Assembler for Assembly Line Workers?
C for the blind? Pascal for lamb lovers? Java for the sleepy? Ada for the adled? Perl for oyster divers? Lisp for speech therapists? Fortran for whom?
Look folks... the distribution of general inteillegence and "capacity" will always and forever be distributed on a bell curve.
The productivity of the economy will probably continue to grow slowly.
Those of you who have got the good in the brain will grab the cash.
The main secular trend may be the concentration of real innovation and real creativity and thus perhaps real wealth among those who are at the far end of the bell curve.
Will the merely intelligent, you know, smarter than 90% of the population, but not smarter than another 10% of the population, have the skills needed to do something genuinely valuable?
All human languages have always been free and open source. Even new invented languages like Esperanto are free and open source. Intellectual property laws were never intended to protect language and grammar.
Do you believe that Microsoft or any other company should be able to invent, promulgate and own an entire human language and grammar? Why?
Should this principle be extended to other technical languages and grammars?
Given that intellectual property ownership is justified by the need to provide an incentive to create new ideas, what is your view of the of the appropriate time duration of intellectual property ownership? Lifetime of human inventor/creator? Fixed period of years? Indefinite?
Is there a coherent rationale for duration of ownership other than arbitrary legistlative choice?
Also, does IP ownership serve other goals (have other justifications) besides fostering innovation, that might be met by other means more effectively?
That's interesting...(I'm no lawyer, although I do play one on TV) its a little like the distinction between...
Marriage law (you get married and all the usual laws apply...)
and an idea of
Contractual Relaitonships (you contract with any person and all the terms of the relationship and its termination are negotiated in advance and described in the contract subject only to standards of interpretation and general principles of contract law.
So you favor a veiw of "free to use" but "all existing legal requirements apply"... sort of like a standard marriage with all existing marriage laws applying.
The alternative would be that each use is subject to the terms negotiated in each case.... like a prenuptial agreement perhaps... or like any sale of real property.
That does seem like a useful distinction to make, and I do see the logic for enabling use (subject to payment requirements.)
Actually, since property law is excercised within a legal framework, each sale has many standard features.... and on the other hand, since liability law would seem to inevitably have "deviant cases" where the necessity of payment or the extent of payment came into dispute... perhaps these are not really pure types, but more two ends of a spectrum?
You also seem to be saying that in a liability context you would much more rarely get to enforcement because (1) compliance is easy (?); and (2) because the time frame where compliance is required is limited...(?).
---
I realize that this is late in the thread lessig, and perhaps beyond the scope of your interest, but what do you think of the idea of limiting licensing rights to the actual creator(s) but in some way keeping the right of ownership from moving beyond the actual human creators of an idea?
Is that too absurd to consider?
Too severe a limitation on the realizaiton of the economic value of new ideas?
I put "owernership" in quotes because I don't mean literal ownership.... I mean that the people through its government establishes the conditions for wealth creation, and therefore rightly owns part of the fruits of that wealth and has every right to tax that wealth and income and to limit the political power of the wealth accumulating and income generating organizations known as "corporations."
I doubt that will satisfy you... but I'm not talking about "state owned" corporations... I'm talking about the fact that because the corporation only exists as a government defined, government licensed entity (typically formally incorporated in a state, such as Deleware)... because it exists in its limited liability form as a result of LAW, and represents a privillige (limited liability) not a RIGHT, the privillige of limited responsibility should come with certain responsibilities... and those responsibilities include payment of sufficient taxes to enable the social infrastructure to flourish, and the responsibility to stay out of politics.
Again, I doubt that this will satisfy you, but it sure satisfyies me.
Well I think my pessimism is "rational". I consistently observe that corporate power is not opposed, and in fact is justified in multiple forms.
By social democrat I mean simply that I believe that a strong state is needed to defend people against, but certainly not to eliminate, corporations. And by democrat I mean supporting one person one vote, not one dollar one vote.
As for IP, I think that it is a legitimate individual right... for a reasonable period of time... whether a decade or a lifetime I don't know... but that when an idea's human creator dies or passes on, that idea becomes the property of "the world", "human kind", and should not be asignable. I take that to be Lessig's point about the framer's being anti-publisher and proauthor, and that makes sense to me.
