Wolfram Alpha Wants To Change Software [& Abuse Copyright]
InfoWorld recently posted an article about search engine Wolfram|Alpha entitled How Wolfram Alpha could change software.
Wolfram Research is claiming that each page of results returned by the Wolfram Alpha engine is a unique, copyrightable work, like a report or term paper. That makes Wolfram Alpha different not just from classic search engines, but from most software. While software companies routinely retain sole ownership of their software and license it to users, Wolfram Research has taken the additional step of claiming ownership of the output of the software itself. It’s a bold assertion, and one that could have significant ramifications for the software industry as a whole.
What a terrible, horrible, awful idea. Copyright protection exists, in large part, to provide an incentive for people to produce creative work. Were there no copyright, the argument goes, then people wouldn’t pursue artistic endeavors. Others would copy and cash in, making the time/energy/skill investment a waste. Granting and enforcing copyright protection, then, can be seen as society recognizing the value of such work and forcing a period of exclusive use to reward effort with an opportunity to profit.
Protecting automated results as creative output absolutely defeats the incentive mechanism, for then not only is the underlying software protected, but so too is that software’s output… even if all that software is doing is filtering and/or re-ordering and presenting others’ content.
Start allowing this sort of protection and an infinite loop is quickly created. Great for Wolfram|Alpha, terrible for everyone else.
Winning vs. Justice
Our foundation, the rule of law.
From 2001-2008, the Department of Justice was transformed from a respectable, reasonably-run segment of the executive that operated to prosecute violations of the law into a partisan frat house on the Monday after a weekend-long party. Drunk with power, philosophically opposed to the rule of law, or simply used as a political tool, the DOJ under W followed the fundamental belief that if you are in charge and you win, then justice has been done. Though blind, Justice could still act improperly and at odds with political goals. Better to cover her, lest other goals be compromised. Regardless of the means, the ends were all that mattered.
Of course, winning is not the same as doing justice. As part of his campaign for President, Obama, an excellent lawyer in his own right, promised major changes to the DOJ. Once elected, our new President started at the top, installing an Attorney General who understands the import of the rule of law and of justice as central to the DOJ's mission.
As one of his first major acts, AG Holder shockingly decided not to contest the appeal of Ted Stevens. Formerly the Republican Senator from Alaska, Stevens had been convicted for corruption under W.
Now you might be saying to yourself "How could this have been a partisan play by W's cronies?" or "Why would the Republicans go after one of their own?" A number of reasons...
- Stevens had run into trouble with the press for pushing for pork projects such as the "bridge to nowhere."
- One of the oldest Senators, he seemed behind the times and out of touch, once famously calling the Internet a "series of tubes."
- Between 1 and 2, he was giving the party a bad name and hurting the party's image. As such, Senator Stevens had made himself expendable.
- With Gov. Palin running for Vice President as an anti-corruption, anti-establishment candidate, it helped her story to say that she got rid of corruption in her state. Who better for her to take down than Alaska's own long-serving, powerful state Senator?
- Ted Stevens represented a highly conservative constituancy. Even were he to be run out of town, it was likely that a different Republican would take his spot. In fact, even though he was facing these corruption charges during his campaign, Stevens was only narrowly defeated by his Democrat opponent.
So if the prosecution of Stevens was a partisan play by Republicans, then shouldn't Holder's decision to drop the case also be seen as partisan?
That argument might have some weight, had Holder not clearly stated his reasons for dropping the charges.
The federal judge presiding over the Stevens decision "said he had never seen such mishandling of a case by prosecutors. He took the extraordinary step of opening an investigation into whether the Justice Department attorneys broke the law by withholding evidence, and he encouraged Holder to increase training for new and experienced prosecutors."
In response, Holder said the following:
There are things that we have to take into account given what has happened recently, with regard to training, with regard to resources, and I expect that we'll have some announcements to make to you all in the not too distant future. . . .
I always want to ensure that the Justice Department acts in a way that is consistent with the long tradition of this great department — that we treat people fairly, that if we make mistakes we admit them and that we then take the appropriate action.
In other words, there's a new Sheriff in town.
