Steve Ballmer in characteristic form at the Gartner conference, managing somehow to overlook the fact that Linux is now taking over the Netbook market. Also talking his usual baloney about the intellectual property issues in Open Source.
Category Archives: Intellectual Property
The Founders got the copyright term just about right
Rufus Pollack, a Cambridge economist, has published an interesting paper in which he estimates the optimal length of copyright. Turns out it’s about fifteen years — pretty close to the fourteen favoured by the guys who wrote the US Constitution. The Abstract of the paper reads:
The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fifteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.
Google is subsidising print publications!
From today’s NYTimes.
As part of the class-action settlement, Google will pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages; copyright holders will also receive a flat fee for the initial scanning, and can opt out of the whole system if they wish.
But first they must be found.
Since the copyright holders can be anywhere and not necessarily online — given how many books are old or out of print — it became obvious that what was needed was a huge push in that relic of the pre-Internet age: print.
So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages (googlebooksettlement.com/r/home) and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.
‘Digital Britain’ filleted for commenting
Here’s a terrific idea — a version of ‘Lord’ Carter’s Digital Britain Interim Report chunked in such a way as to make commenting easy. Find it here.
Warning: before reading some paragraphs of the Interim Report’s text (esp the stuff about IP protection) it might be wise to have a sick-bag handy. What you have to remember that this is a document composed mainly by guys who have been conditioned in the old push-media world. And who think that calling for universal 2mbps broadband coverage is an enlightened forward-looking vision.
(Interesting also that the image used on the Department of Culture Media and Sport’s website announcing the Interim Report — reproduced above — is a gif. Clearly IP madness runs deep.)
The small print
Intrigued by Pixelpipe, I’ve been examining its terms & conditions. Here’s a key clause:
Unless we indicate otherwise on the Site, you retain all copyright in any User Content you post on the Site. However, by posting any User Content or otherwise participating in any Interactive Area, you grant Pixelpipe a perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free, and fully sublicensable right to use, publish, distribute, reproduce, perform, adapt and display the User Content on or in connection with the Site and the Service, including the right to use the name that is submitted in connection with such Content. You further understand and agree that, in order to help ensure smooth operation of our system, we may keep backup copies of User Content indefinitely.
So that’s another one I won’t be using, then.
Open Source Cinema
The bean-counters’ sword
This morning’s Observer column…
In the summer of 1978, a Harvard student named Dan Bricklin was cycling along a path in Martha’s Vineyard, when he had a big idea. As an MBA student, he was being taught to do financial planning using a large sheet of paper ruled into a grid pattern. One entered numbers corresponding to sales, costs, revenues and so on, into cells on the grid, did some calculations and entered the result in another cell. This was called ‘spreadsheet analysis’ and it was unutterably tedious because the moment any of the numbers in the sheet changed, everything else that depended on it had to be recalculated – manually.
Bricklin’s big idea was that all this could be done by a computer program…
Footnotes:
John Dvorak’s engaging rant is here.
Dan Bricklin maintains some enthralling pages about the background to VisiCalc.
Jamie Boyle’s new book is out
Hurrah! And available as a pdf download as well as through the usual channels.
Photography: the next wave
This morning’s Observer column…
Just over a month ago Canon launched the second generation of its full-frame camera, the EOS 5D Mk 2. This not only does traditional still photography, it also records HD video at 30 frames a second. I’ve seen footage shot with this camera and it’s stunning: high-definition movies shot with the low-light capability and optical quality only available on lenses that come with high-end still cameras.
This new camera obliterates the distinction between still photography and cinematography. The guys who sit on touchlines with long lenses will be able to produce not just action stills but video footage better than anything the TV cameras can capture. When billions of dollars rest on the distinction between photography and TV rights, you can imagine the implications.
Already there is talk that the new Canon camera will be banned from the 2012 Olympics because the TV companies won’t stand for it (after all, they pay nearly $1bn for the rights). And one day all photographs will be merely stills from a HD movie sequence…
Google pays peanuts for pole position
This morning’s Observer column…
Is there such a thing as a ‘win-win’ situation? Journalistic cynicism says no. What the phrase usually means is that some people get more than they deserve and others get less – but not so little that they scream blue murder. The big puzzle about the ‘ground-breaking settlement’ announced last week between Google and its legal opponents, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, is whether it really is – as all parties claim – a victory for everyone…
The Bookseller magazine picked up on this piece and posted a good summary.