US Patent Boss Says No Evidence Of Patents Holding Back COVID Treatments, Days Before Pharma Firms Prove He's Wrong

from the say-again dept

A week or so ago, the head of the US Patent and Trademark Office, Andrei Iancu, who has been an extreme patent maximalist over the years, insisted that there was simply no evidence that patents hold back COVID treatments. This is a debate we've been having over the past few months. We've seen some aggressive actions by patent holders, and the usual crew of patent system supporters claiming, without evidence that no one would create a vaccine without much longer patent terms.

Iancu was questioned about how patents might hold back life-saving innovation and he brushed it off like this was a crazy question:

Iancu said while it is necessary to ensure that critical treatments are widely available to the public, intellectual property rights "must always be respected," especially during crises like COVID-19.

Without adequate protections, Iancu warned that companies would lack incentive to invest substantial time and money in developing treatments for the next global health crisis.

Again, that makes no sense. The "incentive" to invest is in the demand for the product itself. Governments around the world are going to pay for any vaccine because it's necessary and the boost to any economy is going to be well worth making the developers of a vaccine very, very wealthy.

Iancu also shot down the idea that patents might be used to limit access to a vaccine:

Dorian Daley, who asked the agency director to address concerns that intellectual property relating to COVID-19 might "create a barrier to access that would be problematic."

"Where is the evidence of that?" Iancu countered, though he noted that the U.S. has "tools at its disposal" — such as the "march-in" rights under the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows the government to invoke rarely used powers to override patents — in the event that additional access is needed.

Of course, historically, the pharma industry flips out any time anyone mentions march-in rights, which is why the government basically never ever uses them.

But just to highlight how ridiculous Iancu's statements were, just days later, Pfizer, Regeneron, and BioNTech -- all working on COVID treatments (including the antibody cocktail that President Trump took from Regeneron) -- were all sued for patent infringement for their COVID treatments.

Allele Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals filed two lawsuits against the three drugmakers on Monday. The San Diego firm alleges that Pfizer and BioNTech, with its investigational COVID-19 vaccine BNT162, and Regeneron’s REGN-COV2, were developed using Allele’s mNeonGreen fluorescent protein without the company’s permission.

So, it certainly appears that patents are getting in the way of some COVID-19 treatments.

And then to make an even stronger point, pharma company Moderna -- which had been facing a ton of questions about how its patents might delay COVID-19 treatment -- has announced that it will voluntarily agree not to enforce the patents during the pandemic.

Moderna Inc. said it wouldn’t enforce its patents related to Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic, in an effort to not deter other companies and researchers from making similar shots.

“While the pandemic continues, Moderna will not enforce our Covid-19 related patents against those making vaccines intended to combat the pandemic,” the company said in a statement on Thursday.

This is a welcome surprise, but it still underlines two key points: yes, absolutely patents can and will get in the way of important life-saving innovations, and the idea that these companies "need" patents to develop these drugs is clearly bogus. Indeed, as KEI points out in a blog post about Moderna's statement, it's good to see the company admit that even after the pandemic is over, its patents may get in the way of important life-saving innovation, and pledges to make sure that it will be more open to licensing its patents after the pandemic:

It is notable that Moderna has addressed both the pandemic and the post pandemic period, stating “to eliminate any perceived IP barriers to vaccine development during the pandemic period, upon request we are also willing to license our intellectual property for COVID-19 vaccines to others for the post pandemic period.”

The key point: even if Iancu pretends otherwise, people actually in the space know that patents can and will get in the way of life-saving innovation, rather than acting as an important incentive.

It's long past the time we recognized how damaging patents are for innovation in many different industries, including pharma, and having a Patent Office boss who simply denies reality is fundamentally unhelpful and anti-innovation.

Filed Under: andrei iancu, covid-19, innovation, patents
Companies: allele, biontech, moderna, pfizer, regeneron

Congressional Republicans With No Strategy On Pandemic, Healthcare, Societal Problems... Have Decided That The Internet Is The Real Problem

from the culture-wars dept

We've pointed out just how ridiculous it is that Congress seems wholly focused on destroying the open internet by gutting the Section 230 protections that enable the open internet to exist in its present form. We're in the midst of a variety of pretty major issues, and yet Congress is introducing new anti-internet and anti-tech bills like it's last call before the bar shuts down.

