Welcome Blue Hill!

Have a look around here and then come talk about it and find out more at the Blue Hill Public Library at 7pm Thursday 29 September.

Marshall Brain on the economic effects of robots

One of the points I'm trying to make is that the cost of distribution of intellectual property goes down because you need vastly fewer people involved in distribution. Compare all the people employed by all the video rental stores and multiplexes and big box book stores and such with the people employed by Amazon. Behind the scenes robots have a lot to do with this. You can be sure that the Amazon warehouses are highly automated and you'd just as well call that robotisized. It's only going to be more so in the years to come.

Marshall Brain has done a lot of thinking about the economoic and cultural effects of this in the next decades and has written about it extensively. For pod enabled there's an interview where he lays out his proposals for dealing with it in a positive way. They're radical and I won't try to them here. Brain comes across as an optimistic and eminently practical guy. He's the one who started howstuffworks.com in his spare time, and that site is nothing if not straightforward.

mbrain future economics robot

Pat Choate Interview

Sam Felton has sent me several pieces relating to Pat Choate and his book, Hot Property: The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization. I listened to his interview with Leonard Lopate at WNYC. He's usually very thoughtful, and sometimes very nationalistic. I see some logical inconsistencies. For example:

He's in agreement with Lawrence Lessig on having a simple mechanism for renewing copyright after some reasonable period of time. Without renewal, the work enters the public domain. Differing from Lessig, however, Choate wants the copyright to be able to be renewed forever by the copyright owners, including heirs of the author and corporate entities. In the US that runs into to the constitutional dictum that copyright be granted for a limited time ("by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"), unless we continue doing it by incremental extensions as approved by the Supremes. But later he praises the public domain with the example of finding Charles Dickens reaction to the printing of his works without royalty payments in the US in his letters available for free on the internet at a university in Australia (the University of Adelaide?). If Dickens' heir had access to unlimited copyright, then he very likely would not have had free access to those documents.


copyright lessig constitution choate

Fall out and fall in over at the 'Bary

I'm going to go dormant on this site for now and continue any posts relating to copyright and intellectual property over at the 'Bary. I may revive posting here leading up to my talk at the Blue Hill library 29 September.

The Discussion

It all came off well Tuesday evening. Thanks to all for coming. I didn't know about half the folk.

Note for next time: More discussion of how you do make money in this emerging digital ecology. I outlined the apparent iPod business model, but that's just one possibility. There needs to me more discussion of niches, the long tail and aggregation as the new scale.

EPIC 2014

The EPIC 2014 (Evolving Personalized Information Construct) video can be found here.

A transcription of the punchline paragraph is here.

Will Hillary Rosen use to new Winamp plugin to set her music free?

Will Steve Jobs sue someone else?

For songs purchased at the iTunes Music Store, which are copy protected by Apple's FairPlay DRM scheme, ml_iPod users must download an application from the Hymn project, which unlocks the copy protection. Then the ml_iPod plug-in must be configured to run the hymn.exe file when it encounters protected files, Fisher explained.

Will Hillary Rosen use it?

Some articles to look at before the talk

The raw data is here. (Pages I've tagged as pertinent the topic)

I've put together packets of pages I've printed out which will be available at the Southwest Harbor library.

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O'Reilly Network: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution Lesson 1: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. Let me start with book publishing. More than 100,000 books are published each year, with several million books in print, yet fewer than 10,000 of those new books have

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Invasion Of The Brain Snatchers A review of HOT PROPERTY - The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization By Pat Choate

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WNYC - Reading Room: Hot Property -The Stealing of Ideas in an Age of Globalization Hamilton’s message to potential immigrants was loud and clear: bring your nation’s industrial secrets to America, gain citizenship, get a patent, be honored, and become wealthy.

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Dethroning King Gillette - Is iPod the Razor or the Blade? - By Robert X. Cringely To me, it seems that Apple has reversed the relationship of razors and blades, and eliminated the loss leader role entirely. Apple makes very little money from selling songs, but it does make some profit. Apple makes a LOT of profit from selling iPods. So

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Copyright Strikes Back | Linux Journal "So she publishes the document on her web site. After all, there's no other way, now that print media are no longer available. Within an hour, the document's gone--and so is her Web site. Why? The minute the company found out about the document's publicat

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The Huffington Post | The Blog - Hilary Rosen - Steve Jobs, Let my Music Go Shaun invents Napster. Hillary shuts it down. Steve comes up with a viable business model based on selling devices. Hillary complains.... (The title reference to a spiritual in the public domain is a nice touch)

RSS

The Acadia Senior College notice

Here's the notice that went out to the Acadia Senior College, including placing Larry Lessig in Stamford rather than at Stanford:

Acadia Senior College: Special Event

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Mickey Mouse, Napster and the Future of Intellectual Property.”

Discussion Leader: Michael Shook, COO, AeroHydro, Inc.

Southwest Harbor Public Library, Tuesday, May 31, 2005: 6:30 – 8:30

The Founding Fathers could not anticipate the Internet. The intellectual property regime enshrined in the Constitution arose out of an enlightenment tradition that owes its roots to the Gutenberg revolution. The printing press brought about a quantum reduction in the cost of reproduction of written works. Digitized works and the Internet have brought about yet another quantum reduction in cost, this time effectively to zero.

What are the cultural and economic implications of these changes? Can media companies whose business models are built on the distribution of physical objects and the exploitation of scarce bandwidth survive? Can artists and writers make a living in this new world? Is the solution to impose artificial barriers barriers to distribution such as the broadcast flag proposed by the FCC and digital rights management schemes? Can we find meaningful parallels in the enclosure of common lands that accompanied the other mid-millennium transformations?

We will use Lawrence Lessig's recent book Free Culture as the jumping off place for discussion of these topics. Lessig is professor of law at Stanford University and has written extensively on the effects of the Internet on society and law.

Here or There?

I'm as yet undecided whether to try to carry on any conversation about IP leading up to and resulting from my talk here or at Talkabout.

The benefit of doing it here is that people can add comments without registering (I think).

The benefit of doing it on my main blog is that I'm more used to blogging there.

We'll see.....

Poster PDF

A pdf of the poster is here.

Poster Post

Acadia Senior College: Special Event

Pirates of the Caribbean: Mickey Mouse, Napster and the Future of Intellectual Property

Discussion Leader: Michael Shook, AeroHydro, Inc.

Southwest Harbor Public Library, Tuesday May 31, 2005: 6:30 – 8:30

The Founding Fathers could not anticipate the Internet. The intellectual property regime enshrined in the Constitution arose out of an enlightenment tradition that owes its roots to the Gutenberg revolution. The printing press brought about a quantum reduction in the cost of reproduction of written works. Digitized works and the Internet have brought about yet another quantum reduction in cost, this time effectively to zero.

What are the cultural and economic implications of these changes?
mickeypirates.blogspot.com