I think Hague's piece, while it's a bit heavy on the nostalgia, does have one good point in it: As 3D-rendered worlds get more and more complex, the level design will be inevitably more and more time-consuming.
However, he doesn't note the business model that successful FPS games have used to overcome that problem: They open up the level-design specs, and make it possible for anybody to design their own level. That, plus the recent phenomena of near-universal Internet access, means that you can find people out there willing to give their work away for free as long as they get one e-mail's worth of praise for it. Egoboo is a powerful thing.
This puts a pretty radical paradigm shift into the gaming world: Your users determine the game's level design and play pattern. The most obvious example is that they can control the spacing and variety of obstacles (puzzles, enemies, etc.). But there are also people who have used the basic 3D engine at the heart of an FPS and applied them to uses that most people would have never predicted, including:
It would be incorrect to argue that 3D-rendered games will lead to a lack of diversity in play. (They won't even completely eclipse other types of games: There will always be people who like Tetris or Scrabble or poker.) In some ways, 3D games represent a broadening of play that's pretty much unprecedented.
What, they're banning my right to see around things? Will this mean my X-Ray Specs will be illegal? And what if I take my X-Ray Specs apart to see how they work?
I agree: If it's public communications -- that is, you sent to somebody else, through e-mail or Usenet or IRC or whatevah -- it should be admissable. (It should also be taken in proper context, too: Words are often just that, words. People say all kinds of things that mean nothing. Anybody in law should know that.)
If it's private -- if you composed it on your own machine, and never sent it to anybody -- then, yeah, there should be protections. But in many cases the private sector already has protections that make legal reform unnecessary: As you say, a decent secure delete program should take care of it. I'd guess that the judge is unaware that such things exist, though we should applaud his effort to think about the rights involved nonetheless.
The sad thing is, if you found the right venture capitalist you could probably convince him/her to give you funding for this. I mean, it's not a dumber idea than letting advertisers influence hits on search engines, and there are already clueless investors funding that...
Remember that the music industry is not acting very rationally. It can only react instinctively to MP3s, in much the same way an insect flails around after its head has been cut off. I personally believe that digital distribution will make it near impossible to make money selling individual copies of CDs. The music industry is trying to fight this instead of adapting to it, and its choices are probably being made by two different groups of people:
1. Old, slow executives who are too tired to learn a new way of doing business.
2. Young, cynical lawyers and consultants who are making a mint by telling those in group 1: "Yes, you can stop MP3s. By the way, here's my bill for last month."
It makes me wonder if anybody hung around on the Titanic, selling pails.
If you're unaware of this, Segfault published a study earlier this year titled "What if Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus?" To quote from the conclusion: "... given standard traffic patterns, Linus Torvalds has an 8.9% (plus or minus 1.4%) chance of surviving and fully recovering from a collision with a bus."
That said, Flash can be useful: it works (and looks!) the same in every corporate browser (most clients don't care if Linux geeks can't see their site) and it allows for their TV commercial on the web to stand out.
1. The emphasis on severely consistent look -- down to control at the pixel-level -- is, I think, an image-centric corporate way of looking at things. I don't think it's particularly relevant to the web. (Though, of course, good luck convincing a corporate client that.)
2. People who want to watch commercials don't go online to do it. That's what television is for.
I can concede that Flash can have legitimate uses, but in practice the overwhelming majority of Flash is useless eye candy.
As somebody who works in an interactive agency, my two cents is that Flash animations are there to satisfy the client, not the user. You'd be surprised how many clients don't actually use the web that much themselves, so they're easily wowed by something that looks like a TV commercial (the Flash presentation) as opposed to something that people will use.
Well, this is probably flamebait, but I want to make two points anyway:
1. Just because somebody's good at math, science, or computers, doesn't mean they have any understanding of how a society should work. For God's sake, look at Slashdot.
2. I think teenagers should get the vote. They may seem irresponsible, but the quickest way to make people grow up is to give them a say in their own lives. And besides, I've known a lot of teenagers who are mature and politically involved, and a lot of adults who are self-absorbed and ignorant. Adulthood and stupidity are not mutually exclusive.
(In case you're feeling too lazy to follow that link right now...) Nader supports putting all Congressional voting records on the Internet, he supports the current Department of Justice lawsuit against Microsoft, and he supports more public control of the airwaves for both radio and TV.
That's all good, though I'll probably be voting for Nader more for his general opinions on labor, corporatism, and the environment. Sure, I work in the tech industry and am pro-Napster and alla that. But I worry more about human rights than my own stock options.
