Re: [silk] Privacy, By Design
I actually disagree. There's a strong divide between what's mathematically possible, and what' happening on a day-to-day basis. Ignoring the 'bureaucratic factions' (which I guess is geek for lawyers and policy nerds?) misses the nuance in the system. You gotta remember -- we're dealing with people here, and most of us (myself included) don't think strictly in the framework of ones and zeros. Until we're a) only dealing with machines, which I suppose makes my job obsolete anyway, or b) programming the law, to ignore context, intent and the like, I still argue there's a viable argument _for_ privacy, and privacy-enhancing mechanisms. Lots of things are possible -- doesn't mean they're legally permissible. Nor should they be. Carey On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 3:39 AM, J. Andrew Rogers and...@ceruleansystems.com wrote: On Mar 29, 2011, at 9:58 PM, Carey Lening wrote: My one and only (slightly self-interested) recommendation is that you also not forget the lawyers ... PbD is a big deal (or is developing into one), and one of the hallmarks for successful implementation is including all the diverse groups together to develop best privacy practices and implement effective technological steps from the ground up. While valuable as a point of information, the policy discussions have arguably fallen too far behind the technology to be constructive. When I was working on this problem five years ago, mostly with national governments, the primary issue was that politically acceptable policy could be distilled down to solving a couple Hard Problems in mathematics. A pragmatic group of people could arrive at an adequate, though imperfect, solution by simply ignoring some bureaucratic factions that made the problem overly difficult. Since then, the mathematics and theoretical computer science has advanced to such a point that privacy is generally not possible even in principle. The old problem was organizations securing their databases; the new problem is that anyone can automagically reconstruct the contents of those databases and much information not in any database from ambient and latent data with remarkable fidelity. Most people not working in this space do not appreciate how rapidly capability has advanced and one cannot meaningfully control technology when the required tool chain is both inexpensive and ubiquitous across the industrialized world. There is cognitive dissonance between my natural predilection for strong privacy and my intimate familiarity with the implausibility of it. Privacy has been reduced to *only* policy, with the weakness implied, because technical controls have become impractical. J. Andrew Rogers
[silk] Fwd: Close the Washington Monument
-- Forwarded message -- From: Lawnun lawnun+mailingl...@gmail.com lawnun%2bmailingl...@gmail.com Date: Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 5:52 PM Subject: Re: [silk] Close the Washington Monument To: Heather Madrone heat...@madrone.com Rule 34 suggests that such a thing already exists... Alas, I have been unable to find anything relating to the Washington Monument, sex or sexual aids of the 'monumental' variety. Pity. I see a business opportunity. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rule%2034 On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 11:36 AM, Heather Madrone heat...@madrone.comwrote: On 12/22/10 10:36 PM December 22, 2010, Lawnun wrote: On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Nikhil Mehra nikhil.mehra...@gmail.comwrote: You know this just might be an Indian speaking, but I seriously want you very privileged American bastards (and I was till recently one of them by sheer virtue of having lived there) to truly fearfully deal with terror cynicism or theatre, to know Schneier's article is everything but fantasy. So, he suggests tough access. Fuck you! ... Counselor -- In general, if you're trying to advance your argument, it might be worthwhile to stick to a position, articulate that position clearly and with then move on. As it stands, can neither tell whether you think we're better off closing the monument, leaving it open, or using it as a sexual aid. Just saying. Carey (an American who neither supports any of this, nor quite gets the need for all the vitriol) ~ Oh, come on, Carey, be broad-minded here. If someone wants to use the Washington Monument as a sexual aid, it should be fine as long as they put the video on youtube under a NSFW tag. [I was puzzled for a long time by the acronym SLYT, which certainly sounds like it ought to be dirty but in fact stands for Single Link YouTube.] -- Heather Madrone (heat...@madrone.com) http://www.madrone.comhttp://www.sunsplinter.blogspot.com I'd love to change the world, but they won't give me access to the source code.
Re: [silk] Close the Washington Monument
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 7:38 PM, Nikhil Mehra nikhil.mehra...@gmail.comwrote: You know this just might be an Indian speaking, but I seriously want you very privileged American bastards (and I was till recently one of them by sheer virtue of having lived there) to truly fearfully deal with terror cynicism or theatre, to know Schneier's article is everything but fantasy. So, he suggests tough access. Fuck you! ... Counselor -- In general, if you're trying to advance your argument, it might be worthwhile to stick to a position, articulate that position clearly and with then move on. As it stands, can neither tell whether you think we're better off closing the monument, leaving it open, or using it as a sexual aid. Just saying. Carey (an American who neither supports any of this, nor quite gets the need for all the vitriol)
Re: [silk] Lurkers, hidden audiences, and public archives
On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Deepa Mohan mohande...@gmail.com wrote: I got savvy and gamed Pagerank. What's this? Please explainin words of one syllable, for an ignorantosaurus. Pagerank is the tool Google utilizes (or one of them at this point, I wager) to weigh webpages. [1] Wikipedia has more on how the technology works, but the short and simple answer is, Google looks for sites with current, relevant and interesting information. The more links you have coming into such sites (particularly from other 'good' link sources and sites) the higher your page will rank. When I opened my practice, I took advantage of this, and got my new baby page linked to dozens of other reliable sources (lawyer directories, blogs, etc. ). I also linked out to many of them in my blog. End result being, when you do searches for me now, you don't see anything incriminating until the 5th or 6th page in :) *And now for something completely random: *I was chatting with Udhay yesterday, and periodically, he likes to inform me that there are other lawyers and law-types on this list. Just curious -- if anyone is, drop me a line. I do occasionally get referrals from strange people in strange places... Carey Lening [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
Re: [silk] Lurkers, hidden audiences, and public archives
On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 6:38 AM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: Since Udhay said that he feels strongly about this, let me start by stating that I too feel very strongly about this group's privacy settings I am still a little unclear as to why. If it is because you are concerned about your postings being quoted out of context, maybe one solution is to have a nom de list, as Ashok suggested. Thoughts? Udhay While I can't possibly begin to guess as to why other individuals worry about the 'publicity' of one's posts being available on the wide open internet, I can at least speak for my own reasons for lurking. And my answer is this: in lurk mode, nothing can be taken out of context. The plain and simple truth is, even if you stand behind your words, sometimes people don't always read the context of the statements made. I know this both from first hand experience, and as a lawyer working on behalf of clients whose sideline conversations on a mailing list, Google Group or even an errant Facebook post that leaked out into the big wide Interwebs and cost them a job, damaged their reputation, or otherwise impacted their life. Hell, I'm willing to wager good money that at least one of my FoRK posts (a mailing list I once posted frequently on) cost me at least a few job opportunities before I got savvy and gamed Pagerank. Not mind you, for much if anything I said in the post (it was a reply to an amusingly-titled spam email)[1] but entirely BECAUSE of the title of the amusing spam. I'm still waiting for someone to invent takebacksies on the Internet. But then I wager, half the world's crazy porn supply would disappear. Carey (who will promptly go back to lurking now) [1] http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/jan00/0906.html
Re: [silk] Gender on Silk
You all have piqued my interest again enough to draw me from my lurker recesses and comment (confirming Deepa's theory, in least insamuch as it applies to moi)... On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 1:18 AM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: In the Indian mind too - the pink elephant always lurks in the background, and even if his body language does not lie, a rebound guilt phenomenon makes the Indian subconsciously contort his language to actively tiptoe around any idea that he may be thinking of that pink elephant, sex somewhere in the background. Shiv: I don't think this is an isolated phenomena. As I like to say, the rebound guilt phenomena penetrates everywhere the Puritans (or puritan-like thought) did. We've got a similar guilt reflex/response, although it's been diminished over the last decade or so due to the fact that as Americans, we'd be doing it all the time. To be fair Indian women too are often guilty of this - a least in my personal experience. I have found friends and collegues beginning to imagine that I am about to express lewd thoughs or tell a dirty joke when nothing of the sort is likely. And of course the ubiquitous and unconscious so called wrist sign where the woman brings her hand up to her face in an ostensibly needless gesture that is actually intended to cover a bare neck and imaginary cleavage from prying eyes. But here Indian women have a pallu/dupatta that they pull across the area when they feel that the pink elephant has squares on his mind. Interesting. I'm curious what the exact pinpoint for their reaction is. Although my male friends often accuse me of trying to read their minds, it turns out that their actions speak a helluva lot louder. While I can't say that I necessarily go for the wrist sign maneuver when I'm graced with a man who's spending what I perceive of as undue time admiring the twins, I have caught myself adjusting my shirt, or twisting my body. More recently though, I've found that the best approach is just to start curiously gazing at their neither regions. That tends to bring everyone back into focus :) I saw an interesting photo yesterday - a group of South American heads of state - all the men were in suits, and the sole woman had a scarf neatly wrapped around her neck to cover any skin that might have been visible in her lower neck/upper chest area. It appears that women must do this to function effectively in a male dominated world. I wouldn't be surprised if this was indeed the case. During the recent elections here, when Hillary Clinton was in the running, the media, spent an inordinate amount of time not only criticizing her policy positions (which is par for the course), but also her fashion statements and trends. [1] Ditto for Michelle Obama. [2] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/business/media/11min.html [2] http://www.latimes.com/features/image/la-ig-arms29-2009mar29,0,4782966.story (now here's a sad commentary... In doing a quick search on the 'tubes for those links ... I found not one, but 4 separate blogs devoted to following Michelle Obama's fashion dos and don'ts. And you wonder why politico women go for out of the conservative shapeless look!) Carey
Re: [silk] Silkmeet in NYC/DC was Meetup in NYC
On Sun, May 31, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Malini Aisola malini.ais...@gmail.comwrote: On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: I'm in NYC for the next week, anyone in town? Cheeni How about a silkmeet in DC next weekend when I believe Cheeni is visiting? Malini Man I almost missed this! (Thanks Udhay for pointing it out!) I'd LOVE to have a DC meetup -- and if there's any interest, Artomatic's running all weekend long, so if you guys need a clever little bit of artsy fun, I highly reccomend that: http://www.artomatic.org/
Re: [silk] More on India in Illiad cartoons
