I think this is the most amazing thing I’ve seen in week. Make sure you watch the whole thing. And I don’t want to spoil the ending, but be sure to play around with it when it gets to the end.
Articles by Tim Lee 
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Three new pieces by me are up this week:
Incidentally, I’ve been perusing 419eaters.com, and it’s full of comedy gold. I think this one might be my favorite:
Dead Parrot sketch – Scammer style! from 419eater.com on Vimeo.
First the guy got the scammer to carve a bust of his own head. Then he claimed an African squirrel had eaten a hole through the bust, so he next got him to perform the famous Monty Python dead parrot sketch and ship him a DVD of the video. Needless to say he didn’t get the $25,000 he was promised. This story of a scammer they got to make a high-quality (if heavily accented) audiobook of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (twice, in fact, after the first one didn’t meet his standards) is hilarious as well.
Walking around campus has given me plenty of time to listen to podcasts lately, and I wanted to recommend the best of what I’ve listened to over the last couple of weeks:
The host, Ira Glass, expressed moral qualms about the whole thing, pointing out that Chad is not a stable country, and the guy could easily have gotten caught up in civil unrest and been injured or killed. But the baiters had zero sympathy for the guy, arguing that they were just doing to him what he was trying to do to his own victims.
Frankly, I’m with the baiters. While I don’t think I’d have the stomach to send a guy to Chad myself, I can’t work up any sympathy for the guy, even after hearing all the horrible things that happened to him. These people don’t have a bit of empathy for the people they defraud, and as far as I’m concerned, if others use the same tactics on them, they deserve whatever they get.
Anyway, EconTalk and This American Life are two of my new favorite podcasts. They don’t focus primarily on tech policy, but the other content is also great. You should subscribe here and here, respectively.
Update: A friend points out that the This American Life MP3s are available if you know where to look, so the link is now available. Thanks!
I’m currently at a talk by Martin Wattenburg, who runs a fantastic visualization site from IBM research. Here’s my favorite visualization to date:
Apparently this got an immediate reaction from someone with a different partisan orientation:
The site is chock full of interesting tidbits. Here is a chart of the inflation-adjusted sized of historical bailouts. Here is a graph of personality types by state. Here is a graph comparing historical immigration rates.
The best thing is that you can upload your own data sets, choose your visualization, and share it in a web 2.0-savvy manner. It’s a really cool site, and I encourage you to check it out.
I’m getting married next Spring, and I’m currently negotiating the contract with our photographer. The photography business is weird because even though customers typically pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars up front to have photos taken at their weddings, the copyright in the photographs is typically retained by the photographer, and customers have to go hat in hand to the photographer and pay still more money for the privilege of getting copies of their photographs.
This seems absurd to us, and we’ve found a photographer who’s willing to give us our images in high-resolution digital form along with a copyright release to make our own copies of the images. I’m currently researching language for the copyright release, and the advice offered on the subject—mostly by photograhers—strikes me as excessively restrictive. Photographers seem to regard it as extremely important to micro-manage their customers’ use of the images they take, giving them glorified permission slips that only allow the pictures to be used for personal, non-commercial use. There seems to be a consensus that this is important, but I don’t really understand why. It’s not like pictures of my wedding are going to have tremendous commercial value, and allowing us to commercially exploit the photos won’t prevent our photographer from doing so as well (which is fine by me).
Anyway, all of the example copyright releases on the web are unnecessarily restrictive, so what I think I’m going to propose to our photographer is language derived from the creative commons license, like so:
the photographer will provide to the undersigned a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual (for the duration of the applicable copyright) license to exercise the rights in all images to: (1) Reproduce the images, to incorporate the images into one or more Collections, and to Reproduce the images as incorporated in the Collections; (2) to create and Reproduce Adaptations; (3) to Distribute and Publicly display the images including as incorporated in Collections; and, (4) to Distribute and Publicly display Adaptations.
If there are any lawyers in the audience, please let me know if you have any suggestions for improvement.
