Monthly Archives: August 2011

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  • Con­fes­sions of a Com­mu­nity Col­lege Dean: Self­ish Tech

    “The tech world loves to bandy about the term “social,” but its con­cept of “social” seems to be based on what sin­gle twen­tysome­things do. “Social” in the sense of “fam­i­lies” is off the radar, as is “social” in the sense of “shar­ing.” It’s happy to make rec­om­men­da­tions for indi­vid­ual pur­chases social, but shared pur­chases are ver­boten. It’s short­sighted. If the demise of the music indus­try has taught us any­thing, it should be that walls don’t work. Sooner or later, demand will find a way around. The blis­ter­ing suc­cess of itunes showed that there’s a sub­stan­tial mar­ket for above­board, legal ways to allow peo­ple to get what they want; this isn’t just about piracy. But piracy may have to hap­pen to make the lit­er­ary ver­sion of itunes accept­able to pub­lish­ers. Put dif­fer­ently, the indus­try needs to learn to lean into change, rather than resist­ing it. I fore­see a mon­ster mar­ket for e-​​textbooks as soon as they offer some­thing anal­o­gous to re-​​selling your used copies. Until then, the value propo­si­tion mostly isn’t there. (Yes, there are issues with dis­abil­ity access, but those strike me as solv­able if the will is there.) Stu­dents will con­tinue, quite ratio­nally, to buy paper text­books and re-​​sell them. ”

    academic-​​culture pub­lish­ers ebooks intellectual-​​property DRM disintermediation-​​targets

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  • The Myth of the Sole Inven­tor by Mark Lem­ley :: SSRN

    “The the­ory of patent law is based on the idea that a lone genius can solve prob­lems that stump the experts, and that the lone genius will do so only if prop­erly incented. We deny patents on inven­tions that are “obvi­ous” to ordi­nar­ily inno­v­a­tive sci­en­tists in the field. Our goal is to encour­age extra­or­di­nary inven­tions – those that we wouldn’t expect to get with­out the incen­tive of a patent. The canon­i­cal story of the lone genius inven­tor is largely a myth. Edi­son didn’t invent the light bulb; he found a bam­boo fiber that worked bet­ter as a fil­a­ment in the light bulb devel­oped by Sawyer and Man, who in turn built on light­ing work done by oth­ers. Bell filed for his tele­phone patent on the very same day as an inde­pen­dent inven­tor, Elisha Gray; the case ulti­mately went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which filled an entire vol­ume of U.S. Reports resolv­ing the ques­tion of whether Bell could have a patent despite the fact that he hadn’t actu­ally got­ten the inven­tion to work at the time he filed. The Wright Broth­ers were the first to fly at Kitty Hawk, but their plane didn’t work very well, and was quickly sur­passed by air­craft built by Glenn Cur­tis and oth­ers – planes that the Wrights delayed by over a decade with patent law­suits. The point can be made more gen­eral: sur­veys of hun­dreds of sig­nif­i­cant new tech­nolo­gies show that almost all of them are invented simul­ta­ne­ously or nearly simul­ta­ne­ously by two or more teams work­ing inde­pen­dently of each other. Inven­tion appears in sig­nif­i­cant part to be a social, not an indi­vid­ual, phe­nom­e­non. Inven­tors build on the work of those who came before, and new ideas are often “in the air,” or result from changes in mar­ket demand or the avail­abil­ity of new or cheaper start­ing mate­ri­als. And in the few cir­cum­stances where that is not true – where inven­tions truly are “sin­gle­tons” – it is often because of an acci­dent or error in the exper­i­ment rather than a con­scious effort to invent. ”

    patents inno­va­tion intellectual-​​property lawyers

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  • Deus Ex Mal­con­tent: Quote of the Day

