This is my experience too, especially on first hearing. Toward the beginning of the piece I recognise some roughly similar rising motifs spanning the keyboard. The human brain is better at finding patterns than Scott Rickard credits.
Similarly, music isn't only about internal repetitions. There are also patterns that we recognise because we're used to listen for them by experience, theory, and tradition. For example, I hear a tonal resolve between about 8:38 to about 8:48 and another even more striking one between 8:53 and 9:05. There's also a nice one right before the end of the piece.
By the way, everyone should appreciate the difficulty of playing a piece like this, without the aids of meter, harmony, or any awareness on the part of the composer of the limitations of human hands. It takes real skill and focus and Michael Linville does an excellent job.
Wikileaks has taken on the two most powerful kinds of organisations in the world, the pillars of the international political system and the global marketplace. It directly damaged the interests of the government of the world most powerful sovereign state (still the USA) and made noises about hurting corporate financial institutions. That's a tall order for any organisation.
Wikileaks put itself in a particularly hard spot because it hasn't played well with others. It took an 'our way or the highway' approach to disclosure. It also released information that no one was asking for, so it didn't make allies with its disclosures. Moreover, it didn't support or enable calls for specific kinds of disclosure from existing organisation. Now it's isolated and atrophying because no one can operate at that level without allies for long.
That's a good point that good international negotiators understand the US process. This is why European trade partners have been disturbed by the lack of democratic ratification and by US statements about the non-binding nature of the agreement. They didn't start the process on the understanding that the US would treat the final document as a voluntary standard instead of a commitment. Europeans plan to treat it as a binding international treaty if signed and aren't best pleased with the idea of an asymmetric partnership through ACTA. And this supports the points I made (again, we agree) about the international position. The executive agreement undermines both the purpose of ACTA as a new standard and the efforts to oppose it.
It occurs to me that ACTA changed a lot over the years and the final text excluded a lot of the language the US wanted in (and the same is true for other parties as well). So to engage in rampant speculation, another possibility is that the USTR (who I put in the drivers seat on this) is trying to give itself room to expand the new standard later. Doing that through ACTA would be difficult, because the document is designed to be hard to change. Therefore, the US may want to leave itself a way out.
Even as this story falls off the front page, I want to quickly come back at you, because I like your perspective. I haven't been following the public statements from the White House about ACTA. I should look for that.
Let's set aside the constitutionality of an ACTA signed and executed on the sole authority of the president, because I think we agree on that. In real political terms, I don't think that the current illegitimate or half-way legitimate status of the agreement/treaty as it stands is good for the interests of either opponents or those in favour of ACTA.
One important purpose of ACTA seems to be to promote a new set of international standards for the enforcement of intellectual property law. That purpose is undermined if the US seems to be uncommitted to it. Similarly, if ACTA is supposed to provide a more favourable, more exclusive venue for development of international IP law than WIPO and the WTO, another apparent goal of the process, the US doesn't advance that objective by undermining the treaty's domestic legitimacy. ACTA as some sort of variation of a sole executive agreement isn't good for ACTA partisans. When you're looking for international agreement, you don't want to be splitting legal hairs.
The current status of ACTA in the US isn't good for ACTA opponents either. For one thing, ACTA is at least superficially in effect, or will be, so the main goal of opponents seems to have failed. Even if the ACTA signing were to be declared unconstitutional in America, however, there remains the question of international legitimacy. The fact of the USA having signed ACTA puts the state under an international obligation to abide by it. That obligation has unpredictable effects and cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant imposition on a sovereign country. It can affect other US interests. It complicates opposition to the treaty through rhetoric and legal argument inside the US. That's not quite as strongly put as I'd like, but I can't spend a lot of time on it.
I suppose it's possible that the administration is playing some very deep political game. It could be trying to undermine the international IP regime, but I don't believe it is, at least not without instituting a modified replacement, which is what I think ACTA is supposed to be. It could be trying to leave the status of ACTA uncertain so that the TPP can eventually supersede it as the standard for international IP enforcement. That strikes me as superficially more likely, but still a bit paranoid.
I agree that the administration is overstepping its constitutional authority. The questions that come up after that are interesting. Why is it doing that? What does that choice reveal about the interests of the ACTA partisans in the US? Who is that choice good for? I think it's basically bad for everybody. I think it's a political and legal bad call. The best would have been if ACTA had gotten its day in the sun and been rejected. However even if it had been accepted by the legislature, that would have been a better situation than the one we find ourselves in.
I'm being trolled, aren't I? What you've latched on to is the minor point of my comment. You can leave it out if you prefer. The upshot of what I was saying is that added steps in the ratification/signing process are good for opponents of ACTA.
Obviously, it's only possible to guess at other people's motivations, which ultimately remain a black box. However, I don't think that the specific self-interested motive you assign to Ron Wyden explains his behaviour convincingly. These points are in no particular order.
First off, Senator Wyden has a record of opposing and complicating the ACTA process. If he were hoping to receive money from lobbyists who want ACTA to come into effect, I think that either he would already be in their pay by now, or he would have realised that the lobbyists have decided to focus their campaign money influence buying on other senators who more broadly share their outlook.
I think lobbyists focus their campaign money influence buying on senators and candidates who more broadly share their outlook. Ron Wyden is one of fifty and is not carrying the day with his demands that ACTA be subject to senate approval. He's just not going to get paid for opposing the interests of the people he hopes will pay him off.
