How many copies is Jammie Thomas-Rasset responsible for?

So Jammie Thomas-Rasset did indeed download and share music using P2P. Others have commented on the disproportionate nature of the penalty damages imposed in this case. Here I want to address a narrower question: how many copies should she be charged for?

The RIAA argues that Thomas-Rasset was sharing 1,700 audio files, and that 2.3 million P2P users had access to those files. This is "the equivalent of standing on a street corner with approximately 150 CDs and giving away free copies to anyone who asks".

But clearly Thomas-Rasset didn't actually create 2.3 million copies of those 1,700 files. Even if she had, the people who downloaded the files must share some responsibility, since they actively chose to make copies (unlike Thomas-Rasset, who merely chose to make them available). The RIAA seems to believe that because we don't know how many people actually downloaded these tracks from Thomas-Rasset's computer rather than someone else, that statutory damages are justified.

But this begs an important question: if a million people decide to share and copy some music track over P2P, how many copies do they make? The answer is quite obvious: one million users, one million copies. Nobody is going to fill their disks with thousands of copies of the same song, and even if they did it wouldn't make any difference.

(Actually quite a few users will have also made temporary copies on MP3 players and the like, but since doing that with a CD you own is fair use, that seems pretty irrelevant)

So at most Thomas-Rasset is guilty of having made 1,700 illegal copies of 1,700 songs. The fact that these songs were also available for others to download is irrelevant to the damages argument. Maybe 1,000 people made copies of these songs, maybe none. Civil law (which this is) is based on the balance of probabilities, and on the balance of probabilities the total responsibility of Thomas-Rasset for the copies made by the network of which she was a part is one copy of each song. These songs are sold for download for a dollar each, which suggests that, absent punitive damages, Thomas-Rasset's true liability should be $1,700. Even with triple damages for deliberate actions, that would still only be $5,100.

But of course, this isn't about justice for artists, this is about the business model of the RIAA members.

Fundamentalist terrorist assassination plot defeated

Tonight the British people celebrate the defeat of a terrorist assassination plot. A group of disaffected men, followers of a foreign religion and egged on by propaganda from overseas and a radical cleric, planned a spectacular atrocity: they would blow up the entire government in one huge explosion. The plot was foiled by the security services, who, responding to a tip-off, mounted a surveillance operation and arrested one of the plotters red handed as he prepared to detonate the explosives. The rest of the gang were tracked down and shot or arrested when soldiers stormed their hideout. In accordance with an executive order from the head of state the survivors were subsequently imprisoned, tortured, and executed after a show-trial.

This happened over 400 years ago, on November 5th 1605. The plotters were Catholics rather than Muslims, but apart from that the story sounds disconcertingly modern, although we tend not to go in for show trials these days: they went out of fashion with Stalin.

Today the Gunpowder Plot is celebrated as Bonfire Night: Guy Fawkes (the one caught with the explosives) is still burned in effigy, and in some places the Pope gets the same treatment as well. However, over the past 400 years the anti-Catholic content has almost entirely leached away: now its just an excuse to let off some fireworks. A Catholic can join in the celebrations just as I (a Briton) joined in the 4th of July celebrations when I was living in the US.

Maybe one day we will look back on 9/11 the same way. I certainly hope so.

Why Voting Machines Can't Add Up

Ed Felten is continuing his excellent work exposing the broken state of electronic voting machines. Many people are wondering how such software can have been allowed out by its developers. The discrepancies don't (at the moment) seem to be a result of fraud, just very buggy software.

Voting machines are obviously important, so their development is regulated. I've never worked in the voting machine industry, but I have worked in another kind of federally regulated software: medical devices. So I know how regulated software projects work, and how they don't.

The fundamental problem underlying this is that nobody in the world actually knows how to write software that reliably does what you want. There are quite a lot of people who can write such software, but if you ask them how its done they basically waffle. Most of them agree on a list of steps to take, starting with writing down exactly what the software is supposed to do. Various attempts have been made to codify this list, and they all look pretty similar. The voting machine standards are just another variation on this theme.

However this is all cargo-cult engineering. We know that the people who can summon up the magic cargo planes do it by putting things over their ears and saying magic words, but it doesn't follow that if we put things on our ears and say the same magic words the cargo will appear. So it is with software engineering. You can write Requirements Documents and Class Diagrams and Test Scenario Documents and Test Execution Reports until you run out of paper, but it won't make any difference if you don't have the Quality Without a Name.