What's more, Holder isn't stopping at spouting rhetoric to the press. A friend and federal Public Defender, passed on this quote today:
Your job as assistant US attorneys is not to convict people. Your job is not to win cases. Your job is to do justice. Your job is in every case, every decision that you make, to do the right thing. Anybody who asks you to do something other than that is to be ignored. Any policy that is at tension with that is to be questioned and brought to my attention. And I mean that.
-- Eric Holder, Attorney General of the United States
Notice that Holder wasn't talking to those who work directly for him, or to those in charge of big cases. He was talking to assistant US attorneys. He was talking to the foot soldiers of the department, the grunts, the younger attorneys who might have worked exclusively under the prior administration, the DOJ attorneys most in need of retraining.
And, with that statement, the pursuit of justice and respect for the rule of law returned to their proper places as guiding principles of the DOJ.
Second Circuit Promotes Confusion Regarding Trademark
How much TM protection is too much?
When you use any "free" Google product (search, email, YouTube, etc.) Google displays some sponsored ads -- AdWords -- most notably on the right side of the screen. Other websites (most commonly blogs) also include these text-only ads on their websites.
AdWords is an incredibly successful program. Google's innovation has been to mine anonymous user data to narrowly target the ads, displaying only ads relevant to a user's search or the content of an email or blog post. Both Google and the site owner gain revenue from displaying the ads, the advertiser gains access to the narrow subset of consumers most likely interested in what the advertiser is promoting via the ad.
As an example if you email your friend about coaching little league baseball, and you happen to mention that you live in San Francisco, you'll likely see AdWord ads for the Giants, Major League Baseball, and maybe someone like Easton, a maker of baseball bats. Old news, right? This all makes sense. The baseball emailer isn't stuck skimming ads about perfume or a shoe sale at Neiman Marcus or low-cost flights to London -- those ads would feel irrelevant, and would be a waste of everyone's time and money.
More controversially, Google also made a practice of selling ad space based on the user's input of trademarked terms. So if I did a search for "SF Giants," the official trademark of a professional baseball team, an ad for the Giants' hated rival, the LA Dodgers, or for MLB fans against steroids might show up. Makes sense, right? Why always preach to the converted; sometimes it's most effective to spread a message to those who might be directly opposed.
More importantly, because Google was willing to sell the rights to any term to the highest bidder -- regardless of who owned the trademark -- to anyone who wanted to buy those rights, Google removed the need for them to make any decision about who should or should not be able to advertise to whom. As such, Google refrained from refusing to allow anyone to speak (so long as they were willing to pay for the ad). In so doing, they also refrained from infringing on any person's First Amendment right to speak and express themselves freely.
Problems arise because there is only a limited amount of real estate available for ads on any given web page. As such, company A's competitor, company B could, theoretically, buy up all access to A's available ad space in order to promote B's product. So while a search for A would show A's website as the first search result, all of the ad's next to that link would point to B's products... and there would be nothing that A could do to stop it.
When this started happening, a number of companies in A's situation felt that their opponents were playing dirty. Worse, they felt that Google, in selling their trademarked company or product name, was violating their right to control those words, which they owned. So, of course, they sued Google.
Trademark law, fundamentally, balances the need of a company to develop a brand and the need of consumers to know the source of a product (important when evaluating aspects such as quality or reliability) against constitutionally-protected free speech.
The first court to hear this challenge to Google's practice felt that Google was balancing free speech and trademark rights in an acceptable manner. The plaintiff appealed, and the Second Circuit this week overruled the lower court's decision. In seeking a middle-ground, however, the Second Circuit muddied the waters.
Today's ruling does not say that buying or selling a trademark as a search keyword necessarily infringes the trademark. The trademark owner still must prove that consumers are confused. The Second Circuit seemed to think that was shield enough for the likes of Google.
But this ignores the financial realities of litigation, and how those realities condition the business decisions of intermediaries. Google and advertisers who participate in the AdWords program have been targeted nationwide in a large number of lawsuits. The Second Circuit's ruling today makes it difficult for these defendants to get rid of these cases on purely legal grounds. Litigating a trademark case past this point, to summary judgement or trial, requires a substantial financial investment that most companies simply won’t want to make, even if they are confident they will win in the end. (Witness Blockshopper’s decision last month to settle with Jones Day after BlockShopper lost its motion to dismiss Jones Day’s trademark suit, even though the case was was widely ridiculed as preposterous.)
