The new social contract

There's an overriding law in the land now, the "End user services agreement", the EULA. Being accused of violating one is enough to see your service cut off.

Non-disclosure agreements and employment contracts are truly frightening things. Mortgage agreements are stacks of paper 6 inches high. The size of the federal register, I try not to think about.

I try not to think about all the EULAs I've clicked on, without reading, in order to use a valuable service. Somewhere in the (must be hundreds, by now) of the end user agreements I've had to navigate, I've probably clicked away the rights to my first-born, and any unique idea I'll ever have, should it prove profitable, my right to my last name, and god knows what else.

I took time out to read the few agreements I'm knowingly subject to this morning, that violating in any way would impact my ability to function in America.

I don't read patents, in the normal case, because of the triple damages rule, and because I find reading them very depressing. Every time I'm exposed to one, I'm non-productive for months.

Comcast

I started my morning's reading with Comcast. I wasn't aware of this clause, until this morning:

“10.2 Comcast may update the use policies from time to time, and such updates shall be deemed effective seven (7) days after the update is posted online, with or without actual notice to Customer. Accordingly, Customer should check the above web addresses (or the applicable successor URLs) on a regular basis to ensure that its activities conform to the most current version of the use policies.”

Comcast terms of service are 17 pages long. They just released an update to the terms of service on 10/25/10, which added the following clarifications to their agreement:

* The Service cannot be resold or otherwise made available to anyone on the Premises or outside the Premises (i.e. wi-fi, "hotspots", or other methods of networking), directly or indirectly, unless done with Comcast’s written approval in accordance with an applicable Service plan.

* The Service cannot be made available to anyone other than you or your authorized employees or contractors unless done with Comcast’s written approval in accordance with an applicable Service plan.

* The Service cannot be used to send unsolicited bulk or commercial messages or "spam" in violation of the law.

* The Service cannot be used to run servers unless you have selected a Service plan which includes a static or statically assigned IP address.

* If you have selected a Service plan with a static or statically assigned IP address, the Service can be used to host a public website.

It's nice of them that running your own web server is expressly allowed, and I wholeheartedly approve of the anti-spam proviso. It's worrisome that running any other kind of server is expressly left a little vague, even if you have rented a static IP address. It's clear that - at least at present - I can run my own DNS and chat servers. :whew:.

But, at a stroke, they've banned wifi coffee shops and throwing a 12 dollar cat5e cable over to my neighbor to share internet service. Routing ipv6 around town with my nifty new meshed nanostation M5 radios... looks impossible. I wonder how airstream wireless, in Australia, and the various mesh networks in Europe are managing to innovate around restrictions like these? Do they have similar EULAs to deal with?

For "normal" comcast cyberserfs, it appears that many (most?) people are violating the comcast terms of service as they stand today. Anybody that uses dynamic DNS, or a squeezebox server, even a fileserver, seems expressly forbidden now. Is it against the new terms of service to have ANY other kind of server in your house if you don't have a static IP?

There's a special set of rules for teleworkers. I'm not sure what they are, because they aren't online. You have to call to get them.

If you want merely a job interview with comcast, you gotta sign an insanely restrictive NDA. Without a signature, there's no interview, and there's NO negotiation over the terms. After seeing their just-for-a-job-interview-NDA I'm sure their employment contracts make slavery or working in the food service industry look like a more appealing option.

Google

At least in mid 2007, Google would let you get away with not signing a NDA for the job interview, as C Scott Ananian fully documented his discomfort and experience at signing that one. He evidently didn't get the job, but at least he can still talk about technology, including google, at a deep level.

Google maps' terms of service are not horrible.

THEN there's google's terms of service for using their search API, which I'll talk to at another time.

Craigslist

Craigslist terms of use, um, makes my brain dump core.

I'm aware that the vast majority of provisos in all these agreements are rarely enforced, and are there primarily to cover corporate arses, but I'd like there to be AT LEAST the following things addressed in America's corporate culture:

1) All basic legal agreements (interview, employment NDAs, employment contracts, EULAs) posted online as a condition of being allowed to function as a corporation... people need to know what they are getting into.

2) There be some attempt at thoroughly vetting these vs a vs the actual laws of the land so people like me, without full knowledge of the law, do not have to be attached to a lawyer at the hip everywhere we go...

3) and some attempt at commonality, of thorough vetting by independent organisations - that would reduce the reams of paperwork regarding using any new service or signing any corporate contract to something sane. I'd like STANDARDs for contracts, in other words. A consumer reports for contracts. Something like that.

Personally,

4) I'd like, by law, that ALL NDAs in particular, should EXPIRE in a reasonable time - like, 3-5 years - except where national security is concerned, which should be more like 10-20 years.

5) Contracts should not be able to be changed on a whim and forward updating changes accepted as part of the contract.

I run Linux, exclusively, these days, because the terms of service in the Microsoft EULA are unacceptible to me, as are most Microsoft based products. I understand how the various licensing schemes Linux uses work - there's only about a dozen - very vetted by various court decisions - that I can rely on, and trust.

The one piece of commercial Linux software I have - fully paid for - is the cepstral speech synthesizer. After reading their agreement today, it looks like I can't distribute an example of the cool way how I use speech synthesis with my email notification system, which is too bad, I've been meaning to do that...

I don't know if there was an age, ever, where legal agreements so cluttered one's mental landscape. All I have is a distant memory of loyalty oaths during the McCarthy era. Now, THAT, was a simpler time.