Imagine you are managing a development project to build a voting machine. Your mission is to get the thing on the market. You have been given a bunch of programmers, half a human factors person and a quarter of an industrial designer. The time available isn't long enough, but you know its no use complaining about that because its not your boss's fault, or even the CEO's fault. Its the fault of the people at Big Competitor who are planning to release their product just in time to tie up the whole market, so if you don't deliver the product at the same time then its not going to matter who's fault it was, the whole division is going to get laid off anyway. You could get some more people if really wanted, but you know that more people aren't actually going to speed things up.

The Quality Department have downloaded the voting machine regulations and someone has been going through them and writing down a list of the things they say you have to do and the order they have to be done in. This is very good. In fact you send the Head of QA a little note saying how helpful his minion has been to your project, because now you have something to aim at. Project Management is mostly a matter of getting your hoops lined up so that you and your minions can jump through them as quickly as possible, and the QA minion has done the regulatory hoops for you. The regulations boil down to a list of documents that have to be shown to the inspectors (who you are going to hire, but thats another story). Each document has a list of things it must contain, and some of those things have to be traceable to other things. All you need to do now is start allocating people to things on the list and getting them ticked off. The list is long, but you have one big advantage: there is nothing to say how good any of these documents have to be. They don't have to be good, they just have to exist.

One of these documents is called "source code". Of course that one does have some quality requirements on it: its got to pass a bunch of tests. But the tests themselves don't have any quality requirements; like everything else they just have to exist. And passing the tests is the only quality requirement on the code. Once the independent laboratory you hired has run the tests and said "pass" you are over the finishing line and you can start selling these things.

This means that you have a very strong motivation to keep the testing to the minimum you can get away with. The regulations say you have to have a test for each item in the original requirements document, and this test has to be run once. If your software fails a test then you get to fix it, and if the fix was small enough you can get away without repeating all the other tests as well. During this whole time your eyes are fixed on the finishing line: the objective is to get this thing over the line. What happens to it after that is someone else's problem.

When you look at these machines from a project manager's point of view you start to see how they got to be so unreliable. "Quality Assurance" is primarily a matter of making sure you get all the items in the regulations ticked off; it has nothing at all to do with the original meaning of the word "quality". Ironically the regulations may actually do more harm than good because they divert energy from real quality onto generating the required inches of documentation.

Over the years I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fix this problem, and I still don't have an answer. Abolishing private companies is a cure worse than the disease, and it won't cure the disease anyway because it won't abolish projects and the need to manage them. Software Engineering has a bad case of Quality Without A Name, and there is no prospect of it getting better soon.

However in the limited domain of voting machines I believe the best cure is sunlight: we may not be able to define quality in software, but we know it when we see it. The source code for voting machines must be published. The manufacturers will scream and shout about their precious IPR and trade secrets. This is nonsense. Any voting machine must have a well defined version of someone's software running, so any illegal copying will generate a cast-iron audit trail back to the perpetrator. And there are no real trade secrets in voting machines: counting votes is not, when it comes down to it, a particularly complicated problem. The voting machine manufacturers will make just as much money as they do now. In fact they'd probably make more because if the machines were trustworthy then people would learn to trust them. However the first vendor to start publishing their source code will be at a disadvantage because everyone else can pinch bits of it with very little risk of detection (and if they get caught they can just blame a rogue programmer). So the regulations on voting machines should be changed to require the publication of the code (and other design documentation too, while we are about it). That will create a real requirement for quality source code. Until then we are stuck with the current mess.

Its the disks that are the problem, not losing them

The UK news this week has been full of stories about the loss of 2 disks (presumably CDs or DVDs) containing all 25 million Child Benefit records. For those outside the UK, Child Benefit is several pounds a week paid to the mother of every child (i.e. under 16) in the UK. In most cases it gets paid directly into a nominated bank account.

This is one of the biggest data losses ever, if not the biggest. The government has been at pains to point out that the disks are probably just mislaid, and they don't contain enough data for criminals to actually use. Meanwhile the Opposition has been alleging government incompetence and calling for them to "get a grip". People are being advised to keep an eye on their bank accounts and not use their childrens' names as passwords.

