Category Archives: Culture

These posts will deal with Copyright and other cultural topics

Pseudonymity and Anonymity II

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Yesterday I gave an extensive overview of the debate that is ongoing between “Real name” supporters and “Pseudonym/Anonym” supporters. If you haven’t read it I suggest you check it out. There are quiet a few different groups of people discussing it, American and International.

Why do I think it’s a big deal though? I mentioned yesterday that I made a personal choice to use my real name instead of a pseudonym. This is partially because I’m really bad at coming up with them, but also because I try to speak with my real voice as much as possible. I’m also aware that this is could have some repercussions depending on what I try to do after I graduate. I haven’t also been the most supportive of the US government. At  one point when I was debating with a hardcore conservative he pointed this out to me as well.

The problem is that we don’t know who has our information. We lose control of it as soon as it’s put on the internet. I have no idea who has access to the conversation I’m talking about. I know that Facebook and the people involved in the conversation do, but I don’t know if that information got passed onto any sort of governmental body.

This is a huge change from what has happened in the past. We had control over who we gave our information to. It was easy because it had to be face to face or perhaps through a letter. Once that conversation was finished unless notes were taken or it was recorded most of the information would only be remembered only imperfectly by the people involved. This is not the case now. it can be stored and recalled perfectly through the internet and web records.

This permanence is dangerous, as the past will haunt people for decades to come instead of only a few years and only with their friends. However, that is not all. Forcing people to use their real names in all cases causes a chilling affect on activism as governments try to stamp down on it. Twitter will be a more popular communication tool for activists than Google + or facebook because of their pseudonym policies.

Regardless of if we like it or not, Facebook, Twitter, Google + and other social networking sites have become our public forums. We don’t have a town square to meet and discuss life. We don’t have the community unity that once used to pervade life so we use the tools that we have. However, all of these new meeting places are controlled by corporations that are required to give data to the US government and other governments as well. The ability to protect your identity from the government, other organizations and from people you don’t want to have find you is important. It allows people to be honest and investigate different parts of themselves or try to fight to bring down repressive regimes.

Pseudonyms are part of the internet’s social norms, a method to protect free speech and to protect yourself. They are very important and we need to fight to keep them. The US government should be seeking to protect our ability to have pseudonyms and not fighting against them. The State Department claims they support internet freedom. Supporting pseudonyms and the ability to be anonymous on the internet is the best way to do so.

Pseudonymity and Anonymity

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There are so many different things going on right now that I don’t even know where to start. There’s tons going on with patents, software patents and copyright, there’s been many things going on with internet freedom and Anonymity/Pseudonymity that I’m not sure where to even start. However, you have to start somewhere. So I’ll start with this: Randi Zuckerberg said pseudonyms should go away. What’s the big deal with that?

Well, Google and Facebook both require real names on their website. There are a few links that have commented on why this is a big deal. Tom from Myspace thinks it’s a bad idea, he has a friend that is an expert in social media privacy policies, Danah Boyd, and she claims that forcing real names is an abuse of power, Tech Dirt agrees withBoyd’s assessment indicating that there’s a great amount of danger in moving away from pseudonyms. The Atlantic also notes how different with normal speech tying all actions to a single person online has become.

One of the common reasons for banning pseudonyms, which Zuckerberg argues, is that it changes online behavior. It basically forces users to comply with offline social norms. Norms that the person may actually be attempting to escape for whatever reason. Boyd also argues that Google + originally had a cultural norm without “Real names.” She pulls in Lessig’s Code book that I’ve mentioned on here a few times to support her claim. It’s a really important point she’s making. Cultural norms are established by early adopters. The early adopters of Google + didn’t go with real names. They liked their nicknames.

While Zuckerberg claims that it’s the users fault and their pseudonyms that cause the problem, others claim that the person who owns the website needs to control this. Basically by creating cultural norms that prohibit the ability to be an asshole/troll online. So when my friend bpost over at KBMOD talks about avoiding feeding the trolls, he’s either reinforcing or preventing trolling behavior. A set stance by the moderators of KBMOD should be established to control trolling behavior.

De Spiegel notes that the actions of governments and corporations amount to a war on anonymity on the web.
Which has lead to the arrest of many members of Anonymous and other hacking groups like that. This war has a few benefits like the recent ring of 72 child pornographers that were caught. Unfortunately for most users the days of freedom to untag your photos may be passed. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed off the shelf products to analysis people freely from pictures pulled from facebook. To me, this is really scary, as we have no control over the privacy settings of our friends. If I’m drinking a tasty beer in a picture it could have employment ramifications. Two years ago a teacher was fired for having pictures of beer while in Europe. This is one example there are many others. While, third parties will likely create applications to determine who is whom in a given facebook picture, Germany is suing facebook over their ability to do say, and are saying it’s illegal.