Then again, the way you worded your comment falls into a simple logical fallacy of confusing the part with the whole. Wyden's letter doesn't represent a broad consensus among senators that ACTA should be subject to senate approval. Its just him. There's not much evidence, therefore, of the senate as a whole being 'mad' over this issue.
Also, some of Senator Wyden's previous letters to the USTR about ACTA come during an election year, last year, when Wyden's seat was in question. That would have been the time to pander to the lobby that supports ACTA, if at any time, but Wyden didn't.
That's a selection of a few of the reasons why I think the idea that "he just wants his reward" from entertainment industry lobbyists and others doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny.
I think my explanation's better for a few reasons, but I'm not committed to it, and I don't think it's the only explanation. As far is it goes (a single sentence, proposing that Senator Wyden cares about the content of ACTA) I think it's correct. As I say, Wyden has a bit of a track record on this and has gone on record before about being concerned about ACTA provisions.
Of course, Senator Wyden comes from a state with an important computer industry, which has generally opposed ACTA. This has to be left in general terms because I don't know the details of the Oregon computer industry's stance on ACTA, but I would guess that if he's in the pay of anyone, it's the side that opposes ACTA. Furthermore, I imagine that position will play better in his district.
Finally, and not least, I think that the Senator from Oregon is using a point of order as a means of expressing concerns about the content of the proposed agreement because that's a senate pattern. That's how congress in general uses rules of procedure, as a way of slowing, or stopping legislation, for example, that congresspeople oppose. It's safer politically to bring up a point of order because then a lawmaker doesn't have to give away his or her rhetorical hand and the congressperson can possibly prevent the passage of something without having to oppose it. That's common, and I think that's what's going on here.
I'll continue agreeing, then. The European Union, for one (or for 25) has called ACTA a treaty, so if the US treats it as non-binding (as it legally should be, at the moment, under US law) and doesn't follow the agreement, or a state undertakes a policy that diverges from the text of ACTA, everyone may end up in an arbitration process, and domestic law has no standing there. So there's a risk to the US in taking this route.
I have a little bit of a problem with people attributing blame for this to the president under any administration. I think the initiative comes from other places, perhaps from the USTR, but probably directly from industry lobbyists. I'm sorry I'm not plugged in enough to know exactly who got ACTA on the table in the first place, (the Japanese premier announced it, but he certainly didn't come up with the idea) but I think it's probably presented to the US president without dissenting opinions. Obviously it's his responsibility, but attributing it to his policy priorities is probably misguided.
Presumably he wouldn't bring up the procedural objection if he didn't care about the content. A vote in two chambers of congress would give opponents of the treaty (or agreement or whatever you want to call it) at least two more opportunities to oppose it in public. Congress is more responsive to public mood than the executive branch. I think it was an ambassador who signed the treaty in Japan over last weekend. That's an event that much harder to make a stink about than a vote in the legislature.
Exactly, thank you for putting it so succinctly. ACTA was badly named. It is not what it pretends to be. This seems to be a common understanding among people who've studied the treaty. Another good article in the American University Washington College of Law series, this one written by Margot E. Kaminski, say that:
"ACTA is primarily a copyright treaty, masquerading as a treaty that addresses dangerous medicines and defective imports."
The reasons that software professionals and free/open-stuff advocates have opposed the treaty has nothing to do with trade law, and everything to do with the criminal penalties for IP violations and the changing relationship between ISPs and their customer.
I disagree, ACTA is not, at heart, a trade agreement at all. It's a law enforcement treaty focusing on intellectual property. It aims to harmonise the enforcement measure with regard to intellectual property across the signatories. There's evidence for this in every portion of ACTA, but you just have to look at the headings for the two substantive chapters:
Chapter II: Legal Framework for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
Chapter III: Enforcement Practices
This doesn't diminish your point or Senator Wyden's. To quote an excellent article by Sean Flynn, ACTA would affect:
"evidentiary standards required for property seizures and criminal prosecution. It would affect state common law, where many trade secret obligations reside. And primarily it would affect the evolution of federal law, including the large federal statutory enactments on patents, copyrights and trademarks."
The president doesn't have any enumerated (or un-enumerated) powers that cover this territory, indeed, the power to regulate intellectual property, I understand, is an enumerated power of congress (Article I, sec 8 of the constitution). Therefore the agreement should be submitted to congress by the president and more specifically by the USTR under his authority.
It's true they lack a goal or objective and that's because they're a genuine, burgeoning social movement, not something else. When many people step out on the street together, they're not all going to be there for a single, shared reason, at least not at first.
Social movements are all about three things:
making collective claims in public over a period of time
using a set of social movement strategies
and demonstrating worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment.
The movements in the Muslim world earlier this year didn't all start with the demands that they ended up with. They took to the streets because they were upset and wanted to shout. That's what going on with the Occupy Whatever protesters too. Most basically, these public performances "assert popular sovereignty." They're democratic (small 'd'!), about the popular voice, showing that there is one and letting it speak.
The fact that these protests aren't motivated by a single voice or interest group encourages me, frankly. It means at the moment there are no shadowy figures behind the scenes pulling strings. There's a lot to shout about in the US at the moment. Me, I'm furious about the bank bailout, the budget crisis, political showboating, wasted war funds, executive bonuses, high unemployment, etc. If I'm anywhere near a protest, maybe I'll jump in and shout, too. If it turns into something I don't like, I'll bow out, or go someplace else the shout.
The list and other observation I've mentioned are all adapted from the writing of the academic Charles Tilly, who wrote the book on social movements.