I don't think I'm the only one looking forward to the day when I can watch TV programs with all the commercials snipped out, but I don't think that means that ads will disappear. The inevitable spread of TiVo/Replay-like devices will make it hard to compel people to watch ads in little 15-second or 30-second snippets, but advertisers will do their best to get their stuff seen, regardless.
Advertisers' response will be to eventually switch to a model of product placement in the content itself. It's already a very widespread phenomenon, from all the sports wares hawked in Jerry Maguire, to the number of Pottery Barn mentions in a particular episode of Friends... And that kind of advertising is much, much harder to edit out.
The thing is, you can make distribution and reediting of this stuff practically free, but production of content will still remain (relatively) costly. If every show looked like South Park, then anybody with a decent computer could put out their own, but most shows require a set, actors, costumes, cameras, crew, etc., etc. Information wants to be free, but not when its production depends on so many atoms.
I tried spelling out words on this (just by visually hunting-and-pecking on the keyboard in their pictures) and it seemed like it was very easy to learn. One of the things they say is that they minimized travel distances for the most common letter transitions -- meaning not only does your finger travel less, but hunting-and-pecking is much easier because the letter you're looking for is probably close to the letter you just typed.
Also, I can say personally that even though I know QWERTY very well -- I type about 80 wpm -- that's with two hands. My experiences using QWERTY one-handed haven't been so positive at all, so if I were to regularly need a one-handed keyboard, I'd seriously consider something like this keyboard. Sure, you'd have to relearn a little, but that's just as difficult a transition (possibly easier) as going from two-handed QWERTY to one-handed QWERTY.
Copyrighted materials are owned by the creator, by default. Often, there are work-for-hire arrangements, in which the creator gives up all rights to someone else -- commercial jingles, for example, are all work-for-hire -- but there always has to be an explicit contract saying so.
Work-for-hire is pretty standard in software, and it makes more sense. But if the company suing you didn't sign such a contract (which is easy to imagine, considering how fast-and-loose the industry is right now), they might have a legal leg to stand on.
Although this might negatively affect your case, my first instinct would be to publicize this nasty suit. Legality notwithstanding, I can't imagine a single agency willing to hire someone who sued somebody for maintaining their code...
Unfortunately, the fast ascendancy of MS & Cisco doesn't change much. Whether a given corporation lasts for 10 years or 100 years isn't so much the issue. The problem is how much we, as a society, let corporate interests in general dictate our needs. If you were to serve Satan one day and Beelzebub the next, you wouldn't be able to call that an improvement.
And although I agree with you about people's suspicion of corporations, I think a lot of that potential can be checked by cynicism. Many people resent the extent to which commercialism seeps into our lives, but few of us feel like we can do anything about it. Nike doesn't care whether we resent them or love them, if we keep buying their shoes.
As usual, Mr. Katz isn't the first person to be saying this. A few good places to look for more info would be:
Noam Chomsky Political Texts Online: Noam Chomsky's a professor of linguistics at MIT, and has been writing about the effects of capitalism on democracy for over 20 years.
The Left Business Observer: A hard look at the messages of capitalism's cheerleaders, from an analytical economist's point of view. Plenty of charts and graphs.
Stay Free! Magazine: A zine focusing on commercialism and consumer culture. Slashdot readers will probably enjoy the mean iMac ad parody on the front page.
One thing that seems to be getting lost in all this discussion is that property (and, conversely, theft) is defined by society. That is, there's nothing natural or intrinsic about the fact that one person can own an idea. Our intellectual property laws are economic and legal schemes designed by society, hopefully for society's benefit.
For example, copyrights exist in large part because our society decided it's good for everybody that artists are compensated for their creations. Patents were created so that inventors wouldn't hoard their secrets jealously and lead to the possibility of trade secrets dying with their innovators. These have been useful schemes, but they are far from natural, intrinsic, or perfect. Many people have argued, for example, against the current extension of patents to algorithms, or the fact that corporations can now hold copyrights nearly indefinitely.
And when these schemes are no longer useful or practical, we as a society can decide to amend or discard them. In this case, digital technology is making it trivially easy to copy music, and many users do it because they don't see it as theft, since it's creating another copy of something, not depriving someone else of their own copy.
We don't need artists and record labels suing Napster. We need to figure out how to treat intellectual property in a way that is consistent with our technological facilities and our own sense of ethics. On one hand, it would be a shame if our society devoted a tremendous amount of legal resources to prosecuting an ever-growing wave of people who insist on trading this stuff freely. On the other hand, we need to make sure artists have some chance of making a living.
