According to this story from the AP.
And on that note: happy new year, everyone!
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Sudden Realization
After looking over these last two posts, I’ve realized that perhaps using my blog as a tool for getting a job…..probably not gonna happen.
🙂
Eh…if they can’t take a joke, do I really wanna work there? And if I’m gonna have to censor myself online…I’m not sure it’s worth any job.
What do you guys think?
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State of the Union Address
Wow. All I can say…wow. When did we completely forget that whole “Church/State” thing, George? As if his stance on same-sex marriage wasn’t Paleolithic in nature, his attempt to get “faith based initiatives” is just insane.
I cannot express how frightening it is to me to have a President that panders to religion to the degree that W has. Then again, I’m an atheistic zealot, so of course I’d feel that way.
But I can’t wait until we outgrow this whole “religious” thing in our thinking as humans.
Current intellectual property law is making, it seems to me now, what philsophers might call a category mistake, and here in libraries we might simply call misclassification. This sort of thing happens all the time in the history of science…it appears as if something should be classified one way, either because of explanatory power or just raw appearance. Lower organisms were thought to arise via abiogenesis, the sun moves around the earth, diseases are caused by an imbalance of humours in the body. It also happens in law…legal history is full of examples where classifications turned out to be simply wrong (primarily when it comes to women and minorities).
The reason that I make the science link is that often it is technology that allows the category error to be rectified. The microscope allowed abiogenesis to be proven false, the telescope to show that the shifting of the stars couldn’t be explained by the Earth being the center of the universe.
Broadband and ubiquitous computing, combined with the digital supply chain, will force a reexamination of copyright in much the same way that Pasteur forced a reexamination of the theory of disease. Before broadband and affordable personal computers, the supply chain of intellectual property had analog pieces…books, VHS tapes, the film at a theater. By the “digitization” of the supply chain, I mean that the chain via which media and other intellectual property is distributed is “broken” of its analog history…there is a step in which the property becomes digital, at which point our current tools (high speed networks and personal computers) tell us that what was once “property” cannot really be considered that way anymore. It’s like a microscope focusing for the first time on the eggs of the larva in leaf litter…the mystery of life is taken away from the inorganic, and moved into the realm of the biological. Computers are telling us that “intellectual property” may need this same shift to occur, that we need to take the focus off of “property” and find another label more fitting the object.
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Quick answer to Eli
Have been having a spirited discussion over on Confessions of a Mad Librarian with Eli Edwards, one of the more interesting people that I met at ALA Midwinter.
So, in answer to her latest question (and to drag some of the traffic onto my blog via trackback): Absolutely, I support Lessig and Eldred (and Creative Commons). These sorts of alternatives not only increase the public awareness of the overall absurdity of current copyright law, but give those who are already aware means of bypassing the lockdown completely. This blog (and all of my academic work here at UNC that is web-based) has been given an appropriate use license, and I go to great lengths to convince others that it is the right thing to do.
Now, that being said: I am well aware that Creative Commons and other licensing schemes of their ilk (GNU, OGL) rely on the power of the US Copyright law to function. This is an irony of which I am not ignorant. 🙂 I think that the fairest implementation of a limit on copyright terms may be Lessig’s suggestion of trivial economic subscription, by asking copyright holders that are interested in maintaining their copyright to pay $1 a year to hold it.
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Great quote…
From Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea on libraries and scholarship.
“A scholar is a library’s way of making another library.”
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Response to comment from 01/16
From Bill: “to say that computers are tools for the analysis of networks is completely ignoring the study of sociology, which developed the idea of a social network long before TCP/IP was invented.”
This is certainly correct. However, we should also keep in mind that computer networks allow for very different interactions between people than traditional sociology was used to (they are certainly catching up). Ubiquitous computing, as Howard Rheingold has written copiously about, changes everything about social networking.
I would also argue, from a philosophical point of view, that it is entirely possible that there are properties that will arise from ubiquitous computing and always on networks that we do not, as yet, have a grasp of, and that may be completely seperate from the study of the people USING the network. The network ITSELF maybe have emergent properties, and sociology is poorly placed in the academy to talk intelligently about communication theory outside of that done by people.
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TARHEELS WIN!
Well…just about the best game I’ve ever seen, and definitely the best I’ve ever seen in person.
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Interesting thought for the day
I’m in the middle of reading a book that I rescued from ALA Midwinter titled The New Humanists, and came across the most lovely description of what computer science should be…I haven’t tracked down the exactly quote yet, so no attribution, but I wanted to get this blogged before I forgot it. The sentiment was, essentially, that we should come to realize that much like cosmology is the study of the cosmos and uses tools like optical and radio telescopes, computer science should realize that the study of computers should use computers as tools, and study the interaction and supervenient properties that emerge within computer networks. Computer = tool. Network = interesting. Properties of complex communication networks = most interesting.
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