Whether or not it's acceptable to you has only very limited bearing on whether it's legal or not. The laws surrounding access to computing resources are complicated, and again, per the article there's no actual legal precedent that weighs on whether the robots.txt mechanism has legal significance. It seems especially unclear that the robots.txt settings can be safely assumed to grant you entirely free reign to the data. After all, the most common purpose of robots.txt is to control access to search engine crawlers, and this guy's usage is quite different from that.
What if, in addition to the ROBOTS.TXT, there's a README.TXT file that specifies that automated downloads are permitted only for search indexing? Or, more applicable, a TOS.HTML in the top directory. It's well established that the mere ability to access a system is not permission to access that system. I don't think it's obvious that there's no responsibility to go further than ROBOTS.TXT to establish his permission to access it for a particular purpose.
Regarding the significance of robots.txt, maybe it is the law's deficiency, but I'm not going to volunteer to put my personal livelihood on the line to test that and I don't fault anyone else who's not willing to do that. Furthermore, I don't think it's obvious on its face that it is necessarily a "deficiency" of the law to require effort beyond complying with robots.txt to do what he was doing. There are non-trivial questions that need to be answered, and precedents other than customs (like robots.txt) and what "feels" right need to be considered. There is, after all, the question of whether the data he's scraped is owned by anyone, and if so whom, etc. I don't think it's a given that he'd win the case.
As to your second point, Facebook is quite welcome to grant an exception to their terms of service to anyone they want. So even if they consider Google's crawling to be a violation, they don't have any obligation to sue them. I'd guess he might have had some points in his favor (should he have contested this in court) if he could show that they were aware of his work and his intentions and they granted him permission to do so, but IANAL.
Anyway, my feeling is that most likely he should be able to do what he did, and that he probably would have been vindicated in the end. I just don't think it's a given, and if my lawyer told me "this is going to be expensive even IF you win," I'd probably act similarly to how he did.
Maybe so, but are you sure that robots.txt is actually a legally significant mechanism? Are you certain that, for example, it has legal precedence over a terms of service linked to from the customary home page for a domain? According to the article, this guy's lawyer advised him that that the significance of robots.txt has never been tested in court, and I can't blame him for deciding it's not worth risking his own livelihood to test this. Especially given that there's probably little real benefit for him if he does win. Sure, he gets to feel warm and fuzzy, and it's unarguably good for the rest of us to resolve that question, but it's hardly his responsibility to foot the bill for us all on that test.
Any single juror can pronounce the defendant "not guilty," and it would have the force of law behind it.
Not in the most places in the US he can't. The jury has to be in unanimous agreement for either conviction OR acquittal. One juror can at best produce a mistrial, which is not the same as an acquittal.
There is very, very little classified work at JPL. The vast majority of the jobs have no need for any sort of clearance. The few that require a clearance already have it, and there is no objection to this requirement or to the background checks for those who need the clearance. The problem is that they're essentially asking for a carte blanche to probe the backgrounds of employees who have explicitly been categorized as not needing special access. Furthermore, there were strong signs that absurd criteria based on the results of these background checks were going to be used to deny them.
I was affected by this as a graduate student who used to work at JPL. As you suggest, I would have changed projects rather than submit to this. Several high-profile scientists and engineers there made a similar decision, and they and others filed this suit. You can be flippant about it, but the work they do there is important, and it's awful, awful policy to force these people out over a ridiculous show of force like this. These people could make a lot more money working in the private sector, but they offer their talents toward projects that benefit us all. It takes a special kind of stupid to act like anyone's doing THEM a favor by "letting" them work there.
Ick, is that all? As I said, I took a really quick look. If they really did that to the close button.. wtf is all I can say. I've converted to OSX recently and the transition to buttons on the left wasn't so bad, but I agree with the other guy here---it's got to be a corner. Oh well...
This is long overdue. The brown theme was a major turnoff for me. It seems silly, I know, but the first impression is an important one. This was at least part of the reason I preferred Kubuntu. The quick screenshot looks a lot better to me.
