Wikipedia is not the only unreliable source of information out there.... we need to teach students how to recognize good sources and bad sources...
Hear, hear!
For example, schools are themselves an unreliable source of information, as is shown ipso facto by
having them declare in a blanket way that Wikipedia is unreliable as a source of information.
But schools are what we have, so we deal with them. I don't suggest shutting them down
just because they've given bad facts once in a while. No system is perfect.
And Wikipedia is what we have, so we should deal with that.
I don't mean to say there aren't alternatives to Wikipedia. What I mean is that Wikipedia is
the issue it is exactly because it is used, not because it is there. Many things are
there that are not used, and hence not banned.
This reminds me of the debate over whether kids should be exposed to TV. I have a few
friends who think they shouldn't be. It's their right, as parents, to decide for their own kids, but I also
think (and I tell them when they ask my opinion) that it's extreme and ill-advised.
Does TV rot minds? Probably somewhat.
But probably not because of an inherent limitation of TV as much as the way in which people learn to consume it. I have little doubt that someone growing up with parents who work with them to watch TV in an informed way, using judgment about what to watch, exercising critical thought about what they see, how to timeshift, etc. is going to do better in life than someone who either hides from TV as a phenomenon or dives in and uses it without help. TV is part of our culture, and one needs to understand it to live in and around it, regardless of one's feelings about it. Teaching abstinence may sound good, but the appeal will be strong, and teaching appropriately safe practices is better for anything so compelling.
And I think the same about Wikipedia. It's a perfect opportunity to talk about objective and subjective knowledge (and even about the philosophical limits of what public education can teach one), about the practical motivations for all those references they want in your papers, about trust relationships and fraud, about truth and lying and the many gray areas between, about free speech and censorship, about cooperative social structures (from the informal Wikipedia to the formal US political system itself) and how it's hard to control them fully without strangling them (the cost of freedom, in other words), about capitalism and economics on the net (and how to shop around for info), about bias in writing (intentional and otherwise), and other things. Or, alternatively, you can just tell people that if they close their eyes, none of these issues will exist.
All in all, I personally like my education systems to be "eyes open".
Then again, this is a democracy... one where we vote district by district on whether to believe Science or Religion... so maybe my personal opinion will be outvoted.
As a footnote, I also wonder if the people who hold Wikipedia to such a strict standard are equally picky across the board about what students are taught in other references and other subject areas. Do they make sure the other dictionaries they use are free of hidden bias? How exactly? Do they have an approved list of newspapers that show no bias? Is CNN or Fox News their preferred TV news? How about the New York Times vs the Washington Post? Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken? And independent of media outlets, what is their standard of truth as applied in other areas? Do they teach politics? history? philosphy? media? art? economics? What do they accept as appropriately documented, unfettered truth in those areas, other than "anything not coming from Wikipedia"?
This sounds like something technically difficult to fix. A radical redesign of the underlying architecture on a system used by thousands of people can't be easy, and it's bound to mean changes that will cause large amounts of drama.
Well, the usual way the market sorts out whether it's worth retooling
is by having some company compete, having the incompatible services already in play,
and having people leave
one product for another. That involves on "incompatibility" other than the sense in which it's incompatible
to have had revenue one day and not another. So if Second Life perceives its revenue is "sufficiently incompatible" due to competition, it will presumably think harder about adjusting.
Then there becoms a market in metametaverses as people have "connected avatars" in the various
underlying metaverses...
(Thanks for the technical overview, by the way. Although I didn't quote it here, it was very helpful.)
If you have your friends near your location then you don't need to specifically visit them, you'll see them when they're there.
(Disclaimer: I have it on my list to visit Second Life, but for now my remarks below are based on other
virtual universes I've been to, and my general understanding of what Second Life is trying to do.)
What it sounds like Linden is selling and others are banking on is real-world geometry injected into
cyberspace. That's an artificial restriction. There really is no reason that it has to be laid out that
way, and while I don't doubt they'll do well at that, I think they will ultimately fall to a more loose-knit
organization that lets people choose who they connect to in a more flexible way.
In cyberspace, geometry doesn't have to be like in the real world. Connections don't have to be symmetric (you can have a door that operates in one direction but not another),
"inside" doesn't have to have smaller volume than "outside" (e.g., you could have a tardis that was small on the outside but big on the inside, sound and sight can be transported non-locally
(e.g., you could have a window out of your house looking through a neighbor's building and seeing the beach on the far side).
There's plenty enough space unless the
universe has made it one of the selling points to deny you that space by creating a model that
makes it hard to get those things I just mentioned. If I tell you that to see the beach, you must be on the
beach, then sure, if you stay in the paradigm the good neighborhoods are limited, but why would you pay good real-world money to be in
a paradigm like that? Why not start a competing business that was more flexible?
You can claim these violations of geometry will lead to a violation of real world desires for privacy. That is, you can say that having someone see you who you can't see back is confusing, but the real world is full of cameras and microphones these days, so that's always a risk any more when you're in public... "public" is, by definition, not private. It would be ironic indeed if the selling point for cyberspace became that people went there to get a more constrained, rather than more flexible, world than the real world!
If Second Life doesn't have or permit "magic windows" that can be connected to views elsewhere not directly connected (so you can see your friends "naturally" without being "next to" them), "magic doors" that make far away places local (so you can get the teleportation effect without losing the virtual reality feel of local point-to-point connectivity), etc., then someone else is likely to offer
that and it will probably seem exotic, fun, and less cost... and they'll lose some customers.
Now, on the other hand, if they get some fundamental power from that connectivity that is truly a limitation of the technology (rendering caching or load balancing or something like that), then they may be
able to defend their turf if no one can make a system that operates better because of that fundamental limitation. But that seems to me an open question this early in the game.
There is, of course, the possibility that the public is so naive about the possibilities that they will
just try this and never investigate alternatives. They've come to believe that the words "Internet" and
"web browser" are synonymous, for example. Or that "Personal Computer" and "computer that runs a Microsoft operating system" mean the same thing. So it wouldn't be the first time...
Perhaps the "scarce commodity" in this scenario
isn't real estate, but imagination.
Has Linden guaranteed in writing that they will never expand the world? If not, then Coldwell Banker buyers are idiots.
Indeed. This is what happened with domain names. They went sky high, then lots of businesses crashed
and they increased the number of TLDs, so people who had invested in the land grab didn't always win.
The other thing is that any theory of scarcity presupposes that Linden will be the only, or at least the winning, item in this area. If someone came along and offered an alternate space, it wouldn't even matter
if Linden had put a guarantee in writing... the value could still drop due to ordinary competition.
No one has guaranteed Linden a monopoly.
Cyberspace is big... There's really no reason for there to be a scarcity of real estate.
It isn't, after all, real estate. It's contrived. And if the prices go too high,
that simple fact should invite competition. A key defining characteristic of real estate is supposed to be
that they're not making more of it.
One relevant issue in contract law is a meeting of the minds. Given that there was only one "mind"
involved, I think the strongest way that Archive.org has to address this is to say that there is no
mind to be met, and therefore no contract to be breached.
If I hang a sign on my door saying "Do Not Enter" and attaching a contract below, does that give me the
right to not only go after someone for breaking and entering (which is pursued in a criminal court under
a standard of reasonable doubt) but also in civil court for breach of contract (which is pursued in a
civil court under a much lower standard of judgment? That would seem convenient to me, but I think it
would be argued that there was more of a burden to creating that contract than merely placing it. You'd
have to show that the person read it and understood it. There's probably some case law on this in audio
contracts when spammers leave messages on your answering machine, and maybe it doesn't break down as I'm
imagining, but then, audio is linear and you have to listen past the "contract" in many cases to leave a message. Web pages are notoriously designed on the belief that the reader will be there only a few seconds,
reading only parts of the page, so showing that the presence of the text implies knowledge of and agreement
to a contract seems farfetched.
Part of the case may hinge on the question of whether the expectation is that there would be a human reader
there at all. In the early days of the net, that might have been a reasonable assumption. But reasonable expectations
are an evolving notion, and if the web site owner can be shown to reasonably know of the existence of web
spiders, it's reasonable to suppose they knew that the spiders are machines, and that machines don't
understand English. So the failure to ask around and find out about ROBOTS.TXT or the equivalent web tags
might be construed to mean that they didn't do the work necessary to ensure the presence of a contract
with a mechanical entity.
The Internet Archive may be in a special situation because it shows pages from times other than modern times
and so some of those pages may have been collected under a different "prevailing expectation". I'm not sure
how that would influence things, but it seems relevant.
Note that
I have previously argued in other forums that in cases of copyright, the burden is on the copier, not the
person being copied, to make the steps to complete the connection.
However, this is not a case about copyright.
This is a case about contract law.
Copyright would seem the stronger way to pursue this, especially if the pages were duly registered
with the copyright office. Because copyright requies the entity copying to receive affirmative
permission. But contract law seems weak to me here because it seems implicit in the entire doctrine
of copyright that you have to have had affirmative knowledge on both sides to have a contract at all,
much less to breach it.
On my web pages where I've wanted to engage in copying language, what I've done is to assume that the
copyright forbids copying at the outset, and then to make any contractual material part of the granted
licenses of use. This is the lever the GPL uses, too, I believe, since otherwise people might claim
never to have read the license. But they can't use the work at all without having read the license.
So such placement allows one to constructively assume that someone has read the contract, since
presumably they wouldn't be copying your work at all unless they read the conditions under which
they were allowed to. So that kind of detail might matter, too. In her case, since she wanted no such
conditions of use, she should have just stopped with "All Rights Reserved." and I'd think she would have
been all set. Detaching the copyright from the contract loses the strongest available tool she had,
in my opinion.
An aside: If I were Google, and if the ethics of it all did not concern me,
I might prefer to join with the plaintiff and insist that spi
Although I don't disagree with a lot of specific claims in the piece, I disagree that those claims can be applied as sweepingly as they seem to be. Generalizations are useful as a way of gathering insights, but are often not predictive unless also exhaustive and rigorous. I gained some useful insights from the article, and yet no confidence that it would predict behavior because it appeared implicitly to give permission to overlook other things of importance in its rush for what seemed to me a too-facile analysis. Overlooking detail can give you good explanatory power, but there's no proof that the same details wouldn't matter in another circumstance, and so an explanation that a certain bridge failed because of bad placement of its struts (without regard to what kind of metal was used) might precisely explain that issue, and yet not usefully predict that the detail of metal choice is the relevant thing to expect in another case where the struts are placed right. I don't doubt that the factors he cites matter in some cases, but I do doubt they are the only things that could matter.