Unfortunately, in the USA (haven't found info on the UK), the law as it stands makes the default situation exactly the opposite: the school owns the copyright on most lesson plans and other IP, as other people have described in other replies. It's crazy.
Also, I don't think anyone has suggested a good existing licensing solution that does what you're describing. A shame. Maybe the guy who posted the question will write a good license, with the school's legal council. Or maybe we'll have to live with the occasional injustice of a distance between the law and the expected behaviour until legislatures get around to solving the problem. In the US, there are proposals to change the 1976 copyright law to include an exemption for teachers.
No, Cory Doctorow gets it right. I've watched the video and, to promote my own posts for moment, I summarise above, but he's responding to comments by both Rolf-Dieter Heuer and Lynn Saint-Amour. You can see when he starts to compose his response, it's at 44:10 on the video just after Lynn Saint-Amour says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." His remarks also reply to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who asserted that patents, as a commercial tool, do not serve as a way to measure the basic research which produces "substantial change" instead "incremental change" (13:40) Therefore primary research serves, Heuer believes, as the most important driver of innovation.
In this context, Gurry is speaking up for the idea that traditional IP instruments should be used as the primary tools to drive innovation and to measure it. Don't be fooled by the mild tone of these kinds of meetings, it really is a tunnel-vision view. He's disagreeing with everyone who spoke before him.
In this case, the groupthink is right on and Francis Gurry's counter-history, such as it is, is patently(!) absurd. People are responding to his specific point about the web, which Cory accurately summarised. Thanks for the reasoned deviation from the party line, though. (I see it's been modded flame bait, now, but I disagree) You deserve an equally good counter-argument and I'll try to give it.
The context is a question posed to the panel: "How can countries, how can organisations improve in the area of innovation." In response to that question, and to the idea of measuring innovation that the Global Innovation Index aims to realise, everyone else on the panel talked about the important of things other than (you could say: in addition to) patents and traditional intellectual property tools. Daniele Archibugi included in his discussion of business innovations, an emphasis on the importance of institutions like schools (17:49) and of the infrastructure for innovation -- including the commons of the internet. Naushad Forbes called patents a "limited indicator of new product innovations and an almost non-existent indicator of new service and new business model innovations" (25:53), meaning that they do not account for the range of different kinds of innovation. Leonid Gokhberg talked about "differentiated policy mixes for different industries" as well as for different types of companies (33:57) because "innovation should be taken in its broad sense, including its non-technological, social, and environmental [effects]" (12:14).
Rolf-Dieter Heuer talked about how the Index fails to measure true innovation because it measures patents and not basic science, which he argues is the essential driver of innovation, essentially an inaccurate indicator instead of the thing itself (13:32). He values "substantial change" over "incremental change" (13:40). As an example of this problem, he cites the invention of the world wide web, which because it was not patented would not have shown up in this index, and yet reflects an important innovation of current age (to understate the case).
Francis Gurry addresses his concluding "white card" comments in response to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but they apply as much to Lynn Saint-Amour's remarks, indeed you can see him begin to compose his words at 44:10 after she says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." She talked generally, not terribly on-topic, about how innovators can use openness to their advantage and the value of non-traditional channels of innovation (the last point at 17:48).
In the context of everything that came before, Mr Gurry's specific comments about the world web web reflect a dogmatic misunderstanding of how the web came to be and how it worked, especially in the 1990s. It's a bizarre and irrelevant counter-history, as I assume is being argued elsewhere in this thread as I compose this long and detailed reply. In brief, if the web had been patented and commercialised it would indeed have been routed around, as Lynn Saint-Amour said. Also, it would not have returned the patent profits to basic research, as Francis Gurry suggests, because then it would have become applied research and the funds would have funded incremental change in the commercial environment, to use Professor Heuer's words. Gurry does not seem to have been listening to the academics and policy advisers around him. They're all saying "tradition IP instruments can't do it all." His response is that "intellectual property is a very flexible instrument" (50:13), essentially "oh yes it can too do it all."
There's a legal question here and an administrative one. Either way, this isn't a decision to be made and announced through the employee handbook. It's great though how you set out just to write a bit of documentation and you end up in a legal a philosophical minefield.
The legal question is who has the right of ownership over intellectual property, such as lesson plans, that teachers produce or use on the job. I imagine the precedents vary by your jurisdiction. Your school should look it up. The way you phrase the question, it sounds as if there aren't any explicit provisions in the teacher contracts that establish who owns what. Maybe it's time for the school to include a clause in the contract that makes the expectations and the legal situation clear.
But really the more important issue is that, again from the way you phrase your question, it sounds as if the school administration seems to expect to dictate terms of intellectual property ownership to its teachers. Regardless of whether they have the legal right to do that, it's just plain bad policy, a great way to pick an unnecessary fight. The administration should do what you're doing now, do some research and decide on a good model for a policy. Then they should bring the issue up at a faculty meeting, ask faculty what they want, give them a chance to go away and read about it, and then come back with their own proposal. Ideally, if you've got good administrators (sounds like they/you have good will, at least) who can negotiate well with faculty based on interests and not positions, then everyone leaves the room happy.
The wrong way to do it is for you, the Director of Technology, to make the decision, present it to the rest of the administration who accept it by default because they don't have any better ideas, and let the faculty know who owns their lesson plans by putting a handbook in their mailboxes at the start of the next term. The value of the intellectual property is either too small to be worth alienating employees or too valuable to approach sloppily.
