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The Libertarian Case for Free Software
One of the most interesting trends in tech policy over the last decade has been the emergence of free software as a major force in the computer industry. For example, some of our readers probably use the Mozilla Firefox web browser, which was developed by a team of volunteers collaborating over the Internet. And in fact, you’re using free software right now! Cato’s own web servers use the Linux operating system and the Apache web server to serve up Cato’s website. Both Linux and Apache are free software, developed by volunteers and made available for free to the general public.
Free software has caught some flack among libertarians who fault it for its failure to rely on the traditional mechanisms of the market. In the latest edition of Cato’s TechKnowledge newsletter, I argue that this criticism is misguided.
Free software is precisely the kind of decentralized, voluntary cooperation that libertarians should be holding up as an alternative to the coercive power of the state. Free software is produced by volunteers donating their time, without a government program in sight. If that’s not a libertarian success story, I don’t know what is.
So why do we see so many libertarians criticizing such peaceful, but noncommercial, forms of social organization? Many are taking the bait offered by the subset of free software proponents who have adopted the rhetoric of the left to promote their goals. We’re used to arguing with these people, who advocate using the state to impose communal forms of organization. Libertarians criticize forcing employees to join unions, prohibiting organ donors from becoming organ sellers, and requiring children to attend government schools. In each case, we hold up markets, business, and money as the tools of voluntary alternatives to coercive government programs.
In these arguments, progressives often claim they can use state power to create and nurture the rich social structures that typify civil society. But they’re wrong. State intervention almost always results in bureaucratized and politicized institutions that pit us against one another in bitter struggles. For example, a lot of progressives laud the potential of public schools to create more unified communities. But in practice, the opposite is true: our public schools have become one of the most divisive institutions in American society. They’ve sparked pitched battles over what to teach our children about sex, evolution, religion, and many other topics. The reality is that you can’t create civil society by government fiat.
So libertarians are right to criticize policies aimed at accomplishing communal goals via coercive means. But some libertarians have gotten so used to defending the market against those who want to impose collectivism that they start criticizing purely voluntary efforts to organize people on more communal lines. They are forgetting that libertarianism is not necessarily about increasing the role of for–profit enterprise in every aspect of our lives. Commercial activity is one alternative to statism, and an extremely important one. But it’s just one possible mode of cooperation, and it’s not necessarily the best choice in every situation.
Tech and the Environment
Valleywag has an excellent rant on the problems with environmentalists’ blackmailing the technology industry:
To ignore the wider benefits of the digital revolution is obtuse. Here’s the fundamental truth: the more human activity is pursued online, the less the environmental footprint. Apple’s pioneering of desktop publishing did away with much of the filthy print industry; its easy video-conferencing will make some business trips unnecessary; Ebay’s person-to-person marketplace bypasses cumbersome retail logistics; and Google is replacing inefficient physical libraries and filing systems across the world. Frankly, if a few computers end up in dumps, rather than recycled: so what.
I can understand why it would be convenient to go after Apple. Steve Jobs’ computer maker is more easily pressured than most companies, because of its pristine brand, and because so many of its customers are environmentally conscious. Al Gore, the planet’s foremost defender, is on the board. Apple makes things, which are messy. And, given the holy war against climate change, and the political correctness that stifles critical thinking, the company can’t defend itself.
The green lobby may choose to target high-tech companies rather than, say, the oil, coal or auto industries. The ex-hippies in charge of Silicon Valley companies are easy targets. But any victory, in converting them to the cause, will be purely symbolic, useful for fund-raising, maybe, but ultimately meaningless. This campaign against Apple is, at best, moral blackmail and, at worst, a cynical shakedown. Shame on them.
Thanks to Joe for the pointer. There’s a broader point here, that was best articulated by Julian Simon: in the long run, free markets and technological progress are good for the environment, because reducing costs often means reducing waste, and reducing waste often means reducing your environmental footprint. Technological progress and rapid economic growth also allows us to devote more resources to cleaning up the environment. Plus it leads to more people having the luxury to spend their time hectoring companies like Apple for their environmental records.
