Tag Archives: Copyright

Evidence of Higgs boson

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I’ve been a bit remiss with my blogging of late and managed to miss discussing this pretty big story. CERN, the European particle physics group, has evidence that there might be Higgs particles. What are Higgs? Well, they are theorized to provide mass to all other particles. Not only has CERN reported this, but Tevatron in Chicago at Fermilab has reported seeing similar, but smaller results. This is very good news. In fact, despite the fact that Tevatron (6.3km) is no where near the size of Large Hadron Colider (LHC) of CERN (27km), which means that it can produce less power, can detect it means that there’s a lot of room for further investigation at LHC. This is exciting.

What if Higgs doesn’t exist? Well, basically it means that the Standard Model of particle physics is partially scrapped. Only partially, because a lot of the theory has been supported through the research at institutions like CERN and Fermilab. However, the evidence is pretty good, however, the scientists are being extremely cautious. They are currently at 2.8 sigma on a normal curve (bell curve for grading). For most research this error rate is more than enough for it to be considered a significant finding, 99.9% likelihood, however in particle physics significantly higher results are required. They require 5 sigma, which is about 1 in a million.

Does this impact my daily life? No not really, however I’m very sure whenever some of the original atomic theories were put forward and verified, most people didn’t see much use in them. It might take us a large amount of time to figure out how to actually use this. For all we know some of these developments may lead to a better understanding of fission in some way. I’m speculating of course, but there’s no reason to assume that this research is good for just doing more research.

In the United States cutting edge particle research is drawing to a close I’m afraid. In October of 2011 Tevatron will shut down for good, and there are only a few other large accelerators in the US, none as large as Tevatron.This will likely have long term impacts on both theoretical physics and particle physics in the US. The expertise will leave Universities like University of Chicago and move over to Europe to work with CERN. This didn’t have to be the case, but in 1993 Congress scrapped the Super Collider in Dallas, the US gave up the desire to lead in particle physics.

Congrats to both Fermilab and CERN for coming so close to detecting the Higgs boson!

A convergence: ICE, Copyright, O’Dwyer Swartz

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I think we’re in the middle of a very bad convergence of cultural inhibitors. Most things that would fall under the purview of culture is copyrighted. Historically, we never had much trouble with this as individuals. However, now we’re seeing more and more problems with this. As I’ve discussed in the past, ICE is heavily involved, individuals like James O’Dwyer and Aaron Swartz are in the middle of two different kind of legal action and content owners are coming up with new ways to control their material.

What do I think is going on? I think that we could be seeing the end of our ability to freely use our culture. We are also seeing the US attempting to govern the world’s copyright law. For instance, the US is seeking to extradite O’Dwyer over a links page, something like Justin.TV, which in the UK isn’t illegal and no one is sure if it’s actually illegal in the US or not (See this ars technica article for more information). This isn’t the only case like this. ICE seized a website that was declared legal in Spain.

One of the best parts of the copyright law for consumers is the First sale provision. This allows a consumer that owns a book, but not the copyright, to sell this book to some one else. Or do with this book anything they want to after the first sale. However, we’re seeing this ability erode away. Autodesk, makers of AutoCad, are suing a guy that is trying to resell a two copies of AutoCad. They are claiming it violates their copyright and their End User Licence Agreement.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is another manner in which content owners are exerting excess control over their content. If you bought a song from iTunes, that DRM is going to last longer than the copyright which it is absurd in my opinion.

Another case where DRM and content ownership is going to have a long term negative impact is in the PC gaming industry. There are a few major platforms for game digital game distribution. Steam being the largest, however all these games are put into a walled garden of “ownership” where you are able to play the game and use it, but you aren’t in control of the actual content. You have absolutely no ability to resell the game. In the past, if you didn’t like a game after you bought it, you had the ability to sell it for a loss to some place like Gamestop. With these online platforms you don’t have the ability to do that, as it would cannibalize sales from Steam itself.

Other services are starting to get into the act to prevent copyrighted materials from being sole without the owner’s consent. Today, PayPal has decided to ban payments to any website that is illegally selling copyrighted material (Torrent Freak article). This is pretty serious. As a company the have the right to do so, and I’m very sure that there will be some other service that will provide secure monetary transfers.

Based on these observations, I believe that our government and content owners are working to control and limit the freedom of usage of our own culture. It’s not a conspiracy, as the government is actively working with RIAA and MPAA to help regulate the material. ISPs have recently gotten involved in the game as well (EFF commentary). These groups are working to use copyright to gain more control over the material every day.

What can we do? Contact your government officials, get educated through EFF and Creative Commons, and other organizations like this.

Further reading:
Lawrence Lessig Code 2.0

Aaron Swartz and Freedom of Knowledge

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Aaron Swartz has been arrested and accused of a multitude of crimes, for a break down of them go here, for gaming a big journal retrieval site called JSTOR (it is a large one many journals are stored within this site). As some one that works with these retrieval services quiet often and has actually hit the limit for the amount of citation data you can pull from them, they can be frustrating. Some of the work I’m personally doing right now is related to citation analysis and co-authorship analysis. Which allows networks of knowledge flows to be seen. Another method is to do a word analysis within articles to create knowledge networks based on what articles are about, what knowledge is contained in each of the articles. Apparently, in the past, Swartz has done something like this. Some of my colleagues also use techniques to allow additional gathering of information. Most of this information, even with you have legal access, is difficult and very time consuming to procure. In this case, Swartz has access and may have been able to get a hold of this data through other means. JSTOR mentioned in one of their releases that they have a program that allows for high volume access to their publications. 