The usual disclaimers: I'm not a lawyer or a teacher.
Well, I'm not an economist, as I said. My field is even less scientific. My guess is that incidence differs under different conditions. In the human sciences, any more consistent result would surprise me.
At a certain point this starts to get into the territory of: go look for the evidence your own darn self. However, because I'm looking for a distraction and I have access to scholarly papers that publish this kind of evidence, I'll point you (and anyone else who's interested, because it's always possible I'm replying to a troll or to a rhetorical question -- those should be banned online, by the way) toward some resources that I've found but haven't read.
Corporate Tax Burden in the European Union. By: García, Santiago Álvarez, Rodríguez, Elena Fernández, Arias, Antonio Martínez, EC Tax Review, 09282750, Feb2011, Vol. 20, Issue 1
Sales tax equity: Who bears the burden? By: Derrick, Frederick W., Scott, Charles E., Quarterly Review of Economics & Finance, 10629769, Summer98, Vol. 38, Issue 2
The Economic Incidence of Replacing a Retail Sales Tax with a Value-Added Tax: Evidence from Canadian Experience. By: SMART, MICHAEL, BIRD, RICHARD M., Canadian Public Policy, 03170861, Mar2009, Vol. 35, Issue 1
INCIDENCE AND ACCIDENTS: REGULATION OF EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION THROUGH THE TAX CODE. By: Mullane, Joy Sabino, Lewis & Clark Law Review, 15576582, Summer2009, Vol. 13, Issue 2
PERFECT COMPETITION, URBANIZATION, AND TAX INCIDENCE IN THE RETAIL GASOLINE MARKET. By: ALM, JAMES, SENNOGA, EDWARD, SKIDMORE, MARK, Economic Inquiry, 00952583, Jan2009, Vol. 47, Issue 1
This is fun, it brings back the stale smell of undergraduate economics courses. IANAE, but if I recall correctly, one problem with a sales tax is that it's regressive. Its burden falls disproportionately on the less well off. Assuming an equal tax rate on all goods and of all consumers, it's a flat tax: everyone pays the same percentage. However, the same percentage of expenditure means more to someone with less. It's "fair" in that it treats everyone equally, but it's not fair in that it doesn't effect everyone equally. Of course fairness comes up when you're discussing tax policy, but I think you have to remember that life isn't fair and you're not going to solve that through the US tax code.
As you say, at first blush, a sales-tax-only code looks like it would also create an incentive to take money out of the country. People from elsewhere would want to be paid in dollars in the US and spend them abroad. Tax law isn't easy and anyone who says it is... well they're wrong!
While I didn't take economics in Junior High, my High School course taught me that the supply of most goods is not perfectly price elastic. It taught me that in theory taxes are only partially passed on to the consumer except in cases of perfect price elasticity. It taught me that in theory, except in cases of perfect price inelasticity of supply, higher taxes on businesses will result in higher prices and fewer goods being sold in that market. Apparently this concept is called tax incidence, though I don't remember that from High School. It also taught me that a tax on individuals is not the same as the tax on corporations. Therefore, based on what I learned many years ago in high school economics, in the case you're talking about, which has very little to do with the proposed tax on individuals, it's true that the consumer bears some of the burden of those taxes. However, it's also true that corporations do in fact pay taxes. That is, ceteris paribus, assuming things like that they don't totally avoid the taxes by using loopholes.
The author of the linked blog post is Will Wilkinson. That wasn't immediately obvious to me when I clicked through, so I thought I'd share it. Wikipedia describes his approach as libertarian and "a mixture of John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods".
Interesting guy and a good writer.
Re:Then Why Are We Seeing the Same Negative Effect
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Debt Deal Reached
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As a matter of fact that's just about correct, if I understand it right. I know you're trying to be snarky, but I think in approximation and analogy that's how it works. The issue isn't directly how much US owes compared with its wealth (it would never be the absolute value of the debt, anyway), but whether creditors are willing to keep lending, which of course depends on other interrelated things like the growth of the US economy, the money supply, the rate of inflation, interest rates, and how the play of all of these factors and others in the economies of other countries in the world effect their credit-worthiness relative to the US. If lenders start to decide they don't trust the US to hold their money, more than they do any other country, that's when the American national debt becomes a huge problem for everyone. And I think it's true that one of the reasons this could happen is if people start to see the risk of American default because of the overwhelming size of the debt relative to the US economy.
You're absolutely right I should support all this with evidence, and I'm astonished that it seems to be really hard to find reliable explanations of the dynamics of government debt online. Maybe I'm using the wrong keywords. However, the US Government Accountability Office has a pretty good explanation of the reasons why creditors generally buy US debt. It doesn't say exactly what I'm saying, but gives a more detailed explanation of the way US debt works.
I'm not an economist, of course, so possibly talking out of the wrong end.
IANAWD, but a few weeks ago I heard Raphael Sofaer and Dan Grippi do a presentation on Diaspora. They said they're hoping for a release version by the end of the year. One reason they said they're keeping a low profile is that they don't want to worry about scaling problems at the moment. There are other problems too, such as that its a bit of a pain to set up a pod, right now. They seem like cool, smart guys. They've got bigger goals than just duplicating facebook's functionality, but I didn't take good notes during that part and can't reproduce it from memory.
It's not just about copyright. Sites whose only function (or just about) is related to trademark violations or is about helping people get around DRM would be targeted by this law too, if it passes. Look at the definitions section (Sec. 2, par. 7.a.ii and ii).
