More on IP

Reading Kinsella as suggested by Victor in the earlier SOPA / PIPA thread …

The usual “property value based on scarcity / replacement cost / value” doesn’t apply to IP since the creator / owner is not in any sense deprived of the IP however many copies others make. True, but the natural reduction in scarcity caused by the free copying reduces the value of the IP to its creator / owner. So as Kinsella continues, it is a matter of “contract” by the creator at time of publication – and what is “fair value” in return at that point. Fairness is a good concept – from both moral and utilitarian perspectives – though remember, for me, correctly applied, pragmatism IS morality (another story).

I have to conclude that most of the rest of Kinsella’s case is about difficulties (*) in fair application of copyright “contracts” to future people not party to original contracts directly, and where the “essence” of the copyrighted idea is patterned at some level below any physical artefact “copy” owned legitimately by a third-party in future. All of which says to me we should be taking exactly what is copyrighted and patented very seriously, not simply dismissing it as “untenable”. Strengthening (fair) legal arrangements not rejecting them.

Good to be reminded that for IP the questions are in fact about contracts for fair use, not ownership per se, as would be the case for property rights generally. The distinction is very important. Property is the wrong word, copyright is right.

No surprise, morally, fair value lies in multiple levels of patterns. What is surprising is how quickly Kinsella’s IP debate leads straight to metaphysical fundamentals of value. Wow. Double wow.

(*) Examples of problems include : Patents with unfair assertion of creative copyrights, occupation and “homesteading” etc … the idea of a light-bulb, things discovered (in science) not “created”, not being distinct about the actual thing created. I remember doing a master’s paper on this on Pharmceutical patenting back in the late 80’s. (Creation is the key concept here, in an aontic world-view, all reality is in fact created, a view I only recognized in the noughties.)

PS love the example character “Galt-Magnon” – magic, I hope Kinsella copyrighted it 😉 I’m guessing Kinsella rejects (Ayn) Rand as strongly as I do.

[Post Note : Here is an example “guinea-pig” case.]

#SOPA/PIPA @WordPress

Yes, democratized web-publishing is a great force for change, for good. That’s why I blog. That’s why I use WordPress (and a dozen other social publishing tools).

But that doesn’t mean SOPA / PIPA are a bad thing. Creative people publishing content can choose their preferred IP model. Creative musicians and artists can work outside the corporate mainstream if they want, with cheap distribution and easy access to their customer base, with a larger share of a smaller revenue stream – if they want. (That is an example of what is enabled by the democratized publishing capabilities.)

And we can all choose to ignore the offerings of mainstream publishing, not contribute to their corporate coffers. But, unless you’re a “property-is-theft” extremist, IP needs copyright protection, to the extent that its owner wants to assert that copyright (again the owner is free to choose what rights to assert, or not).

The problem as ever is potential abuse of powers of enforcement, and conspiracy theories whipped-up to focus on “censorship” and infringements against freedoms. But theft is no-one’s right. We should focus on practical implementation and safeguards against abuses, not throw out common sense.

Surfing 9/11 USA

Picked these up last September from Andy Martin (Author of Beware Invisible Cows) but also film-maker and lecturer at Cambridge Uni.

The story 9/13 New York Board Meeting
The film 9/26 New York Surfing

Zen koans and a little religious experience, a subway ride from Manhattan.
(Same gentle style as his Cambridge Languages promo film. I see Andy’s Hawaii connection now.)

Egyptian Spreadsheets & MesopotamianML

In these days of mark-up languages believing they have made spreadsheets old-hat, I often point out that spreadsheets are a mark-up language, that they were invented by the ancient Egyptians and they still have a long life ahead of them. In fact it seems they were invented by Mesopotamian accountants before being taken across the Red Sea to Egypt.

Of course in these days where the latest mark-up language is “the best sliced bread” since the previous mark-up language, I saw a very interesting slide at a conference late last year that showed how clearly spreadsheet cells map to RDF OWL Triples. (A slide Kari Anne borrowed from Thore I understand.)

[Post-Note: Followed up this thought and the Thore Langeland “triples” reference in a paper on by business site. “For the Love of Spreadsheets”.]

Diane Abbott Comment Racist

Of course Abbott’s comment was racist.

The point is was it racist with positive moral intent ? Or was it done with ignorance or negative intent ? Colour-blindness is a red-herring too. Sometimes race/colour is germane to the topic, sometimes it isn’t.

Obviously her intent was positive and race/colour was more than just relevant, it was the subject. No problem there. Her mistake was to generalize “the whites” as some group with one set of qualities & motives vis-a-vis “blacks”, even though she used the expression in the context of a particular conversation. That was clearly racist. Diane on the whole is not I’d suggest – a lack of common sense maybe, given her profile as a politician. Get over it, she’s apologised..

Nice tweet from Mr_Eugenides :

DianeAbbott: Making Other Labour MPs Look Like Intellectuals Since 1987™
Worth a chuckle. Diane Abbott is OK, it is possible to be too intellectual. That’s why the Abbott & Portillo double-act worked so well.

Assisted Living

They’ve got something wrong here, confusing quality with quantity. Why would you need assisted dying for someone given only a short time to live ? You’d want assisted living, to get the max out of remaining time.