I'll preface this with I'm not Indian but... I must admit, the whole comic screams gross caraciture, and not terribly funny to boot. That being said, userfriendly ceased being entertaining (at least to me) about 3 years ago. By design though, I understand Illiad's need to yank in the generalizations for an attempt at comedic effect -- he works in a medium that falls back on such conventions regularly. In some respects, particularly in the case of the three-panel daily comic, I think you need to employ caricature and generalization to hit the succinct punchline at the end of the third panel. That India (and to a lesser extent, Indians, are the brunt of this particular thread) seem only to serve the current story arc, and I'm not sure it'd be fair to extrapolate ignorance of India(ns) to the creator (and even less so, to the comics' readership). Given that, I'm curious, in an 'across-the-pond' sort of way -- do you ask the same questions (or generate the same 'datasets' that Bonobashi did) -- regarding Indian comics that exaggerate or generalize about the U.S. or Canada (or anywhere considered away for that matter)? Carey On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Bonobashi bonoba...@yahoo.co.in wrote: --- On Sat, 23/5/09, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: From: Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com Subject: Re: [silk] More on India in Illiad cartoons To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Date: Saturday, 23 May, 2009, 7:24 PM Bonobashi wrote, [on 5/23/2009 7:05 PM]: Next, if we enumerate these bits of information and knowledge, we find that these do not form a cohesive, intermingled whole; instead, what we have is a set of bullet-points, like so: * India is a low-cost location for voice-based BPOs; * Chennai is a typical Indian city; * All Indian cities resemble one another; (implied in the depiction of buildings, denizens, and descriptions of available food) * Chicken tikka is an Indian dish (as opposed to regional, or faux-Mughlai); * Curry is another generic Indian dish; * There are no female Indians in real life; * There are mythical Indian females, and these are seductive entities which cannot be resisted; * There are mythical Indian female deities, and these may or may not be the same as mythical Indian females; * The iconology of Indian deities is easy; multiple limbs, an aggressive attitude, imminent danger to mankind; The issue is that, if one is to apply a strict standard of accuracy and cohesiveness, this needs to be applied to the rest of the strip's story arcs as well (such as the recurring characters from HP Lovecraft, and the AI, and the dustbunny and so on) The whole thing falls apart then. I suppose this could be taken as a generic comment on the nature of the implied contract between reader and writer (willing suspension of disbelief) and so on, but there seems to be more to it that this - and I am not able to put my finger on what this is. The whole story arc obviously piqued Giancarlo's curiosity enough that he asked twice what our thoughts on it are. I don't really have any thoughts on it at this point, I'm afraid, as I don't know what the cartoonist is trying to say. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com)) The point is, I don't think the cartoonist knows either, and seems to be feeling his way forward. Maybe if we track the data revealed by him, we will come to realise what the general idea is more or less at the same time as he. Explore and discover exciting holidays and getaways with Yahoo! India Travel http://in.travel.yahoo.com/
Re: [silk] Last.fm / CBS cover up
On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.comwrote: What's the punishment under EU data privacy laws if indeed user data was handed over without authorization as is claimed? Cheeni How interesting -- I'm working on an update to a Data security law treatise, and while I'm firmly entrenched in the U.S. aspects only, this article does give me an opportunity to speculate on laws across the pond. Mind you, I'm no EU Data Directive geek, but after a quick reading of the law ( substantive portions available here: http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/fsj/privacy/docs/95-46-ce/dir1995-46_part2_en.pdf), I'm curious whether the law would even attach. There's a lot of holes and unanswered questions, and in the light of discovery, its quite possible that all of my initial views could be wrong. That being said: 1. To qualify under the Data Directive, data has to be of a personal nature. Personal data are defined as any information *relating to an identified or identifiable natural person** *(data subject); an identifiable person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity; (art. 2 a). I'm not sure a username and IP address alone would qualify, but then again, caselaw may argue otherwise. If anyone knows of such a case, I'd be interested! 2. The Data Directive, under Art. 7 explicitly excludes notification requirements in cases when processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject. If this was in response, say to a legitimately-crafted DMCA Sec. 512 takedown notice, then I think CBS' actions, while repugnant, would seemingly be in the clear. 3. I haven't perused Last.fm's privacy/ToS policies in awhile, but assuming they added language in the agreement permitting the disclosure of userids/ip addresses in response to a request by their contracting licensees (e.g., the record companies) for infringement purposes, I'm not sure that disclosure by the parent would trigger liability under the data directive. Admittedly, this does make for one hell of an interesting legal question! Interesting stuff. Carey (who is up to her eyeballs in hackers, lawsuits and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act)
Re: [silk] Facebook's New Terms Of Service: We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.
Thanks for posting that, Thaths. It's helpful sometimes to see a comparison with other ToS'es. In this case, I'm seriously curious what the hell FB's lawyers were thinking when they crafted this nonsense. As it states in the TOS: You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. 1. Facebook's usurpation of Right of publicity and perpetual copyrights will be challenged, assuming this little stunt doesn't get changed quickly. Its just _too_ broad to fly, and I can hear a court screaming 'unconscionable' -- particularly where the 13 year-olds are involved. 2. How many bong rips were these guys taking when they thought they could get you to sign away the rights to content created by third parties to your web site? I mean, privity of contract was taught within the first weeks of my 1L year. There is no privity here to outside third-party created content posted on the website of a consenting user. That's insane. And let's not even consider the works that are covered by CC. Trust me, I dig that FB wants to have its ass covered when it comes to wall posts and the like (managing the content implications of a user who posts to his buddies and then quits, does strike me as daunting on a mass scale), but this is insane. Perhaps another rationale for discontinuing my FB obsession. Carey On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Thaths tha...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 8:02 PM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote: A follow-up on Consumerist: http://consumerist.com/5154745/facebook-clarifies-terms-of-service-we-do-not-own-your-stuff-forever Facebook Clarifies Terms Of Service: We Do Not Own Your Stuff Forever By Chris Walters, 6:52 PM on Mon Feb 16 2009, 10,958 views It is interesting to compare Facebook's ToS against others: http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/ Facebook terms of service compared with MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter February 16, 2009 – 2:28 pm With today's outrage over Facebook's newly altered Terms of Service at its peak, I figured I'd do a quick comparison of their terms of service as regards user-uploaded content to the terms specified by other social networking sites, just to see if said outrage is fully justified. It looks as though the finger-pointing at the Bush robots.txt file wasn't justified, for instance, and I was guilty of spreading that story. Conclusion? Go ahead and be outraged. Facebook's claims to your content are extraordinarily grabby and arrogant. Here's the rundown, which I go through in more detail below: 1. Facebook apparently wants to keep all its rights to your stuff after you remove it from Facebook, and even after you delete your Facebook account; they just removed the lines that specified that their rights end when your content comes down. Nobody else (of those I looked at) would dream of that; mostly they specifically state that their rights to your content end when you remove the content from their site or delete your account. 2. This one kills me: Facebook claims it can do whatever it wants with your content if you put a Share on Facebook link on your web page. Unbelievable–and unique, as far as I can tell. People can post links in Facebook to your content just by copying and pasting the URL, but if you want to save them a few keystrokes by putting a link or a widget on your site, Facebook claims that you've granted them a whole mess of rights. Count me out. 3. Other sites point out in their terms of service that you still own your content: Facebook doesn't mention that little fact. Facebook also neglects to remind you that you're giving other Facebook users rights to your Facebook content, too — YouTube, for example, makes it clear that other people besides YouTube have a right to use and spread around the videos you upload. In general, other sites' terms of service just have a more helpful tone. So let's look at what other popular user-generated content sites say about their rights to your stuff: MySpace's rights to your stuff: 6.1 MySpace does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, applications, or any other materials
Re: [silk] Facebook's New Terms Of Service: We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.
Occam or Ockham, either way, it appears that the masses of concerned citizens have won: From the FB Blog: Update on Terms Share by Mark Zuckerberg http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=4ref=blog Today at 1:17am A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input. Going forward, we've decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don't plan to leave it there for long. More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren't just a document that protect our rights; it's the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service. Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterdayhttp://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=54434097130around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms. You have my commitment that we'll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we've changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted. If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilitieshttp://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774. I'm looking forward to reading your input.
Re: [silk] Mumbai silklisters OK?
Sorry for the late word (I was in the air all day), but I just wanted to send a note hoping that anyone who might be affected is ok. Horrible, horrible stuff. Carey On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 1:23 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: If they were etickets booked on irctc, you could just download those tickets from elsewhere .. srs -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:silklist-bounces+suresh silklist-bounces%2Bsuresh=hserus.net@ lists.hserus.net] On Behalf Of Radhika, Y. Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 11:46 AM To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Subject: Re: [silk] Mumbai silklisters OK? the big problem for me is that all my travel from mumbai was by train and my tix are sitting with my cousin in mumbai. the situation being quite tense, i don't want to worry her and ask her to dhl something. anyway thanks for the quick responses. Mumbai was purely a pleasure trip for me so even if the flight is rerouted i don't mind. it is the subsequent travel that will be affected by this change that is more of a concern. On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 9:54 PM, Deepa Mohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 11:14 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: You are likely to find yourself rerouted by the airline into some other Indian city - I hear that flights into bombay are getting canceled. Radhika, last time, Mumbai proved very resilient after the terror attacks, but I do not know if the same will hold true this time. What is your schedule like? If you have the time, coming into another Indian city, and going to Mumbai a couple of days later may be a viable option. This is a good time to re-examine the farce that our security system generally isas long as we are so lax in our security, and we have so much of politics-crime nexus, how can we root out terrorism? Deepa.
Re: [silk] When I Have The Time
On Sat, Nov 15, 2008 at 12:54 PM, Mohit (मॊिहत) [EMAIL PROTECTED]wrote: Udhay: you are a sadist :p Indeed. But this sounds like great fun, so I'll bite: 1. Travel more (particularly around Japan/China). See the world, in particular... 2. Go to India (I'm probably the only Silker who hasn't!) 3. Get at least a masters in Economics, probably a Ph.D. 4. Write the novel I've been tossing around in my head for the past two years. 5. Get through the 250+ books on my to read list. 6. Get SCUBA certified. 7. Get back into piano. 8. Obtain proficiency on violin. 9. Learn how to belly dance properly. 10. Learn at least one new language. 11. Take a few good cooking classes. 12. Volunteer. What a lovely thing to contemplate on a rainy day (at least in D.C.) Carey
Re: [silk] Musings on Youtube et. al.
