Actually, as Proudhon pointed out, all property is theft. One may then conclude that intellectual property is intellectual theft, or plagiarism. Your ideas, writings, and inventions are no more your property than your computer, your car, or your house.
You do not need to be an anarchist to realize that property is not a natural state of affairs. Property is a "social construction" just like government. Once property did not exist. Later people decided that it would be a "good thing," as Martha Stewart might say, for people to be able to control other people and tangiable things so the idea of family was created wherein a man could be given government sanction of ownership over his tangiable possessions such as land, tools, slaves, wife, and children.
Later, people decided that owning other people might not be such a desirable thing so the definition of property was edited to exclude other people.
Much later than that, as printing became popular and lucrative, intellectual property was added to the list because people felt that it was desirable for authors and inventors to have some kind of property rights to their ideas and creative expressions.
Let's accept that although we may disagree with the definitions of property currently in vogue, there is no natural existence of property, so arguments based on nature won't pass muster. Further, arguments based on the historical concept of property will have to contend with the fact that for the first several thousand years of property, people could be considered property, which kind of dampens my desire to emulate those ideas.
The bright side, for those who would like to be able to take the work of others without being constrained by intellectual property laws (I too have chafed under the unfair laws that prohibit me from taking GPL code and wrapping it in my own closed source projects) is that property laws are no more nor less than arbitrary acts of legislation, which can be changed by amending our Constitution and persuading Congress to pass a few new laws. You can, however, find better fora in which to push for such action than bellyaching on/.
BUSH: But Columbine spoke to a larger issue, and it's really a matter of culture. It's a culture that somewhere along the line we begun to disrespect life, where a child can walk in and have their heart turn dark as a result of being on the Internet and walk in and decide to take somebody else's life.
Three years ago I saw a presentation on this technology at an ASM conference and one of the biggest applications was something that is not mentioned in the New Scientist article: Surgery.
It seems that surgeons, working as they do in a confined space covered with blood, use touch more than sight to figure out what they're doing and translating CAT scans to touch is non-intuitive. Moreover, for reconstructive surgery reorganizing three-dimensional tissue in the mind's eye can be complicated.
A number of medical centers have been working on using 3D printing to build models from CAT scans to assist surgeons in identifying tumors and for use as templates in reconstructive surgery. In the talk I saw, there were slides from the reconstrution of a baby girl's skull to correct a severe congenital abnormality. It was reported that instead of the usual three operations, the use of computer-generated templates, which were used in the OR to guide cutting and rebuilding the skull, allowed the surgeons to do everything in a single operation.
Another medical application that was discussed (relevant since the speaker came from Dayton and worked with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) was the idea of rebuilding spinal vertibrae for pilots who punched their ejection seats without first ejecting the canopy.
Interesting that Stephen King says the two following things on his site about pricing "The Plant". First he says, "In other words, you complete financial liability for the first 8 installments of this story will be $13 or about the cost of a trade paperback or a hardcover novel offered at 40% discount in a chain bookstore."
Later he says, "We have also had some complaints about the cost of ink and paper. On that subject, I have just two words: oh, please. One would think the books people bought in book stores were printed on air or that the cost of ink, paper, binding and boards were not included. As Internet readers---en as printers-buyers of The Plant are being spared these last two expenses."
Does this not seem non-sequitur to anyone else. The ebook will cost the same as the paper and ink version would at a bookstore, but somehow, King asserts that the internet reader is spared these expenses. Compared to what?
Academic eschatology (claiming that universities are going down the tubes) is an ancient sport. In 1776, Adam Smith complained in The Wealth of Nations that Oxford's new policy of paying salaries to its professors was sending university teaching to the dogs.
I don't see a big change here. MIT used to be a land-grant university in Massachusetts, but converted itself to a private institution largely on the strength of its ability to do joint-ventures with commercial firms. During the Cold War, MIT spun off private laboratories to do defense research and development and which continue to produce significant income for MIT. I don't see why Columbia's ventures into the marketplace are any different from MIT's stretching back over a century. Some of this history is described in Zachary G. Pascal's Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the Century.
In addition, I would note that while $100M that Columbia receives in patent royalties may seem like a lot, in an institution with annual gross revenues of a few billion dollars (mostly tuition), this is not a dog-wagging tail. This is especially true as most universities actually lose money on research, since providing the infrastructure costs more than grants bring in in indirect cost reimbursement (see below), and those that do make any significant money tend to make almost all of their money on one or two patents---so profit from research becomes a big crap-shoot. The real marketplace value of research to universities is as P.R.