There is no compelling reason for Miramax to go to the trouble. The quality will be worse than VHS, and it'll be less convenient than going to the store and renting a VHS tape. If it was hardcore indie filmmaking with a niche audience, putting it online is justified because a production like that can't deal with the distributive overhead of getting their tapes into the neighborhood Hollywood Video. But as to why anybody would go to the trouble to spend 20 minutes downloading "Cider House Rules" to watch it on a tiny little window in their monitor is beyond me.
It's worth noting that the vast majority of shows, movies, etc., that fanfic is based on is not, in fact, written by a sole author. Most of this stuff -- Star Trek, Babylon 5, Buffy -- comes from corporate-owned sources.
I'm not making the distinction so I can go on some "Fight the man" rant; I simply think the creative differences are significant. When Anne Rice writes her novels, it is a pretty personal process, and it's hard to imagine someone else doing it like she would. (I actually don't like Anne Rice, myself, but you get the idea.) But TV shows, and many movies, are written by committee, or by different authors at different times, so it's hard to see fanfic as diluting that singular artistic vision. It just adds one more author to an already-crowded roster.
I don't know that Mozilla really intended to build something that could be used as a platform. It's just that they built a highly modularized set of free-software tools -- cross-platform widgets, online bugtracking, interpreters for a whole slew of different kinds of protocols -- simply to do Netscape right. And once that code was mostly in place, it was relatively easy for others to step in and say "Hey, I want to do such-and-such, and if I use this chunk of the Mozilla code, it'll save me 25% of the work."
In terms of how the ambition helps Mozilla itself, I think the theory is that it will prove advantageous in the long run. Remember that the reason Mozilla pretty much rebuilt Netscape from scratch was that the Netscape 4 codebase was considered so scrambled that further development on top of it just didn't make sense. Sure, it's taken forever to see Netscape 6, but now that it's built on such a well-engineered codebase, future iterations should benefit from the fact that it'll be so much easier to ferret out old bugs and add new features. That's the theory, anyway.
I agree with your criticisms, but it should be pointed out that this article comes from the Associated Press, not Yahoo. In other words, the problem goes even deeper than that.
Maybe you should think twice. I heard a story (a long time ago) about a guy who had been active as a student in the '60s. When the Freedom of Information Act was passed, he sent a letter to the FBI asking for his file. They sent him back a xerox copy of the letter.
This may have happened, or it may just be just an urban legend. All I can do is cite my own experience: When I asked for my own FBI file a couple of years ago, they told me they had no files matching my name. Maybe they did, and were lying, or maybe they started a file based on my letter, and lied about it. Or maybe FOIA requests out of curiosity are common enough these days that making one is no longer considered suspicious behavior.
I have to admit being a little disappointed about not having a file (though I'm currently appealing the CIA's refusal to confirm or deny the existence of any files on my grandfather). The implicit meaning of this, of course, is that the FBI thinks I'm powerless enough as to not bother monitoring -- I'd almost rather be considered a threat.
I see this as a good thing, actually. Remember, cartoon strips didn't actually start out as talking head strips. Look at the original strips of Krazy Kat or Little Nemo -- the pictures are vibrant and expressive, and full of lush background detail.
What happened? The bottom line, of course. Profit-minded newspaper publishers realized they could draw in more readers if they shrunk the funnies and offer more comics on a single page, but in doing so they made it almost impossible for strip artists to justify the beautiful details of the past, leading to talking-heads strips such as the infamous Dilbert. (When Bill Watterson came back from his sabbatical, he made a stipulation that any newspaper that carried his Sunday Calvin and Hobbes had to give it an entire half-page, so that he could stretch his artistic muscles at least once a week.)
As you say, Junks, computer graphics are making it trivial to include talking-heads graphics for a gag cartoon. The end result could be a good thing -- if we're inundated by online strips like that, people could start offering more visually arresting cartoons to stand out from the crowd. (And I personally don't care how those cartoons are generated, as long as they're good.)
Now all the company needs to do is send the images through image recognition software that scans for naked breasts (from women sunbathing in the nude). Offer the option to for a "nude surveillance" subscription, and you'll retire early.
With XML as the central protocol, content structuring is going to be one of the next innovations to hit the web. This will reduce a lot of technical hurdles to scanning for & restructuring other sites' content.