And yes, of course you can change the colors, but there's a lot of value of a nice out-of-the-box experience. Developing your own color scheme is trickier than you'd think to get "right."
Nobody worth a damn uses, or should use, "The DNA profile matches this random man we plucked off the streets, therefore he did it."
"should [not] use" is not much of a comfort when they do it anyway.
Are you now saying that the hard facts that a DNA sample with a profile matching yours are a lie?
Not a lie, but if they're not presented correctly, they can be powerfully misleading. That's just as bad.
It either matches or it doesn't. There's no 'lying' involved there. You would be perfectly well to point out - perhaps citing the aforementioned data - that the DNA sample not only matches you, but a dozen other people as well.
Good luck, I hope the courts don't decide to prevent you from raising that fact. After all, you're not an approved expert witness. Courts have been known to limit what should be reasonable questions of accuracy/efficacy for techniques such as BAC tests and fingerprinting, and they're not showing much sign of being smarter when it comes to DNA evidence either.
But in any sane court case, just a "we found DNA, extracted a profile, and it matches this guy - we have no further evidence, we have no opportunity, no motive, no means, the guy lives 1500 miles away, he's on CCTV footage of an ATM machine by a bank just 30 minutes before the crime was committed and a bunch of coworkers and a bartender claiming he was in a bar having drinks there until at least 3 hours after the murder, but gosh darnit we have DNA!!!" isn't gonna cut it.
I don't find this very reassuring. Not every case is going to be that clear-cut. What if it's just a couple hours away and you happened to be home alone that night. The solution is, as you suggested to start with, that prosecutors should not misuse these techniques in blind searches. But the prosecutor's job is to convict people, so we need to be vigilant to be sure that they remain honest. That means raising hell when DNA (or any technology/method) shows signs of being misused. A guilty man going free is unfortunate, but it's not a gross miscarriage of justice. Using flimsy evidence to convict an innocent person, however, is.
Not if their contracts in the construction don't inform the artist that he's giving up his copyright. It's not as simple as "copyright should belong to the public because it's right," there's actually laws and standards for this kind of thing. In particular, ownership of an object decidedly does not grant the owner the right to reproduce it. So, in answer to your rhetorical questions (ignoring specific laws about preservation of memorials or the like), yes, the US could dismantle or destroy the work, and they could augment or modify the original. Neither of these rights in any way implies that they can also duplicate it.
Yes, there is something special: non-locality. You can pretty well look at a mechanical system and determine what the extent of the system that can be affected by that part is. Sure, there can be complicated interactions in a complex system, but generally the linkage is clear to an expert. It's much more difficult to constrain the interactions in a software system. This greatly increases the opportunity for unexpected catastrophic failure modes.
I have no probem believing that 25% of claims could be bogus, so on its face that's not really evidence of any misbehavior. There's very strong evidence that people are cheating the system (from the claim spikes), so it's unreasonable to expect the company to just take your word for it that your claim is valid (hint: I'm not talking about your phone, it's the generalized "your"). Without more information about the specifics of the rejections it's hard to evaluate whether they're being fair or not.
Well, for the purposes of verifying the speed of light without circularity, (in principle) you could construct a high-speed clock divider to divide the microwave signal down to a frequency you can measure using a pocket watch. Obviously whoever constructed the microwave knew the speed of light, but you don't need to assume it to make this measurement.
Since either path justifies a proportional response it does not matter which argument you make; ergo, the outcome is independent of the moral nature of the original action. If you steal then you can be fined, if you murder then you can be killed, if you kidnap then you can be imprisoned, etc., all without reference to anyone's personal moral code.
That is an unworkable basis for a system of laws. How do you define stealing without reference to a moral code? What is the basis for the original ownership if not some axiom that amounts to defining moral ownership? What if you murder someone because he is stealing from you? Are you to be killed? What if he's stealing food that you need to survive?
