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Friday, January 28, 2005 |
the (c) office asks a brilliant question.
As is old news (but everything on the Lessig Blog is old news), the Copyright Office has asked for comments on whether a solution is needed to deal with "orphan works" -- works still under copyright but whose owner cannot be identified. This, as PublicKnowledge notes, fantastic news. For many years, many have been trying to refocus this debate on copyright from the binary questions that p2p sharing seems to raise ("seems to") to the more pragmatic and fundamental questions that this insanely inefficient and bizarrely complex system of speech regulation called copyright raises. When Congress shifted our system of copyright from an "opt-in" to an "opt-out" regime, it transformed copyright from a system that automatically narrowed its protection (and hence regulation) to those works that had some continuing need for copyright protection, to a system that totally indiscriminately spreads copyright to every creative work reduced to a tangible form -- automatically, and for the full term of copyright. This issue is the focus of our challenge in Kahle v. Ashcroft. It is something I've been whining about in every publication that will have me (see, e.g., this op-ed in the LA Times). But this is an issue that I've only become aware of because of the writings and emails from many who visit this space. And it is time for you to speak to government. No one who read the emails that I've collected could think that this was not a problem. But the copyright office doesn't accept email inboxes. It reads submissions only. The requirements are simple. Submission is free. We'll be organizing as many submissions as we can at eldred.cc. But please help spread the word: The Copyright Office needs to hear about every example of where the existing system is stifling the cultivation and spread of our culture. Not because Congress extends the term of copyright for Mickey Mouse. That battle is over. But because the way in which it protects Mickey Mouse blocks access to the balance of our copyrighted culture - for no good copyright, or free speech, related reason. This point is clear to many. You need to make it clear to the government.
[Lessig Blog]
10:17:33 PM 
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Letters. Not every online school is a soulless factory: Readers respond to Alex Wright's "From Ivory Tower to Academic Sweatshop." [Salon.com]
10:16:53 PM
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Election Recounts.
Here's a nice little essay about election recounts.
[Schneier on Security]
Turns out it's Cindy's. She says, to start:
Now that the dust has settled on the majority of the close elections nationwide, we can see more clearly than ever the most disturbing problem caused by using paperless touchscreen voting machines: the recounts were, to put it bluntly, a charade.
The goal of a recount is to ensure that the voters' intentions were properly recorded and the right person won. That's why we pull out the punch cards and review them for hanging chads, or check optically scanned ballots for stray marks.
But nothing remotely that sensible occured in Washington State, Ohio, or anywhere else that voters used paperless touchscreen machines. Instead, we saw what could accurately be described as a "reprint."
10:16:46 PM
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What's the Big Idea?
Sometimes musicians like to look at ideas from more than one angle (or more than one song), and they may want to tell a story and take the listener on a journey. Then we find ourselves in the territory of the "concept album," a group of interconnected songs which, through its scope, tries to touch on some big ideas. Here are two albums, one old—"S.F. Sorrow" by The Pretty Things—and one new—"Mount Eerie" by The Microphones—which deal with the subjects of life and death and mountain journeys, and do so with a group of imaginative songs and surprising sounds. We'll hear both albums from start to finish. Host David Garland also presents selections from the album "The Isle" by World Standard and Wechsel Garland, an album of elegant instrumentals that explore a musical island and enjoy its serenity.
[WNYC New York Public Radio]
7:04:31 PM
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Announcing Webjay version 1.
Congrats Lucas
I've been quiet for the past couple weeks because I have been working furiously to finish a major rewrite of the Webjay.org front page.
You can now play items and playlists right off the browse listings; songs are listed along with the playlist; there are ratings for items according to how many playlisters have linked to them; there's a listing for most popular items in a playlist and for most recent; the look is a lot sexier; load time should be much better; you can now find out everybody who linked to an item, and the first person to playlist a hit gets credit for the discovery.
I hope you'll dig it. [unmediated]
7:03:47 PM
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The Lock Busters. They've never met a padlock -- or six-pin paracentric cylinder -- they couldn't crack. Live, from the lock-picking championship of the world. By Charles Graeber from Wired magazine. [Wired News]
5:41:52 AM
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The Everquest Economy (crossposted at johnquiggin.com).
The Economist has an interesting piece on the interaction between the economy in massively multiplayer games and that of the real world. The classic study of this question is Castronovo’s analysis of the economy of Norrath, the setting for Everquest. Among various features of Norrath’s economy, one of the most interesting is trade with Earth through the sale of game items (weapons and so forth) via private treaty or on eBay. This enables Castronovo to estimate that the wage in Norrath is $US3.42 an hour, a figure that has some interesting implications.
At the Creative Commons conference last week, I heard a story to the effect that when the owners of one of these games tried to prohibit item trading they were sued and, in the course of litigation discovered that the plaintiff ran a sweatshop in Mexico where workers participated in the game solely to collect salable items. Clearly as long as the wage is below $3.42 there’s an arbitrage opportunity here. More technically sophisticated arbitrageurs have replaced human workers by scripted agents, working with multiple connections. Either way, arbitrage opportunities can’t last for ever, and are likely to be resolved either by intervention or inflation
The positive economics of all this are interesting enough. But how about policy analysis? Who benefits and who loses from this kind of trade, and do the benefits outweigh the costs?
[Crooked Timber]
Try some key search terms ("virtual economy," perhaps, or "Norrath") in the search box over there to turn up some other items on these subjects. ("Castroneva" should work, as should "Alphaville" and you should look for stories on Julian Dibbell's effort last year to be able truthfully to declare on his tax return that such efforts were his primary source of income. He learned a lot. There's to be a book.
5:40:56 AM
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Eyes on the Prize Hits P2P. An activist group encourages people to download digitized copies of the landmark civil rights documentary, which is currently hamstrung by licensing fees. The effort could draw attention to problems in copyright law, but the production company is not pleased. By Katie Dean. [Wired News]
See earlier coverage.
5:34:56 AM
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