The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Policy, not providence

Paul Krugman once again points out the obvious and straight line between policy choices and the economy today:

[T]he financialization of America wasn’t dictated by the invisible hand of the market. What caused the financial industry to grow much faster than the rest of the economy starting around 1980 was a series of deliberate policy choices, in particular a process of deregulation that continued right up to the eve of the 2008 crisis.

Not coincidentally, the era of an ever-growing financial industry was also an era of ever-growing inequality of income and wealth. Wall Street made a large direct contribution to economic polarization, because soaring incomes in finance accounted for a significant fraction of the rising share of the top 1 percent (and the top 0.1 percent, which accounts for most of the top 1 percent’s gains) in the nation’s income. More broadly, the same political forces that promoted financial deregulation fostered overall inequality in a variety of ways, undermining organized labor, doing away with the “outrage constraint” that used to limit executive paychecks, and more.

Other commentators have noted that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations seem to lack coherence or an intellectual center. Krugman disagrees, pointing out that they all share a common target: plutocrats.

Gnawing away at the middle classes leads, eventually, to the destruction of democracy. Today is the anniversary of just such an occurrence.

Friedman on Emanuel

New York Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman interviewed Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel recently:

I find “Rahmbo’s” Chicago agenda intriguing because it’s a microcosm of what the whole country will have to do for the next decade: find smart ways to invest in education and infrastructure to generate growth while cutting overall spending to balance the budget — all at the same time and with limited new taxes. It’s a progressive agenda on a Tea Party allowance.

“I want to be honest about this budget,” the mayor declared. “Almost every one of these ideas has been discussed and debated before. But politics has stood in the way of their adoption. Maybe in the past, we could afford the political path. But we have come to the point where we can’t afford it any longer. The cost of putting political choices ahead of practical solutions has become too expensive. It is destroying Chicago’s finances and threatening the city’s future. In all of these reforms, we will be guided by principle, pragmatism and progress — not politics. What we simply cannot do is to temporize any longer. We can’t kick the can down the road because we’ve run out of road.”

I like our mayor. He's more policy-motivated than his predecessor. I hope he's at least as effective at getting his policies through.

Reducing externalities in Chicago

In a long-overdue move I completely support, Chicago will raise the annual vehicle tax on SUVs and minivans:

[Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel] is pushing in how ... large passenger vehicles are defined. Instead of setting the bar at 4,500 pounds, as it is now, Emanuel wants it set at 4,000 pounds.

Such a change means 184,000 more Chicago vehicles would fall under a pricier sticker class. And their owners would pay $60 more for a sticker.

Minivans like the Dodge Grand Caravan and Honda Odyssey and midsize SUVs like the Honda Pilot and Kia Sorento will join outsize gas guzzlers already subject to the higher sticker fee such as Hummer H1s, the GMC Suburban and Land Rover Discovery. Vehicle weights depend on the year and model.

The mayor explicitly linked the tax increase to the well-known relationship between vehicle weight and road repairs. As a driver of a VW hatchback, and as a responsible city dweller who understands that roads are the modern commons, it has always irked me that people who own SUVs are allowed to drive don't pay their share for parking or road maintenance. I look forward to this tax increase, which I hope will encourage people, however slightly, to buy smaller cars.

Astrolabe responds

This morning The Daily Parker received a press release from Gary Christen, responding to my analyses of their lawsuit against the guys who maintain the Posix time zone database (here, here, and here).

Unfortunately for Christen, Astrolabe's response fails to rebut my central assertions. I said, essentially, they have failed to state a claim upon which relief can be granted by a Federal court (or, as one of my colleagues who actually practices law suggested, their complaint is actionable in itself). Their response doesn't make their original claim any stronger.

Christen seems at pains to make non-technical people feel better about the alarm we technical people raised regarding the likely effects of shutting down the tzinfo project. "Astrolabe has now done a careful reading of ... the various industry publications that broke this story on October 7," Christen claims, but if so it was a reading without comprehension. We technical folks got over our panic in about thirty seconds, in favor of outrage and scorn. And with their detailed, bullet-pointed release, Astrolabe systematically reinforces this writer's outrage and scorn.