Relativism is great and all, but every society has some modicum of common morality. That is what ultimately defines what you consider to be rights that the laws will protect. Maybe in an ideal world, that morality would be shared and agreed upon by everyone, but in this world it doesn't. If you want to be a member of society, you need to compromise a bit. So does everyone else.
Those questions aren't (or weren't, I haven't been asked in a while) to help find dangerous items, they are to ensure that the airlines/law enforcement can hold you responsible for the contents of your luggage should they find such an item. If you try to claim that someone must have slipped it in when you weren't looking, they have you on record as affirming that there was no opportunity for that. At least that's the idea, given that they seem to have abandoned the practice in the last couple years, I gather it was pretty ineffective.
Fox can spin out all the "78% of people polled said they were happy with their coverage" pie charts all they like, and they are probably accurate - most people are happy right up until the point when they get sick and actually need to use it.
Exactly. Why do I have to pay for insurance at all, I never get sick?
Americans' (and probably other places, but I don't have as much of a sense of their societies) sense of planning for the future is pathetically bad and getting worse. It's a complete failure to grasp the importance of investing in the future, and is the same reason that we overspend our savings, don't plan for loss of job, etc, etc. I think it's because we've come through a century of prosperity where investments are unnecessary because of constant growth. There's no need to save when you are virtually guaranteed you can pick up a high-paying job when you need it. It makes us soft and stupid, because at some point that assumption will fail.
It is really cruel but some people should not have children.
There is no reasonable way to decide this for someone, except perhaps in cases of mental problems where caring for the child will not be a possibility. People with these diseases can have rewarding, meaningful lives and it's not your place, nor the government's place to decide whether someone should have a child. You can't draw a line and say "this amount of probable suffering is allowed."
It is a fact of life in this universe that some people will be in pain sometimes, some people will have bad luck. You cannot prevent this. I'll thank you not to try to live life for someone else.
You don't normally retract a paper simply because it's wrong. Even if you do everything correctly, statistics say that you expect to reach the wrong conclusion in some cases. It's apparently taken longer than you might think for the details of the fraudulent nature of the work to be concrete enough to warrant this unusual step.
This in and of itself is not a reason to doubt his research. You can do reasonable statistics with small samples, albeit with limited sensitivity to small effects. The problem is it was 12 who were not properly selected (as you mention), and later work with larger samples contradicted his results.
Yes, and the M&M story is also different because they documented and published their "failed" experiments correctly. That's textbook good science. Nearly every scientist has a preferred outcome for each of their experiments. He knows that finding a particular result will strengthen the evidence for his pet theory, or will prove the importance of other work he's doing, or the like. And like you say, there's nothing wrong with this if the scientists act ethically and openly and have the confidence to accept criticism of their work.
There's a difference though. There's a clear mechanism by which police presence deters crime. It's also a reasonable approach that balances its effectiveness with the amount of inconvenience it imposes. Finally, statistics about crime rates and about police deployments are available. None of these are true of the airline security measures: the recent extensions don't obviously address any real threats, the information you'd need to independently evaluate whether they are somehow effective is most certainly not available except to people with a vested interest in ensuring they're found to be effective, and based on extrapolations from past rates, the costs of these measures far, far, far exceeds the impact they have in terms of actual results. So I don't think comparisons to magic stones of tiger warding are at all unreasonable.
Well, let's bear in mind that copyright hasn't got anything to do with the quality of works. Copyrights are equally available for both works of high and low quality, and offer equal amounts of protection for each.
What you say is true, but that's not quite what I mean. The angle I have in mind is that thanks to copyright, a work has relatively more value to its creator than it would if it could be freely duplicated by others. This creates an opportunity for industries that might not exist otherwise. For example, if the movie industry were not able to generate huge amounts of revenue, I don't imagine that movie-making technology would be as advanced as it is today. This development benefits not only the huge mind-bogglingly expensive productions, but "trickles down" into the technologies that improve even the cheap camcorders that are an alternative.
