Tag: facebook

Show Me the Innovation

Now that the very early stages of copyright reform are underway with preliminary hearings on Capitol Hill, I think it’s worth revisiting the question as to why the conversation is happening in the first place.  There are, of course, specific adjustments to the system that ought to be looked at with regard to media & information distribution in the digital age, but these details are often hard to identify amid the clamor of broad, public messaging that has been pumped out of the Silicon Valley PR leviathan for more than a decade.  Instead of specifics, much of the testimony, editorials, and even academic theory can be boiled down to two generalized assertions:  1) the copyright system no longer serves the public interest overall; and 2) the copyright system stifles innovation, which is technically a premise for the first statement.  Since I began paying attention to these issues, I have encountered variations on these declaratives more times than I can count; and each time I do, I look for the innovation being stifled by copyright but can’t seem to find it.  In fact, if we assemble a few fragmentary glimpses of Google and Silicon Valley, a mosaic begins to take shape and forms a picture that is not exclusively innovative at all.

Innovation is one of those catch-all terms that demands context in order for it to have any discernible value. Eli Whitney didn’t necessarily intend to foster a demand for African slaves in the American South, but both slavery and the war it spawned were consequences of his Cotton Gin.  (As a side note, Whitney’s patent was overwhelmingly ignored because he wanted too much money for the simple machine, so IP theft also had a hand in expanding the slave trade and the Civil War.)  But, if the copyright system, which has already yielded more than two centuries of tremendous social and economic benefit, is now in fact stifling innovation (as Big Tech insists that it is), we should demand specifics as to exactly what is being stifled, how it’s being stifled, and who would be the beneficiaries of any proposed un-stifling to be undertaken by congress. The last part is easy to answer; Silicon Valley corporations benefit in a system with weak intellectual property laws — or at least they do now that they’ve already built multi-billion-dollar businesses from patented technologies — but the overall benefit to the public of scaling back these laws in the name of vaguely described future “innovation” is questionable.

Assuming we must rationally define innovation as something that fosters prosperity, then a view of Silicon Valley in general, and Google in particular, makes clear that we cannot unequivocally say that their brand of innovation is always a boon to American or universal well being. Yes, there are many businesses made possible by the internet, but this does not mean Google & Co. get all the credit for this entrepreneurism; and neither should we take at face value their claims that IP laws are somehow a threat to  such enterprises. Moreover, the leading web companies reveal a culture that belies the kind of universal humanism they tend to preach when they want to rally the public to support their political agendas.  This article in the Daily Beast paints a pretty clear portrait of Big Tech as a new American oligarchy that consumes much, controls unprecedented, consolidated wealth, and does not contribute a great deal either to the US or to foreign economies.  As a companion piece, this article from The Guardian (shared by a regular reader) reveals a rather disturbing anthropological manifestation in which the minority population of Silicon Valley employees live a detached existence from their Northern California neighbors, with Facebook employees shuttling in private, luxury busses between the city and their corporate cloisters where they enjoy subsidized haut cuisine, barber shops, and massages as part of the working environment.  Viewed together, these two shards in the mosaic already begin to project a picture antithetical to the grand, social equalization these wizards claim will be the inevitable byproduct of their monastic labors on our behalf.

Looking at some other pieces in the mosaic, we want to be very careful not to let the word innovation become some new PC term for criminal, unsavory, immoral, or meaningless endeavors just because they’re based in web technology.  For instance, Wired offers this detailed account describing Google’s role in “innovating” the sale of millions of dollars worth of illegal and counterfeit drugs.  The story describes exactly how federal agents, working with a con-man-turned-cooperator,  conducted a sting operation that led to Google settling the case against them for a half-billion dollars.  That’s a fine that exceeds the annual revenue of nearly all the largest businesses that depend on copyright and patent protections; whereas for Google, I imagine it’s the snack budget for the programmer pool.  In this story at Music Tech Policy, we see that only under pressure from people like Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) did Google back off the inclusion of the app Utoopi on its Android phones.  Utoopi Combines geo-location with escort services in order to “innovate” prostitution, which is known to be a primary driver for “innovating” contemporary human trafficking.  And, of course, we had the Google Streets bugaboo, in which the company was charged with “innovating” unauthorized access to private data from people’s computers through open WiFi while driving around in their “innovation” buggies taking photographs.

Yet, for all these shenanigans, Google employs fewer than 40,000 people worldwide, if we exclude the Motorola division.  At the same time, Facebook employs fewer than 5,000; Twitter employs just about 1,000; Pandora employs fewer than 500; and Reddit employs about 20.  Naturally, these numbers alone do not reflect the gross economic value of the internet, which has fostered many start-ups in many lines of business; but the premise being asserted by this elite group of dominant companies is that IP laws like patents and copyrights are a barrier to even more untapped, economic value. The message being sent is that congress must revise these laws so that we the people can benefit.  Start to sound familiar?  “Lift these environmental regulations and drill, baby, drill!”  But at least in that case, there really is oil in them thar hills, and we can debate the pros and cons of drilling for it. When the internet industry and its paid advocates say copyrights and patents stand in the way of economic opportunity, it’s a double-lie.  First, they’re simply serving their own interests; and second, there is no solid evidence that these long-standing rights of creators and inventors inhibit anything that can be called real innovation.

