All that matters is chance

From the readings, what is the controversy surrounding the H1-B Visa program? What are the arguments for and against the expansion of the program? After examining the topic, where do you stand on the issues surrounding the program? If you are in favor of expanding the use of H1-B Visa guest workers, explain why it is beneficial for the United States. How would you respond to concerns about lowering of wages or loss of jobs for US citizens? If you are agains the use of H1-B Visa guest workers, explain why it is is not necessary or potentially harmful to the United States. How would you respond to the idea that America is a nation of immigrants and that these guest workers are an effective means of tackling the problem of a tech talent shortage? In either case, discuss whether or not you are concerned with competition due to foreign workers or possibly outsourcing. If you are non-US citizen, discuss how these issues impact you and your future plans as it relates to residency and employment in America.

The H-1B visa system, as of today, is messed up.

The mainstream criticism of the H-1B visa program, that it’s designed for bringing cheap labor to take over American jobs, is misinformed. The current H-1B visa program has a few requirements to ensure companies aren’t recruiting foreign workers as cheap replacement for domestic workers: the job has to require a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience; the job has to be related to the worker’s field of study; the company has to pay prevailing wage (average wage or above, paid to workers in a specific occupation in a specific location). Theoretically, these requirements would guarantee that H-1B visas are used only to fill highly demanded, highly skilled positions, and would protect American workers from an influx of cheap labor.

But the criticism isn’t completely invalid—the current debate stemmed from actions of a few infamous companies (Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys, for example) that abuse the program and blatantly disregard and work around these requirements, in order to bring temporary, disposable, cheap workers into the US. The fact that Indian foreign nationals composed almost 70% of all H-1B applicants in 2014 is telling: the H-1B system is out-of-date and deeply flawed.

These unlawful practices have some deep impact on legitimate applicants. They have taken up the majority of H-1B applications and raised the number of applications so much, such that the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) has to employ a random lottery system to determine which applications to review. Last year, only a third of applications were randomly selected to be reviewed; the rest were sent back and the workers had to keep waiting, many of whom had to leave the U.S. before they had a chance for their application to be reviewed.

If the H-1B visa is designed to attract and retain talents and “specialty workers,” is it reasonable to let chance determine who leaves and who stays?

To paint the picture more clearly, here’s a sketch of my own application process. After I graduate this May, I have around 30 months of remaining employment authorization that comes with my student (F-1) visa, thanks to my STEM degree; during these 30 months, my company will apply for an H-1B visa for me on every April 1st, so I have 2 chances to apply for H-1B before I have to leave the U.S.; assuming the same number of applications as last year, my application has a 30% chance of being reviewed (and most likely approved), so I have roughly a 50% chance of getting the visa (or I have to leave). And after I receive the H-1B visa, if I want to apply for permanent residency or citizenship in the U.S., I’ll have to wait for another 5 to 7 years, due to the sheer number of applicants. It’s a pure waiting game.

The USCIS doesn’t care whether I’m good at what I do, whether I am employed by one of the most sought-after companies, whether I’m a top graduate of a top college, or whether I speak fluent English. All that matters is chance.

I’m in favor of expanding the H-1B visa program (there is a bipartisan bill that raises the cap of H-1B workers, that’s slowly moving through the congress), but more importantly, I want to see an improvement in the application and review process, such that chance doesn’t determine who stays and who leaves. But given the chaotic political landscape in the U.S., maybe the current system actually helps me in some sense. If the political divide furthers among the U.S. population, moving somewhere else is an attractive option too.

 

Missing the target

Is encryption a fundamental right? Should citizens of the US be allowed to have a technology that completely locks out the government? How important of an issue is encryption to you? Does it affect who you support politically? financially? socially? Should it? In the struggle between national security and personal privacy, who will win? Are you resigned to a particular future or will you fight for it?

The right to encryption is as much a fundamental right as the right to privacy, and possibly much more. Do we truly have privacy when we can’t encrypt our data, so no one else can access them? Especially in a time when all our data and personal exchanges are logged on our devices, when our devices can be easily unlocked and decrypted by the government or other people and organizations, a lot is at stake.

In authoritarian regimes, our freedom of speech and freedom of thought could be compromised; when dealing with hackers, our rights to properties is at risk; even in the U.S., the fifth amendment right that citizens have, that people cannot be compelled to testify against themselves, is in danger. If citizens don’t have a means to keep data truly to themselves only, if the U.S. government one day exerts more executive power than today, or if some authoritarian figure is elected president (see pre-WWII Germany), everyone’s rights will be in jeopardy.

The future looks even bleaker if we consider other parties that may exploit a lack of encryption. In a world where anyone performing a man-in-the-middle attack can change contents of any communications, what can we believe?

And as we discuss the right to encryption, stripping encryption from consumer devices doesn’t boost national security either. For organized extremist organizations, even with backdoors to all devices, there are other approaches for them to secure their own communications. The existence of non-centralized encryption methods, peer-to-peer PGP encryption of emails and distributed bridge relays, show that any attempt to control encryption is futile. Encryption is not a threat to national security; external enemies are. The ongoing battle around encryption is the government missing its target.

So the lack of education on the subject of encryption from the government is shocking, as is a general disrespect of expertise on this matter from the government’s end. There’s no question whether something with such widespread, looming consequences should affect one’s political alignment; why wouldn’t it?

Why wouldn’t anyone fight these misinformed attempts?