I'll give two specific examples of concerns I had about the reasoning he did:
First, DRM as practiced relies on additional assumptions not made
apparent not discussed in the otherwise good essay; those need to be
accounted for, and I don't think the accounting is trivial. In
particular, there's an implicit assumption in industry that the
"good" music and the "good" TV is what is under DRM and the "other"
music and the other "TV" is not. People might quibble over whether I
should substitute "polished" or "slick" for "good" and "unpolished" or
"raw" for "bad", but I think any fair analysis would say that the
aggregate level of quality available in TV, at least, from Cable TV or
a commercial movie studio is different and of higher quality (along at
least some axes) than the average level of quality produced on a home
camcorder and posted to YouTube. Over time, that will change, of
course, there is a notion of "scarcity" which relates to quality, and
one argument that DRM clings to and that is somewhat defensible is
that what is needed to maintain this distinction is money, and that
DRM enables the money, allowing a small number of larger and better
funded efforts. If what it takes to make the good stuff is money in
large quantities, and money in large quantity is doomed to remain
scarce, then DRM might succeed for a long time. If making good
quality music or movie houses becomes dirt cheap, then it might be
gone overnight. But neither scenario seems to me a refutation of the
usefulness of DRM in aggregating money. But the scarce thing might be "production money" not "music" and it might be that DRM is converting a market with no "aggregated money" into one with "just some" aggregated money, in which case it is adding value, and under the restrictions of the author's own reasoning, it is adding value.
Second, though, I think DRM is villified unnecessarily here, if by DRM
you mean "the management of digital rights" (in the abstract). If by
DRM you mean "the specific set of rules in play today and the specific
programs that implement these, notwithstanding that other rules could
be chosen and other programs could be implemented that could still be
correctly described under a banner named DRM", then indeed maybe
something is broken. We don't condemn Democracy because we don't (depending on our party) like
Clinton or Bush--we vote in smoeone else and still call it democracy. We don't condemn capitalism
because we have a recession, nor herald it because of a monetary bubble.... well, we do, but we
ought not. The subtext of this article seems to be to bring down DRM by proof, rather than to seriously analyze it. I see no enumeration of what it sets out to do, whether there are ways to fix it, etc. I see not even a definition of what DRM is so that I can know for sure whether it's a philoosphy or a specific set of rules being discussed.
Copyright works not only to allow big companies to se
I think the economic model of open source software is quite a bit different than you suppose. In fact, I suspect I have as much of a chance of becoming a millionaire via open source software as I do via royalties. Perhaps even more of a chance.
I don't doubt that this is true, but I don't think it refutes my point.
That doesn't make me right--it just means that your evidence is insufficient to
convince me. I don't doubt that some people can make a lot of money on open
source. I never claimed otherwise. Hence your citing an example of this kind doesn't
contradict me. You might be right, or I might. We've both got opinions, I guess.
One way to view my concern is to observe that the skill and interest that leads to creating a work
of this kind is not the same as the skill or interest that is required to make money after the fact.
You sound like you've made a useful transition from software programmer to entrepreneurial manager
of a software support organization. That's great, but I bet many others can't do it. I'm not saying no one can--just many can't.
A lot of people who are programmers are going to stay programmers. For reasons of personality, for reasons of risk-taking, for reasons of skills required, for reasons of financial opportunity, for reasons of family considerations, and so on. I've seen some fail at moving from programmer to manager, much less owner/founder. I've certainly seen people fail by picking businesses they didn't understand, so I don't automatically assume a skilled programmer is going to translate to a skilled business person.
Industry can be cutthroat, and the business model you're apparently describing of "spend x years intensely writing a killer piece of software then give it away free and hope that people will rush to you to provide support so you can hire yourself and smoothly others before it gets out of hand" doesn't sound to me like a strategy I'd be comfortable advocating to, say, a child of mine or a student of mine. I don't hear caveats. I hear reassurances. Sure, people write books or articles in which they allege that this might work or cite examples where it has, but they can't gurantee it, and they always talk like it's a no-brainer. That bothers me. It's harder when the question comes up "should I quit my day job?" or even "should I give away all that hard work on the hope that I'll later be able to quit my day job?".
I don't think it's unreasonable to make an analogy to the many people who play sports
thinking they'll one day be professional players. Having a pro player step forward and say "It happened to me, it can happen to you." is hard to "disprove". But it still may be that it's not going to happen to most people. Most people is not all people. And while some people have a chance, all people don't have an equal chance. Some people play for fun. And some people who play for serious succeed. But there are many in between who play for serious and fail. I think it's a good thing when people speak honestly to that class and say "while you might succeed, there are many more chances not to". I feel the same about open source software.
Hopefully you don't disagree with any of that, other than perhaps in the question of how to weigh "personal optimism" and "financial risk", which is always a personal choice. But the hard to answer question, since there simply can be no valid data, is whether if there were no open source market, there would be more or fewer people succeeding financially at software creation. Maybe the idea was inevitable, maybe not. It's not obvious to me that it had to go that way. Nor that it's a good idea that it did.
And, I allege, my motive is not selfish greed but the common good. I just come at it from a different point of view than many. It seems to me that the world is presently facing severe problems that might be loosely grouped into categories like "computational complexity overflow", "process problems", "unexpected im
This is targeted at folks who have already decided they want to use Postgres, so they can't be sold on the $xx,000 MSSQL license... but maybe they can still be sold on the $300 OS license!
While that's not money any of us as individuals would sneeze at, I doubt that's the money
Microsoft cares about. The big money is surely in support, and Microsoft is leaving that
money on the table if it insists, based on foolish pride, that it won't support stuff it didn't
develop.
Large companies like Microsoft have little to fear from free software.
It provides a rich source of business problems to solve for respectable consulting return. In many ways, the initial production of software is just a loss leader for big companies to get into the consulting game. Free software doesn't threaten that. All it does is limit the ability of the author to gain economically from royalty revenue at levels that would probably matter to them but that almost certainly is too smallfry for a company like Microsoft to even care about.
It seems to me very sad for the producers of useful software to unilaterally and voluntarily
economically disempower themselves. The world needs people who can think and develop, and when they don't use that power to put food on the table, they lock themselves into day jobs working for someone else to do so... Worse, the main places to get those day jobs will be the places business wants to buy software support from: stable companies offering longevity and stability... companies like, say, Microsoft. Great.
Personally, I'd rather see a few more "small" millionaires, perhaps starting small and interesting sofwtare houses from royalty revenue, than no royalty revenue going to the code authors and all of industry's money going to the same old big consulting houses, who realize the market will bear the spending of that money and are willing to provide a product that the market can spend it on.
The big companies know they don't have to waste time and money trying uselessly to put
the free software producers out of business. They can just use the freeness of the software to reduce their development costs in producing new products--why not do your R&D on someone else's nickel? Then they can make money on cleaning up the mess when the failure to acquire revenue means the talented creators of free-and-should-be-charged-for software software can't scale to support what they've made.
Heck, if the Postgres business really takes off for Microsoft, it could later eliminate a few of its developer jobs and cancel its own SQL product and just let Postgres continue to be developed by people willing to give away their skills rather than charge for them in a legitimate commercial challenge to Microsoft.
What possible reason could you have to oppose opt out ads for wikipedia? If you don't like them you could turn them off
Or better still: If you don't like them, you could pay a fee to have them turned off.
One of the things that drives me nuts about public radio is that even if
you contribute, you still have to endure the pleas for money.
PBS would probably get a lot more donors if donating let you shut them up with
their fund raisers.
But the Internet
doesn't have to force you endure fund-raising where you've given funds because it
can tell people apart and provide service according to what people pay for.
It could let you log in and then you could access info advertising-free.
The only people who should be entitled to complain about the format a free
service comes in should be the ones funding the free service.
And this isn't about withholding content, either. This is just a matter of trading
some aesthetics for some financial stability. It seems a reasonable trade.
How Would You Deal With A Global Bandwidth Crisis?
It bugs me that when I buy bandwidth, I don't really get bandwidth.
It's like the airlines used to be: oversold, on the assumption there will be no shows.
But when there aren't, the people who've paid for a service don't get it.
So I guess you could have a mode where it told you there was a shortage and asked
for volunteers to get bumped for a few days, perhaps in exchange for free bandwidth
later (or free porn or whatever it is that people want to trade for in order to get
them to voluntarily stand down). But that sounds like it still relies on someone to
be willing to give up. If they're expecting to die of bird flu tomorrow, you might find
a lot of people who want to watch YouTube or some porn site today before it's too late
and don't really care to trade it away.
But I think a better solution would be to have selling someone bandwidth really mean selling them bandwidth. Stop all these stupid clauses in access providers saying you can't resell bandwidth (because those are just there to keep you from exposing the
overselling of bandwidth they've supposedly promised you anyway and it should be your
right to resell what you've legally purchased). Create large monetary penalties for any
provider who sells you bandwidth and doesn't really reserve it for you.
No, I'm not anti-capitalism. I don't mind someone selling the notion of gambling
on getting bandwidth and getting a cheaper price. I just don't think that should be
sold by saying you're getting x bandwidth. It should be like on credit cards where
you have to disclose the info in a manner plain for anyone to know, not hidden in terms of service that the gigantically fonted numbers about how fast the connection will be is not necessarily reliably there... and certainly if you're going to be in trouble for trying to use the capacity of what you're given, that should be in big letters, too. Just like the credit cards have the Schumer Box, broadband agreements should expose things like: what's the worst case? how much is it oversold? will it go down if everyone uses it at once? will it go down if more people in your neighborhood buy? under what circumstancse do they commit to increase bandwidth?
With proper labeling, I have a lot fewer objections.
But also, if after proper labeling I find there's no one in my area who will sell
reliable bandwidth and everyone will only sell me probabilistic bandwidth, that's
significant, too. Right now, a lot of places probably figure they have broadband
reliably available when really they have it only probabilistically available (that is, oversold).
It seems to me the reason bandwidth might fall short in an event like a bird flu emergency (if it might--and that's hard to know) is that there's no serious recourse
to the consumer if it does. And so what's the motivation for vendors to even care?
RCN itemizes the resale of what you've paid for in bandwidth as Theft of Service.
