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]
All posts by Jeremy Lyon
Real Time Flight Tracking
O’Reilly Radar reminds me of FlightAware, a resource that combines great pragmatic utility and pure geeky fun. FlightAware shows you exactly where just about any commercial flight is at this moment. With airport Wi-Fi and a laptop, you can know more about when your delayed flight will arrive than the gate crew.
Throwing Off The Shackles of Reality
When you think about it, Drew Harry’s got a point. Developing a virtual world that slavishly apes the real is kind of stupid. His meeting spaces arrange people based on their allegiances, representing a person’s expressed opinions by aligning them physically in a wide open space. I don’t know if that’s what I’d choose to emphasize, but giving up the virtual Aeron chair makes sense. [kurzweil]
MySpace For The Literati
The phrase “jump the shark” has probably jumped the shark, but if I can be indulged in its use one last time, I’ll point out that social software has jumped the shark when you need a MySpace for people to talk about books. Or maybe I’m just cranky about the slickness factor: somehow LibraryThing doesn’t set my teeth on edge in the same way. [mefi]
Wand For Scraping Audio Samples
Two Ph.D. candidates at MIT have invented The Sound of Touch, a digital instrument that texturizes sound. It works like this: you use a microphone built in to the wand-like instrument to record a sound, then you brush the tip of the wand across a surface. A processor translates the shape of that surface into an effect applied to the sound. Sandpaper would gives your sample a gritty sound, silk a satiny smoothness.