Bill Gates’s Flip-Flop
In today’s New York Times, I make the case against software patents, comparing a 1991 memo by Bill Gates to today’s battle between Verizon and Vonage:
[Microsoft general counsel Brad] Smith has argued that patents are essential to technological breakthroughs in software. Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “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.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want….”
It’s not surprising that Microsoft — now an entrenched incumbent — has had a change of heart. But Mr. Gates was right in 1991: patents are bad for the software industry. Nothing illustrates that better than the conflict between Verizon and Vonage.
Vonage developed one of the first Internet telephone services and has attracted more than two million customers. But last year, Verizon — one of Vonage’s biggest competitors — sued for patent infringement and won a verdict in its favor in March.
The Times has strict word-count limits, so I didn’t have the space to discuss some of the details of my argument. Here is an in-depth analysis of Verizon’s patents. And here is a longer discussion of Microsoft’s change of heart on software patents.
Immigration and American Exceptionalism
John Derbyshire has a post on immigration that perfectly captures the small-minded nativism that too often underlies opposition to immigration:
A nation has a distinctive culture. The U.S.A., which is much further than the world average from any other consequential country, and has endured several character-forming great national crises, has a culture more distinctive than most. Small boys in 1950s England could pick out an American at 200 yards. Our football (which we love) is nothing like the rest of the world’s soccer (which we find extremely boring, and which the rest of the world can keep, far as we’re concerned).
Most of the people of a nation are strongly attached to that nation and its culture. (This is called “patriotism.” Try the word out a few times. Stress on the firts syllable. It’s not that hard to spell.) They like their culture. They don’t want to see their culture transformed by uncontrolled mass immigration from places with utterly different cultures.
You may think it would be good for them to have their nation so transformed, but they don’t believe you. They like their culture. They’re attached to it. They don’t want to see it transformed in ways they do not approve, and have never voted for.
Derbyshire is right that America has a culture more distinctive than most. But the rest of this passage gets things completely backwards. What makes America exceptional is not a shared love for American football. We’re distinct because we’re the first nation explicitly founded on a set of political ideals. Patriotism, as the Founders understood it, was never about blind loyalty to our nation and its political leaders. Rather, the Founders believed that patriotism is about a commitment to the ideals they enunciated in the Declaration of Independence.
Derbyshire thinks that high levels of immigration are a threat to American exceptionalism, but the truth is the exact opposite. A big part of what makes American culture distinctive is our strong work ethic, our disrespect for authority, and our appetite for risk-taking. A big reasons for these traits is the fact that almost all of us are descended from people who valued liberty and opportunity enough to leave everything they knew behind and bear the tremendous costs and risks of crossing an ocean (or more recently, a desert) in search of freedom and opportunity. That steady stream of immigrants has always been an important source of cultural vitality. Whenever America’s elites became too complacent, a new crop of freshly minted Americans came along and challenge their dominance.
Derbyshire’s counterparts in the 19th Century no doubt warned that American culture would be “transformed by uncontrolled mass immigration from places with utterly different cultures” like Ireland, Italy, and Germany. And they were absolutely right. The details of American culture today are dramatically different from the WASP-y culture that dominated our elite institutions a century ago. It would have been unthinkable a hundred years ago to have a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court, for example.
But we’re a better country with a more distinctive culture thanks to the new cultural influences that previous waves of “uncontrolled mass immigration” brought with them. It’s important that we teach each new generation of immigrants about the values and ideals that make America distinctive, but there’s no reason to think that the current wave of mostly Hispanic immigrants will embrace these ideals any less enthusiastically than past waves did.
The real danger is that if we slam the door shut on new immigrants, our culture will gradually become stagnant and parochial like the countries most of our ancestors fled. In those countries, the defining cultural attributes center around things like what kind of clothes you wear, what kind of food you eat, and what sports you play. We’ll know that American culture has truly ceased to be distinctive when we start to define ourselves primarily by our shared love of American football.