Yes, that's exactly what's happening, though it's not quite a free-for-all of cries for inclusion. Those invited to this "E-G8" include 'civilian groups' such as representatives of the press and business leaders. For example Cory Doctorow was invited and Larry Page apparently attended. Now the civil society groups are saying: we know all about the internet and society, you should listen to what we have to say.
These groups (including Privacy International and La Quadrature du Net) aren't entirely naive. They were left off the guest list because Sarkozy didn't want to hear what they have to say. They recognise this and their press release is really just a way of pointing out that the meeting has left out some of the most important voices on net freedom and digital rights.
Slashdot Mirror
This is my experience too, especially on first hearing. Toward the beginning of the piece I recognise some roughly similar rising motifs spanning the keyboard. The human brain is better at finding patterns than Scott Rickard credits.
Similarly, music isn't only about internal repetitions. There are also patterns that we recognise because we're used to listen for them by experience, theory, and tradition. For example, I hear a tonal resolve between about 8:38 to about 8:48 and another even more striking one between 8:53 and 9:05. There's also a nice one right before the end of the piece.
By the way, everyone should appreciate the difficulty of playing a piece like this, without the aids of meter, harmony, or any awareness on the part of the composer of the limitations of human hands. It takes real skill and focus and Michael Linville does an excellent job.
Wikileaks has taken on the two most powerful kinds of organisations in the world, the pillars of the international political system and the global marketplace. It directly damaged the interests of the government of the world most powerful sovereign state (still the USA) and made noises about hurting corporate financial institutions. That's a tall order for any organisation.
Wikileaks put itself in a particularly hard spot because it hasn't played well with others. It took an 'our way or the highway' approach to disclosure. It also released information that no one was asking for, so it didn't make allies with its disclosures. Moreover, it didn't support or enable calls for specific kinds of disclosure from existing organisation. Now it's isolated and atrophying because no one can operate at that level without allies for long.
Ok, sorry for suggesting it. I guess just like with politics, it's too easy to fall into an unfair mistrust online as well.
That's a good point that good international negotiators understand the US process. This is why European trade partners have been disturbed by the lack of democratic ratification and by US statements about the non-binding nature of the agreement. They didn't start the process on the understanding that the US would treat the final document as a voluntary standard instead of a commitment. Europeans plan to treat it as a binding international treaty if signed and aren't best pleased with the idea of an asymmetric partnership through ACTA. And this supports the points I made (again, we agree) about the international position. The executive agreement undermines both the purpose of ACTA as a new standard and the efforts to oppose it.
It occurs to me that ACTA changed a lot over the years and the final text excluded a lot of the language the US wanted in (and the same is true for other parties as well). So to engage in rampant speculation, another possibility is that the USTR (who I put in the drivers seat on this) is trying to give itself room to expand the new standard later. Doing that through ACTA would be difficult, because the document is designed to be hard to change. Therefore, the US may want to leave itself a way out.
Even as this story falls off the front page, I want to quickly come back at you, because I like your perspective. I haven't been following the public statements from the White House about ACTA. I should look for that.
Let's set aside the constitutionality of an ACTA signed and executed on the sole authority of the president, because I think we agree on that. In real political terms, I don't think that the current illegitimate or half-way legitimate status of the agreement/treaty as it stands is good for the interests of either opponents or those in favour of ACTA.
One important purpose of ACTA seems to be to promote a new set of international standards for the enforcement of intellectual property law. That purpose is undermined if the US seems to be uncommitted to it. Similarly, if ACTA is supposed to provide a more favourable, more exclusive venue for development of international IP law than WIPO and the WTO, another apparent goal of the process, the US doesn't advance that objective by undermining the treaty's domestic legitimacy. ACTA as some sort of variation of a sole executive agreement isn't good for ACTA partisans. When you're looking for international agreement, you don't want to be splitting legal hairs.
The current status of ACTA in the US isn't good for ACTA opponents either. For one thing, ACTA is at least superficially in effect, or will be, so the main goal of opponents seems to have failed. Even if the ACTA signing were to be declared unconstitutional in America, however, there remains the question of international legitimacy. The fact of the USA having signed ACTA puts the state under an international obligation to abide by it. That obligation has unpredictable effects and cannot be dismissed as an irrelevant imposition on a sovereign country. It can affect other US interests. It complicates opposition to the treaty through rhetoric and legal argument inside the US. That's not quite as strongly put as I'd like, but I can't spend a lot of time on it.
I suppose it's possible that the administration is playing some very deep political game. It could be trying to undermine the international IP regime, but I don't believe it is, at least not without instituting a modified replacement, which is what I think ACTA is supposed to be. It could be trying to leave the status of ACTA uncertain so that the TPP can eventually supersede it as the standard for international IP enforcement. That strikes me as superficially more likely, but still a bit paranoid.
I agree that the administration is overstepping its constitutional authority. The questions that come up after that are interesting. Why is it doing that? What does that choice reveal about the interests of the ACTA partisans in the US? Who is that choice good for? I think it's basically bad for everybody. I think it's a political and legal bad call. The best would have been if ACTA had gotten its day in the sun and been rejected. However even if it had been accepted by the legislature, that would have been a better situation than the one we find ourselves in.
I'm being trolled, aren't I? What you've latched on to is the minor point of my comment. You can leave it out if you prefer. The upshot of what I was saying is that added steps in the ratification/signing process are good for opponents of ACTA.
