John Palfrey

A few days ago, at StopBadware.org, we released a report on AOL 9.0, the free software on offer from one of the giants of the Internet industry.

The back-story on this matter is that we wrestled hard with the right way to release this report. We followed our research process rigorously, following tips and leads from dozens of users who submitted reports to us via StopBadware.org about AOL 9.0, and found that the application didn’t meet our guidelines on multiple fronts. (And yes, we have tested the apps of other big, mainstream tech companies; we are not just “picking on” AOL.) We tested AOL 9.0 many, many times; we shared the draft with a number of trusted advisors and with AOL itself; and we are confident that the results of our testing are accurate. But we also didn’t want to mislead users into thinking that AOL is malicious, when we plainly think they are not.

As I’ve said in every interview I’ve done on this topic, AOL does not belong in the company of the most malicious of spyware and malware providers. No question about it, AOL has been a leader for the past several years in working to fight spyware, whether through its involvement in the Anti-Spyware Coalition that Ari Schwartz of CDT runs or any number of other initiatives overseen by Jules Polonetsky. On his blog, AOL Vice-Chairman Ted Leonsis, the senior executive who has been with the company the longest, wrote, “No company on the Internet has done more to protect users from the dangers of spyware and adware.” That strong statement may or may not be true, but it is certainly the case that AOL has been on the side of the angels in this matter in many ways and on many occasions. It’s important that the nuance is captured, by putting this report in a newly-created category of “open inquiries” on our reports page, rather than issuing a final statement, especially while the company is working to improve the application and says it intends to meet the standards set in the guidelines we’ve published. I admire many people who work at AOL, including one of my oldest friends, from high school. And it’s essential that we make clear that AOL has stepped up to the plate to make changes, many of which they say are already in the works, destined for a new release next month.

Even good companies can release bad applications. Our concern related to AOL 9.0 is primarily about disclosure. The report lists our specific concerns, which I won’t repeat here.

Set aside AOL and our “open inquiry” for a moment, and consider the problem in a broader, abstract construct. If an ordinary computer user goes to a website and decides to accept the offer of a free software download:

1) Does the user have a good chance of knowing — more or less — what will happen to their computer when she clicks “I agree”?

2) Will the user know what’s running in the background after that download, and where she got it from?

3) And once the user decides she no longer wishes to have these services running on their computer, will she be able to get them completely off the computer?

What I wanted to recount here is not our process before issuing the report, but rather just my personal experience trying this application at home — just one user’s view, setting aside all the guidelines and formality of StopBadware. If you doubt our findings, I urge you to try it.

The day before we issued our report, (to be clear, the real testing was in a pristine testing lab environment, many times over), I went home and turned on an ordinary computer. It’s a few years old, a Dell, quite nice when I bought it and generally in great shape, but not exactly humming along on the latest dual-core processors. It is on a fast broadband connection, wired, from Comcast, in the Boston area. I get a good throughput on it.

I went to aol.com and I found the free application, available for download from this page. (On the same page, you are also offered a version that comes with access services, for $9.95 per month, which I did not test.) Then you arrive at this page. You are asked to put personal information, nothing too revealing, into a form. But nowhere on this page can you access what AOL is going to do with your personal information — such as a privacy policy — nor a statement of what you’ll get installed on your computer if you do the download. (Update: if you hit the page from outside, rather than from within the sign-up process, I see that they now have a link to the privacy policy in the footer of this page. The privacy policy link seems curiously still absent if you are within the process — you have to try it, but I have a screencapture — taken after a cleared cache and so forth.)

OK, so, I make the leap of faith and I enter in my (correct) personal information, including name, address, phone, e-mail, and birthday. I come to another page asking me to choose a screen name. I choose the screen-name I had when I got my first private, commercial e-mail address, which was in fact the same one, with AOL. It was still available. Then you get another page, asking me to agree to the Terms of Service, and, also incorporated by reference, consent to the Privacy Policy. Are you forced to scroll through either of them before you click? Nope. Are you told “look in here to find out exactly what you’re downloading”? Nope.