The reason for this is not that hard to grasp, really. As Politico reports, the Trump administration has decided that a culture war against the internet is the best election strategy right now:

The Trump administration is pressuring Senate Republicans to ratchet up scrutiny of social media companies it sees as biased against conservatives in the run-up to the November election, people familiar with the conversations say. And the effort appears to be paying off.

In recent weeks, the White House has pressed Senate Republican leaders on key committees to hold public hearings on the law that protects Facebook, Twitter and other internet companies from lawsuits over how they treat user posts, three Senate staffers told POLITICO. They requested anonymity to discuss private communications.

As the article notes, most of these new anti-internet bills are coming from Republican Senators who are engaged in big political fights and want to retain the backing of the President. The focus on "big bad tech" serves to accomplish multiple goals:

1. Culture war: These are always popular during election seasons. Politicians need to get people riled up while pretending that they're "doing something." So starting culture wars is a common past time during election seasons.
2. Distraction: We're still in the middle of a pandemic in which thousands of people are dying. We're still in the middle of an economic crisis with record unemployment, and massive impacts to people all around the country. We're still in the middle of a social upheaval as more and more people are speaking out against police brutality. We're still in the middle of huge climate issues, including devastating wild fires up and down the west coast and devastating hurricanes in the south. Fighting with internet dweebs is a distraction.
3. Fundraising: It's common knowledge in DC for politicians that if you need to bump up your coffers, you introduce important legislation about an industry that is doing well, because it leads them to suddenly start throwing money into the campaign funds of folks on all sides of the issue. Tech is an industry that has been doing well, so why the fuck not?
4. Working the refs: A key strategy of Republicans lately has been to try to use this "oh, poor us, we're the victims" snowflake mentality to pressure social media companies to treat them with kid gloves when it comes to handling the propaganda and misinformation they're posting on social media. Continually attacking tech companies has worked so far, in at least getting Facebook to give Trump and friends more leeway to post nonsense, so why not keep pushing that button over and over again.

Note, of course, that none of this actually helps the public even slightly. Apparently, that's not what's important to the White House or folks in Congress.

Indeed, at a time when technology and the internet has become that much more important due to the pandemic that the President seems to want to ignore, it seems that much more damaging to focus on destroying and hammering the open internet. It's positively backwards. Sure, let's attack the one sector that is helping to keep a bunch of stuff afloat, and helping to keep people at home, rather sending them out to risk their lives in the midst of a pandemic.

And, of course, all of this seems to be coming directly at the request of the President himself who is desperately looking for any issue to draw focus to other than all of the things that make him look bad:

“There’s hardly a conversation I have with the president where this doesn’t come up, where Section 230 does not come up, usually raised by him,” Hawley said in an interview. “It is much on his mind and I think his strong stance on this issue has had a big effect in opening the eyes of some of my Republican colleagues to realize this is a major issue.”

Spoiler alert: it's not "a major issue." It's a half-baked, made up, hyped up issue for all of the reasons above, having nothing to do with actual problems in the world.

I get that culture wars are the way politics is done. I get that demonizing successful industries is something that lots of politicians do for political reasons. But it seems kind of batshit crazy that in a time when literally hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake, we're still seeing Congress and the White House play political games rather than focusing on actual issues.

Filed Under: congress, donald trump, gop, internet, josh hawley, open internet, pandemic, republicans, section 230
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Cord Cutting Has Utterly Exploded During the Covid Crisis

from the accelerated-evolution dept

The cable industry was already struggling last year, when a record number of cable customers "cut the cord" and flocked to over the air or streaming alternatives. That was before a pandemic came to town. Now, with some sports on hiatus and folks desperate to cut costs, the trend has only accelerated, to the point where 6 million Americans are poised to cut the cord this year alone:

"By the end of this year, 31.2 million US households will have cut the cable TV cord in aggregate. And 6.6 million households will cancel their pay TV subscriptions. By 2024, more than one-third of US households will have cut the pay TV cord."