So, what’s all of this mean? There’s been a lot of people talking about this and why should people care? Well, personally I have made a choice to use my real name. Well, it’s still a nickname, but I made a choice to do that. However, since I was aware of the choice when I set my handle as my last name I am conscience of what I should and should not say on the public record online. The first three Google searches for “Kapsar” are for me. Sadly, none of them is for my blog. Thus my online activity easily follows me.

That being said, I fully support the right and the ability of people to use any different name or no name online. It’s the right thing to do morally, and for freedom of speech.

In my next post I’ll discuss some of the speech issues a little bit more. Many of the people I’ve linked too have commented on these issues as well.

The value of a Copyright

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Just to make it clear, I’m going to say that there is some merit behind some copyright. A way to ensure a return on effort spent to produce the piece of work. That being said, it should not be the same right for every piece produced.

I don’t really need any sort of scientific survey to look into part of this. Most copyrighted material is absolutely worthless. However, is it afforded the same protection as a major blockbuster movie, for free. Depending on how I structure the copyright of this blog, it has the same protection as Transformers 3. Why? To me this doesn’t make any sense. Which is why I’ve decided to license my blog with a creative commons license. You can see it down at the bottom. However, I still got that copyright with no effort for myself. I have to do nothing to keep that copyright. 
The arts, sciences and technologies have had a strong interaction on each other throughout human history. We can see this with how our arts are pushing our technological limits. Video games push the limits of personal computers, recording studios push the limits of audio equipment and flawless video push the limits of TV and cameras. However, for any piece of art that was created on any of these technologies, they are afforded much more protection than the technology. The art also gains this protection for free, without any effort, whereas the technology has to go through a great deal of work to prove its worthy of the protection. 
As much as I would like to remove the auto guarantee of state protection on a work, I don’t think that’s feasible. However, I do think what is feasible and realistic is implementing a registration requirement for works older than a year old. This minimum level of effort demonstrates, at least to the owner, there is value in the copyright. If the content creator fails in this, the work should fall into the public domain. Thus freeing the vast majority of our culture from copyright. 
In the patent system there is a minimum cost for renewing the protection each year, which is considered the minimum value of a patent. This scale is graduated so that the the longer you want the protection the more expensive it is. For most firms this isn’t really that much money. I think we need to add something like this for copyright. However, our current copyright length is extremely long. Which brings us to another point, after 20 years, which is the maximum allowable protection length for a technical discovery, the yearly rates should be exorbitant. In the last 10 years the copyright should cost more than $1,000,000 per year to manage. There will be firms that are willing to pay it, but it will be a difficult choice. Because it would be for every single copyright. This would quickly reduce the numbers of items within copyright protection.
I also think that there should be a payment difference for levels of protection. So this goes a bit to the different types of creative commons licenses out there. However, I think the most basic cheapest level of protection is required source acknowledgement if remixed, and the right to license out the work. Anything more than that would be extra money. So, if you didn’t want it remixed for profit you would have to pay a significant amount of money more. Again, this is per copyright. There wouldn’t be any blocks for works on a CD as each song can be sold separately, which would require a separate registration. 
I think with a system such as this we would quickly understand what the true value of a copyright actually is. At this point we have an artificially high valuation of copyrighted material based upon an extremely small subset of copyrighted material. From my previous post on the value of patents, we saw that most patents were barely able to cover the value of owning the patent. Additionally, most wouldn’t cover the cost of litigation. 
We need to come to accept that most of our art at some point becomes economically worthless, if it ever was. That’s not to say it’s not emotionally full of worth, however, we can only truly understand that value when we have easy open access to it.
Further Reading:
Free Culture Lawrence Lessig: http://www.manybooks.net/titles/lessiglother04free_culture.html (Free ebook)

What is the value of a patent?

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The truth of the matter is that most patents are worthless. What? How can that be with so many people suing over these patents? Why has there been a HUGE increase in patent activity in the past few years? Just because something is worthless doesn’t mean it can’t be useful. However, that being said, most patents are still useless. A patent on how to swing some one in a swing, is in fact, worthless and useless (real patent) (Jaffe and Lerner, 2006). In fact, I would argue it has negative value as it cost substantial money to have it patented. Granted the father was the patent attorney, however, there are still expenses that has to do with the procedures to get it patented.