If the public benefits the most by having multi-hundred-million dollar movies, and all the impositions that go with them in order to make their business model viable, then fine, I'm in favor of it. Or, if the public benefits the most by having a flood of cheap movies made by amateurs with camcorders and desktop video software, then fine, I'm in favor of it. There's no rule that says that we have to have mind-bogglingly expensive movies. Even if they are really great, if they come at too high a cost, we are literally better off without them.
Yes, I agree. It's great to recognize this, but you also need to recognize that making that determination is really fucking hard. That's part of what I'm getting at when I say one needs to understand the details of how copyright law fits into the environment. As I hinted above, a lot of the cheap camcorders and video software available to amateurs fell out of development for the big guns; a lot of the big guns get their start with the cheap camcorders and move up. And the public sure seems to enjoy the expensive movies. But sure, if it requires an unreasonable sacrifice, then we surely can survive without Avatar II (the Quickening) ["This time it's PERSONAL"] {NOW IN 4-D!! WITH SMELLIVISION!!}. It's "just" a matter of knowing what else we give up if that industry dries up.
No, it's not. Plus, even today, it usually isn't feasible. Some people manage it. I used to support myself as an artist, although the copyrights on my works were utterly irrelevant to everyone, and I never got or needed so much as a penny from them.
Well, again this is and isn't true. Narrowly, sure, most artists don't do well. But the movie industry and other "big business" art employs a lot of people in its productions, and you can include authors and other media in the equation. Further, even if they can't exclusively support themselves, having it be lucrative enough to be encouraging has some value.
In fact, copyright is a way to exploit authors for the benefit of the public.
Not sure what you mean. If you mean "exploit" as in to "fully utilize as a resource" then I would agree, but that doesn't seem to be what you say, since you definitely seem to mean this negatively. It seems to me that, in principle, copyright can be a reasonable bargain.
From your last paragraph (no quote), I think you and I see things in a pretty similar way. My suspicion is that copyrights will slowly sort themselves out into something reasonable, because I'm optimistic that technology will defeat backward-thinking regulatory schemes in the end. I do worry that the disconnect that's developing between the corporations/politicians and the average citizen and manifesting in the copyright wars is a sign of something more profoundly wrong with our political/economic system, but that's probably more paranoia than anything. I certainly don't mean to suggest that I believe a major revolution is required---I threw that in because it seems that many on/. DO think that, but few have enough background
Interesting questions. No doubt that the human/social aspects are what make certain properties so valuable. Throw in the "Happy Birthday" song as another example of something woven deeply into the fabric of American culture yet "owned" by a private party. It is easy to forget that somewhere along the line most of these things WERE the creation of someone (or a small group). Fundamentally I believe that it's not unreasonable to have a system in place that allows a creator to reap financial rewards for his creation, and that the reward for something that winds up so ubiquitous that we forget it was ever new reasonably ought to be pretty big. The trick is finding a way to do this that is consistent with the fact that preventing copies requires outrageous artificial limits to technology. The original concept of a "limited time" protection was pretty good thinking, it's a shame it's gotten out of hand. But even if the protections were in place for shorter times there'd still be hard questions about how to balance creators' against consumers' rights during whatever period copyright lasted.
The reason I think worthiness type discussions come up is that questions like these, about copyright and issues of freedom versus protection, ultimately are balancing acts where we make a social agreement to waive some freedoms (e.g., unfettered use of digital audio tools) to protect a market. It's hard to weigh that decision without regard for the product being protected. This sort of came up in one of the other subthreads (which got more than a bit derailed): who gets to decide how much reward is reasonable, and how do you reasonably protect that opportunity for the creator?
I probably didn't answer much of what you asked, but it's a lot more fun asking than answering, isn't it? Good night.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean they "can't do that"?