The first quarter of 2020 alone saw more than 1.8 million users cancel traditional cable -- a record. That's fairly impressive for a trend cable industry executives (and the folks at places like Nielsen paid to tell them what they want to hear) spent years trying to pretend wasn't happening, then tried to downplay it as something only losers do. Late last year, a lot of cable executives made headlines by trying to claim the shift was coming to an end. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge, for example, offered up this prediction last November:

"I think in aggregate they’re going to slow down,” said Rutledge. “Because I think most single-family homes have big TVs in them and that’s where you get sports, that’s where you get news, that’s where you get live TV like this. It’s still going to be under price pressure. I’m not saying the category isn’t under pressure. But I think the rate of decline will slow."

It didn't slow. And there was absolutely no indication a slowdown was coming, even before Covid-19 came to town. The number of folks still paying for traditional cable has now dropped 22.8% from pay TV's peak back in 2014. But by the end of 2024, analysts expect that fewer than half of US homes will subscribe to a traditional pay TV service. That is, I believe, the opposite of "slowing down."

To be clear, the cable TV sector still lays claim to 77 million subscribers in the United States, even though that's a drop of 7.5% year over year (another record). And many of the biggest companies (like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast) should be fine, given they can just jack up the price for broadband thanks to regional monopolies over internet service. But with competition heating up in streaming, and consumer financial headaches likely persisting throughout 2020, downplaying or ignoring one of the biggest trends in TV history is no longer an option for some of the least liked companies in American industry.

Filed Under: cord cutting, covid, entertainment, internet

Collaboration Houses: How Technology & A Pandemic Have Created Entirely New Ways To Go To College

from the fascinating dept

There has been plenty of talk about how technology has impacted how we live during the pandemic, but it's interesting to see how that's impacting things beyond the most obvious -- including some interesting cultural changes. Over in the NY Times, reporter Taylor Lorenz, who always has her finger on the beat of the most interesting cultural changes due to technology, has an article about college collaboration houses. That is, because so many colleges are remaining in distance learning to start the school year, thanks to the ongoing pandemic, students are recognizing that just because they don't need to be on campus, it doesn't mean they need to stay at home either:

Two groups of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, have rented large houses in Hawaii for the fall semester. Six rising seniors at Columbia University will be living in a house in Portland, Ore. Several rising seniors at Harvard are renting property in Montana. There are at least seven large houses that have been rented in the greater Salt Lake City area alone, filled with students from different colleges.

While these may be modeled on the idea of so called "hype houses", in which social media stars rent some crazy mansion and live together while creating attempted viral content, this seems a lot more practical. And while my initial reaction was that this sounded like something only the most privileged students could do, as the report highlights, in many (though certainly not all) cases, the opposite is true:

Well-off students have pursued expensive rentals in premier vacation locales including Lake Tahoe, Calif., and Aspen, Colo. But for other students, college collab houses are a way to save money. “Costs have been a major factor in our decision because some of us are on financial aid,” said Phillip Pyle, 20, a rising junior at Williams College who is planning to rent a house with six friends in Maine or Massachusetts.

Hanah Jun, 19, a rising sophomore at Yale who is from Queens, just finalized plans to move to Barbados in the fall with three friends. She said that her family’s financial instability and lack of reliable Wi-Fi have made completing her studies from home nearly impossible. “I’m on full financial aid,” Ms. Jun said. “In terms of financial privilege, there’s a lot of students from alternative backgrounds looking to do this.”

In other words, for at least some of the students, doing a collab house is actually cheaper and better than (a) being on campus or (b) staying at home. Obviously, for some, their options for which houses they could "join" were impacted by their economic situation:

Morgan Margulies, 20, is a rising junior at Columbia University who will be doing his online classes this year from a house in Santa Cruz, Calif., with nine friends from other colleges, including state schools. “I am a first generation, low-income student and this is my cheapest option,” he said. “For a lot of people at Columbia, money is not an issue. They’re moving into places and they invited me and told me the rent, but it was not a realistic thing I could do.”