(Pause here for a few other notes, of interest probably only to lawyers. One line in the relevant AOL privacy policy is the ominous statement, a stand-alone paragraph: “Your AOL Member information may be supplemented with additional information, including publicly-available information and information from other companies.” Good to know, but does this mean Choicepoint, or something else? What will my info be supplemented with? How does that relate to all the mail AOL has sent over the years? But one wonders also whether the user has in fact affirmed their consent, as a legal matter, by this means of “agreeing” to the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy. Consider the line of shrinkwrap, browsewrap and clickwrap cases, including the venerable ProCD, but also Specht v. Netscape Communications Corp., 150 F. Supp. 2d 585 (S.D.N.Y. 2001) and Rudder v. Microsoft, 1999 Carswell Ont. 3195 (Ont. Super. Ct.). A quick, though a bit dated, overview of the cases appears here. AOL surely knows all about this, given the Williams case (Williams v. America Online, Inc. 2001 Mass. Super. LEXIS 11, 43 U.C.C. Rep. Serv. 2d (Callaghan) 1101 (Mass. Super. Ct. Feb. 8, 2001)), in which a court found that there were issues related to whether users had in fact assented. I’m not positive, but there’s certainly a possibility that another judge might say that the user did not actually assent by virtue of this form of establishing “agreement,” since the user is not required to scroll through or otherwise clearly presented with all the relevant terms, other than via mutiple hypertext links. In any event, while simple for users, this process of assent is probably not a best-practice for an interface to ensure that the user knows what they’re getting in for, especially novice Internet users. Maybe no issue here, I suppose, but the caselaw doesn’t seem to answer my question fully. I expect AOL has had wonderful counsel on this score, and that it’s been fully vetted, but I guess I’m still not sure from my own analysis and reading of the caselaw. Some clever e-commerce lawyers, like Ronald Mann and Jane Winn, who wrote the casebook on this topic, might well have some insights here.)

So, lawyerly musings about the intricacies of Remote Contracting aside, I consent by typing in the captcha letters. Then, you get to the screen where they offer you the download itself — one, big bundle, apparently. The sign-up is super-easy, but I’m none the wiser, unless I followed an intricate series of links and tabs, about what’s about to happen to my computer. Even if you do follow all the threads, as we found, you have to get into the Privacy Policy to find some of the apps to download — and even then, we couldn’t find a list of everything that we eventually downloaded. (Perhaps AOL is right and in fact users tend to look to a Privacy Policy to find out what apps are in the bundle, if they do in fact look for such information; that just doesn’t happen to square with my own instincts, but they no doubt have more data on this score than I do.)

I set to downloading the application. It took a while, despite the speed of the connection and the relative power of the computer — perhaps a sure sign that lots was going on. During this time, my screen filled with various statements about security software and so forth that I was getting, and noting that for-pay upgrades would be available to make the services better. At no point did I have the chance to see a full list of what was arriving onto my computer, nor a chance to “uncheck” the boxes so as to say that, no, I didn’t actually need more than one new media player, for instance. The process took maybe 15 minutes or so. After a reboot, I checked out what had happened.

AOL gave me a lot of stuff. This would not come as a surprise to anyone who has downloaded an application suite from AOL before, I suppose. And no doubt other leading Internet firms do the same thing. Several icons appeared on my desktop and in the tray along the bottom of my Windows 98 (yeah, I know, I said it was old) screen. A new search bar appeared in a second layer of the tray along the bottom, branded clearly as AOL. As soon as I tried to go online, I found myself back in 1998 — in AOL’s garden. The experience wasn’t terrible, to be sure — nothing malicious that I could find, to be sure — but not for me. I admit: I’m not likely AOL’s target customer anymore, even if I was in the 1990s. I decide I want to uninstall the whole thing.

I go to add/remove programs, because I know to do that. I suppose most users at this point do, thanks to the computing industry’s standardization around this method, at least in the Windows environment. The process of getting rid of the applications, even the ones that do uninstall, was for me exactly as described here. Let’s just say it took forever. A much longer time than it took to get it installed, by a wide margin.

All in all, let’s assume AOL fixed the pop-up that didn’t have an “x” to close it (floating for days on our test machine, vaguely offering some form of upgrade related to connectivity services) and the .exes that didn’t fully uninstall (seems to have been done, and AOL says it has, and that they were never doing anything bad while they were there) and so forth, as we outline in our report. Let’s assume also that the disclosure is improved.

Would it then add up to Badware, if all of these programs were disclosed and the user could go through and take them all off? Nah. But still pretty annoying? You bet. And is the average user likely to go all the way through this process of informing themselves and then uninstalling all these programs, loads of reboots, etc.? Honestly, I don’t think so. But let’s be clear: this is not just an AOL problem — it’s instead an industry issue, one related to bundling of applications. Do users really want this level of simplicity? Maybe. But maybe users deserve more credit: maybe users really do want to take the easy route OR to be able to install a subset of those applications. Maybe it’s possible within AOL 9.0, but I sure couldn’t find it.