"if it gets to the point where the system is really concentrating power in the hands of a minority, people won't stand for it. You might think that's the case now, but it isn't. The majority of the US is now bought into the system through their 401k, or because they work for a corporation."
If you don't understand that this has already happened, I'm sorry for you. Precisely because the majority of the US has been SOLD (or as you say "bought in" but the truth is SOLD, as in sold a bill of goods) on the ownership of stock as the key to their future, instead of on the collective national "ownership" of the instruments of wealth production as a key to their retirement, the country is highly "bought in" to a system and can't afford to change it, or challenge it. Hell, I can't afford to challenge it either... my retirement is tied up in the stock market too. My retirement assets (such as they are) are tied up in companies that buy and sell intellectual property, and I'm dependent on the corporate system as much as the next guy.
But the first step to changing that is to articulate a viable alternative... democratic control in place of corporate control of the nation. One reason I'm pessimistic is because I and others like me are COMPLICIT in the system that we ought by rights to oppose.
That's just another way of saying there are no easy answers.
Yes yes... but that was merely an effort to overthrow a system of racist discrimination founded in unreasoning hatred....
Capitalism, I would politely put to you, is made of MUCH stronger stuff....
The battle in the south was a battle against a power structure that was peripheral to the capitalist economy of the industrialized north.
If you plan to take on the ownership of ideas you are aiming your cannons right between the eyes of Bill Gates, Intel, and the whole power structure of the industrialized nations of the west... not just some weak biggotted southern backwater states.
This is a whole different ball game.
Not that I think people should try to wrest power back from corporations... but I just think, fear, and believe that it is too late. Their lock on power is overwhelming. You can't write laws that harm property interests in the US Senate, including IP property interests because you can't be a US senator unless you have bought into the corporate agenda and promissed to support it down the line.
I might sound like some communist, but I am most certainly not that. I'm just a simple social democrat, and unfortunately very pessimistic about the eroding political power of "the people".
...sounds like a formula for a "who started it" dispute in court... with all the liklihood of success now associated with figuring out whether Palestinians or Israelis are the "real" agressors.
Sure change the incentives, but I still don't see that the situation is any different when someone violates the law by using without credit or payment.
I apreciate that you are trying to think outside of the box, but I think the box is a tough one to get outside of.
Re:Newsflash--Lessig Hates IP
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
istartedi,
Do you have any idea what kind of revolution would be required to eliminate "corporate personhood"?
Such an idea would die laughing on the floor of the Judiciary committee. Because limited liability corporations are persons you have to sue them... their board members and officers are not personally liable for their actions by and large.
If you say the corporations are not the legally responsible party, you are restoring a world of direct personal ownership and business partnerships in which owners become personally liable for what is done by the company.....
Needless to say there isn't a chance in hell that that will ever come to pass.... For one thing, in extremis, it would mean that every stock owner could be sued for the actions of the company he held stock in!!!!
Common sense didn't help you understand this issue... so I'd suggest that you need a little more than common sense to deal with IP issues.
Corporations have "personhood" and their officers limited liability in theory to spur business... in practice it enables all sorts of venal things to be done by people who are not themselves held personally responsible.... its the core of modern capitalism. To destroy it you would need a revolution.
So yes, as a practical matter, it is unthinkable that it would really happen.... that battle is already over and lost.
"restricting and ultimately eliminating donations to political parties made on behalf of corporations. After all, corporations aren't real citizens so it makes little sense to afford them full rights as citizens"
You must be kidding? I'm telling you the system is already bought and sold. The fact that it makes "little sense" is quite irrelevant. Exxon and Microsoft OWN the Senate already... who is going to vote against that cozy relationship? And Exxon and Microsoft and many others want corporations to own intellectual property.... and they will.
And the monopoly concentration of power will continue.... look what happened to the effort to break up Microsoft? The corporations got their man in the office, and the "penalty" is now going to be that lots of poor children have to learn to use Microsoft software!
Microsoft must be saying.... please! penalize us again!
"You deserve more than those morons who drank and partied their way through business school and now control your career because they accidentally discovered strength in fraternity."
Accident or not, social skills and social relationships (Clinton skill based version or W. Bush inherited version.. they both work) are the source of all power, and the only talent that really matters in life. To be a geek is to live in ignorance or disbelief of this fundamental truth.
