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Saturday, December 04, 2004 |
Sony v. Kottke: Point/Counterpoint (Donna Wentworth).
Red Herring, reporting on Sony Entertainment threatening Jason Kottke with infringement claims after he spoiled the "surprise" ending of Ken Jennings' winning streak on Jeopardy -- while letting The Washington Post off the hook (hyperlinks, mine):
"I think it's possible that Sony thinks individual bloggers are more easily intimidated," said Wendy Seltzer, an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney who specializes in intellectual property law. "I don't think they had a reasonable request. A short audio clip -- not a full show -- could be a fair use in the context of news reporting. Jason Kottke was reporting an event that had, in fact, happened. And just because television producers wanted to treat it as suspense media, doesn't mean that it's not also news."
[...]
"Even copying a small part of someone else's work can be a copyright infringement," said UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, an expert on the First Amendment and Internet law. "Sony can say, 'We're particularly unhappy about this one guy who is the first to publish the spoiler and we want to send a message,' or Sony might say, 'Why should we start scrapping with someone who may have lots and lots of lawyers instead of someone who's more likely to give in?'"
[Copyfight]
1:17:13 PM 
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Open source biotech, one year later.
A good post by Jamais Cascio on a blog called Worldchanging asks why cheap generics for life-threatening illnesses are not more readily available when patents expire, and makes a case that "open source" methods could boost innovation and diffusion of medical biotechnology more effectively that secretive, stovepiped research by corporate competitors seeking patent protection. [Via this post on DennisKennedy.blog.]
As Cascio notes, the open-source biotech initiative proposed by Richard Jefferson that I posted about exactly a year ago is up and running, a wonderful development, under the name of BIOS, or Biological Innovation for an Open Society. BIOS seeks to bring open source concepts to biological innovation, defined as something broader than biotechnology, "encompassing the creative use of
living systems and their environment. This includes activities as diverse as plant breeding, agriculture, nutrition, biology research, ecosystem and natural resource management, biofermentation, public health and medicine."
[Subdued Citizen]
8:26:58 AM
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Bush's Ohio win was closer than thought. President Bush's victory over John Kerry in Ohio was closer than the unofficial election night totals showed, but the change is not enough to trigger an automatic recount, according to county-by-county results provided to The Associated Press on Friday. [Salon.com]
7:58:08 AM
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What's a Blink? (Donna Wentworth).
It's a short, one-sentence blog post + a link, à la Kottke remainders (see below for an example). We'll be using "blink" posts here at Copyfight to share links to articles, resources, and websites of interest that do not necessarily require paragraphs of context or analysis. Enjoy!
[Copyfight]
Ob-pedantry: To the best of my knowledge, the term "blink" was coined by Eliot of Follow Me Here.
7:57:37 AM
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December 03, 2004.
See that little picture of the books on the left hand side? It used to be 42,241 bytes long. 34,885 of those bytes were in a useless "application block" that some photo editing program put there. Thanks to Dennis Forbes, who posted an explanation and a free utility to remove the unneeded bloat, it's now only 7354 bytes.
[Joel on Software]
7:54:01 AM
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Is Philosophy a Science?.
Amid all this talk about whether economics is a science, I began to wonder about philosophy. Not only do have our own Nobel Prize, but most of us spend our days testing hypotheses, and even making (all too easily) falsifiable predictions (e.g. about what sort of intuitions rational beings will have under various counterfactual circumstances). There is furthermore a lot of circumstantial evidence that we're scientists. Many of us spend our time hanging around semi-reputable folks like linguists and psychologists, and even topics that have no prima facie connections to anything reputable, upon closer investigation, are in fact linked in fairly obvious ways to the most respected disciplines of all. Indeed, over the course of my career, I've been surprised to see how the most abstractly metaphysical topics originally discussed by philosophers have come to impact a variety of clearly empirical disciplines outside philosophy. Work by philosophers on the metaphysics of modality (or the semantics for modal languages) resulted in a model that has useful applicability in a wide variety of topics (e.g. the study of probability, the study of natural language meaning). Philosophers nursed the notion of causation while it was hiding from anti-metaphysical forces, and now it is a respectable topic again in the human sciences (e.g. no discussion of practical reasoning can ignore it). Psychologists interested in concept formation appeal to work in metaphysics as abstract as David Wiggins and Michael Ayers on sortal concepts (to the great chagrin of some of my colleagues). Some of us are even quite explicit about the fact that we do experiments. It is not just in my Quinean moments that I wonder how to make a distinction between philosophy and 'real' science.
-Jason Stanley
[Leiter Reports]
7:52:07 AM
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Body Fat and Muscle. To the Editor:. [NYT > Opinion]
Re "Tell the Truth: Does This Index Make Me Look Fat?" (Week in Review, Nov. 28):
The body mass index is a useful approximation of body fat, but it can be misleading for muscular athletic individuals, like President Bush, who would be considered overweight, as the article notes. A direct measurement of body fat is more valid, and though possible, it isn't commonly done.
A simple but good approximation of body fat, especially central fat, is based on waist circumference, which is high if above 40 inches for men (and above 35 inches for women). By that criterion, President Bush would likely be considered normal weight.
Allan Geliebter
New York, Nov. 30, 2004
The writer is a research scientist at the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital
7:42:14 AM
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Weather Data for the Masses. The U.S. government's weather data is now available in a more friendly XML format, so everyone can make use of it. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News]
Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered. Taxpayers fund the NOAA and the subsidiary National Weather Service, which gathers weather data from thousands of locations and uses massive computing firepower to predict the weather.
Commercial weather providers like AccuWeather and The Weather Channel then massage the data, supplement it with their own and turn it into consumer-friendly websites and TV weather segments. The commercial weather providers make more than $1 billion in revenue each year from sales to media, transportation companies, farmers and financial traders, according to Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president.
That arrangement rankled some. "The public should not have to pay twice for access to basic government information that has been created at taxpayer expense," wrote Ari Schwartz, an associate director of the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, in a July 28, 2004, essay.
Earlier this year, NOAA made the data available in XML as a test, called the National Digital Forecast Database. After receiving comments from the public and commercial providers, the agency made the decision permanent this week. Now anyone can get information in an XML format directly from the National Digital Forecast Database website.
"There was pressure on the National Weather Service not to make that information available," said Jamais Cascio, a writer for WorldChanging, an online pro-environment publication. But now "anyone with XML skills can build a reader," Cascio said. "It takes a minimal amount of XML knowledge to cobble together a weather program, and that's exciting."
7:41:16 AM
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