University technology transfer offices are less important for making money for the university than for impressing superstar faculty whom the univeristy wants to hire and who want to know that if they come, the university will support them in their quest to make millions off their research. The millions do not, in general, materialize, but supporting these fantasies is an increasingly significant part of the hiring process.
Even more significant for a university, though, is attracting good students, and here research acts as a loss-leader, as the economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook describe in The Winner-Take-All-Society. The argument here is that good students, all other things being equal, would prefer to go to a university that produces a lot of Nobel Prizes, even if their tuition is helping subsidize the research (Frank and Cook argue unpersuasively that the increasing importance of research has driven hyperinflating college tuitions, but fail to account for the fact that four-year liberal arts colleges, where much less research is done, have suffered similar inflation). Again, there is nothing new in the.com world that we haven't seen before with the defense industry or biotechnology.
One of the best serious historical looks at the interaction of university research and the commercial sector is the first half of David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg's Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth. A more contemporary account of the cutting edge can be found in Lewis M. Branscomb's Industrializing Knowledge: University-Industry Linkages in Japan and the United States . Both books provide strong evidence that Katz's alarmism reflects neither anything fundamentally new nor anything so seriously alarming or threatening as he would have us believe.
I get uncomfortable when the geek community holds different standards for mainstream journalists versus 2600 regarding the hacker/cracker distinction. I may not have seen it, but I am unaware of the same kind of opprobrium being directed at 2600 for calling itself a hacker quarterly, when a significant fraction of its articles are pro-crime, as gets directed at more mainstream journalists when they use "hacker" in the same way 2600 does. I hope that if I am missing something important here, y'all will help me to understand my errors.
I have never published a book, but after talking to several people I know who have been decently successful authors, I learned that for them the services provided by the publisher in editing their books was very important. Stephen King may have his licks down well enough not to need an editor, but most authors desperately need a good editor to help them put their best work into a book.
As an amateur typographer, I also can see that having professional design and typesetting would help a lot, even for a book to be downloaded as PDF, but this is secondary by a long shot to the services of the editor.
I have other friends who have gone the DIY route with vanity presses and it's clear that their work would have benefitted greatly from a good editor (as well as more polished design and typography).
Where my friends tell me publishers definitely overpromised and underdelivered was in promoting their books. (But don't all authors feel this way?)
In other areas, particularly nonfiction, authors such as Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) and Jonathan Haar (A Civil Action) were able to write their excellent books only because publishers took risks and fronted them significant advances which they used to spend several years researching and writing their books. It's hard to see how such books could have been written if the authors tried to go the Stephen King route. Possibly a venture capital financing scheme could be worked out, but does anyone think this would be less predatory on authors than existing publishers?
There may be room for improvement in the publishing business, but it's not clear to me how professional editing will fit into the King-style world. I have read the comments on stephenking.com and don't see how his model addresses the services a good publishing house offers to less polished writers than King.
Ultimately, the RF spectrum offers of order 10 GBits per second shared among the whole population of a metropolitan area. It may be possible to go a little higher by subdividing the area into local cells, but this gives a ballpark sense of what the physical limits are.
The long-term prospect for wireless networking, then, looks to short-range optical transmission. This suffers significantly from its limitation to direct line-of-sight transmission, but benefits from the fact that receivers can be enormously more efficient and that the potentially available information bandwidth of visible light is of order 10000 times that of the rf/microwave spectrum. Ubiquitous inexpensive low-power optical transceivers would have the advantages of great bandwidth and short range---allowing the city to be subdivided into an enormous number of cells. Rural users would still need to bring in the signal with radiofrequency or land-line or else face difficulties communicating during inclement weather (light doesn't go through clouds and rain too effectively) but in a dense urban environment, short-range optical seems to hold a lot of promise for the long run.
Much of this is in the pipe-dream stage at the moment, but you might want to check out Light Pointe for a sense of what's available now and where industry sees this going.
I think you're confusing copyrights with patents here. I don't know if there is a special category for software, but generally copyrights run until 50 years after the death of the author, so I don't think anything's expiring anytime soon.
Max Perutz, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work in discovering the molecular structure of proteins, wroke an incisive commentary on the overstatement of the threat of biological terrorism in The New York Review of Books last April (Vol. XLVII, No. 6, 13 April 2000, pp. 44-9) while reviewing Ken Alibek's book Biohazard on his work in the Russian biological warfare program.