Apparently a lot of these students are using Airbnb to rent out homes -- and getting extreme discounts because they're renting them long term at a time when some Airbnb renters were finding it harder to find short term tenants.

It seems noteworthy how this is a somewhat emergent solution to deal with ongoing issues thanks to the pandemic, and a clever use of technology at the same time. Because you can do remote learning from anywhere (while acknowledging time zone differences can be an issue...), doing the schoolwork from home might not be the best option. And getting together with a small group of college friends can allow students to create a much smaller pod that is safer to weather the pandemic, and an online service like Airbnb helps make it more economical for many.

There are also some interesting cultural situations at play as well. We've discussed ICE's attempt to require foreign students attending US colleges and universities remotely to stay in their home countries, and while that's been scaled back somewhat, it appears that this has helped create scenarios where students are remaining in their home countries, but forming local pods to recreate at least some of the college experience:

More than 30 students from China who attend American universities plan to create a college collab courtyard in Beijing. Wendi Yan, 21, a rising sophomore at Princeton, is organizing the group. The students, from colleges including University of Pennsylvania, U.C. San Diego, Brown, Duke, Stanford and Middlebury, are planning to live in several apartments that face each other so they can somewhat recreate the American college experience remotely and study and socialize together.

“It feels like China and the U.S. are trying to split people apart, but because I’ll have these people, I think it will help tremendously,” Ms. Yan said.

Of course, they note that trying to do remote learning from China creates its own challenges, given the Great Firewall blocking so many US websites.

And, yes, obviously, getting college kids together creates risk of COVID-19 spreading, but keeping a much smaller group together -- if they take precautions and don't break out of that group too much -- can certainly help limit the spread (and, yes, I also remember being in college and recognize that not all college kids will be good at keeping in a small group or following restrictions, but contrary to the popular narrative, not all college kids are so bad).

Several college collab houses have created detailed spreadsheets outlining plans for what happens if residents fall ill. Others specifically chose destinations that were close to large cities or major hospitals.

“We have the largest Google doc,” said Merel Timmermans, 20, a rising junior at Grinnell College, who is renting a house in Utah with other Grinnell students. “There’s a Covid safety plan, all of our meals, a roommate contract, a ‘how things work’ guide, information on how we’re going to do chores, cook meals, and we have summaries of all the house meetings we’ve had over Zoom. We made a house Spotify playlist. We’re all filling out medical forms so we have them in case of emergency.”

There's a lot more in the article, and the whole thing really is fascinating to see how technology and culture are creating these new scenarios in the midst of a pandemic.

Filed Under: collaboration houses, covid-19, distance learning, education

Has The Pandemic Shown That The Techlash Was Nonsense?

from the hopefully dept

There's an excellent piece over at RealClearPolitics arguing that COVID-19 killed the techlash. It makes a fairly compelling argument, coming at it from multiple angles. First, there's the question of how real the "techlash" ever was. It's long appeared to be more of a media- and politician-driven narrative than a real anger coming from people who make use of technology every day:

In 2019, more than 600 news articles explicitly mentioned the techlash, so it is not surprising that many of us accepted it as reality without ever really asking, does it exist outside of a narrow echo chamber? 

While there was clearly anger about tech in general, people’s actual opinions of tech firms were overwhelmingly positive. A survey by Vox Media/The Verge in December 2019 found that Amazon, Google, YouTube, Netflix, and Microsoft all had favorability ratings in the high 80s to low 90s. Even Facebook and Twitter, the two most frequently maligned tech firms, had 71 percent and 61 percent favorability ratings, respectively. 

And that was before we all became even more reliant on technology, in these lockdown pandemic times. The narrative flame has been fanned by politicians "seeking the limelight" and media organizations more than willing to run with that narrative. As the article notes:

News organizations are not disinterested observers. Indeed, as Professor. Ramsi Woodcock has argued, the media has  an incentive to amplify those complaints. Newspapers never succeeded as businesses  by selling news, they sold advertising based on their regional monopolies on the distribution of information. Those local monopolies are not coming back. In response, there’s a push for new revenue streams — some legitimate and innovative, like a shift to subscription for increasingly niche expertise, others less so, such as seeking regulatory favors like an antitrust exemption. 

