Brian Berman
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Depression Part Two

[ed. Simple, straightforward depiction of what depression feels like. Excellent.]

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.

I didn't understand why it was fun for me, it just was.

But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren't the same.

I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse's Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled. I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

by Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half |  Read more:

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Gatsby le Magnifique, Paul Rogers
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Not Safe for Funding: The N.S.F. and the Economics of Science

Last month, Representative Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, introduced a divisive new bill, the High Quality Research Act, that would change the criteria by which the National Science Foundation evaluates research projects and awards funding. (The N.S.F., with a budget of seven billion dollars, funds roughly twenty per cent of federally supported basic research in American universities.) Currently, proposals are evaluated through a traditional peer-review process, in which scientists and experts with knowledge of the relevant fields evaluate the projects’ “intellectual merits” and “broader impacts.” Peer review is a central tenet of modern academic science, and, according to critics, the new bill threatens to supersede it with politics.

John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said last week that “adding Congress as reviewers is a mistake.” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson warned more forcefully that Representative Smith was “sending a chilling message to the entire scientific community that peer review may always be trumped by political review.” But in a statement, Representative Smith said the draft bill “improves on [the peer-review process] by adding a layer of accountability.” The bill’s new three-point criteria for funding require that a project be “in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense”; solve “problems that are of the utmost importance to society at large”; and not be “duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

Implicit in the proposal’s language is a desire for oversight built into the process of determining which areas of study are significant. (Representative Smith cited five N.S.F.-funded social science projects, with concerns as to whether they “adhere to NSF’s ‘intellectual merit’ guideline.”) To Smith’s point, despite sizable public investment in research and development (nearly $150 billion this year), relatively scant attention is devoted to investigating whether the process of science, in its current form, is well-designed for generating knowledge.

As it turns out, the N.S.F. recently awarded a grant to Kevin Zollman, an assistant professor of philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University, to investigate what drives researchers to pursue particular projects, and how they secure funding for them. In an ideal world, all science would proceed from the simple and lofty social goal of expanding human knowledge, but researchers are of course subject to the constraints of economic reality. To disentangle these knotted incentives, Zollman is applying a branch of game theory known as “mechanism design,” which uses simple models to understand how individual players within a system balance competing motivations to arrive at different ends. (...)

As researchers scramble to carve out intellectual real estate, however, overly aggressive competition and singular focus on originality can elicit a host of negative behaviors: bias toward reporting positive or rushed results, withholding or fabricating data, and counterproductive levels of output. Of fifty million scholarly articles published since 1665, more than half of themappeared in the last twenty-five years. While a number of factors contribute to this glut, one of them is the pressure to publish results even when they’re not immediately relevant. “Much of the recent scientific literature is repetitive, unimportant, poorly conceived or executed, and oversold; perhaps deservingly, much of it is ignored,” wrote the microbiologist Ferric Fang in a 2012 editorial. The problem is becoming particularly acute as a growing pool of scientists face a shrinking pot of money, both from drying stimulus funds scheduled to disappear this September and 2.9-percent budget cuts forced on the N.S.F. through sequestration. The currently overcharged pull of priority, by spurring unnecessary questions and hairs to be split, can thus dilute or stifle the advancement of science.

In light of these problems, Representative Smith proposed his bill. Yet the economic straits in science already encourage research that targets specific, funder-driven priorities over riskier, more open-ended questions. As the Nobel laureate Roger Kornberg lamented in 2007, “If the work that you propose to do isn’t virtually certain of success, then it won’t be funded.” Elevated political scrutiny would likely only reduce the willingness of agencies like the N.S.F. to fund projects without clearly defined, or even expected, outcomes. In tension with this reality is the fact that revolution in science is often indebted to prolonged exploration of basic research projects, which may at their outset fail to meet Representative Smith’s criteria. Forecasting how well research will “advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare,” or predetermining the degree to which a project is or is not “groundbreaking,” demands an unlikely prescience. Further embedding specific requirements in grant allocation could make improvements at the margins by defunding egregiously conspicuous research. But it also threatens to close off a large landscape of research questions with unforeseen potential.

by Dylan Walsh, New Yorker |  Read more:.

Photograph, of Representative Lamar Smith, by Bill Clark/Roll Call/Getty

Rachel Rickert
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The Genius of Tesla

Tech writers love to compare Tesla to Apple. As Steven Johnson pointed out earlier this year—and as many other writers have as well—Elon Musk’s electric-car company seems to be following the master plan Steve Jobs drew up when he brought Apple back from the brink in the late 1990s.

