senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter

a sushi potluck

• ip idiocy link of the day: now someone wants to patent plot points. at least the writer of the article is skeptical, which is a step in the right direction for a Forbes article:

    
  The Bard borrowed most of his plots 
  from poems and books by lesser writers 
  and turned them into masterpieces.  
  Would he have written Romeo and 
  Juliet if it meant paying a royalty 
  to the hack who first came up with the 
  idea of two star-crossed lovers who die 
  rather than live apart? 
  

  what's next, individual words ? oh, right, that's trademark law, which just happens to have a protection term of, umm, forever ... hmm, i see where this is going now. oh, and the patenter again delivers that oft-repeated refrain that creators won't bother to create if they don't get financially compensated. well, bollocks to that, i say. it's the whole 'what would i do if i won the lottery' question. unlike farmers who might accept payment to leave their fields fallow, i'm not sure that you would be able to find 'real' creators who could be paid not to create.

movie nite in iqaluit

the producers are the audience

• link of the day: we are the web
  

  What happens when everyone is uploading 
  far more than they download?  If 
  everyone is busy making, altering, 
  mixing, and mashing, who will have time 
  to sit back and veg out?  Who will be a 
  consumer?
  
  No one. And that's just fine.  A world 
  where production outpaces consumption 
  should not be sustainable; that's a 
  lesson from Economics 101.  But online, 
  where many ideas that don't work in 
  theory succeed in practice, the audience 
  increasingly doesn't matter.  What 
  matters is the network of social creation, 
  the community of collaborative interaction
  that futurist Alvin Toffler called 
  prosumption.  As with blogging and 
  BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume 
  at once.  The producers are the audience, 
  the act of making is the act of watching, 
  and every link is both a point of departure 
  and a destination.
  

finishing off the week

• ip idiocy link of the day: why patent reform only helps the big boys
  

  If patent reform will hurt most 
  of the people who receive patents, 
  why are we doing it?
  
  Good question.
  
  Patent reform appears to be based 
  primarily on the idea that big 
  companies invent useful stuff that 
  needs protection while smaller 
  companies and individual inventors 
  use the patent system to suck revenue 
  out of big companies through 
  frivolous patents and frivolous 
  lawsuits.  Of course, it isn't at 
  all clear that this assumption is 
  correct.  The primary principles of 
  patent reform are switching the U.S. 
  system from 'first to invent' to 
  'first to file' by replacing legal 
  challenges to patents with a more 
  administrative challenge process, 
  and by practically eliminating 
  injunctions through which a patent 
  holder forces an infringer to stop 
  using his intellectual property.
  

social butterflies