Taking each of Christen's points in turn:

1. Astrolabe’s lawsuit is in no way intended to interfere with compilation of current time-zone information maintained by Mssrs. Olson and Eggert, or any other persons.

Read in the light most favoring the plaintiff, this is irrelevant. Read in the light of my office, it's false. Astrolabe's intent is irrelevant in any case; the tzinfo database contains historical and prospective time zone data because computers on occasion need to represent times and dates in the past. For that, and other technical reasons I'll get into in another post, "past" and "future" data can't be separated. Shutting down the tzinfo project shuts down the whole thing.

2. The aim of Astrolabe’s suit is only to enforce copyright protection for materials regarding historical time data prior to 2000. This does not affect current time-setting on computers, and it has little or no effect on the Unix computing world.

Taking the second sentence, time-setting isn't the issue; time display is; and if their suit survives a motion to dismiss (big "if"), it could have a crippling effect on time displays in the U.S. But the first sentence demonstrates nicely the fallacy of petitio principii (begging the question) concerning who owns the material in the first place.

3. The fact is that the historical time zone data compiled by ACS is protected by registered copyrights, first on its publication in book form as the American Atlas and the International Atlas, and later in electronic form as the ACS PC Atlas.

Gary, the data is not protected by copyright. Of course the books and the software are protected, which no one disputes. But the data—Gary, can't you understand the difference?

Let me try to help. Let's say the book has the sentence "In 1985, the U.S. passed a law that moved the first day of Daylight Saving Time from the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday." The tzinfo database distills from that sentence the following entry: "Rule US 1987 2006 - Apr Sun>=1 2:00 1:00 D". Does the database entry look, maybe, a little different? Can you start to see how the fact and its expression have different forms? No? Sigh.

The question of whether the material is “copyrightable”: has already been decided by the U.S. Copyright Office in the affirmative.

NO, NO, NO, you crashing ignoramus. Wow, either you got astoundingly bad legal advice, or ignored the advice you got.

The Copyright Office does not decide whether a work presented for registration is protected; it simply registers the work. All creative works have presumptive copyright protection at the time of creation. Copyright registration provides legal benefits in the event of infringement. But the Copyright Office makes no determinations at all on the validity of the copyright claim.

But "the material" in the tzinfo database is not subject to copyright protection, as Judge O'Toole is going to make clear to you in short order.

4. Why is the material considered copyrightable? Many hold the mistaken belief that all databases are mere compilations of fact, and are therefore not subject to copyright. However, compiling the ACS database went far beyond gathering official government data. In 20th-century America, particularly in the Midwest, time standards were a chaotic patchwork of not only state and local ordinances, but even of different time observances in the same jurisdiction.

Gary, the information expressed in the tzinfo database "is...considered copyrightable" only by Astrolabe, not, in fact, by Title 17, U.S. Code. And as your attorney should have told you, it doesn't matter whether the authors crossed fields of broken glass barefoot and rinsed the blood off with lemon juice in an effort to find the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and time zones. Once the answer is out there, the facts are public domain. I can tell everyone I want that the answer is 42, and neither you nor the restless ghost of Douglas Adams can make a penny off me saying so.

5. Why did the ACS compilers bother to undertake this effort?

Having moved from petitio principii we move now to argumentum ad misericordiam, an argument to pity. No one cares whether you are curing cancer, leading us to eternal salvation, or as you suggested in your press release, you guys "are money-seeking parasites on society," all that matters right now is the nature of the material you claim to own.

6. Why is Astrolabe suing to defend this copyright? ... Astrolabe inherited the obligation to pay royalties on the Atlas to Michelsen’s widow and to the other principal compilers, who are now at retirement-age.

Oh my heavens, save the widows and orphans! It's irrelevant to your lawsuit, but it does fill me with emotion. Unfortunately, the emotion is disgust.