All this misses the point. The problem was not that a couple of disks got lost, it is that a comparatively junior person could burn the entire database to a couple of disks, apparently on his/her own initiative, and without further controls. There was a time when copying 25 million records would have required substantial resources, such as an overnight run on the mainframe and a boxful of tapes. The sheer volume of data made it physically difficult to copy, or to lose. However Moore's Law has turned that big, slow, expensive job into a few minutes with a CD burner. If those two disks were CDs then the whole lot would also fit on a £10 thumb drive, or even a cell phone. The story referenced above suggests that in the past the National Audit Office (the place where the disks in question never arrived) have made their own copies and sent them to outside auditors. None of the commentators seem to have realised that the most probably route for the data to get into the hands of criminals is not the loss of an authorised copy but the creation and distribution of unauthorised copies.

There are supposed to be procedures in place, but its no surprise that they are not being followed; when was the last time you reached for the Company Procedure Manual to check on the detailed procedure for some simple action? Its also too easy to blame the middle manager who decided that a written procedure was better than implementing a software access control system. Given a choice between implementing costly access controls and writing a procedure for making copies, which would you chose? Now try it again, but imagine that your annual evaluation is going to suffer if you "waste" money doing something that has no positive benefit on your departmental targets.

I would like to think that this incident will be a wake-up call for the civil service to revamp its data control procedures. However I doubt it. A scapegoat has already fallen on his sword (to mix the commonest metaphors). The government is keen to show it is doing something, but mostly to counter the opposition claims of incompetence. And the opposition is more interested in a ministerial scalp than in actually pushing for effective action. What is really needed is an audit of all databases containing UK citizen personal information, followed by a study into the necessary forms of access and the implementation of software-based authorization and logging mechanisms. But nobody in authority seems to be thinking along those lines.

The sad thing is that the Ministry of Defence has had hundreds of years experience in dealing with sensitive and secret data, and they have become quite good at it. Perhaps they should give the rest of the government some lessons.

Tax as Percentage of GDP

In the 17th century French economist Jean Baptiste Colbert said "The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing”. His observation is as true today as it was then.

Whenever the government in the UK decides to charge for something, especially if it was previously free, it is in turn charged with "stealth taxation". I don't know about other countries, but I imagine that the politics are similar. There is often a good reason why the government wants to levy a charge, which often has nothing to do with its overall level of income. An example is the recent proposal to charge by the kilo for domestic refuse collection: the "polluter pays" principle is generally recognised as sound and "free" rubbish collection is increasingly expensive. But not everyone agrees:

Mother-of-five Mandy Price, who has just begun to recycle but still produces an average of nine bin liners of rubbish a week, said the assembly could not justify introducing such a policy in the wake of council tax rises.

She said: "You pay your council tax for the local authority to come and collect your rubbish, so why should we pay more?"

In other words, the charge is perceived primarily as just another source of revenue rather than an attempt to shift the costs onto the people who actually use the service the most. The government response is always to say that this is going to be offset by lower taxes elsewhere (in this case, council tax), but this makes a very unconvincing soundbite.

Gross Domestic Product is a standard way of measuring the overall economic activity in a nation or economic area, and the usual way of measuring the tax burden on an economy is the ratio of taxation to GDP. For instance, Reform points out that the US takes 26.4% of GDP as tax, whereas the UK takes 35.8%. Of course, these figures are almost useless for international comparison because they don't say what the tax pays for. In the UK most health care is paid for by the government out of general taxation whereas in the US it is mostly paid for privately by employer-funded health schemes that get a tax break. The NHS is funded out of taxation, and so is charged to the government's account, but a scheme partly funded by a tax reduction (as in the US) is not. If the US were to eliminate the tax break and subsidise these schemes directly instead then the basic nature of the system would not change one whit, but the proportion of US GDP taken in tax would increase. The US spends around 16% of GDP on health care (compared to about 8% in the UK). From an employer's point of view taxation and healthcare are both just costs of doing business, and the overall burden of general taxation and healthcare in the US is actually higher than in the UK. As always you get what you pay for, but a worrying amount of political debate seems to revolve around which ledger the payment is recorded in.

However one place where such figures would be useful (but never seem to be used) is in domestic political arguments. The Liberal Democrats used to have a policy of adding 1% to the rate of income tax in order to fund improved education. Meanwhile the Tories are struggling with a reputation for aggressive cost-cutting in public services in order to fund tax cuts, and the Labour government has been increasing taxes in order to spend more on public services (with notable lack of effect, but thats another issue).

What I would like to see is for each party to declare a target level of taxation as a percentage of GDP. That gets their macro-economic policy on taxation out in the open, without confusing it with a lot of micro-economic questions over how it is collected. Thats not to say that those micro-economic questions are unimportant, but they need to be separated from the macro-economic debate about the overall level of taxation.