Patent Rent-Seeking
When I worked in Cato’s DC offices a couple of years ago, I always found it kind of depressing to go to lunch on K Street and see thousands of smart, attractive young men and women crowded around me, the vast majority of whom worked as lobbyists. They were people who otherwise might have been entrepreneurs, journalists, accountants, or doctors, creating wealth and improving society. But instead, they were enticed by the fat paychecks to come to Washington, where their talents are devoted to finding clever ways to enrich their clients at the expense of taxpayers and consumers.
I had a similar sinking feeling when i read this article (via Techdirt) about the flood of young scientists and engineers who are leaving the lab for careers as patent lawyers:
Demand for these specialists is being driven by an explosion in patent applications in recent years and a growing need for lawyers to protect old patents or challenge new ones. The U.S. Patent Office estimates 450,000 patent applications will be filed this year, up from about 350,000 five years ago.
Law professors say they’re seeing more students with strong science backgrounds make the leap to law, where recruiters are snapping them up.
For at least some students who might otherwise gravitate toward a science career, the promise of much bigger paydays is a powerful lure. Others say the opportunities in academia are not as certain as they once were.
“It’s an exciting area of legal practice right now,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor R. Polk Wagner. “Every year I see more and more people coming into law school with technical backgrounds.”
“It almost scares me,” said Wagner, whose proteges include Weathers. “Who’s left in the lab?”
Who indeed?
Digg, Hacking, and Civil Disobedience
Randy Picker asks when civil disobedience is acceptable, and concludes that posting HD-DVD encryption keys doesn’t cut it:
I wouldn’t think that not being able to play an encrypted high-definition DVD on your platform of choice would fall into that category. I understand fully that people disagree about whether digital rights management and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act are good copyright policy. I also understand that users can be frustrated by limitations imposed by DRM (I’ve run into those myself). But I think the DMCA (and the DRM that it makes possible) is a long, long way from the sorts of laws for which civil disobedience is an appropriate response. Simply not liking the law is not enough. There must be more, something that recognizes the nature of reasonable disagreement over law, and the range of possible legitimate variations about those laws.
Ed Felten points out some of the reasons that geeks felt so strongly about this case. Partly it was geeks’ knee-jerk opposition to censorship. Partly it’s a protest against the DMCA.
There are a variety of reasons that the DMCA is bad public policy. I presented some of them in a paper I did for Cato last year. But instead of rehashing those arguments, let me quote an excellent essay by Paul Graham about America’s heritage of hacking. Prof. Picker dismissively characterizes this week’s incident as a dispute over “being able to play an encrypted high-definition DVD on your platform of choice,” but from the perspective of computer programmers it’s about something more fundamental than that:
Hacking predates computers. When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents. This tradition continues today. When we were in grad school, a hacker friend of mine who spent too much time around MIT had his own lock picking kit. (He now runs a hedge fund, a not unrelated enterprise.)
Digging Piracy
Something rather astonishing happened on the Internet on Tuesday. Let me start with a bit of background: Hollywood has an encryption system called AACS that it uses to scramble the content on high-definiton home video discs. Like all copy protection systems, it only took a few months before hackers found security flaws in the system. In the process they extracted a 16-byte key (basically, a very long number) that allows programmers to unlock the encrypted content.
This key had been floating around various minor websites over the last couple of months. But last month, the organization that controls the AACS system began sending cease and desist letters to various ISPs demanding that the keys be taken down from websites that were displaying them. In response, people all over the web began posting copies of the key, which is just a 16-character string.
One of the sites that had the key on it is Digg. Digg is a news website in which all of the news stories are chosen by the collective wisdom of readers. Anyone can submit a story, and then other users can vote for (called “digging”) or against (called “burying”) individual stories. The stories that get the most votes get promoted to the front page where they’re viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.
