Re:Bollier missed something important!
on
Reclaiming the Commons
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
we do not have accurate ways of measuring the value of everything, but we could always guess. It's a safe bet that clean air is worth more than $0 more than unclean air, yet $0 is the current price of dirtying the air.
an "easy", incremental step would seem to be to charge for externalities, that is, guess a price for dirtying the air and charge companies that price when they dirty the air the guess will probably be slightly closer to the "true value" than $0.
may we see the licence? what exactly did the lawyers say, and what are the precedents?
in the absense of this info, i'll assume that the license says that the click-through must virally carry through to anyone else using the source. this is a bad idea. the license must be modified so that the user can agree at most once when installing a single piece of software; it is unacceptable for the user to have to agree 10 times to the different click-through licenses inherited by a piece of software (my "once" requirement includes any licenses for any libraries, dependencies, etc).
however, i have no problem with requiring something along the lines of:
"either this clickthrough notice is included or it is incorporated into a sufficiently protective one by the program that inherits the code", as this would allow a single, system-wide clickthrough assent to some sort of standardized clickthrough license.
i haven't read it yet, but "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" by Douglas Hofstadter seems heavier on the I.
but i do think basic pattern recognition theory is also heavy on the I. and i agree that "What you call 'Cognitive Imitation', I would often call 'Trying to understand cognition'."
so here are some things heavy on the A:
some forms of planning
most kinds of statistical natural language processing
some kinds of machine vision
some uses of "uncertainty in AI" (i.e. many uses of Bayes' nets as a model for some domain, like medical diagnosis)
i'm also a cog sci undergrad. Regardless of whether Cyc is a budding "intelligence", i think this sort of thing will be very useful to other projects, for example, resolving ambiguities in natural language processing.
i agree. Whether or not it eventually serves as the core of a complete A.I., Cyc will help hundreds of other projects to solve problems in various domains that require some amount of "common sense knowledge" in order to deal with the occasional special case. For example, natural language parsing is sometimes ambiguous without knowledge of which semantic content makes sense. I expect that Cyc will be able to resolve many of these sort of ambiguities, driving up the usefulness of various technologies.
your denotation may be correct but the connotation is misleading. "link farms", i.e. content selection and summary, is as important as the reporting of original news itself because information is plentiful and an individual's time is scarce. Maybe it is not "journalism", but it is certainly important enough to have classes and even whole courses of study analyzing how it is done and how to do it better.
perhaps "Blogs are the future of news distribution" would be a better slogan (although personally i believe that something even more P2P, probably more like wikis than blogs, are the future of news distribution)
oh, and i agree that Slashdot is not a blog -- i like to reserve the word "Blog" for things either more personal (like online journals) or for "web logs", i.e. lists of interesting links that someone or some group has visited. I like to call Slashdot a news discussion board.
attacking the motivations of the writer source doesn't discredit all his ideas. when someone says, "in my opinion, these are the facts:...", then it would make sense to question his opinion about those facts (for instance, his statement that "Piracy itself is in fact the central problem facing digital creations" is such an opinion and is hence questionable given his sponsors).
however, most of what he says are more abstract ideas than purported facts, and those ideas may be correct regardless of his motives for advancing them.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i copied and summarized some of this thread to MeatballWiki at page CopyrightAlternatives
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
>Take the busking example. In a world without copyright, but with a Requirement of Authorship, and Perhaps a corrallary Exemption of Authorship >that exemps works sold by the artist (or a duly appointed publisher) from taxes that would be levied against a competitor selling the same >book/record/etc. you could give artists an economic edge over others, not authorized but nevertheless entitled to publish and sell a work, >without granting them an all out monopoly, or restrict how others might use or incorporate said works in their derivative material.
i agree. contracts that are too long to read makes the whole idea worthless.
