It was because they wanted to give the people moving into these houses the chance to have some ability to make these their houses, to customize them and build them in configuration that is were useful to them. The government provided building assist sfa assistance services. They talk about what it looks like. Half the houses look exactly the same. The other half, some people have built them out. Some people have built porches. It is sort of half stepford wives, half andy warhol. I think that says something about why ownership is important. It allows people to take advantage of the creativity and offer a perspective. A professor i like has done studies on lead user innovation. When people purchase things, sometimes they come up with creative uses that you wouldnt expect. They might turn paper plate noose frisbees. I think that drives people forward on an individual matter. I think this is really important to people in their daily lives but also as a society. We take advantage of the learning that each of us can do. Pe tutt it on the internetant tell other people how to do it. You go to the internet, lifehack. Com and learn things you wouldnt have expected. That depends on the basic right of ownership which allows you to do unexpected things with what you have. I think thats a really interesting issue and something that we can explore in a lot more depth in terms of we arent really sure how much we own specific things. Our homes, thats something you sit in your house all day. You are like, this is my pillow, my chair. I could paint it a different color, whatever you are thinking about that. In terms of my phone and the software thats running on it, there are updates to that every couple days sometimes you think. Many you dont really read through whats going on in the update. Often times, it is something good. Oftentimes, it is a security update that you definitely should use. We dont necessarily know whats going to happen with those and we dont have a choice. How does our perception of ownership in the Digital Space spill over to the physical and how much do manufacturers own certain objects . The really interesting thing these days. For a long time, i assume i own my chair. I assume i own my notebook. Computer software, im not totally sure. You have to sign that giant thing that nobody reads. You have signed away all your rights. For a long time, that was like a simple distinction. There are a lot of court case that is follow that sort of distinction. Software is one thing and physical is another thing. Today, we have all these devices. Your car has a computer in it. Your thermostat has a computer in it. Your cat feeder has a computer in it to feed the cat at a certain time. You have this merger of things. The boundaries of ownership arent really as clear. The companies that are manufacturing these devices are still take advantage of the same techniques they used in the Software Field to say you dont actually own this. We are only providing you with lie se license. We can take it back from you or you are not allowed to use it on sundays. It is a little different than saying you are not allowed to use itunes. People are starting to recognize that as devices have more software in it, in order to acquire their physical defvices it is not as clear whether or not ownership is as simple as we expected like owning a chair. I think thats right. Ideally we dont think about it. You mentioned, we own our home. I own my home. We are renovating my kitchen. I didnt ask my bank. Technically, they own it. We buy our phones. I think this phone, i did one of those twoyear contracts where i paid per month. I guess technically verizon owns the phone until i hit my twoyear mark. You mentioned manufacturing. I was fortunate enough to be in dayton. I was there representing commerce secretary pritzker for manufacturing day. Toured five factories. Ownership in terms of intellectual property and parts. A lot of auto manufacturing parts going on there but through the supply chain and other parts. Sometimes somebody comes, an inventor and they tell the manufacturing plan manufacturing plant, i need this design. The manufacturing plant might sit down and if they are getting involved in it, they might become a coowner. In some cases, i need this made. They own the i. P. In other cases, maybe it is license. I saw these grills being made for dodge ram trucks. I assumed the designer was licensing that to ford or maybe they were sell teeing ing it to. We dont think about that. You just drive the ram truck. All this stuff was being sold in the background. We dont have to think about that. Absolutely. Thats certainly something that goes along with the background and you may not notice when something bad happens, i guess. One thing i think about a lot when i am writing is technology and the law. Technology Ma Technology has rapidly progressed. Has the law always kept up with that in terms of privacy. Oftentimes, it has not. Something that i read about regularly and i honestly do not know all that much about patent law. I know that you both do. My media boss, direct store lee, talks a lot about this and how we are moving in the manageable economy. As we have these new products and services, they are disrupting Business Models. I any air b b can certainly talk about the mayor of new york and talk about some of the disruption that they are experiencing in terms of regulation. It actually goes broadly. I do think it is important, though, to recognize that often you dont need to completely rethink the law. So weve been using the term sharing economy. In reality, basically, it is like a rental economy. In the 90s, i was covering the tech boom. I would appear on the scene and program called the new economy show. By its very name the assumption was the economy was new. That pets. Com changed the dog food provider and the world. Then, it turns out it was a regular economy. The sharing economy is changing the ways we can interact with each other and products and services. Ultimately, it is still driven by economic forces. I think we would agree with that. You can work within the law but you do have to recognize there are going to be implications that you are an entrepreneur if you are trying to get ahead of those, which is what director lee advises people. One of