Adelaide and Fringe, Feasible Socialism and French Films

[tcpip]

The visit to Adelaide and the Fringe Festival was very enjoyable. Most days spent with Paula and seeing her play 'Bugger Me Dead' (a faux Australian war veteran has troubles with hippie daughter and contracts cancer on retirement), seeing Gail's JPG inspired tie-and-scarf fashion parade, and meeting in real life up with Morrigan77 (hooray!).

The Fringe Festival, considered second in the world only to the Edinburgh festival, certainly had its attractions for cabaret, theatre, comedy, visual arts and music. I didn't get to see much, preferring more comprehensive visits to the State Art Gallery and State Museum. One pleasant encounter was The Kilted Generation, a meeting between trad-scots and punk. I just had to buy their CD, entitled "Liverdance".

Two disappointing items included The Baudrillard Brothers, an alleged comedy show with excellent copy ("What happens when Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes walk into a bar?" etc), but poor (indeed, pathetic) execution and a sloppy Cajun band with French spoken with an Australian nasal twang. The Computerland exhibition - old computers from yesteryear - wasn't as good as longi could do. The exhibition was small (less than a dozen) and most of them I'd owned or worked with in the past. Also there wasn't much of an interactive element - I mean, what's the point of computers if they aren't interactive? Grumble..

Anyway, I did take the opportunity to work further on my thesis. For the first time in over I year I composed it into a single document. Over 140,000 words and over 520 pages. The spell and grammar checker crashed at page 123. At this stage I'm looking at the broader issue of changes to social formations with the introduction of communications technology. With reference to books on the history of telegraph (including a pithy document given by caseopaya, "The Victorian Internet") and radio I am leaning against postmodern interpretations of the Internet and more in favour of a modernist "industrialisation of information" orientation.

In the meantime, not to separate the means of communication from the relations of production, I took the opportunity to read Alec Nove's, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (2nd Edition 1991) which is believed to had significant influence in the transformation of the Eastern European economies. Nove's mainly critical of Marx's assumptions of abundance, central planning (ex ante assumptions prior to ex post justifications), the transformation between labour theory of value to exchange value and the disappearance of the division of labour. In general, I agree with Nove's criticisms of Marxian socialism (which in no way invalidates Marx's criticisms of capitalism!) and in fact, his "feasible socialism" is actually more "socialist" than something I would advocate. I would not, for example, claim that capitalisation is "unearned income", as he does. I do however hold that copyright and patents are. In many ways, I think my ideas about economics are a lot closer to Henry George than Karl Marx.

Have been thinking about seeing parts of the French Film Festival. (Ugh, what a terrible website). Except the copy presented for each film is very disappointing. The following may get my viewing...

Since Otar Left

Princes and Princesses and

Bon Voyage.

But in general, it's slim pickings this year. So what has happened to French culture and especially French film culture? Why has it become so self-referential and inward looking? Insidious postmodern theorists?

The Intelligence Report. Well worth a read.
www.aph.gov.au follow the links to committees, joint committee on ASIO, ASIS and the DSD.

I must admit I was warned about this debacle with
Australia purchasing US tanks. Via Lederhosen. Who also reminds us of that campaigns that attempt to divert the course of nature simply don't work. The failure of teenage sexual abstinence.

Sometimes you can't win. I thought about doing a book on basic systems administration. So I went to google and typed in "basic systems administration". What did I get?

Comments

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Er, you realise that would *increase* the lifetime of a patent? Currently, IIRC, the typical life of a patent is 14-20 years depending on whether it's a design or utility patent.

(I could talk all day about the things that are wrong with patent law, but the lifetime isn't high on my list. Copyright lifetimes, now, those are screwed up.)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Copyright lifetimes, now, those are screwed up.

Yes, and increasingly so. The original US copyright law was for 14 years. Now, with expectations of authors (in any field) to produce more information the period of copyright has been extended to the life of the author plus an additional fifty years!

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Worse than that, even. It's now author's lifetime plus seventy years, or 95 years in the case of corporate authorship or work published before 1978. This extension had a lot to do with the fact that a certain cartoon mouse's early films were about to pass into the public domain...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

As a consequence of the act, no copyrighted works will enter into public domain due to term expiration in the United States until January 1, 2019, when all works created in 1923 will enter into public domain.

[zey.livejournal.com]

Er, you realise that would *increase* the lifetime of a patent? Currently, IIRC, the typical life of a patent is 14-20 years depending on whether it's a design or utility patent.

In my "New World Patent Order", there'd be a complete ban on granting patents for which prior art existed in patent, practice or nature. So, essentially you wouldn't be able to patent advertising in space, urinating through a straw, ecommerce using cookies, etc.

The guys who design things like the Cochlear Implant, etc, need to have their work protected. I'm less concerned with people whose only claim to fame is refining molecules found in the Snozberry plant in South America. (By that same process, the company that designed the first microwave oven could only patent their particular device, not the use of microwaves for heating/cooking carbon-based dead life forms.)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

The guys who design things like the Cochlear Implant, etc, need to have their work protected. I'm less concerned with people whose only claim to fame is refining molecules found in the Snozberry plant in South America.