Comcast restricts you from offering the service to others, as well as telling you that even if you use it for yourself, you (not they) are responsible for making sure your use is within the scope of what you were sold (as if the typical Joe Sixpack is going to know how to assure his use of YouTube is within such bounds) and warns you that if you exceed your quota, they can shut you down at their discretion
This seems an unfair question. Suppose a group of robbers is robbing my neighborhood
and I find one of them and take them to court. Suppose they say "We have a well-established policy that if you don't want your house robbed, you should leave a note to that effect tacked to your front door." Even supposing they have, in fact, well-advertised this policy, does that make it my fault for not putting up such a note?
robots.txt is an internet protocol issue, and an informal one, and no
robot is obliged to heed it. That Google does and others don't is certainly
good, but that doesn't mean they haven't violated the law because they've provided
a way of people opting out of what they do. To my non-lawyerly understanding,
copyright license can't happen by accident or some informal gesture, it requires
actual permission. So if there is a violation, the violation doesn't seem to be
mitigated by the practice of the offender of creating their own out-of-band mechanism
not prescribed by law.
It might be that this is fair use, of course. That's a separate question. But
fair use doesn't hinge on the availability of opt-out (i.e., availability or absence of a robots.txt), at least not in the US.
You might argue a fifth criterion should be adopted, as has sometimes been argued for other reasons, but I don't see it there as a reliable element. So any fair use argument has to be made, it would seem to me, on the basis of whether the a priori use is fair, whether or not the author is capable of engaging a private cease-and-desist order absent court assistance.
To say otherwise is to say that a defense against any lawsuit would be a claim
that the party would stand down if you just complained to it. The problem with this
posture, much though it might reduce load on the courts, is that it makes it impossible
to bring a case against people who prey only on the weak. There are plenty of people
who don't know or care to contact their oppressors, and yet you can't say that it's ok to keep preying until a complaint is made, and moreover that a formal complaint will be dismissed merely because a lighter weight complaint could have worked.
There's also the issue of fair use itself based on content. I'm mixed on this, having been in journalism myself and having been on both sides of this. On the one hand, Google provides a possible advertising service; that's in Google's favor. It's opt-out rather than opt-in; that's not in Google's favor. They use a certain amount of the story they have farmed from elsewhere. To the extent that text is small, that's in Google's favor. To the extent that some people only want a small blurb anyway, that's not in Google's favor, since many news organizations present themselves as portals themselves, and Google may be detracting from that. (You might legitimately disagree, but part of what's at issue in this case is whether the infringer gets to decide. The whole notion of freedom surrounds "whose freedom", and present copyright law says it's the content creator's choice. If you disagree, argue for changing the law, not for willful violation... which seems to me to be just advocating lawlessness.)
The problem is that Google is doing a service, but it is not charging the people who benefit. Rather, it is "taxing without representation" the other services on the web, taking incremental value from them in order to provide its own at no cost. Its opt-out nature, its indirect charging, etc. all contribute to a weird sense of unease about it all.
I'll close on the issue of "chilling effect" with this Supreme Court case, which may or may not be directly relevant, but which informs my personal sense of unease. The fact patterns don't exactly overlap, but I feel obliged
It's a black hole consisting of two subatomic particles.
It sounds less scary when you put it that way.
Kinda like the Military's advertising catch phrase "An Army of One"--which,
charming as it sounds, wouldn't be spin, would it?
(Sorry, just a bit of atomic subhumor.)
But maybe we're making progress.
In what sense can two subatomic particles be said to be a black hole?
What is the qualifying characteristic for being a black hole?
... a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut...
I get the impression that the "small size" thing is supposed to be reassuring.
But aren't all black holes comparatively small, compared to what they've had for lunch? How big would a black hole be that, say, had accidentally swallowed the Earth?
And I suppose mass should also reassure me. But the thing is, my gradeschool science
oversimplification of black holes said their defining characteristic was not their mass but their insatiable, chain-reaction-like desire to swallow more mass... like a rolling snowball.
And it's all well and good to say some theoretical rays we've never seen before will
magically swing in at the end and save us, but... Since this is testing an unproven theory and not applying a well-understood theory,
what are the procedures for evaluating the level of risk?
And what is the recourse
of those who don't agree? Science has ethical guidelines for not experimenting on
humans because of risk. Does the fact that humans are in the next room... or the next building... or the next city, "safely away" from the black hole being created, mean that there is no ethical obligation for informed consent? It would seem like there are more rules governing putting make-up on a rat than there are on this kind of experimentation...
I don't know the details of this kind of thing. I just have to trust someone doing them does. But I wonder exactly what I'm trusting. Anyone know?
At least the global warming skeptics have become "global warming is man made"-skeptics. During the 90ies, the dispute was about weither there actually was any warming going on at all.
I don't know if this is better or worse, but I've certainly noticed this trend, too.
It sounds at some level like progress, but I fear it actually hides a weird assumption on some people's
part that if we didn't cause it, it's not up to us to fix it--that it will either fix itself or else that it can't be fixed because it's God's doing, not man's.
These days people are looking for any reason to dismiss things because there's just too much to think
about. It's like when person A writes a long email on a serious topic and person B responds "there's a typo in line 2 there." Whose turn is it to respond now? What passes for discourse these days is really more like a game of ping pong. It doesn't matter what you respond, it only matters that you did respond. Then it's back in the other person's court for action. (If you don't like sports analogies,
perhaps you'd prefer a Petri net. But it works out to the same thing.)
And when the debate is between someone who is using rationality and logic on one side and someone who is thinking superficially on the other side, it has a wierd kind of surreal sense to it--like something's wrong with the picture but you can't quite figure out what. The end result, though, seems to be a lulling of the public into non-action so that it doesn't perturb Big Business, which often just likes the status quo. But if inaction is the result, I'm not sure that's progress.
Under the law, copyright protects the form of a work, not an idea.
In the case of music, for instance, where is the line between idea and form? George Harrison got sued and lost for subconsciously copying two motifs totaling 9 notes from "He's So Fine" by Ronald Mack into his own "My Sweet Lord" and adding different lyrics.
This is a fair example to raise for discussion, and I'm happy to engage it.
Here is how I break down that situation:
First, there are certainly always "edge issues" for anything small. Can one copyright a fortune cookie? A haiku? What is fair use when you want to quote part of a fortune cookie? None of these
are easy issues, but I think the practical answer is "notwithstanding copyright, don't bet your fortune on copyrighting something so tiny that people are likely to reproduce it". So from the side of the person who did originate the work, I think they should enjoy flimsy protection not because I don't value a crisp statement but because I think there's too much societal good in being able to compose sentences. Another way of sayng what I'm saying is that I am fine about the idea of saying that anything shorter than x words can't be copyrighted. It's not chunky enough. And that saying this is so is not enough to refute the goodness of copyright.
In a sense, music has this problem all over because, like some forms of digitized computer stuff, there just aren't that many ways to do certain things. Computer Science people have no business copyrighting (or patenting--a separate can of worms) small things like xor or an assignment statement. A trivial exhaustive search would find certain alleged "protected works", and that should be proof of obviousness (while for patents it's taken as infringement, which seems inane in small search spaces).
The idea of copyrighting a few notes, therefore, seems silly to me. Though obviously there's nothing silly about the dire consequences of the present system, which admits the possibility. I just don't think the problem is copyright or law. I think it's courts and lawyers and maybe even juries. We've taken all the judgment out of judging, and told people to be ultra-literal and that using their hearts and minds is not allowed. Something wrong there, and no wonder we get to odd rulings.
So that suits like the one you describe occur seems more like an abuse of the courts and/or ineffective counsel than really a material breakdown in the copyright system. The core value of copyright seems to me to be that, Jabberwocky notwithstanding, people mostly don't memorize long written works and so don't accidentally regurgitate them. Music, by contrast, is often memorized and integrated in a way that makes it possible to regurgitate accidentally. As a consequence, I'd easily be swayed by an argument that music should be under different forms of protection than written works. I've made similar arguments for software patents.
I've argued that software copyright neglects some basic concepts, one of which is something I call convergence issues. (And perhaps there's an analogy to music.) There is work that is done for "best practice" reasons and work that is done for "creative" reasons, but copyright law does not distinguish. If I assign to you to write a paper on Truth and you turn in the same essay as your classmate, you should get an F. But if I assign you to write a program that tests truth of the combination of booleans, you should get an F if you don't get the same answer as most of your classmates, since there's a convergent solution. Programming is an engineering discipline, and we value convergence in engineering tasks. While writing is a divergent discipline, and we value individuality. Yet copyright sees the two the same, and that matters if you're going to claim that "having converged" is the test of "infringement".
We want the choice by a computer to use a square box or rounded-edge bo
One man's "creative influence" could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism". It is all a matter of degree.
There are surely gray areas, but your remark suggests there is nothing but gray areas
His remark does nothing of the sort. "One car could very well be a green car." in no way suggests that all cars are green. It merely states that it is possible that there exists at least one car which is green.
It would seem appropriate in the context of a discussion of citation and intellectual property at this point for me to cite someone else on the point I want to make. In that spirit, let me draw your attention to the point in his trial where Sir Thomas More, a fictionalized amalgamation of several historical figures including a real person of the same name, in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons says: ``The world must construe according to its wits; this court must construe according to the law.''
In case the point of my quote is not clear: It's certainly true that one is free to construe as you say, but a lawyer is not similarly free. A lawyer is bound by the rules of law in what he construes, and the law is clear that the notion that creative influence (ideas) is not the same as copyrightable matter. I've argued in another post that this article didn't seem to really be about plagiarism as much as copyright, which is why I've confined my remarks to that area. But when I said that not all areas are gray, I meant under the law, on the grounds that we were talking about lawyers in action.
Plagiarism is probably more vague, exactly because it's not really codified per se in the law (that a quick web search turned up, anyway--many law sites don't index it and the Wikipedia says it's buried in tort law on reputations). But that's an entirely subjective area, and if you assume "ability to file a lawsuit" supports the claim at top of this post, then the sad truth of the American system seems to be that One man's mere existence in the world could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism" since you don't have to do anything at all to get a lawsuit filed against you. (Indeed, Michael Crichton comes uncomfortably close to making this claim in his Next novel... not to be confused with his next novel, which I assume won't be named Next).
Groundless lawsuits are filed all the time by people with money against people with no money, and a great deal of the law operates by monetary intimidation rather than pursuit of justice.
It would be sad if that truth about how courts operated infected the language we use out of courts about truth and justice. It would be a shame if you could anything in the ordinary world is ambiguous merely because that thing might be the subject of a lawsuit. (That's effectively what the Intelligent Design and Global Warming discussions have done, and it hasn't improved the world's understanding.)
One must reasonably draw the line somewhere, and I think it rational to say that plagiarism is not defined operationally by someone's ability or willingness to file suit alleging violation.