I don't think it's the reporters, necessarily, who are doing this, but we've certainly seen that newspaper ownership has been eagerly pushing this narrative -- from fake "free marketer" Rupert Murdoch whining that Google and Facebook need to be regulated, to Heath Freeman, the hedge fund boss, whose been buying up tons of local newspapers, strip mining them for parts and cash, and now whining about how Google and Facebook are the "real" problem.

And once a narrative takes hold, it can be hard to stop the momentum. It becomes almost self-fulfilling.

And yet, at the same time, the pandemic has shown that many of the claims about the techlash are overblown.

For most of us, new technologies are nice things to have. Sure, having instant Prime delivery, FaceTime and all the information in the world at your fingertips is convenient but in the wake of the pandemic, technology has become essential.

Consider telemedicine — it is no longer a niche benefit for rural or disabled Americans who cannot easily access a doctor. These remote services provide a desperately needed way to reduce transmission risk by using software to remotely enable patient diagnosis, referral, and treatment. Virtual contact reduces the overall strain to our health care system by providing quality care to people, while shielding both patient and provider from unnecessary hazard.

And it goes beyond that. It's not just the "big" internet companies that have become so critical. Contrary to the claims that there are monopolists who dominate everything, we've seen other companies succeed against the big guys during the pandemic:

The rise of Zoom illustrates this perfectly. For all of the criticisms of the company, it has become a household name and provided 200 million people a day with an easy-to-use platform that keeps workers connected.

The article doesn't even mention the fact that Zoom has become so successful while competing against Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others which all have competing products.

I've also seen some fairly amazing new markets spring up. Here at Techdirt we're going to be doing some virtual events in the coming weeks and months, and when I started researching back in May, I was stunned at what a vibrant, competitive market there is. Every time I talk to more people about it, they name some other company I've never heard of. At one point, I found three different "top 10" lists of companies in this space that had no overlap in names. There are dozens of companies in the space, and none has run off with the market yet. There's lots of competition and different approaches.

And, so, perhaps the whole narrative of techlash was overblown and the pandemic has made it even more clear to people how useful the internet is in their lives:

Claims about the techlash’s reach were overblown before the pandemic. Americans have moved on to focus on more important topics. Recent polling shows 38 percent say their view of the tech industry has become more positive since the start of the coronavirus outbreak. 88 Percent reported having “a better appreciation” for tech’s positive impact on society than before the outbreak.  

Does that mean that the techlash is over? Or that COVID-19 killed the techlash? That... might be going too far. Narratives, once they take hold, seem to live on quite a while. So the techlash may still exist -- but the question of whether or not it's warranted should be put to rest. It's reasonable to complain about this or that bad move by this or that company. But the idea that there needs to be an industry wide "reckoning" seems quite overblown, and we should try to leave it behind.

Filed Under: covid-19, pandemic, techlash, technology

England's Exam Fiasco Shows How Not To Apply Algorithms To Complex Problems With Massive Social Impact

from the let-that-be-a-lesson-to-you-all dept

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has touched most aspects of daily life. Education is obviously no exception, as the heated debates about whether students should return to school demonstrate. But another tricky issue is how school exams should be conducted. Back in May, Techdirt wrote about one approach: online testing, which brings with it its own challenges. Where online testing is not an option, other ways of evaluating students at key points in their educational career need to be found. In the UK, the key test is the GCE Advanced level, or A-level for short, taken in the year when students turn 18. Its grades are crucially important because they form the basis on which most university places are awarded in the UK.

