Symbsys 209

10 responses so far ↓

• 1    gnewman // Nov 26, 2007 at 9:27 pm

  I found the article by Chris Anderson inspiring, and unbeknownst to Chris (our Chris not Anderson), it an incredibly poignant article for my life. Why? Well because after a long stretch of limbo about where my life after Stanford would take me, I have come back from break with an answer for this next summer: filming short sketch comedies with my two best friends from back home.

  Anderson has a case study on three guys, the lonely island boys, who have already succeeded down the path of viral sketch comedies. This article was comforting to me because it affirmed my belief that emerging trend is toward smaller audiences with the Internet as an enabler. Essentially Anderson says that low budget productions can garner some real attention because of Internet word-of-mouth. He is also certainly on point when he mentions the popularity of lonely Islands boys’ “Lazy Sunday” was mainly the result of the internet and other sites besides SNL’s own. It is also my understanding that Anderson is attempting to make the point that some of these productions can go beyond mainstream because “Lazy Sunday” and “D*** in a Box” garners far more attention than SNL ever does by itself. The lonely island boys do not play under the conventional media wisdom, and it is for those reasons that they are capturing something that resonates with my age group. For these reasons, I feel comforted by the article about my choice, but there are some serious issues for my group.

  I have known my friends Nick and Alec since middle school and we have been acting together since 7th grade, not to mention that we have tons of sketches that we have already written together. However, nowadays we got real bills to pay, so were not sure how much time we can devote to our project versus how much we have to work to pay the bills. I am not mentally ill, I am rather aware that I cannot expect money from what we will do. Yet it is my dream that I can find a way to do what I love, and get paid enough to continue doing so. Monetary issues are our biggest roadblocks. Our current arrangement is that Alec will work his current 40 hour- restaurant gig. Yet Nick and myself will find jobs that are just part-time, so we can focus more time on our collective project. Alec really needs the money, while Nick and myself can manage, at least for the summer, on a limited income. However, after the summer there is a good chance that Nick will move to New York, unless we have a measurable amount of success. In Nick’s mind he wants to find a way to act for a living, and his resume caters much more to the theater than the screen. So the question is: how do we measure success?

  I apologize that it appears I have just written a list of my own problems. However, I had a reason for doing this, and that was to show that these issues can be very complicated. I suppose Anderson could do a case study on my own situation where the future is less certain than that of the lonely island boys. I imagine countless people are led under the false belief that they can follow in the footsteps of those guys, when really the money is just not there to support it. Ultimately, I rather try, than not do so and always regret it, but god it would help if I didn’t have to worry about the money for rent.

• 2    lvmesa // Nov 26, 2007 at 11:16 pm

  Reading this chapter, one gets a feeling that governmental control of the internet is inevitable, and to an extent, I agree. The internet has been molded by countries we live in and there doesn’t seem to be a more efficient model of organization.

  But now that different countries, like China, are beginning to regulate their internet, and to a certain extent, re-create the internet experience, I wonder which of the various kinds of internet we will prefer?

  This may seem like an easy question–obviously, as a born and bred westerner, you chose the internet that respects and believes and lives by democracy. But I don’t think it is that simple. There are some benefits to the Chinese way of doing things. For example, a faster infrastructure, faster search applications, niche-based technology and a more regulated, predictable audience are some incentives for some users. And although there may be censorship, the overall internet experience within the firwall would be one of an upgraded technology with faster applications and uses of the internet.

  Compare this to the democratic model, which is dependent on the weakest link for definition and where technology upgrades come slower and with more concern for universality. This model also allows data to be less filtered and for illegal material to be easily downloaded. Internet Service Providers are intermediaries and are, though somewhat easy to manipulate, still unregulated and information is easily attained.

  The comparison can go on and on, but at the end of the day, what type of system would you prefer? I guess it depends on what you hold to be important in your internet experience: if speed and regulation is important to you, you should opt for the Chinese model. If you hold the ability to obtain information dear to your heart, than the general western model would work well for you…In the end it all comes down to preferences, which ironically, is what you don’t have in the case of the Chinese model..