Whether or not this will be considered legal behavior is still a matter of debate. But the Department of Justice is currently undertaking an antitrust probe of eBay for their actions against sites like AuctionWatch and Bidder's Edge.
Meaning that there's a possibility that the actual location of this content may not be as significant as it once was.
Slashdot Mirror
However, he doesn't note the business model that successful FPS games have used to overcome that problem: They open up the level-design specs, and make it possible for anybody to design their own level. That, plus the recent phenomena of near-universal Internet access, means that you can find people out there willing to give their work away for free as long as they get one e-mail's worth of praise for it. Egoboo is a powerful thing.
This puts a pretty radical paradigm shift into the gaming world: Your users determine the game's level design and play pattern. The most obvious example is that they can control the spacing and variety of obstacles (puzzles, enemies, etc.). But there are also people who have used the basic 3D engine at the heart of an FPS and applied them to uses that most people would have never predicted, including:
- Real-time virtual wedding ceremonies
- Animated short films set in the Quake world
- A virtual sysadmin tool that simulates kill -9 with a shotgun
It would be incorrect to argue that 3D-rendered games will lead to a lack of diversity in play. (They won't even completely eclipse other types of games: There will always be people who like Tetris or Scrabble or poker.) In some ways, 3D games represent a broadening of play that's pretty much unprecedented.Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
If it's private -- if you composed it on your own machine, and never sent it to anybody -- then, yeah, there should be protections. But in many cases the private sector already has protections that make legal reform unnecessary: As you say, a decent secure delete program should take care of it. I'd guess that the judge is unaware that such things exist, though we should applaud his effort to think about the rights involved nonetheless.
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
1. Old, slow executives who are too tired to learn a new way of doing business.
2. Young, cynical lawyers and consultants who are making a mint by telling those in group 1: "Yes, you can stop MP3s. By the way, here's my bill for last month."
It makes me wonder if anybody hung around on the Titanic, selling pails.
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
1. The emphasis on severely consistent look -- down to control at the pixel-level -- is, I think, an image-centric corporate way of looking at things. I don't think it's particularly relevant to the web. (Though, of course, good luck convincing a corporate client that.)
2. People who want to watch commercials don't go online to do it. That's what television is for.
I can concede that Flash can have legitimate uses, but in practice the overwhelming majority of Flash is useless eye candy.
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
1. Just because somebody's good at math, science, or computers, doesn't mean they have any understanding of how a society should work. For God's sake, look at Slashdot.
2. I think teenagers should get the vote. They may seem irresponsible, but the quickest way to make people grow up is to give them a say in their own lives. And besides, I've known a lot of teenagers who are mature and politically involved, and a lot of adults who are self-absorbed and ignorant. Adulthood and stupidity are not mutually exclusive.
Francis Hwang
That's all good, though I'll probably be voting for Nader more for his general opinions on labor, corporatism, and the environment. Sure, I work in the tech industry and am pro-Napster and alla that. But I worry more about human rights than my own stock options.
Francis Hwang
Advertisers' response will be to eventually switch to a model of product placement in the content itself. It's already a very widespread phenomenon, from all the sports wares hawked in Jerry Maguire, to the number of Pottery Barn mentions in a particular episode of Friends ... And that kind of advertising is much, much harder to edit out.
The thing is, you can make distribution and reediting of this stuff practically free, but production of content will still remain (relatively) costly. If every show looked like South Park, then anybody with a decent computer could put out their own, but most shows require a set, actors, costumes, cameras, crew, etc., etc. Information wants to be free, but not when its production depends on so many atoms.
Francis Hwang
Also, I can say personally that even though I know QWERTY very well -- I type about 80 wpm -- that's with two hands. My experiences using QWERTY one-handed haven't been so positive at all, so if I were to regularly need a one-handed keyboard, I'd seriously consider something like this keyboard. Sure, you'd have to relearn a little, but that's just as difficult a transition (possibly easier) as going from two-handed QWERTY to one-handed QWERTY.
Francis Hwang
Work-for-hire is pretty standard in software, and it makes more sense. But if the company suing you didn't sign such a contract (which is easy to imagine, considering how fast-and-loose the industry is right now), they might have a legal leg to stand on.
Although this might negatively affect your case, my first instinct would be to publicize this nasty suit. Legality notwithstanding, I can't imagine a single agency willing to hire someone who sued somebody for maintaining their code ...
