Dr. Dobb's Journal May 2000
If letters to the editor were delivered the old-fashioned way, the mailman would still be groaning after our February 2000 issue. Virtually speaking, "Worker Shortage a Tall Tale?" generated a ton of mail. Some of your letters responding to the editorial began appearing in last month's issue, with more to come in the future. There were some wrenching tales from readers who have experienced discrimination of one kind or another. Surprisingly, most reports of abuses didn't involve anything personal, but instead came down to money -- getting laid off because of high salaries, while less expensive replacements were waiting in the wings.
More specifically, I'd like to thank Norman Matloff and others for setting me straight on one misstatement: "...most high-tech H1-B workers are recently graduated students from U.S. universities." As Professor Matloff has pointed out in his paper "Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage" (http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/itaa.html), which I referred to but didn't read carefully enough, U.S. Department of Labor statistics indicate that the majority of H-1B recipients don't have degrees, U.S. or otherwise. Matloff goes on to point out that even Congressional authors of a bill to exempt foreign graduates of U.S. schools from H-1B quotas estimate that only a small proportion of H-1Bs would be affected.
I'd also like to thank Mike Schmit and David Charlap, both of whom have written for DDJ over the years, for their comments on DVD and DeCSS (see "Open Source, Open Projects," DDJ, March 2000). At issue, you recall, was reverse-engineered playback software for DVD players, which was released over the Internet. The DVD Copyright Control Association, http://www.dvdcca.org/, went nuts and started litigating left and right.
As David pointed out, what put the DVDCCA's knickers in a knot is that DeCSS makes it possible to build unlicensed players. A high percentage of the price of every DVD player (and a slightly lower percentage of DVD-ROM drives and software for playing movies) goes to pay patent license fees. The CSS code that was reverse engineered prevents a manufacturer from selling a player without paying the license fees -- if you don't buy the CSS software, you can't play commercial discs, and you can't buy the software without paying the royalties. Mike, who has been an active participant in the DVD industry, described in even more detail how much of the money required to build DVD players seems to go for patent royalties and related fees, rather than for hardware or software (those are my words, not his, by the way). Mike is neutral on the patents, but rightly points out that the real problem involves how we move forward and get beyond the battle of free speech versus intellectual-property protection.
In all likelihood, this volatile topic will generate another batch of letters reacting to Jawed Karim's article "A Win32 Network Crawler" (page 38), which describes MP3 Voyeur, a freely available program that automates the task of finding MP3 on a LAN. Let's be perfectly clear: DDJ supports free speech, but we also support intellectual-property rights. It's legally and ethically wrong to violate copyrights. Alas, it seems that once again, the intellectual-property problems we're struggling with are because the law isn't keeping pace with technology, so it is up to each of us to act responsibly.
While there are certainly valid patents associated with DVD, the nincompoops at the U.S. Patent Office continue to bounce back and forth between the ridiculous and absurd with other patents. For instance, they followed the idiocy in giving Amazon.com a patent for its "1-Click" cookie-based shopping technique, by turning around and granting another one for its "Associate's" program. The patent, officially described as "An Internet-based referral system that enables individuals and other business entities ('associates') to market products, in return for a commission, that are sold from a merchant's web site," is broad, obvious, and trivial. (For a description of all of Amazon.com's patents, go to http://www.patents.ibm.com/ and search for "amazon.com.") And, as Greg Aharonian of the Internet Patent News Service reports, Donald Lewine of Profitable Technology claims to have filed for a similar affiliates program patent in 1994, but was denied because of prior art.
Neither of these patents should have been granted, and calling them "inventions" is an affront to serious technologists everywhere. The only justification for Amazon.com to even file for these patents is that the company knows it can't keep bleeding financial losses forever and is starting to look for new revenue streams, perhaps from patent royalties.
Outrage over Amazon.com's bogus patents was immediate and harsh. Richard Stallman, for instance, called for a boycott of Amazon.com (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon.html#whyBoycott), while Tim O'Reilly posted an open letter and organized a letter writing campaign (http://www.oreilly.com/ask_tim/amazon_patent .comments.html). Thousands added their names to O'Reilly's letter. In a move smacking more of PR than sincerity, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos called O'Reilly (press releases announcing the calls were immediately distributed, of course), then released his own open letter on patents (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ subst/misc/patents.html/002-6193829-1826626). Bezos' self-serving letter didn't break any ground or denounce the patents. Instead, he disingenuously called for a change in the patent laws, while making it clear he's going to enforce Amazon.com's patents. He also agreed to help fund a prior art database, if he can find one. Great. I'd recommend the Software Patent Institute (http://www.spi.org/): It already exists and it's reputable. It's also not for profit -- a concept familiar to Bezos.
Jonathan Erickson
editor-in-chief
jerickson@ddj.com