Obviously, it's only possible to guess at other people's motivations, which ultimately remain a black box. However, I don't think that the specific self-interested motive you assign to Ron Wyden explains his behaviour convincingly. These points are in no particular order.
First off, Senator Wyden has a record of opposing and complicating the ACTA process. If he were hoping to receive money from lobbyists who want ACTA to come into effect, I think that either he would already be in their pay by now, or he would have realised that the lobbyists have decided to focus their campaign money influence buying on other senators who more broadly share their outlook.
I think lobbyists focus their campaign money influence buying on senators and candidates who more broadly share their outlook. Ron Wyden is one of fifty and is not carrying the day with his demands that ACTA be subject to senate approval. He's just not going to get paid for opposing the interests of the people he hopes will pay him off.
Then again, the way you worded your comment falls into a simple logical fallacy of confusing the part with the whole. Wyden's letter doesn't represent a broad consensus among senators that ACTA should be subject to senate approval. Its just him. There's not much evidence, therefore, of the senate as a whole being 'mad' over this issue.
Also, some of Senator Wyden's previous letters to the USTR about ACTA come during an election year, last year, when Wyden's seat was in question. That would have been the time to pander to the lobby that supports ACTA, if at any time, but Wyden didn't.
That's a selection of a few of the reasons why I think the idea that "he just wants his reward" from entertainment industry lobbyists and others doesn't stand up to even cursory scrutiny.
I think my explanation's better for a few reasons, but I'm not committed to it, and I don't think it's the only explanation. As far is it goes (a single sentence, proposing that Senator Wyden cares about the content of ACTA) I think it's correct. As I say, Wyden has a bit of a track record on this and has gone on record before about being concerned about ACTA provisions.
Of course, Senator Wyden comes from a state with an important computer industry, which has generally opposed ACTA. This has to be left in general terms because I don't know the details of the Oregon computer industry's stance on ACTA, but I would guess that if he's in the pay of anyone, it's the side that opposes ACTA. Furthermore, I imagine that position will play better in his district.
Finally, and not least, I think that the Senator from Oregon is using a point of order as a means of expressing concerns about the content of the proposed agreement because that's a senate pattern. That's how congress in general uses rules of procedure, as a way of slowing, or stopping legislation, for example, that congresspeople oppose. It's safer politically to bring up a point of order because then a lawmaker doesn't have to give away his or her rhetorical hand and the congressperson can possibly prevent the passage of something without having to oppose it. That's common, and I think that's what's going on here.
I'll continue agreeing, then. The European Union, for one (or for 25) has called ACTA a treaty, so if the US treats it as non-binding (as it legally should be, at the moment, under US law) and doesn't follow the agreement, or a state undertakes a policy that diverges from the text of ACTA, everyone may end up in an arbitration process, and domestic law has no standing there. So there's a risk to the US in taking this route.
I have a little bit of a problem with people attributing blame for this to the president under any administration. I think the initiative comes from other places, perhaps from the USTR, but probably directly from industry lobbyists. I'm sorry I'm not plugged in enough to know exactly who got ACTA on the table in the first place, (the Japanese premier announced it, but he certainly didn't come up with the idea) but I think it's probably presented to the US president without dissenting opinions. Obviously it's his responsibility, but attributing it to his policy priorities is probably misguided.
Presumably he wouldn't bring up the procedural objection if he didn't care about the content. A vote in two chambers of congress would give opponents of the treaty (or agreement or whatever you want to call it) at least two more opportunities to oppose it in public. Congress is more responsive to public mood than the executive branch. I think it was an ambassador who signed the treaty in Japan over last weekend. That's an event that much harder to make a stink about than a vote in the legislature.
Exactly, thank you for putting it so succinctly. ACTA was badly named. It is not what it pretends to be. This seems to be a common understanding among people who've studied the treaty. Another good article in the American University Washington College of Law series, this one written by Margot E. Kaminski, say that:
The reasons that software professionals and free/open-stuff advocates have opposed the treaty has nothing to do with trade law, and everything to do with the criminal penalties for IP violations and the changing relationship between ISPs and their customer.
I disagree, ACTA is not, at heart, a trade agreement at all. It's a law enforcement treaty focusing on intellectual property. It aims to harmonise the enforcement measure with regard to intellectual property across the signatories. There's evidence for this in every portion of ACTA, but you just have to look at the headings for the two substantive chapters:
This doesn't diminish your point or Senator Wyden's. To quote an excellent article by Sean Flynn, ACTA would affect:
The president doesn't have any enumerated (or un-enumerated) powers that cover this territory, indeed, the power to regulate intellectual property, I understand, is an enumerated power of congress (Article I, sec 8 of the constitution). Therefore the agreement should be submitted to congress by the president and more specifically by the USTR under his authority.
It's true they lack a goal or objective and that's because they're a genuine, burgeoning social movement, not something else. When many people step out on the street together, they're not all going to be there for a single, shared reason, at least not at first.
Social movements are all about three things:
The movements in the Muslim world earlier this year didn't all start with the demands that they ended up with. They took to the streets because they were upset and wanted to shout. That's what going on with the Occupy Whatever protesters too. Most basically, these public performances "assert popular sovereignty." They're democratic (small 'd'!), about the popular voice, showing that there is one and letting it speak.
