Category Archives: Blog

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Who owns the dead? Guitar Hero, Kurt Cobain and publicity rights in a digital era

Screenshot of Kurt Cobain avatar from Guitar HeroI’m guessing you’ve probably caught wind of Courtney Love’s lawsuit against Activision regarding their reanimation of the image of Kurt Cobain in the latest edition of Guitar Hero. I’ve not seen it myself, but friends have told me it’s a bit tasteless, and this particular lawsuit may be one of the more sane things Love has done in some time (even though there are protestations from Activision that she actually signed off on a contract that gave them permission to do it). [image ganked from Kotaku post under Fair Use terms; contact for immediate takedown if required]

Specifics aside, though, this raises the spectre of an issue that is only set to become more complicated – the use of someone’s image for marketing purposes when they’re no longer around to give their permission. Take it away, TechDirt:

[…] that issue is getting more and more complicated as technology gets better and better. In the last few decades, for example, there’s been a growing trend to use famous dead people, such as John Wayne, Lucille Ball and Fred Astaire in commercials. But those mostly involved taking clips of those actors from existing films/TV and splicing them into a commercial (with permission from their estates). However, as some lawyers have been noting, with better and better digital technologies, this issue is becoming more important as it’s now possible to digitally recreate someone for the purpose of film. Or, say, a video game.

Or, say, a life-size photorealistic face-mask. I’d be the first to concede that making money from the dead is a bit crass – especially from as tragic a figure as Cobain – but is Activision being any more crass than Love and the Cobain holding companies she controls? Who gets to decide what’s appropriate, what’s tasteful?

There’s always going to be a price at which someone’s moral stance becomes less rigid, after all, and the dead can’t hang around to complain… not until we’ve cracked personality uploads or Turing-compliant simulations, anyway. And even then, would the electronic personality be considered legally the same person as the no-longer-living meat-machine?

And just to add an extra fillip of weirdness, consider the results of a recent experiment at Warwick University here in the UK, which shows that doctored video footage can easily persuade eyewitnesses that they saw something which never actually occurred. [via FuturePundit]

The legal implications are a bit nasty – especially in a country as saturated in CCTV cameras as this one – but let’s look at the light side: how much fun would it be to convince your best friend that he was so steaming drunk at his own birthday party that he missed Kurt Cobain wandering through the front room trying to bum cigarettes from people playing Guitar Hero?

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Medical insurers impressed by electronic smoker detector

cigarette buttsNot, that’s not a typo. A team of Australian scientists have built a device that can identify tobacco smokers without the need for bodily fluid samples:

[They] tweaked a commercially available e-nose so that it would detect the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the breath of a person who had smoked a cigarette.

The e-nose uses an array of 32 sensors whose electrical resistance changes as different VOCs are detected. The resultant “smellprint” correctly identified 37 out of 39 volunteers as either smokers or non-smokers.

Obviously the insurance companies are pretty interested in this little development – it would allow them to weed out those smokers who try to keep their premiums down by concealing their habit. There’s no news yet on devices that can detect the “pre-existing condition” of domestic abuse, though. [image by Saudi…]

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The replicator analogy: why infinite ebooks make more jobs

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The common wisdom of record labels and publishing houses alike is that the redistribution of infinite goods – digital music files, say, or ebooks – will be the doom of the industry: if no one needs to pay for the end product, the end product will eventually disappear, as will the jobs that currently create said product.

Now, that seems logical enough, doesn’t it? But that’s because we’re used to thinking in terms of artificial scarcity. Jon Renaut has sat down and written out an analogy to explain why he thinks the conventional wisdom about infinite goods is wrong… and it’s based on the replicators from Star Trek.

A better analogy [for the music or publishing industry] would be if the replicator only made tomatoes. You could have as many tomatoes as you wanted, they’d always be perfect and delicious, and they’d always be free. This would put tomato farmers out of business. But these tomato farmers could likely start growing something else instead. And what happens to the rest of the economy? Pizza and pasta restaurants suddenly find that a major ingredient in many of their dishes just became free. Now, for the same dish, they can charge less, or buy higher quality ingredients, or make more profit. And if you’re a really talented cook specializing in tomatoes? Your skills are now in very high demand.

And there is still a demand for the people who bring the tomatoes from the replicator to your table. There is still a demand for the person who stews and cans the tomatoes, or dices and seasons them. And all the other food items, the ones that aren’t in infitnite supply, still need people to produce, process, and distribute them.