Oh come now Gautam... _Everytime_ a video is taken down, God kills a kitten? Hyperbole aside, it's still a gross overstatement of the types of videos that are _mostly_ being taken down. Although I'll admit that many legitimate works of the type you rightly are concerned about have been targeted, most of the videos targeted are not capturing 'discrete slices and slivers'--as you suggest--but entire episodes of a given work. Making a copy of a work in full isn't anymore enriching to the world than is stealing a book from a store. That hasn't, and isn't likely to change, no matter how revolutionary the new technology is. Let's not kid ourselves here. Copyright law, at least the spirit of the letter, still remains alive, viable and necessary. The better question isn't whether it's outserved its purpose (it hasn't), but to what end it can be amended and adapted to meet the changing needs of the times. There are kludgy bits in the code of copyright. Not many (thankfully) but enough to make it a headache for a lot of otherwise well-meaning folks. That's unfortunate, but changable. It's not a call to scrap the system entirely. C On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:50 AM, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've been thinking about Youtube and, in particular, hosted clips of sporting and other news worthy events. Never before have we had the ability to capture so many snapshots of milestones in history from varying perspectives and I'm beginning to feel that copyright law has overreached its domain even if only morally and not necessarily in the letter of the law. Youtube and Flickr and other such services seem to function as a shared societal archive with discrete slices and slivers saved over time and it makes for a so much richer commentary when you are able to reference these slivers on demand. Every time a video is taken down for copyright infringement, God kills a kitten. -- Please read our new blog at: http://blog.prathambooks.org
Re: [silk] Musings on Youtube et. al.
On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 3:06 AM, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 12:22 PM, Lawnun [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: _Everytime_ a video is taken down, God kills a kitten? Hyperbole aside, It was meant to be - it's a meme. I should have added cute memetic hyperbole aside ;-) Meme as it is, the point of my statement is that we're far from there. targeted are not capturing 'discrete slices and slivers'--as you suggest--but entire episodes of a given work. I would tend to agree for pragmatic reasons. But in this instance, it's more these slices I'm talking about and in some ways they are as valuable as entire works. When the works have something that they've added to the discourse, I'm right there with you. That's what fair use is designed to protect, and that is, admittedly, one of the areas where copyright law is in need of serious repair. And I agree--if it keeps to erode further, we step closer to that point where copyright law is officially without balance and is serving only one side of the bargain. But we're not there yet, by a long shot. And it has not gotten so bad in the land of copyright that Little Johnny duplicating that part of 'Spider Man 3' and slapping it up on YouTube because he thought it was cool, somehow makes it as valuable as the original work. Making a copy of a work in full isn't anymore enriching to the world than is stealing a book from a store. That hasn't, and isn't likely to change, no matter how revolutionary the new technology is. Again, this is open to discussion. How one is a physical good and one is virtual and a copy does not destroy the original yada yada yada. Fine. So let's get out of the realm of the physical altogether. It's still theft the same way as blueboxing used to allow phone phreaks to poach calls from the phone company, or the way someone copying down your information and stealing your identity is theft. In each instance, you're depriving something of value (revenue/opportunity/credit etc.) from someone else. Whether that thing of value is physical or not is irrelevant. whether it's outserved its purpose (it hasn't), but to what end it can be amended and adapted to meet the changing needs of the times. A good question does arise. Has it been perverted to serve a purpose it was not intended to originally serve? In all historical interpretations that i'm aware of, the western notion of copyright law was founded on the idea of protecting rights (originally far more rigidly, imho) of the creators to their creation *for a liimited time, *with the understanding that those rights revert back to the public at the expiration. So in answer to your question, no, it hasn't been perverted to serve a purpose it was not intended to originally serve, but we have lost sight of that original purpose and shifted the balance of the bargain to an unreasonable degree. The bathwater is getting murky, but that isn't an incentive to throw the baby out. On a side tangent -- why is it copyright law, to the exclusion of damn near anything else -- singled out for wholesale execution so frequently ? I mean, we've got plenty of flawed systems in the world -- governments, economic systems, tax laws, medicine, law, etc., where reasonable people tend to agree that although the system is fucked, its in need of service, not abolition. Only copyright law seems to be evil enough to inspire anarchy among otherwise law-respecting groups of people. Carey
Re: [silk] Musings on Youtube et. al.
Drug laws. Drinking age laws. Adult consensual sex laws. Immigration laws. For the most part, the first three are laws lacking a victim. I won't speak to the immigration issue, other than to say I doubt there are many who don't see a point to at least some degree of immigration policy. Admittedly, this is out of my area of expertise, so ... The same cannot be said for laws against theft. There are victims who suffer loss. The difference in IP theft and others is one to degree, not existence. Bad laws reduce respect for laws in general, it seems patently clear that current copyright law is bad law. How? If it's so patently clear, educate me. I'm tired of hearing the tired thread 'Copyright law is a bad law, therefore no law!' argument, and being expected to accept it as gospel. C
Re: [silk] Musings on Youtube et. al.
For the most part, the first three are laws lacking a victim. You are moving the goalposts. You complained that copyright laws were unique in encouraging otherwise law abiding people to ignore them. They aren't. I actually said: Only copyright law seems to be evil enough to inspire anarchy among otherwise law-respecting groups of people. Probably better to say nihilism, not anarchy. and on to Rishab's: It is not a question of degree, but a question of quality altogether. theft does not occur when you can't deprive someone of something. i can't deprive you of your song when i copy it. i can deprive you of your revenue from that song, yes. but that not theft of the song, but of the revenue. you don't have any guarantee to that revenue from your chosen business model. So by that logic, since i'm not in fact depriving you of your credit card when I steal it, you won't mind posting the numbers on Silk? What's so tiresome about the whole theft must = physical property line of thought, is that it assumes only one definition. So lets go to the dictionary. Dictionary.com qualifies theft as: 1.*the act of stealing; the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny. * 2.an instance of this. 3. Archaic. something stolen. Really, only the first definition is helpful. Although the clause lists additional explanation of the definition (e.g., the wrongful taking and carrying away...) you'll note that the act of stealing is separate. So we turn to that definition: *steal* 1.to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch. 2.*to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment. * 3.to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend. 4.to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly; smuggle (usually fol. by *away, from, in, into,* etc.): They stole the bicycle into the bedroom to surprise the child. 5.Baseball. (of a base runner) to gain (a base) without the help of a walk or batted ball, as by running to it during the delivery of a pitch. ... (I omitted the other definitional uses of the term for the sake of brevity) If theft is to steal, and stealing can be defined both as a (physical) taking, and an *appropriation of ideas*, *words, credit*, etc., *without right or acknowledgment*, then it seems pretty clear to me that to infringe, or appropriate another's ideas without right or permission, is in fact, a theft. The whole business model malarkey is just a clever dodge. In my humble opinion, Big Record's business model *is *crap. But guess what? Copyright law isn't designed to protect business models. It's designed to protect creative works. And it works beautifully in that regard, and protects all works, big or small, and regardless of the relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the business model they may or may not be attached to. Instead of everyone hewing about how we'd all be better off if we just eviscerated copyright, why not spend the better part of one's energies tearing down the crap business models that we don't like? Not only are they _not_ protected under the existing regime (as has been proven by the innumerable artists who are releasing their works free, or through Itunes), but it's by far, the easier fix. Our goal should be to move towards amending the system, changing the marketplace (e.g. Itunes) and operating in the negative spaces not policed or controlled by the law (e.g., Creative Commons). You want a regime change? Make copyright less important by educating people on the other alternatives, instead of scaring them into clinging more closely to what they feel is their only option. Not only is it more effective, but its already starting to happen. perhaps you operate the only taxi in town. if i start a bus service, i'm depriving you of your revenue from your taxi. but you still have your taxi. so i'm not stealing. One's competition between differing and competing services, whereas the other (infringement) is competition between providing the original created work (that involved the author's cost, time, energy, 'sweat', etc.) and a duplicate of that work that exists with an effective marginal cost of zero. So, no, it's not the same. Carey
Re: [silk] ask a silly question... (thanks)
Also i recall this interesting Dr.Who episode where the aliens look like stone statues... and move only when not being looked at directly... (only when you blink...) Great minds ... That was the first one that came to mind for me while I was riding on the metro this morning. Wikipedia says the episode is called 'Blink' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(Doctor_Who)
Re: [silk] FW: [IP] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions