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things, this lawsuit reduces the market for your book. The tzinfo database not only exhorts people to buy the books (thus creating the onerous obligation for you to give a few of your hard-inherited dollars back to the family of the guy who wrote them) but gives expression to the data the books contain such that the entire world can benefit from it. Given that computer software engineers, being logical sorts, generally avoid bunkum, the tzinfo database creates a market for the books that would never have otherwise heard of them.

Contrary to the accusations that it is trolling for dollars, it is not filing this suit in pursuit of vast amounts of cash. In the astrology world, there are no vast amounts of cash. The suit was filed in order to make Astrolabe’s concerns known to Mssrs. Olson and Eggert having not received a satisfactory reply to earlier phone calls and letters. Astrolabe has no wish to cripple the database on which Unix, Linux, Java and other computing depends.

Obviously you're not interested in money, because you would have named the U.S. government and the University of California as defendants if you were. (By the way, you need a new lawyer, or you need to listen to the one you have. Since Olson and Eggert maintained the tzinfo database in their official capacities as employees of those institutions, their employers will be joined in the suit eventually, and now you're up against a lot of really good attorneys. Good luck.)

But wait—you filed a Federal lawsuit to make a point? Because Olson and Eggert ignored your calls as any reasonable person would when some crank claims ownership of historical facts? And didn't you write earlier—right there, in the first bullet point—that you "in no way intended to interfere with compilation of current time-zone information maintained by Mssrs. Olson and Eggert?"

Finally, your conclusion:

In filing this suit, Astrolabe has touched the hot buttons on a number of highly emotional issues. One issue is the long-held right of people to receive money for their labors vs. the newer values of open sourcing, wiki and the other forms of the free information exchange that have made the internet so great.

No, you've touched on a well-settled legal issue. The people who labored on the work you're attacking didn't ask for compensation; they donated their time and efforts to the tzinfo project. Also, you, Gary, didn't provide any labor at all. You bought the rights at a bankruptcy sale. Think on what that says about your concerns for the widows and orphans, not to mention your noble purpose in filing this suit. Will you give all the cash flows from the sale of the ACS books directly to the creator's estate? No? Why not?

Another is the clash of paradigms between a mechanistic one unfriendly to astrology and a newer (and older) one that recognizes that the universe is far more mysterious than we thought.

The only reason people think it at all interesting you lot are astrologers is simply that it suggests you refuse to accept evidence as a way of understanding the world. If you want to live in your demon-haunted world and fleece people with similar beliefs, that's your right as Americans.

But filing a lawsuit in U.S. District Court inserts you into the reality-based community in ways I don't think you understand. Preach ignorance all you want; just not in Federal court.

Finally, I have to call out for special derision this bit:

[I]n answer to those whose outrage is increased by the fact that astrologers are the plaintiffs, we can only say that these detractors are uninformed. Uncritical recipients of the opinions of those who are higher in status than they are, they have obviously never experienced the power of astrology for themselves. Why astrology works is still a mystery, but as the prevailing paradigm morphs from 19th-century mechanism into one that has to embrace all the new things we are finding out about the universe, perhaps we will soon have a plausible explanation. Anyway, to those who know that astrology is bunkum and its practitioners are money-seeking parasites on society, all we can say is try to be a bit humbler and accept that the universe is far more mysterious than you imagine.

We aren't pissed at you because you're astrologers; we're pissed at you because you're stupid. Speaking only for myself, precisely my ability to think critically and my refusal to accept extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence (from anyone regardless of status) lead me to conclude that this lawsuit is the work of children, who have neither the comprehension, the logic, nor the humility to realize their error in misusing the legal process in their tantrum. I don't wish you harm; I don't care whether your business succeeds or fails; but I do wish upon you and your attorney a Rule 11 dismissal with sanctions so harsh they're recorded in the stars for generations to come.

Chicago contemplating congestion charge

Good idea:

Drivers parking in public garages and lots in the central business district would pay an extra $2 on weekdays under Emanuel's plan. It would come on top of the current $3 city parking tax that goes into the general fund, officials said.