  I think that there is always a happy medium between extremes, but in many ways, I don’t know if each extreme has been reached, or if there might be another model that hasn’t been thought of? Maybe a model run by international corporations? Maybe a model run by collaborating nations? Maybe one run by cs organizations/unions? Maybe a model that is completely regulated and enclosed by firewalls?

• 3    benkr // Nov 27, 2007 at 5:23 am

  I agree with Laura; reading “How Governments Rule The Net” convinced me that governments are inevitably able to limit the actions of their citizens over the internet by excercising control over whatevver intermediary parties exist within their borders. However, the book took a very descriptive angle on this discussion, and barely weighed in on the normative side. While it is possible for governments to control internet use by its citizens by any number of methods (arraigning ISPs, credit card companies, domain name registries, consumers, etc), which of these methods can be considered just?

  You can probably get any answer to this question from anybody by framing it however you like, and inciting either the person’s outrage towards a serious crime to elicit a stricter response or their indifference towards a petty offense to elcit a looser response. For example, if the crime in question is child pornography, I suspect most people would support any and all methods to stop its consumption, whereas if it’s betting on sports, people will take a more liberal attitude. However, we risk treading into “ends justify the means” territory if we allow this to impact our conception of how, in general, a government may justly limit crime.

  So, who may be assigned responsibility for any given illegal exchange? Clearly the two endpoints of the exchange cannot deny their responsibility (”Source” and “Targets” on p.71; e.g, the child pornographer and the pervert, or the buyer and seller of a vote). A government can fairly prosecute either of these two parties; but, as discussed in the chapter, prosecuting the source is impossible when it’s overseas and prosecuting the targets may be unfeasible. If none of the intermediaries can justly be blamed, I’d say the government is out of luck.

  Three intermediaries discussed in the chapter are ISPs, credit card companies, and domain name registries. It’s mainly a philosophical question whether inadvertently enabling immoral activity is immoral; a parallel question would be whether the Napster company was responsible for its users’ copyright infringements. In the case of credit cards, I think bringing them to trial for their involvement in online gambling is no more justified than bringing the US Treasury to trial if I paid my bookie in cash. In the case of ISPs and domain name registries, it’s more unclear. But I feel that all tools, from hammers to internet service, have the potential for misuse, and if responsibility for misuse is assigned too capriciously, it creates a disincentive to create the tools in the first place. Also, forcing toolmakers to be excessively stringent in preventing misuses of the tools may result in tools which are limited in their capacity for positive uses as well.

  There is also the question of where the illegal actions are “taking place,” which would determine which government has the power to stop them. If I risk my money in an Antiguan sports book, couldn’t it be said I am gambling in Antigua? If I buy cigarettes from a site based on a reservation, couldn’t it be said I am buying them on that reservation? Does my physical presence define the action’s location? I think it’s equally plausible to define the location of monetary exchange as the action’s location (perhaps more plausible, as the exchange is the essence of the transaction), in which case the US government would have no say in these matters. (By contrast, in the case of child pornography, not just the sale but the possession is a crime, and the possession indisputably occurs on the computers of the offenders.)

• 4    benkr // Nov 27, 2007 at 5:33 am

  uh, in that last paragraph, change the first line to say “/should/ have the power to stop them” (based on the assumption that a country shouldn’t prosecute you for what you do elsewhere). Because as the chapter shows us, governments /do/ take power by defining the illegality anywhere they like.

• 5    jarobb3 // Nov 27, 2007 at 8:49 am

  In The Long Tail, Anderson tells the tale of the band Birdmonster, whose online publicity efforts turned into success in the indie music scene (104-106). The lesson to be learned from this story, I imagine, is that we are entering a new era in which artists no longer need the monetary resources of record labels to enter the music industry. Anderson lists the four primary functions of a record label and explains how a band like Birdmonster can fulfill these needs for themselves with recent technologies and the network. However, Anderson doesn’t consider the primary function(s) a record labels provide for consumers.

  Music genres have cultures, molds in which their artists fit so that their look and music send one coherent message. Anderson’s point that the network gives artists a way around record labels is valid, but it is not a coincidence that this story involves an indie rock band. The culture of this genre venerates those who scoff at pop culture and the processed icons that emerge from the music mega-corporations. It is not trivial that Peter Arcuni (band member) had to explain that the band was not “anti-label in principle” — an indie band could conceivably reject label offers to improve their image in the eyes of their fans.