On Looting
Now that we own their sponsor, U.S. taxpayers should get a free Man U jersey with income tax payment. Or we should be able to have Rooney punch a banker. Either way.
Does listening to pundits discuss he financial crisis make your head spin, leaving you both angry and confused? Do you know that something in the discussion is just not right... in an Orwellian sense? Do you feel like you're watching the aftermath of the largest theft in the history of the world?
If so, you're not alone... and you're right to feel this way.
In the early nineties, a pair of economists classified the behavior that led to this debacle, described the environment that would make such behavior likely, and suggested that it would happen again as the natural result of that environment.
Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: “Looting.”
The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that . . . investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses.
In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.
The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”
[Emphasis added.] Sound familiar?
On certain low-documentation loan programs, such as stated income/stated asset (SISA) loans, income and assets are simply stated on the loan application. On other loan programs, such as no income/no asset (NINA) loans, no income and assets are given on the loan application form. These loan programs open the door for unethical behavior by unscrupulous borrowers and lenders.These loan programs are designed for borrowers who have a hard time producing income and asset verifying documents, such as prior tax returns, or who have untraditional sources of income, such as tips, or a personal business. These loans are called liar loans because the SISA or NINA features open the door for abuse when borrowers or their mortgage brokers or loan officers overstate income and/or assets in order to qualify the borrower for a larger mortgage.
For more on how these loans were abused by lenders, see this Washington Post article from 2007. (And if you have more time, devote an hour to listen to "The Giant Pool of Money," a fantastic report by This American Life.)
So what about the idea that a lot of smart people just made innocent mistakes, or that this is a systemic problem that no one could have predicted? Looting is not just an error in judgment, but knowing, self-interested behavior.
The term that’s used to describe this general problem, of course, is moral hazard. When people are protected from the consequences of risky behavior, they behave in a pretty risky fashion. Bankers can make long-shot investments, knowing that they will keep the profits if they succeed, while the taxpayers will cover the losses.
[The distinction between moral hazard and looting is an important one.]
With moral hazard, bankers are making real wagers. If those wagers pay off, the government has no role in the transaction. With looting, the government’s involvement is crucial to the whole enterprise.
Knowing that their financial institutions were too big too fail, bankers made choices that were only rational in an environment where personal gains were all that mattered, and where a government bailout was seen as inevitable. The government was the escape route, the getaway driver... and the thieves got away scot free.
We should be angry. We've been robbed.
Friends Abroad Watched The Inauguration
Mary (in profile) and Sun (front and center) are intercontinental when they eat french toast.
A couple of my friends -- law school classmates -- are giving back by working for the public good in southeast Asia. They got together in Cambodia to watch the inauguration, and had their photo snapped and blown up with a half-page, above-the-fold article in the Phenom Penh Post!**
Mary is working in Chiang Mai, Thailand, experimenting in the new frontier of corporate social responsibility and setting up a new ice cream business dedicated to supporting needy children in the region. She's posting adventure updates on her blog.
Sun is working as a law clerk for the UN in Cambodia. She explains,
The United Nations Assistant to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT) provides the international component to the “hybrid” court, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The tribunal was set up in 2003 jointly by the UN and the Cambodian government to prosecute senior members of the former Khmer Rouge regime. Among the crimes charged are violations of the Cambodian penal code, genocide, crimes against humanity and violations of the Geneva Convention.
[It's] a clerkship, but on the international level. doing research, writing memos, orders, decisions and stuff for the pre-trial judges. Ok, that's familiar. But throw in this hybrid tribunal and parts of the civil law system (since cambodian criminal procedure is based on the french civil system from the 1950s) and the learning curve is steep.
Sun is blogging, too. Check her out here.
Great to see that they're getting to hang out and enjoy life abroad. Now if they can just keep the damn paparazzi out of their way, they'll be set. Celebrity is nice for a minute, but believe you me, it gets old fast.
* Caption refers to a line from The Move by the Beastie Boys.