The money generated by the new tax would be used to rebuild two CTA "L'' stations downtown (the specific stations are still to be determined) and launch a long-planned bus rapid transit system, officials said.

For drivers who complain they already are paying too much, in many cases $30 a day or more to park downtown, the congestion tax is intended to provide strong motivation to switch to buses and trains.

In economic terms, they're aligning incentives. By the way, the congestion isn't on downtown roads so much as on the highways leading into downtown. Driving on the Kennedy or Eisenhower during rush hour is an experienced matched only by driving through the Lincoln Tunnel on days that end in "y."

Obama's job bill blocked by GOP in procedural move

That's what Fallows says the headline should be:

Here is the headline in the online home page of the NYT, about Obama's "pass this jobs bill, pass it now" proposal. Note the word "fails":

Obama's Jobs Bill Fails in Senate in First Legislative Test

The subhead and the rest of the article make clear that more Senators voted for the bill than against it -- 50 to 49. It would have been 51-48 except for a parliamentary ruse by Majority Leader Harry Reid, who switched to a "No" vote so that he would later be able to call it up for reconsideration.

We have gone so far in recent years toward routinizing the once-rare requirement for a 60-vote Senate "supermajority" into an obstacle for every nomination and every bill that our leading newspaper can say that a measure "fails" when it gets more Yes than No votes.

The headline Fallows suggests in its place (heading this post) "would help offset the mounting mis-impression that the Constitution dictates a 60-vote margin for getting anything done." Remember, the GOP want people to think government can't get anything done. It's important to remind people that this is a political strategy to consolidate power, not a feature of our government.

Note: As of this writing, the headline has changed to "President’s Jobs Measure Is Turned Back in Key Senate Test," which doesn't really change Fallows' point.

The hidden truth about astrology software

After the shocking disappearance of the Olson time zone database yesterday (described here and here), some things have become clearer overnight.

o The wonderful land of Oz has stepped up. Robert Elz, an Australian computer scientist who has actively supported the tzinfo project throughout, has revived the time zone mailing list maintained at the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). My, but the list was active overnight, with dozens of people volunteering to host the database, move it to non-U.S. servers, and continue to research and develop it.

o The current database is available from an Australian site at ftp://munnari.oz.au/pub/tzdata2011k.tar.gz. (This is the version running on Weather Now.)

o Astrolabe, Inc., the mom-and-pop Cape Cod outfit responsible for this insanity, has a suddenly-popular Facebook page upon which hundreds of people have expressed themselves. (I wonder if the company will figure out how to disallow wall postings? Oopsi.)

o Software developer Curtis Manwaring, CEO of Zodiasoft Technologies in Las Vegas, claims that he and Astrolabe have had a running fight for years about ownership of various software implementations of time zone data. Says Manwaring:

Gary Christen (CEO of Astrolabe) tried to hire me on three separate occasions and I refused. When Astrolabe obtained the ACS Atlas (when ACS went bankrupt in July 2008), I was concerned that I wouldn't have an atlas for my software anymore. The last time that they tried to hire me, the ACS Atlas became leverage to coerce me into working for them because I had no guarantee that they would give me access to the ACS Atlas. When I refused the last time, I managed to obtain a verbal agreement that I would send my customers to them for a special discount on the ACS Atlas and was relieved for a while. But over the next several months, my customers started complaining about the run around they were getting on the special deal that Gary promised my customers. Eventually one of my customers said that he thought that Astrolabe was trying to make me look bad and disadvantage my business by making it difficult to obtain the stand alone version of the ACS Atlas which is required by my software (but not Solar Fire which has the ACS Atlas bound with it). He was so fed up with the run around Astrolabe gave him that he formatted a database of latitudes and longitudes for me and asked me to add it to my software. That got me back on the issue of researching time zones after which I found the Olson time zone database. I subsequently found from the Olson sources that the ACS data was extremely unreliable, much more than I previously thought.

