How litigation only spurred on P2P file sharing: “[...] the US Supreme Court in Grokster created a brand new legal doctrine, called inducement, that did not rely on either knowledge or control. That rule was aimed at capturing “bad actors” – those P2P providers who aimed to profit from their users’ infringement and whose nefarious intent was demonstrated by “smoking guns” in their marketing and other communications. But the inducement law failed to appreciate some of the other differences that make the software world special and thus led directly to the explosion in the number of P2P technologies. In understanding why, three other physical world assumptions come into play.

One is that it is expensive to create distribution technologies that are capable of vast amounts of infringement. Of course in the physical world, the creation of such technologies, like printing presses, photocopiers, and VCRs required large investment. Research and development, mass-manufacturing, marketing and delivery all require massive amounts of cash. Thus, the law came to assume that the creation of such technologies was expensive.

That led directly to the next assumption – that distribution technologies are developed for profit. After all, nobody would be investing those massive sums without some prospect of a return.

Finally comes the fourth assumption: that rational developers of distribution technologies won’t share their secrets with consumers or competitors. Since they needed to recoup those massive investments, they had no interest at all in giving them away.

All of these assumptions certainly can hold up in the software development context. For example, those behind Kazaa spent a lot on its development, squeezed out the maximum possible profit and kept its source code a closely guarded secret. By creating a law that focused on profits, business models and marketing, the Supreme Court succeeded in shaking out Kazaa and its ilk from the market.

But the Court failed to appreciate that none of these things are actually necessary to the creation of P2P file sharing software. [...]” http://www.itnews.com.au/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spurred-on-p2p-file-sharing.aspx

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SCOTUS Affirms High Standard of Proving Patents Invalid “Today the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s rule that, in litigation, a patent may only be proved invalid by clear and convincing evidence. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case – Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership – supporting Microsoft’s request that the standard for proving invalidity merely be by a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) rather than clear and convincing evidence (a high probability). [...]” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/supreme-court-affirms-high-standard-proving

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Forget piracy, US government is going after Bitcoin http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/08/government-crackdown-on-bitcoin/ Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2636078

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“[...] The upshot? If the government wants to track your cell phone or seize your email or read your private IMs or social network messages, the bill would require that it first go to court and get a search warrant based on probable cause. [...]

The bill isn’t absolutely free of problems: although it clearly would require a warrant for ongoing tracking of your cell phone, it would also and unfortunately preserve the current statutory rule allowing the government to get historical records of your location without probable cause. It also expands the government’s authority to use National Security Letters https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters to obtain rich transactional data about who you communicate with online and when, without probable cause or court oversight. You can count on EFF to press for these problems to be fixed, and for all of the DDP principles to be addressed, as the bill proceeds through Congress.

However, as the start of the process of updating ECPA for the always-on, location-enabled technology of the 21st century, Senator Leahy’s bill represents an incredibly important step in the right direction, and we at EFF look forward to working with Senator Leahy and others in Congress as they work to create new laws to better protect your online and mobile privacy. [...]” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/eff-applauds-new-electronic-privacy-bill-tells

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All complex systems contain parasites. In any system of cooperative behavior, an uncooperative strategy will be effective — and the system will tolerate the uncooperatives — as long as they’re not too numerous or too effective. Thus, as a species evolves cooperative behavior, it also evolves a dishonest minority that takes advantage of the honest majority. If individuals within a species have the ability to switch strategies, the dishonest minority will never be reduced to zero. As a result, the species simultaneously evolves two things: 1) security systems to protect itself from this dishonest minority, and 2) deception systems to successfully be parasitic.

Humans evolved along this path. The basic mechanism can be modeled simply. It is in our collective group interest for everyone to cooperate. It is in any given individual’s short-term self interest not to cooperate: to defect, in game theory terms. But if everyone defects, society falls apart. To ensure widespread cooperation and minimal defection, we collectively implement a variety of societal security systems.