Both companies sell high-end products that inspire evangelical fervor in their supporters and incredulous, irrational hatred in their opponents. Both are adored by critics. Consumer Reports just gave Tesla’s Model S sedan a near-perfect score, one of the best in the magazine’s history. (On the other hand, a New York Times reviewer did (controversially) have to call a tow truck.) Both Apple and Tesla strive for excellent customer service. When your Tesla breaks down, the firm will deliver a loaner vehicle to your location and pick up your old one for free, which is even better than when the guy at the Genius Bar gives you a new phone to replace the one you dropped in the toilet. And Musk, like Steve Jobs, is a fascinating figure—charismatic, pugilistic, unpredictable.

The most important comparison involves the two firms’ business models. When he came back to Apple, Jobs set out to do something unheard of in tech: sell luxury products at mainstream prices. The iPod, iPhone, and iPad weren’t just the most desirable gadgets in their categories. They were also very competitive on price: The first iPad was the cheapest tablet you could buy, the iPhone sells at the same price as other top-tier phones (when you include a service contract), and the iPod was available at every price point. But even though its prices were competitive, Apple was able to keep its profits high, thanks to amazing manufacturing efficiencies.

Now Tesla seems to be following the same path. At $70,000 the Model S, its family sedan, is still a very expensive car, but it’s far cheaper than the $109,000 Roadster that Tesla launched in 2009. This week, the company announced that in the first quarter of 2013, it earned its first-ever corporate profit. It sold 5,000 cars in Q1, and its list of orders is growing by 20,000 per year. Part of the reason Tesla has turned profitable, Musk explained in a shareholder letter, is by making its production processes more efficient. Among other things, the company reduced the amount of time it takes to build a car by 40 percent. Over the long run, Musk aims to keep lowering the price of its cars—he’s hoping to release a $30,000 car in the next three or four years—while keeping the company’s gross profit margin at 25 percent, which is very high for the car industry.

So, there you go: Tesla wants to be just like Apple. That’s not a bad goal—Apple has done quite well for itself. But what few in the tech press have noticed is that Musk seems to have another tech titan in mind: Google. Musk knows that there’s a single, towering problem in the electric car business: a lack of infrastructure. Batteries aren’t good enough, charging stations are too far apart, and there aren’t enough mechanics and dealers. Tesla is trying to create this infrastructure by itself, which means everything’s moving more slowly than it could. If the entire car business worked together to improve this stuff, batteries and charging infrastructure would improve at a faster pace.

So how can Tesla persuade General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other car giants—not to mention other car startups that are similar in size to Tesla—to all work together to improve the world’s electric vehicle infrastructure? By licensing its tech to its competitors, in the same way that Google gives Android away to every phone-maker in the world.

by Farhad Manjoo, Slate |  Read more:

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

After Catastrophe

Resilience, as it is now defined, has roots in various fields but perhaps most notably in ecology. In 1973, C.S. (Buzz) Holling, then a professor of ecology at the University of British Columbia, published an article titled "Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems." Holling argued that traditional studies of systems, using methods inherited from fields like physics, assumed that ecosystems existed in an equilibrium—to which they would return after a disturbance.

"What Holling was trying to introduce in this idea was that ecosystems could exist in qualitatively different forms," says Lance H. Gunderson, a professor of environmental studies at Emory University who worked extensively with Holling on resilience research.

Essentially, "resilience" refers to a system's ability to absorb shocks. Over time, various fields have adopted the term and the ideas behind it, and it has become value laden. When national-security experts and risk managers talk about resilience, they're often thinking about "recovery"—protecting "normal" life, and how quickly we can rebound to "normal" after a disaster. Others think of "resilience" and "sustainability" as synonyms. (...)

Most approaches to resilience, Fiksel complains, resemble traditional risk management: Identify a set of risks, calculate the probabilities, and do what you can to mitigate those risks. Those techniques, says Fiksel, don't account for the unexpected—the so-called black swans—and they don't acknowledge the rolling, compounding effects that disruptions can have in a hyperfast, hyperconnected world.

"We tend to get locked into economic and technological patterns that constrain us in terms of our ability to evolve and cope with new challenges," he says. "What we really need is to operate with variability as the norm."

Consider what has hit us hardest in recent years, how some of these disruptions came from or led to other woes: September 11, 2001; the 2003 Northeast blackout; the oil shock of 2008; the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession; Deepwater Horizon; the intense droughts; Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy.