In 2008 a study was published on the values of patents based on a survey asking both inventors and managers what they felt the value of a patent would be. As can be see in the figure below it’s a greatly skewed graph with the vast majority of the patents being worth less than €1 Million ($1.5 Million). This value is related to how much an inventor or manager would have sold the patent for as soon as it was issued.

Gambardella et al, 2008

But wait! That’s not worthless. In fact that’s worth a lot of money! Is it? For a person yes. For a company maybe not. R&D is not cheap. Let’s say it took three years to develop the technology and a staff of 5 people making €50,000, that alone is a cost of €750,000. You’d barely recoup the expenses of that let alone the materials. However, most economists would argue that those costs are sunk and shouldn’t be factored into the cost of the patent. I do agree with this assessment, however there are other costs to consider as well. One of the biggest costs is risk of lawsuits. Which as you can see below are growing at an alarming rate.

In a lot of ways, patents are worthless until you sue someone. There are arguments that a patent has no value until you try to actually use it, or prevent some one from using it. Thus, the fact you’re suing means it has inherent worth. Additionally, as there are requirements to pay for patents, a certain fee each year, there is a certain bottom level threshold to indicate the value of a patent. Shifts in this value will impact different patent holders differently. Increasing it towards the end could drive up litigation, while decreasing it, means that no patents will lapse.

So what can we take from this? With the rising numbers of patents, and the rising numbers of law suits, it could be argued that there is a sense of an increased value of patents. However, I think we need to be very careful with this sort of argument. As, we could just be letting bad patents get approved because of changes in the USPTO (there has been more of an increase in the USPTO than at the European Patent Office). In the end, the value of a patent is truly decided in the market when people purchase a product. Unfortunately, the person that gains value out of the patent may not be a true innovator. They could be a troll like Intellectual Ventures http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack

References/Further Reading:

A.B. Jaffe & J. Lerner (2006). Innovation and Its Discontent.  NJ: Princeton
University Press.

Alfonso Gambardella, Dietmar Harhoff, Bart Verspagen (2008). The value of
European patents. European Management Review (2008) 5, 69–84.

Norway and extremism

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My heart goes out to Norway. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about this, there have been tons of blog posts speculating the reasons that drove this man to commit these heinous crimes. Over on /r/atheism there’s discussion that atheists should be pointing out that this was a christian terrorist and work to ensure that the name sticks. They are saying that our media uses different words because he was christian compared to muslim.

In the US this massacre will no doubt bring up debates about restricting gun usage and access. However, Norway has some of the strictest gun laws in the world, and it clearly didn’t help. This blog post helps explain the extent that this man went to in carrying out this violence. Additionally Al Jazeera has an interesting op-ed lambasting NYT for quickly claiming it was a muslim terrorist then switching to christian extremist.

My take on this is a bit more complex. The op-ed writer claims that it’s not a battle between Islam and Christianity but a battle between extremists and the average person. While he is correct in that, it’s not as simple as we’d like it to be. Unfortunately, differences in religion and cultures make it very difficult to figure out ways of dealing with these problems. Misinformation has spread so there is a lack of trust between your average person in the west and in the middle east. Bridging that gap will be difficult. In europe there are additional problems.

In many articles there are discussions of the lack of integration of different groups of immigrants into European countries. Some of these groups have the highest rates of criminality in the country. For example in the Netherlands Moroccans are the group with the highest level of criminality in the country. They have not integrated well at all. However, this is a two edge sword, as in many cases they aren’t allowed to integrate. One of my friends told me about a friend of his roommate’s that is Moroccan and even though he was born and raised in Amsterdam he is excluded from most bars because he is Moroccan.

These problems are extremely difficult to deal with and the stereotyping and racism can lead to extremism. This is what we’ve seen in this case. In the US, it was fueled by the Tea-Party, Beck, Palin and other politicians, in the Netherlands it’s been fueled by Geert Wilders, and unless we can figure out a way to make them feel responsible for the anger they entice and inflame we are not going to see these messages stop.

That’s only part of it. We need to work together to create a way for both groups of people to integrate. Requiring immigrants to take language courses is a way to do this. However, at least in the Netherlands, they are extremely expensive and many of the workers are working class and may not be able to afford the courses. So, perhaps some integration programs by the government will help with this. Additionally, to help with cultural issues using full immersion courses would work best. These courses can help teach the history of the country and about the cultural heritage of the country as well. This will ease the transfer from the previous living environment to the new one, as well as make the new immigrants more likely to integrate.

Who is going to pay for that. I don’t know, most likely the immigrants and recent immigrants. However, this won’t address a lot of problems. Specifically how do you deal with people like this Norwegian guy? I’m not sure. But I think addressing the ability of immigrants to integrate may help a great deal with these problems.