Re:Copyrights on software should be shortened
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i agree
Re:"Original" Copyright law and Patent law
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i agree. i'd go even shorter; 10 years.
also, i think what Ungrounded Lightning said was important. Any law extending copyright should only be applied to new works. This slightly lessens the incentive of corporations to push for longer copyright.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i like your demand auction idea.
>They like to raise issues regarding the formulation of the law because it conceals their true motives and brings the issue into an academic realm where they can obfuscate the issue. It plays in their favor.
i don't think the "AIP movement" is so manipulative.
>In fact, formulating IP as real property could actually sanitize things a great deal. That's because it could then be taxed
there are however many things which are different between IP and "real property". the two big ones for me are these:
* IP can be copied
* many ideas in the public domain had their greatest impact in ways that couldn't be anticipated. the "consumers" who used these ideas to create even better ideas would not have been able to value their demand for the prerequisite idea until they had actually "consumed" it. the government can't figure out how much to tax ideas which don't seem to have much value until they spur another idea.
Re:Leveraging what business, exactly?
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
>Your have a point in the second half of your post. Some artists need to be payed. What I am saying is that copyright is an inefficient and unjust way af making the >payments. The payment needs to be seperated from the distribution. Similar arguments apply to all areas of society where development is expensive but use is very >cheap or free, such as medicine, roads, television
true, but do you have an alternative system for payment in mind? i can't think of any without even greater problems.
Re:Leveraging what business, exactly?
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
>>I'm sorry, but this is just f***ing nuts. Almost >>all musicians or writers worth their salt do >>nothing but make music or write. That's why >>they're so good, and that's why you want to >>listen to and read their stuff. So what other >>"business" do they have to leverage? Selling >>T-shirts? This might be funny if it weren't so >>stupid.
>Unfortuneately, that's *exactly* the way most >bands make their money. Sure you have the >occasional artist who has great record sales and >manages to come out on too after they're anally >raped by their label, but the great majority of >smaller performers make their money by a) selling >merchandise such as t-shirts and b) selling >concert tickets. Even then, they may not break >even.
yes, but its still possible that the incentive created by the chance of making money off album sales later on encourages the artists to work under these conditions. so its possible you would still have less art being produced without IP, even if very few artists actually benefit from it.
Re:Leveraging what business, exactly?
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
>>Sure you have the occasional artist who has >>great record sales and manages to come out on >>top after they're anally raped by their label, >>but the great majority of smaller performers >>make their >>money by a) selling merchandise such as t-shirts >>and b) selling concert tickets. Even then, they >>may not break even.
> But is this the fault of the labels >or the performer? Perhaps he's just not that good >a performer. Or perhaps he's not that good at >handling the business end of the job.
from what i've heard it's not the performer's fault. maybe it is the label's fault, or maybe the market just can't sustain as many performers as there are (even if the market is big enough, perhaps consumers would rather buy a few famous people than buy small acts (right now it's hard to tell as the industry is biasing people towards liking fame))
Re:Leveraging what business, exactly?
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i don't feel that information is necessarily property, or that we are instinctively disposed to treat it that way. i think IP is a device a society can use to try to encourage content production. so i feel the decision of whether or not we should have IP is a purely utilitarian one, with little moral content.
personally, i think the optimal thing to do right now for our society is to have IP, but to limit it to 10 years or so.
Re:The concept of intellectual property has got to
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i agree
Re:Just read the Constitution, fer chrissakes.
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
i agree with other comments posted in response to this one.
it limits the creator's options rather than expanding them.
it doesn't work for complex works made by large teams.
and it is unreasonable to expect the content creators to have to take people to court themselves.
perhaps a reduced version of this in which the creator retains some sort of moral rights. at the very extreme one could prohibit the creator from assigning an exclusive license to others (i.e. the creator would always be permitted to give additional non-exclusive licenses to others). the holders of non-exclusive licenses could still sue, however, as long as they didn't sue another license holder.
i would much prefer just shortening copyright terms drastically, say to 10 years.
still doesn't seem like her fault. what's wrong with having leather seats, being arthritic, and opening coffee? if i were in that position i would reasonably expect that any burns i would suffer from a spill would be minor.