  Other genres have a quite different culture. Their audiences want their artists to be Fergalicious and Glamorous. Let’s face it: we love rich, beautiful people. If they are singing to us, all the better. Music labels, with their resources, can provide for this want (need?). Consider the words: chain, ice, whips, bling, Benjamins, etc. Why do we know the meanings of these words? Because they have invaded pop music. While it would be convenient to blame the evil music exec who controls pop culture, messages of frivolous spending and the fast life have infiltrated pop music because that is what the widest audience responds to. Being an artist in pop music, now mostly rap, involves embodying the culture of fabulously rich.

  Record labels can dress artists in the garb of pop culture whereas indie groups do not need such makeup. Anderson, I think, misses the crucial reality that a new paradigm of music, one that does not include record labels, not only has to fight the influence and affluence of the labels but also the human causes of their influence and affluence. One only needs to watch the transformation of American contestants from regular Joe to Idol to understand what most consumers of music want to see on stage: not the woman sneezing next to me but someone who seems more than human, someone who is, well, an idol.

• 6    dreadpirateroberts // Nov 27, 2007 at 11:19 am

  While reading the Stallman and Anderson articles it occurred to me that throughout the class (certainly in the later readings) that the arguments that appear most frequently why copyright and the patent system should be loosened are the music industry (Anderson 98-106) and the various medical patents (Stallman and Perelman, though Stallman seems to want to do away with all patents).

  For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to focus on the music.

  The music argument is frequently used to show that copyright (and the big corporations who are, apparently, the only ones who benefit from it) can be diminished without harm to the creative art. I figure that this case is frequently served up as an example because it is so much a part of the public eye. As Anderson stated about the long tail, there is a lot of crud, but some of it is quality. However, the argument that “Birdmonster” is the future of music doesn’t quite ring true to me. Of the three examples used to prove that homegrown music with a strong core of fans is the way of the future it seems that My Chemical Romance is probably the poster child of the future of music, not Birdmonster.

  The success of My Chemical Romance is that they started off with the home base to act as cogs to assist the big machine of music. My Chemical Romance must have felt it was worth their time to sign, as they did and have achieved international fame as a result. Perhaps they were more interested in the prospect of this stardom that the benefits of having almost complete control over their work. Perhaps they just figured if it worked for other bands, why not them? At any rate, I would call the hybrid of pandering to the old guard via the internet and creating a way to get their name out to the wide world through more traditional channels the immediate future formula.

  Birdmonster might just be ahead of its time, but I think that for right now, having a label does help enormously in achieving stardom as opposed to creating music.

• 7    fwy08 // Nov 27, 2007 at 4:00 pm

  “They are us” (Anderson 107). But “us” isn’t everybody.

  Does the opportunity to contribute to these collections require some degree of privilege? Obviously there is a minimum requirement of resources, like access to computers and the Internet, but it seems like there is another strong factor. There is also a cut-off at the bottom and top for the people who have no leisure time. The Long Tail is democratizing in breaking down the barriers between consumer and producers, and individuals and corporations, but what’s interesting is that along with the new system, a new metric of privilege emerges. For a related reason to why projects must be modular, people must have a certain amount of free time to contribute any impactful information.

  This distinction may seem trivial. Every human has 24 hours per day and 7 days per week. You manage your time. This is nothing new. However, look deeper. Who are these individuals that might lack the free-time to contribute to these side-projects? They may be the most marginalized individuals, who work two jobs, who have the most socially relevant needs but haven’t found the means or time to communicate. On the other end, they may be the expert, whose expertise is in such high demand that there is no time to contribute to enhancement projects because his skills need to solve problems NOW. It would be interesting to research who are the people who end up NOT contributing to these systems and the reasons for why they don’t because there are probably many valuable voices we’re not hearing.

