Category Archives: Culture
These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics
Feds need warrant to get phone data
In a victory for cell phone users everywhere, A court says that the feds need a warrant to request phone data which includes location. We should be celebrating this victory even though it isn’t a total victory. This case will most likely go to the US Supreme Court. The Federal government is not going to give up on this easily. Especially since there have been other rulings that have ruled in favor of warrantless mobile phone tracking. So it’s still unclear what the end result of all of this will be.
Additionally, this may also have implications for some of the other tracking that the government is doing. Apparently, the governments don’t need a warrant to install GPS tracking devices onto cars. Which the police argue saves tax payers money. It raises serious privacy concerns though. What is the limit to the number of people the police can track at a time? Can they simply track anyone closely related to a crime even if they have nothing to do with any sort of crime? With polices officers required to track individuals this puts an obvious limit on the number of people the police and other law enforcement agencies can track. They are limited to the usefulness of the tracking and the number of officers they have available to track. With the GPS tracking they have the ability to simultaneously, continuously track any individual associated with a crime or a suspect of a case. This gives them a huge amount of data on people that may not have done anything illegal and shouldn’t be tracked in the first place.
With this data agencies are able to construct a network of frequent activities for the prime suspect and any other people they consider interesting. If these suspects go to a known drug hide out it can implement additional people in a crime that wouldn’t have been obvious without the tracking. It could allow for an increased ability to crack down on crime. However, it can also send up a great deal of false positives and implement innocents.
Should we be concerned with this type of tracking? Definitely. The purpose of requiring a warrant, in a historical context, is to prevent the government for arbitrarily searching the house of a person. I find the ability to be remotely tracked terrifying. Just because I don’t have any thing to worry about doesn’t mean I’d want the government to have the ability to track me on a whim. I feel it’s important for there to be a check on the law enforcement. I think it’s clear from the UC Davis pepper spray incident that there’s a sense of unlimited power within many of our police forces. Warrantless tracking through cell phones or vehicles are incredibly similar.
The job of the court and our constitution is to protect the people from the excesses of the government through the actions of law enforcement. We need to work with our legislation to push for laws to address these issues if the courts don’t make the action in the manner to protect the fourth amendment and our privacy.
Review: Republic Lost. Or the hand book for OWS
I just finished Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig last night. If it’s not obvious by now, I’m a big Lessig fan. I find his work extremely interesting and relevant to the changing world. It is a bit dry to be honest, all of his writings deal with how society, the market and laws interact.
In my opinion this book should be the handbook for anyone interested in the Occupy movement. I’ll explain why in a few steps. First, he mentions various different cases of inequity which are highly promenient in the US. He specifically addresses the 99% argument and does it a great deal of good. He fully explains what it means to be in the 99% in a way that has been missing in the dialogue. He actually says that the 1% isn’t the biggest problem it’s actually a much smaller percentage, but the 1% can cause a lot of damage as well.
In the book he systematically explains how and why money is a problem in the system. In many cases it’s not that there is quid pro quo corruption going on. More that it seems like there is corruption going on because of the money involved. As an outsider it’s hard to trust a system where the Teachers union (or wall street or exxon) can say I will give $1 million dollars to any candidate that supports tenure (or bail outs or deep water drilling). This is an implicit threat because if you don’t support these topics your opponent will, because it will give them campaign donations. As donations play a huge amount of time for a congressman (30-70%) anything that makes it easier to get money the congressmen will campaign to support.
There have been studies that question if these gifts actively change legislative voting behavior, but many quotes from former congressmen explaining that there is a sense of obligation to the donor. This isn’t a tit for tat type exchange, Lessig argues it’s more of a gift economy. Like what buy a round of beers for your friends, you don’t want money for it, you want them to buy you the next round. The fact that you bought instills (in most people) a sense of obligation to buy the next round. This analogue is perfect in fact, as Lessig argues that congress is dependent on these funds like an alcoholic. This is an illicit dependency as he shows that Congress should be “dependent on the People alone.”
Lessig builds an extremely will supported case that donations impact the legislative process by impacting what congressional leaders allow debate on. Even if it doesn’t impact votes, it impacts what is considered important by the congress. This is one of the ways that congress seems out of touch with regular people. I believe Lessig builds a strong enough case to demonstrate that something must be done. He actually has a few suggestions on how to deal with the problem.
The first is the old fashioned way of trying to build support through congress to enact real campaign reform. Lessig doesn’t believe this is realistic and gives it about a 0% chance of success. His next idea is to get about 300 well known people to run as super candidate to force the issues. Have these people run in multiple different districts (it’s legal) and garner enough attention to force the politicians to say they will vote for reform. Do this in enough state and in the right states and it might work. He calls this a kind of political terrorism. He gives it a 5% chance of working once you get started.
His next idea is to have one of those types candidates run for the of president making the promise to hold congress hostage until the reforms are made, BUT resign as soon as the reforms are completed. He argues that this is required for people to honestly believe that the changes would happen and for congress to actually enact the changes. There would be no negotiations other than making sure all the normal people get paid and services don’t impact most business. He also gives this one a 5% chance of working.
The final suggestion is to push for a constitutional convention. This would require 38/50 states to OK the convention. He, at length, describes all the potential problems and legal issues with the convention, which matter once the ball gets rolling. In addition to this he suggests creating about 300 shadow conventions where regular people are given the opportunity to make constitutional amendments. These could then be the basis for what is sent to congress.