    “Again, there’s a point to be made that it’s a waste of time and copy-​​space to give Paul’s ram­blings any more cre­dence than those of the recently released Belle­vue patient who’s now staked out a soap­box in the mid­dle of Cen­tral Park. For Christ’s sake, in 1977 Jimmy Carter implored this coun­try to make the tiny sac­ri­fice of drop­ping the ther­mo­stat a few degrees and wear­ing a sweater — and he was pub­licly cas­ti­gated for it. You think Amer­i­cans are gonna go for the aban­don­ment of entire swaths of the coun­try and its peo­ple every time a dis­as­ter like a mon­ster hur­ri­cane hits? You’re even more of a lunatic than Ron Paul — and that’s not easy.”

    lib­er­tar­i­an­ism pol­i­tics amusing-​​pseudorationalists-​​at-​​the-​​gate Thun­der­domes

  • The Exile Bib­lio­phile: Books: Own­ing them, Lov­ing them

    “So, I recently dis­cov­ered Stacked Up: Writ­ers Show off their Shelves, which is exactly what it sounds like. Short inter­views with writ­ers and some of their books. Just won­der­ful, though a bit too NYCen­tric to be truly invig­o­rat­ing. I just don’t get that worked up over THE BIG DEAL that is NYC. Give me space, keep your crowds! But, NYC is where a LOT of writ­ers live, so I can’t be too cranky about it. Hope­fully the Stacked Up folks will one day be able to get off the lit­tle island and out into the real world. Any­way, go enjoy these things Book Folk– you’re not alone.”

    books bib­lio­ma­nia book­shelves another-​​tag-​​involving-​​the-​​word-​​books author­ship writing-​​culture video

  • Cre­ative Com­mons Is Not Pub­lic Domain | Com­pound Eye, Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can Blog Network

    “Again, I do not know that the blog­gers didn’t write the pho­tog­ra­phers to obtain commercial-​​use per­mis­sion. But I doubt it. My judge­ment is borne from per­sonal expe­ri­ence. I see my images pop­ping up on com­mer­cial blogs all the time, and fewer than one in ten asks my per­mis­sion. I don’t mean to sin­gle out WIRED, either. I’m only pick­ing on them for the recent ant exam­ple. In real­ity, many com­mer­cial blog net­works show ram­pant dis­re­gard for the rights of artists, pho­tog­ra­phers, and musi­cians. They may not have been caught, yet, but they could incur sub­stan­tial legal lia­bil­ity when a copy­right owner decides to seek dam­ages. After all, using an image beyond the bounds of the license is break­ing the law. The bot­tom line is this: if some­one else’s cre­ative work is help­ing you make money, you have a moral and a legal oblig­a­tion to reach an agree­ment with that per­son about the terms of use. Cre­ative Com­mons is sup­posed to make this eas­ier, but it only works if the con­tent con­sumers treat CC as a con­tract and not a blan­ket license for free use. Cre­ative Com­mons is not pub­lic domain.”

    creative-​​commons intellectual-​​property copy­right cultural-​​assumptions

Items of some interest…

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These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

Items of some interest…

Posted on by

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

  • Anthros & Econs: Cross­ing the chasm | Sav­age Minds

    “In their recent book Eco­nomic Anthro­pol­ogy, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write about one of their main goals:  “We hope to per­suade econ­o­mists with real world con­cerns to take an inter­est in what anthro­pol­o­gists have dis­cov­ered about the human econ­omy, and in the kinds of the­o­ries we have advanced to under­stand it” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  How­ever, they also make this point quite clear: “There is not much hope for dia­logue with those who define eco­nom­ics exclu­sively as the appli­ca­tion of an indi­vid­u­al­is­tic logic of util­ity max­i­miza­tion to all domains of social life” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  Ulti­mately, they say, “The project of eco­nom­ics needs to be res­cued from the econ­o­mists” (Hann and Hart 2011:162).”

    anthro­pol­ogy eco­nom­ics cultural-​​assumptions academia-doesn’t-guarantee-acuity silos social-​​sciences