... so a little digging goes a long way. There's much more here: http://gawker.com/385255/ivy-league-prof-sues-students-for-being-mean-to-her and she finally acknowledged that a class action lawsuit for Title VII violations was probably not the bestest way to go. http://gawker.com/385785/ivy-league-lawsuit-update All I can say is, wow. Also, the third person business on the first link is just adorable in that I'm really crazy kind of way. There's much more to add, of course, but I thought I'd kick the ball a bit with more facts before jumping in. My own half a cent is that I see this as the height of excess in political correctness, compounded with a person who apparently has made a poor career choice in life. Carey On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 11:24 AM, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Most of you already read Dave Farber's list so this is kinda like taking coals to Newcastle. But well, as there's an Indian prof (at Dartmouth, yet) involved, and as her behavior (at least from this article) strikes me as being something even the most hair splitting post modernist jhola + kurta + beedi JNU academic would boggle at .. .. I think silklist would be a great place to discuss this (such as what would have happened if some of us found ourselves in Ms.Venkatesan's class) suresh -Original Message- From: David Farber [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2008 8:37 PM To: ip Subject: [IP] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions Begin forwarded message: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dewayne Hendricks) Date: May 5, 2008 8:01:47 PM EDT To: Dewayne-Net Technology List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions [Note: This item comes from friend John McMullen. DLH] From: John F. McMullen [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: May 5, 2008 12:43:57 PM PDT To: Dewayne Hendricks [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions (fwd) (johnmac -- this is, to put it simply, bizarre) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120995103004666569.html?mod=opinion_main_co mmentaries Dartmouth's 'Hostile' Environment By JOSEPH RAGO May 5, 2008; Page A13 Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their anti-intellectualism violated her civil rights. Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of French narrative theory that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional exposé, which she promises will name names. The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press. Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful, she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. They'd argue with your ideas. This caused subversiveness, a principle English professors usually favor. Ms. Venkatesan's scholarly specialty is science studies, which, as she wrote in a journal article last year, teaches that scientific knowledge has suspect access to truth. She continues: Scientific facts do not correspond to a natural reality but conform to a social construct. The agenda of Ms. Venkatesan's seminar, then, was to problematize technology and the life sciences. Students told me that most of the problems owed to her impenetrable lectures and various eruptions when students indicated skepticism of literary theory. She counters that such skepticism was intolerant of ideas and questioned my knowledge in very inappropriate ways. Ms. Venkatesan, who is of South Asian descent, also alleges that critics were motivated by racism, though it is unclear why. After a winter of discontent, the snapping point came while Ms. Venkatesan was lecturing on ecofeminism, which holds, in part, that scientific advancements benefit the patriarchy but leave women out. One student took issue, and reasonably so – actually, empirically so. But these weren't thoughtful statements, Ms. Venkatesan protests. They were irrational. The class thought otherwise. Following what she calls the student's diatribe, several of his classmates applauded. Ms. Venkatesan informed her pupils that their behavior was fascist demagoguery. Then, after consulting a physician about intellectual distress, she cancelled classes for a week. Thus the pending litigation. Such conduct is hardly representative of the professoriate at Dartmouth, my
Re: [silk] FW: [IP] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions
and she finally acknowledged that a class action lawsuit for Title VII violations was probably not the bestest way to go. http://gawker.com/385785/ivy-league-lawsuit-update Well, ok. She did... and then she didn't: http://dartlog.net/2008/04/venkatesan-drops-lawsuit-plans.php
Re: [silk] FW: [IP] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions
Casey: So in part the editors of Social Text explained that they were trying to bring scientists into their conversation. Unfortunately at that moment Alan had the bright idea of playing a hoax, rather than really attempting to engage with science studies. Oddly, the same mistake science studies scholars had with scientists. ;) ... The point that, Reflections on an Intellectual Life That Came and Went in 15 Minutes, makes is that Alan never chose to engage with science studies. Instead he chose to be a critic. Was this necessarily a bad thing if the criticism was a valid one? Granted, I will admit ignorance-- aside from the wiki article and a few quick jaunts about the net, his criticism was of the most basic level: From the wiki article: Sokal argued that this was the whole point — the journal published articles not on the basis of whether they were correct or made sense, *but simply because of who wrote them and how they sounded.* My goal isn't to defend science from the barbarian hordes of lit crithttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lit_crit(we'll survive just fine, thank you), but to defend the Left from a trendy segment of itself. ... There are hundreds of important political and economic issues surrounding science and technology. *Sociology of science, at its best, has done much to clarify these issues. But sloppy sociology, like sloppy science, is useless or even counterproductive.* Perhaps, for what it was worth at the time, this criticism no matter how basic, was necessary.Peer-review aside, his point is valid, and one that most editors/publishers (at least those that would like to earn a reputation for providing something worth reading) have an obligation to be at least passably aware of. He may have abused their trust (the hew and cry of anyone suffering egg-on-face), but if that makes them more rigorous as editors, is that really such a bad thing? Mind you, that isn't a critique on PM or STS, I assure you. As a case in point: I work for a legal publication, and I can guarantee that we'd suffer substantial ire from our subscribers just the same as the Social Text folk if we started letting our editorial guard down and just publishing anything that sounded pretty and came from a well-known source, no matter *what our post hoc justification was. *Carey * *
Re: [silk] Wikileaks
Not to mention a dismissal of the case by the plaintiff bank: http://www.eff.org/cases/bank-julius-baer-co-v-wikileaks *UPDATE:* Following the hearing, Judge White dissolved his previous ordershttp://www.eff.org/files/filenode/baer_v_wikileaks/wikileaks102.pdf-- citing First Amendment concerns and other arguments raised by the proposed intervenors and amici curiae -- allowing the wikileaks.org domain name to go back up. Julius Baer has subsequently moved to dismiss the casehttp://www.eff.org/files/filenode/baer_v_wikileaks/wikileaks105.pdf . On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Deepa Mohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Have you heard of the decentralised (no HQ, no office, no CEO) WIKILEAKS?? [This has since been started up again due to a change of heart by the judge in question.] http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1545 Wikileaks Exposes Corporate and Government Secrecy, So It Has Been Shut Down in the U.S. Submitted by BuzzFlash on Sat, 02/23/2008 - 9:43am. Guest Contribution A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION (Special to BuzzFlash.com) By Jonathan Franklin An attempt by a Swiss bank to shut down Wikileaks, a website that publishes secret military and corporate documents, has backfired into a fiery debate over Internet freedom. On February 15, Bank Julius Baer won a court order in San Francisco Federal Court to have the US domain for the site shuttered, after the controversial whistleblower site published hundreds of pages of internal bank documents. The documents, allegedly given to Wikileaks by a former bank vice president, purport to show money laundering and tax evasion by the venerable Geneva-based institution, which manages an estimated 405 billion Swiss francs (GBP 189.7 billion). Following the court victory, however, Bank Julius Baer instantly lost what may have been its most valuable asset – anonymity. Hundreds of bloggers, online columnists and websites decried the bank's move as they launched a counterattack and lobbied in favor of Wikileaks right to anonymously publish secrets. By Wednesday evening, less than a week after the court decision, a Google search for the court case turned up a staggering 69,000 hits. Four hours later, the tally was 78,000 hits. The infrastructure that wikileaks uses is easily replicated. It is not unique but potentially very important as it is a format that is simple, inexpensive to design and easily mirrored. …from a technical standpoint it is trivial, said John Paulfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center at Harvard. In a way it is a censors nightmare and a very good friend to democracy activists in repressive regimes. While the Judge's order has blocked the US website address, the banned documents were plastered around the world on websites from South Africa to Switzerland. Founders of Wikileaks long ago made contingency plans by setting up sites around the world including here that continued to publish thousands of documents and promote what the website calls an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis. Whether the controversy will also derail Julius Baer's attempt to spin off Julius Baer Americas, its $73 billion US subsidiary in an IPO remains unclear. With thousands of Internet users and the worldwide media now carousing through the bank's internal records, however, Goldman Sachs will bring a most unusual IPO to market – a secretive Swiss bank with a controversial Caymen Islands subsidiary under worldwide scrutiny. The bank is in a tough position. They've gotten an order out of a judge on very short notice and without Wikileaks represented; as the case matures, I think the American courts will be reluctant to maintain the broad remedy of trying to block access to an entire Web site, says Oxford's Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation. Wikileaks is just a small example of a larger phenomenon on today's Internet - data is treated as just heaps of information, whether it's a song recording or a sensitive bank document or someone's medical records. Wikileaks itself is amorphous. The site has no office. There is no CEO, no staff list, no organizational chart, just a skeleton advisory committee that includes Chinese dissidents, an Australian broadcaster, a Brazilian human rights activist and CJ Hinge, an American draft resister now living in Thailand. Wikileaks is a decentralized phenomenon and that means there are wikileaks volunteers in dozens of countries. These volunteers form a very loose network so that in fact, government can't home in on anybody and take drastic action against them, said Hinge, in a telephone interview from Thailand. Ordinary people come across things that governments or companies or individuals would prefer to keep secret. I think it is possible for almost everybody to expose these kinds of events on wikileaks. The idea of leaking secrets over the web is hardly new. Sites like
Re: [silk] Chris Anderson on 'Freeconomics
At least he put his money where (Wired's) mouth is -- http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free_sweeps And I keep hearing unconfirmed bits that the book itself will actually be released free *in hard copy, *though I'm not holding my breath for that one. On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 2:54 PM, Manar Hussain [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: argh. as the quote re gillette shows, this is just cross-subsidy or loss-leader economics. old wine, not even sure if the bottle is new. It's as if the price of steel had dropped so close to zero that King Gillette could give away both razor and blade, and make his money on something else entirely. (Shaving cream?) - and this is different from giving away the razor and making money on blades HOW? I thought that line was indeed very weak. But I don't think that means there's nothing new going on. At the very least I think interesting happen if an established business model looks to become highly ascendant. -r On Thu, 2008-03-06 at 14:28 +0530, Amit Varma wrote: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business By Chris Anderson
Re: [silk] Randy Cassingham's This is true- feminist take on polygamy
On Sun, Mar 2, 2008 at 5:13 AM, divya manian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 3/2/08, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: divya manian [02/03/08 17:56 +0800]: I do not see what is feminist in her ensuring her husband had clean shorts in the morning and dinner at night. :) Seems kinda anti-feminist! I can't say i'm terribly surprised. For one, anyone can call themselves a feminist these days -- at least in the United States its tossed around at equal opportunity to both promote and condemn the teachings of the early feminist movement. And second, this is the Utah NOW chapter we're talking about...