"However, to have "CAN" based laws such that anyone can use what good you have done, so long as they give you proper credit and reward. Perhaps based upon a relative percentage of the profits one makes in using your good. Or perhas this is a probelm area the public can better solve? see below! "
That SOUNDS great... except that when someone doesn't give you credit or reward, they face fines, penalities and lots of "CANNOT" restrictions, no?
Having laws that sound nicer doesn't feel like a solution of any useful sort.
If there are laws then there is enforcement... and enforcement is inherently nasty and unpleasant... but the existence of enforcement is the difference between
"pleasant recommendations for better living" and (say) "federal law, enforcable by big nasty penalities and jail time."
While arguments from original intent are usually not productive... the framers were many other things too that we don't want to be... that is an interesting observation.
For me the fundamental issue that libertarians and "techies" miss consistently is the sheer power in a financial sense to be sure, but also in a structural sense (which I take to be the focus of your book) of technological innovation.
When you write the language of communication you own culture... and the more levels of language you write, from compiler to web browser standards, the more of it you own.
In my old fashioned democratic socialist way of thinking only a strong central state has the possibility of resisting that kind of power... and only if elections and democracy can be structured to provide a power base independent of the primary benificiaries of the structural power of technical standards and languages....
This implies campaign financing by the public, free media access time... all sorts of things to enable individual voice to be heard over the structurally overwhelming power of corporate voice.
Currently of course not only is the country being overrun by the structural control exerted by big technology players, but in a very traditional way Washington DC is being controlled by their dollars and agenda setting capacity.
I find it amusing or sad when libertarians want to further reduce the power of DC and turn it into a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America... yet this is seriously proposed as a solution. They are fighting the wrong battle.
The battle should be for a strong central government capable of taking on corporate interests because it better reflects the voice of the public (the "unhegemonized" public we hope... if it still exists). However I fear the hour is very late.
In the support for the tech industry and the disdain for DC I see the new corporate fascism rapidly rising... OF COURSE it is not the old fascism. It will be new, but it will share the absolutely dominant power of business interests in all aspects of policy, including new ways of controlling political culture that make not only resistance, but the idea of resistance, all but unthinkable.
I don't mean to be appocolypitc (however you spell it...) but I just don't see the power base that can resist corporate power.... and I don't know how to build it. The Nader effort demonstrated if anything people already believe in and accept the hegemonization of their political lives by the corporations who employ them (and fire them at will.)
Is there a place to stand and rebuild a counterbalance to corporatism? An open question I think.
Re:Better jurisprudence, not fewer laws
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just to hack away at the notion of ownership concentration a little more, it does seem intuitive that an individual person could "own" an idea, at least while he or she lives.
That limits the concentration of original ideas to the a density equivalent to the number of original ideas a person can come up with in his/her lifetime.
Corporate ownership on the other hand, or the resale or inheritance of owned ideas seems to be the real problem. If ideas are freely transferable property, concentration becomes inevitable...
Concentrate enough of them and you can easily own culture and political thought itself.
The idea of a corporation as a legal person seems to me, in my innocence, to be the root of much evil.
Individual IP ownership is a potentially "humanizing" and just construct... group ownership, corporate ownership, inheritance of ideas... these things seem to be fatal trends....
So Dr. Lessig, what's your view of the concentration of IP ownership?
Sorry but I haven't read the book yet.
It seems to me that since ideas actually shape the physical architecture of the brain and the relationships between its parts, learning itself is a kind of copyright violation...
It's only because so many copyrights are violated that learning is possible... its too difficult to enforce the infringement.
But concentration of ownership... (imagine Mircrosoft owned private school systems.... teaching a Microsoft curriculum...) seems very dangerous... more so than concentration of ownership of physical assets.
Can a person's thoughts be owned? A whole culture?
on
The Future of Ideas
·
· Score: 1
If a person is educated using copyrighted material, and just to make it more pointed, that copyrighted material is owned largely by one large media conglomerate, is it not the case that most or all of their thoughts are simply rearrangments of ideas "owned" by another party?
And in that case does their intellectual output not become a wholly or partially owned product of the company that provided the great bulk of the words, patterns and ideas that shaped their brain?
The idea of "idea" ownership is terribly insidious, but it is wholly consistent with the logic of capitalism.
The best argument for a strong state capable of resisting the encroachment of the private sector on culture, history, and ideas is that a strong counterweight is needed to resist the tendency of private parties to own what "should" be the collective property of peoples and of humanity.