We need to keep the concepts of plagarism and copyright seperate in our thinking.
Under normal circumstances, I'd agree. However, the article (and I admit I read about half of it in detail and then barely skimmed the rest) didn't seem to me to be about plagiarism, which is (I assume) why
the subject line upthread is "The/. headline is typically bad." It really seems to be an article about information-sharing, not about plagiarism. He cites numerous well-known authors with apparent (but seemingly ill-founded) concern that they have plagiarized, but I would say that the fact that those various authors were not discredited is illustrative of the power of both fair use and established/approved literary techniques such as homage, parody, etc.
The examples he uses really seem to me to illustrate that the existing system is in balance already... or has been until recently. (None of my remarks should be taken as an endorsement of the new trends introduced by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).)
As to calling things contributions, perhaps it might help to name the contributions we claim where we can. We should not denigrate even the smallest honest contributions. And a small contributor today may be a large contributor next year.
To the extent that your remark can be construed as an affirmation of the age-old line "one man's trash is another man's treasure", I certainly don't mean to detract from it. But I still have some concerns that your suggestion is not strong enough to really solve the problem. (My remarks here ran longer than I wanted, and I edited them down a bit. I hope the result isn't incoherent as a result.)
The problem is not that people can't or shouldn't start with small contributions and grow them to big ones. The problem is that referring to something by its history or pedigree is not the same intellectual activity as referring to something by class. One can trivially, but uselessly, describe a pedigree system as a class system, by saying that every pedigree names a class, but it defeats the ability to do generalized reference to something because each name is so heavily overloaded that short names start to have no meaning. As I was reading one of the books in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game trilogy, there was reference to a hierarchically oriented net that sounded like the idea that kids grew up posting in their town and if they gained enough stature, they were allowed to post nationally, and so on. There are obvious disadvantages of this when some governments are repressive, but just because something has disadvantages doesn't mean it's got no advantages. There's some value to saying that people should not post their first grade homework for world-wide scrutiny on usenet.
And note that I'm not trying to say that textual size implies importance. It probably tends to be correlated, but it's possibly different. A remark like "Fixed a big security hole." might be accompanied by a one-line change and yet the change might be a substantive contribution. But most small changes are not of that kind. And documenting that you only did a small change doesn't fix that--rather, it invites people to so overwhelm people with documentation that you can't tell it was just a small change. That's how lawyers have learned to address requirements for disclosure: don't withhold, but instead drown the opposition in so much disclosure that they can't find the thing they care about.
So I'm leary that encouraging "disclosure" as a standard for saying you made a contribution is, while a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.
One man's "creative influence" could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism". It is all a matter of degree.
There are surely gray areas, but your remark suggests there is nothing but gray areas,
and I don't think that's true. Under the law, copyright protects the form of a work, not an idea. It comes right out and says that plainly, in a way that law doesn't always
do. Just to make sure there is no confusion.
As such, "creative influence" insofar as it is an "idea" is generally protected.
The author of the article seemed to speak at times as if he were arguing against things that are in
fact not in play. It is considered fair use to quote one
another in the course of public dialog. (The right of fair use happens to be implementationally threatened by coercive DRM attempting to conform to the DMCA, but that's a slightly different problem. I have argued (but so far have not managed to convince any actual lawyers) that the legal concept of an easement (from Real Estate law) needs to be injected into Intellectual Property law in order to address the present state of affairs in that regard. For rights to be meaningful, having some way to enforce them seems useful. There are a
number of mechanisms for addressing infringement, but there needs to be a counterbalancing force to
address fair use. That the US Government Copyright FAQ does not even mention "fair use" in the set of questions is perhaps telling in and of itself.)
It is trivially true that as you morph an idea from a single source, there is a point in which the
idea is still so much the original that the new form carries with it no serious value and cannot legitimately be called its own work. So in this regard, your remark is technically correct.
However, another way of interpreting copyright might be not to regard it as a right of use, but a standard we hold ourselves to before we call something a contribution. That is, if I take a play you
wrote, change a word or two, and then offer it back to the public, odds are the public will say
"this wasn't a material contribution". Forget copyright issues, my obligation to say I have contributed
something is higher. If I'm a writer, even a good one, and call a press conference every time I type a period or comma, eventually people will get tired. It's not a novel, or even a chapter, until a chunkier contribution has been made. And copyright just enforces that same notion, but between people instead of internally within them.
So maybe it is just a matter of degree after all. But maybe degree matters. Maybe the whole point is, as in Aristotle's Virtue Ethics that at either end of the spectrum is an "unreasonable extreme", and that there really is no well-defined, uniquely determined midpoint, but that the goal is to seek a balance in spite of that fact, so that one doesn't slide to one of the endpoints. To say that any contribution, no matter how trivial, that includes another's work is ok is to create spam. To say that any contribution, no matter how large, that includes another's work, is infringing is to create a society that doesn't grow through interaction.
Mid to late 90s or mid to late 80s? TCP/IP and internet was pretty settled by the nineties.
Sigh. Yeah, that part was just a typo. Thanks for catching it.
Although the connective glue had been in place for years,
in my own mind I use the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994 as marking
the birth of the Internet because I remember looking it
up on my newly unpacked
Mosaic browser, seing the pictures of the impact, and then looking to the TV news a while later and seeing the same pictures
after I had found them on the web. My jaw dropped and the impact of it all (if you'll
pardon the pun) hit me all at once. TV would never be the same.
So the Wiki search box is better if you know what you want and spell it correctly then you might as well use it and avoid the adverts - but if you are unsure of spelling or exact word choice, then Google scores big-time.
Ability to search isn't the only criterion I use these days for deciding whose input box to type into.
Data retention policies also matter to me. The idea that Google is retaining search strings associated
with IP addresses really creeps me out. Lately I've been nervous about and tend to avoid typing searches
of a medical or political nature into Google for fear I'll see them later regurgitated to me in the form
of increased insurance rates or someone trying to manipulate my political freedoms, whether as an
individual or as a group.
Misspellings or not, I'd rather type them straight to
Wikipedia, if only to break up the trail of Internet breadcrumbs I involuntarily leave into different
parcels. I've started to use other search engines more often, I have uninstalled Google toolbar, I won't use gmail, and I refuse to let it index my desktop.
I'm starting to regard the centralization of public and personal data by Google
as something vaguely like an opt-in, privately
managed version of all the things I like least in the Patriot Act. And, little by little,
I find myself opting out.
Crap. The 'original model of the Internet' didn't incude the web at all and when the web originated it was as a tool for governments and academics with no 'hint that micropayments would closely follow'.
The unnecessary bile in your remark notwithstanding,
this is a reasonable terminological clarification to make, but it doesn't falsify my point.
Btw, on that terminlogy issue, just as an aside: I was using the term Internet in the modern usage, as the thing that was born around 1994 with the birth of the web (which existed for a number of years before in limited distribution but didn't burst forth until the Mosaic browser became widely available around that time). I personally joined the net in 1978 (hence my moniker of "netsettler"), so I'm not unaware of all of this. We just called it the ARPANET back then. There was a transitional time from mid to late 1990's where one might quibble about whether it was called ARPANET or Internet, since the routing technology was emerging.
My points were really directed at the web era, which people call the Internet because they see the
Internet Explorer icon on their desk. And I stand by my claim that there was early (read: mid 1990's) talk of pervasive micropayments which just sort of quietly fell away as portal vendors found they could charge for access without having to pass money through to the content providers to whom they were gatewaying paying users.
And even if none of that were true, what still remains of my point after that would still be valid and relevant, which is that it's a choice society makes about what it wants to pay for. We could do things differently in a free society, any time there's a will. Yet modern social patterns are heavily inertial and fatalistic. This tends to support the accumulation of funds in a small number of hands, often
through the good works of many individual contributors who themselves don't profit.
Perhaps the real problem is that we treat the Internet as if it should not cost money.
It does cost money, but it's made artificially bad manners to say so.
Money regularly goes to bandwidth providers, but that generally doesn't reimburse content providers.
Content providers are taxed for having done the service they provide. When you get a web site, you
say how much volume you want to support and you pay rather than are paid for the
volume of traffic. Your content users are often outright irate at the
idea they should have to give anything back to the people from whom they benefit.
The original model of the Internet included the hint that micropayments would closely follow as a way
for web server providers to get paid. But it never happened.
Nowadays, when the idea of payment get suggested, the Public treats it like
a content provider is getting greedy, but it's really not. Money is nothing more than a way of saying "this is what
I value and want to encourage". When you don't pay, you get a system that gets paid by someone else.
Which means it doesn't have your value system, it has someone else's. So an encyclopedia rises or falls on the basis of whether it hires good "fund raisers" rather than whether it provides good content.
The whole email system is another example where people don't want to pay a few dollars a year for email,
so they pay much more in real money and in aggravation dealing with spam. The cost is there either way.
You can't get it out of the system. It just ends up being that since the cost is not directly for the services people receive, people have lost control of the ability to just say simply "I like this, plesae keep it going" or "I don't like this, I won't support it." The simplicity of money and of pay-for-service directly is that it promotes direct involvement of the consumer in what is available.
The indirect models we've all got in which we indulge the fiction that things are free all work toward
a model where someone who isn't what we want to consume gets the money and then collectively bargains
for us in a way we really have no serious control over. The money by that point has been blended with other money from other sources, perhaps even conflicting with our desires.
I think it's worth a few moments reflection now and then, and surely at times like this.
Jahn points the finger at detractors as well: 'If people don't believe us after all the results we've produced, then they never will.'
That's rather the point. In science it doesn't really matter what results you can produce, if no-one else can reproduce them...
I was going to make this identical point. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
In this day of trumped-up controversy over the difference between Science and nonsense/non-science,
Princeton is missing a big opportunity to underscore the importance of this by underscoring
that "lack of faith" has nothing to do with anything in Science.
These were often not expensive experiments to try,
and I'm sure there was plenty of money riding on a successful outcome,
so
budget was not what impeded opportunities to reproduce.
Surely anyone would be proud to show they'd reproduced results
as important as these would be if they could be reproduced in an independent lab.
I've never had occasion to stop and read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, but the title has always said to me what needs to be said. Nevertheless, there's clearly some segment of the populace that doesn't understand what Scientific Method is and that thinks that anything scientific-sounding is science and that probably really does think that faith is a key
component.
The sad part of a lot of the debate on so-called Intelligent Design is that people who don't get it often use words like "hypothesis" or "theory" as if they were criticisms of Science. They point to the Theory of Evolution as if the mere use of the word "theory" was a trump card over the more emotionally comforting yet more scientifically misleading term "fact". It is being spun in public debate as if it were an outright admission of failure.
