Something About The Law

Why are text messages limited to 160 characters? Why not more – surely we seem to have a lot to say to each other – or less? Why not 200, or even 150? A recently published article in the Los Angeles Times reveals a fascinating, yet somewhat disturbing, story.

Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters.

That became Hillebrand’s magic number — and set the standard for one of today’s most popular forms of digital communication: text messaging.

“This is perfectly sufficient,” he recalled thinking during that epiphany of 1985, when he was 45 years old. “Perfectly sufficient.”

As chairman of the “nonvoice services committee” within the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), a group that sets standards for the majority of the global mobile market, Hillebrand introduced his idea into the telecommunications market in 1986. All cellular carriers and mobile phones, he decreed, must support the short messaging service (SMS), and allow for up to 160 characters of data. (Here is Hillebrand’s first proposal for a uniform ‘smt’, short message transmission, system.)

The irony of Hillebrand’s brainchild was that it allowed him, virtually, no benefits: there were no royalties for the 160-character-sms. He doesn’t receive a couple of pennies each time someone sends a text. More than fifteen years later Friedhelm Hillebrand is (relatively) poor and obscure.

Could Hillebrand have been helped by (tighter) intellectual property norms? Does his case fall into the ambit of a wrong at all, considering that he was the employee of a firm meant to prescribe standards? Can one such standard, no matter how successful, be made to generate revenues outside of the firm’s ordinary revenue, based on the number of people who choose to implement it?

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The free distribution of ideas also has its benefits. John Hilton, a doctoral candidate in Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, has recently studied the effects of releasing free ebooks through Creative Commons and other (over-the-internet) methods.

For his research, he has located, so far, approximately 40 book titles for which publishers have released free online versions at least eight weeks after releasing the printed version. He does not consider books that were released both simultaneously for free online and as print products because then he wouldn’t be able to observe the before and after effects on sales. He then records the Bookscan numbers — which account for about 70% of all US book sales, including those sold at most retailers — for the eight weeks prior to the free release and the eight weeks after.

On March 4 of this year, Random House announced that it would release five books for free through its science fiction portal, all of which came in downloadable PDF files (among other formats). Hilton recorded the before and after book sales and found that “one of the five books has had zero sales in 2009. So no sales before or after the free version. But the other four books all saw significant sales increases after the free versions were released. In total, combined sales of the five books were up 11%. Together they sold 4,633 copies the 8 weeks prior to being released free and 5,155 copies the eight weeks after being released.”

What this means is that free online distribution actually increases an author’s revenues – by pushing up the sales of real, royalty-carrying books – rather than decreasing it, as proponents of copyright have always feared. This has important implications for the future of intellectual property, as well as the distribution process itself – will all books in the future be released intially free of cost, like the trial versions of software, in an effort to get people to buy ‘the real thing?’

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