The fact that these protests aren't motivated by a single voice or interest group encourages me, frankly. It means at the moment there are no shadowy figures behind the scenes pulling strings. There's a lot to shout about in the US at the moment. Me, I'm furious about the bank bailout, the budget crisis, political showboating, wasted war funds, executive bonuses, high unemployment, etc. If I'm anywhere near a protest, maybe I'll jump in and shout, too. If it turns into something I don't like, I'll bow out, or go someplace else the shout.
The list and other observation I've mentioned are all adapted from the writing of the academic Charles Tilly, who wrote the book on social movements.
Good points! I agree with everything you wrote.
Unfortunately, in the USA (haven't found info on the UK), the law as it stands makes the default situation exactly the opposite: the school owns the copyright on most lesson plans and other IP, as other people have described in other replies. It's crazy.
Also, I don't think anyone has suggested a good existing licensing solution that does what you're describing. A shame. Maybe the guy who posted the question will write a good license, with the school's legal council. Or maybe we'll have to live with the occasional injustice of a distance between the law and the expected behaviour until legislatures get around to solving the problem. In the US, there are proposals to change the 1976 copyright law to include an exemption for teachers.
No, Cory Doctorow gets it right. I've watched the video and, to promote my own posts for moment, I summarise above, but he's responding to comments by both Rolf-Dieter Heuer and Lynn Saint-Amour. You can see when he starts to compose his response, it's at 44:10 on the video just after Lynn Saint-Amour says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." His remarks also reply to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who asserted that patents, as a commercial tool, do not serve as a way to measure the basic research which produces "substantial change" instead "incremental change" (13:40) Therefore primary research serves, Heuer believes, as the most important driver of innovation.
In this context, Gurry is speaking up for the idea that traditional IP instruments should be used as the primary tools to drive innovation and to measure it. Don't be fooled by the mild tone of these kinds of meetings, it really is a tunnel-vision view. He's disagreeing with everyone who spoke before him.
In this case, the groupthink is right on and Francis Gurry's counter-history, such as it is, is patently(!) absurd. People are responding to his specific point about the web, which Cory accurately summarised. Thanks for the reasoned deviation from the party line, though. (I see it's been modded flame bait, now, but I disagree) You deserve an equally good counter-argument and I'll try to give it.
The context is a question posed to the panel: "How can countries, how can organisations improve in the area of innovation." In response to that question, and to the idea of measuring innovation that the Global Innovation Index aims to realise, everyone else on the panel talked about the important of things other than (you could say: in addition to) patents and traditional intellectual property tools. Daniele Archibugi included in his discussion of business innovations, an emphasis on the importance of institutions like schools (17:49) and of the infrastructure for innovation -- including the commons of the internet. Naushad Forbes called patents a "limited indicator of new product innovations and an almost non-existent indicator of new service and new business model innovations" (25:53), meaning that they do not account for the range of different kinds of innovation. Leonid Gokhberg talked about "differentiated policy mixes for different industries" as well as for different types of companies (33:57) because "innovation should be taken in its broad sense, including its non-technological, social, and environmental [effects]" (12:14).
Rolf-Dieter Heuer talked about how the Index fails to measure true innovation because it measures patents and not basic science, which he argues is the essential driver of innovation, essentially an inaccurate indicator instead of the thing itself (13:32). He values "substantial change" over "incremental change" (13:40). As an example of this problem, he cites the invention of the world wide web, which because it was not patented would not have shown up in this index, and yet reflects an important innovation of current age (to understate the case).
Francis Gurry addresses his concluding "white card" comments in response to Rolf-Dieter Heuer, but they apply as much to Lynn Saint-Amour's remarks, indeed you can see him begin to compose his words at 44:10 after she says "if it [the web] was patented, the internet community would have found a way to route around it." She talked generally, not terribly on-topic, about how innovators can use openness to their advantage and the value of non-traditional channels of innovation (the last point at 17:48).
In the context of everything that came before, Mr Gurry's specific comments about the world web web reflect a dogmatic misunderstanding of how the web came to be and how it worked, especially in the 1990s. It's a bizarre and irrelevant counter-history, as I assume is being argued elsewhere in this thread as I compose this long and detailed reply. In brief, if the web had been patented and commercialised it would indeed have been routed around, as Lynn Saint-Amour said. Also, it would not have returned the patent profits to basic research, as Francis Gurry suggests, because then it would have become applied research and the funds would have funded incremental change in the commercial environment, to use Professor Heuer's words. Gurry does not seem to have been listening to the academics and policy advisers around him. They're all saying "tradition IP instruments can't do it all." His response is that "intellectual property is a very flexible instrument" (50:13), essentially "oh yes it can too do it all."
I fancy you can get a measure of the in
There's a legal question here and an administrative one. Either way, this isn't a decision to be made and announced through the employee handbook. It's great though how you set out just to write a bit of documentation and you end up in a legal a philosophical minefield.
The legal question is who has the right of ownership over intellectual property, such as lesson plans, that teachers produce or use on the job. I imagine the precedents vary by your jurisdiction. Your school should look it up. The way you phrase the question, it sounds as if there aren't any explicit provisions in the teacher contracts that establish who owns what. Maybe it's time for the school to include a clause in the contract that makes the expectations and the legal situation clear.
But really the more important issue is that, again from the way you phrase your question, it sounds as if the school administration seems to expect to dictate terms of intellectual property ownership to its teachers. Regardless of whether they have the legal right to do that, it's just plain bad policy, a great way to pick an unnecessary fight. The administration should do what you're doing now, do some research and decide on a good model for a policy. Then they should bring the issue up at a faculty meeting, ask faculty what they want, give them a chance to go away and read about it, and then come back with their own proposal. Ideally, if you've got good administrators (sounds like they/you have good will, at least) who can negotiate well with faculty based on interests and not positions, then everyone leaves the room happy.