There are surely more disruptions to come. Stephen E. Flynn, a security expert and former military officer who is co-director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University, ticks off the most likely threats: a breakdown in the power grid; interruption of global supply chains, including those that provide our food; an accident at one of the many chemical factories in urban areas; or damage to the dams, locks, and waterways that shuttle agricultural products and other goods out to sea. The No. 1 threat, he says, is a terrorist attack that prompts lawmakers and a frightened public to shred the Bill of Rights or overreact in another way.

The tendency in government has been to focus intensely on these threats—or other problems, considering the wars on cancer, poverty, drugs, crime, and so on—and to try to eliminate them.

"If you look at the post-World War II area," Flynn says, "there is almost an overarching focus on reducing risk and bringing risk down to zero," the idea that this could be done "if you brought enough science and enough resources and you applied enough muscle." Since 9/11, that policy has meant spending vast sums to go after terrorists out there, but perhaps we aren't safer.

"Why do we have all this money to go after man-made terrorist attacks, and then we let our bridges fall down?" Flynn wonders.

He advocates a different approach. We should make American society more robust so that it can absorb shocks and carry on. Part of that shift includes reorienting people's attitudes so that they are more willing to deal with these uncertainties. The generation before World War II accepted risk as a matter of life, he says. "They had less ambition or hubris to believe that you would contain all of these things," he says, "and a measure of character was how you would deal with adversity, how you overcame it."

by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education |  Read more:
Image: Michael S. Yamashita, National Geographic Stock

Yelp and the Wisdom of the "Lonely Crowd"

David Riesman spent the first half of his career writing one of the most important books of the twentieth century. He spent the second half correcting its pervasive misprision. “The Lonely Crowd,” an analysis of the varieties of social character that examined the new American middle class, appeared in 1950 to what Riesman, a lawyer who ended up teaching sociology, once called “quite astringent criticism” in the relevant academic prints. He was surprised, and of course pleased, that the book went on to find a wide general audience, but spent decades reckoning with the cost of its popularity: namely, the “profound misinterpretation” of the book as a simplistic critique of epidemic American postwar conformity via its description of the contours of the “other-directed character,” whose identity and behavior is shaped by its relationships. Riesman did his best, in prefaces to two subsequent editions of the book (at great length in 1961, and, with some brittleness about having to do it once more, in 1969), to correct this reading—to insist that he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there’s even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.

With the rise of the Internet, Riesman’s book—which is, at its root, a discussion of the emotional life of information—has become even more relevant now than it was in the nineteen-fifties. But it won’t be of much use if it continues to be read as a book about all the miserable conformists. (It has probably not helped that the publisher, Yale University Press, put a flock of jammed sheep on the book’s cover.) Critics like Lee Siegel continue to press a distorted Riesman into the service of any given day’s anti-Internet jeremiad. In this past weekend’s Styles section of the New York Times, Siegel uses “The Lonely Crowd” to analyze the putative “Yelpification” of contemporary life: according to Siegel, Riesman’s view was that “people went from being ‘inner-directed’ to ‘outer-directed,’ from heeding their own instincts and judgment to depending on the judgments and opinions of tastemakers and trendsetters.” The “conformist power of the crowd” and its delighted ability to write online reviews led Siegel down a sad path to a lackluster expensive dinner. Unhappy with his monkfish and the names of the desserts, Siegel writes that “gone are the days when ‘conformist’ was a slur on someone’s character. Now the idea is that if you are not following the crowd of five-star dispensers, you’re a tasteless, undiscriminating shlub.”

What Riesman actually suggested was that we think of social organization in terms of a series of “ideal types” along a spectrum of increasingly loose authority. On one end of the spectrum is a “tradition-directed” community, where we all understand that what we’re supposed to do is what we’re supposed to do because it’s just the thing that one does; authority is unequivocal, and there’s neither the room nor the desire for autonomous action. In the middle of the spectrum, as one moves toward a freer distribution of, and response to, authority, is “inner-direction.” The inner-directed character is concerned not with “what one does” but with “what people like us do.” Which is to say that she looks to her own internalizations of past authorities to get a sense for how to conduct her affairs. Contemporary society, Riesman thought, was best understood as chiefly “other-directed,” where the inculcated authority of the vertical (one’s lineage) gives way to the muddled authority of the horizontal (one’s peers). The inner-directed person orients herself by an internal “gyroscope,” while the other-directed person orients herself by “radar.”

It’s not that the inner-directed person consults some deep, subjective, romantically sui generis oracle. It’s that the inner-directed person consults the internalized voices of a mostly dead lineage, while her other-directed counterpart heeds the external voices of her living contemporaries. As Riesman put it, “the gyroscopic mechanism allows the inner-directed person to appear far more independent than he really is: he is no less a conformist to others than the other-directed person, but the voices to which he listens are more distant, of an older generation, their cues internalized in his childhood.” The inner-directed person is, simply, “somewhat less concerned than the other-directed person with continuously obtaining from contemporaries (or their stand-ins: the mass media) a flow of guidance, expectation, and approbation.” You can imagine how the Internet intensifies things.  (...)