Re: [silk] Youtube an .pk Telecom
Thanks Udhay. The article was extremely helpful for those of us coming to the matter from a non-engineering perspective. Quick question. The article said: YouTube took countermeasures within minutes, first trying to reclaim its network by narrowing its 1,024 broadcast to 256 addresses. Eleven minutes later, YouTube added an even more specific additional broadcast claiming just 64 addresses--which, under the Border Gateway Protocol, is more specific and therefore should overrule the Pakistani one. Over two hours after the initial false broadcast, Pakistan Telecom finally stopped. Why does shrinking the number of addresses create 'priority' as far as the BGP is concerned? Is there some merit to fewer addresses, as opposed to more? On a side note -- I'm totally curious if there's any legal implication for parties that are, as you all have indicated, lax in their enforcement of net standards? I mean, for one site, I can see it being as big of a deal, but what about the earlier example cited in the news.com piece about Turkey pretending to be the entire internet? That smacks of negligence to me. C On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 1:18 AM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Gautam John wrote: [ on 09:58 AM 2/26/2008 ] http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080225-insecure-routing-redirects-youtube-to-pakistan.html What the heck does this stuff mean? It escaped? So anyone can 'escape' routing information to shut down the 'tubes? In essence, yes. Sometimes. This piece may be of help: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9878655-7.html?tag=nl.e498 Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Youtube an .pk Telecom
Thanks Abhijit! That makes sense. The article wasn't quite clear enough, is all. On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Abhijit Menon-Sen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 2008-02-26 11:57:19 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Why does shrinking the number of addresses create 'priority' as far as the BGP is concerned? Is there some merit to fewer addresses, as opposed to more? Routers give priority to more specific routes over less-specific ones. Announcing a route for 10/24 (aka the network containing 255 addresses from 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.255) is more specific than announcing a route for 10/16 (i.e. the 65535 addresses from 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.255.255). This is so that an ISP can say Send traffic for this whole network to me, while the ISP's customers can say Send traffic for my small part of the ISP's network to me (that is, if they run BGP at all) and it all works. -- ams
Re: [silk] Copyright this
Dallas Weaver is a scientist and consultant. ... and one of the multitudes lacking in clue on the nature, and distinction of copyrights and patents. Mr. Weaver doesn't grok that copyright is limited in scope and nature, and offers no protection to Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, concepts, principles, discoveries, or devices, [1] -- that's strictly the providence of patent law. In fact, most of the examples he cites are issues of patent, not copyright law, and are in the public domain precisely because they're both obvious and for the most part, outside the scope of patentability. His subject cases fail, rather than make, his argument. I will give Weaver one thing -- we do need more carrying costs to copyright law. In the days before Berne[2], copyright law, like patent and trademark law today, had such carrying costs in the form of formalities, and the world, imho was better for it. Fix that, and the pendulum swings back, regardless of the extent of the term, the power of Disney, nearly anything else[3]. [1] http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#wnp [2] http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/berne/index.html [3] I say nearly because DRM has the potential to be longer-lasting than any finite copyright term. (Finally, this: http://xkcd.com/386/) On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:12 AM, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Intellectual property's social value may trump copyright law. By Dallas Weaver February 20, 2008 Jon Healey correctly points out that the debate over intellectual-property theft is complex because we are often dealing with non-real properties. These properties cost nearly nothing to produce, and an infinite number of people can use the same property at the same time. And yet, we still want to treat them as if they were real property. Significantly, some of these non-real properties have major effects on human welfare. Take, for example, the formula for oral rehydration therapy, a mixture of salt, sugar and water. Although it could potentially be copyrighted, it has saved more lives in the Third World than almost anything else. The world is lucky that this formula is in the public domain, not copyrighted and subject to use charges that people who need it couldn't afford. The present system treats these copyrighted works as a funny kind of real property with no carrying costs, taxes or significant fees. Without carrying costs, copyrights remain in force almost forever - even though, over time, the demand for the copyrighted material can fall to almost nothing. As the demand decreases, the value may remain, but it becomes effectively unavailable to, as the Constitution puts it, promote the progress of science and useful arts. Witness all the copyrighted books, scientific journals, audio works and visual works that are out of print or otherwise unavailable because copyright law prevents the new, low-cost methods of distribution from being utilized. In the scientific field, this has devastating effects on the advancement of human knowledge - which is just the opposite of the intent of copyright law. As a member of a scientific journal's editorial board - and as a senior citizen - I see reams of manuscripts that just reinvent the wheel. Because the whole scientific enterprise has become so complex that non-electronic research is effectively impossible, many young scientists don't know and can't find out what has already been done from older, copyrighted, paper-based literature. This results in a huge waste of resources. The same can be said for copyrights in creative areas such as music and writing, in which older works with limited distribution could be built upon to promote the progress of science and useful arts. A solution to determining which works are in the Mickey Mouse category of copyrights and which are in the more socially valuable oral rehydration therapy class of work is not feasible for a government bureaucracy. However, if all copyrights were taxed at a fixed (but significant) amount per year to maintain the copyright (all registered through the copyright office and searchable), there would be a significant carrying cost and most of the copyrighted material would revert to public domain and become available to promote the progress of science and useful arts. As intellectual property and copyrights become an even more significant part of our economy, and as copyright holders (not necessarily the creators) make claims of stealing as though it is real property, it should be taxed. Relative to copyrights' significance in our economy, the amount of revenue from this source should be in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year. With a proper tax system, publishers like the L.A. Times or scientific journals may maintain a copyright for only a year or so before letting the content revert to public domain and letting Google and everyone else utilize the material for its small, but socially
Re: [silk] Fwd: To Restore Democracy: First Abolish Corporate Personhood
I think Andrew hit it -- Businesses obviously operated prior to honoring the legal fiction of corporate personhood. I will agree though, that the size and power that corporations now command likely flows from the legislative and judicial recognition of the corporate person in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Carey On Jan 30, 2008 12:45 AM, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 30, 2008 10:28 AM, J. Andrew Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The officers of a corporation are still personally liable I should have been more specific, I meant personal financial liability.
[silk] Fwd: To Restore Democracy: First Abolish Corporate Personhood
His presentation would be so much more believable if he just chucked a bit of the breathy editorializing and stuck to the facts. That Jefferson wanted an anti-monopoly amendment does not in and of itself, mean that he was anti-corporation. One can exist absent the other -- and at least in the U.S., our legal system has accounted for this (see the Sherman Antitrust Act for starters). As for the supposed flub in the headnotes, if you read a bit farther down (still in the syllabus, admittedly, but a clarification Mr. Hartmann omitted to mention: One of the points made and discussed at length in the brief of counsel for defendants in error was that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.* Before argument, MR. CHIEF JUSTICE WAITE said:* *The Court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a state to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does. * This actually seems less like some nefarious error, and more like what actually occurs in court cases all too frequently. The Supreme Court usually addresses a few of the issues on appeal. In this case, Justice Waite was reiterating that the corporate personhood issue was not at issue in this case, because the court was all of the opinion that it was. To me, this reads as non-binding dicta, rather than some horrible plot by corporations to 'sneak' personhood into existence. Moreover, Hartmann's evil railroad theory not grossly presumes that the lot of Supreme Court Justices, from that point on, are all a bunch of incredibly lazy individuals ([the statement] was taken as precedent by generations of jurists ... who followed and apparently read the headnote but not the decision), but he misses a few crucial bits in history as well. Primarily, SCOTUS (and the lower courts) had all been moving in the direction of recognizing corporate personhood, albiet in differing degrees. For once, I cite Wikipedia, because it actually correctly details the debate (and the relevant cases) that I remember from L-school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood An important aside. Corporate personhood can't merely be revoked, as some have argued, on account of this 'clerical error' because SCOTUS actually agreed with the dicta in subsequent cases e.g., *Northwestern Nat Life Ins. Co. v. Riggshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_Nat_Life_Ins._Co._v._Riggs * (203 U.S. 243 (1906) (citing Blake v. McClung, 172 U.S. 239 (1900)http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?court=usvol=172invol=239#260 It is true, also, that a corporation of one state, doing business in another state, under such circumstances as to be directly subject to its process at the instance of suitors, may invoke the protection of that clause of the 14th Amendment which declares that no state shall 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' I'm not entirely sure about your second statement re: corporate personhood being the basis of business -- There are plenty of businesses (solo practitioners, partnerships, etc.) that are not formal corporations, and nonetheless manage to exist profitably as businesses and fuel the economy. Moreover, corporate charters were able to survive as businesses before the whole personhood deal was decided... C snipped to fit the 40k rule
Re: [silk] FREE RICE ... an amazing concept to harness the power ofInternet advertising ...for a great cause ...
The game was both amusing and addictive. Still the investigator in me forced me to delve a little further. Turns out Mr. Breen, the creator of the site (and poverty.com) is reluctant to become a legitimate nonprofit organization. Absent the accountability (and transparency) of this designation, we're all generally supposed to trust him that the money raised by adverts is actually going to to the World Food Program. [1] The upside to Mr. Breen's work, is that he's done this before, with apparently a good track record. Hey, he even won a Webby (not sure if that says much, but still) [2]. Admittedly, the World Food Program seems to find him legitimate enough, so for now, I'll keep clicking (and boosting my vocabulary). [3] [1] http://www.thepcspy.com/read/is_freericecom_making_150k_each_day_in_profits [2] http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/wavlength/archive/2007/11/should_you_trust_freericecom.shtml [3] http://www.wfp.org/english/?n=681 On Dec 18, 2007 7:02 AM, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Persisted upto 2000 grains. Hope that kid isn't very hungry today. shiv On Tuesday 18 Dec 2007 3:27 pm, Deepa Mohan wrote: On Dec 18, 2007 3:19 PM, Valsa Williams [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: *Read on … http://www.freerice.com/ * * * Cheers ! Valsa Valsa...I just spent TWENTY minutes there and I hope that was enough rice to feed at least one child! Thanks, will be visiting often. What an enjoyable way to do something nice! Deepa.
Re: [silk] home book cataloging software ?
My only complaint with Bookpedia (which does something similar to Delicious Library, in addition to possessing a ton of really nifty features) is that when it switches to new versions, it requires that you do so as well. Seeing as it charges for every new version release, I was mightily annoyed when I, happy to settle with a previously paid-for version, was nonetheless locked out from using it! It would at times crash in the version I had, but I assume by now, given their policy of mandatory upgrades, that they have fixed this issue by now. Online cataloging has been a hobby of mine for awhile, so I'll definintely check out some of the competing models. Carey On Dec 2, 2007 6:04 AM, Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sun, Dec 02, 2007 at 11:41:33AM +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote: Delicious Monster sells a pack of 5 programs, Delicious Library included for about $25. Anyone knows whether http://www.bruji.com/bookpedia/ is any good? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
[silk] The Geekiest Show on TV
I just love the show that much more now... Cohen refers to a One Percent Rule that guided the writing on Futurama. When they were scripting the episode Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch, a character claims that he painstakingly programmed a holographic simulation using 4 million lines of BASIC. One writer pointed out that 99 percent of the audience wouldn't get the reference to an old programming language. Producer-writer Eric Kaplan responded, Fuck them! http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/magazine/15-12/ff_futurama_geekiestshow
[silk] Conspiracy theorists beware: Tinfoil hats likely to enhance governmental mind-reading frequences.
