently, at http://maverecon.blogspot.com/. I was invited by the Financial Times to move my blog to their site. Because of the likelihood of greater vanity/ego rents and the possibility of more frequent intelligent feedback through wider readership, I accepted this invitation. When the FT lose interest, I will go private again. I don’t get paid for this blog.

Attaboy! Echoes of my own attitude to the question.

Google as a predictor

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Following on from this post and today’s Observer column, I’ve had some feedback asking how one might go about using Google queries as forward indicators of economic developments. The answer is that I don’t know, but it probably hinges on finding the right search queries to map. Here are some experiments I’ve done.

This suggests that people weren’t really concerned about bank deposit guarantees until August 2008. I don’t believe this, so perhaps this is the wrong search term to be tracking.

This suggests that the peak of interest in house prices occurred in 2005 and is now in gentle decline. This might indicate that this search term is a token for general curiosity (“wonder why our house is worth at the moment?”) rather than alarm. It’s interesting to compare this with the chart for ‘negative equity’ below.

This has a regular annual cycle but is now clearly on the rise. Again, it’s not clear that it has much predictive power.

Speaks for itself, I think.

Ditto.

As I say, the trick would be to identify search terms which would give an indication of what people know or suspect about their organisational future.

There’s nothing terribly systematic about this — I was just trying to think of search terms that might reveals what people were thinking as they realise that they face an uncertain future.

Tony Hirst, who is the nearest thing to a wizard with Google data that I know, has some interesting things to say about the topic. He’s also knowledgeable about the limitations of the Google data.