Futurismic

Did you know that the International Olympic Committee threatens non-sponsor advertisers just for mentioning the Olympics?

Lucky for us that Futurismic’s too small to show up on their radar, then… but that’s not all. The IOC’s latest move in Beijing is to cover up the brand names of anything that isn’t an official Olympic sponsor - things like bathroom furnishings, or the headphones of press reporters… or entire non-sponsor hotels. And there we were questioning the ethics of the Olympics taking place in totalitarian China. Looks like a perfect match after all, no? [via TechDirt]

In more Olympics-related news, those wily Swedes behind legendary torrent-tracker site The Pirate Bay have fallen foul of the IOC as well, in this case for acting as a tracker for Olympic footage.

But far from capitulating, The Pirates have yet again used the Streisand effect to turn legal threats to their advantage and boost their public profile… which is why, should you head over there to download a video of some weightlifter popping his elbow joint out or something, you’ll notice the site has been temporarily named The Beijing Bay. Zing - gold medal for Team Sweden! [via Wired]

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J K Rowling might be interested to see that suing people who make derivative works based on your own creations isn’t necessarily the best option. YA author Stephanie Myers Meyer took the opposite approach by encouraging her fans to produce a Lexicon of her Twilight Vampire books, and as a result has engendered a hard core of people who evangelise the books on her behalf. [via TechDirt]

Word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing there is, so they say - and getting someone else to do the hard work for you seems like a smart move in a networked world. As I’ve mentioned before, I think the importance of fan-fic in building an author’s career is set to increase over time, and it is in author attitudes to fan-created works that we’ll start seeing the split between writers who have embraced the internet and those who cling to the old paradigms of print.

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Sven Johnson reports on intellectual property wranglings in Second Life for the latest instalment of Future Imperfect.

Second Life’s unique content creation tools have been its strongest unique selling point, resulting in a vigorous virtual economy. But there, just as in real life, intellectual property rights are a thorny issue - and there are signs that the social media masses are starting to change their attitude to content theft.
Continue reading “Second Life, 3D dildos and the intellectual property mindset inversion”

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Building on Paul’s post on writing and piracy, I thought I’d flag an article by Rasmus Fleisher (of Sweden’s Piratbyrån) on the future of copyright;

According to one recent study 95 percent of British youth engage in file sharing via burned CDs, instant messaging clients, mobile phones, USB sticks, e-mail, and portable hard drives.

Such practices constitute the “darknet,” a term popularized by four Microsoft-affiliated researchers in a brilliant 2002 paper [opens pdf]. Their thesis is simply that people who have information and want to exchange it with each other will do just that, forming spontaneous networks which may be large or small, online or offline…

One early darknet has been termed the “sneakernet”: walking by foot to your friend carrying video cassettes or floppy discs. Nor is the sneakernet purely a technology of the past. The capacity of portable storage devices is increasing exponentially, much faster than Internet bandwidth, according to a principle known as “Kryder’s Law.” The information in our pockets yesterday was measured in megabytes, today in gigabytes, tomorrow in terabytes and in a few years probably in petabytes (an incredible amount of data)…

In other words: The sneakernet will come back if needed. “I believe this is a ‘wild card’ that most people in the music industry are not seeing at all,” writes Swedish filesharing researcher Daniel Johansson. “When music fans can say, ‘I have all the music from 1950-2010, do you want a copy?’ - what kind of business models will be viable in such a reality?”

And there’s something about the idea of the sneakernet which, particularly when approached from a speculative angle, really captures my imagination.

Imagine - five years from now. With the internet collapsing under the bandwidth-distorting weight of iPlayer streams and mobile videoblogs, you watch the sun rise from the dovecot, anxiously fiddling with your (slightly battered) GPS-enabled iPhone as you await the feathernet delivery of a USB primed with the entirity of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks collection. For many, the most important question - was the USB in ordered directly from the publishers, or a copy from a mate?

[Image by kookalamanza]

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Malicious software and obfuscatory legalese - two bad tastes that, I imagine, taste even worse together. [image by j l t]

Thankfully, as I’m not in the business of trying to turn a profit by building botnets, it’s not a flavour combo I’ve encountered myself, but there are reports that such things really do exist. Caught with the same economic problem as legitimate software houses - an infinite good, easily reproduced - malware crews are including EULAs with their program packages.

Of course, a malware author can’t fall back on the courts to enforce the terms of the agreement, and so the threatened actions are a little more, er, direct - basically, if you mess with the code they’ll rat you out to the antivirus companies. But, in the words of Mike Masnick at TechDirt:

“… we already know that almost no one reads normal software EULAs, so I somehow doubt that the online scammers using this software are bothering with the fine print either.”

I can’t say I’m feeling too sad about that.

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Hooo-boy. Remember the Scribd/Science Fiction Writers of America dust-up a while ago? It would appear the fat lady has not yet sung.

Andrew Burt, the man behind the Scribd DMCA take-downs, was removed from the SFWA Piracy Committee because of the incident. But now, despite recommendations to the contrary, the committee has been re-established under a new aegis (the Copyright Committee) … and Burt is back at the helm.

Charlie Stross is, to say the least, livid - especially as he was part of the exploratory committee that recommended, among other things, that Burt be kept well away from copyright issues.

Scalzi is politely baffled.

Cory Doctorow is, unsurprisingly, not very impressed either.

I’m not even going to pretend to understand the deep architecture of this debate - I’m not a professional writer, much less a member of SFWA - but from an outsider’s perspective, no matter how valid their motivations may be, the SFWA is displaying a marked lack of smarts by going back on themselves and, in the process, annoying three of the most popular and publicly outspoken writers on their roster. Not very pragmatic, really.

I think Steve “My Elves Are Different” Wilson has struck the nail firmly on the head in this instance. In the meantime, I think this will be the sf story of the moment for a few weeks to come.

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What is the optimum length of copyright (from a social benefit perspective)? Rufus Pollock calculates it to be 14 years in this paper (pdf). He’s a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge University, and reached his conclusion based on a few assumptions (which he backs up with data): (a) that as copyright length increases, it encourages the creation of new works, (b) up to a certain point, after which it can inhibit the creation of new works, and (c) that the optimal length of copyright is in part a function of the cost of production, so that as the cost of production falls so to does the optimal copyright length. [slashdot]

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