66 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
  2. Aug 2023
    1. Cuthbertson, Anthony. “Musician Uses Algorithm to Generate Every Possible Melody to Prevent Copyright Lawsuits.” The Independent, February 28, 2020, sec. Tech. https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/music-copyright-algorithm-lawsuit-damien-riehl-a9364536.html.

    2. the number of possible melodies is finite and therefore liable to patterns being repeated unintentionally.
    3. Working with programmer Noah Rubin, Damien Riehl built software capable of generating 300,000 melodies each second, creating a catalogue of 68 billion 8-note melodies.
    4. At what point do we have the computing power to create the machine of "Shakespearean monkeys at typewriters" that generates all available combinations of text to end copyright of text? Compare with Melody/Music: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/music-cop

    1. Oliar, Dotan; Sprigman, Christopher (2008). "There's No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy". Virginia Law Review. 94 (8): 1848. JSTOR 25470605. Retrieved September 16, 2020. There is also evidence in the [Diller archive…at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.] file suggesting that Diller appropriated from other sources [apart from self-creation or using her writing team], including newspaper comic strips and comedy books. For example, a number of Diller's jokes about her dysfunctional marriage to her fictional husband 'Fang' appear to have been inspired by a comic strip, 'The Lockhorns,' that Diller followed obsessively over the course of nearly a decade. The Diller joke files contain hundreds of 'Lockhorns' panels cut out of newspapers and mounted on index cards.
  3. Apr 2023
    1. Recommended Source

      Under the "More on Philosophies of Copyright" section, I recommended adding the scholarly article by Chinese scholar Peter K. Yu that explains how Chinese philosophy of Yin-Yang can address the contradictions in effecting or eliminating intellectual property laws. One of the contradictions is in intellectual property laws protecting individual rights while challenging sustainability efforts for future generations (as climate change destroys more natural resources.

      Yu, Peter K., Intellectual Property, Asian Philosophy and the Yin-Yang School (November 19, 2015). WIPO Journal, Vol. 7, pp. 1-15, 2015, Texas A&M University School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 16-70, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2693420

      Below is a short excerpt from the article that details Chinese philosophical thought on IP and sustainability:

      "Another area of intellectual property law and policy that has made intergenerational equity questions salient concerns the debates involving intellectual property and sustainable development. Although this mode of development did not garner major international attention until after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the Yin-Yang school of philosophy—which “offers a normative model with balance, harmony, and sustainability as ideals”—provides important insight into sustainable development."

  4. Jul 2022
    1. Only humans can create art that is copyrightable. So by extension, if a machine is deemed to be the author of a work, no one can exercise a copyright in that particular artwork. And in the context of NFTs, there's untold numbers of works that are touted as being created by computers that's deemed to be a feature, not a bug.

      Generative Art, the kind in most NFTs, is not subject to copyright

  5. May 2022
  6. Apr 2022
  7. Jan 2022
  8. Dec 2021
  9. Nov 2021
    1. Raspberry Pi Trading

      At the moment, this company is wholly owned by the Raspberry Pie Foundation.

      For clarity, tell us the distinction between the foundation, which you run, and the trading company that Eben Upton presides over, and how they work in conjunction with each other. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK-registered charity with an educational mission and Raspberry Pi Trading Limited is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation. That means that the Foundation is the shareholder of the trading company, which is an independent, commercial business. That distinction is really important because there are limits on what charities can do commercially. For example, a charity couldn't sell computers that are used in industry, which is a huge part of the Raspberry Pi computer business now. I lead the foundation and I also serve as a director on the board of the trading company. As you said, Eben Upton leads the trading company. [source]

      So it will be interesting to see how much control the Foundation has if/when the trading company goes public.

  10. Jul 2021
    1. it is also clear that there would be no need for copyleft licences to govern the exercise of copyright in software code by third-party developers at all if copyright did not guarantee rightsholders such a high degree of exclusive control over intellectual creations in the first place

      This is simply not true. The unique character of software under the conventions that most software is published (effectively obfuscated, albeit not for the purpose obfuscation itself, but for the purposes of producing an executable binary) means that reciprocal licenses like the GPL are very much reliant on the existing copyright regime. Ubiquitous and pervasive non-destructive compilation would be a prerequisite for a world where copyright's role on free software were nil.

