I had a lot of fun at CopyNight yesterday, including meeting Joe Gratz and several other people, and a lot of discussion about the other AAUP letter to Google, the Audio Home Recording Act, the prehistory of some of our contemporary copyright law (in the 1980s and 1990s!), and so on.
I just wrote a paper about compatibility in which I suggest that we should have privacy in what technology we use (that is, an attempt to tell or a means of telling technologies apart can be seen as a privacy invasion). I'm therefore relieved that at least one person on the other side is straightforward in saying that compatibility is not a goal for him.
We had this fight a lot (mostly out of sight of the press) when Dmitry Sklyarov was arrested. Dmitry's software achieved compatibility between Adobe eBooks and every sort of digital device in the world. Adobe's reaction was to say explicitly that this was improper because they were entitled to decide which kinds of compatibility could exist. Even though it was technically possible to achieve universal compatibility (and Dmitry had done so), they would, so to speak, try to turn back the clock and say that consumers were only entitled to compatibility on Adobe's schedule and at Adobe's sufferance. They said that even though you knew how to get the compatibility you wanted, you would have to wait until they did it for you, and they couldn't say when that would be.
More recently, when Real figured out how to achieve compatibility with Apple, Apple went on the attack and said that Real was using "the tactics and ethics of a hacker". Jamie Boyle explained the issue well:
The first lesson of the story is how strangely people use the metaphors of tangible property in new economy disputes. How exactly had Real "broken into" the iPod? It hadn't broken into my iPod, which is after all my iPod. If I want to use Real's service to download music to my own device, where's the breaking and entering? What Real had done was make the iPod "interoperable" with another format. If Boyle’s word processing program can convert Microsoft Word files into Boyle’s format, allowing Word users to switch programs, am I "breaking into Word"? Well, Microsoft might think so, but most of us do not. So leaving aside the legal claim for a moment, where is the ethical foul? Apple was saying (and apparently believed) that Real had broken into something different from my iPod or your iPod. They had broken into the idea of an iPod. (I imagine a small, Platonic white rectangle, presumably imbued with the spirit of Steve Jobs.)Their true sin was trying to understand the iPod so that they could make it do things that Apple did not want it to do. As an ethical matter, is figuring out how things work, in order to compete with the original manufacturers, breaking and entering? In the strange netherland between hardware and software, device and product, the answer is often a morally heartfelt "yes!" I would stress "morally heartfelt". It is true manufacturers want to make lots of money, and would rather not have competitors. Bob Young of Red Hat claims "every business person wakes up in the morning and says 'how can I become a monopolist?'" Beyond that, though, innovators actually come to believe that they have the moral right to control the uses of their goods after they are sold. This isn't your iPod, it's Apple's iPod. Yet even if they believe this, we don't have to agree.
One approach to this is to deny that Real did to say that Real did adopt the tactics and ethics of a hacker, and that those ethics are actually preferable to Apple's ethics. Because Apple's ethics say that compatibility is not a goal, and the ethics of the hacker say that compatibility is a goal, and more than a goal.
And those ethics are outraged when someone precludes what we want and know how to do, and says: Be ye therefore patient.
Congratulations to Biella on her defense of her dissertation at the University of Chicago!
Contact: Seth David Schoen
