I just noticed that the latest version of Cato Policy Report, Cato’s bimonthly newsletter, contains edited excerpts from three of the best presentations at March’s copyright conference. Here’s Jim Harper on the philosophical foundation of intellectual property:
John Locke gave us the best explanation for how we divvy up things in the physical world: by mixing our labor with something, we make it ours. If you imagine a Garden of Eden or an original place with plentiful common property, the way you make property your own is by mixing your labor with it, by tilling soil, by plucking an apple from a tree, and so on.
It’s a happy coincidence, of course, that ownership of property puts us in a position to trade goods with one another. So that if I’m particularly good at collecting apples from trees and Drew is particularly good at collecting fish from streams, we can trade apples for fish and have wonderful meals of apple fish pie.
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The ACLU has prevailed at the district court level in its lawsuit against the NSA’s domestic wiretapping program. Presumably, the ruling will immediately be appealed.
The ruling caught me by surprise; I’d gotten used to the courts shying away from confrontations with the Bush administration over civil rights. I’m glad to see the judiciary taking a more assertive posture. Of course, in an ideal world, striking down the program would have been a foregone conclusion.
The judge sided with the government on the NSA’s other secret program, the one that data mines calling records. I tend to think that program is illegal too, although as Orin Kerr argued back in May, it’s not as clear-cut.
This has got to be the silliest critique of the blogosphere I’ve seen in years. Nick Carr writes that the blogosphere is a “fraud,” a “grand system of patronage operated by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite.” He says that non-“A List” bloggers are like peasants begging at the gates of the royal elites, pathetically linking to them in a desperate hope that the “A list” blogger will take pity on them and link back. He quotes Seth Finklestein’s tale of woe:
I [write my blog] because:
1) I was suckered into the idea that blogs were a way to “route around” media power, and to be HEARD.
2) I had delusions of influence.
3) The random-payoff of attention makes it seem far more effective than it actually is.
4) It’s painful to admit that you’ve wasted so much time and effort and pretty much nobody is listening.
Blog evangelism is very cruel, as it preys on people’s frustrated hopes and dreams.
My blog is read by a few dozen fans … I’ve come close to shutting it down at times, and will finally reach the breaking-point eventually.
Seth gives the impression that he toils in obscurity, with maybe 20 or 30 people reading what he writes on a good day. Yet Alexa ranks Seth’s site #84,819 among all web sites, with a “reach” of 24 readers per million web users. In contrast, TLF is ranked #295,434, and we have a “reach” of 4 per million. Technorati tells a similar story: TLF is ranked #7076 among all blogs with inbound links from 294 sites. Seth’s blog is ranked #5443, with inbound links from 365 blogs.
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The Register has a sensible commentary defending Google’s campaign to prevent people from using “google” as a generic term:
When the Washington Post reported that “Google” had entered the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, it observed that the word has become a descriptor for its sector. Google wrote that it must avoid “genericide” and provided a list of appropriate and inappropriate uses of its name.
Among its examples was this appropriate use: “I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party”; and this inappropriate use: “I googled that hottie.”
Google no doubt hoped that a light-hearted example would avoid the company sounding oppressive. It has to send letters like this; but its lawyers know that it has only limited powers to dictate how the brand is used. So the letters are seeking support, not threatening litigation.
The risk for Google is that it ceases to become a brand altogether. If it becomes generic, the brand can be struck from the register of trademarks, leaving the owner without rights. This has happened before: escalator, aspirin, pogo, gramophone and linoleum were once registered trademarks that became victims of genericide.
On the other hand, I think it’s harder to defend Apple’s campaign against anyone who uses the letters p-o-d in their products on these grounds. The products in question were not direct competitors to the iPod, and they aren’t even using the whole name.
Adam’s right that OK Go’s music videos are awesome. You can check out other music videos here. “Invincible” is particularly good.
So I clicked over to OK Go’s blog and I saw this post urging readers to jump over to VH1’s site to vote for “Here it Goes Again” (the video Adam linked to yesterday) on VH1’s Top 20 music countdown. I did as I was told, and clicked on the link on VH1’s site to watch the video on “VSpot,” VH1’s free music video site. Instead of treadmill-video goodness, I was confronted with this helpful message:
We are sorry! Vspot does not currently have Digital Rights Management (DRM) support for Macintosh. Please see our FAQ for system requirements to view on demand and free video on Vspot.
The FAQ says:
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I was listening to an interesting piece on NPR the last night entitled “Does Age Quash Our Spirit of Adventure?” The piece featured a neuroscientist who had been studying why it is that humans (indeed, all mammals) have an innate tendency to lose their willingness to try new things after a certain point in their lives. He called this our “adventure window.” The neuroscientist came to study this phenomenon after growing increasingly annoyed with his young male research assistant, who would come to work every day of the week listening to something new and quite different than the day before. Meanwhile, the much older neuroscience professor lamented the fact that he had been listening to the same Bob Marley tape seemingly forever.
Why is it, the neuroscientist wondered, that our willingness to try new things (our “adventure window”) fades rapidly after a certain point in life? Unfortunately, science can’t provide us with all the answers here, but his research and that of others suggests that there exists something deep within our psyche that relishes novelty and experimentation when we are young, but firmly rejects it as we grow older. To use a more common phrase: We grow set in our ways. And what’s most interesting, this neuroscientist unearthed research on other mammals (like baboons) which suggests that this is a common phenomenon throughout nature. A group of older baboons transported to new surroundings, for example, will typically refuse to try new foods they find, whereas their young will be willing to sample everything in sight.
OK, this is all quite interesting but what does all of this have to do with radio formats?