Assisted dying is a quality of life issue surely.

Designers Who Code

Interesting Garry Tan piece.

Reminds me of a conversation years ago – and several since. A colleague reporting to myself and another manager simultaneously found herself conflicted. As an engineer whose job had nothing directly to do with producing software products, she announced she was doing a course on coding (some variant of C, back in the day). Not asking specifically for funding or time off, just a bit of leeway and acknowledgement for her initiative. We needed tools and, whilst she / we never envisaged she’d be producing the tools we needed, she’d be better placed to understand the process of getting them delivered against our needs. I was game, but the other manager told her that coding was skill she didn’t need and more or less (publicly) instructed her to drop the course.

Regretted several times myself not learning coding, beyond noddy script-editing stuff. Increasing understanding of processes you need to manage is obviously part of it, but often we’ve concluded that producing a working prototype of what was needed, is much more effective than writing a comprehensive specification between engineer and developer, at either the individual or inter-organizational level. (If software is your business, interactive, iterative prototyping “agile” methods have been the rage for some time, but those for whom software is “merely” an enabler of core business could learn a thing or two.)

(The counter argument, really just a call for balance, is not to have the hobbyist hacker “secondary” developer get too far into the product process before you have an unsustainable, unmanageable, mill-stone of a product on your hands.)

Trivial?

“It was a trivial problem …
… that occurs every year,”

Bethlehem police Lt-Col Khaled al-Tamimi told Reuters.

“No one was arrested because …
… all those involved were men of God,”

The KM / IM Debate

I don’t really see any worthwhile debate – the buzz of turf-wars may keep the subjects in the headlines, but there is no definitional problem not already adequately sorted by the data > information > knowledge > wisdom stack. (Thanks to David Gurteen’s tweets prompting this post.)

Anyone with strong allegiance to any one part of the stack will widen (blur) their definitions into the adjacent layers, but anyone interested in the whole stack can see worthwhile (pragmatic and valuable) distinctions, each being a layer of patterning built on the previous layer.

  • data – is about significant difference – bits and bytes being distinct from one another, at any level of granularity from fundamental physics upwards to whole books and libraries.
  • information – is about the significance of those data differences, their semantics – what the patterns of data mean.
  • knowledge – is about how that information is applied to add value, valuable patterns of use, applied information.
  • wisdom – is about understanding (knowing, experiencing, appreciating) value and the fact that it depends on how the whole stack works, and the pragmatic need to balance interests and priorities across (two-way) interactions between all levels of the stack. A more “holistic” view, if that’s not a dirty word.

Personally, like anyone else who’s given the matter any thought I guess, the aims are always towards the higher level – wisdom – whatever our (current) level of activity as a practitioner. In my particular case as an engineer I started and worked for 20 years in the applied space – learning and using knowledge of how to apply information to specific ends. It’s all about “decision-support” of course – all worthwhile activities involve decisions, so that truism in itself doesn’t add much to any definitions. One of the things you learn – wisdom you gain – is that those practitioners in the data and information layers can, by inadvertent presumptions about decision-making and use-in-action, create constraints on usage in the knowledge layers. So for the last 12 years or so, I shifted my focus down a couple of layers to understand the presumptions and how (unnecessary) constraints can arise.

I have to say in the process, I’ve developed a huge respect for librarians. Anyone who thinks it’s “just” thorough record keeping – some clerical admin task – misses the need for good strategies and architectures for how data, meta-data, information and relations between these are organized. We benefit from some types of “constraint”. The more virtual our libraries become, the more we need to avoid librarianship becoming a dying art.

Ubiquitous, real-time, interactive connectivity is not necessarily entirely good in and of itself.

Mobile McLuhan

Piece by Peter Benson in Philosophy Now (posted on Facebook by ex-MoQer David Morey) – Marshall McLuhan on the Mobile Phone.

Unsurprising to find McLuhan on the money when it comes to the social effects of our communications age but, for me, a couple of interesting points on value and memetics.

Print is the technology of individualism” (The Gutenberg Galaxy pp.157-8) whereas with [mobile technology and the net], the tendency is once more towards interconnected thinking in a community of minds, and so perhaps less ‘free ideation’.

Less free, notice. It’s the usual Darwinian call for evolutionary balance between fidelity and fecundity. If it is too easy to copy patterns of information in hi-fidelity it is harder for mutations to be introduced in ways that create new value. Too hard is obvious, but too easy is not good. Less is more. Life’s just complicated enough. McLuhan continues:

It is important to recognize the subtlety of McLuhan’s views. He is not saying that modern technology distorts an original human nature, which must be protected from such distortions. Instead, from the moment humans began to create tools, our nature was shaped by the tools we used. The silent reading of texts proliferated after Gutenberg’s invention. This activity is not ‘natural’, in the sense of resulting through evolution from the necessities of survival; but it can be regarded as having value, conferred on it by our judgement as individuals and as a society. [His emphasis]

It is entirely possible that a future society could reverse this judgement; but in the interim we need to give consideration to the potential change in our values due to actual changes in our dominant communications media. [My emphasis]

Did we ever need a little conservatism to moderate mediation in the mix. The art of editing.