If we are going to allow the internet industry to speak as loudly as it does on the subject of legislative reform this important, their track record on social responsibility should be factored into their testimony. In short, when the web gets ugly and reveals its capacity to enable bullying, defamation, illegal and counterfeit transactions, human trafficking, incitement to terrorism, organized misogyny, and mass copyright exploitation, the owners of these sites and designers of these systems consistently claim the amoral high ground of neutrality. “We are just the highway,” they say, “and we cannot be responsible for how people drive.”  And that’s fair enough to an extent, but not when these companies profit, however inadvertently, from exploitation or from some other form of human suffering, and especially not when these same companies presume to take credit for all the social good derived from the internet.  It seems to me they want their cake, your cake, my cake, and would like to eat it all.

So, operating under the premise “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” congress should begin with what already works, and has worked for a very long time, in the copyright system.  In fact, this week’s WSJ reports, “In the past two decades, intellectual property has emerged as the principal driver of economic growth in the U.S. and other developed countries. IP is now, in many respects, the new global currency.”  So, if we are to revise this system at the urging of this small but vocally powerful industry, legislators should get its Cuba Gooding Jr. on and insist, “Show me the innovation.”

Tuesday Tech Roundup

A weekly aggregation of tech stories of note

December 11, 2012

Steam Without Boiling Water – Metallic nano particles can be used to produce steam using sunlight without raising the surrounding water to the boiling point. This has huge implications for energy production and other industries that rely on steam generation.  See story at Earth Techling.

Classical Musician Reinterprets Video Game Music – Canadian violinist Angele Dubeau lends her strings to compositions for Angry Birds, Halo 3, and others. See story and hear samples at NPR.

FTC Investigates Children’s Apps on Data Collection – It seems at leas some applications designed for kids may be collecting data, including phone numbers and location information.  See story at the LA Times.

Not Just Apple Using Mobile for Retail POS – As someone who would rather experience physical pain than wait in line, I have to cheer the retailers moving toward using mobile devices for POS in-store transactions. Turns out, it might help boost sales, too.  Read or listen to story at NPR.

Storytelling Software the Future of AI – It is the goal of technologists working in AI to build machines that mimmic human behavior, but what are the implications for human behavior? See story at Big Think.

Facebookers Didn’t Vote on Site Governance – I don’t know how many people posted and shared meaningless copyright statements on Facebook when it announced its new user policies, but it turns out only .067 percent of users bothered to vote on those policies when invited by Facebook to do so.  See story at The Huffington Post.

SOPA didn’t matter. What’s next?

That SOPA had little to no measurable effect on the election results in Congress is not surprsing. While the online protest against the bill was an unprecedented moment for the Internet industry and social media, I believe the reality is that the average voter actually didn’t give a damn about SOPA or even know what it was. Of course, I have already asserted on numerous occasions that the majority of Web users who clicked on the online petition against the bill didn’t know what they were protesting either, but I won’t retread that ground here.

Presumbably, Internet issues will gain footing among the electorate as the Millenials age into the process. They already outnumber the Boomers, many who are still figuring out how to use AOL; and they way outnumber us meager and motley GenXers, who are net-savvy but still lived half our lives without these technologies. I am eager to read Chris Ruen’s new book Freeloading, but my understanding is that Ruen asserts that we see these tools, social media in particular, as extensions of ourselves. I tend to agree with this premise, and it stands to reason that a generation born using these technologies is going to have an even stronger association in this regard. Hence any threat, real or perceived, to these tools and media is going to be taken personally; and as the manipulators of politics know, it is emotion not reason that tends to win the day.

Still, I don’t believe it is inevitable that the Internet industry will be able to replay the same charade indefinitely that it did so well with SOPA/PIPA. In particular, the veneer that all web-based companies are the guardians of free speech will likely begin to wear thin among progressives, traditionally the voters with whom such a message tends to be effective. In the months since the defeat of SOPA, we have seen the formation of a lobbying juggernaut called the Internet Association; we have the disturbing, anti-labor components of the Pandora-backed Internet Radio Fairness Act; and we have more than a few privacy concerns with regard to how Internet companies collect personal data and how that data is used.

Combine these manifestations with the generally libertarian (at times Ayn Rand-like) ideology of Silicon Valley, and progressive voters may start to make that critical distinction between the products and the the producers — between the tools we like, or even need, and the corporate practices of those who make the tools. It’s true that if one crticizes Google, Facebook, Pandora, et al, this will often result in some reactionary response involving accusations like “technology luddite,” but such fallacious reasoning brings a very simple example to mind. Several years ago, General Electric was locked in an ongoing battle with envrinomental groups and the EPA over its disposal of PCBs into the Hudson River. At the same time, the company’s national consumer-focused ad campaign was a neo-Rockwellian vision of the world with the slogan “We bring good things to life.” And yes, a refridgerator is a good thing, as are all the jet engines that ever carried us safely from point to point around the world. But that doesn’t mean we’re okay with the PCBs in the river, does it now?

It will certainly be interesting to see how these dynamics play out over the coming year, but as a progressive, I found it telling (and more than a little pitiful) that on election eve, Google co-founder Sergey Brinn went out of his way to state publicly he was “dreading the elections” because party politics will still dominate and that his plea to either victor is to “govern as an independent.” Call me a cynic, but when a billionaire executive, who practically rules the Web, makes an ambiguous political statement I can hear from any Joe on the street, my Spidey Sense tingles.  If progressives listen carefully, they will hear the familiar refrain an anti-institutional song coming from Northern California that is more reminiscent of the Tea Party hymnal than anything else.