hanno kaiser

According to the NYT, Nicolas Sarkozy said that “[w]e won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” probably referring to the fact that about half of the 12 million books scanned by Google are not in English. How exactly is cultural heritage threatened by increased access? Because hundreds of thousands of links to French language books would be added to the 850,000 entries in the French Wikipedia within weeks? Because more and more people around the world would read, re-read, and incorporate in their own lifes, storytelling, and cultural production French works? Prime Minister Francois Fillon similarly said that France would not accept another cultural industry being “threatened by looting.” So culture is looted by access, use, and relevance? What a profound misunderstaning of what culture is and how it works.

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Among the stock arguments in the debate whether IP rights can be essential facilities and if so whether and under what conditions mandatory RAND licenses can be pursued under Section 2 is the claim that a duty to license (e.g., API specifications) is fundamentally at odds with the grant of the IP right itself. That is because patents and copyrights explicitly involve the power to exclude others from infringing those rights. A consequence of this argument has been the call for stronger protection against antitrust duties to share for IP rights than is afforded to tangible property. The CSU v. Xerox case is an illustration of this line of reasoning. Irrespective of one’s policy position with respect to essential facilities claims, the argument that duties to license are fundamentally at odds with the IP grand is unconvincing, because both IP rights and essential facilities are expressions of very similar tradeoffs between losses in short term static efficiency in order to promote long term dynamic efficiencies. Copyrights and patents are granted to promote the progress of science and useful arts in the long run. The right to exclude, and the costs that come with it, is a means to that end. Essential facilities recalibrate the exclusion/incentive tradeoff where the expected gains from maintaining the upstream incentives to innovate and invest are outweighed by the expected gains from increased downstream competition. Given the structural similarity of the tradreoffs involved, essential facility tweaks to the IP exclusion default are not “fundamentally at odds” with the IP grant. Rather, both are expressions of the same policy concerns. That doesn’t mean, of course, that such tweaks — or exceptions to the IP rules — are always appropriate, as some facilities are far more likely to induce significant downstream welfare gains from being opened than others. It does mean, however, that one cannot simply avoid the issue by pointing to an existing IP right.

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Here are the slides for an upcoming talk on standard setting after Rambus, Broadcom (3rd. Cir.), Qualcomm (Fed. Cir.), and N-Data at the Advanced Patent Law Institute Conference in Palo Alto. Drop me a note if you are attending and would like me to address any other topics (offline, probably, the slot is only for 30 minutes).

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Here are the slides from my talk at the PLI seminar Understanding the IP License 2009 in Chicago. This was a fun event with a great crowd. Thanks to everyone for making this such a rewarding trip!

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Kudos to Google for setting up the Data Liberation Front project, which is headed up by Brian Fitzpatrick out of Chicago. (Nice logo, by the way.) To me, open data formats are even more important than open source software, because it’s stuff that I wrote that I can’t retrieve when it’s stored in some proprietary format. The ability to export my stuff is really about whether technology serves me or vice versa. Call me paranoid, but that’s why since about 1985 I’ve been archiving almost all of my writing in plaintext ASCII. I like the fact that Google set a high standard for itself. The website proclaims:

Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google’s products. Our team’s goal is to make it easier for them to move data in and out.

From an engineering standpoint, that shouldn’t be too hard, but without a dedicated team championing the cause (and doing the work) it simply wouldn’t get done. Developers are busy people and export features aren’t mission critical. Data export, of course, is about more than being able to save individual files in a more or less standard format. It is about bulk export. I am looking forward to seeing an “export all” button in Google Docs.

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If the Wordpress landing page is static, having a sidebar is often not particularly useful. To only display the sidebar on a dynamic journal page, the is_page function comes in handy. is_page() is true if and only if the page displayed is a static page. Thus, to remove the sidebar from all static pages, add a condition to the template’s sidebar.php file that displays the sidebar only if the current page is not a static page.

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Facebook lowers the cost of maintaining social relationships. It allows us to actively and continually be a part of the lives of many more people than we otherwise could. If the level of interaction and involvement enabled by Facebook is sufficient to transform our contacts from strangers to friends (which is very much an open question), then Facebook and other social networks could have a profound impact on morality by scaling up moral particularism into a realm previously reserved to universalism (or politically organized “communities of fate.”) A perennial problem of universalist moral theories (such as consequentialism and theories of right) is their lack of motivational pull. Particular relationships such as among friends and family, in contrast, supply us with (more or less) reliable altruistic motivations but have limits both in the size of the in-group and as rationally justifiable moral theories. Social networks cannot solve the theoretical problem, but they could change our moral practice by extending in-group motivations for benevolent action to a much larger group, thus creating a mesh network of overlapping particular obligations on a very large scale.

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