Perutz's conclusion is that many people previously involved in bio-warfare projects are now sowing FUD to enhance their own prestige and to generate opportunities in spurious counterterrorism (as Henry Sokolski notes below, fears of terrorism have generated $10 billion annually in spending by the U.S. government alone).
Last year President Clinton announced the US would spend $10 billion on countering terrorism, including biological and chemical threats, for fiscal year 2000. Would there be better things to spend such large sums of money on? As for biological attacks worldwide, seventy have occurred in the last century causing nine deaths, but only eighteen of these seventy attacks were made by terrorists. There are risks not only in underestimating the chemical and biological domestic terrorist threat, but in overestimating it as well.
One such risk, which should be of great concern to/.ers, is "Preemptively undermining U.S. civil liberties in the name of enhanced homeland defense." The United States has a long history of curtailing human rights and civil rights on the flimsiest pretexts when the words "National Security" are uttered. It would behoove/.ers to apply the same skepticism to FUD on bioterrorism as they do to FUD on cyberterrorism, media piracy, internet pornography, and the abuse of cryptography.
Slashdot Mirror
You do not need to be an anarchist to realize that property is not a natural state of affairs. Property is a "social construction" just like government. Once property did not exist. Later people decided that it would be a "good thing," as Martha Stewart might say, for people to be able to control other people and tangiable things so the idea of family was created wherein a man could be given government sanction of ownership over his tangiable possessions such as land, tools, slaves, wife, and children.
Later, people decided that owning other people might not be such a desirable thing so the definition of property was edited to exclude other people.
Much later than that, as printing became popular and lucrative, intellectual property was added to the list because people felt that it was desirable for authors and inventors to have some kind of property rights to their ideas and creative expressions.
Let's accept that although we may disagree with the definitions of property currently in vogue, there is no natural existence of property, so arguments based on nature won't pass muster. Further, arguments based on the historical concept of property will have to contend with the fact that for the first several thousand years of property, people could be considered property, which kind of dampens my desire to emulate those ideas.
The bright side, for those who would like to be able to take the work of others without being constrained by intellectual property laws (I too have chafed under the unfair laws that prohibit me from taking GPL code and wrapping it in my own closed source projects) is that property laws are no more nor less than arbitrary acts of legislation, which can be changed by amending our Constitution and persuading Congress to pass a few new laws. You can, however, find better fora in which to push for such action than bellyaching on /.
My bad. Somehow I didn't see those stories. Thanks for the correction.
Three years ago I saw a presentation on this technology at an ASM conference and one of the biggest applications was something that is not mentioned in the New Scientist article: Surgery.
It seems that surgeons, working as they do in a confined space covered with blood, use touch more than sight to figure out what they're doing and translating CAT scans to touch is non-intuitive. Moreover, for reconstructive surgery reorganizing three-dimensional tissue in the mind's eye can be complicated.
A number of medical centers have been working on using 3D printing to build models from CAT scans to assist surgeons in identifying tumors and for use as templates in reconstructive surgery. In the talk I saw, there were slides from the reconstrution of a baby girl's skull to correct a severe congenital abnormality. It was reported that instead of the usual three operations, the use of computer-generated templates, which were used in the OR to guide cutting and rebuilding the skull, allowed the surgeons to do everything in a single operation.
Another medical application that was discussed (relevant since the speaker came from Dayton and worked with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base) was the idea of rebuilding spinal vertibrae for pilots who punched their ejection seats without first ejecting the canopy.
Interesting that Stephen King says the two following things on his site about pricing "The Plant". First he says, "In other words, you complete financial liability for the first 8 installments of this story will be $13 or about the cost of a trade paperback or a hardcover novel offered at 40% discount in a chain bookstore." Later he says, "We have also had some complaints about the cost of ink and paper. On that subject, I have just two words: oh, please. One would think the books people bought in book stores were printed on air or that the cost of ink, paper, binding and boards were not included. As Internet readers---en as printers-buyers of The Plant are being spared these last two expenses." Does this not seem non-sequitur to anyone else. The ebook will cost the same as the paper and ink version would at a bookstore, but somehow, King asserts that the internet reader is spared these expenses. Compared to what?