This case also has made me think of a few other issues with our current knowledge retrieval systems and repositories. Companies need to make money off these publications, so we can’t have them for free. However, through my research, I’ve used articles that are 20 years old. If this knowledge was patented, I would be able to access this and use it with no problem at this point. In many cases, it could happen sooner as many patents aren’t renewed after a certain time frame. Using a scientific article is typically more like using something published under a creative commons license, which means you can remix the information. Through citations you give credit where it is due. In most cases you can get access to the data and models, if you give the person credit, either through citations or co-authorship. Why does this work? Because the research is publicly funded.
Authors can also pay to allow full free access to their work depending on the journal. However, in most cases they don’t, or don’t get the article to be free continuously. However, there is some relief from the burden of paying for individual articles, Google Scholar, is able to find articles that scientists have on their personal websites, and allow access to “working paper” versions, which means they aren’t quite publishable yet, even after they have been published. 
I think for publicly funded research we need to have an exception to the copyright law, which changes it from 70 years to 10 years. Depending on the field even 10 years is to long. The work my wife is doing articles cited which are that old are typically cited because it’s giving credit to trail blazers. These papers are typically cited in the hundreds compared to the average of the tens. Once the copyright expired there would be much more competition for distribution of the articles and reduces the risk to the knowledge community if any given retrieval system or journal fails.
This Swartz case scares me in general, because it will make it even more difficult to access information and care a large risk if you create scripts to make it easier to get access to massive amounts of data.

YouTube Copright School

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Since I’ve been posting recently about copyright and infringement and YouTube, I figured I should watch the video they have posted for “Copyright School.” Although I tried to embed the video into this post it appears it’s not working. So you can find the link here.

The video itself is moderately annoying. The song used through out the video kind of reminds me of this song.  It explains the bare bones basics of copyright works and how copyright can work on YouTube. It shows how copying a video is copyright infringement, and how potentially filming a live concert can be considered copyright infringement. Although they didn’t explain it was infringement because of the song not because of the video itself.

The fair use part is rather deplorable. However, this is to be expected. I’m sure whenever the writers got to this section the lawyers heavily edited it. I’d argue that it’s overly protective of YouTube. By stating that most remixes are likely to be outside of fair use, the video makes it very safe for YouTube itself. Youtube can point to this video and say, “See we told them those remixes weren’t allowed under fair use.” However, this is not entirely accurate. In fact the very video they use to explain this problem most likely is covered by fair use. Realistically, there’s no difference between the video Youtube uses and Numa Numa.

I’m not an expert at fair use, so I decided to post some commentary from one person who is. Here’s a pretty good discussion between Colbert and Lawrence Lessig. In this they discuss how remixing is and should be ok under fair use. It can benefit both parties. Here’s a blog post written by Lessig describing some of the failures of the fair use system as well.

So what can we gather from these two discussions and the YouTube video? First, YouTube is clearly putting itself in a position to not be liable for any work that may not actually fall under fair use. Second, it’s difficult to determine what is and what is not fair use. Lessig also points out that there is a dividing line between commercializing the work and keeping it for free. I’d suggest as much as possible to clearly understand these issues before attempting to commercialize any remixes.

In the terms of the internet commercialization isn’t the same as it used to be. Placing ads on your blogs or within your videos basically commercializes your work.

Btw here are two remixes from the Colbert Lessig Inteview.

Copyright’s History and what’s gone wrong

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I’m not going to go into a super deep history of copyright here. What I plan to do is outline the general idea behind copyright and how it’s shifted over time. If you want an in depth discussion on this I suggest reading it from Lawrence Lessig’s book Free Culture which the link to a direct download isn’t working right now. I can email it to you if you’d like, I believe.

Basically, the idea of copyright came about around the same time as patent protection. The idea, which is rooted in the same theories as patent protection, is to give just reward to people who created creative works, without fear of someone stealing it, and selling it for their own gain. This worked extremely well in a time when to listen to a great piece of music you had to listen to it live. This is where the public performance aspect came into affect. Of course, books were much more difficult to copy en mass as it’s really expensive to print a run of books. Copyright was originally much shorter in length of time than it is currently. At the longest it was until the creator of the work died. Now, as we know, copyright can persist significantly longer. We have more interaction because the material is more accessible. In the early 1900’s there was a big congressional hearing about sheet music. If sheet music should be allowed at all. Today, I think our version of sheet music is the video or musical remix, al a GirlTalk. I feel like I’m really pimping Lessig today, but he also wrote a book specifically about this topic called simply enough Remix. In this book he interviews GirlTalk about this very topic.

So, how does this shift in copyright really impact us? Well, as we can tell from the O’Dwyer case, RIAA, MPAA, and their equivalents in other countries, we interact with copyright on a daily basis. Not enough of us have a clear understanding of how we’re actually interacting with it. It’s conceivable that the video commentary out on Youtube for video games is technically copyright infringement. However, it would be stupid for video game publishers to go after the Youtubers, like my friends at KBMod, because they are effectively giving free advertisement for these games.

I suggest people that are active in posting videos online on Youtube become aware of the copyright issues that you may be interacting with. Sadly, ignorance is not a defense. The books I’ve mentioned above are easy to read. Lessig writes in a very clear way that non lawyers can understand easily.