Copyright and patent monopolies can be reformed to be less terrible, but in the long-term they need to be reformed into smithereens with a sledgehammer. Politically, this may be impossible. Practically, doing nothing to encourage creativity and innovation may not even be desirable. Erik Zoltan and I have a new alternative: the Payright System.
The full proposal is available here, but at 35 pages it’s a lengthy read. I’ll do my best to sum it up here.
Erik Zoltan
Erik Zoltan is the mastermind behind the Payright System; I only served as a contributing editor. Zoltan is the Massachusetts Pirate Party‘s co-founder and representative to the US Pirate National Committee. He can also divide by zero, count to infinity, and roundhouse kick Chuck Norris.
Copyright concerns the right to copy. Payright concerns the right to get paid. Under Payright, a creative work or invention can be distributed, modified, reappropriated, and built upon with no restrictions. If you monetize a work, you just have to share a predetermined percentage with the original creator(s).
The poker player and baseball nerd turned political forecaster won fame after predicting the result of the US election with uncanny accuracy. And as his star rises so too does that of a whole new generation of ‘quants' leading the digital revolution
Nate Silver is a new kind of political superstar. One who actually knows what he's talking about. In America, punditry has traditionally been about having the right kind of hair or teeth or foaming rightwing views. Silver has none of these. He just has numbers. Lots of them. And, on the night of the US presidential election, they were proved to be right in quite spectacular fashion.
Every year, on average, 40 Europeans die in terrorist attacks. When you compare the policies and billions plown down into this number, you quickly discover that we should not be spending billions to fight terrorism, but to fight bathtubs. Over five times as many people drown in bathtubs every year.
I’m a very strong proponent of evidence-based policymaking and putting quality requirements on the legislative process, and therefore, I require hard data to justify decisions and policy. When researching this topic, the strangest thing about the number of fatalities from terrorism wasn’t the number itself, but how hard it was to find. It seemed to never have been published anywhere by any single European bureaucracy. It seemed that policymakers weren’t interested in quantifying the threat.
You can find lots of data on terror in Europe (causes, groups, police forces, etc) when searching for it. You just can’t find what danger it actually poses.
I rely on Nicholas Carr to be the fly in the ointment to all things hailed as utopian about the Internet. The critic's view of the online learning “revolution”.
Online vesion of college courses are attracting hundreds of thousands of students, millions of dollars in funding, and accolades from university administrators. Is this a fad, or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?
Nicholar Carr
MIT Technology Review, 27 September 2012
Phi Beta Iota: This is a better overview article than those previously posted here.
Publishing, music, shopping, journalism – all revolutionised by the internet. Next in line? Education. Now US academics are offering world-class tuition – free – to anyone who can log on, anywhere in the world, is this the end of campus life?
Two years ago, I sat in the back seat of a Toyota Prius in a rooftop car park in California and gripped the door handle as the car roared away from the kerb, headed straight towards the roof's edge and then at the last second sped around a corner without slowing down. There was no one in the driver's seat.
It was the prototype of Google's self-driving car and it felt a bit like being Buck Rogers and catapulted into another century. Later, I listened to Sebastian Thrun, a German-born professor of artificial intelligence at Stanford University, explain how he'd built it, how it had already clocked up 200,000 miles driving around California, and how one day he believed it would mean that there would be no traffic accidents.
A few months later, the New York Times revealed that Thrun was the head of Google's top-secret experimental laboratory Google X, and was developing, among other things, Google Glasses – augmented reality spectacles. And then, a few months after that, I came across Thrun again.
The self-driving car, the glasses, Google X, his prestigious university position – they'd all gone. He'd resigned his tenure from Stanford, and was working just a day a week at Google. He had a new project. Though he didn't call it a project. “It's my mission now,” he said. “This is the future. I'm absolutely convinced of it.”
The future that Thrun believes in, that has excited him more than self-driving cars, or sci-fi-style gadgets, is education. Specifically, massive online education free to all. The music industry, publishing, transportation, retail – they've all experienced the great technological disruption. Now, says Thrun, it's education's turn.
Denver — Clay Shirky is one of the country’s most prominent Internet thinkers—“a spiritual guide to the wired set,” as The Chronicle Review put it in a 2010 profile of him. In his latest book, Cognitive Surplus,the New York University professor argues that a flowering of creative production will arise as the Internet turns people “from consumers to collaborators.”
On Wednesday, Mr. Shirky took that message to a group of higher-education-technology leaders who have been buffeted by a rapidly evolving ed-tech landscape. Mr. Shirky, in a keynote speech kicking off this year’s Educause conference, explored how technology was changing everything, from research to publishing to studying. (The talk starts about 20 minutes into this link.)