It's still windy and wet.
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
The main reasons that people don't commute on motorcyles and bikes are:
1 Too windy... messes up their hair and clothes.
2 Too wet and too cold when the weather is bad.
3 They don't like the idea of getting hit by cars.
This "IT" solves none of this... you're still riding around under the sky, cold and wet and totally vulnerable to getting hit by bigger things.
Still, of course I'd love to try one. It looks totally fun.
electronic medical records face similar issues
on
Human Markup Language
·
· Score: 1
In a sense this is like the problem of medical informatics and the electronic patient record... how do you organize data about a person so that is private and accessible, and captures all of the important facts about a person.... I can see where this project would have a lot to learn from the effort to create an electronic medical record, and vice versa.
I don't understand why anyone claims that it would be less distracting to have words emblazoned (good word for lazers on the retna, no?) on the back of your eyeballs would be LESS distracting than trying to cognitively process words on a screen just below the object of your attention out in the world.
The only difference is that you have to move your eyeballs and shift focus to look at a screen, but most of the shift that has to occur is an ATTENTIONAL shift, from image/object processing, to linguistic processing.
Furthermore your eyes are busing darting around to create the illusion of a gingle unmoving still world... Some people have tried this, so it must work, but I would think that an image that was remaining still on one part of the retna would not necessarily seem to remain still as the eye moves to capture features in the world.... At the very least I can imagine a huge headache as the apparent RELATIONSHIP of the words and the background world shifts as the eyeball moves to a different feature in the external world....
Again, I know people have tried this, and maybe this isn't a problem, but the basic situation of needing to shift from driving a car/airplane or navigating obstacles in 3d space to processing words seems unchanged whether the words are on the eyeball or on a screen just below the field of vision....
Slashdot Mirror
"Unfortunately, checking their website shows that only business machines will have a Linux option; home machines are still WinXP only."
The last thing "linux needs" right now is a bunch of unhappy home users with an OS that isn't quite ready for a casual user.... And it just isn't.
Assembler for Assembly Line Workers?
C for the blind? Pascal for lamb lovers? Java for the sleepy? Ada for the adled? Perl for oyster divers? Lisp for speech therapists? Fortran for whom?
Never mind.
What won't I be able to do with a bsd desktop/workstation that will make me wish I had stuck with linux?
Look folks... the distribution of general inteillegence and "capacity" will always and forever be distributed on a bell curve.
The productivity of the economy will probably continue to grow slowly.
Those of you who have got the good in the brain will grab the cash.
The main secular trend may be the concentration of real innovation and real creativity and thus perhaps real wealth among those who are at the far end of the bell curve.
Will the merely intelligent, you know, smarter than 90% of the population, but not smarter than another 10% of the population, have the skills needed to do something genuinely valuable?
Nobody reads the LA Times online... but I get it in my driveway every day. Its an underappreciated paper.
An operating system is a language and a grammar.
All human languages have always been free and open source. Even new invented languages like Esperanto are free and open source. Intellectual property laws were never intended to protect language and grammar.
Do you believe that Microsoft or any other company should be able to invent, promulgate and own an entire human language and grammar? Why?
Should this principle be extended to other technical languages and grammars?
Lessig,
Given that intellectual property ownership is justified by the need to provide an incentive to create new ideas, what is your view of the of the appropriate time duration of intellectual property ownership? Lifetime of human inventor/creator? Fixed period of years? Indefinite?
Is there a coherent rationale for duration of ownership other than arbitrary legistlative choice?
Also, does IP ownership serve other goals (have other justifications) besides fostering innovation, that might be met by other means more effectively?
Uh... can someone comment on mirrors?
Like if I make a really shiny tank, can I drive around and be impervious to mean old high energy lazers? Why not?
What about shiny shiny mortar shells? Could they be safe?
thank you and goodnight!
That's interesting...(I'm no lawyer, although I do play one on TV) its a little like the distinction between...
Marriage law (you get married and all the usual laws apply...)
and an idea of
Contractual Relaitonships (you contract with any person and all the terms of the relationship and its termination are negotiated in advance and described in the contract subject only to standards of interpretation and general principles of contract law.
So you favor a veiw of "free to use" but "all existing legal requirements apply"... sort of like a standard marriage with all existing marriage laws applying.