  11. Jun 2021
  12. May 2021
  13. Feb 2021
    1. In this idealised utopia we obviously want to place value on sharing and curation as well as original creation, which means giving a small fraction of the payment to the re-publisher as well.We should note monetisation of all this content is optional. Some websites would allow their content to be transcluded for free, while others might charge hefty fees for a few sentences. If all goes well, we'd expect the majority of content on the web to be either free or priced at reasonable micro-amounts.

      While this is nice in theory, there's a long road strewn with attempts at micropayments on the web. I see new ones every six months or so. (Here's a recent one: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqrvNoDE35lFDUv2enkaEKuo6ATBj9GmL)

      This also dramatically misses the idea of how copyright and intellectual property work in many countries with regard to fair use doctrine. For short quotes and excerpts almost anyone anywhere can do this for free already. It's definitely nice and proper to credit the original, but as a society we already have norms for how to do this.

  14. Oct 2020
    1. Computer software, for example, can be protected by copyright, patent, trade secret and trademark.

      did not know that

  15. May 2020
  16. Mar 2020
    1. That page spreads confusion by using the misleading term “intellectual property rights”, which falsely presumes that trademark law and patent law and several other laws belong in one single conceptual framework. Use of that term is harmful, without exception, so after making a reference to someone else's use of the term, we should always reject it.
  17. Nov 2019
    1. There used to be an imperfect but useful pathway for research to move from the academy to the corporate world through tech transfer.

      Used to be? It feels to me like it didn't really exist as a codified pathway until the early 2000's at best. Universities only seem to be mastering the entire flow in the past several years. Prior to that most professors took the intellectual property and did almost what they wanted with it and didn't provide any ancillary financial streams to the university out of which the work grew.

  18. Dec 2018
    1. This resource, while written from the perspective of economists, explores how intellectual property laws (and historically uneven enforcement of the laws) have increased the divide between developing countries and wealthy, industrialized developed countries.

  19. Oct 2018
    1. how do we help students navigate privacy issues in learning spaces augmented with social/digital media. There was a specific request for examples to walk students through this. Here is what I do.

      I'm a little unnerved by the semi-legal nature of the "Interactive Project Release Form" but I think it's a great model (whether really legally enforceable or just a class constitution-type document).

  20. Sep 2016
    1. d  Provider  has  a  limited,  nonexclusive  license  solely  for  the  purpose  of  performing  its  obligations  as  outlined  in  the  Agreeme

      Here we are good and much better than, say, Genius:

      When you post User Content to the Service or otherwise submit it to us, you hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Genius an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to use, reproduce, publicly perform, publicly display, modify, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part), create derivative works of, distribute and otherwise fully exploit all Intellectual Property Rights in and to such User Content for purposes of providing, operating and promoting the Service or otherwise conducting the business of Genius.

    2.  all  intellectual  property  rights,  shall  remain  the  exclusive  property  of  the  [School/District],

      This is definitely not the case. Even in private groups would it ever make sense to say this?

  21. Jul 2016
    1. I could have easily chosen a different prepositional phrase. "Convivial Tools in an Age of Big Data.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of DRM.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Venture-Funded Education Technology Startups.” Or “Convivial Tools in an Age of Doxxing and Trolls."

      The Others.

    1. Or do we really even own ideas?), and why we would even fuss about ownership might suggest an attachment of monetary value to the shared thing. Or is it really about wanting to get credit? Can we get credit without staking ownership?

      I think credit has a lot to do with it. Also, feeling like you "own" your idea is largely cultural. We live in society where just ideas alone are sellable (corporate world especially). We have been taught since college that you do not amount to anything without ideas even though your ideas are built upon ideas of others, we do not teach that kind of connectivity, we do not teach "collective knowledge." What we do teach is publishing a paper and copyrighting it. One of the most prominent questions I have from faculty I work with in regards to creating a public professional ePortfolio is "What if someone copies, steals my idea or paper?" and "How do I make it so that only particular people can see it?" I am sure stealing does happen because there is a lot of pressure in academia to "generate" ideas. And I am also thinking that publishing your copyrighted idea in a peer-reviewed or any other academic publishing instance gives your work "validity." But if the mind set we build in our students is ownership-oriented how can we expect anything else?