• 8    johnmagdaleno // Nov 27, 2007 at 5:32 pm

  Stallman’s arguments in the excerpt were informed and sensible, but seem to preclude any formula for patents which cover truly inventive work. It’s arguable that there are no software innovations that aren’t patentable, and although Stallman does not express this but provides a number of arguments which suggest that all software patents are bad. While I agree with most of Stallman’s views on Software patents, I found portions of his arguments pedantic and polemical.

  I wanted to address portions of Stallman’s argument, specifically areas that I didn’t find convincing, and areas in which I discovered some insight into the domain of software patents.

  1. Intellectual property is a bad concept because it is used to lump different legal concepts, trademark, patent, and copyright into the common philosophy of control of ideas. While it may be true that intellectual property is not precisely correct when lumping such legal elements together, it seems that it deserves to be fairly treated as a possible important concept, whether agreed to or not. In particular, Stallmen says that “this term ‘intellectual property’ prejudges the most basis question” and that “[it] is not conducive to clear and open-minded thinking” (97). Certainly, it is obvious that “intellectual property” prejudges that ideas are property (given its use of the word property), but I don’t see how this gets in the way of clear and open-minded thinking. Clearly, Stallman questions the legitimacy of allowing an idea to be monopolized, but he never demonstrates how the term confuses the issue beyond his point that it refers to different areas of law and policy. I think that the law is being modified to reflect a more basic concept than copyrights, patents, and trademarks, and that is the commercial control of ideas. So it seems that people’s inclination to discuss this issue as “intellectual property” is not a confusion of law and policy, but a more basic philosophical question of whether an idea can be owned or at least controlled. We need to discuss this as a matter of social norms and decide on an approach that reflects are values as a liberal, democratic, and market-driven society.

  2. Stallman makes an earnest attack on the use of patents for software, especially to the seemingly non-determinism of the process and enforcement. Stallman points out that “some of the patent applications that are pending are secret” (98) and that “[patents] are hard to understand” (99). A developer may not know that she is violating someone else patent. I agree that this is an important issue that needs to be addressed to make the process fairer.

  Probably, Stallman’s most important argument is the licensing issues, the ability of large companies to manipulate the patent system by threatening and using legal action, and the process for deciding if a patent describes a truly unique and inventive application of software. While Stallman may wish to not use the patent system to protect software (or to even protect software), I think there are remedies to these problems that do not require throwing out the baby with bath water. For example, can we modify law to disincentivize companies from litigious behavior? Can we develop a new process that requires much more diligence (not legalese) in describing and proving that a software idea is truly unique, can we use a body of professionals who are qualified for reviewing patent ideas, and can we shorten the length of the patent so that it is more in line with the pace of technology change? While freely available software is great avenue for the development of software ideas and solutions, it doesn’t necessarily require that is exist as the only form.

• 9    clizzin // Nov 27, 2007 at 5:49 pm

  Stallman’s discussion of software patents makes a lot of sense upon first read, especially in the context of our previous knowledge of how information production informs others’ ability to pursue and produce more information. I especially appreciated his very concrete analysis of how large corporations cross-license patents with one another in order to accrue the benefits of the patent system without taking on the full impact of the harms.

  The question I want to study is how we can attribute ideas to people in the absence of a system of economic benefits. There is a value placed upon being able to come up with a great idea, after all, and especially in the case that someone is the first to come up with a great idea – to use an extreme example, we want to be able to make sure Einstein gets credit for his work on the theory of relatively, and not some other random scientist. In other words, we expect people to build up a reputation based on the quality of their work, and we expect that people who come up with important ideas are known to be and respected as the creators of those ideas.

  Stallman’s example of musicians who use previous compositions’ themes in their own work provides an instructive instance of where proper accreditation of reputation starts to get tricky. It seems obvious that punk bands like The Ramones and The Sex Pistols (or, if we wanted to go even further down the line, Green Day and Blink-182) shouldn’t be sued by Patti Smith or The Velvet Underground for taking the sounds of proto-punk and developing upon them in their own songs, but at the same time, it seems that the latter two should deserve some recognition for pioneering an entirely new way to play and think about music. This works on both an ethical and an economic level – ethically, they deserve to be known as artists whose work was built upon by later, more popular bands, and economically, they could not make any money selling albums or playing concerts if they were not recognized for their achievements.