The alternative would be that each use is subject to the terms negotiated in each case.... like a prenuptial agreement perhaps... or like any sale of real property.
That does seem like a useful distinction to make, and I do see the logic for enabling use (subject to payment requirements.)
Actually, since property law is excercised within a legal framework, each sale has many standard features.... and on the other hand, since liability law would seem to inevitably have "deviant cases" where the necessity of payment or the extent of payment came into dispute... perhaps these are not really pure types, but more two ends of a spectrum?
You also seem to be saying that in a liability context you would much more rarely get to enforcement because (1) compliance is easy (?); and (2) because the time frame where compliance is required is limited...(?).
---
I realize that this is late in the thread lessig, and perhaps beyond the scope of your interest, but what do you think of the idea of limiting licensing rights to the actual creator(s) but in some way keeping the right of ownership from moving beyond the actual human creators of an idea?
Is that too absurd to consider?
Too severe a limitation on the realizaiton of the economic value of new ideas?
I put "owernership" in quotes because I don't mean literal ownership.... I mean that the people through its government establishes the conditions for wealth creation, and therefore rightly owns part of the fruits of that wealth and has every right to tax that wealth and income and to limit the political power of the wealth accumulating and income generating organizations known as "corporations."
I doubt that will satisfy you... but I'm not talking about "state owned" corporations... I'm talking about the fact that because the corporation only exists as a government defined, government licensed entity (typically formally incorporated in a state, such as Deleware)... because it exists in its limited liability form as a result of LAW, and represents a privillige (limited liability) not a RIGHT, the privillige of limited responsibility should come with certain responsibilities... and those responsibilities include payment of sufficient taxes to enable the social infrastructure to flourish, and the responsibility to stay out of politics.
Again, I doubt that this will satisfy you, but it sure satisfyies me.
Well I think my pessimism is "rational". I consistently observe that corporate power is not opposed, and in fact is justified in multiple forms.
By social democrat I mean simply that I believe that a strong state is needed to defend people against, but certainly not to eliminate, corporations. And by democrat I mean supporting one person one vote, not one dollar one vote.
As for IP, I think that it is a legitimate individual right... for a reasonable period of time... whether a decade or a lifetime I don't know... but that when an idea's human creator dies or passes on, that idea becomes the property of "the world", "human kind", and should not be asignable. I take that to be Lessig's point about the framer's being anti-publisher and proauthor, and that makes sense to me.
"if it gets to the point where the system is really concentrating power in the hands of a minority, people won't stand for it. You might think that's the case now, but it isn't. The majority of the US is now bought into the system through their 401k, or because they work for a corporation."
If you don't understand that this has already happened, I'm sorry for you. Precisely because the majority of the US has been SOLD (or as you say "bought in" but the truth is SOLD, as in sold a bill of goods) on the ownership of stock as the key to their future, instead of on the collective national "ownership" of the instruments of wealth production as a key to their retirement, the country is highly "bought in" to a system and can't afford to change it, or challenge it. Hell, I can't afford to challenge it either... my retirement is tied up in the stock market too. My retirement assets (such as they are) are tied up in companies that buy and sell intellectual property, and I'm dependent on the corporate system as much as the next guy.
But the first step to changing that is to articulate a viable alternative... democratic control in place of corporate control of the nation. One reason I'm pessimistic is because I and others like me are COMPLICIT in the system that we ought by rights to oppose.
That's just another way of saying there are no easy answers.
...I meant to say "not that people SHOULDN'T try to wrest power back..."
typing error
Yes yes... but that was merely an effort to overthrow a system of racist discrimination founded in unreasoning hatred....
Capitalism, I would politely put to you, is made of MUCH stronger stuff....
The battle in the south was a battle against a power structure that was peripheral to the capitalist economy of the industrialized north.
If you plan to take on the ownership of ideas you are aiming your cannons right between the eyes of Bill Gates, Intel, and the whole power structure of the industrialized nations of the west... not just some weak biggotted southern backwater states.
This is a whole different ball game.
Not that I think people should try to wrest power back from corporations... but I just think, fear, and believe that it is too late. Their lock on power is overwhelming. You can't write laws that harm property interests in the US Senate, including IP property interests because you can't be a US senator unless you have bought into the corporate agenda and promissed to support it down the line.