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I see that Jason Schultz at EFF was way ahead of me on blogging about software patents. Over the last two and a half years, he’s accumulated a list of 25 silly software and Internet patents. Lucky for me, he doesn’t appear to have patented the idea of blogging about software patents, leaving me free to shamelessly rip of his idea.
Google’s plan to let local merchants offer their coupons, for free, via Google’s map interface is exciting news. It’s a step toward fixing one of the most glaring deficiencies of the web to date: online sites do a terrible job of making content geographically relevant.
Case in point: I love Craigslist. It provides apartment rental listings that you just can’t find anywhere else. I found there of my last four apartments via Craigslist. And I love Google Maps, with its snazzy, AJAX-powered interface. But it took a third-party to mash up, the two services into what I really want: a map of apartments for rent laid out on a map, so I can see at a glance which ones are in the neighborhood I want. Unfortunately, that site doesn’t include St. Louis, so it’s not useful to me. Moreover, if Craigslist or Google implemented it themselves, they could doubtless add a lot of additional functionality that a third party can’t provide.
I’ve got the same issue with restaurants: There are a number of sites that provide restaurant reviews, and some of them even break them down by city region. But no one gives me an easy way to zoom into a map and view all the restaurants on a particular city block. I can search for “restaurant” in Google Local and get a reasonable list of restaurants near where I work. But I can’t easily narrow the search down by cuisine, or by price range, to get a list of restaurants with desired characteristics. I don’t think it’s finding all the restaurants, and it annoyingly only shows me 10 restaurants at a time. (I assume this is because the interface grinds to a halt if the map has too many pins on it)
A good way to fix this is by forging more direct relationships with the actual retailers. 20 years ago, having your name in the yellow pages was an indispensable way for your customers to find you. Today, having a pin on Google Local when someone searches for your business category ought to be considered equally indispensable. Hopefully, Google will continue to give content creators more and easier ways to link their information to geographical locations, allowing us to search our neighborhoods as powerfully as we can search the web as a whole.
… the videos were this damn cool. This video by OK Go for their snappy new tune “Here It Goes Again” is probably the most creative thing I’ve seen since Spike Jonze created those brilliant videos for Fatboy Slim, Weezer and the Beastie Boys back in the 90s. And what makes OK Go’s new video so creative is that is so decidedly low-tech. Who ever thought 4 guys dancing on 6 running machines could be so entertaining?
Seriously, I love technology, but in terms of the art of music videos, I have always subscribed to the theory that less is more. I basically had it with high-tech videos way back in the mid-80s after Dire Straits did “Money For Nothing” and A-Ha made “Take on Me.” Yes, I know that dates me in a terrible way, but those really were cutting edge videos in terms of high-tech wizardry–both then and now. After that, artists were destined to do all sorts of stupid things with technology in music videos. Remember that horrible Paula Abdul video with a dancing cartoon cat. Of course, everything Paula’s ever done is horrible (remember her “Rebel Without A Cause” video ripoff featuring a young Keanu Reeves?), so maybe that isn’t the best example.
Perhaps TLF readers will have some examples of their least favorite music videos of all-time. Beyond anything by Paula Abdul, I’d have to say that the worst videos I’ve ever seen are:
1 – “We Built This City” by Starship (pure, unadulterated music video evil… When Abe Lincoln’s statue gets up and dances, that’s when I usually reach for a beer bottle to throw at the TV.)
2 – “Mr. Roboto” by Styx (I’m always rooting for the machines to rip Dennis DeYoung apart in this video… and IBM should have sued these guys for having their good name used in this piece of crap song.)
3 – (tie)
“She Likes to Party All the Time” by Eddie Murphy
“Return of Bruno” – Bruce Willis
… and last but most certainly not least…
Don Johnson’s “Heartbeat” (oh, the horror, the horror… and yes that is Dweezil Zappa and Paul Schaefer in the video.)
… oh, man, just too many choices here. Let me know your favorites.
Scotland Yard should be ashamed of Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Stephenson.
Last week, discussing the foiled attack on passenger air transportation, Stephenson stood before cameras, flash-bulbs popping, and read the following from a prepared statement:
We cannot stress too highly the severity that this plot represented. Put simply, this was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.
In fact, Stephenson quite badly over-stressed the severity of the plot. It is easy to comprehend in terms of both execution and anticipated result. The planned attack would have killed many people in a very dramatic way – everyone should be glad that it was defeated – but it wasn’t anything near “unimaginable.”
Is this a quibble about semantics? No. Stephenson’s hysterical statement is a form of incompetence.
As I wrote [at Cato@Liberty] last week (citing national security expert John Mueller), it is the reaction to terrorist attacks that inflict the most damage. Controlling the reaction through even-handed public communications is the best thing officialdom can do when an attack has succeeded – to say nothing of the opportunity for confidence-building when an attack has been thwarted.
The fact that this embarrassing public pants-wetting was part of a statement written in advance is reason for Scotland Yard to fully review its communications strategy. Stephenson’s verbal vomitus splashed across America’s television screens numerous times over the weekend.
But the public doesn’t appear to be falling for it. A poll appearing in this morning’s Washington Post Express found that 72% of people feel safe flying. USA Today reports that air travelers are adapting quickly to measures that foreclose the threat of a liquid bomb attack. Let’s hope that the measures are quickly minimized to reach what attacks are actually possible, rather than those that are only speculative.
My [Cato] colleague Gene Healy’s post here last week (preceding news of the foiled terror plot) and his citation to James Fallows’ article “Declaring Victory” are even more solid and relevant now than they were before. We do not face an existential threat from terrorism. The “War on Terror” is effectively won. All that’s left is for someone to declare it so.
(Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty, where it was edited so as not to offend government-types. The result is kind of amusing. Or sad.)
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.