The fact is that what gives science its power is the willingness of the claim-maker to step forward and offer a thesis for possible falsification. Anything where you can't make a single testable statement that, if proven, would falsify your work makes for pretty questionable science.
There's also no shame or loss of face in thoroughly researching an area that
doesn't show an original thesis. People get very bound up in the hope they'll show truth,
but Science proceeds also by trying and failing, and we should do more to laud those who fail and
are straightforward and honest about such failures. Because research dollars are often really a gamble
on someone's part that a claim is true, we create both emotional and economic incentives for
researchers to bias results toward the original claim.
It may upset the funders, but it should not upset Science, to see a well-documented failure.
But the researchers throw away all the honor they may have gained by properly
exploring and documenting a set of failure results if they stubbornly insist that non-reproducible results are best described as "success
that others refuse to have faith in" since there really isn't any outcome in any research that couldn't be described by such words if one wanted to... You could print those words on a stamp, buy a post office box, and open your own research lab with little more than that as your research facility.
Educated people should use opportunities like this to focus loudly on what Science is and what it is not. The Public can use all the education it can get on this issue, especially in the US, where the very notion of Science is under active attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear, hear!
For example, schools are themselves an unreliable source of information, as is shown ipso facto by having them declare in a blanket way that Wikipedia is unreliable as a source of information.
But schools are what we have, so we deal with them. I don't suggest shutting them down just because they've given bad facts once in a while. No system is perfect. And Wikipedia is what we have, so we should deal with that.
I don't mean to say there aren't alternatives to Wikipedia. What I mean is that Wikipedia is the issue it is exactly because it is used, not because it is there. Many things are there that are not used, and hence not banned.
This reminds me of the debate over whether kids should be exposed to TV. I have a few friends who think they shouldn't be. It's their right, as parents, to decide for their own kids, but I also think (and I tell them when they ask my opinion) that it's extreme and ill-advised. Does TV rot minds? Probably somewhat. But probably not because of an inherent limitation of TV as much as the way in which people learn to consume it. I have little doubt that someone growing up with parents who work with them to watch TV in an informed way, using judgment about what to watch, exercising critical thought about what they see, how to timeshift, etc. is going to do better in life than someone who either hides from TV as a phenomenon or dives in and uses it without help. TV is part of our culture, and one needs to understand it to live in and around it, regardless of one's feelings about it. Teaching abstinence may sound good, but the appeal will be strong, and teaching appropriately safe practices is better for anything so compelling.
And I think the same about Wikipedia. It's a perfect opportunity to talk about objective and subjective knowledge (and even about the philosophical limits of what public education can teach one), about the practical motivations for all those references they want in your papers, about trust relationships and fraud, about truth and lying and the many gray areas between, about free speech and censorship, about cooperative social structures (from the informal Wikipedia to the formal US political system itself) and how it's hard to control them fully without strangling them (the cost of freedom, in other words), about capitalism and economics on the net (and how to shop around for info), about bias in writing (intentional and otherwise), and other things. Or, alternatively, you can just tell people that if they close their eyes, none of these issues will exist.
All in all, I personally like my education systems to be "eyes open".
Then again, this is a democracy ... one where we vote district by district on whether to believe Science or Religion ... so maybe my personal opinion will be outvoted.
As a footnote, I also wonder if the people who hold Wikipedia to such a strict standard are equally picky across the board about what students are taught in other references and other subject areas. Do they make sure the other dictionaries they use are free of hidden bias? How exactly? Do they have an approved list of newspapers that show no bias? Is CNN or Fox News their preferred TV news? How about the New York Times vs the Washington Post? Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken? And independent of media outlets, what is their standard of truth as applied in other areas? Do they teach politics? history? philosphy? media? art? economics? What do they accept as appropriately documented, unfettered truth in those areas, other than "anything not coming from Wikipedia"?
Well, the usual way the market sorts out whether it's worth retooling is by having some company compete, having the incompatible services already in play, and having people leave one product for another. That involves on "incompatibility" other than the sense in which it's incompatible to have had revenue one day and not another. So if Second Life perceives its revenue is "sufficiently incompatible" due to competition, it will presumably think harder about adjusting.
Then there becoms a market in metametaverses as people have "connected avatars" in the various underlying metaverses...
(Thanks for the technical overview, by the way. Although I didn't quote it here, it was very helpful.)
(Disclaimer: I have it on my list to visit Second Life, but for now my remarks below are based on other virtual universes I've been to, and my general understanding of what Second Life is trying to do.)
What it sounds like Linden is selling and others are banking on is real-world geometry injected into cyberspace. That's an artificial restriction. There really is no reason that it has to be laid out that way, and while I don't doubt they'll do well at that, I think they will ultimately fall to a more loose-knit organization that lets people choose who they connect to in a more flexible way.
In cyberspace, geometry doesn't have to be like in the real world. Connections don't have to be symmetric (you can have a door that operates in one direction but not another), "inside" doesn't have to have smaller volume than "outside" (e.g., you could have a tardis that was small on the outside but big on the inside, sound and sight can be transported non-locally (e.g., you could have a window out of your house looking through a neighbor's building and seeing the beach on the far side).
There's plenty enough space unless the universe has made it one of the selling points to deny you that space by creating a model that makes it hard to get those things I just mentioned. If I tell you that to see the beach, you must be on the beach, then sure, if you stay in the paradigm the good neighborhoods are limited, but why would you pay good real-world money to be in a paradigm like that? Why not start a competing business that was more flexible?
You can claim these violations of geometry will lead to a violation of real world desires for privacy. That is, you can say that having someone see you who you can't see back is confusing, but the real world is full of cameras and microphones these days, so that's always a risk any more when you're in public... "public" is, by definition, not private. It would be ironic indeed if the selling point for cyberspace became that people went there to get a more constrained, rather than more flexible, world than the real world!
If Second Life doesn't have or permit "magic windows" that can be connected to views elsewhere not directly connected (so you can see your friends "naturally" without being "next to" them), "magic doors" that make far away places local (so you can get the teleportation effect without losing the virtual reality feel of local point-to-point connectivity), etc., then someone else is likely to offer that and it will probably seem exotic, fun, and less cost... and they'll lose some customers.
Now, on the other hand, if they get some fundamental power from that connectivity that is truly a limitation of the technology (rendering caching or load balancing or something like that), then they may be able to defend their turf if no one can make a system that operates better because of that fundamental limitation. But that seems to me an open question this early in the game.
There is, of course, the possibility that the public is so naive about the possibilities that they will just try this and never investigate alternatives. They've come to believe that the words "Internet" and "web browser" are synonymous, for example. Or that "Personal Computer" and "computer that runs a Microsoft operating system" mean the same thing. So it wouldn't be the first time...
Perhaps the "scarce commodity" in this scenario isn't real estate, but imagination.
Indeed. This is what happened with domain names. They went sky high, then lots of businesses crashed and they increased the number of TLDs, so people who had invested in the land grab didn't always win.
The other thing is that any theory of scarcity presupposes that Linden will be the only, or at least the winning, item in this area. If someone came along and offered an alternate space, it wouldn't even matter if Linden had put a guarantee in writing... the value could still drop due to ordinary competition. No one has guaranteed Linden a monopoly.
Cyberspace is big... There's really no reason for there to be a scarcity of real estate. It isn't, after all, real estate. It's contrived. And if the prices go too high, that simple fact should invite competition. A key defining characteristic of real estate is supposed to be that they're not making more of it.
One relevant issue in contract law is a meeting of the minds. Given that there was only one "mind" involved, I think the strongest way that Archive.org has to address this is to say that there is no mind to be met, and therefore no contract to be breached.
If I hang a sign on my door saying "Do Not Enter" and attaching a contract below, does that give me the right to not only go after someone for breaking and entering (which is pursued in a criminal court under a standard of reasonable doubt) but also in civil court for breach of contract (which is pursued in a civil court under a much lower standard of judgment? That would seem convenient to me, but I think it would be argued that there was more of a burden to creating that contract than merely placing it. You'd have to show that the person read it and understood it. There's probably some case law on this in audio contracts when spammers leave messages on your answering machine, and maybe it doesn't break down as I'm imagining, but then, audio is linear and you have to listen past the "contract" in many cases to leave a message. Web pages are notoriously designed on the belief that the reader will be there only a few seconds, reading only parts of the page, so showing that the presence of the text implies knowledge of and agreement to a contract seems farfetched.
Part of the case may hinge on the question of whether the expectation is that there would be a human reader there at all. In the early days of the net, that might have been a reasonable assumption. But reasonable expectations are an evolving notion, and if the web site owner can be shown to reasonably know of the existence of web spiders, it's reasonable to suppose they knew that the spiders are machines, and that machines don't understand English. So the failure to ask around and find out about ROBOTS.TXT or the equivalent web tags might be construed to mean that they didn't do the work necessary to ensure the presence of a contract with a mechanical entity.
The Internet Archive may be in a special situation because it shows pages from times other than modern times and so some of those pages may have been collected under a different "prevailing expectation". I'm not sure how that would influence things, but it seems relevant.
Note that I have previously argued in other forums that in cases of copyright, the burden is on the copier, not the person being copied, to make the steps to complete the connection. However, this is not a case about copyright. This is a case about contract law. Copyright would seem the stronger way to pursue this, especially if the pages were duly registered with the copyright office. Because copyright requies the entity copying to receive affirmative permission. But contract law seems weak to me here because it seems implicit in the entire doctrine of copyright that you have to have had affirmative knowledge on both sides to have a contract at all, much less to breach it.
On my web pages where I've wanted to engage in copying language, what I've done is to assume that the copyright forbids copying at the outset, and then to make any contractual material part of the granted licenses of use. This is the lever the GPL uses, too, I believe, since otherwise people might claim never to have read the license. But they can't use the work at all without having read the license. So such placement allows one to constructively assume that someone has read the contract, since presumably they wouldn't be copying your work at all unless they read the conditions under which they were allowed to. So that kind of detail might matter, too. In her case, since she wanted no such conditions of use, she should have just stopped with "All Rights Reserved." and I'd think she would have been all set. Detaching the copyright from the contract loses the strongest available tool she had, in my opinion.