  22. Jul 2015
    1. Third, there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering.

      Totally. Whenever I end up in conversations about GMOs I steer the conversation toward monoculture and intellectual property. These are issues I have concerns about and I think the labeling wars are hurting our chances for useful dialog here. I don't want labeling. I want biodiversity.

  23. Jun 2014
    1. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal.
  24. Feb 2014
    1. The innate qualities of intellectual pr operty, however, in combination with INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 15   strong economic motivations have led U.S. intellectual property policy to operate according to rights - based, non - utilitarian theory, possibly as a result of lobbying (capture theory).

      Lobbying has led to a rights-based non-utilitarian theory copyright policy in the US at the present time (2014).

    2. The U.S. social contract establishes a utilitarian basis for protection of intellectual property rights: protection as a means of encouraging innovation.

      The social contract of the US Constitution provides a utilitarian basis for protection of intellectual property rights.

    3. As intellectual property lacks scarcity, and the protection of it fails the Lockean Proviso, there is no natural right to intellectual property. As such, the justification for intellectual property rights arises from the social con tract, and in the case of the United States, the Constitution.

      The justification for intellectual property from the social contract established by the US Constitution; it otherwise has no justification by natural right because it fails the Lockean Proviso.

    4. By contrast, any positive or negative effects that intellectual property rights have on the wider populace are diffused, and any individual member of the wider populace has little motive (and potentially insufficient means) to overco me the significant barriers to active political lobbying. As a result, the intrinsic trend is for intellectual INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 11   property holders to actively lobby, largely unopposed, for greater rights protections. (Fisher, 1999, Sect. II. C.)

      Both positive and negative effects stemming from intellectual property rights to the wider populace are diffused, thus the wider populace has little motive to oppose changes to laws and policies that support intellectual property.

    5. On one hand, there are infinite ideas, and so the taking of one idea as private property clearly leaves “enough,” and debatably “as good” for others (Locke, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 8   1690, Chap. V, Sect. 27).

      This statement seems to me a stretch-- a very far stretch.

      What does it mean to have "infinite ideas"? And how do you arrive at the judgments "enough" and "as good" here?

      Ideas don't exist in isolation; they are not individual fruits to be plucked from the world of thought. Ideas are built upon other ideas. They are embedded within each other, juxtaposed one next to the other, stacked, remixed; varied one from the other, sometimes as a derivation, sometimes an inspiration.

      And in the face of this, what is the notion of "creation"? Given a certain base of knowledge, there are some natural next steps that can be built from those basic building blocks.

      Here we have to disentangle the notion of discovery from creation. I think maybe that, in part, is the notion of patents vs copyright, but in the land of software we seem to have a tangled mess.

    6. Here, there is disagreement about whether intellectual property violates the Lockean Proviso.

      Does the notion of intellectual property violate the Lockean Proviso?

    7. The Privatization of the Natural State Proponents also invoke Locke’s discussion of the making of private property from the natural state by the joining of one’s efforts to the natural state (Menell, 1999, p. 129). The argument goes that authors (ar tists, inventors, etc.) join their efforts to the natural state of undefined ideas, and through their efforts arrive at an intellectual work; and by that effort, they may make a legitimate claim on that intellectual work as their property (Menell, 1999, p. 129; Locke, 1690, Chap. V, Sect. 26).
    8. This is understatement to be sure, but the debate has been principally between two theories: a utilitarian policy theory, and a rights - based , non - utilitarian property theory (Long, 1995, n.pag.) .

      The debate in intellectual property law has centered around utilitarian policy theory and a rights-based non-utilitarian property theory.

    9. U.S. intellectual property law originates (as law) from the Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution makes copyright and patent law possible (“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 4   respective Writings and Discoveries”) ,

      Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 makes copyright and patent law possible.