Whether or not it's acceptable to you has only very limited bearing on whether it's legal or not. The laws surrounding access to computing resources are complicated, and again, per the article there's no actual legal precedent that weighs on whether the robots.txt mechanism has legal significance. It seems especially unclear that the robots.txt settings can be safely assumed to grant you entirely free reign to the data. After all, the most common purpose of robots.txt is to control access to search engine crawlers, and this guy's usage is quite different from that.
What if, in addition to the ROBOTS.TXT, there's a README.TXT file that specifies that automated downloads are permitted only for search indexing? Or, more applicable, a TOS.HTML in the top directory. It's well established that the mere ability to access a system is not permission to access that system. I don't think it's obvious that there's no responsibility to go further than ROBOTS.TXT to establish his permission to access it for a particular purpose.
Regarding the significance of robots.txt, maybe it is the law's deficiency, but I'm not going to volunteer to put my personal livelihood on the line to test that and I don't fault anyone else who's not willing to do that. Furthermore, I don't think it's obvious on its face that it is necessarily a "deficiency" of the law to require effort beyond complying with robots.txt to do what he was doing. There are non-trivial questions that need to be answered, and precedents other than customs (like robots.txt) and what "feels" right need to be considered. There is, after all, the question of whether the data he's scraped is owned by anyone, and if so whom, etc. I don't think it's a given that he'd win the case.
As to your second point, Facebook is quite welcome to grant an exception to their terms of service to anyone they want. So even if they consider Google's crawling to be a violation, they don't have any obligation to sue them. I'd guess he might have had some points in his favor (should he have contested this in court) if he could show that they were aware of his work and his intentions and they granted him permission to do so, but IANAL.
Anyway, my feeling is that most likely he should be able to do what he did, and that he probably would have been vindicated in the end. I just don't think it's a given, and if my lawyer told me "this is going to be expensive even IF you win," I'd probably act similarly to how he did.
Maybe so, but are you sure that robots.txt is actually a legally significant mechanism? Are you certain that, for example, it has legal precedence over a terms of service linked to from the customary home page for a domain? According to the article, this guy's lawyer advised him that that the significance of robots.txt has never been tested in court, and I can't blame him for deciding it's not worth risking his own livelihood to test this. Especially given that there's probably little real benefit for him if he does win. Sure, he gets to feel warm and fuzzy, and it's unarguably good for the rest of us to resolve that question, but it's hardly his responsibility to foot the bill for us all on that test.
Any single juror can pronounce the defendant "not guilty," and it would have the force of law behind it.
Not in the most places in the US he can't. The jury has to be in unanimous agreement for either conviction OR acquittal. One juror can at best produce a mistrial, which is not the same as an acquittal.
There is very, very little classified work at JPL. The vast majority of the jobs have no need for any sort of clearance. The few that require a clearance already have it, and there is no objection to this requirement or to the background checks for those who need the clearance. The problem is that they're essentially asking for a carte blanche to probe the backgrounds of employees who have explicitly been categorized as not needing special access. Furthermore, there were strong signs that absurd criteria based on the results of these background checks were going to be used to deny them.
I was affected by this as a graduate student who used to work at JPL. As you suggest, I would have changed projects rather than submit to this. Several high-profile scientists and engineers there made a similar decision, and they and others filed this suit. You can be flippant about it, but the work they do there is important, and it's awful, awful policy to force these people out over a ridiculous show of force like this. These people could make a lot more money working in the private sector, but they offer their talents toward projects that benefit us all. It takes a special kind of stupid to act like anyone's doing THEM a favor by "letting" them work there.
Ick, is that all? As I said, I took a really quick look. If they really did that to the close button.. wtf is all I can say. I've converted to OSX recently and the transition to buttons on the left wasn't so bad, but I agree with the other guy here---it's got to be a corner. Oh well...
This is long overdue. The brown theme was a major turnoff for me. It seems silly, I know, but the first impression is an important one. This was at least part of the reason I preferred Kubuntu. The quick screenshot looks a lot better to me.
And yes, of course you can change the colors, but there's a lot of value of a nice out-of-the-box experience. Developing your own color scheme is trickier than you'd think to get "right."