Since it was not possible to hold the exams as usual, and online testing was not an option either, the body responsible for running exams in the UK, Ofqual, turned to technology. It came up with an algorithm that could be used to predict a student's grades. The results of this high-tech approach have just been announced in England (other parts of the UK run their exams independently). It has not gone well. Large numbers of students have had their expected grades, as predicted by their teachers, downgraded, sometimes substantially. An analysis from one of the main UK educational associations has found that the downgrading is systematic: "the grades awarded to students this year were lower in all 41 subjects than they were for the average of the previous three years."

Even worse, the downgrading turns out to have affected students in poorly performing schools, typically in socially deprived areas, the most, while schools that have historically done well, often in affluent areas, or privately funded, saw their students' grades improve over teachers' predictions. In other words, the algorithm perpetuates inequality, making it harder for brilliant students in poor schools or from deprived backgrounds to go to top universities. A detailed mathematical analysis by Tom SF Haines explains how this fiasco came about:

Let's start with the model used by Ofqual to predict grades (p85 onwards of their 319 page report). Each school submits a list of their students from worst student to best student (it included teacher suggested grades, but they threw those away for larger cohorts). Ofqual then takes the distribution of grades from the previous year, applies a little magic to update them for 2020, and just assigns the students to the grades in rank order. If Ofqual predicts that 40% of the school is getting an A [the top grade] then that's exactly what happens, irrespective of what the teachers thought they were going to get. If Ofqual predicts that 3 students are going to get a U [the bottom grade] then you better hope you're not one of the three lowest rated students.

As this makes clear, the inflexibility of the approach guarantees that there will be many cases of injustice, where bright and hard-working students will be given poor grades simply because they were lower down in the class ranking, or because the school did badly the previous year. Twitter and UK newspapers are currently full of stories of young people whose hopes have been dashed by this effect, as they have now lost the places they had been offered at university, because of these poorer-than-expected grades. The problem is so serious, and the anger expressed by parents of all political affiliations so palpable, that the UK government has been forced to scrap Ofqual's algorithmic approach completely, and will now use the teachers' predicted grades in England. Exactly the same happened in Scotland, which also applied a flawed algorithm, and caused similarly huge anguish to thousands of students, before dropping the idea.

The idea of writing algorithms to solve this complex problem is not necessarily wrong. Other solutions -- like using grades predicted by teachers -- have their own issues, including bias and grade inflation. The problems in England arose because people did not think through the real-life consequences for individual students of the algorithm's abstract rules -- even though they were warned of the model's flaws. Haines offers some useful, practical advice on how it should have been done:

The problem is with management: they should have asked for help. Faced with a problem this complex and this important they needed to bring in external checkers. They needed to publish the approach months ago, so it could be widely read and mistakes found. While the fact they published the algorithm at all is to be commended (if possibly a legal requirement due to the GDPR right to an explanation), they didn't go anywhere near far enough. Publishing their implementations of the models used would have allowed even greater scrutiny, including bug hunting.

As Haines points out, last year the UK's Alan Turing Institute published an excellent guide to implementing and using AI ethically and safely (pdf). At its heart lie the FAST Track Principles: fairness, accountability, sustainability and transparency. The fact that Ofqual evidently didn't think to apply them to its exam algorithm means its only gets a U grade for its work on this problem. Must try harder.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: algorithms, education, exams, grads, predictions, predictive algorithms, protests, testing

AMC Theaters: Risk Death And Disability To Watch Movie Reruns For 15 Cents!

from the hard-pass dept

Even before COVID-19, the brick and mortar movie industry was already struggling to adapt in the face of technological evolution. Now with a pandemic demolishing theater attendance, companies like AMC Theaters face an accelerated timeline as they attempt to cling to outdated constructs like movie release windows, sticky floors, and seventeen dollar popcorn, which were already showing their age in the 4K streaming era.

Theater chains haven't exactly been handling this pandemic thing all that well. When Comcast Universal began sending its movies straight to home streaming (you know, given that people don't want to die), AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron threw an apoplectic fit, insisting his chain would never again show a Comcast/Universal movie. After apparently realizing he didn't have any leverage to make those kinds of threats -- and negotiating to get an unspecified cut of the proceeds -- Aron and AMC agreed to a shorter 17-day release window. Baby steps, I guess.