What I’ve been so surprised at, both before and since releasing the report, is what other people have said to us. My e-mail box has filled up with reports of people saying, “I’ve been waiting for someone to say this” or telling stories about how they’ve had similar experiences and have felt powerless to do anything about it. It’s not hard to hear what users are saying about AOL 9.0. Read what people are saying in the comments fields, say, of the many blogs, Slashdot postings, etc. who have covered this story. One user: “What that org. says about AOL is true. AOL 9.0 puts so much extra crap on your computer, doesn’t tell you about it, then tries to say it’s a vital part of the AOL program.” Another user told us, before we released the application: “I re-installed the newest software for AOL and it just keeps coming on and on whether I want it to or not. … I’ll NEVER put AOL on again! Warn people, this is something new.” The user comments, submitted to us directly or to the web before and after this report, tell a pretty clear story: at least some meaningful subset of users are not happy with what they’re getting.

Eric von Hippel is here at the Berkman Center today. He’s amazing — a professor at MIT’s Sloan School and champion of Democratizing Innovation. For the past three decades, he’s been talking about user-centric innovation. The Internet community is packed with people seeking to tell their story back to companies that offer services online. Sometimes users are cranks, for sure. But sometimes they speak very clearly and loudly and with their feet — and much of the time, as von Hippel and others have proved, a subset of these users are in fact the innovators. (This is a big Dave Winer theme, too.) One argument goes: AOL users are not the innovators. But I don’t believe this, not for a second. There are almost 20 million users, and no doubt these users have had a lot to say to AOL over time that has made its way into the many fine applications AOL has developed and offered as part of its services. This is an era of user-centered innovation, not just in Web 2.0, but in many many fields, as von Hippel has shown. Users of AOL 9.0’s free version are doing a whole lot of free reviewing out there and telling a story of their experiences across the web, some of which we’ve echoed on StopBadware.org. Eric von Hippel’s insight strikes me as relevant not just to AOL, but to all those offering bundles of applications for free downloads. Users have a lot to say, and some of it might help get to innovation, if the conversation is kept open. Put another way, instead of trying to make it more and more simple but also more and more closed, could AOL and others similarly situated instead make its application more “hackable”?

Jim has another must-read post in his series of thought-provoking mini-essays on the patent system, innovation, and the web 2.0 space.

A call to action: the security infrastructure for RSS is not where it needs to be for the mainstreaming of this technology to work and to be adequately protective of user privacy.

I was resetting my Bloglines account this morning, adding some new feeds, taking out some that I don’t read, and so forth. I searched on a friend’s web moniker (”Whirlycott”) to find whatever feeds he might be offering. Up popped a feed related to a web-based invoicing service he uses entitled (”[His Name] Invoices”) to which I could subscribe in Bloglines. I am not sure what it would have rendered — I did not subscribe! — but I thought it worth mentioning to him. It turns out he has been mad about this privacy problem for months. His initial post, worth reading and reviving as an issue of public discussion, is here.

I credit the fact that this may not be (just) a “Bloglines issue” but rather an “RSS industry” issue. But it’s a real problem if we are to continue to express ourselves via these citizen-generated media tools that offer RSS feeds, and moreso if we move into the promising realm of using RSS feeds to support other productivity-type tools. The privacy problems that already exist in cyberspace are enough to tackle; we need to get in front of an RSS privacy problem before it grows into yet widespread issue. After this morning’s experience, it’s clear to me it’s already a problem.

(Following the thread a bit, there’s another post in the series, including, some months ago, a note from someone appearing to be with Bloglines saying that they know it’s a serious problem.  How can we fix it, gang?  If it’s not a Bloglines-only issue and it’s a community issue, what has to get done?)

The Boston Herald’s Kimberly Atkins is promising to take questions from citizens for the three candidates for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. So, if you have something you want to know about Tom Reilly, Deval Patrick, or Chris Gabrieli, please get in touch with her via her blog.

I just saw that my friend-since-childhood, Andrew Sanocki, has a fabulous new design-related site called DesignPublic.com. It’s a very hip place in cyberspace. I don’t know much about fashion or design but it seems very cool to me. They have a blog, too, called Hatch.

Just before summer recess, some prominents senators have revived patent reform legislation (more or less) that had been proposed in the House last year. It’s interesting to witness the politics between the Professional Inventors Alliance (which dislikes these proposals) and the Big TechCos (which are full-bore behind it, it appears).