After having my eyes glaze over on the first 120 pages of agreements today I decided to not look at blogger's and just post this piece. I remember reading blogger's EULA 8 years ago, and it didn't have a clause in it that required I read it again, then.

All my NDAs, except one of dubious enforcability, have expired. I'm glad of that. The EULAs though, are beginning to bother me.

Labels: law, patents

  ¶ 10:28 AM 1 comments

  My most interesting failures, #1: Anagram architecture

Back in 1993 I came up with a paper design for a multicore CPU architecture that was strikingly similar to SUN's Niagra architecture, which came out over a decade later. My design probably shared some aspects with multicores that shipped before Niagra did, too.

I wrote about it publicly, only once, but by the time I stopped working on it, a year later, in Dec, 1993, it was well developed enough to file a few patents, had I chosen to do so, but I didn't. Someone that "knew" that the crossbar switches inherent in the design were impossible to build, convinced me I was barking up the wrong tree. (That person worked for SUN, amusingly enough)

It used an ISA roughly derived from the MIPS architecture and a stack based register set much like the transputer T800. Probably the most innovative feature from my perspective was that I used RAMBUS chips hooked up serially, rather than in parallel, and divided the memory up into as many 8 bit paths as I had pins available. Getting the RAM industry to produce sticks of ram in this segmented fashion would have been nearly impossible! Soldiering the chips directly on the buses was my answer but this put a hard outer limit on the amount of memory you could have with RAMBUS....

Still, I figured that the narrow memory buses would be a way of producing a series of CPU chips of various performance levels. I thought, also, that you could eventually produce smarter ram sticks - with cache and a MMU on board each one - if you did things this way.

The design also could do DMA at the virtual memory level, rather than at the physical addressing level. Memcpy was basically an op-code that suspended that CPU and handed off the operation to the MMU. This took best advantage of the slow memory buses because it could do burst transfers - so common in the message passing operating systems in academia at the time.

I called it the Anagram Architecture because, being stack based, and highly threaded, you could rewind and restart various sorts of instruction in a super-scalar fashion, and run more jumbled up processes in parallel, more simply than you could with a classic Van Neuman architecture.

I don't know when the crossbar switches I envisioned became buildable, but they are everywhere now. I've dabbled with hardware design ever since, and played with a few FPGAs, but ideas like 32 bit and 64 bit memory busses are firmly embedded in everything, and developing a competitive CPU from scratch a pointless, expensive, exercise. Not that that stops people. Two interesting CPUs I've seen recently are the Propeller and David May, creator of the Transputer, is working on Xmos.

Labels: failures, patents

  ¶ 5:32 PM 0 comments

  Keeping copyright accessible

For a while now.... I've been wanting to republish 7 minutes of a wonderful recording of Richard Feynman telling how he got the patents on the nuclear rocket and airplane. If I can't republish it, I'd like to at least use it as part of another non-web-presentation.

Feynman's patent story is seven+ minutes long. Publishing a 30 second snippet under the fair use doctrine wouldn't illustrate the point I was trying to make, but I'll get to that in a second, because in coping with this dilemma I came up with a somewhat new realization in managing copyright.

My guess is, that although Feynman spoke the words in the 1970s and has been consulting with God for over 20 years now, Ralph Leighton owns the tapes, and as they have been remixed and mashed together into at least 3 different recordings that I know of, that they remain very valuable pieces of IP.

I can get already made mp3s of the whole record. Cheap. And I discovered just now from lulu.com, there's more stuff that I haven't heard, and as soon as my cat gets off my lap I look forward to sitting at the feet of Feynman once again.

That gets me to my point of the day, via an odd path. I have zero problem with the copyright owner in this case to license this recording as he sees fit. My problem is that I'd like to find Ralph so I can at LEAST ask a question about a different license, show him my work, and discuss the fee.

I think a world full of anonymous monopolists is a really painful one to live in and create in - thus the requirement that copyrighted materials be registered with the copyright office in pre-1976 law was a darn good one. Copyrighted work needs to be assigned a central tracking number like a patent or a normal piece of property, so that the owners can be tracked down more easily.

Otherwise... everyone ends up stuck in the mire of not knowing who to talk to about anything.

I'm very encouraged by google's patent search. Still, they don't go far enough. I want to know who has the rights to a patent *presently*, so I know who to talk to! Heck, if you were a patent/copyright owner wouldn't you want people to be finding you rather than you suing them?

So, the conclusion I've come to - If you want to be a monopolist on your work, you have to remain reachable! Sublicensors and cross licensors need to be tracked - publically - maybe via some system like the stock market. "Copyright Stock". Tracking a corporation's value with the value of their IP broken out this way ought to be an interesting way to look at things.

One of these days I'll write the article that is so well illustrated by Feynman's patent story, but not today. The recursive irony of the difficulties in using his patent story... which illustrates the point of my own copyright story... ought to give you a belly laugh.... but I can't explain it without you having heard Feynman's patent story. Buy yourself a copy of the whole CD from tuvatrader, to grok why, or a mp3 from Lulu.com.

To add to today's irony - google has lots of patents that refer to Feynman's work - but doesn't have the ones on the nuclear airplane!

Bonus Link: transformative appropriation

Labels: copyright, feynman, mp3, music, patents

  ¶ 2:44 PM 1 comments