An aside: If I were Google, and if the ethics of it all did not concern me, I might prefer to join with the plaintiff and insist that spi
Although I don't disagree with a lot of specific claims in the piece, I disagree that those claims can be applied as sweepingly as they seem to be. Generalizations are useful as a way of gathering insights, but are often not predictive unless also exhaustive and rigorous. I gained some useful insights from the article, and yet no confidence that it would predict behavior because it appeared implicitly to give permission to overlook other things of importance in its rush for what seemed to me a too-facile analysis. Overlooking detail can give you good explanatory power, but there's no proof that the same details wouldn't matter in another circumstance, and so an explanation that a certain bridge failed because of bad placement of its struts (without regard to what kind of metal was used) might precisely explain that issue, and yet not usefully predict that the detail of metal choice is the relevant thing to expect in another case where the struts are placed right. I don't doubt that the factors he cites matter in some cases, but I do doubt they are the only things that could matter.
I'll give two specific examples of concerns I had about the reasoning he did:
First, DRM as practiced relies on additional assumptions not made apparent not discussed in the otherwise good essay; those need to be accounted for, and I don't think the accounting is trivial. In particular, there's an implicit assumption in industry that the "good" music and the "good" TV is what is under DRM and the "other" music and the other "TV" is not. People might quibble over whether I should substitute "polished" or "slick" for "good" and "unpolished" or "raw" for "bad", but I think any fair analysis would say that the aggregate level of quality available in TV, at least, from Cable TV or a commercial movie studio is different and of higher quality (along at least some axes) than the average level of quality produced on a home camcorder and posted to YouTube. Over time, that will change, of course, there is a notion of "scarcity" which relates to quality, and one argument that DRM clings to and that is somewhat defensible is that what is needed to maintain this distinction is money, and that DRM enables the money, allowing a small number of larger and better funded efforts. If what it takes to make the good stuff is money in large quantities, and money in large quantity is doomed to remain scarce, then DRM might succeed for a long time. If making good quality music or movie houses becomes dirt cheap, then it might be gone overnight. But neither scenario seems to me a refutation of the usefulness of DRM in aggregating money. But the scarce thing might be "production money" not "music" and it might be that DRM is converting a market with no "aggregated money" into one with "just some" aggregated money, in which case it is adding value, and under the restrictions of the author's own reasoning, it is adding value.
Second, though, I think DRM is villified unnecessarily here, if by DRM you mean "the management of digital rights" (in the abstract). If by DRM you mean "the specific set of rules in play today and the specific programs that implement these, notwithstanding that other rules could be chosen and other programs could be implemented that could still be correctly described under a banner named DRM", then indeed maybe something is broken. We don't condemn Democracy because we don't (depending on our party) like Clinton or Bush--we vote in smoeone else and still call it democracy. We don't condemn capitalism because we have a recession, nor herald it because of a monetary bubble.... well, we do, but we ought not. The subtext of this article seems to be to bring down DRM by proof, rather than to seriously analyze it. I see no enumeration of what it sets out to do, whether there are ways to fix it, etc. I see not even a definition of what DRM is so that I can know for sure whether it's a philoosphy or a specific set of rules being discussed.
Copyright works not only to allow big companies to se
I don't doubt that this is true, but I don't think it refutes my point. That doesn't make me right--it just means that your evidence is insufficient to convince me. I don't doubt that some people can make a lot of money on open source. I never claimed otherwise. Hence your citing an example of this kind doesn't contradict me. You might be right, or I might. We've both got opinions, I guess.
One way to view my concern is to observe that the skill and interest that leads to creating a work of this kind is not the same as the skill or interest that is required to make money after the fact. You sound like you've made a useful transition from software programmer to entrepreneurial manager of a software support organization. That's great, but I bet many others can't do it. I'm not saying no one can--just many can't. A lot of people who are programmers are going to stay programmers. For reasons of personality, for reasons of risk-taking, for reasons of skills required, for reasons of financial opportunity, for reasons of family considerations, and so on. I've seen some fail at moving from programmer to manager, much less owner/founder. I've certainly seen people fail by picking businesses they didn't understand, so I don't automatically assume a skilled programmer is going to translate to a skilled business person.
Industry can be cutthroat, and the business model you're apparently describing of "spend x years intensely writing a killer piece of software then give it away free and hope that people will rush to you to provide support so you can hire yourself and smoothly others before it gets out of hand" doesn't sound to me like a strategy I'd be comfortable advocating to, say, a child of mine or a student of mine. I don't hear caveats. I hear reassurances. Sure, people write books or articles in which they allege that this might work or cite examples where it has, but they can't gurantee it, and they always talk like it's a no-brainer. That bothers me. It's harder when the question comes up "should I quit my day job?" or even "should I give away all that hard work on the hope that I'll later be able to quit my day job?".
I don't think it's unreasonable to make an analogy to the many people who play sports thinking they'll one day be professional players. Having a pro player step forward and say "It happened to me, it can happen to you." is hard to "disprove". But it still may be that it's not going to happen to most people. Most people is not all people. And while some people have a chance, all people don't have an equal chance. Some people play for fun. And some people who play for serious succeed. But there are many in between who play for serious and fail. I think it's a good thing when people speak honestly to that class and say "while you might succeed, there are many more chances not to". I feel the same about open source software.
Hopefully you don't disagree with any of that, other than perhaps in the question of how to weigh "personal optimism" and "financial risk", which is always a personal choice. But the hard to answer question, since there simply can be no valid data, is whether if there were no open source market, there would be more or fewer people succeeding financially at software creation. Maybe the idea was inevitable, maybe not. It's not obvious to me that it had to go that way. Nor that it's a good idea that it did.
And, I allege, my motive is not selfish greed but the common good. I just come at it from a different point of view than many. It seems to me that the world is presently facing severe problems that might be loosely grouped into categories like "computational complexity overflow", "process problems", "unexpected im
While that's not money any of us as individuals would sneeze at, I doubt that's the money Microsoft cares about. The big money is surely in support, and Microsoft is leaving that money on the table if it insists, based on foolish pride, that it won't support stuff it didn't develop.
Large companies like Microsoft have little to fear from free software. It provides a rich source of business problems to solve for respectable consulting return. In many ways, the initial production of software is just a loss leader for big companies to get into the consulting game. Free software doesn't threaten that. All it does is limit the ability of the author to gain economically from royalty revenue at levels that would probably matter to them but that almost certainly is too smallfry for a company like Microsoft to even care about.
It seems to me very sad for the producers of useful software to unilaterally and voluntarily economically disempower themselves. The world needs people who can think and develop, and when they don't use that power to put food on the table, they lock themselves into day jobs working for someone else to do so... Worse, the main places to get those day jobs will be the places business wants to buy software support from: stable companies offering longevity and stability... companies like, say, Microsoft. Great.
Personally, I'd rather see a few more "small" millionaires, perhaps starting small and interesting sofwtare houses from royalty revenue, than no royalty revenue going to the code authors and all of industry's money going to the same old big consulting houses, who realize the market will bear the spending of that money and are willing to provide a product that the market can spend it on.
The big companies know they don't have to waste time and money trying uselessly to put the free software producers out of business. They can just use the freeness of the software to reduce their development costs in producing new products--why not do your R&D on someone else's nickel? Then they can make money on cleaning up the mess when the failure to acquire revenue means the talented creators of free-and-should-be-charged-for software software can't scale to support what they've made.
Heck, if the Postgres business really takes off for Microsoft, it could later eliminate a few of its developer jobs and cancel its own SQL product and just let Postgres continue to be developed by people willing to give away their skills rather than charge for them in a legitimate commercial challenge to Microsoft.
Or better still: If you don't like them, you could pay a fee to have them turned off.
One of the things that drives me nuts about public radio is that even if you contribute, you still have to endure the pleas for money. PBS would probably get a lot more donors if donating let you shut them up with their fund raisers.
But the Internet doesn't have to force you endure fund-raising where you've given funds because it can tell people apart and provide service according to what people pay for. It could let you log in and then you could access info advertising-free.
The only people who should be entitled to complain about the format a free service comes in should be the ones funding the free service.
And this isn't about withholding content, either. This is just a matter of trading some aesthetics for some financial stability. It seems a reasonable trade.
It bugs me that when I buy bandwidth, I don't really get bandwidth. It's like the airlines used to be: oversold, on the assumption there will be no shows. But when there aren't, the people who've paid for a service don't get it.
So I guess you could have a mode where it told you there was a shortage and asked for volunteers to get bumped for a few days, perhaps in exchange for free bandwidth later (or free porn or whatever it is that people want to trade for in order to get them to voluntarily stand down). But that sounds like it still relies on someone to be willing to give up. If they're expecting to die of bird flu tomorrow, you might find a lot of people who want to watch YouTube or some porn site today before it's too late and don't really care to trade it away.
But I think a better solution would be to have selling someone bandwidth really mean selling them bandwidth. Stop all these stupid clauses in access providers saying you can't resell bandwidth (because those are just there to keep you from exposing the overselling of bandwidth they've supposedly promised you anyway and it should be your right to resell what you've legally purchased). Create large monetary penalties for any provider who sells you bandwidth and doesn't really reserve it for you.
No, I'm not anti-capitalism. I don't mind someone selling the notion of gambling on getting bandwidth and getting a cheaper price. I just don't think that should be sold by saying you're getting x bandwidth. It should be like on credit cards where you have to disclose the info in a manner plain for anyone to know, not hidden in terms of service that the gigantically fonted numbers about how fast the connection will be is not necessarily reliably there... and certainly if you're going to be in trouble for trying to use the capacity of what you're given, that should be in big letters, too. Just like the credit cards have the Schumer Box, broadband agreements should expose things like: what's the worst case? how much is it oversold? will it go down if everyone uses it at once? will it go down if more people in your neighborhood buy? under what circumstancse do they commit to increase bandwidth? With proper labeling, I have a lot fewer objections.
But also, if after proper labeling I find there's no one in my area who will sell reliable bandwidth and everyone will only sell me probabilistic bandwidth, that's significant, too. Right now, a lot of places probably figure they have broadband reliably available when really they have it only probabilistically available (that is, oversold).
It seems to me the reason bandwidth might fall short in an event like a bird flu emergency (if it might--and that's hard to know) is that there's no serious recourse to the consumer if it does. And so what's the motivation for vendors to even care?
RCN itemizes the resale of what you've paid for in bandwidth as Theft of Service.
Comcast restricts you from offering the service to others, as well as telling you that even if you use it for yourself, you (not they) are responsible for making sure your use is within the scope of what you were sold (as if the typical Joe Sixpack is going to know how to assure his use of YouTube is within such bounds) and warns you that if you exceed your quota, they can shut you down at their discretion
Time-Warner Cable has similar restrictions.