Somebody posted a story containing the AACS key, and Digg got a letter demanding that the story be removed. Digg complied. Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten describes what happened next:
Then Digg’s users revolted. As word got around about what Digg was doing, users launched a deluge of submissions to Digg, all mentioning or linking to the key. Digg’s administrators tried to keep up, but submissions showed up faster than the administrators could cancel them. For a while yesterday, the entire front page of Digg — the “hottest” pages according to Digg’s algorithms — consisted of links to the AACS key.
Last night, Digg capitulated to its users. Digg promised to stop removing links to the key, and Digg founder Kevin Rose even posted the key to the site himself.
Fred von Lohmann has a good rundown on the legal liability Digg could face from allowing the key to be posted on their site. But more interesting, I think, is the light the incident sheds on the broader debate over Internet piracy.
How to Reform E-Voting
On Friday, I made the case for scrapping computerized voting. Today I’m going to look at the leading legislative proposal to accomplish that goal, Rush Holt’s Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act. As I wrote in a recent article, the proposal would do several things:
It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available.
All of these seem to me to be big steps in the right direction. Requiring source code disclosure gives security experts like Ed Felten and Avi Rubin the opportunity to study e-voting systems and alert the authorities if major security problems are discovered. Banning Internet connections and wireless networking hardware closes off two major avenues hackers could use to compromise the machines. Perhaps most importantly, by requiring that machines produce paper records, that those records be the official record, and that the records be randomly audited, the legislation would provide a relatively high degree of certainty that even if a voting machine were hacked, we would be able to detect it and recover by using the paper records.
All in all, this seems like a good idea to me. But the legislation is not without its critics. I’ll consider two major criticisms below the fold.
The Case Against E-Voting
Ars Technica has an article about problems created by e-voting machines in the French elections on Sunday. Apparently, technical problems caused long lines, causing some voters to be turned away from the polls.
France’s problems are not an isolated incident. In November’s U.S. election, one county in Florida (ironically, the one Katherine Harris was vacating) seems to have lost about 10,000 votes, which happens to be smaller than the margin of victory between the candidates. And there were numerous smaller examples of e-voting problems all over the United States in the 2006 elections.
Those incidents by themselves would be a good argument for scrapping computerized voting. But the most important argument is more fundamental: e-voting is not, and never can be, transparent. The most important goal of any election system is that the voting process be reliable and resistant to manipulation. Transparency is a critical part of that. Transparency makes it more likely that any tampering with the election process will be detected before it can do any damage.
With e-voting, the process of recording, tabulating, and counting votes is opaque, if not completely secret. Indeed, in most cases, the source code to the e-voting machines is a trade secret, not available for public inspection. Even if the source code were available, there would still be no way to ensure that the software on a voting machine wasn’t tampered with after it was installed. This means that if someone did install malicious software onto a voting machine, there would likely be no way for us to find out until it was too late.
Against Software Patents
Over at the American, I’ve got an article on what I regard as one of the biggest threats to the long-term vitality of the software industry: the patentability of software. Last year, we saw a company with no products of its own extort $612 million from Research in Motion, makers of the wildly popular BlackBerry mobile devices. Last month, Vonage, a company that pioneered Internet telephony, was ordered to pay $58 million to Verizon and enjoined from signing up new customers. Vonage is appearing in court today to appeal the decision. Given that Vonage has yet to turn a profit, if the injunction is upheld it’s likely to be a death sentence for the company.
The really frustrating thing about both cases—and numerous other software patent cases in recent years—is that there was no allegation that the defendants’ products were in any way based on the plaintiffs’ technologies. It’s universally agreed that RIM and Vonage developed their technologies independently. Rather, the problem is that the patents in question cover extremely broad concepts: essentially “wireless email” in NTP’s case, and “translating between Internet addresses and phone numbers” in Verizon’s. It’s simply impossible to develop a mobile device that doesn’t check email wirelessly, or an Internet telephony application that doesn’t translate between IP addresses and phone numbers.