the things that is interesting, you can look at how ownership affects law. When you have a device that you own and you can inspect it, you can figure out how it works. You can figure it out, publicize it and say, if there is a problem, maybe you shouldnt buy this. The government can get involved in recalls. A lot of times the devices we are buying are black boxes. They put in restrictions to make it harder for us to open them up, figure out whats going on inside, figure out their security flaws. Some of those protections are even technological protections. You might try to circumvent them. There are law that is make it potentially criminal to try and circumvent that sort of thing. Thats somewhat concerning. It means we cant actually fully understand the things that we supposedly own. People couldnt figure out that volkswagen had this Computer Program inside them to achieve the emissions testing program. You cant just go and open up the computer and figure out how it works. They put a whole lot of encryptions in them. The Car Manufacturers have sought to Block Security researchers from actually doing that sort of investigation. In a real world sense, i find that unfortunate. It is a Real Public Service when people go out and figure out na these products might have some sort of defect or some sort of problems. To the extend that companies are able to prevent them from doing that, that seems pretty worrying to me. Absolutely. As a journalist, i speak for Public Awareness and transparency. Thats an important aspect of it. Also, i feel like this could be an issue in terms of creativity. When you have a device or something you use, you want to modify it in some way. You want to use that product to create something of your own. Does your lack of ownership there cause problems for your sense of creativity and in what ways could you envision that . I definitely think that thats an issue. One of my favorite websites is ikea hackers where people will take a chair. Theyll turn it into something my favorite one was, they took file boxes and turned it into an expanding table. I flip out the file boxes and you can make a table of whatever size you want. People do really cool stuff with materials that you would not expect. But there are a lot of companies out there who they really want you to use the products the way they expect. Lexmark is probably the most famous of these companies. They sell toner cartridges with this prebait program, you are only allowed to use the toner cartridge once. You have to return it to lexmark. You are not allowed to do anything else with the cartridge. What that means is that if you come up with some sort of unusual way of using it. For example, there were people who figured out how to put food coloring into ink jet cartridges, to put on cakes and you are not allowed to do it, because they have taken advantages of legal techniques to avoid that. Im glad both of you have mentioned creativity. I like this notion of being the creativity like with your ikea example. We have with the supply chain creativity throughout the chain. Somebody came up with the way to design those pieces of ikea furniture where you could assemble them with only an allen wrench. In theory, you can assemble them. Some of us have had challenges with ikea furniture. You think about lift, right . It just seems intuitively obvious to us. I enjoy using lift and how easy it makes it to tip the driver. I like that feature. We just heard that lift recognizes this need and designed some algorithms to deal with it. There is a full chain of it. There are all kinds of new technologies coming out. How is the Patent Office considering things like 3d printing. How could that infringe on things other people have created . We held an event called additive manufacturing. It is 3d printing. One of the five manufacturing plants i toured only did 3d printing and they have been around since 96. This has been out in the marketplace for a while now. There are certainly implications in terms of copyrights and patents and trademarks, the ability to download something that may have a trademark from somebody else and manufacture it yourself. I think the consensus, though, is, this is truly a revolutionary technology that is going to really improve our lives. At that manufacturing plant, they were designing these parts that were going to be used actually in machines to make other things and they were able to create passages and drillthroughs, for example, like fluids, oils for advice cosity. You cannot do with the drill. No way to drill through. You can work it out. We have to figure out the nuances of i. P. And some will make headlines. We are going to see great Economic Growth and opportunity z one opportunity. One of the most exciting things i think is that it takes manufacturing. It used to be in the hands of people that knew how the entire supply chain worked. They knew fabrication plants and the designers. They knew the specifications for how to do drawings. It takes all of that and puts it into the hands of you and me. I dont know any fabrication plants that can cast metal for me. I know how to type things. If i call a design and i can can design it using Computer Programs for 3d modeling. I can send it off to shapeways and they give me the thing i need to print. Another one is great. I am excited about the potential of 3d printing for replacing kids toys. I have a 3yearold. He loses his favorite leggo every week. More importantly, i am excited about the idea of fast prototyping, the idea that right now, if i want to try out a new idea, i have to send it out to the factory. It is going to take a mt. For them to manufacture it. It turns out there is a problem. I have to redo the design. 