Lawrence Lessig is giving a rousing lecture right now to a standing-room-only crowd in Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School. It’s a plenary session of Wikimania 2006. He is in his element. It’s amazing to feel the energy in this room — unconveyable by blog or any other Internet-borne medium, but very very real.

Interoperability, he’s saying, is the key to the story — the Free Culture story — of which Wikipedia is such an illustrative chapter. The instinct to control a platform that you give (or sell) to other people is understandable, but it is also stupid. There needs to be interoperability and free standards that provide the widest range of freedoms for human beings to build upon the platform (sounds a lot like JZ’s Generativity).

We need to remember this lesson as we build a free culture. But we also need to make it possible for this platform to enable people to participate in a free culture. We need also to support the work of the Free Sofware Foundation and work toward free CODECs to allow content to flow across various platforms.

But we need to move past the technical layer, and enable a platform at the legal layer, too, one that protects free culture. The CC movement is an important piece of the story.

Yochai Benkler’s extraordinary book oozes with praise for Wikimedia. You are the central element, the central example, of Yochai’s wonderful argument. It is out of praise for all Wikimaniacs that Larry got on a plane at midnight, he says.

He’s also got a plea for everyone at Wikimania 2006: enable free culture, generally. There are two ways, he says, to do that:

1) Help others to spread the practice with your extraordinary example. There’s a CC/Wikimedia project — PDWiki — to help do this. It will put works in the hands of Canadians in digital form. Beyond demonstrating what you can do with works, it will help to establish what’s in the public domain and what’s not.

2) Demand a user platform for freedom. It came from a conversation with Jimbo Wales; they were drinking awful coffee in Europe. The problem was a lack of interoperability among islands of free cultures. We need interoperability among licenses that are allowing you to do the same thing with the content. We need to support an ecology of different efforts seeking to achieve the same functional outcomes — just as the original web was architected, only this time for cultural works, for content, not for code.

The way it work work is not that CC would have control, but rather that Eben Moglen’s Software Freedom Law Center would be in charge of running the federation of free licenses. The outcome should be that you can say: Derivatives of works under this license can be used under other equivalent licenses.

If we do not solve this problem now, we will face an ecological problem. These islands of free culture will never become anything but silos. We could do good here; we should do good here. Keep practicing the same kind of Wikimaniacal citizenship, he urges, that you’ve practiced to date, and get others to join you.

[Loads of applause.]

* * *

Elsewhere: CNet picks up the event itself as well as a wiki-photo-stream. Artsy, and nice.  And Martin LaMonica has covered Lessig’s talk.
Dan Bricklin, David Isenberg, David Weinberger, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Mitch Kapor, Wendy Seltzer, Yochai Benkler, many other great people are in the room. An old-home week for Berkman Center.

And what a happy picture this is, taken by Dave (he also has a movie of it): a group posing on the steps of the Old Berkman Center (we’ve just moved across campus).

I should start off by saying that I am not a fan of the patent system as a means of establishing IP rights in software. My critique of the system is (at least) five-fold: 1) there is widespread evidence that the system of granting claims in the United States, at least, is deeply flawed (see the scholarship of Doug Lichtman, Mark Lemley and others, for empirical evidence and policy arguments related to it); 2) the process is prohibitively expensive for small firms and individuals to have a fair shake when compared to the patent-filing goliaths (witness not just the cost of prosecution of patents, but the $3 - 5 million price-tag of most patent litigation); 3) the extent to which these first two factors and others favor incumbents over newcomers — and potential innovators; 4) there are also special cases, such as the standards-setting processes for software, where these and other problems arise and are particularly acute (Lichtman’s piece on patent hold-outs is helpful here, too, and a bit counterintuitive); and 5) the patent system often works at cross-purposes with the goals of teaching and learning, in contexts including computer science, biotechnology, and so forth (we at the Berkman Center have an active research project on this topic, funded by the Revson Foundation). Others — Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler (see pp. 437 - 439 of Wealth of Networks for a particularly strong form of the critique of software patents), Jamie Boyle, for instance — have made these critiques more forcefully and more convincingly than I have; this is not novel stuff. While of course I disagree on some fronts, often at the margins, with each of these scholars, I owe much to the line of thinking that they’ve blazed in all of what I do.