In total, if you are part of the OWS movement you need to read this book. It will help give more firepower for your arguments against the 1% and it will give some guidance on what the first priority should be. I agree with Lessig that until we get money out of the system no other reforms are possible. We will not have a function government until the People are the only thing the government relies on for choices of legislature.
Unintended consequences of knowledge management regimes
There are several consequences of the differences between the US (and the west) and China (and other autocracies). First, with one of the major assumptions of neoclassical economics out the window, it calls into question basing economic policy on neoclassical economics. Second, with a monopoly structure for intellectual property several different economic incentives have been created. Finally, the differences in IP management between the countries creates tensions at several different levels. I’ll discuss each of these points in more detail.
First, if one of the major assumptions for economic policy includes non-rival, non-exclusive knowledge, it’s difficult to understand why there isn’t more competition in many markets. However, as we know it’s not really possible for any firm to pick up any sort of technology and start to produce a given product. Because of this difficulty regions and areas tend to become experts at specific types of technologies. However, even in the case of China the freedom of access to IP makes it easier for firms to produce specific products. The problem still lies in the fact that you still need tacit knowledge to actually make the product. A patent is supposed to give you the information you need to produce the technology. However, the actual patents are difficult to read and not likely to be possible
Second, with a monopoly structure in place for intellectual property it gives very different incentives for owners of intellectual property. First, for people who actually produce a product, attacking products that are similar for infringement can be a very lucrative proposition. It prevents other companies from becoming competition. Apple is currently using this tactic to go after Android through Samsung and HTC. With a full monopoly technological progress can actually come to a standstill. An example of this is with Xerox copiers. With the monopoly in place Xerox did not innovate and kept prices extremely high. As soon as their patent ran out the competition came in and almost took all of the market share from Xerox. They introduced lower priced products and a wider more personal product range. Without the monopoly in place other companies could try to move into the market space earlier and drive innovation from the beginning of the market. Finally, with reduced ownership of IP there will be less patent trolls like Intellectual Ventures.
Third, the IP management is causing issues between firms and the Chinese government. The firms do not want to give up their IP because it’s how they are able to make their money. Some of these technologies are so easy to copy it’s impossible to make a profit without protection. In theory pharmaceuticals should be perfectly copyable based on the chemical properties of the drug. If the pharmaceutical companies didn’t have a chance to recoup the investment on a drug (500 million – 1 billion per drug) there would be no innovation. The differences present problems for trade and agreements between countries. The US and China have had serious disagreements over how IP should be managed.
Basically, the differences in how IP is understood impacts a countries policies economically and in trade. It is important to understand exactly what’s going on with these issues. Our governments are pushing for different levels of control over IP both in patents and other forms of copyright. As some one interested in policy, it’s important to understand what types of policies we should be pushing for. I don’t think there’s any true right answer for the IP problem. In different situations policies should be adjusted. We cannot have a stagnant IP regime when technologies are evolving as fast as they are.
Are democracies or autocracies better with technology Management?
According to neoclassical economics knowledge is a non-rival (I can use it without preventing you from using it) and non-exclusive (available to everyone) resource. This has two impacts on their economic theory. First, the actual impact of research and development is excluded from economic growth and is ignored. Second, that any company should be able to pick up and produce any technology. Both of these points are relatively ridiculous. For two reasons. First, we know that research leads to the formation of new companies. Second we know that most companies cannot produce any product and many companies that produce products outside their expertise fail at it.
From a neoclassical perspective democracies are terrible at sharing knowledge and technologies. Democracies have a slew of laws that regulate access to technology form monopolies for specific technologies if they have something called a patent. Additionally, there are other contracts that can get in the way of sharing of knowledge in a way that is neoclassical. Non-disclosure agreements and non-compete clauses. If you aren’t allowed to discuss a specific technology with other people, it prevents knowledge from spreading and being shared to other companies. If you aren’t allowed to compete within the same industry after you leave a company, it prevents you from using that knowledge in a positive way at another firm.
These laws have been put into place in our democracies to ensure proper protection of technologies for firms. It’s designed to prevent the spreading of tacit knowledge from company A to company B. As a company this is incredibly desirable. Without these protections some research would be worthless to conduct. Knowledge spill-overs would cause prices to fall to cost or lower as firms compete for market share. It’s great for consumers, but bad for firms.
So what happens in China? Well according to Make it in America, China requires many firms to hand over their Intellectual Property to the Chinese state. What ends up happening after this is that the Chinese government sells the information or gives the information to one or more Chinese company. These companies tend to be made up of former employees at the company that made the product before. This allows tacit knowledge transfer to the firm and a fast ramp to compete directly with the inventor of the technology. The knowledge is freer in China than it is in the US because of this. This increases competition and may be impacting the cost of goods like solar panels.
In a way this type of behavior forces companies to compete based on the actual costs of the technology. This is what is expected in the neoclassical theory. All prices will eventually drop to the marginal cost of a product with near zero profits for the producing company. In a perverse way, this is a “freer” market than ours because it comes closer to the non-rival non-exclusive knowledge base.
In my next blog, I’ll discuss this topic more.
Science, Technology, + Culture 