I really have very little to add to this one, aside from the fact that it's already sparked others to question the study's efficacy [1]* http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason. *[1] http://zapatopi.net/blog/?post=20052730.afdb_effectiveness* *
Re: [silk] Re-architecting the music business
On 8/16/07, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8/16/07, Jeff Bone [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Then they'll use the lobby influence to try to get a tax on all such equipment, media, etc... at which point, if it flies, we'll probably have arrived at about the best practical outcome. If this blanket tax is an implied license to download music, videos et.al. then it might even be an interesting proposal. But of course, there'll never be a consensus on either the quantum of such tax, the point of impact of such tax etc. And what do you do with people who have no interest in 'pirating' (the word will be a moot point in such a system) content? How do they opt out and how would it be enforced? You'd be surprised. The United States already did something similar under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992[1], which imposed a tax on CD-Rs and (most) Digital audio recording devices. And like many laws, it was for the most part hashed out by the parties in back room negotiations well before Congress stepped in. Consensus therefore, is attainable. Just like the AHRA, you can readily write in exclusions for devices /services (iTunes?) that are obviously non-infringing, or those that already provide a royalty to artists. The larger problem I see, is keeping the exclusions from subsuming the rule. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Home_Recording_Act#Digital_Audio_Recording_Device_Defined
Re: [silk] Propaganda - How it works in the West
Or Noam Chomsky, for that matter. On 8/17/07, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The EFF and moveon.org fit that bill almost as much as the right wingers do. In fact just about any political action propaganda does. suresh Venkat Mangudi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am not so sure it is confined to the west, but this is an interesting take on journalism as well. http://edstrong.blog-city.com/noam_chomsky_how_propaganda_works_in_the_west.htm
Re: [silk] Propaganda - How it works in the West
Some of that is a bit snarky on my part. But the following (from his original posting) struck me as things Mr. Chomsky has himself been a part of at least w/r/t this subject and others: It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. ... With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then use the democratic process to agree or disagree — for, after all, their intention is to mobilise enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent. IT isn't all that difficult to see my point, assuming you substitute 'governments' for academia. As an example, I'll cite the speaking engagements, lectures and other presentations, where Chomsky seems to dwell only on a few key subjects -- usually, the war (both on Terror, and Iraq), the crisis(es) in Latin America, and our general ineffectual stance on foreign policy.[1] I've attended or listened to enough of these things (thank you Democracy! Now), as well as read much of his works (both linguistics oriented and other), to know that in addition to truly understanding how the process of propaganda and influence works, he has also capitalized on that knowledge for his own interests. I can't say its entirely Chomsky's doing though. More often, a group of academics or others wish to steer what we're talking and thinking about to a specific idea, and Chomsky is good at providing eloquent and thoughtful affirmations of what they already believe, not to mention,assuring that the room will be PACKED with folks eager to hear that message. Although I admit that the majority of this _does_ apply more obviously to governmental institutions, I fail to see how it should be limited to them. As Suresh noted, the EFF and other causes on both the left and right also partake in prop-agenda. I hold that Mr. Chomsky's power and force as an icon in academic and political circles also gives him that same power. The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action. Indeed. [1] http://www.chomsky.info/talks.htm On 8/17/07, Thaths [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8/17/07, Lawnun [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Or Noam Chomsky, for that matter. Explain how. Thaths On 8/17/07, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The EFF and moveon.org fit that bill almost as much as the right wingers do. In fact just about any political action propaganda does. suresh Venkat Mangudi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am not so sure it is confined to the west, but this is an interesting take on journalism as well. http://edstrong.blog-city.com/noam_chomsky_how_propaganda_works_in_the_west.htm -- Homer: He has all the money in the world, but there's one thing he can't buy. Marge: What's that? Homer: (pause) A dinosaur. -- Homer J. Simpson Sudhakar ChandraSlacker Without Borders
Re: [silk] Re-architecting the music business
I just skimmed the article, but how is this really all that new? The idea of record-label free distribution has been done at least since 1997 [1], to varying [2] degrees [3] of success. [4] In the States, it was quite a big deal when the rock group Clap Your Hands Say Yeah sold over 200k albums on iTunes, sans a recording deal: From: http://strangeglue.com/diy-by-any-means-necessary/216/ Case study #1 - Clap your Hands Say Yeah In June 2005, Clap your Hands Say Yeah released their self-titled album. At last count they had sold over 200,000 copies of it, all without the aid of a record deal in the U.S. How did this come about. Guitarist and vocalist Alec Ounsworth started off with a dream. He'd had the feeling for a while that record companies had lost the plot somehow, and held on to the notion that this was something that was possible. So the band organised the recording of the album, printed a first run and started a sales push using a two-pronged strategy of concert sales and internet sales. Doubtless they impressed the local music scene with their shows, for soon kids from the area were sharing their album via file-trading websites. It was on one of these websites that music blogger Dan Beirne came across them, enormously impressed, he then posted a glowing endorsement of the band. With a buzz quickly developing around the band, indie-rock website Pitchfork started to take notice and similarly posted an enthused recommendation on their site. The domino effect continued until the celebrity world took notice, and icons such as David Bowie and David Byrne were spotted attending CYHSY gigs. This led to more press coverage until almost anyone with an interest in Indie and a modem were exposed to them. --Carey [1] www.cdbaby.com [2] http://www.artistshare.com/home/about.aspx [3] www.interpunk.com http://interpunk.com/ [4] On the demise of Prince's NPG Music Club: http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002837775 On 8/14/07, ashok _ [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 8/14/07, Udhay Shankar N wrote: Robert Frost once claimed that poetry would begin in delight and end in wisdom. The complaint about inflated price of CDs reminds me of the classical music label Naxos: http://www.naxos.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxos_Records they produce excellent classical music albums at very low prices. the artists / orchestras in many instances are from east european, asian countries recorded using simple (but good quality) equipment and with proper acoustics. maybe this a model to follow?
[silk] Fwd: What type of Adopter Are you?
All: Jeremiah Owyang has a rather interesting theory here. When I'm presented with the opportunity (and I'll admit, its a rare one) I tend to fall somewhere un-neatly between the Surfers, Boaters and the Fleet'ers. But I'm curious how Owyang's theory factors in the secondary development (ripples?) of communities within an existing (but still largely new) system. For example, there were only a few 'pebbles' in the initial adoption of Facebook, but the technology didn't really take off until others began to develop applications within the system. This imho, has singlehandedly opened up Facebook to a new applicability that probably wasn't even apparent to the initial pebble(s) -- making that part of Facebook a new discovery in and of itself. My guess is, that its pretty unlikely that the initial early adopters also took the lead on the dev/creation front. So is it possible when a system is developing, but still largely in its infancy (e.g., before the NYT comes across it), that secondary rippling pebbles may be coming along charting out the development end. To strain the water examples a little more -- when discovering an ocean, do subsequent discoverers of the tributaries, lakes, and streams within still constitute pebbles, or do they instead fall under another metaphor altogether? http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/08/07/personas-of-the-early-adopters-the-pebble-swimmer-surfer-boater-or-fleet/#comment-74958 [Within the bleeding edge are different personas of adopters who all centralize around the epicenter: The Pebble, Swimmer, Surfer, Boater, or with the Fleet] Jeremiah Owyang Web Strategist Blog: www.web-strategist.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [silk] The Top 237 Reasons of Why we Have Sex
Yes, xkcd is one of the greatest little secrets on the web ;) #162 is one of my personal favs. Its the epitome of geek sentimental. On 8/4/07, Venkat Mangudi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thanks, both of you... Just experienced xkcd. Here is something I felt was quite funny... http://xkcd.com/232/ Venkat Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: i may have said this before, but i love xkcd. this one [1] is just so sweet. -rishab 1. http://xkcd.org/162/ On Fri, 2007-08-03 at 13:07 -0400, Lawnun wrote: 39. The person was intelligent (Nothing says turn-on quite like a href= http://xkcd.com/55/;this/a for instance).
