Lessig on the limits of copyright

Intellectual copyright is protected by myth and economics. To illustrate this look at where the protection of intellectual copyright is breaking down: the downloading of copyrighted music from the internet. The myth that doing this is illegal or simply wrong doesn’t protect the property. As for economics: once the downloader has a computer the cost is neglible while the downloader’s profit; viz, the amount saved by not buying the downloaded material is the faux market price.

This may be a matter of life and death to some but this is only a small part of the story. Remember that the term intellectual property is fairly broad. The term encompasses patents: which – at the moment – are protected if not by myth certainly by economics.

Generally, patents have a cost burden with respect to conducting the processes that they describe. Secondly, the cost of policing is comparatively low since; current technology, as a consequence of technologies of scale, tends to centralise production. The centrallisation effect leaves a big fat target (think, Sudan pharmaceutical plant bombed by Clinton). Thus, the policing of this aspect of intellectual property is cost effective. What will happen when technology makes it possible to produce goods in a distributed, rather than centralised, manner? (See this link where scientists are bringing chemical manufacture to the desk top).

In answer to the question, perhaps we should turn to H de Soto’s ‘Mystery of Capital’.

Boynton in BookForum on copyright.

IP law, like numerous other regimes (e.g. securities regs), requires the cover of protecting the little guy (nudge nudge wink wink say no more squire!) … and any alternate network will be relentlessly attacked should it rise to a level that might compromise profits — it’s tactical because it’s transient, action provoking reaction — only the amorphous survive (since no clear target is presented).

This:

I was so struck by the elegance of his minimalist Powerpoint presentations..

is excuse enough for me to plug Edward Tufte’s wonderful * The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, available from Tufte’s web site for USD7. And a bargain. Everyone who uses Powerpoint should be required by law to read it first.

Disclaimer: I have no connection to Tufte other than as a reader and cult member.

*although not as wonderful as The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which you have all read, right?

How many people had background images — much less animated background images — on their slides before PowerPoint?

kcindc –

Is that supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing?

I’ll concede d-squared’s underlying argument – that Powerpoint facilitates some appropriate organizational principles – if he’ll concede that the default visual product is rubbish. As Keynote demonstrates, this need not be so. However, MS’s absolute dedication to the principle that anything worth doing is worth doing unattractively has lead to countless bits of ugliness foisted on unwitting audiences.

Furthermore, it isn’t just the wizards (and I would challenge your bald assertion about their (non)prevalence), but the built-in defaults themselves. I spent an afternoon setting up a clean, attractive template suited to the kinds of presentations that I do, but still find myself wasting time on every presentation undoing things that PP tries to make me do. It is, in fact, in many ways similar to so much MS software, in that the defaults are enforced, not merely what you get if you don’t tell it otherwise. Take the (meaningless) example of IE and Outlook on the desktop. I prefer a desktop with no program icons, but MS refuses me that option for no reason that benefits me.

Sorry to got so OT on a rant, but as a designer, I think it’s important to use all available nails in crucifying Bill Gates.

Everywhere I’ve ever worked, there has been an organisation-wide standard template for presentations, and it’s usually been pretty unobjectionable. I’d be surprised if the defaults were widely used in a professional context either.

I’m sure that professionals will find all sorts of irritating things about .ppt – statistics bores have a scunner against Excel too. But on the other hand, experts love Linux and TeX, and I’ve found both of them to be unusable pieces of crap. It’s very much horses for courses.

My real disagreement with Tufte is the idea that there is a “cognitive style” of Powerpoint that can in some way be blamed for all the shortcomings of presentations. I just don’t think it’s true. Even quite bad Powerpoint presentations aare usually better than the heap of rubbish the presenter would have come up with without .ppt.

did you mean Latex, rather than Linux? (idiot)

LaTeX is perfectly intuitive, once you learn it.

uhhh,

Now that is funny. TeX is in the same family as LaTeX. Linux is where both applications are mostly found (coming default in most distros) and is often found incomprehensible to those coming from a Windows background. So, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you are the idiot here, tough guy.

As for anyone who finds LaTeX difficult, there are great manuals you can look at online or order from Amazon. And for Linux, if you want a distro useable by non-techies, try Fedora Core 3. You will probably need someone with *nix skilz to help you on the install though.

jet: Maths (“math”) and physics departments are where (La)TeX is mostly found.

Personally, I’ve run Linux since 1995 (kernel 1.2.13 nostalgia, yo!) and the next computer I buy will be a Mac for very sure: Linux is now almost as militantly unwilling to tell you what’s going on (“user friendly”) as Windows, without any obvious compensation.

And I produce all my documents in LaTeX and while it is the best there is at what it does, getting it to do things package-authors didn’t expect you to want to do often sucks, in the American idiom, ass. And Lamport’s book is without question the worst technical documentation I’ve paid stand-alone cash for.

So there.