The second talk by Christopher Yoo of Vanderbilt was on network neutrality. I was pleased to learn that I am not the only one who thinks that the market can probably sort out neutrality on its own without government intervention. Many scholars I admire, such as Lessig, and with whom I generally agree on copyright and patent issues, think that government enforcement of network neutrality is desirable. The main issue I see has to do with the monopoly over the last mile granted by local governments. There is not real problem with backbone competition - as Yoo says, entry is easy. Roger Noll, one of the later speakers pointed out that wireless is probably going to break the back of the last mile monopoly. So the most effective federal government policy on issues such as network neutrality is to open up a lot of spectrum for wireless.
The third talk was by Randal Picker of Chicago on mistrust based DRM. He argued in favor of a DRM system in which leaking your DRM encrypted files would reveal personal information you would prefer not to have revealed. This would give users an incentive not to leak. Ed Felten had a long reply to Randal on his blog. I am inclined to agree with Ed that this isn't a terribly good idea. It doesn't concern me a great deal - the market has dealt pretty effectively with DRM so far. My concern is only with government mandated DRM - which I think is a bad idea regardless of what form it might take.
I think the big gap here is between those who think they understand the technology - and think that DRM can't work - and those that admit they don't understand the technology - and think that it might. While I fall into the former camp, I should point out that the experts haven't alway been right about these things. In the later 1970s I argued to a friend who was far more expert about computers than I that small personal computers would take over the universe soon. My technical friend told me that would never happen - while electronics are getting smaller, mass storage like disk drives are mechanical devices, and simply could not drop rapidly in size and weight.
The final talk was by Roger Noll of Stanford. He gave a fascinating talk about the misuse of intellectual property. Apparently the legal penalties are draconian - you can effectively lose all of your rights to the property during the period of misuse. So, for example, if the recording industry was guilty of misusing their copyrights to violate the anti-trust laws (and it looks like they did) then anyone who downloaded any of their music during the period of misues (it ended in 2003) is off the hook. The movie industry faces a similar problem. Before we could all rush off and illegally download something in hopes of filing a class action lawsuit against the entertainment industry (apparently 14 such lawsuits are already pending) David Nimmer - a world expert in copyright law - shed some doubt on how draconian the punishment really is. Apparently the law is a little grey in this area: it may be that while anything the entertainment industry did during the period of misuse is invalid - that is lawsuits they won during that period might go out the door - they may be able to sue retroactively after they end the misuse.