OK, enter the complicating factor: what if you are an entrepreneur who is devoted to creating a wonderful new generative (to use Jonathan Zittrain’s term) technology, say in the Web 2.0 space? One hard problem faces you early in the process. So, you get the part about being part of a development community, building your cool new platform, sharing it in various ways, making a market for your services, and generating a return for your investors. But what should you do about patenting? Say you, like me and others, are queasy about the current patent system (”yuck, I just don’t like them,” or “I don’t want to participate in that mess”), you don’t have much time or money, and you face an uphill battle in your crowded marketplace already. What’s a sensible, reasonably public-spirited, honest entrepreneur trying to make a living and a return for investors (if you’re lucky, or unlucky as the case may be, enough to have them) supposed to do?

Some investors I’ve heard speak or write on this topic — Joichi Ito, Brad Feld, A VC, and others — are opposed to software patents generally. As I noted above, I’m in the same camp. But most VCs do not share this view: IP rights are increasingly viewed as an asset, or as a defensive necessity, or both. Why? Well, some argue there’s a market emerging in patent rights (see Kenn Cukier’s long and provocative piece in The Economist on this score; but see the largely failed Ocean Tomo patent auction). Others believe that patents are necessary to create freedom of action in most fields of software.

This conundrum is real, and I’ve learned a great deal from finding myself caught in it. As with many people who teach, I have “outside activities” beyond my work at HLS and Berkman. Outside activities are good because they help pay the mortgage in the Boston area. They are also good because you learn things about the real world and keep you from becoming an ivory-tower-bound caricature of an academic; my teaching and research are plainly informed by outside work in the technology field. My outside activities have been primarily as an investor in RSS-related technologies and helping real entrepreneurs found companies in this space. Outside activities are a pain in the neck because I, anyway, constantly feel a tension between my academic identity (teacher and researcher of interesting Internet law topics) and my outside-activities identity (investor and participant in the marketplace). Much of this tension can be dealth with through disclosure — more on that in a moment. Nowhere is that tension more acute than in this patent space.

So, here’s the hard question: if you are an entrepreneur or investor who dislikes the patent system (either you want it scrapped altogether for software or you want it reformed), what do you do? Do you sink the money and time into participating, one-off, against the big guys and try to patent what you’ve done; do you sit it out and take your chances; do you license from someone the protective cover of some patents; or do you try to find some other solution? I do not know the answer, but I’m genuinely trying to puzzle it out. There probably is no right answer for every entrepreneur and every part of the software space (think of it as a variant of Terry Fisher’s disaggregation argument).

One other fact to be noted: large companies in the ICT space — IBM, Microsoft, HP, Sun, whomever — have massive-scale patenting operations. Some are newer to the patenting game but getting geared up, like Google. These companies have patent portfolios in the thousands or tens of thousands, with claims many times that many. IBM alone has over 31,000 patents and applies for thousands more each year. In the Web 2.0 space, Apple has begun to publish a series of applications. Google has applied for patents related to embedding ads in RSS feeds. No doubt the Intellectual Ventures team has thought about working in this space, or will soon. These entities are far from alone — patent applications related to RSS and other Web 2.0 technologies are coming out all the time. (Smaller companies, like Technorati, have applications pending as well.) As I’ve written before, there’s a difference between obtaining IP rights and enforcing them, so it’s not certain that this emerging thicket of patents will preclude innovation. Apple may never sue anyone at all for infringement of the many claims that may well be granted to it. But should an entrepreneur run that risk?

Here’s one idea. What about working with other small-scale entrepreneurs to do what the big guys do? What if you were to hold your nose and apply for patents that protect your work; share your patents with other little guys (and gals!); agree to reasonable cross-licensing terms for other entrepreneurs; and create a dual-licensing regime to allow highly favorable (no- or low-cost) licensing terms for .edus and .orgs (to solve problem number 5, above)? This is the idea that Jim Moore has been championing in the Web 2.0 space. He’s got a long and thoughtful post about it here. You may not agree with the strong form of his argument, but it’s very provocative. A company that we’ve both been working with, Newsilike Media Group, has applied for a series of Web 2.0 patents, which will soon begin to be published (as applications, to be clear, not as issued patents). Jim’s idea, which I support as an important experiment in this space, is to try to create freedom of action for start-ups and others in the Web 2.0 space by blazing a trail. While Jim and I disagree on some aspects of this matter — we have a genuine, long-standing, always-spirited conversation going on this score from which I’ve learned and continue to learn enormously — I have to say I welcome his efforts to bring innovative thinking to the space.