It seems to me that these sorts of problems are almost inevitable when you allow patents on software, because software is built out of a very large number of modular components. (A typical software product might have 100,000 lines of code, and just a handful of lines of code could conceivably be considered an “invention”) If you allow a significant number of those components to be patented, it becomes prohibitively expensive for software companies to even find, much less license, all of the patents that might be relevant to their particular software. And indeed, most software companies don’t even try. Many deliberately avoid doing patent searches, because “willful” infringement can carry heightened penalties.
A La Carte Cable and the Economics of Abundance
Ars Technica reports that FCC chairman Kevin Martin is once again pledging to force cable providers to offer “a la carte” cable programming. I’ve found discussing this issue frustrating because people have surprisingly strong intuitions about it. Indeed, with the possible exception of “independence from foreign oil,” I can’t think of a single policy idea that is simultaneously so wrong-headed and so popular across the political spectrum.
But it is wrong-headed. People have this intuition that when they sign up for cable, they’re “forced” to pay for MTV to get Nickelodeon. Or conversely, that they’re “forced” to pay for Nickelodeon to get MTV. They seem to imagine that if they could just pick and choose cable channels individually, they’d be able to get the content they want and lower their overall cable bill.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that almost none of the cost of providing cable service to you is dependent on the number of channels you take. In economics jargon, cable channels have close to zero marginal cost. Once the content has been produced and the coax has been laid, it costs little or nothing to give every customer access to every channel in the bundle rather than only certain channels. So if they stop sending you Nickelodeon, it doesn’t reduce the total cost of providing you with your service. So why would you expect a price break?
Indeed, there are lots and lots of examples of bundled products and services that no one in his or her right mind would demand be unbundled. For example, why am I forced to buy the sports section with the business section in my morning paper? Why am I forced to buy evening and weekend minutes with my cellular phone plan? Why was I forced to buy a variety of software products with my new laptop? Why am I forced to take an all-you-can-eat Internet connection rather than paying for only the minutes I need?
These add-on products all have near-zero marginal cost, so it doesn’t cost the company anything extra to provide them to all customers. Indeed, in some cases, it would actually cost more to provide them on an a la carte basis. Imagine the nightmare of being a paper boy if each customer got to decide which sections of the paper he would take. Read the rest of this post »
Another “Piggybacking” Story
CNN reports on another example of police hysteria over “wireless theft.” Stories like this seem to pop up every few months: somebody parks their car on a residential street, opens up his laptop, and uses it to access a wireless network that’s not protected by a password. Then the police come along and arrest the guy. In the two cases reported in this story, both of which occurred in the UK, the police let them off with a warning. But in 2005, a guy was fined 500 pounds and placed on probation for a year for “stealing” Internet access.
As I argued in an op-ed last year, this is silly. Accessing someone else’s wireless network, especially for casual activities like checking your email, is the very definition of a victimless crime. I’ve done the same thing on numerous occasions, and I deliberately leave my wireless network open in the hopes that it will prove useful to my neighbors.
The only concrete harm opponents of “piggy-backing” can come up with is that the piggy-backer might commit a crime, such as downloading pirated content or child pornography, with your connection. But remember that there are now thousands of coffee shops, hotels, and other commercial locations that offer free WiFi access, and most of them don’t make any effort to verify identities or monitor usage. So someone who wants to get untraceable Internet access can go to any one of those establishments just as well as they can park outside your house.
Which isn’t to say that there are no reasons people might not want to share their network connections with the world. If sharing your Internet access creeps you out, by all means set a password. And there’s almost certainly work to be done educating users so that people are fully informed of the risks and know how to close their network if they want to do so.
But arresting people for logging into an open network is completely counterproductive. Ubiquitous Internet access is socially useful, and the vast majority of “piggy-backers” aren’t doing anything wrong. If you see someone parked on the street outside your home using your wireless network, you shouldn’t pick up the phone and call the cops. Instead, call your geeky nephew and ask him to set a password for your network. Or, even better, do nothing and consider it your good deed for the day.
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