Verizon is alleged to be quite overly strict in similar ways. They make a point of noting that Verizon advertises itself as offering a service
This seems an unfair question. Suppose a group of robbers is robbing my neighborhood and I find one of them and take them to court. Suppose they say "We have a well-established policy that if you don't want your house robbed, you should leave a note to that effect tacked to your front door." Even supposing they have, in fact, well-advertised this policy, does that make it my fault for not putting up such a note?
robots.txt is an internet protocol issue, and an informal one, and no robot is obliged to heed it. That Google does and others don't is certainly good, but that doesn't mean they haven't violated the law because they've provided a way of people opting out of what they do. To my non-lawyerly understanding, copyright license can't happen by accident or some informal gesture, it requires actual permission. So if there is a violation, the violation doesn't seem to be mitigated by the practice of the offender of creating their own out-of-band mechanism not prescribed by law.
It might be that this is fair use, of course. That's a separate question. But fair use doesn't hinge on the availability of opt-out (i.e., availability or absence of a robots.txt), at least not in the US. You might argue a fifth criterion should be adopted, as has sometimes been argued for other reasons, but I don't see it there as a reliable element. So any fair use argument has to be made, it would seem to me, on the basis of whether the a priori use is fair, whether or not the author is capable of engaging a private cease-and-desist order absent court assistance.
To say otherwise is to say that a defense against any lawsuit would be a claim that the party would stand down if you just complained to it. The problem with this posture, much though it might reduce load on the courts, is that it makes it impossible to bring a case against people who prey only on the weak. There are plenty of people who don't know or care to contact their oppressors, and yet you can't say that it's ok to keep preying until a complaint is made, and moreover that a formal complaint will be dismissed merely because a lighter weight complaint could have worked.
There's also the issue of fair use itself based on content. I'm mixed on this, having been in journalism myself and having been on both sides of this. On the one hand, Google provides a possible advertising service; that's in Google's favor. It's opt-out rather than opt-in; that's not in Google's favor. They use a certain amount of the story they have farmed from elsewhere. To the extent that text is small, that's in Google's favor. To the extent that some people only want a small blurb anyway, that's not in Google's favor, since many news organizations present themselves as portals themselves, and Google may be detracting from that. (You might legitimately disagree, but part of what's at issue in this case is whether the infringer gets to decide. The whole notion of freedom surrounds "whose freedom", and present copyright law says it's the content creator's choice. If you disagree, argue for changing the law, not for willful violation... which seems to me to be just advocating lawlessness.)
The problem is that Google is doing a service, but it is not charging the people who benefit. Rather, it is "taxing without representation" the other services on the web, taking incremental value from them in order to provide its own at no cost. Its opt-out nature, its indirect charging, etc. all contribute to a weird sense of unease about it all.
I'll close on the issue of "chilling effect" with this Supreme Court case, which may or may not be directly relevant, but which informs my personal sense of unease. The fact patterns don't exactly overlap, but I feel obliged
It sounds less scary when you put it that way. Kinda like the Military's advertising catch phrase "An Army of One"--which, charming as it sounds, wouldn't be spin, would it? (Sorry, just a bit of atomic subhumor.)
But maybe we're making progress. In what sense can two subatomic particles be said to be a black hole? What is the qualifying characteristic for being a black hole?
Oh, ok. Since you ask so nicely. (Thanks for the explanations, btw.)
Right. Happening only once per evolved civilization. Hardly woth mentioning in the grand scheme of things...
Well, maybe they're there and they just explain Olber's Paradox.
From the article:
... a black hole far smaller than a proton and circled by a squashed four-dimensional black doughnut ...
I get the impression that the "small size" thing is supposed to be reassuring. But aren't all black holes comparatively small, compared to what they've had for lunch? How big would a black hole be that, say, had accidentally swallowed the Earth? And I suppose mass should also reassure me. But the thing is, my gradeschool science oversimplification of black holes said their defining characteristic was not their mass but their insatiable, chain-reaction-like desire to swallow more mass ... like a rolling snowball.
And it's all well and good to say some theoretical rays we've never seen before will magically swing in at the end and save us, but... Since this is testing an unproven theory and not applying a well-understood theory, what are the procedures for evaluating the level of risk?
And what is the recourse of those who don't agree? Science has ethical guidelines for not experimenting on humans because of risk. Does the fact that humans are in the next room ... or the next building ... or the next city, "safely away" from the black hole being created, mean that there is no ethical obligation for informed consent? It would seem like there are more rules governing putting make-up on a rat than there are on this kind of experimentation...
I don't know the details of this kind of thing. I just have to trust someone doing them does. But I wonder exactly what I'm trusting. Anyone know?
Nothing bad about being a bit distrusting, but to borrow a line from Reagan: distrust but verify.
There's a difference between being skeptical of the answers and being skeptical of the questions.
I don't know if this is better or worse, but I've certainly noticed this trend, too. It sounds at some level like progress, but I fear it actually hides a weird assumption on some people's part that if we didn't cause it, it's not up to us to fix it--that it will either fix itself or else that it can't be fixed because it's God's doing, not man's.
These days people are looking for any reason to dismiss things because there's just too much to think about. It's like when person A writes a long email on a serious topic and person B responds "there's a typo in line 2 there." Whose turn is it to respond now? What passes for discourse these days is really more like a game of ping pong. It doesn't matter what you respond, it only matters that you did respond. Then it's back in the other person's court for action. (If you don't like sports analogies, perhaps you'd prefer a Petri net. But it works out to the same thing.)
And when the debate is between someone who is using rationality and logic on one side and someone who is thinking superficially on the other side, it has a wierd kind of surreal sense to it--like something's wrong with the picture but you can't quite figure out what. The end result, though, seems to be a lulling of the public into non-action so that it doesn't perturb Big Business, which often just likes the status quo. But if inaction is the result, I'm not sure that's progress.
This is a fair example to raise for discussion, and I'm happy to engage it.
Here is how I break down that situation:
First, there are certainly always "edge issues" for anything small. Can one copyright a fortune cookie? A haiku? What is fair use when you want to quote part of a fortune cookie? None of these are easy issues, but I think the practical answer is "notwithstanding copyright, don't bet your fortune on copyrighting something so tiny that people are likely to reproduce it". So from the side of the person who did originate the work, I think they should enjoy flimsy protection not because I don't value a crisp statement but because I think there's too much societal good in being able to compose sentences. Another way of sayng what I'm saying is that I am fine about the idea of saying that anything shorter than x words can't be copyrighted. It's not chunky enough. And that saying this is so is not enough to refute the goodness of copyright.
In a sense, music has this problem all over because, like some forms of digitized computer stuff, there just aren't that many ways to do certain things. Computer Science people have no business copyrighting (or patenting--a separate can of worms) small things like xor or an assignment statement. A trivial exhaustive search would find certain alleged "protected works", and that should be proof of obviousness (while for patents it's taken as infringement, which seems inane in small search spaces).
The idea of copyrighting a few notes, therefore, seems silly to me. Though obviously there's nothing silly about the dire consequences of the present system, which admits the possibility. I just don't think the problem is copyright or law. I think it's courts and lawyers and maybe even juries. We've taken all the judgment out of judging, and told people to be ultra-literal and that using their hearts and minds is not allowed. Something wrong there, and no wonder we get to odd rulings. So that suits like the one you describe occur seems more like an abuse of the courts and/or ineffective counsel than really a material breakdown in the copyright system. The core value of copyright seems to me to be that, Jabberwocky notwithstanding, people mostly don't memorize long written works and so don't accidentally regurgitate them. Music, by contrast, is often memorized and integrated in a way that makes it possible to regurgitate accidentally. As a consequence, I'd easily be swayed by an argument that music should be under different forms of protection than written works. I've made similar arguments for software patents.
I've argued that software copyright neglects some basic concepts, one of which is something I call convergence issues. (And perhaps there's an analogy to music.) There is work that is done for "best practice" reasons and work that is done for "creative" reasons, but copyright law does not distinguish. If I assign to you to write a paper on Truth and you turn in the same essay as your classmate, you should get an F. But if I assign you to write a program that tests truth of the combination of booleans, you should get an F if you don't get the same answer as most of your classmates, since there's a convergent solution. Programming is an engineering discipline, and we value convergence in engineering tasks. While writing is a divergent discipline, and we value individuality. Yet copyright sees the two the same, and that matters if you're going to claim that "having converged" is the test of "infringement".
We want the choice by a computer to use a square box or rounded-edge bo
It would seem appropriate in the context of a discussion of citation and intellectual property at this point for me to cite someone else on the point I want to make. In that spirit, let me draw your attention to the point in his trial where Sir Thomas More, a fictionalized amalgamation of several historical figures including a real person of the same name, in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons says: ``The world must construe according to its wits; this court must construe according to the law.''
In case the point of my quote is not clear: It's certainly true that one is free to construe as you say, but a lawyer is not similarly free. A lawyer is bound by the rules of law in what he construes, and the law is clear that the notion that creative influence (ideas) is not the same as copyrightable matter. I've argued in another post that this article didn't seem to really be about plagiarism as much as copyright, which is why I've confined my remarks to that area. But when I said that not all areas are gray, I meant under the law, on the grounds that we were talking about lawyers in action.
Plagiarism is probably more vague, exactly because it's not really codified per se in the law (that a quick web search turned up, anyway--many law sites don't index it and the Wikipedia says it's buried in tort law on reputations). But that's an entirely subjective area, and if you assume "ability to file a lawsuit" supports the claim at top of this post, then the sad truth of the American system seems to be that One man's mere existence in the world could very well be one lawyer's "plagiarism" since you don't have to do anything at all to get a lawsuit filed against you. (Indeed, Michael Crichton comes uncomfortably close to making this claim in his Next novel... not to be confused with his next novel, which I assume won't be named Next).
Groundless lawsuits are filed all the time by people with money against people with no money, and a great deal of the law operates by monetary intimidation rather than pursuit of justice. It would be sad if that truth about how courts operated infected the language we use out of courts about truth and justice. It would be a shame if you could anything in the ordinary world is ambiguous merely because that thing might be the subject of a lawsuit. (That's effectively what the Intelligent Design and Global Warming discussions have done, and it hasn't improved the world's understanding.) One must reasonably draw the line somewhere, and I think it rational to say that plagiarism is not defined operationally by someone's ability or willingness to file suit alleging violation.