    10. This paper establishes cause to suspect that current intellectual property policy overstep s utilitarian justification, and suggests that a clearer distinction should be drawn between the proper role of U.S. law in intellectual property (that which promotes innovation) and moral questions of creator’s rights.
    11. The U . S . Co nstitution firmly grounds the proper role of intellectual property policy as utilitarian .

      Identify where/how this ground is established.

    12. Keywords : anticommons, copyright, intellectual property, Lockean Proviso, patent, property rights, state of nature, trademark, utilitarian theory
    1. A LOCKEAN JUSTIFICATION

      Locke's Two Treatises of Government

    2. A universal definition of intellectual property might begin by identifying it as nonphysical property which stems from, is identified as, and whose value is based upon some idea or ideas. Furthermore, there must be some additional element of novelty. Indeed, the object, or res, of intellectual property may be so new that it is unknown to anyone else. The novelty, however, does not have to be absolute. What is important is that at the time of propertization the idea is thought to be generally unknown. The re

      Intellectual property cannot be common currency in the intellectual life of the society at the time of propertization.

      What constitutes society at this point; do small groups and communities suffice or does it have to be popularly known beyond a small few?

    3. At the most practical level, intellectual property is the property created or recognized by the existing legal regimes of copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret. n17 We also must include property recognized by similar legal regimes. For example, federal law now protect original semiconductor masks. n18 "Gathered information" is another genre of intellectual property. Copyright law protects the particular arrangement of the contents of telephone directories and reference works, n19 while other forms of gathered information may have quasi-property status under International News Service v. Associated Press. n20

      Intellectual property is the property created or recognized by the existing legal regimes:

      • copyright
      • patent
      • trademark
      • trade secret

      And other legal regimes including:

      • semiconductor masks
      • gathered information
      • particular arrangements of directories and reference works
      • quasi-property status
    4. Like most subjects, intellectual property has grey zones on the periphery, such as the right to publicity -- whether, in property style, someone can control his public image.

      Right to publicity

    5. inasmuch as coming to own intellectual property is often tied to being well-educated. If people become increasingly progressive with increasing education, intellectual property confers economic power on men and women of talent who generally tend to reform society, not because they are haphazard Burkian goblins, but because they have well-informed convictions.
    6. ctual property may be a liberal influence on society

      Intellectual property may be a liberal influence on society.

    7. The breakthrough patent that produces a Polaroid company is more the exception than the rule. The rule is the modestly successful novelist, the minor [*292] poet, and the university researcher -- all of whom may profit by licensing or selling their creations.

      Breakthrough patent of Polaroid (the exception) vs modestly successful novelist (the more common case)

    8. ecause such accumulation is less typical, the realm of intellectual property has less of the laborer/capitalist hierarchy of Marxist theory.
    9. In the final analysis, intellectual property shares much of the origins and orientation of all forms of property. At the same time, however, it is a more neutral institution than other forms of property: its limited scope and duration tend to prevent the very accumulation of wealth that Burke championed.
    10. One cannot call the history of intellectual property a purely proletarian struggle. While ancient Roman laws afforded a form of copyright protection to authors, n14 the rise of Anglo-Saxon copyright was a saga of publishing interests attempting to protect a concentrated market and a central government attempting to apply a subtle form of censorship to the new technology of the printing press.

      One cannot call the history of intellectual property a purely proletarian struggle.

    11. But this is only part of the truth. Much intellectual property is produced only after considerable financial investment, whether it be in the research laboratory or in the graduate education of the scientist using the facility.

      Intellectual property is more egalitarian than property in that anyone may obtain it for limited duration, however that is only part of the truth, and in practice it is more likely that most intellectual property is produced only after considerable financial investment.

    12. Intellectual property is far more egalitarian. Of limited duration and obtainable by anyone, intellectual property can be seen as a reward, an empowering instrument, for the talented upstarts Burke sought to restrain. Intellectual property is often the propertization of what we call "talent." It tends to shift the balance toward the talented newcomers whom Burke mistrusted

      intellectual property is often the propertization of what we call talent.

    13. In many quarters, property is viewed as an inherently conservative concept --

      a social device for maintenance of the status quo

    14. WHAT COUNTS AS INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY?
    15. The Philosophy of Intellectual Property