Francis Hwang
And although I agree with you about people's suspicion of corporations, I think a lot of that potential can be checked by cynicism. Many people resent the extent to which commercialism seeps into our lives, but few of us feel like we can do anything about it. Nike doesn't care whether we resent them or love them, if we keep buying their shoes.
Francis Hwang
Noam Chomsky Political Texts Online: Noam Chomsky's a professor of linguistics at MIT, and has been writing about the effects of capitalism on democracy for over 20 years.
The Left Business Observer: A hard look at the messages of capitalism's cheerleaders, from an analytical economist's point of view. Plenty of charts and graphs.
Stay Free! Magazine: A zine focusing on commercialism and consumer culture. Slashdot readers will probably enjoy the mean iMac ad parody on the front page.
Francis Hwang
For example, copyrights exist in large part because our society decided it's good for everybody that artists are compensated for their creations. Patents were created so that inventors wouldn't hoard their secrets jealously and lead to the possibility of trade secrets dying with their innovators. These have been useful schemes, but they are far from natural, intrinsic, or perfect. Many people have argued, for example, against the current extension of patents to algorithms, or the fact that corporations can now hold copyrights nearly indefinitely.
And when these schemes are no longer useful or practical, we as a society can decide to amend or discard them. In this case, digital technology is making it trivially easy to copy music, and many users do it because they don't see it as theft, since it's creating another copy of something, not depriving someone else of their own copy.
We don't need artists and record labels suing Napster. We need to figure out how to treat intellectual property in a way that is consistent with our technological facilities and our own sense of ethics. On one hand, it would be a shame if our society devoted a tremendous amount of legal resources to prosecuting an ever-growing wave of people who insist on trading this stuff freely. On the other hand, we need to make sure artists have some chance of making a living.
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
I'm not making the distinction so I can go on some "Fight the man" rant; I simply think the creative differences are significant. When Anne Rice writes her novels, it is a pretty personal process, and it's hard to imagine someone else doing it like she would. (I actually don't like Anne Rice, myself, but you get the idea.) But TV shows, and many movies, are written by committee, or by different authors at different times, so it's hard to see fanfic as diluting that singular artistic vision. It just adds one more author to an already-crowded roster.
Francis Hwang
In terms of how the ambition helps Mozilla itself, I think the theory is that it will prove advantageous in the long run. Remember that the reason Mozilla pretty much rebuilt Netscape from scratch was that the Netscape 4 codebase was considered so scrambled that further development on top of it just didn't make sense. Sure, it's taken forever to see Netscape 6, but now that it's built on such a well-engineered codebase, future iterations should benefit from the fact that it'll be so much easier to ferret out old bugs and add new features. That's the theory, anyway.
Francis Hwang
I agree with your criticisms, but it should be pointed out that this article comes from the Associated Press, not Yahoo. In other words, the problem goes even deeper than that.
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
This may have happened, or it may just be just an urban legend. All I can do is cite my own experience: When I asked for my own FBI file a couple of years ago, they told me they had no files matching my name. Maybe they did, and were lying, or maybe they started a file based on my letter, and lied about it. Or maybe FOIA requests out of curiosity are common enough these days that making one is no longer considered suspicious behavior.
I have to admit being a little disappointed about not having a file (though I'm currently appealing the CIA's refusal to confirm or deny the existence of any files on my grandfather). The implicit meaning of this, of course, is that the FBI thinks I'm powerless enough as to not bother monitoring -- I'd almost rather be considered a threat.
Francis Hwang
What happened? The bottom line, of course. Profit-minded newspaper publishers realized they could draw in more readers if they shrunk the funnies and offer more comics on a single page, but in doing so they made it almost impossible for strip artists to justify the beautiful details of the past, leading to talking-heads strips such as the infamous Dilbert. (When Bill Watterson came back from his sabbatical, he made a stipulation that any newspaper that carried his Sunday Calvin and Hobbes had to give it an entire half-page, so that he could stretch his artistic muscles at least once a week.)
As you say, Junks, computer graphics are making it trivial to include talking-heads graphics for a gag cartoon. The end result could be a good thing -- if we're inundated by online strips like that, people could start offering more visually arresting cartoons to stand out from the crowd. (And I personally don't care how those cartoons are generated, as long as they're good.)
Francis Hwang
Francis Hwang
Whether or not this will be considered legal behavior is still a matter of debate. But the Department of Justice is currently undertaking an antitrust probe of eBay for their actions against sites like AuctionWatch and Bidder's Edge.
Meaning that there's a possibility that the actual location of this content may not be as significant as it once was.
Francis Hwang