** Their friend who was interviewed by the Post was misquoted by the reporter!
What I said to journalist I liked McCain personally, but I don't like Republican Policy: 1) War in Iraq and 2) Anti-abortion. He misquoted my opinions -- anyways now I turned to support Obama.
Obama's First Task — Hit Pause At Gitmo
There's a new sheriff in town.
Use of torture, the murder of habeas corpus, secrecy and the unilateral use of force. Over time, these are four of the most powerful memories we will have of President Bush, and they will linger as a stain on Americas past.
It was widely speculated that one of Obama's first actions as President would be to move towards closing Guantanamo. Still, Cheney (along with commentators on the Right) argued that Obama would enter his new post, see the daily security reports, and change his position, finding that the threat was real and imminent, that Guantanamo was central to our security.
What did the new President do?
Hours after taking office on Tuesday, President Barack Obama ordered military prosecutors in the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals to ask for a 120-day halt in all pending cases. . . .
The request would halt proceedings in 21 pending cases, including the death penalty case against five Guantanamo prisoners accused of plotting the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks in 2001.
An excellent start for the new President. Mark Day #1 down as a success. On to tomorrow...
[Image via The Big Picture.]
Chronobuilder — A New Tool For Attorneys
My friend Jim is helping launch a new tool intended to make data entry and document management as painless and as accessible as possible. Though aimed primarily at litigators, the tool seems like it might also be useful for managing contract and licensing transactions. From their site:
Every screen of this program was designed by attorneys with one goal in mind: to enable high volume, fast-paced data entry and analysis of facts and evidence.
Chronobuilder was designed so that you can immediately start entering evidence. It is very similar to how you enter facts on the web when you buy products, how you enter information to online tax programs, or how you buy movie tickets online. You do not need to think about objects, lists, or start trying to make linkages. Just grab your first piece of evidence or think of the first fact you want to enter, and go to the Single Evidence Entry Screen. We like to call the Single Evidence Entry screen “S.E.E.” or “SEE”. (You can remember this by thinking: “I use Chronobuilder to SEE my facts and evidence.”)
They're offering a 30-day free trial, and offer a discount to 2L Summer Associates and recent Law School grads. No risk, so give it a spin, kick the tires, and see if Chronobuilder can remove some of the complexity from your practice.
My Telecom Professor, On DTV
An op-ed by my Telecommunications and Broadcast Media Law professor was published in the SF Chronicle. Regarding the first crisis to hit the next President, he suggests the following...
So mark Feb. 17, 2009, on your calendar. That's the date when over-the-air broadcast television stations stop transmitting in analog signals and turn on digital television broadcasts, called DTV. The effect, for anyone who receives over-the-air television with an analog television, will be a blank screen. . . . Make no mistake about this: it will be a train wreck.
There are several additional steps the government should take right now to ensure that those at risk of either not receiving nor understanding the message do get it. The Social Security Administration should include a simple notice of the change and the steps an over-the-air viewer must take with every Social Security check or deposit acknowledgement. Further, the U.S. Postal Service could also distribute a flyer with every mail delivery several times during the remainder of this year and then again in January 2009.
Unless the government does a much better job of ensuring that everyone gets the message, many won't. The result will be a fiasco.
Completely on target. From what I've read, that NC test had a 0.5% fail rate, which sounds great until you realize that this was under optimal conditions with extensive community outreach. Expanded out to the entire country, even this near-perfect performance leaves one million people tuning in to snow. Feb. 17, 2009 is going to be interesting. I'm expecting a run on converters at Target and Walmart, and a lot of unhappy calls to customer support.
Bar Prep Lyrics (Part II)
Black Thought In Action
- Life is hard in general / and we can't complain if things are hard - Talib Kweli
- He caused earthquakes / just from / ex-per-i-ments / some thoughts got lost / not knowing where it went - GZA
- The half-truth is a whole lie - Fly Union
- Stay fluid even in staccato - Mos Def
- I saw The Wizard when the curtain fell - Talib Kweli
And my new mantra for the Bar...
- I'm exhausted but I'll never ever forfeit - Black Thought
[Image via http://black-thought.com/]