Note to Curtis, Gary, and everyone else involved in this nonsense: there's a difference between software, which enjoys copyright protection, and data, which does not. This is established, black-letter law in the U.S. (and in most other countries). The fact that both of you produce products that use the same data does not in itself constitute copyright infringement.

What this sounds like—and I'm sorry, Curtis, but you're in it up to your neck—is that you're both amateurs, and your narcissistic dispute has started claiming innocent lives. Arthur Olson and Paul Eggert were trying to help people, as part of the open, collaborative effort we in the software community like to call "open collaboration."

Now, I write software for money, and in fact I have a time zone factory written in .NET, that reads and parses the entire tzinfo database so you can use it in .NET applications. (Send me an email if you want to license it!)

But here's the thing: I know it's a lot less expensive for someone to license my tzinfo parser than to roll their own. Like, two or three orders of magnitude less expensive. And if someone else writes a better parser, they might take my customers away—but that's not copyright infringement (unless they actually use the same C# code or documentation), that's creation.

Speaking of professional software development, I have to start billing now. I'm glad Robert Elz has stepped up, along the dozens of other volunteers, to keep this hidden but vital software project going.

More about the tzinfo copyright lawsuit

At lunch I thought more about the copyright case against timezone data that the crazy astrologers have launched. I believe Arthur Olson and Paul Eggert, the volunteers who coordinated the tzinfo database for years and who now find themselves sued for doing so, have two principal defenses, one of which may allow them to get the case dismissed.

First, copyright law does not protect strictly-factual information. The Copyright Act only protects the expression of facts. 17 USC 102(b) clearly states:

In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

Massachusetts (!) attorney Ronald B. Standler analyzed the copyrightability of factual information in a 2009 essay that relies heavily on the 1991 Supreme Court decision in Feist Publications v Rural Telephone. In the case, a publisher blatantly copied and republished directory listings from a telephone company's white pages. The Supreme Court found that the directory information was not protected by copyright, because it was strictly factual data.

In a later case, Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com, the defendant had used a bot to scrape event information off Ticketmaster's website. The trial court found that the event information was not protected, and the temporary copying required for the bot to operate (it had to download a copy of each page in order to parse it) was fair use.

This brings up the second defense, should the first not win the case for Olson and Eggert. 17 USC 106 allows certain uses of copyrighted works "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research..." and requires consideration of "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

In this case, the tzinfo database (technically a publication of the U.S. government thanks to Olson's employment at the National Institutes of Health) lists historical time zone rules to enable any consumer of the data to find local wall-clock time for any point on earth back to the institution of standard time there. Who cares about this? Well, how about historians? Meteorologists? Frikin' astrologers?

And earlier today I pointed out that, if anything, the Olson database creates a market for the time zone atlas, by referring to it and even providing links to the author.

Oh, and a bonus third defense (which will probably be raised first): the infringement, if any, started waaaay back in the 1990s; 17 USC 507 prohibits a lawsuit "unless it is commenced within three years after the claim accrued." Of course, each time they published a new version of the tzinfo database, it might constitute a new infringement, so I'm not sure about this.

This case stinks. Don't even get me started on the plaintiff's attorney, who's not the cleanest dog in the pound according to the Massachusetts State Ethics Commission. (Molloy "admitted that she had violated the conflict of interest law by appearing before the Sandwich Zoning Board of Appeals on behalf of her private law clients to oppose a special permit application after she had participated in her capacity as a Planning Board member in formulating comments on the same special permit application." Oopsi.)

If this case gets past initial motions I'll be shocked. And as soon as I find out where to send checks, I'll post information about Olson's and Eggert's legal defense funds.

Time zone database shut down

The National Institutes for Health, through a quirk of history, maintainsed the worldwide-standard time zone database until today. A Massachusetts-based company, Astrolabe, Inc., has sued the people who maintain the database for copyright infringement. The company claims to have purchased the rights to The American Atlas, from which the time zone database derived some of its data. From the complaint:

Defendant Olson’s unauthorized reproduction of the Works have been published at ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/tzarchive.qz, where the references to historic international time zone data is replete with references to the fact thatthe source for this information is, indeed, the ACS Atlas.