[silk] The Top 237 Reasons of Why we Have Sex
My personal favorites: 31. My hormones were out of control 39. The person was intelligent (Nothing says turn-on quite like a href= http://xkcd.com/55/;this/a for instance). 110. IT would allow me to get sex out of my system so I could focus on other things. Of course, many of the answers (I'm a sex addict; I'm addicted to sex) do suffer from repetition. More than likely, the real number remains unknown, but I think the effort was at least a worthwhile one ;) Study can be found here: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/pdffiles/why%20humans%20have%20sex%202007.pdf [image: The New York Times] http://www.nytimes.com/ [image: Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By] http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=gotopage=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendlypos=Position1camp=foxsearch2007-emailtools02d-nyt5-511278ad=once_88x31_Nowplaying.gifgoto=http://www.foxsearchlight.com/once/ -- July 31, 2007 Findings The Whys of Mating: 237 Reasons and Counting By JOHN TIERNEYhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/john_tierney/index.html?inline=nyt-per Scholars in antiquity began counting the ways that humans have sex, but they weren't so diligent in cataloging the reasons humans wanted to get into all those positions. Darwin and his successors offered a few explanations of mating strategies — to find better genes, to gain status and resources — but they neglected to produce a Kama Sutra of sexual motivations. Perhaps you didn't lament this omission. Perhaps you thought that the motivations for sex were pretty obvious. Or maybe you never really wanted to know what was going on inside other people's minds, in which case you should stop reading immediately. For now, thanks to psychologists at the University of Texas at Austin, we can at last count the whys. After asking nearly 2,000 people why they'd had sex, the researchers have assembled and categorized a total of 237 reasons — everything from I wanted to feel closer to God to I was drunk. They even found a few people who claimed to have been motivated by the desire to have a child. The researchers, Cindy M. Meston and David M. Buss, believe their list, published in the August issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, is the most thorough taxonomy of sexual motivation ever compiled. This seems entirely plausible. Who knew, for instance, that a headache had any erotic significance except as an excuse for saying no? But some respondents of both sexes explained that they'd had sex to get rid of a headache. It's No. 173 on the list. Others said they did it to help me fall asleep, make my partner feel powerful, burn calories, return a favor, keep warm, hurt an enemy or change the topic of conversation. The lamest may have been, It seemed like good exercise, although there is also this: Someone dared me. Dr. Buss has studied mating strategies around the world — he's the oft-cited author of The Evolution of Desire and other books — but even he did not expect to find such varied and Machiavellian reasons for sex. I was truly astonished, he said, by this richness of sexual psychology. The researchers collected the data by first asking more than 400 people to list their reasons for having sex, and then asking more than 1,500 others to rate how important each reason was to them. Although it was a fairly homogenous sample of students at the University of Texashttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_texas/index.html?inline=nyt-org, nearly every one of the 237 reasons was rated by at least some people as their most important motive for having sex. The best news is that both men and women ranked the same reason most often: I was attracted to the person. The rest of the top 10 for each gender were also almost all the same, including I wanted to express my love for the person, I was sexually aroused and wanted the release and It's fun. No matter what the reason, men were more likely to cite it than women, with a couple of notable exceptions. Women were more likely to say they had sex because, I wanted to express my love for the person and I realized I was in love. This jibes with conventional wisdom about women emphasizing the emotional aspects of sex, although it might also reflect the female respondents' reluctance to admit to less lofty motives. The results contradicted another stereotype about women: their supposed tendency to use sex to gain status or resources. Our findings suggest that men do these things more than women, Dr. Buss said, alluding to the respondents who said they'd had sex to get things, like a promotion, a raise or a favor. Men were much more likely than women to say they'd had sex to boost my social status or because the partner was famous or usually 'out of my league.' Dr. Buss said, Although I knew that having sex has consequences for reputation, it surprised me that people, notably men, would be motivated to have sex solely for social
Re: [silk] As Medical Patents Surge, So Do Lawsuits
In addition to Rishab's fine points, I wanted to add that (at least the U.S. patent office) has begun to recognize this. Recently, in conjunction with N.Y. Law School, the office unveiled a program whereby folks can sign up and contribute prior art to relevant patents that are undergoing the application process [1] Yes, yes, its still in beta, and yes, its still very limited, but it's a start. And to Shiv's post: In fact people still keep secrets, despite patents. The only thing the patent does for you is to allow you to claim that you were the first to think of that particular idea. The only way you can do that is by saying what you have done. Patents are designed to protect your copyright and to create a public notice that you are the first one to register a particular bit of knowledge so that nobody else can claim that they thought of it before you did. Patents, unlike trade secrets, also force knowledge to the fore. While you're absolutely right that they create an exclusive monopoly for a term by allowing you to protect your [property] rights, the term is short and definite, and once it's up, the information is free to the world. To say that you can accomplish the same goals under trade secret protection is a misnomer. Also, a huge pet peeve of mine: Patents = protect novel, useful and non-obvious inventions and methods of invention. Copyrights = protect the tangible expression of an original work of authorship, such as writings, musical compositions, paintings, sound recordings. You cannot obtain a patent to protect your copyright, or a copyright to protect your patent. Period. I admit, it comes across as linguistically pedantic to make those distinctions, but they're important. Part of the confusion about 'intellectual property' stems from, in my humble opinion, the fact that people mix and match terms (and accompanying grants of rights) either carelessly, or intentionally. Finally, to Cheeni's GPL observation: P.S. It is possible to get recognition for your efforts without holding a patent as the GPL has proven in a somewhat limited context. I question that assertion. In the back of my mind, I remember Eben Moglen or perhaps, even Stallman himself, admitted that GPL, as a license, is nonetheless premised on a strong intellectual property regime. The beauty of GPL, is it allows people to contractually agree to play by a different set of rules when it comes to _enforcement_ of those rights. However, the underlying incentive basis to comply with GPL is the knowledge that the underlying rights holders have the ability to exact the full force of their intellectual property rights against GPL violators.[2] GPLv3 adds some interesting quirks to the concept of patent protection [3], in that it expressly concerns patents in a way that GPLv2 did not. What will be perhaps most interesting, is to see parties adopt the GPL model, but still secure patent protection (which unlike copyright, is not automatic) for security. Carey [1] http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/ [2] http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/50421.html. Additionally, the preamble of both GPL versions reads as follows: Developers that use the GNU GPL protect your rights with two steps: (1) assert copyright on the software, and (2) offer you this License giving you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it. [3] Specifically, Section 11 -- http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html On 7/30/07, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Mon, Jul 30, 2007 at 03:02:49PM +0530, shiv sastry wrote: This is where the controversy about patenting old and well known stuff comes in. there is no controversy - old and well known stuff can't be patented. it gets patented only because overworked patent offices don't find the references to prior stuff and don't know better than to believe applicant claims that it is their new invention. patents thus granted are invalidated when old stuff is drawn to the attention of the patent office. but this happens all the time especially with the US PTO which is underfinanced and overworked; it is hardly limited to patents on turmeric. -rishab
Re: [silk] As Medical Patents Surge, So Do Lawsuits
This is vaguely reminiscent of Guilty until proven innocent I patent something that already exists and get away with it, and start earning money on my patent from people who don't know it exists. Eventually someone comes along who disputes the patent. He then has to appeal to the same overworked patent office that issued the patent to overturn it - and the burden of proof is on him. So the combination of a quick thinking patenter and an overworked office can lead to a system that is absurd. shiv I'd argue that the process for invalidating a patent, while perhaps costly (At the very least in time)[1], is a far easier burden to sustain than proving innocence after a presupposition of guilt. Sometimes it can be challenging past the application phase, but I see patents routinely declared invalid on a daily basis. Clear and convincing evidence is not proof beyond a reasonable doubt ;) THe patent system needs reform, no doubt. But let's put it into perspective here: To take your guilty before proven innocent criminal example a little father, it's equivalent to throwing out a perfectly workable system that happens to have some failings just because some (but by no means most, or even a great many) innocent individuals get thrown in the slammer.[2] [1] http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=688005 [2] Prof. Mark Lemley, who is one of the most ardent supporters of US patent reform in particular, even acknowledges this much: The problem, then, is not that the Patent Office issues a large number of bad patents. Rather, it is that the Patent Office issues a small but worrisome number of economically significant bad patents and those patents enjoy a strong, but undeserved, presumption of validity. http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv28n4/v28n4-noted.pdf
Re: [silk] As Medical Patents Surge, So Do Lawsuits
On 7/30/07, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday 30 Jul 2007 7:47 pm, Lawnun wrote: The other question I have is whether patents are given for products or for the product plus the process by which that product is made. For example is it possible to patent a single piece blisk for an aero engine without revealing the process by which it is made? If so, little knowledge is being Yes. As a friend who's far more expert at this than I said, you don't patent, for example, the engineering analysis that led you to choose the [blisk], especially if the process itself is mundane, or already known. That doesn't mean that the knowledge isn't out there, or that the patentee is hiding the ball. My guess is, that if the examiner (who is usually knowledgeable in the art in question) can figure it out the process to make X, than the process is sufficently known that it does not need to be disclosed. But I'll happily defer and STFU if I'm wrong on that assumption. C
Re: [silk] As Medical Patents Surge, So Do Lawsuits
Charles: All patents, really? While I'm perfectly fine accepting that reasonable minds may differ as to software and business method patents (or hell, even Design patents on fonts), do you really dismiss the entire patent enterprise? In other words, was the patent granted for the telephone (#174465) equally as useless as an incentive as say, the patent for painting a picture with the posterior of an infant (#6213778)? ;) On 7/27/07, Charles Haynes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 7/26/07, Venkatesh Hariharan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I cannot think of anything more immoral than patents on surgical procedures. Really? Wow. How about the Armenian Genocide, Stalin's starvation of the Ukraine, the Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Rwanda, or the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia? Hyperbole is all fine and good, but it also has the effect of trivializing and devaluing things for which the terms are actually appropriate. This is what happens when the trend of commoditising and pricing knowledge goes too far. Are you equating patents and markets? Don't get me wrong. I hate patents on intellectual property, and I personally both decline to file them and offer to assist the companies I work for in fighting them (for example providing DEC with examples of prior art when defending against bogus patent claims.) However I think you weaken our case by confounding arguments against patents with arguments against IP in general. A matter of style perhaps, so take my comments as a suggestion or an indication of how your arguments may come across even to people who agree with you. -- Charles
Re: [silk] As Medical Patents Surge, So Do Lawsuits
How do you tell the reasonable from fascist ones, a priori, every time? Fascist patents? Eugen -- Governments and people can be fascist, inanimate property rights, not so much. Even if all of them were reasonable, the current MAD approach favors very big players, and causes stagnation across the board. What's wrong with keeping things secret? Or limiting things to have an actual product, or at least a working prototype? And please make them ephemeral. These days things grow stale fast. Your arguments strike more towards patent (or larger IP) reform, rather than abolition. I don't disagree with those folks. Our current system _does_ favor big players, and the 2-5 years (or longer) between application and grant is ridiculous. Supporting and advocating an approach that favors inventions that have been actualized also is eminently reasonable, at least for most fields. I think there's probably a university, physicist or otherwise more theoretical type, that might argue (convincingly) for cases where the limits of physical technology should not act as an encumbrance to the protection of the idea, but I would be willing to wager that those examples would be the exception, and not the rule. Trade secrets, for the most part, can be tricky, especially when you're talking about pharmaceuticals or novel, yet easily reverse-enginerable industries. For one, if you can figure out how to reverse engineer a novel new device, there's no prohibition to doing so. That's great for the secondary market (and arguably consumers), but piss poor for the guy actually doing the inventing. Just because something is easy to reverse engineer, doesn't necessarily mean, after all, that it was easy to come up with in the first place. For two, the legal system (at least in the US) is state-based and a bit of a mess, but at least more uniform than it used to be. Nonetheless, trying to enforce your rights only through an NDA, especially in a global and net-connected economy, can be challenging. In addition to requiring a robust policing system (which, if you're arguing for the little guy, may be even more complicated than a patent), a company may be diligent at protecting their secret and sue the leakers, only for the court to ascertain, after 5 years of litigation and the glasses of hindsight, because the secret has already been leaked out into the wild for the past 5 years, too bad, so sad, the inventor is out of luck. I'm not saying trade secrets protection isn't an available option, and often, its advisable over patents. But I wouldn't abolish the patent system in favor of protecting every new invention through TS. C -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: [silk] Collectors items or fire hazard?