3d printing, i just say, i want to make that design here. Lets just reprint it. It will take an hour. You think about the auto industry. We have talked about cars here, right . Traditionally, you would get the new model every four or five years. The car i own, they completely changed the interior from the 15 to the 16 model. I suspect 3d printing was involved in that. They can make these fast prototypes cheap and on the fly. They can test them, run through. We may not even ten years from now, since we are talking future tense. We may not have model years of cars. They may keep it ter rating them in real time. You just keep getting the latest one. It changes the way we think about things. Definitely. Im curious whether or not you both think that types of 3d printing will butt heads with these big manufacturers. We talk about apple and the iphone. I think i know hundreds of people that have broken their iphones. Im not one of them yet. Knock on wood. I probably will tomorrow break my screen. We were just discussing earlier in the greenroom about how it is incredibly challenging to replace that screen without spending a lot of money going to the genius bar. Do you think things like 3d printing and other solutions will be good for that and pubut heads with the big company sns. I was talking about my experience of replacing an ipad screen. The process, in case any of you want to try this out, involves trying is to open the glass with a pry tool in one hand while blow drying the glue that holds the glass together with the other hand. Because this glass is so thin, it breaks off into small pieces. You are sitting there, blow dryer on the one hand. Prying tool in the other, pieces of glass are flying in your face. It is a wonderful experience. I did manage to do it. It says that something about the way some of these manufacturers are training in these devices. I also have a keyboard that i purchased maybe about six years ago. That thing is entirely held together with philip screws. I can take a screwdriver and open it up, replace the logic boards, clean off the keys and do all the things that i want, screw it back together and it works fine. That process takes me about maybe half an hour. When companies moved from things like Standard Hardware to these pentelope screws that they use on laptops and gluing things together and parts that cant be replaced. Parts that are custom fit so you cant replace them with other parts. It makes it a lot harder for people to engage in ordinary repairs of their stuff. That means that if my iphone breaks, unless you have a lot of skills and time or are willing to go to a specialized repair shop, you probably have to throw it away. That, i think, is unfortunate. Because i have to throw a device away because a small part might be broken, a recycling problem, because it contains lithium glass, metal, and you cannot separate it out and send it to a recycling plant. The trend is concerning. 3d printing makes it a little better as it offers the option of recreating customized part that is you might not be able to find. If there is a particular curved bezel on an iphone that is broken and you cant find a replacement for it, you can 3d print it and you have your cell. That is cool. A lot of companies are not terribly happy with the idea. They want to be the only ones selling repair parts. There is going to be something of a conflict there of incentives. Absolutely. As a journalist who works with a very small segment, i work with people who are really interested in things like security, i know that there are a lot of users out there that have different priorities. Maybe the standard iphone isnt necessarily a good example. They have pretty good security. The standard android user. Most people have an driedroids e country but they dont have great security. When they push out the software and there is a flaw and they choose not to update it and all these users are vulnerable to criminal hackers, sometimes even state actors, depending on who it is, i have known certain people who are certainly at risk to that, how do we properly incentivize companies to be able to develop those things when they dont even give us the choice it do that . This is something that commerce secretary pritzker is focused on a lot, cybersecurity and ntia is a part of commerce and she works a lot with them and other sub agencies that have been included in the u. S. Patent and trademark office. It is a real challenge. We work a lot with startups. Generally, what you see with it, specially a tech startup, you see that engineer, the wozniak, lets call it, you see that the evangelist, the jobs, and maybe they get in somebody who actually understands the money part, which is good and then they just plow forward and they get those customers and services. So secretary pritzker and undersecretary lee like to remind people. You should probably early on be thinking about intellectual property and cybersecurity. Both of them are really hard to back load. Once you start getting down the chain, right . Now, in terms of creating the incentives, we are doing it through public education. We are going around, doing round tables, talking to schools. We at the usbto have a program called camp intervention where we work through first through sixth graders. You bring in ibm selectrics and modify them. It is a serious problem. Security is an interesting issue when it comes to io devices. We all know about the recent internet outage that was caused by iot cameras that was easily hacked because they had a fixed password that nobody could change, not even the users. There are two approaches dealing with security vulnerability. The first one is, you would want to lock their devices down as much as possible, dont let anybody access them. Make it hard for anybody to figure out whats going on. It sounds very attractive. The issue is that most of the security vulnerabilities that are discovered are not discovered by the company. They are discovered by third parties who do research on it and they do the fuzzing, they do the Penetration Testing and realize there is something the company overlooked. A lot of times, these companies, they are Design Companies and Manufacturing Companies and software is second or third down the list for them. Sooftware security may not be at the top of the priority chain for them. It would be for users and security users. That leads to a different approach. Open the device as much as possible. Let people figure out whats going on. Make the software an open source. That way, it would take advantage of the crowd. They can figure out what are all the issues. They can report on them and you can incrementally improve the device at a much more rapid pace. So i think that there is that aspect ech of owning and understanding devices that is helpful to cybersecurity concerns. You talk about Security Researchers. Ther