The problem with Yelp is not the role it plays, for Siegel, in the proliferation of monoculture; most people of my generation have learned to ignore Yelp entirely. It’s the fact that, after about a year of usefulness, Yelp very quickly became a terrible source of information. There are several reasons for this. The first is the nature of an algorithmic response to the world. As Jaron Lanier points out in “Who Owns the Future?,” the hubris behind each new algorithm is the idea that its predictive and evaluatory structure is game-proof; but the minute any given algorithm gains real currency, all the smart and devious people devote themselves to gaming it. On Yelp, the obvious case would be garnering positive reviews by any means necessary. A second problem with Yelp’s algorithmic ranking is in the very idea of using online reviews; as anybody with a book on Amazon knows, they tend to draw more contributions from people who feel very strongly about something, positively or negatively. This undermines the statistical relevance of their recommendations. (This phenomenon has been dramatized to hilarious effect in the series of YouTube videos that feature actors performing melodramatic readings of Yelp reviews.)

by Gideon Lewis-Krause, New Yorker |  Read more:

Illustration by D. Krán.

Portrait of a young woman (detail) 1869, Pierre Auguste Cot.
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Carbon Dioxide Level Passes Long-Feared Milestone

[ed. Don't worry, it's just a political ploy.]

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

The new measurement came from analyzers high atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide carbon dioxide trend.

Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa. But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, according to data from both NOAA and Scripps.

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle and the level will dip below 400 this summer, as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a Columbia University earth scientist.

by Justin Gillis, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Jonathan Kingston/Aurora Select, for The New York Times

Claudia Rogge (1965)
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Embroidery by Hiroko Kubota (hiroko&5 on Flickr)

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Joe Biden: The Rolling Stone Interview

There is a keen Kennedy-like vigor to Joe Biden that overwhelms any room. As was once said of Theodore Roosevelt, he, too, wants to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral. Unlike President Obama, who speaks in interviews with Hemingway-esque sparseness, Biden rambles like Thomas Wolfe, painting a robust picture of an ever-changing America where coal miners will soon be working in clean-tech jobs, gun-safety laws will be tougher and China will be reined in by the White House from poisoning the planet with megatons of choking pollutants. (...)

As Biden tells it, these days he and the president see eye to eye on all policy issues. Only their nuances are slightly different. It's not far-fetched to think that Biden will run for president in 2016 on Obama's coattails. This notion surprises many Republicans, who feel Obama is foundering and that Biden, who will be 74 at the beginning of the next presidential term, is too old. But Biden is smart to stay close to Obama, whose public-approval rating hovers just below 50 percent (a number that rises to around 75 percent among registered Democrats). Assuming Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016, she will sell herself as a successor to her husband, harkening back to the economic heyday of the 1990s. By contrast, if Biden gets into the race, it will be as an Obama Democrat promising to expand on the record of the last two terms.

What matters the most to Biden these days is whether he can persuade Congress to enact meaningful gun-control laws. After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama asked Biden to head up the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. Though his efforts so far have failed to overcome congressional resistance, he says that he is not giving up. If serious gun-control legislation is passed in the next three years – and Biden is convinced it will – he will deserve the lion's share of the credit.

My takeaway from my one-hour White House interview with Joe Biden is that he must be considering a presidential run. There will be too much Obama-era unfinished business – implementing the Affordable Care Act, fighting for climate-change initiatives, for example – for Biden to throw in the towel. His strengths as a candidate are his blue-collar persona, family values, lifetime support of labor unions and farmers, foreign-policy expertise and stouthearted belief that the Obama administration's record of accomplishment – from the economic recovery to the killing of Osama bin Laden – has been historic. With Air Force Two at his disposal and his two superbright sons, Hunter and Beau, probably working as his chief advisers, Biden can give Hillary Clinton a run for her money. Although she will have an unquestioned advantage among women, it's not inconceivable to think that labor unions, environmentalists, African-Americans, LGBT voters and small-business owners will prefer the hypercaffeinated, hard-charging vice president. Like Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a presumed Republican candidate, Biden has learned to turn the sound-bite culture on its head by speaking from the gut. Though he's been a major political player since the Nixon years, Biden has pulled off the trick of not seeming like politics-as-usual. It could be a mistake to underestimate his populist appeal. And it's hard to imagine that this highly ambitious man will choose not to pursue the office he's wanted all his life.

by Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Mark Seliger

Departures

My uncle never did a bad thing to anybody, but one day while he was on his front porch eating an ice cream cone, two men came upon him, pushed him inside, tied his hands and feet, robbed his house, and shot him in the head. He was in a coma for a week. I was nine years old and my father took me to see him that first Saturday he was in the hospital. I remember his forehead was wrapped up and someone had placed a straw hat on top of his head. On the television mounted to the far wall there was a hefty Italian woman stirring a pot of tomato sauce.