It should go without saying that the scientific consensus is that the pandemic isn't going anywhere, and the problems it's creating are very likely to get worse as it collides with the traditional flu season this fall. Like so many who think they can just bull rush through factual reality and scientific consensus, AMC seems intent on opening a good chunk of its traditional theaters next week, and is hoping to draw crowds by offering 15 cent movie tickets on the first day:

"AMC Entertainment, which owns the chain, said Thursday that it expects to open the doors to more than 100 cinemas — or about a sixth of its nationwide locations — on Aug. 20 with throwback pricing for a day. AMC theaters have reopened in numerous international countries but have remained shuttered in the U.S. since March. The chain touted the reopening as “Movies in 2020 at 1920 Prices."

There's innovating, and then there's just denying the obvious. There's creative adaptation, and then there's business decisions that are literally putting people's lives at risk by encouraging mass public indoor gatherings during an historic pandemic that largely spreads, you know, indoors. Yes, the risk is mitigated somewhat by the fact AMC is requiring people wear masks, but there's obviously no guarantee your fellow theater patrons are going to comply, or that AMC will spend two hours and potential risk making employees enforce mask use in the dark.

Most of the films they'll be showing (Grease, Black Panther, and Back to the Future) are already on home video, so I'm not sure how many folks will be willing to risk death and potential lifelong disability to watch reruns. But hey, this being America, I suppose anything is possible. With all sympathy to theater industry employees, it may be time for AMC Theaters to begin considering a much harder pivot into a business sector that doesn't require denying obvious technological evolution and won't kill or disable its target audience.

Filed Under: covid-19, movies, pandemic, theaters
Companies: amc theaters

Congress To Consider National Right To Repair Law For First Time

from the baby-steps dept

About five years ago, frustration at John Deere's draconian tractor DRM culminated in a grassroots "right to repair" movement. The company's crackdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM and the company's EULA prohibited the lion's share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair, or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.

Since then, the right to repair movement has expanded dramatically, with a heavy focus on companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony and their attempts to monopolize repair, driving up consumer costs, and resulting in greater waste.

It has also extended into the medical arena, where device manufacturers enjoy a monopoly on tools, documentation, and replacement parts, making it a nightmare to get many pieces of medical equipment repaired. That has, unsurprisingly, become even more of a problem during the COVID-19 pandemic due to mass hospitalizations and resource constraints, with medical professionals being forced to use grey market parts or DIY parts just to get ventilators to work.

Hoping to give the movement a shot of adrenaline, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Yvette D. Clark have introduced the Critical Medical Infrastructure Right-to-Repair Act of 2020 (pdf), which would exempt medical equipment owners and "servicers" from liability for copying service materials or breaking DRM if it was done so to improve COVID-19 aid. The legislation also pre-empts any agreements between hospitals and equipment manufacturers preventing hospital employees from working on their own equipment, something that's also become more of a problem during the pandemic.

From a Wyden statement:

"There is no excuse for leaving hospitals and patients stranded without necessary equipment during the most widespread pandemic to hit the U.S. in 100 years,” Wyden said. “It is just common sense to say that qualified technicians should be allowed to make emergency repairs or do preventative maintenance, and not have their hands tied by overly restrictive contracts and copyright laws, until this crisis is over."

While numerous states have attempted to pass right to repair legislation, none have succeeded so far. In large part because companies like Apple have lobbied extensively to thwart them, (falsely) claiming that letting customers and independent repair merchants fix devices (usually for far less money) would be a privacy and security nightmare. In Nebraska, Apple even tried to claim that such legislation would turn the state into a mecca for hackers (sounds pretty cool to me, but what do I know). Apple has also spent years bullying a small repair shop in Norway because he used refurbished Apple parts to fix devices.

This is the first time such legislation will be proposed on the federal level. As such, likely seeing it as a gateway to broader legislation, companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, and John Deere will now likely do their best to (quietly) kill it, despite the positive impact it could have during a pandemic.

Filed Under: medical equipment, ownership, right to repair, ron wyden, yvette clark