Copyright

From the readings, what exactly the DMCA say about piracy? What provisions does it have for dealing with infringement? What exactly are the safe-harbor provisions? Is it ethical or moral for users to download or share copyrighted material? What if they already own a version in another format? What if they were just “sampling” or “testing” the material? Have you participated in the sharing of copyrighted material? If so, how did you justify your actions (or did you not care)? Moreover, why do you think so many people (regardless of whether or not you do) engage in this behavior even though it is against the law? Does the emergence of streaming services such as Netflix or Spotify address the problem of piracy, or will are these services not sufficient? Is piracy a solvable problem? Is it a real problem?

The DMCA doesn’t directly legally define or outline the issue of piracy (that’s covered in the U.S. Code, title 17); instead, it outlines the “safe harbor” provision, protecting online service providers from copyright-infringing materials shared by their users, given they promptly block access to these materials when copyright holders notify them of the infringement. This seems like an effective provision and has been widely implemented by all major content providers, and although there’s some concern over companies using copyright to censor speech, it seems to have worked well overall. There are some borderline cases where the user’s original work could be in jeopardy, but because of the myriad of sharing websites, the user can always find one that is willing to defend their work.

Although it’s illegal and unethical to download and share copyrighted material, it is not illegal to make copies of copyrighted material that a user legally owns, given that usage of the copies adheres to the user’s rights to the original (so it’s okay to copy CDs or scan books for personal use). I’m unsure whether “downloading” counts as “making a copy,” but I tend to believe that because the uploader is surely not making fair use of the copyrighted material, downloading it isn’t ethical either. Other acts of downloading copyrighted material are even less justifiable, since the user didn’t have rights to the original to begin with.

Personally, I have downloaded copyrighted books and music before, when I was in China. (Disclaimer: I’m now buying paperback books from Amazon and paying for Apple Music.) In China, the issue of copyright had never really occurred to me—we didn’t have a lot of access to new music and unabridged, contemporary English-language books, so for people like me who want materials in English, we’re almost encouraged to look online and download books. But when people have access, the only justification is price, and free is a good price, especially when it’s hard to catch these violations of the law.

Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify does help eliminate piracy in its traditional sense (where people download illegally shared files from the internet), but they bring another layer of problem: what if my friend pays for the rights to stream movies and songs, and I use my friend’s account to access these services? These companies seem to be okay with it, but does account sharing count as a form of piracy? I guess it doesn’t hurt the copyright owner as these streaming companies pay them per stream, but it’s a legal gray area that still needs to be defined.

The human factor

From the readings, what exactly are patents? What are the ethical, moral, economic, or social reasons for granting patents? In your opinion, should patents be granted at all? Are they really necessary or beneficial for society? Do the promote innovation or do they hinder it? Explain. Additionally, should patents on software be granted or should patents be restricted to physical or more tangible artifacts? Explain. Finally, is the existence of patent trolls evidence that the patent system is working or that the system is broken? Explain.

I happen to have taken a lecture class on patent law, so stuff I say here without attribution come from my notes. Let’s establish the definitions first: legally, a patent is a right to exclude others from using the patentee’s invention for a limited period of time (20 years in the U.S.), in exchange for detailed public disclosure to add to the collective public knowledge—when the patent expires, anyone can use the invention described in the patent, benefiting from the inventor’s brainpower. There are a few major types of patents: machines, methods, designs (and interestingly, plants), and patents about software are usually patents about methods. The U.S. patent law excludes abstract ideas—theories and algorithms are not patentable—software patents are usually framed as “a method for doing something.” The patent office requires patents to be very narrow, encompassing only the novelty in the invention, defined painstakingly in detail, so the patentee can’t prosecute other people when their invention is only tangentially related to a product. Patents can also be “designed around”—companies can design products specifically so they are similar to a patent but don’t fit its description—which is morally questionable, but it helps deliver the patented inventions to more people.

Normally, the patent system helps us tremendously—it incentivizes inventors to publish their new inventions, so that everyone else can benefit from the invention. Take Apple as an example—Apple designed and patented “slide-to-unlock” when people had to punch in a passcode to unlock phones (the patent is still in effect in the U.S.), greatly improving the usability of the iPhone. After the Apple patent, multiple companies learned from Apple’s patent and developed similar techniques for unlocking their phones using gestures, and ultimately it’s the users who benefited from the general idea of gesture-to-unlock. Had the patent system not been in place, Apple, or any other company, may not be incentivized to invest in R&D, knowing that their inventions would be appropriated. (I should note that this is not the case for Tesla, since their goal is to get as many people into the electric car field as possible, not to protect themselves against nonexistent competitors.)

But patent trolls clearly show that there’s a weak link in the system, which is the human factor in the process of granting a patent. There are no committees or panels that review patent applications and make decisions—that would be too time-consuming and costly—usually, one patent examiner who specialize in a specific technical field is assigned a patent application, and they work closely with the applicant’s patent agent to revise and decide on the application. When the examiner is not authorized to sign decisions, other senior examiners may review the decisions. Under the current system, we’re relying solely on a handful of examiners to differentiate legitimate patent applications from applications filed by patent trolls. It’s difficult, because it’s hard to tell the difference between trolls and research facilities that make no products but only license their patents. It’s also not really part of the examiners’ job—the more important aspect of their job is to search for prior art, understand the novel technical details, limit the scope of applications, and clarify any ambiguous language.

I tend to think the USPTO should employ more patent examiners, and require multiple examiners review each application to dispel illegitimate applications, but today, the current system may be the best we can have for now. We’re moving in the right direction, however. Europe has less of a patent troll problem because the loser of patent lawsuits pays attorney fees for both sides, and the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in 2014 which allows similar schemes to happen in the U.S.. Before we eliminate human greediness altogether, the patent system is doing a decent job of protecting us against ourselves.