I might sound like some communist, but I am most certainly not that. I'm just a simple social democrat, and unfortunately very pessimistic about the eroding political power of "the people".
...sounds like a formula for a "who started it" dispute in court... with all the liklihood of success now associated with figuring out whether Palestinians or Israelis are the "real" agressors.
Sure change the incentives, but I still don't see that the situation is any different when someone violates the law by using without credit or payment.
I apreciate that you are trying to think outside of the box, but I think the box is a tough one to get outside of.
istartedi,
Do you have any idea what kind of revolution would be required to eliminate "corporate personhood"?
Such an idea would die laughing on the floor of the Judiciary committee. Because limited liability corporations are persons you have to sue them... their board members and officers are not personally liable for their actions by and large.
If you say the corporations are not the legally responsible party, you are restoring a world of direct personal ownership and business partnerships in which owners become personally liable for what is done by the company.....
Needless to say there isn't a chance in hell that that will ever come to pass.... For one thing, in extremis, it would mean that every stock owner could be sued for the actions of the company he held stock in!!!!
Common sense didn't help you understand this issue... so I'd suggest that you need a little more than common sense to deal with IP issues.
Corporations have "personhood" and their officers limited liability in theory to spur business... in practice it enables all sorts of venal things to be done by people who are not themselves held personally responsible.... its the core of modern capitalism. To destroy it you would need a revolution.
So yes, as a practical matter, it is unthinkable that it would really happen.... that battle is already over and lost.
"restricting and ultimately eliminating donations to political parties made on behalf of corporations. After all, corporations aren't real citizens so it makes little sense to afford them full rights as citizens"
You must be kidding? I'm telling you the system is already bought and sold. The fact that it makes "little sense" is quite irrelevant. Exxon and Microsoft OWN the Senate already... who is going to vote against that cozy relationship? And Exxon and Microsoft and many others want corporations to own intellectual property.... and they will.
And the monopoly concentration of power will continue.... look what happened to the effort to break up Microsoft? The corporations got their man in the office, and the "penalty" is now going to be that lots of poor children have to learn to use Microsoft software!
Microsoft must be saying.... please! penalize us again!
"You deserve more than those morons who drank and partied their way through business school and now control your career because they accidentally discovered strength in fraternity."
Accident or not, social skills and social relationships (Clinton skill based version or W. Bush inherited version.. they both work) are the source of all power, and the only talent that really matters in life. To be a geek is to live in ignorance or disbelief of this fundamental truth.
"However, to have "CAN" based laws such that anyone can use what good you have done, so long as they give you proper credit and reward. Perhaps based upon a relative percentage of the profits one makes in using your good. Or perhas this is a probelm area the public can better solve? see below! "
That SOUNDS great... except that when someone doesn't give you credit or reward, they face fines, penalities and lots of "CANNOT" restrictions, no?
Having laws that sound nicer doesn't feel like a solution of any useful sort.
If there are laws then there is enforcement... and enforcement is inherently nasty and unpleasant... but the existence of enforcement is the difference between
"pleasant recommendations for better living" and (say) "federal law, enforcable by big nasty penalities and jail time."
yes... like individual IP, not corporate IP... but that requires directly addressing the fiction of corporate personhood....
... and the fact that that is politically unthinkable tells you a lot about how late the hour is.
While arguments from original intent are usually not productive... the framers were many other things too that we don't want to be... that is an interesting observation.
For me the fundamental issue that libertarians and "techies" miss consistently is the sheer power in a financial sense to be sure, but also in a structural sense (which I take to be the focus of your book) of technological innovation.
When you write the language of communication you own culture... and the more levels of language you write, from compiler to web browser standards, the more of it you own.
In my old fashioned democratic socialist way of thinking only a strong central state has the possibility of resisting that kind of power... and only if elections and democracy can be structured to provide a power base independent of the primary benificiaries of the structural power of technical standards and languages....
This implies campaign financing by the public, free media access time... all sorts of things to enable individual voice to be heard over the structurally overwhelming power of corporate voice.
Currently of course not only is the country being overrun by the structural control exerted by big technology players, but in a very traditional way Washington DC is being controlled by their dollars and agenda setting capacity.
I find it amusing or sad when libertarians want to further reduce the power of DC and turn it into a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate America... yet this is seriously proposed as a solution. They are fighting the wrong battle.