In addition, I would note that while $100M that Columbia receives in patent royalties may seem like a lot, in an institution with annual gross revenues of a few billion dollars (mostly tuition), this is not a dog-wagging tail. This is especially true as most universities actually lose money on research, since providing the infrastructure costs more than grants bring in in indirect cost reimbursement (see below), and those that do make any significant money tend to make almost all of their money on one or two patents---so profit from research becomes a big crap-shoot. The real marketplace value of research to universities is as P.R.
University technology transfer offices are less important for making money for the university than for impressing superstar faculty whom the univeristy wants to hire and who want to know that if they come, the university will support them in their quest to make millions off their research. The millions do not, in general, materialize, but supporting these fantasies is an increasingly significant part of the hiring process.
Even more significant for a university, though, is attracting good students, and here research acts as a loss-leader, as the economists Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook describe in The Winner-Take-All-Society . The argument here is that good students, all other things being equal, would prefer to go to a university that produces a lot of Nobel Prizes, even if their tuition is helping subsidize the research (Frank and Cook argue unpersuasively that the increasing importance of research has driven hyperinflating college tuitions, but fail to account for the fact that four-year liberal arts colleges, where much less research is done, have suffered similar inflation). Again, there is nothing new in the .com world that we haven't seen before with the defense industry or biotechnology.
One of the best serious historical looks at the interaction of university research and the commercial sector is the first half of David C. Mowery and Nathan Rosenberg's Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth . A more contemporary account of the cutting edge can be found in Lewis M. Branscomb's Industrializing Knowledge: University-Industry Linkages in Japan and the United States . Both books provide strong evidence that Katz's alarmism reflects neither anything fundamentally new nor anything so seriously alarming or threatening as he would have us believe.
I get uncomfortable when the geek community holds different standards for mainstream journalists versus 2600 regarding the hacker/cracker distinction. I may not have seen it, but I am unaware of the same kind of opprobrium being directed at 2600 for calling itself a hacker quarterly, when a significant fraction of its articles are pro-crime, as gets directed at more mainstream journalists when they use "hacker" in the same way 2600 does. I hope that if I am missing something important here, y'all will help me to understand my errors.
As an amateur typographer, I also can see that having professional design and typesetting would help a lot, even for a book to be downloaded as PDF, but this is secondary by a long shot to the services of the editor.
I have other friends who have gone the DIY route with vanity presses and it's clear that their work would have benefitted greatly from a good editor (as well as more polished design and typography).
Where my friends tell me publishers definitely overpromised and underdelivered was in promoting their books. (But don't all authors feel this way?)
In other areas, particularly nonfiction, authors such as Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb) and Jonathan Haar (A Civil Action) were able to write their excellent books only because publishers took risks and fronted them significant advances which they used to spend several years researching and writing their books. It's hard to see how such books could have been written if the authors tried to go the Stephen King route. Possibly a venture capital financing scheme could be worked out, but does anyone think this would be less predatory on authors than existing publishers?
There may be room for improvement in the publishing business, but it's not clear to me how professional editing will fit into the King-style world. I have read the comments on stephenking.com and don't see how his model addresses the services a good publishing house offers to less polished writers than King.
The long-term prospect for wireless networking, then, looks to short-range optical transmission. This suffers significantly from its limitation to direct line-of-sight transmission, but benefits from the fact that receivers can be enormously more efficient and that the potentially available information bandwidth of visible light is of order 10000 times that of the rf/microwave spectrum. Ubiquitous inexpensive low-power optical transceivers would have the advantages of great bandwidth and short range---allowing the city to be subdivided into an enormous number of cells. Rural users would still need to bring in the signal with radiofrequency or land-line or else face difficulties communicating during inclement weather (light doesn't go through clouds and rain too effectively) but in a dense urban environment, short-range optical seems to hold a lot of promise for the long run.
Much of this is in the pipe-dream stage at the moment, but you might want to check out Light Pointe for a sense of what's available now and where industry sees this going.
I think you're confusing copyrights with patents here. I don't know if there is a special category for software, but generally copyrights run until 50 years after the death of the author, so I don't think anything's expiring anytime soon.
Perutz's conclusion is that many people previously involved in bio-warfare projects are now sowing FUD to enhance their own prestige and to generate opportunities in spurious counterterrorism (as Henry Sokolski notes below, fears of terrorism have generated $10 billion annually in spending by the U.S. government alone).
Perutz quotes an article by Henry Sokolski, the director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, saying:
One such risk, which should be of great concern to