"If intellectual "property" were morally indistinguishable from tangible property--as copyright holders suggest when they equate infringement with theft--there would be nothing wrong with a perpetual copyright. We take it for granted that ownership of a house or a diamond ring does not simply expire after a set number of years and that such assets can be passed on to descendants indefinitely. A song, a movie, or a book is not quite the same, as the very existence of the Copyright Clause suggest [snowdeal.org | conflux]
I agree. The copyright holders demogogue the issue when they equate all infringement with theft. Another thing to consider is that real property has a long legal history (there were laws that governed the transfer of real estate that go back over 2,000 years). By contrast, "intellectual property" is very new and most of the laws that relate to this area of human endeavor have been created in the past three hundred years (or less). And guess what? Were humans creating music and art, and inventing things before that? You betcha!
10:05:23 PM
Grandparents, the Auto-Club, and Blogs....what do they have in common?
My wife, Monique, and I went to see her grandparents yesterday for Mothers' Day. After lunch, we went to their house and her grandfather told me about how he built his house. I've heard the story before (many times), but it always fascinates me. He basically built the house that they live in with a friend in about four weeks (it would have been three weeks but he could only use two weeks of his vacation time so he had to do a lot of it at night after he got home from his job).
Her grandfather (his name is Jesse) also built a log cabin in Mississippi, close to the place where he and his wife grew up. They grew up poor. He hunted squirrels as a kid, but not for fun. For food. His grandmother would give him 3 bullets and tell him not to miss because they needed the meal. Dolly, his wife, said that an exciting night was to go to the railroad tracks at 6:30 and wait for the trains to pass by (they didn't stop). She wasn't kidding.
Jesse built a lot of houses, and he restored cars. He and Dolly were members of an auto-club, whose members also were interested in restoring cars. Apparently, these members lived all over the country and so trips would be arranged to visit these members. But the auto club members that lived near each other would help each other out when they needed help building a house or whatever. It was a close-knit community, and Jesse spoke with a gleam as he talked of the annual New Years Eve party that he would have where the auto club members and other friends would come and dance til the wee hours. The auto club was supposedly about the passion of restoring cars. But really it was about a community of friends, who would never have come together but for their interest in cars.
Listening to these stories makes me think of how similar this is to online communities (of course it also vastly different too). But the similarity is that people come together, drawn by common interests, to help each other out. And that is what the 'blog communities are all about. Of course, there are differences because our lives are not by any stretch as intertwined as the lives of the members of the auto clubs were. For example, how many of us who link to one another and "help out" with tips and so forth have actually met? Okay, maybe a lot, but not in the same way as Monique's grandparents.
It's kind of sad that our generation doesn't have a better understanding or appreciation of the lives of people like Jesse and Dolly. These are people who lived a rich life which they shaped directly with their own hands. Where they built their own houses, grew their own vegetables and caught their own food, we might create our own software. Creating software is certainly impressive, but it's just not the same thing as what they did....
9:13:57 PM
Cost-cutting 101
The biggest single thing Universities (and to a lesser degree corporations) could do to cut costs is get a credit card for the purchasing department. I am in the midst of an ongoing process to bill academic orders (we are the largest vendor of academic website management software -- much larger than Blackboard, Interwoven, and Vignette -- in the world) for our software. Why are we up to our necks in POs, snail mail, and multiple paper copies??? Hey! [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
Yeah, I agree. Our firm just recently got a credit card because we had to have one to participate in the now-mandatory bankruptcy court's electronic filing system. There is a knee-jerk assumption that credit cards are subject to spending abuse. I think it's quite the opposite because the monthly bills show what purchases were made in one centralized statement (of course, someone will have to review the statement).
But these sorts of money saving changes are always tricky. The cost of dealing with paper is a hard to measure cost and so no one really considers it. The other day a Xerox vendor was telling us how much the new digital copiers were getting were going to save us. He said the ability to use them as network printers alone was a significant cost saving. And then he asked if we knew how much it cost us to use the HP network printers that we were currently useing (obviously itching to cite some figures that he had based on an extensive study). I cut him off and told him that the network printers cost us nothing to operate. He said, "how to you know?" And I said "because we don't keep track of the cost it costs us nothing to operate." I think that reflects a typical corporate mindset.
"Information Rules" (1999, Harvard Business Press, $29.95) was written at the height of the dotcom craze as an antidote to the IT industry's hyperbolic declarations and muddled thinking. Clearly, not enough people read it. Authors Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, distinguished professors in both economics and business at Berkeley, set forth the key economic principles that underpin the exchange of information goods. This is a not a dense economics text however. It is a practical guide to the information economy written for the business leaders and MBA graduates who were to revolutionize society. As such they use clear examples, short sentences and small words. [kuro5hin.org]
Another book for my reading list. Right now I'm finishing "The Tipping Point" and I have "Going Wireless" and "Growing Up Digital" waiting in the wings. All of these books were recommended by Jenny so I'm thinking that perhaps she should make up a summer reading list. How about it Jenny?
"The cool thing about blogs is somebody can say something, or point to a story in Time magazine or CNN, and other people can have at the story, and almost debug it... What this does is takes information and it puts it out before a community of users who will, in effect, crash test it. Hold every single fact up to the light and make sure that it all works.
There's ... one Blog Software that actually is way cooler [than Pita], far more sophisticated and allows you to add all sorts of graphical components and do all sorts of indexing and interesting diagnostic stuff. It's called Radio Userland." [CNN] Via [Scripting News]
This article is in the form of a Q & A, but it's on CNN. I've been asking this question now for a few weeks: when is the blogging story going to make the cover of Time or Newsweek? It would be great if it would appear on the cover, and I'm thinking that Michael Lewis (of Next: The Future Just Happened fame) would be a good person to cover the phenomenon.