Slashdot Mirror
we do not have accurate ways of measuring the value of everything, but we could always guess. It's a safe bet that clean air is worth more than $0 more than unclean air, yet $0 is the current price of dirtying the air.
an "easy", incremental step would seem to be to charge for externalities, that is, guess a price for dirtying the air and charge companies that price when they dirty the air the guess will probably be slightly closer to the "true value" than $0.
may we see the licence? what exactly did the lawyers say, and what are the precedents?
in the absense of this info, i'll assume that the license says that the click-through must virally carry through to anyone else using the source. this is a bad idea. the license must be modified so that the user can agree at most once when installing a single piece of software; it is unacceptable for the user to have to agree 10 times to the different click-through licenses inherited by a piece of software (my "once" requirement includes any licenses for any libraries, dependencies, etc).
however, i have no problem with requiring something along the lines of:
"either this clickthrough notice is included or it is incorporated into a sufficiently protective one by the program that inherits the code", as this would allow a single, system-wide clickthrough assent to some sort of standardized clickthrough license.
i haven't read it yet, but "Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought" by Douglas Hofstadter seems heavier on the I.
but i do think basic pattern recognition theory is also heavy on the I. and i agree that "What you call 'Cognitive Imitation', I would often call 'Trying to understand cognition'."
so here are some things heavy on the A:
some forms of planning
most kinds of statistical natural language processing
some kinds of machine vision
some uses of "uncertainty in AI" (i.e. many uses of Bayes' nets as a model for some domain, like medical diagnosis)
Deep Blue/lookahead style game playing
fine, there may be a limit, but Linux should be at least as easy to use as Windows.
sounds allright.. i'll probably buy a few albums at this price, if i have time to buy any this summer.
i'm also a cog sci undergrad. Regardless of whether Cyc is a budding "intelligence", i think this sort of thing will be very useful to other projects, for example, resolving ambiguities in natural language processing.
> Computers are better at recognizing faces than humans
is this really the case? could you cite your sources (not that i have any counter-references at this time)? thanks
i agree. Whether or not it eventually serves as the core of a complete A.I., Cyc will help hundreds of other projects to solve problems in various domains that require some amount of "common sense knowledge" in order to deal with the occasional special case. For example, natural language parsing is sometimes ambiguous without knowledge of which semantic content makes sense. I expect that Cyc will be able to resolve many of these sort of ambiguities, driving up the usefulness of various technologies.
your denotation may be correct but the connotation is misleading. "link farms", i.e. content selection and summary, is as important as the reporting of original news itself because information is plentiful and an individual's time is scarce. Maybe it is not "journalism", but it is certainly important enough to have classes and even whole courses of study analyzing how it is done and how to do it better.
perhaps "Blogs are the future of news distribution" would be a better slogan (although personally i believe that something even more P2P, probably more like wikis than blogs, are the future of news distribution)
oh, and i agree that Slashdot is not a blog -- i like to reserve the word "Blog" for things either more personal (like online journals) or for "web logs", i.e. lists of interesting links that someone or some group has visited. I like to call Slashdot a news discussion board.
however, most of what he says are more abstract ideas than purported facts, and those ideas may be correct regardless of his motives for advancing them.
i copied and summarized some of this thread to MeatballWiki at page CopyrightAlternatives
>Take the busking example. In a world without copyright, but with a Requirement of Authorship, and Perhaps a corrallary Exemption of Authorship
>that exemps works sold by the artist (or a duly appointed publisher) from taxes that would be levied against a competitor selling the same
>book/record/etc. you could give artists an economic edge over others, not authorized but nevertheless entitled to publish and sell a work,
>without granting them an all out monopoly, or restrict how others might use or incorporate said works in their derivative material.
this is a great idea.
i agree. contracts that are too long to read makes the whole idea worthless.
i agree
i agree. i'd go even shorter; 10 years.
also, i think what Ungrounded Lightning said was important. Any law extending copyright should only be applied to new works. This slightly lessens the incentive of corporations to push for longer copyright.
i like your demand auction idea.