“How can he watch television when he’s asleep?” I asked my father.

We heard the toilet flush and out walked Tutti, my uncle’s girlfriend.

“How’s he look?” she said, gesturing to the hat.

“Like a dead farmer,” my father said.

“Whoa, I just had déjà vu,” Tutti said, her hand at her chest.

“Any news?” my father asked.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She could tell my father was unhappy about the hat. “This is just to keep me entertained. I’ve been here for hours. I didn’t mean anything by it.” She took the hat off his head and put it over the lamp on the nightstand.

“What are you two doing this afternoon?” she asked.

“We didn’t have anything planned other than to visit the hospital. Maybe we’ll go down to the beach for a little while. Right, bud?”

My father patted me on the back.

“I would just love it if I could come with you.”

“What if he wakes up?” I said.

“He won’t wake up while we’re at the beach,” Tutti said.

Tutti was from Ottawa. She didn’t live with my uncle. She had a condo in Naples, Florida, provided for her by another lover, a wealthy man who sold Mercedes-Benzes and turned over houses that had been foreclosed on. She was in her mid-forties and had been married to her high school boyfriend, who managed a Tim Horton’s doughnut shop. She still saw him, but, according to my father, whose openness about that time, years later, provides most of the exposition here, wanted to experience much more than that man could give. She flew to Canada in the summers and stayed with him for a month or two, and then flew to Boston to be with my uncle in his little cottage near the beach on Cape Cod. Her lover in Florida unknowingly paid for everything. Tutti’s cover was that she was one of the top interior decorators in the world. She had phony business cards and a client list of rich-sounding names. I thought she was beautiful, but I didn’t have much to compare her to. My mother had died when I was three. She was an artist. Her paintings hung in our house. There is one of a cathedral in Mexico that I particularly like and that I have with me still. The cathedral is off to the side of a dirt road. The viewer stands on the road, considering whether or not to enter the cathedral. She died from a brain embolism. My father and I were asleep when it happened. “She died dreaming,” my father used to say. In photographs she was still and easy to forget. But Tutti moved. Her breasts swung. Her skin changed colors. Her hair glowed in sunlight.

by Patrick Dacey, Guernica |  Read more:

Image from Flickr via anyjazz65

KEXP

La Luz

Black Prairie

Finally, Serious DMCA Reform

The Library of Congress sparked a firestorm late last year when it issued new rules that made it effectively illegal to unlock a cell phone to switch to a new wireless carrier. An online petition on the issue attracted more than 100,000 signatures and prompted a White House statement criticizing the new rule. Members of Congress sprang into action, introducing at least three bills to deal with the issue.

But copyright reform groups panned these bills. Not only did they provide only narrow and temporary relief on the cell phone unlocking issue, the groups said, but they completely ignored the underlying problem: a provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that makes it a crime to "circumvent" copy protection even for lawful purposes.

New legislation sponsored by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Anna Eshoo (D-CA), and Jared Polis (D-CO) takes a broader approach to the issue. In addition to explicitly legalizing cell phone unlocking, the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013 also modifies the DMCA to make clear that unlocking copy-protected content is only illegal if it's done in order to "facilitate the infringement of a copyright." If a circumvention technology is "primarily designed or produced for the purpose of facilitating noninfringing uses," that would not be a violation of copyright.

For example, Lofgren's bill would likely make it legal for consumers to rip DVDs for personal use in much the same way they've long ripped CDs. It would remove legal impediments to making versions of copyrighted works that are accessible to blind users. And it would ensure that car owners have the freedom to service their vehicles without running afoul of copyright law.

"Americans should not be subject to fines and criminal liability for merely unlocking devices and media they legally purchased," said Rep. Lofgren in a press release. "If consumers are not violating copyright or some other law, there's little reason to hold back the benefits of unlocking so people can continue using their devices."

Lofgren's bill attracted enthusiastic support from activists and advocacy groups that had been lukewarm about previous unlocking bills.

by Timothy B. Lee, ARS Technica |  Read more:

Image: topcat_angel

Kitty Sabatier
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