Also next time a lawyer at Creative Commons has some spare cycles, it would be great if he or she could write a guide to the copyright issues around wedding photography (or for-hire photography more generally). Ideally, CC should provide a how-to guide for hiring a photographer in a way that ensures that all photos taken will wind up under the appropriate CC license. This might include explanations of the key legal pitfalls and example language that could be placed directly into the photographer’s contract. It would also be good if it included a page that customers can point their photographers, explaining what a CC license is and why the photographer shouldn’t freak out about having some of his or her photographs released under it. In our digital age, it’s absurd that most people have to ask permission to make copies of pictures of their own wedding.
Wow. Mike Masnick writes about NASA’s plan to auction off some of its patent portfolio to the private sector. When I read this I had to do a double-take: NASA has a patent portfolio?
This is absurd. The purpose of patent law is to promote the progress of the useful arts by giving inventors an incentive to invent. NASA engineers already have an incentive to invent: they’re being paid taxpayer dollars to do so. Accordingly granting patents to NASA is a pure dead-weight loss to the economy. It restricts the free flow of ideas with no offsetting benefit from improved incentives. Indeed, this is precisely why the copyrights on government-created works are immediately placed in the public domain.
Why isn’t there a similar doctrine in place for patent law? I can’t see any reason government agencies should be allowed to apply for patents in the first place, but if they are going to do so, they should be placed in the public domain the same way copyrights are. How can it be legal for a government agency to use taxpayer money to perform research and then obtain patents that effectively prohibit most taxpayers from using the results of that research? If I helped pay for research, I should be free to use the results.
A major breathalyzer vendor is facing increasing pressure to make the source code of its product available for inspection by defendants. I’m pleased to see my home state of Minnesota leading the charge. The Constitution gives you the right to confront your accuser, and if your accuser is 50,000 lines of assembly code, then you have a right to examine that code. And if CMI doesn’t want to release the source code for its products, then it shouldn’t have gone into a business in which its product is the key witness against defendants in criminal cases.
CMI’s argument that releasing the source code would put it at a disadvantage is nonsense. Making the source code available for inspection would not entail licensing the copyright of the code to anyone who wants it. So it’s true that a competitor might somehow get a copy of the source code, but it wouldn’t be able to do anything with it without facing a copyright lawsuit. And just looking at the assembly language isn’t going to be very helpful. Assembly language is notoriously difficult to interpret, and the small amount of insight a competitor might glean from seeing the source code would be outweighed by the risk of a successful copyright or trade secret lawsuit down the road.
Incidentally, all of these points apply with equal force to touchscreen voting machines. Those should be available for public inspection too, although unfortunately there’s probably not an explicit constitutional provision allowing you to confront your election judge.
A friend pointed me to this event, which looks pretty cool:
Who? Anyone who is interested in technology, mobility, art, social justice, sustainability, micro-finance – and all things Africa-esque
What? A good opportunity to share ideas, start conversations and build connections with people and organizations making a positive impact in Africa
When? Saturday, October 11th 9 am – 8 pm (end time to be confirmed)
Where? Google’s Mountain View Campus
We don’t talk about international development issues much on TLF, but technology certainly plays a key role in helping developing countries develop. If you’re in the Bay Area, you might want to check it out.
Princeton’s Center for IT Policy, where I’ll be studying for the next five years or so, is looking for visiting scholars for Spring 2009. Here are the details:
The Center has secured limited resources from a range of sources to support visitors this coming spring. Visitors will conduct research, engage in public programs, and may teach a seminar during their appointment. They’ll play an important role at a pivotal time in the development of this new center. Visitors will be appointed to a visiting faculty or visiting fellow position, or a postdoctoral role, depending on qualifications.
We are happy to hear from anyone who works at the intersection of digital technology and public life. In addition to our existing strengths in computer science and sociology, we are particularly interested in identifying engineers, economists, lawyers, civil servants and policy analysts whose research interests are complementary to our existing activities. Levels of support and official status will depend on the background and circumstances of each appointee. Terms of appointment will be from February 1 until either July 1 or September 1 of 2009.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.