Here are a couple of examples from the database:

# From Paul Eggert (2006-03-22):
# A good source for time zone historical data in the US is
# Thomas G. Shanks, The American Atlas (5th edition),
# San Diego: ACS Publications, Inc. (1991).
# Make sure you have the errata sheet; the book is somewhat useless without it.
# It is the source for most of the pre-1991 US entries below.

Here's an example from the data itself, in the Newfoundland section:

# Rule	NAME	FROM	TO	TYPE	IN	ON	AT	SAVE	LETTER/S
Rule	StJohns	1917	only	-	Apr	 8	2:00	1:00	D
Rule	StJohns	1917	only	-	Sep	17	2:00	0	S
# Whitman gives 1919 Apr 5 and 1920 Apr 5; go with Shanks & Pottenger.

I don't think anyone will deny that Arthur Olson, Paul Eggert, not to mention the hundreds of other people who have maintained the database for years, have used the book in question as a key reference. So here are the questions which, unfortunately, will take the court a couple of years to work out:

  1. Is data about when time zone rules changed throughout history protected under copyright?
  2. If so, who owns it?
  3. If someone owns it, is the Olson database a derivative work under copyright law?
  4. If the Olson database does, in fact, derive from the work in question, is it a fair use?
  5. Just how stupid are these astrologists, anyway?

Because what you may not know, dear reader, is that almost every Unix-based computer in the world uses this database to set its clock to local time. (All of the applications I've written, starting with Weather Now, use the database as well.) Shutting down the database project will require individual system administrators to update their local copies when rules change. It's not onerous, but it will lead to gaps, particularly in global applications like Weather Now.

What's even stupider about this lawsuit is that comments in the database encourage people to buy the book. So even if Astrolabe owns the copyright to the facts about time zone rules—a troubling proposition—their republication in the Olson database increases the likelihood that they'll make money off it.

Only, facts as such are not protected, so I can't see how Astrolabe can possibly win this suit. I will be contributing to Olson's and Eggert's legal defense fund once they get it set up.

Astrolabe doesn't need to look to the heavens to see how this will turn out.

Update: More here and here.

"Our three year national nightmare is over!"

So says Sullivan, reacting to the news that Sarah Palin is done, one hopes forever:

Sarah Palin said on Wednesday that she will not seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, ending months of speculation and leaving the Republican field largely settled.

Palin had left the door open to a run but gave little sign of joining the race to challenge Democratic President Barack Obama. She made it official in a letter to supporters and in an interview with conservative talk radio host Mark Levin.

"After much prayer and serious consideration, I have decided that I will not be seeking the 2012 GOP nomination for president of the United States," she said in the letter.

Sullivan interprets:

Her explanation is, as usual, opaque. But the idea that this person is protecting her family - after putting them all on a reality show, after deploying an infant with Down Syndrome as a book-selling prop, after pushing her son into the military, after sending her elderly dad headfirst into a ravine for a reality TV shot, and after using another young daughter as a campaign press bouncer ... well, it's as ludicrous as almost everything she says. I suspect she knows somewhere that the truth about her will eventually come out in full - as it has already in part, culminating with Joe McGinniss' devastating and exhaustively reported book, The Rogue. And the sheer craziness of this clinically disturbed person would bring it all crashing down. So she's bowing out. Call it cowardice; call it a rare example of sanity; call it a bizarre end to an even weirder game of hide and seek for the past few months. But the bottom line is: we can stop worrying about the threat she posed to this country.

I am not alone in my party to have hoped she'd face the President next November, because I'd like to see him win over 500 electoral votes and 45 or so states (why not 49?). But still, one fewer mentally ill person with national exposure sounds all right to me today.

Update: TPM has a delightful collection of videos reminding us of what we'll miss now Queen Esther is back to Persia.