A key component of this strategy is to try to innovate in the area of no- or low-cost licensing for non-profits and educational institutions. Patent Commons, Science Commons, and others have been working on similar or related ideas. We should all be eager to learn more about this line of thinking. I think it’s brilliant. I very much hope that entrepreneurs will one day have an easy way to subscribe to a license — just like a Creative Commons license for copyrighted works — to give away some or all of the IP rights that you’ve obtained. Maybe it’s limited to certain classes of users (the .org and .edu idea), or fields of use, or the like, but allowing you to stand behind your beliefs while competing on reasonable terms in the marketplace. I’d love to see a way where the little guy doesn’t have to unilaterally disarm him or herself, but can do so in a way that lets him or herself sleep at night.

I am wondering what Yochai would say about this idea as a practical matter. In Wealth of Networks, he writes: “Even if the patent owner has a very open licensing policy — say, licensing the patent non-exclusively to anyone without discrimination for $10,000 — most free software developers will not be able to play.” He continues, “If working on a problem requires a patent license, and if any new development must not only write new source code, but also avoid replicating a broad scope patent or else pay a large fee, then the conditions for free software are thoroughly undermined.” (p. 438). So, if you buy this argument but you also live in a future in which large companies get broad claims via their Web 2.0 patents, what, absent reform that anti-patent people would support, should the entrepreneur do? To me, it’s a hugely vexing problem that requires innovative thinking, challenging the “yucky” feeling many of us have about software patents and honing in on short-, medium- and long-term solutions.

(One further, personal note: I’ve long had on my disclosures page my Personal Patent Profits Pledge: if I make money from any patent activity that is not consonant with my beliefs as to what is good public policy, I pledge to donate those profits to the Berkman Center or a similarly-situated institution that is working on the study and appropriate reform of the patent regime.)

There is much more to be said and learned on this topic. I welcome debate and critique; I think that the cyberlaw community, myself included, has been so focused on copyright that we haven’t delved as deeply into patent (and trademark and trade secret, perhaps, too) as we might. I look forward to participating actively in a pro-innovation, good-for-the-entrepreneur, good for society-at-large outcome. Is there a form of software patenting that can help drive innovation, not frustrate it?

* * *

Addendum, with thanks to Phil for a pointer, here is a bit of a terrific short essay from Paul Graham’s “Are Software Patents Evil?“, which covers much of the same ground:

“Do patents encourage or discourage innovation?

“This is a very hard question to answer in the general case. People write whole books on the topic. One of my main hobbies is the history of technology, and even though I’ve studied the subject for years, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to say whether patents have in general been a net win.

“One thing I can say is that 99.9% of the people who express opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but out of a kind of religious conviction. At least, that’s the polite way of putting it; the colloquial version involves speech coming out of organs not designed for that purpose.

“Whether they encourage innovation or not, patents were at least intended to. You don’t get a patent for nothing. In return for the exclusive right to use an idea, you have to publish it, and it was largely to encourage such openness that patents were established.”

Worth reading in full.

The excitement is mounting at Harvard Law School as the first attendees of Wikimania 2006 have begun to arrive. The Berkman Center is abuzz. The Phoenix wrote a preview and Tom Ashbrook, at WBUR’s On Point, took up the topic of Wikipedia today on the radio, with Jimbo Wales, among others, as a guest. (Of course, The Onion also has its own spin on this matter.) We are so fortunate and honored to be able to host this event and to welcome the Wikimaniacs to our fair city.

Prof. Jonathan Zittrain has responded to the enormous outpouring of Groklaw reader comments to his paper on The Generative Internet with an FAQ posted back at Groklaw.

For instance: wondering how Blackberries and other mobile devices fit into the picture of JZ’s argument about the PC lock-down future we face? Here’s an exchange that picks up on that thread. Z writes: “This is a serious challenge to my argument that after years of general purpose PC primacy, the momentum is shifting in favor of limited-use devices. The next few generations of information appliances will be telling, I agree. My sense, though, is that these devices are less products than they are services. Mess too much with an iPod, and the next iPod update (needed, of course, to work with the next gen iTunes music store, and to coordinate with one’s Nike sneakers so that one can upload running times to the iPod) will say, ‘Sorry, this iPod’s functionality has been modified, and it will no longer work with iTunes.’ Or it will simply overwrite one’s own adaptations.”

Also worth reading: a cool post from CALIopolous on JZ’s article and its Groklaw reaction, complete with a picture of a blender.

(A curious side-note: the article itself, on SSRN and in the Harvard Law Review, continues to climb the SSRN download rankings, having just broken into the top 1000 articles.)