That one's problematic. Even under current IP laws, you can't patent pharmaceuticals found in nature. Consequently, there's no incentive* for researchers to study such things, and right now we're losing medicinal species in places like the Amazon - because you can make money by bulldozing that territory, but not by studying it. IMHO we need a system that provides *more* incentive for such research, not less.

(By that same process, the company that designed the first microwave oven could only patent their particular device, not the use of microwaves for heating/cooking carbon-based dead life forms.)

Possibly a bad example - a microwave oven isn't much more than a magnetron in a box, and magnetrons were already in use for radar before it was discovered that they could be used for cooking. So under the system you propose, the discoverer of that use would have very little incentive to publicise it.

Keep in mind here that the original purpose of the patent system is actually to *encourage* people to share information, with a fifteen or twenty-year exclusivity period as the carrot. In the absence of that carrot, the best way to profit from a discovery is often to keep it as a proprietary secret - which might be great for the company that has the secret, but stops anybody else from benefitting from that knowledge and building upon it.

FWIW, I'm *not* very fond of the current patent system. I work in scientific research, and I know firsthand that it's cumbersome and often abused. (One of my 'favourites', which has been upheld in court: Company A identifies a certain material property as important, and patents a process for measuring said property. Then, in a separate patent, they lay claim to all materials having certain values of said property... as measured by their patented process. So you can't even tell whether your material infringes their materials patent, without using their patented measurement process.) I spent several months of my time last year arseing around with patent requirements when I'd much rather have been doing new research, and I'd love to see a better way to encourage research and sharing of ideas. But until that alternative exists, patenting is the only system we have - broken as it is.

*Except altruism, which is a wonderful thing but not the sturdiest of foundations to build upon.

Henry George's comments on copyright and patents

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

http://www.schalkenbach.org/library/george.henry/pp083.html

Footnote: 1 Following the habit of confounding the exclusive right granted by a patent and that granted by a copyright as recognitions of the right of labor to its intangible productions, I in this fell into error which I subsequently acknowledged and corrected in the Standard of June 23, 1888. The two things are not alike, but essentially different. The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination, which by the natural law of property all are free to use; but only to the labor expended in the thing itself. It does not prevent any one from using for himself the facts, the knowledge, the laws or combinations for a similar production, but only from using the identical form of the particular book or other production -- the actual labor which has in short been expended in producing it. It rests therefore upon the natural, moral right of each one to enjoy the products of his own exertion, and involves no interference with the similar right of any one else to do likewise. The patent, on the other hand, prohibits any one from doing a similar thing, and involves, usually for a specified time, an interference with the equal liberty on which the right of ownership rests. The copyright is therefore in accordance with the moral law -- it gives to the man who has expended the intangible labor required to write a particular book or paint a picture security against the copying of that identical thing. The patent is in defiance of this natural right. It prohibits others from doing what has been already attempted. Every one has a moral right to think what I think, or to perceive what I perceive, or to do what I do -- no matter whether be gets the hint from me or independently of me. Discovery can give no right of ownership, for whatever is discovered must have been already here to be discovered. If a man make a wheelbarrow, or a book, or a picture, he has a moral right to that particular wheelbarrow, or book, or picture, but no right to ask that others be prevented from making similar things. Such a prohibition, though given for the purpose of stimulating discovery and invention, really in the long run operates as a check upon them.


In the final chapter, like everything else, he advocates funding inventors through land-rents.

Re: Henry George's comments on copyright and patents

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Discovery can give no right of ownership, for whatever is discovered must have been already here to be discovered.

Dubious. An undiscovered, never-used industrial process (say, a better way to produce cloth), or a medicine which has never been refined - is "already there" only in possibility, which is to say no more than an unwritten novel. We can equally well say that a block of granite contains every possible sculpture, but when a sculptor realises one such sculpture it's still protected by copyright.

To bring any of those into actual existence takes a good deal of effort. Edison's remark about inspiration vs. perspiration is right on the money here.

The copyright is not a right to the exclusive use of a fact, an idea, or a combination, which by the natural law of property all are free to use; but only to the labor expended in the thing itself.

In practice, regardless of what Mr. George may have thought about it, copyright *does* protect a combination. If Stephen King combines words in a particular way to make a book, then nobody else is permitted to use that same combination of words - even if they go to the effort of writing them out themselves, putting just as much tangible 'labour' into the process as the original. George Harrison discovered this the hard way when he unconsciously infringed on the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" - although he went through all the labour of writing "My Sweet Lord", believing it was an original work, he still ended up using somebody else's music and lost the ensuing case.
Non sequitur.

If a man make a wheelbarrow, or a book, or a picture, he has a moral right to that particular wheelbarrow, or book, or picture, but no right to ask that others be prevented from making similar things.

Actually, if he makes an *original* book or picture, copyright gives him very much that right.