Under normal circumstances, I'd agree. However, the article (and I admit I read about half of it in detail and then barely skimmed the rest) didn't seem to me to be about plagiarism, which is (I assume) why the subject line upthread is "The /. headline is typically bad." It really seems to be an article about information-sharing, not about plagiarism. He cites numerous well-known authors with apparent (but seemingly ill-founded) concern that they have plagiarized, but I would say that the fact that those various authors were not discredited is illustrative of the power of both fair use and established/approved literary techniques such as homage, parody, etc.
The examples he uses really seem to me to illustrate that the existing system is in balance already... or has been until recently. (None of my remarks should be taken as an endorsement of the new trends introduced by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).)To the extent that your remark can be construed as an affirmation of the age-old line "one man's trash is another man's treasure", I certainly don't mean to detract from it. But I still have some concerns that your suggestion is not strong enough to really solve the problem. (My remarks here ran longer than I wanted, and I edited them down a bit. I hope the result isn't incoherent as a result.)
The problem is not that people can't or shouldn't start with small contributions and grow them to big ones. The problem is that referring to something by its history or pedigree is not the same intellectual activity as referring to something by class. One can trivially, but uselessly, describe a pedigree system as a class system, by saying that every pedigree names a class, but it defeats the ability to do generalized reference to something because each name is so heavily overloaded that short names start to have no meaning. As I was reading one of the books in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game trilogy, there was reference to a hierarchically oriented net that sounded like the idea that kids grew up posting in their town and if they gained enough stature, they were allowed to post nationally, and so on. There are obvious disadvantages of this when some governments are repressive, but just because something has disadvantages doesn't mean it's got no advantages. There's some value to saying that people should not post their first grade homework for world-wide scrutiny on usenet.
And note that I'm not trying to say that textual size implies importance. It probably tends to be correlated, but it's possibly different. A remark like "Fixed a big security hole." might be accompanied by a one-line change and yet the change might be a substantive contribution. But most small changes are not of that kind. And documenting that you only did a small change doesn't fix that--rather, it invites people to so overwhelm people with documentation that you can't tell it was just a small change. That's how lawyers have learned to address requirements for disclosure: don't withhold, but instead drown the opposition in so much disclosure that they can't find the thing they care about.
So I'm leary that encouraging "disclosure" as a standard for saying you made a contribution is, while a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition.
There are surely gray areas, but your remark suggests there is nothing but gray areas, and I don't think that's true. Under the law, copyright protects the form of a work, not an idea. It comes right out and says that plainly, in a way that law doesn't always do. Just to make sure there is no confusion. As such, "creative influence" insofar as it is an "idea" is generally protected.
The author of the article seemed to speak at times as if he were arguing against things that are in fact not in play. It is considered fair use to quote one another in the course of public dialog. (The right of fair use happens to be implementationally threatened by coercive DRM attempting to conform to the DMCA, but that's a slightly different problem. I have argued (but so far have not managed to convince any actual lawyers) that the legal concept of an easement (from Real Estate law) needs to be injected into Intellectual Property law in order to address the present state of affairs in that regard. For rights to be meaningful, having some way to enforce them seems useful. There are a number of mechanisms for addressing infringement, but there needs to be a counterbalancing force to address fair use. That the US Government Copyright FAQ does not even mention "fair use" in the set of questions is perhaps telling in and of itself.)
It is trivially true that as you morph an idea from a single source, there is a point in which the idea is still so much the original that the new form carries with it no serious value and cannot legitimately be called its own work. So in this regard, your remark is technically correct.
However, another way of interpreting copyright might be not to regard it as a right of use, but a standard we hold ourselves to before we call something a contribution. That is, if I take a play you wrote, change a word or two, and then offer it back to the public, odds are the public will say "this wasn't a material contribution". Forget copyright issues, my obligation to say I have contributed something is higher. If I'm a writer, even a good one, and call a press conference every time I type a period or comma, eventually people will get tired. It's not a novel, or even a chapter, until a chunkier contribution has been made. And copyright just enforces that same notion, but between people instead of internally within them.
So maybe it is just a matter of degree after all. But maybe degree matters. Maybe the whole point is, as in Aristotle's Virtue Ethics that at either end of the spectrum is an "unreasonable extreme", and that there really is no well-defined, uniquely determined midpoint, but that the goal is to seek a balance in spite of that fact, so that one doesn't slide to one of the endpoints. To say that any contribution, no matter how trivial, that includes another's work is ok is to create spam. To say that any contribution, no matter how large, that includes another's work, is infringing is to create a society that doesn't grow through interaction.
Sigh. Yeah, that part was just a typo. Thanks for catching it.
Although the connective glue had been in place for years, in my own mind I use the impact of Shoemaker-Levy 9 in July 1994 as marking the birth of the Internet because I remember looking it up on my newly unpacked Mosaic browser, seing the pictures of the impact, and then looking to the TV news a while later and seeing the same pictures after I had found them on the web. My jaw dropped and the impact of it all (if you'll pardon the pun) hit me all at once. TV would never be the same.
Ability to search isn't the only criterion I use these days for deciding whose input box to type into. Data retention policies also matter to me. The idea that Google is retaining search strings associated with IP addresses really creeps me out. Lately I've been nervous about and tend to avoid typing searches of a medical or political nature into Google for fear I'll see them later regurgitated to me in the form of increased insurance rates or someone trying to manipulate my political freedoms, whether as an individual or as a group.
Misspellings or not, I'd rather type them straight to Wikipedia, if only to break up the trail of Internet breadcrumbs I involuntarily leave into different parcels. I've started to use other search engines more often, I have uninstalled Google toolbar, I won't use gmail, and I refuse to let it index my desktop.
I'm starting to regard the centralization of public and personal data by Google as something vaguely like an opt-in, privately managed version of all the things I like least in the Patriot Act. And, little by little, I find myself opting out.
The unnecessary bile in your remark notwithstanding, this is a reasonable terminological clarification to make, but it doesn't falsify my point.
Btw, on that terminlogy issue, just as an aside: I was using the term Internet in the modern usage, as the thing that was born around 1994 with the birth of the web (which existed for a number of years before in limited distribution but didn't burst forth until the Mosaic browser became widely available around that time). I personally joined the net in 1978 (hence my moniker of "netsettler"), so I'm not unaware of all of this. We just called it the ARPANET back then. There was a transitional time from mid to late 1990's where one might quibble about whether it was called ARPANET or Internet, since the routing technology was emerging.
My points were really directed at the web era, which people call the Internet because they see the Internet Explorer icon on their desk. And I stand by my claim that there was early (read: mid 1990's) talk of pervasive micropayments which just sort of quietly fell away as portal vendors found they could charge for access without having to pass money through to the content providers to whom they were gatewaying paying users.
And even if none of that were true, what still remains of my point after that would still be valid and relevant, which is that it's a choice society makes about what it wants to pay for. We could do things differently in a free society, any time there's a will. Yet modern social patterns are heavily inertial and fatalistic. This tends to support the accumulation of funds in a small number of hands, often through the good works of many individual contributors who themselves don't profit.
Perhaps the real problem is that we treat the Internet as if it should not cost money. It does cost money, but it's made artificially bad manners to say so. Money regularly goes to bandwidth providers, but that generally doesn't reimburse content providers. Content providers are taxed for having done the service they provide. When you get a web site, you say how much volume you want to support and you pay rather than are paid for the volume of traffic. Your content users are often outright irate at the idea they should have to give anything back to the people from whom they benefit.
The original model of the Internet included the hint that micropayments would closely follow as a way for web server providers to get paid. But it never happened. Nowadays, when the idea of payment get suggested, the Public treats it like a content provider is getting greedy, but it's really not. Money is nothing more than a way of saying "this is what I value and want to encourage". When you don't pay, you get a system that gets paid by someone else. Which means it doesn't have your value system, it has someone else's. So an encyclopedia rises or falls on the basis of whether it hires good "fund raisers" rather than whether it provides good content.
The whole email system is another example where people don't want to pay a few dollars a year for email, so they pay much more in real money and in aggravation dealing with spam. The cost is there either way. You can't get it out of the system. It just ends up being that since the cost is not directly for the services people receive, people have lost control of the ability to just say simply "I like this, plesae keep it going" or "I don't like this, I won't support it." The simplicity of money and of pay-for-service directly is that it promotes direct involvement of the consumer in what is available.
The indirect models we've all got in which we indulge the fiction that things are free all work toward a model where someone who isn't what we want to consume gets the money and then collectively bargains for us in a way we really have no serious control over. The money by that point has been blended with other money from other sources, perhaps even conflicting with our desires.
I think it's worth a few moments reflection now and then, and surely at times like this.
I was going to make this identical point. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
In this day of trumped-up controversy over the difference between Science and nonsense/non-science, Princeton is missing a big opportunity to underscore the importance of this by underscoring that "lack of faith" has nothing to do with anything in Science. These were often not expensive experiments to try, and I'm sure there was plenty of money riding on a successful outcome, so budget was not what impeded opportunities to reproduce. Surely anyone would be proud to show they'd reproduced results as important as these would be if they could be reproduced in an independent lab.
I've never had occasion to stop and read Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, but the title has always said to me what needs to be said. Nevertheless, there's clearly some segment of the populace that doesn't understand what Scientific Method is and that thinks that anything scientific-sounding is science and that probably really does think that faith is a key component.
The sad part of a lot of the debate on so-called Intelligent Design is that people who don't get it often use words like "hypothesis" or "theory" as if they were criticisms of Science. They point to the Theory of Evolution as if the mere use of the word "theory" was a trump card over the more emotionally comforting yet more scientifically misleading term "fact". It is being spun in public debate as if it were an outright admission of failure. The fact is that what gives science its power is the willingness of the claim-maker to step forward and offer a thesis for possible falsification. Anything where you can't make a single testable statement that, if proven, would falsify your work makes for pretty questionable science.
There's also no shame or loss of face in thoroughly researching an area that doesn't show an original thesis. People get very bound up in the hope they'll show truth, but Science proceeds also by trying and failing, and we should do more to laud those who fail and are straightforward and honest about such failures. Because research dollars are often really a gamble on someone's part that a claim is true, we create both emotional and economic incentives for researchers to bias results toward the original claim. It may upset the funders, but it should not upset Science, to see a well-documented failure. But the researchers throw away all the honor they may have gained by properly exploring and documenting a set of failure results if they stubbornly insist that non-reproducible results are best described as "success that others refuse to have faith in" since there really isn't any outcome in any research that couldn't be described by such words if one wanted to... You could print those words on a stamp, buy a post office box, and open your own research lab with little more than that as your research facility.
Educated people should use opportunities like this to focus loudly on what Science is and what it is not. The Public can use all the education it can get on this issue, especially in the US, where the very notion of Science is under active attack.