>They like to raise issues regarding the formulation of the law because it conceals their true motives and brings the issue into an academic realm where they can obfuscate the issue. It plays in their favor.
i don't think the "AIP movement" is so manipulative.
>In fact, formulating IP as real property could actually sanitize things a great deal. That's because it could then be taxed
there are however many things which are different between IP and "real property". the two big ones for me are these:
* IP can be copied
* many ideas in the public domain had their greatest impact in ways that couldn't be anticipated. the "consumers" who used these ideas to create even better ideas would not have been able to value their demand for the prerequisite idea until they had actually "consumed" it. the government can't figure out how much to tax ideas which don't seem to have much value until they spur another idea.
>Your have a point in the second half of your post. Some artists need to be payed. What I am saying is that copyright is an inefficient and unjust way af making the
>payments. The payment needs to be seperated from the distribution. Similar arguments apply to all areas of society where development is expensive but use is very
>cheap or free, such as medicine, roads, television
true, but do you have an alternative system for payment in mind? i can't think of any without even greater problems.
>>I'm sorry, but this is just f***ing nuts. Almost
>>all musicians or writers worth their salt do
>>nothing but make music or write. That's why
>>they're so good, and that's why you want to
>>listen to and read their stuff. So what other
>>"business" do they have to leverage? Selling
>>T-shirts? This might be funny if it weren't so
>>stupid.
>Unfortuneately, that's *exactly* the way most
>bands make their money. Sure you have the
>occasional artist who has great record sales and
>manages to come out on too after they're anally
>raped by their label, but the great majority of
>smaller performers make their money by a) selling
>merchandise such as t-shirts and b) selling
>concert tickets. Even then, they may not break
>even.
yes, but its still possible that the incentive created by the chance of making money off album sales later on encourages the artists to work under these conditions. so its possible you would still have less art being produced without IP, even if very few artists actually benefit from it.
>>Sure you have the occasional artist who has
>>great record sales and manages to come out on
>>top after they're anally raped by their label,
>>but the great majority of smaller performers
>>make their
>>money by a) selling merchandise such as t-shirts
>>and b) selling concert tickets. Even then, they
>>may not break even.
> But is this the fault of the labels
>or the performer? Perhaps he's just not that good
>a performer. Or perhaps he's not that good at
>handling the business end of the job.
from what i've heard it's not the performer's fault. maybe it is the label's fault, or maybe the market just can't sustain as many performers as there are (even if the market is big enough, perhaps consumers would rather buy a few famous people than buy small acts (right now it's hard to tell as the industry is biasing people towards liking fame))
i don't feel that information is necessarily property, or that we are instinctively disposed to treat it that way. i think IP is a device a society can use to try to encourage content production. so i feel the decision of whether or not we should have IP is a purely utilitarian one, with little moral content.
personally, i think the optimal thing to do right now for our society is to have IP, but to limit it to 10 years or so.
i agree
i agree with other comments posted in response to this one.
it limits the creator's options rather than expanding them.
it doesn't work for complex works made by large teams.
and it is unreasonable to expect the content creators to have to take people to court themselves.
perhaps a reduced version of this in which the creator retains some sort of moral rights. at the very extreme one could prohibit the creator from assigning an exclusive license to others (i.e. the creator would always be permitted to give additional non-exclusive licenses to others). the holders of non-exclusive licenses could still sue, however, as long as they didn't sue another license holder.
i would much prefer just shortening copyright terms drastically, say to 10 years.
still doesn't seem like her fault. what's wrong with having leather seats, being arthritic, and opening coffee? if i were in that position i would reasonably expect that any burns i would suffer from a spill would be minor.
the articles on the web site posted seemed to indicate that most of the people affected were previously healthy individuals.
agreed. this thing should be swiftly renamed.