Nobody worth a damn uses, or should use, "The DNA profile matches this random man we plucked off the streets, therefore he did it."
"should [not] use" is not much of a comfort when they do it anyway.
Are you now saying that the hard facts that a DNA sample with a profile matching yours are a lie?
Not a lie, but if they're not presented correctly, they can be powerfully misleading. That's just as bad.
It either matches or it doesn't. There's no 'lying' involved there. You would be perfectly well to point out - perhaps citing the aforementioned data - that the DNA sample not only matches you, but a dozen other people as well.
Good luck, I hope the courts don't decide to prevent you from raising that fact. After all, you're not an approved expert witness. Courts have been known to limit what should be reasonable questions of accuracy/efficacy for techniques such as BAC tests and fingerprinting, and they're not showing much sign of being smarter when it comes to DNA evidence either.
But in any sane court case, just a "we found DNA, extracted a profile, and it matches this guy - we have no further evidence, we have no opportunity, no motive, no means, the guy lives 1500 miles away, he's on CCTV footage of an ATM machine by a bank just 30 minutes before the crime was committed and a bunch of coworkers and a bartender claiming he was in a bar having drinks there until at least 3 hours after the murder, but gosh darnit we have DNA!!!" isn't gonna cut it.
I don't find this very reassuring. Not every case is going to be that clear-cut. What if it's just a couple hours away and you happened to be home alone that night. The solution is, as you suggested to start with, that prosecutors should not misuse these techniques in blind searches. But the prosecutor's job is to convict people, so we need to be vigilant to be sure that they remain honest. That means raising hell when DNA (or any technology/method) shows signs of being misused. A guilty man going free is unfortunate, but it's not a gross miscarriage of justice. Using flimsy evidence to convict an innocent person, however, is.
Not if their contracts in the construction don't inform the artist that he's giving up his copyright. It's not as simple as "copyright should belong to the public because it's right," there's actually laws and standards for this kind of thing. In particular, ownership of an object decidedly does not grant the owner the right to reproduce it. So, in answer to your rhetorical questions (ignoring specific laws about preservation of memorials or the like), yes, the US could dismantle or destroy the work, and they could augment or modify the original. Neither of these rights in any way implies that they can also duplicate it.
Yes, there is something special: non-locality. You can pretty well look at a mechanical system and determine what the extent of the system that can be affected by that part is. Sure, there can be complicated interactions in a complex system, but generally the linkage is clear to an expert. It's much more difficult to constrain the interactions in a software system. This greatly increases the opportunity for unexpected catastrophic failure modes.
I have no probem believing that 25% of claims could be bogus, so on its face that's not really evidence of any misbehavior. There's very strong evidence that people are cheating the system (from the claim spikes), so it's unreasonable to expect the company to just take your word for it that your claim is valid (hint: I'm not talking about your phone, it's the generalized "your"). Without more information about the specifics of the rejections it's hard to evaluate whether they're being fair or not.
Aggregation + discussion = value added.
Indirection = worthless.
Well, for the purposes of verifying the speed of light without circularity, (in principle) you could construct a high-speed clock divider to divide the microwave signal down to a frequency you can measure using a pocket watch. Obviously whoever constructed the microwave knew the speed of light, but you don't need to assume it to make this measurement.
Since either path justifies a proportional response it does not matter which argument you make; ergo, the outcome is independent of the moral nature of the original action. If you steal then you can be fined, if you murder then you can be killed, if you kidnap then you can be imprisoned, etc., all without reference to anyone's personal moral code.
That is an unworkable basis for a system of laws. How do you define stealing without reference to a moral code? What is the basis for the original ownership if not some axiom that amounts to defining moral ownership? What if you murder someone because he is stealing from you? Are you to be killed? What if he's stealing food that you need to survive?
Relativism is great and all, but every society has some modicum of common morality. That is what ultimately defines what you consider to be rights that the laws will protect. Maybe in an ideal world, that morality would be shared and agreed upon by everyone, but in this world it doesn't. If you want to be a member of society, you need to compromise a bit. So does everyone else.