Well, it _is_ a fire hazard, but I do agree with the closing sentiment of the lawyer -- the city should be spending its time on things that actually serve a purpose, rather than cracking down on what appears to mostly be a nuisance issue (for the Landlord). On a side issue, I'm curious if Mr. Puchniak qualifies as a 'hoarder' for purposes of assessing his mental state. That's a lot of books, but it dawned on me, that I'm slowly creeping to that point m'self ;) On 7/26/07, Binand Sethumadhavan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I saw a link to this in a blog I read: http://www.timesleader.com/news/20070725_25evicted_1a_ART.html Sad in a way... Binand
Re: [silk] Are menus and recipes intellectual property?
God bless the metro -- a perfect reading outlet. Anyhoo-- The recipe argument will probably be a lose--absent strict controls on her part, the odds of her successfully showing that it was a true secret (ala the Coke Recipe) are likely slim to none. And we all know there is no such thing as a copyright in a recipe... However, this might encourage her to get wise and start having her sous chefs sign NDAs from now on... ;) On the larger issue, which the NYT stupidly designates under the broad umbrella of intellectual property *sigh*, I think she actually might have a case (at least under U.S. law). Not sure if this translates over to other areas of the world, but U.S. law does recognize a right of trade dress protection in the look, feel, and signature of one's business. That is, if she can prove that the look and feel of the Pearl (e.g., the paint, pictures and chotchkeys, artistic elements, color and placement, etc.,) has created a secondary meaning or impression, and Mr. McFarlan has created something that would be confusingly similar to that, she might actually succeed. Very similar to trademark law, except that there's an added bonus that the elements that will be protected not have a primarily functional aspect (in other words, she's unlikely to protect things like fishtanks and other practical paraphenilia you'd generally expect to see in a seafood joint). I write on these cases quite a bit for work, so there have been cases (including examples in the restaurant context), where the plaintiff was successful. C ** On 6/27/07, Badri Natarajan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But it's a hard sell, to claim originality to a recipe but again, the article does reference a recipe that could possibly have claim to being a trade secret, no matter how it was acquired. I'll let the legal minds answer this. Come now, Gautam..you're a legal mind. Or were those five years wasted..:-) B PS - On my very quick scan of the article, I doubt it would qualify as a trade secret.
Re: [silk] The most annoying words on the web
/me is an old IRC relic that still lives on through certain IM clients. Or at least it did in Trillian. :) On 6/27/07, Deepa Mohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I don't understand this /me business, when a simple I would suffice...why do geeks use it all the time? Is there a software background to that? SMS language...alas, here to stay, I think... do U hate it, 2? Deepa. On 6/27/07, Casey O'Donnell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 6/25/07, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sent along primarily for the inclusion of 'blogosphere' and 'blog' itself. :-) So blogosphere is annoying, but I don't really think blog is, other than that it's kind of like cool at this point, all the squares are using it. All of those words are as much memes (is that on there? I hate that word too) as they are words spawned by the web. All in all though, I can just glaze over those things. What I hate most are people who feel compelled to text/sms talk in their email correspondence. My favorites are of course coz (translation because) or ppl (translation people). It makes me want to stab myself in the eyes. Or at least send them nasty emails saying I am not a f*cking cell phone! Casey
Re: [silk] Introduction
And... not everyone is in India! Just the large lot of you. On another note -- did all the DC-metro folks die off again? Weren't we going to arrange a Silklister meetup extravaganza ? On 6/19/07, Danese Cooper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Jeremy. Nice to see you here. We really should have lunch soon, man. Everybody in India is sleeping now (but you'll get some pings from the Silklist Diaspora before they wake up :-) ). Danese On Jun 19, 2007, at 10:10 AM, Jeremy Bornstein wrote: Greetings all! I just joined this list, courtesy of Udhay. I see in the list description that introductions are appreciated, but I'm not quite sure of the list's character yet, so I'll partially punt by this inclusion of some version of my professional bio: http://jeremy.bornstein.org/bio.html I will also add that I enjoy aikido, playing music, rock climbing, cooking, and making trouble. I have a five and a half year old son. I've recently started a toy company about which I can't say much yet. I do *not* like long walks on the beach. -Jeremy -- jeremy bornstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] -*- The esoteric appeal is worth the beatings. -*- http://jeremy.org/
Re: [silk] game theoretic analysis of leaving the toilet seat down
This reminds me of the following critique on what would be called by The New Republic Cute-o-Nomics -- the idea of using economics to answer trivial, but amusing questions (although, in this situation, only the subject and cheekyness of the writing really qualifies). http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=v6SQ0ZfMvgDefMZaRQ0gQS%3D%3D They didn't really factor in a few things that under the seat-up position, add to costs against Marsha that John will be less likely to face -- e.g., sitting down on a 'wet' raised seat, especially after you stumble into the bathroom in the dark. Nothing says 'HELLO!' quite like a cold seatless toilet on a bare rear end. Though, I'm firmly in agreement with others -- why is it that guys can't just make the freakin bowl when they urinate? Is it that hard? Carey On 6/4/07, Deepa Mohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 6/4/07, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: summary: it is inefficient as a social norm, but perfect equilibrium, once the cost of women yelling at men who leave the seat up is modelled. http://www.scq.ubc.ca/the-social-norm-of-leaving-the-toilet-seat-down-a-game-theoretic-analysis/ oh, my goodness, how do these scientific types write all that with a straight face?...probably their faces WERE a little flushed... I am sorry but I just could NOT read through that! Deepa. On 6/4/07, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: summary: it is inefficient as a social norm, but perfect equilibrium, once the cost of women yelling at men who leave the seat up is modelled. http://www.scq.ubc.ca/the-social-norm-of-leaving-the-toilet-seat-down-a-game-theoretic-analysis/
Re: [silk] Good Indian restaurants in Northern Virginia/DC?
Oooh. I second that need. And maybe, if we get a good suggestion, a few of us can do a little DC/VA silklist meetup? Carey (who has yet to find Indian food that's worth anything out here) On 5/30/07, Dan Moniz [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi all, Speaking of food, I wonder, can anyone recommend good Indian restaurants in the Northern Virginia (primarily Arlington, VA) and Washington, DC area? Preferably ones you or someone whose culinary tastes you trust have dined at. I ask because earlier today in another forum, I was recommending some other places to eat that I liked to someone else, and I made a note that I had found no worthwhile Indian places yet. The few that I've been to (notably not any in DC lately, just ones in NoVA) have been either roundly awful or, at best, fall severely short of the hype seen in reviews of them. Thanks in advance! -- Dan Moniz [EMAIL PROTECTED] [http://pobox.com/~dnm/]
Re: [silk] Good Indian restaurants in Northern Virginia/DC?
Agreed -- I'll be back from CA by then, and would love to get together and do drinks. Who knew there were so many Silkers actually in/around the district! I'm totally all over checking out some of these restaurants -- esp. Rasika. Carey On 5/30/07, Dave Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 5/30/07, Suresh Ramasubramanian [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Lawnun [30/05/07 17:20 -0400]: Oooh. I second that need. And maybe, if we get a good suggestion, a few of us can do a little DC/VA silklist meetup? I'll be in DC from July 10th night to the 14th afternoon .. 11 / 12 July in a meeting, but should be free on July 13 for any silkmeets that may be organized I like this idea, and I'm in.
Re: [silk] in the eye of the beholder
Agreed. An excellent description. As I've only seen the copies (or images on the web), I never really saw how a Rothko work commanded the $ that it does. I have a new appreciation. On a side note, does anyone ever speculate that sometimes the price of these works of art are high both due to the artistic merit of the piece, and the status of the prior owner? When I read the economist piece, it struck me that part of the allure for both Sotheby's and to that extent, The Economist, was the fact that you had a consignment by one of the richest men in America. Obviously, prior ownership translates in Hollywood film memoribilia (e.g., Audrey Hepburn's little black dress worn in Breakfast at Tiffany's), but does the same hold true for art? Carey http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/12/05/arts/EU_A-E_MOV_Britain_Hepburns_Dress.php On 4/24/07, Deepa Mohan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That was SUCH a good description of Rothko's work Danese. Deepa. On 4/24/07, Danese Cooper [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: $46 million is a ridiculous amount of money for a painting (any painting) but I'd hardly characterize a Rothko as stripes of color. The depth and texture Rothko's methods achieved are much more compelling than can be communicated by a reductionist description (or even a print or photo of the painting). You really have to see them in person, and see them up close and properly hung to get the whole effect. They are calming, soothing and sometimes deeply moving. They are interesting to experience from different perspectives; because most are quite large, you can surround your field of vision with color standing close and then stepping away the separation of different color fields resolves in your eye. Such a simple thing (paint on canvas) but carried off so beautifully. Impossible to cheaply copy (because of the surface texture and something about the layering of color that achieves the end result). You can actually see that it took some time to make each one. Again as architect Christopher Alexander coined the term, which Bill Joy later taught to me, there is a quality with no name that is deeply pleasing and that makes you sigh when you recognize it. Rothko was channeling that quality in paint and canvas, IMHO. Danese On Apr 24, 2007, at 1:32 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: stripes of red, black, white and purple - how much is it [1] worth? apparently at least $46 million [2], guaranteed by sotheby's to david rockefeller who's selling it. -rishab 1. http://economist.com/images/columns/2007w16/Rothko.jpg 2. http://economist.com/daily/columns/artview/displaystory.cfm? story_id=9061031
Re: [silk] pearls before swine
admittedly, this says less about d.c. And more about the choice of metro. Had it been at say, Dupont, instead of L'enfant (which is known for being the exit for most govt employees who aren't necessarily interested in being late for work) he would have earned considerably more, I think. carey (who is stuck in DC for the time) -Original Message- From: Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subj: [silk] pearls before swine Date: Fri Apr 13, 2007 9:06 am Size: 390 bytes To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] famous violinist joshua bell played for 45 minutes at a DC metro station. he earned $32, and less than a dozen out of 1000+ people who passed by even noticed (though all children who passed tried to stop and were dragged away by their parents). all on video with a nice washington post story. -rishab http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html