  Even now, in the age of the supposed amateur producer who cares only for the joy of creation, many people who produce works in the name of contributing to culture would like to receive recognition for it – or at the very least, they would be miffed if they saw anyone else claiming to have produced their work and garnering the reputational benefits that derive from that claim. For example, many creators and producers of comedic Internet videos oppose the content aggregation site Ebaum’s World on the grounds that Ebaum’s World does not produce any of its own content but rather takes others’ content without attribution and brands that content with the Ebaum’s World site name. In more serious arenas, academics surely would be unsettled if there were no reputational benefits associated with their work, and some bloggers would be miffed if a brilliant idea that they put on their blog for their own audience was later claimed by someone else more prominent.

  Therefore, it seems that even without the use of patents to ensure economic control over an idea, society expects that there is some sort of reputational benefit associated with becoming the “first” to come up with and publicize an idea. The way in which people think about reputational benefits seems similar to the way in which people think about the economic benefits of patents – just as people who weren’t going to do anything with their idea anyway want to be able to claim benefits off of others who do use the idea in a profitable way, people who didn’t necessarily want their name on the front cover of a project would demand reputational benefits if someone else claimed their work. For example, there are a lot of Wikipedia users who enjoy the reputational benefits associated from having their extensive edits recorded (some users proudly display awards on their user page), but even the Wikipedia users that usually don’t care about claiming recognition would be angry if the team behind the Encylopedia Brittanica claimed all of Wikipedia as their own work.

  The economy of reputation is especially important if, as many have suggested, we want creative producers to stop making money off the selling of goods and instead start making money from the selling of services. Musicians cannot get venues for concerts, authors cannot get speaking engagements, academics cannot get university appointments, and Internet content producers can’t lure visitors to their sites to generate hits for advertising revenue if they don’t first secure their own reputation by ensuring that the work they produce is attributed solely to them. Given the new efficiencies in distribution that make it harder to make sure distribution points of content are associated with the original creator, it seems that removing a patent system would take away another avenue for people to ensure that their ideas are solely attributed to them.

  I realize that this doesn’t quite relate to Stallman’s discussion of patents, since he’s primarily concerned with patents used in engineering industries, not creative work, and particularly in software development. I also realize that a lack of control over reputation is not a reason to accept the patent system – Stallman makes a pretty convincing argument for why the patent system is bad when dealing with informational goods. But his critique of the system does inspire questions of how software developers or algorithm inventors can get the credit they deserve for their work in forms other than the ability to sue others, and in my experience, the general answer to that question has merely been that they will accrue reputational benefits from it. I think it would therefore be useful to discuss how reputation functions economically, especially in the context of the Internet’s ability to separate content from its original creator so quickly and easily.

• 10    dulcinea // Nov 27, 2007 at 5:56 pm

  In reading “Who Controls the Internet”, I was struck by the way that the strategy of controlling the intermediaries breaks down some of the normal rule of law as applies to technology issues. For example, instead of seeking an injunction against online cigarette companies and having to prove that they are violating the laws against sale to minors, government forces can simply pressure credit card companies not to deal with them.

  Imagine if this was the situation with other “meatspace” laws. What if your neighbors could stop you from having noisy parties by shutting off your utilities? What if you could be prevented from loitering by having your shoes disintegrate if you did so?

  These seem like pressure tactics more than due process remedies. I think that institutions ill-prepared to deal with cyberlaw issues respond with extreme punishments rather than think through what the equivalent due process would be in cyberspace.

  One issue that was not addressed in the chapter was the use of humiliation as a tactic for government control of online behavior. Local governments have, for example, posted the names of people arrested for soliciting prostitution in an attempt to shame people away from using prostitutes. They have also posted photos of people involved in the commission of a minor crime (smoking marijuana, drinking underage) and asked those on the ‘net to identify the perpetrators.

  This is an example of distributed government enforcement to match the examples in the chapter of distributed evasion of government power. By posting this information in a way that a search engine can pick it up, this enforces law without having to seek out each individual “john”. Not only can law-breakers avoid the government by spreading the risk, government itself can spread the enforcement through selected intermediaries.

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