The price cut could add momentum to a phone that, by one reckoning, costs only $49 unlocked.
And, by another reckoning, it actually saves you $5,000 and rescues your cat from a tree. Incidentally, both reckonings are fallacious.
I thought use of the presidential seal was restricted.
Common misconception. There is actually no presidential seal; it was replaced by a sea lion in 1963.
Those questions aren't (or weren't, I haven't been asked in a while) to help find dangerous items, they are to ensure that the airlines/law enforcement can hold you responsible for the contents of your luggage should they find such an item. If you try to claim that someone must have slipped it in when you weren't looking, they have you on record as affirming that there was no opportunity for that. At least that's the idea, given that they seem to have abandoned the practice in the last couple years, I gather it was pretty ineffective.
Fox can spin out all the "78% of people polled said they were happy with their coverage" pie charts all they like, and they are probably accurate - most people are happy right up until the point when they get sick and actually need to use it.
Exactly. Why do I have to pay for insurance at all, I never get sick?
Americans' (and probably other places, but I don't have as much of a sense of their societies) sense of planning for the future is pathetically bad and getting worse. It's a complete failure to grasp the importance of investing in the future, and is the same reason that we overspend our savings, don't plan for loss of job, etc, etc. I think it's because we've come through a century of prosperity where investments are unnecessary because of constant growth. There's no need to save when you are virtually guaranteed you can pick up a high-paying job when you need it. It makes us soft and stupid, because at some point that assumption will fail.
It is really cruel but some people should not have children.
There is no reasonable way to decide this for someone, except perhaps in cases of mental problems where caring for the child will not be a possibility. People with these diseases can have rewarding, meaningful lives and it's not your place, nor the government's place to decide whether someone should have a child. You can't draw a line and say "this amount of probable suffering is allowed."
It is a fact of life in this universe that some people will be in pain sometimes, some people will have bad luck. You cannot prevent this. I'll thank you not to try to live life for someone else.
You don't normally retract a paper simply because it's wrong. Even if you do everything correctly, statistics say that you expect to reach the wrong conclusion in some cases. It's apparently taken longer than you might think for the details of the fraudulent nature of the work to be concrete enough to warrant this unusual step.
His sample size was 12
This in and of itself is not a reason to doubt his research. You can do reasonable statistics with small samples, albeit with limited sensitivity to small effects. The problem is it was 12 who were not properly selected (as you mention), and later work with larger samples contradicted his results.
Yes, and the M&M story is also different because they documented and published their "failed" experiments correctly. That's textbook good science. Nearly every scientist has a preferred outcome for each of their experiments. He knows that finding a particular result will strengthen the evidence for his pet theory, or will prove the importance of other work he's doing, or the like. And like you say, there's nothing wrong with this if the scientists act ethically and openly and have the confidence to accept criticism of their work.
There's a difference though. There's a clear mechanism by which police presence deters crime. It's also a reasonable approach that balances its effectiveness with the amount of inconvenience it imposes. Finally, statistics about crime rates and about police deployments are available. None of these are true of the airline security measures: the recent extensions don't obviously address any real threats, the information you'd need to independently evaluate whether they are somehow effective is most certainly not available except to people with a vested interest in ensuring they're found to be effective, and based on extrapolations from past rates, the costs of these measures far, far, far exceeds the impact they have in terms of actual results. So I don't think comparisons to magic stones of tiger warding are at all unreasonable.
Well, let's bear in mind that copyright hasn't got anything to do with the quality of works. Copyrights are equally available for both works of high and low quality, and offer equal amounts of protection for each.
What you say is true, but that's not quite what I mean. The angle I have in mind is that thanks to copyright, a work has relatively more value to its creator than it would if it could be freely duplicated by others. This creates an opportunity for industries that might not exist otherwise. For example, if the movie industry were not able to generate huge amounts of revenue, I don't imagine that movie-making technology would be as advanced as it is today. This development benefits not only the huge mind-bogglingly expensive productions, but "trickles down" into the technologies that improve even the cheap camcorders that are an alternative.