The battle should be for a strong central government capable of taking on corporate interests because it better reflects the voice of the public (the "unhegemonized" public we hope... if it still exists). However I fear the hour is very late.
In the support for the tech industry and the disdain for DC I see the new corporate fascism rapidly rising... OF COURSE it is not the old fascism. It will be new, but it will share the absolutely dominant power of business interests in all aspects of policy, including new ways of controlling political culture that make not only resistance, but the idea of resistance, all but unthinkable.
I don't mean to be appocolypitc (however you spell it...) but I just don't see the power base that can resist corporate power.... and I don't know how to build it. The Nader effort demonstrated if anything people already believe in and accept the hegemonization of their political lives by the corporations who employ them (and fire them at will.)
Is there a place to stand and rebuild a counterbalance to corporatism? An open question I think.
Just to hack away at the notion of ownership concentration a little more, it does seem intuitive that an individual person could "own" an idea, at least while he or she lives.
That limits the concentration of original ideas to the a density equivalent to the number of original ideas a person can come up with in his/her lifetime.
Corporate ownership on the other hand, or the resale or inheritance of owned ideas seems to be the real problem. If ideas are freely transferable property, concentration becomes inevitable...
Concentrate enough of them and you can easily own culture and political thought itself.
The idea of a corporation as a legal person seems to me, in my innocence, to be the root of much evil.
Individual IP ownership is a potentially "humanizing" and just construct... group ownership, corporate ownership, inheritance of ideas... these things seem to be fatal trends....
So Dr. Lessig, what's your view of the concentration of IP ownership?
Sorry but I haven't read the book yet.
It seems to me that since ideas actually shape the physical architecture of the brain and the relationships between its parts, learning itself is a kind of copyright violation...
It's only because so many copyrights are violated that learning is possible... its too difficult to enforce the infringement.
But concentration of ownership... (imagine Mircrosoft owned private school systems.... teaching a Microsoft curriculum...) seems very dangerous... more so than concentration of ownership of physical assets.
If a person is educated using copyrighted material, and just to make it more pointed, that copyrighted material is owned largely by one large media conglomerate, is it not the case that most or all of their thoughts are simply rearrangments of ideas "owned" by another party?
And in that case does their intellectual output not become a wholly or partially owned product of the company that provided the great bulk of the words, patterns and ideas that shaped their brain?
The idea of "idea" ownership is terribly insidious, but it is wholly consistent with the logic of capitalism.
The best argument for a strong state capable of resisting the encroachment of the private sector on culture, history, and ideas is that a strong counterweight is needed to resist the tendency of private parties to own what "should" be the collective property of peoples and of humanity.
The main reasons that people don't commute on motorcyles and bikes are:
1 Too windy... messes up their hair and clothes.
2 Too wet and too cold when the weather is bad.
3 They don't like the idea of getting hit by cars.
This "IT" solves none of this... you're still riding around under the sky, cold and wet and totally vulnerable to getting hit by bigger things.
Still, of course I'd love to try one. It looks totally fun.
In a sense this is like the problem of medical informatics and the electronic patient record... how do you organize data about a person so that is private and accessible, and captures all of the important facts about a person.... I can see where this project would have a lot to learn from the effort to create an electronic medical record, and vice versa.
for stuff about that....
http://www.healthcare-informatics.com/index.htm
I don't understand why anyone claims that it would be less distracting to have words emblazoned (good word for lazers on the retna, no?) on the back of your eyeballs would be LESS distracting than trying to cognitively process words on a screen just below the object of your attention out in the world. The only difference is that you have to move your eyeballs and shift focus to look at a screen, but most of the shift that has to occur is an ATTENTIONAL shift, from image/object processing, to linguistic processing. Furthermore your eyes are busing darting around to create the illusion of a gingle unmoving still world... Some people have tried this, so it must work, but I would think that an image that was remaining still on one part of the retna would not necessarily seem to remain still as the eye moves to capture features in the world.... At the very least I can imagine a huge headache as the apparent RELATIONSHIP of the words and the background world shifts as the eyeball moves to a different feature in the external world.... Again, I know people have tried this, and maybe this isn't a problem, but the basic situation of needing to shift from driving a car/airplane or navigating obstacles in 3d space to processing words seems unchanged whether the words are on the eyeball or on a screen just below the field of vision....