Two of these systems evolved in prehistory: morals and reputation. Two others evolved as our social groups became larger and more formal: laws and technical security systems. What these security systems do, effectively, is give individuals incentives to act in the group interest. But none of these systems, with the possible exception of some fanciful science-fiction technologies, can ever bring that dishonest minority down to zero.

In complex modern societies, many complications intrude on this simple model of societal security. Decisions to cooperate or defect are often made by groups of people — governments, corporations, and so on — and there are important differences because of dynamics inside and outside the groups. Much of our societal security is delegated — to the police, for example — and becomes institutionalized; the dynamics of this are also important. Power struggles over who controls the mechanisms of societal security are inherent: “group interest” rapidly devolves to “the king’s interest.” Societal security can become a tool for those in power to remain in power, with the definition of “honest majority” being simply the people who follows the rules.

The term “dishonest minority” is not a moral judgment; it simply describes the minority who does not follow societal norm. Since many societal norms are in fact immoral, sometimes the dishonest minority serves as a catalyst for social change. Societies without a reservoir of people who don’t follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/05/status_report_t.html

Cf. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/02/societal_securi.html

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The Hired Gun Mechanism “We present and experimentally test a mechanism that provides a simple, natural, low cost, and realistic solution to the problem of compliance with socially determined efficient actions, such as contributing to a public good. We note that small self-governing organizations often place enforcement in the hands of an appointed leader–the department chair, the building superintendent, the team captain. This hired gun, we show, need only punish the least compliant group member, and then only punish this person enough so that the person would have rather been the second least compliant. We show experimentally this mechanism, despite having very small penalties out of equilibrium, reaches the full compliance equilibrium almost instantly.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w17032.pdf

Gun For Hire: Does Delegated Enforcement Crowd out Peer Punishment in Giving to Public Goods? “This paper compares two methods to encourage socially optimal provision of a public good. We compare the efficacy of vigilante justice, as represented by peer-to-peer punishment, to delegated policing, as represented by the “hired gun” mechanism, to deter free riding and improve group welfare. The “hired gun” mechanism (Andreoni and Gee, 2011) is an example of a low cost device that promotes complete compliances and minimal enforcement as the unique Nash equilibrium. We find that subjects are willing to pay to hire a delegated policing mechanism over 70% of the time, and that this mechanism increases welfare between 15% to 40%. Moreover, the lion’s share of the welfare gain comes because the hired gun crowds out vigilante peer-to-peer punishments.” http://www.nber.org/papers/w17033.pdf

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An API for European Union legislation http://api.epdb.eu/

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Why The Copyright Industry Isn’t a Legitimate Stakeholder in Copyright http://torrentfreak.com/why-the-copyright-industry-isnt-a-legitimate-stakeholder-in-copyright-110430/

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Russia’s Crime of the Century – How crooked officials pulled off a massive scam, spent millions on Dubai real estate, and killed my partner when he tried to expose them. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/20/russia_s_crime_of_the_century?page=full

Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2479865

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Netflix Is Killing BitTorrent in the United States http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-killing-bittorrent-in-the-us-110427/

Competing with free: anime site treats piracy as a market failure http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/competing-with-free-anime-site-treats-piracy-as-a-market-failure.ars

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/the-only-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-cut-prices

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Surveillance Self-Defense: “The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.
Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?” https://ssd.eff.org/

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A new study on Israeli judges shows that, when making parole decisions, they grant about 65% after meal breaks, and almost all the way down to 0% right before breaks and at the end of the day (i.e. as far from the last break as possible). There’s a relatively linear decline between the two points.

http://lsolum.typepad.com/files/danziger-levav-avnaim-pnas-2011.pdf

Cf. http://lesswrong.com/lw/58y/the_bias_you_didnt_expect/

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Patently Obvious “ON Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise unremarkable patent dispute, the Court has promised to decide the degree to which juries should be allowed to question whether a patent should have been issued at all. [...]” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/opinion/16Lichtman.html

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“How should libertarians frame government?
(a) as a criminal enterprise; or
(b) as a service provider that does a bad job, largely because it is a monopoly, with too many restrictions on entry and exit [...]” http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/04/two_questions_f_1.html

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