If the public benefits the most by having multi-hundred-million dollar movies, and all the impositions that go with them in order to make their business model viable, then fine, I'm in favor of it. Or, if the public benefits the most by having a flood of cheap movies made by amateurs with camcorders and desktop video software, then fine, I'm in favor of it. There's no rule that says that we have to have mind-bogglingly expensive movies. Even if they are really great, if they come at too high a cost, we are literally better off without them.
Yes, I agree. It's great to recognize this, but you also need to recognize that making that determination is really fucking hard. That's part of what I'm getting at when I say one needs to understand the details of how copyright law fits into the environment. As I hinted above, a lot of the cheap camcorders and video software available to amateurs fell out of development for the big guns; a lot of the big guns get their start with the cheap camcorders and move up. And the public sure seems to enjoy the expensive movies. But sure, if it requires an unreasonable sacrifice, then we surely can survive without Avatar II (the Quickening) ["This time it's PERSONAL"] {NOW IN 4-D!! WITH SMELLIVISION!!}. It's "just" a matter of knowing what else we give up if that industry dries up.
No, it's not. Plus, even today, it usually isn't feasible. Some people manage it. I used to support myself as an artist, although the copyrights on my works were utterly irrelevant to everyone, and I never got or needed so much as a penny from them.
Well, again this is and isn't true. Narrowly, sure, most artists don't do well. But the movie industry and other "big business" art employs a lot of people in its productions, and you can include authors and other media in the equation. Further, even if they can't exclusively support themselves, having it be lucrative enough to be encouraging has some value.
In fact, copyright is a way to exploit authors for the benefit of the public.
Not sure what you mean. If you mean "exploit" as in to "fully utilize as a resource" then I would agree, but that doesn't seem to be what you say, since you definitely seem to mean this negatively. It seems to me that, in principle, copyright can be a reasonable bargain.
From your last paragraph (no quote), I think you and I see things in a pretty similar way. My suspicion is that copyrights will slowly sort themselves out into something reasonable, because I'm optimistic that technology will defeat backward-thinking regulatory schemes in the end. I do worry that the disconnect that's developing between the corporations/politicians and the average citizen and manifesting in the copyright wars is a sign of something more profoundly wrong with our political/economic system, but that's probably more paranoia than anything. I certainly don't mean to suggest that I believe a major revolution is required---I threw that in because it seems that many on /. DO think that, but few have enough background
Interesting questions. No doubt that the human/social aspects are what make certain properties so valuable. Throw in the "Happy Birthday" song as another example of something woven deeply into the fabric of American culture yet "owned" by a private party. It is easy to forget that somewhere along the line most of these things WERE the creation of someone (or a small group). Fundamentally I believe that it's not unreasonable to have a system in place that allows a creator to reap financial rewards for his creation, and that the reward for something that winds up so ubiquitous that we forget it was ever new reasonably ought to be pretty big. The trick is finding a way to do this that is consistent with the fact that preventing copies requires outrageous artificial limits to technology. The original concept of a "limited time" protection was pretty good thinking, it's a shame it's gotten out of hand. But even if the protections were in place for shorter times there'd still be hard questions about how to balance creators' against consumers' rights during whatever period copyright lasted.
The reason I think worthiness type discussions come up is that questions like these, about copyright and issues of freedom versus protection, ultimately are balancing acts where we make a social agreement to waive some freedoms (e.g., unfettered use of digital audio tools) to protect a market. It's hard to weigh that decision without regard for the product being protected. This sort of came up in one of the other subthreads (which got more than a bit derailed): who gets to decide how much reward is reasonable, and how do you reasonably protect that opportunity for the creator?
I probably didn't answer much of what you asked, but it's a lot more fun asking than answering, isn't it? Good night.