The wrong way to do it is for you, the Director of Technology, to make the decision, present it to the rest of the administration who accept it by default because they don't have any better ideas, and let the faculty know who owns their lesson plans by putting a handbook in their mailboxes at the start of the next term. The value of the intellectual property is either too small to be worth alienating employees or too valuable to approach sloppily.
The usual disclaimers: I'm not a lawyer or a teacher.
There is now.
Ah ha! But how do you tax a yacht made out of bread!? :D
Anyway, I'm glad to hear it's that easy.
Well, I'm not an economist, as I said. My field is even less scientific. My guess is that incidence differs under different conditions. In the human sciences, any more consistent result would surprise me.
At a certain point this starts to get into the territory of: go look for the evidence your own darn self. However, because I'm looking for a distraction and I have access to scholarly papers that publish this kind of evidence, I'll point you (and anyone else who's interested, because it's always possible I'm replying to a troll or to a rhetorical question -- those should be banned online, by the way) toward some resources that I've found but haven't read.
This is fun, it brings back the stale smell of undergraduate economics courses. IANAE, but if I recall correctly, one problem with a sales tax is that it's regressive. Its burden falls disproportionately on the less well off. Assuming an equal tax rate on all goods and of all consumers, it's a flat tax: everyone pays the same percentage. However, the same percentage of expenditure means more to someone with less. It's "fair" in that it treats everyone equally, but it's not fair in that it doesn't effect everyone equally. Of course fairness comes up when you're discussing tax policy, but I think you have to remember that life isn't fair and you're not going to solve that through the US tax code.
As you say, at first blush, a sales-tax-only code looks like it would also create an incentive to take money out of the country. People from elsewhere would want to be paid in dollars in the US and spend them abroad. Tax law isn't easy and anyone who says it is... well they're wrong!
While I didn't take economics in Junior High, my High School course taught me that the supply of most goods is not perfectly price elastic. It taught me that in theory taxes are only partially passed on to the consumer except in cases of perfect price elasticity. It taught me that in theory, except in cases of perfect price inelasticity of supply, higher taxes on businesses will result in higher prices and fewer goods being sold in that market. Apparently this concept is called tax incidence, though I don't remember that from High School. It also taught me that a tax on individuals is not the same as the tax on corporations. Therefore, based on what I learned many years ago in high school economics, in the case you're talking about, which has very little to do with the proposed tax on individuals, it's true that the consumer bears some of the burden of those taxes. However, it's also true that corporations do in fact pay taxes. That is, ceteris paribus, assuming things like that they don't totally avoid the taxes by using loopholes.
The author of the linked blog post is Will Wilkinson. That wasn't immediately obvious to me when I clicked through, so I thought I'd share it. Wikipedia describes his approach as libertarian and "a mixture of John Rawls's principles and Friedrich von Hayek's methods".
Interesting guy and a good writer.
As a matter of fact that's just about correct, if I understand it right. I know you're trying to be snarky, but I think in approximation and analogy that's how it works. The issue isn't directly how much US owes compared with its wealth (it would never be the absolute value of the debt, anyway), but whether creditors are willing to keep lending, which of course depends on other interrelated things like the growth of the US economy, the money supply, the rate of inflation, interest rates, and how the play of all of these factors and others in the economies of other countries in the world effect their credit-worthiness relative to the US. If lenders start to decide they don't trust the US to hold their money, more than they do any other country, that's when the American national debt becomes a huge problem for everyone. And I think it's true that one of the reasons this could happen is if people start to see the risk of American default because of the overwhelming size of the debt relative to the US economy.
You're absolutely right I should support all this with evidence, and I'm astonished that it seems to be really hard to find reliable explanations of the dynamics of government debt online. Maybe I'm using the wrong keywords. However, the US Government Accountability Office has a pretty good explanation of the reasons why creditors generally buy US debt. It doesn't say exactly what I'm saying, but gives a more detailed explanation of the way US debt works.
I'm not an economist, of course, so possibly talking out of the wrong end.
I'd love a Diaspora update, too.
IANAWD, but a few weeks ago I heard Raphael Sofaer and Dan Grippi do a presentation on Diaspora. They said they're hoping for a release version by the end of the year. One reason they said they're keeping a low profile is that they don't want to worry about scaling problems at the moment. There are other problems too, such as that its a bit of a pain to set up a pod, right now. They seem like cool, smart guys. They've got bigger goals than just duplicating facebook's functionality, but I didn't take good notes during that part and can't reproduce it from memory.
It's not just about copyright. Sites whose only function (or just about) is related to trademark violations or is about helping people get around DRM would be targeted by this law too, if it passes. Look at the definitions section (Sec. 2, par. 7.a.ii and ii).
Yes, that's exactly what's happening, though it's not quite a free-for-all of cries for inclusion. Those invited to this "E-G8" include 'civilian groups' such as representatives of the press and business leaders. For example Cory Doctorow was invited and Larry Page apparently attended. Now the civil society groups are saying: we know all about the internet and society, you should listen to what we have to say.
These groups (including Privacy International and La Quadrature du Net) aren't entirely naive. They were left off the guest list because Sarkozy didn't want to hear what they have to say. They recognise this and their press release is really just a way of pointing out that the meeting has left out some of the most important voices on net freedom and digital rights.