This is what’s happening in the music industry, and starting to happen in the publishing industry. Some parts of the industries are finding their functions obsolete. Instead of looking at the money they could save with electronic distribution, and what good use they could put that money to, the industry is seeking new laws and regulations to limit the infinite supply so business can continue as usual.

Even if every single song, book, and movie was distributed digitally for free, there would still be a need for the music, publishing, and movie industries. There would still be demand for editors, producers, marketers, and all sorts of other services that these industries have always provided.

As is discussed in the comments, the analogy doesn’t hold for other non-infinite goods – medicines, for example. But for goods that can be duplicated endlessly without degrading, there’s plenty of opportunity to build value-adding business models around the free stuff. [via TechDirt]

Your thoughts?

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Robot hop

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military-robotIn the latest of your monthly dose of robot drones coming to a theatre of war hopefully-some-distance-from-you we have news that DARPA have developed a remote military robot with the capability to jump over walls:

Most of the time, the shoebox-sized robot – which is being developed for the US military – uses its four wheels to get around.

But the Precision Urban Hopper can use a piston-actuated “leg” to launch it over obstacles such as walls or fences.

The robot could boost the capabilities of troops and special forces engaged in urban warfare, say researchers.

It occurs to me that in a couple of decades this kind of robot could have developed into a truly terrifying war machine. Imagine thousands of tank-sized versions of these, each containing a really pissed-off synthetic cat brain programmed to zap humans with a tactical high-energy laser.

/DrEvil

[from the BBC, via h+ Magazine][image from h+ Magazine]

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Caster Semenya and the postgendered future

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You’d have had to be living under a metaphorical rock not to have heard about the story of Caster Semenya, the record-breaking athlete whose superior performance caused the regulatory bodies of the athletics world to have her tested thoroughly – not for performance-enhancing drugs, but to determine her gender.

The results indicated that Semenya is in fact intersexed – a natural (if rare) state wherein she possesses both male and female sexual organs – and as such has a higher level of testosterone than the “average” woman. The media coverage has been a deeply unpleasant display of almost Puritanical horror with an undertone of carnival freakshow; the implicit racism was bad enough, but to have the biological status of a teenager discussed in terms of her “abnormality” on the pages of newspapers across the world is – at the very least – deeply insensitive. I guess there’s no way that the tests and inquiry could have been kept secret, but even so: the story doesn’t say nice things about our attitudes to difference.

Transhumanist thinker George Dvorsky takes that ball and runs with it in a post that asks whether postgendered athletes should be allowed to compete alongside “normal” male and female athletes:

The IAAF has already admitted that Semenya is not at fault here. This is not a doping issue. According to the IAAF, “These tests do not suggest any suspicion of deliberate misconduct but seek to assess the possibility of a potential medical condition which would give Semenya an unfair advantage over her competitors. There is no automatic disqualification of results in a case like this.”

Their decision will be an important one because it will determine whether or not intersexed persons will be able to compete against regular males and females. If they rule that Semenya cannot compete, the IAAF will essentially be saying that there are some ‘natural’ physical conditions that have to be sanctioned against.

[…] it may also set a precedent for a prohibition against the deliberate blurring of male and female traits for competitive advantage. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that some professional athletes — women in particular– may willingly adopt traits of the opposite sex to give them an edge. And as medical biotechnologies continue to advance, there’s a very distinct possibility that such interventions may become more available.

If you’re thinking “hang on there, George, that’s a bit of a sweeping discriminatory statement,” you’d be quite correct. But it’s a rhetorical play – Dvorsky’s point is that the target of that discrimination will shift. Resentment of postgendered humans – a term that I think Dvorsky is using here to differentiate between those born with intersex characteristics and those who choose to blur the lines within themselves – will be huge… not just in sports, but in general.

It has been my contention that, as the human species enters into a transhuman condition, strictly stratified gender designations will begin to blur. Men and women will consciously trade-off advantageous gender-specific traits (both physical and cognitive), while discarding some gendered traits altogether. Gender may eventually become a thing of the past — a legacy of our biological heritage.

Now, should the IAAF rule against intersexed persons, and by logical extension postgendered humans (including transgendered individuals), it would appear that the future has no place for these type of athletes.

This will clearly become a problem of discrimination. And it will likely be compounded by all the other ‘enhancement’ related interventions that future holds.

Indeed it will… just look at the polarised attitudes to simple present-day enhancements like cognitive performance drugs. Where is the line between doing as you please with your body and giving yourself an “unfair advantage” over others? Should the law control that line, enforce it? Is enforcing that line a defence of the median or a suppression of a minority? How is self-enhancement any different to being born with a natural advantage by comparison to the human baseline?