Copyright and incentivising content creation in the attention economy
Apparently Facebook now hosts 4% of all photos ever taken in history. Techdirt:
For all the talk of how content creation is going down the drain due to lax copyright enforcement, it seems that everywhere we look, we just keep seeing more and more and more content creation. The latest is a report that Facebook currently hosts 4% of all photos ever taken. Specifically, it hosts 140 billion photos out of 3.5 trillion photos taken in history. Now, obviously, technology change is at work here. Photography really only showed up for real about a century and a half ago, and didn’t really hit the mainstream until less than a century ago. And, of course, for most of that time it involved (sometimes expensive) film and the expensive step of processing it. Photography has exploded over the last decade or so with the rise of digital cameras, and, of course, high quality digital cameras built into mobile phones.
But, really, that raises a bigger point: the tools of creation for all sorts of things have been changing rapidly and making it easier and cheaper to create content, whether it’s a photograph, a song, a movie, a book or.. well… just about anything. We’re being inundated with new creative works… at the same time we’re being told that content creation is dying. Now, to be fair, much of the content production we’re talking about is amateur production, but some of that is of fantastic quality, and is leading people into professional content creation roles. But, I guess this raises a separate question. What is the real purpose of copyright? Is it only to incentivize professional content creation, or to incentivize content creation overall? Given the stated purpose is to “promote the progress,” and to provide the public with more content, I would argue the goal is to promote more overall content, and it seems that technology is doing a much better job of that than copyright.
This is a really interesting point, and one that I hadn’t considered until now. There’s a huge deluge of new content being produced, the vast majority of it by amateurs. But nearly all of this content (the Facebook photos, Twitter updates, YouTube videos) operates in the attention economy, not the cash economy, and I can’t see how copyright could increase the value in that space:* in the attention economy, infinite goods become more valuable the further they spread, because this distribution is of itself payment.
So, while the purpose of copyright should be to “promote the progress” by providing more content overall, I’d argue it can’t extend beyond the (semi-)professional sphere because the idea of restricting distribution of infinite goods is antithetical to content in the attention economy.
I think.
* Though there are plenty of reasons why it could decrease it.
Aaaand somewhat related to the previous entry, “When leopard slugs make love”. Surprisingly fascinating and tender, if a little slimy. (BB)
MANILA, Philippines - Women ended armed clashes in 2 Mindanao villages by not having sex with their husbands unless the men laid down their weapons.
Clearly the penis is mightier than the sword.
Why do women orgasm?
As one of the commenters on Wired said, this would have made for one hell of a research proposal: “I’m going to find twins and give them orgasms.”After baffling biologists for decades, the female orgasm has resisted yet another attempt to explain its elusive evolutionary origins. […]
While the male orgasm is, in evolutionary and practical terms, a fairly straightforward thing — it makes men want to have sex more often, thus continuing their lineage, and is achieved with ease — the female orgasm is a far trickier beast.
Unlike male orgasm, which is found across the primate spectrum, female orgasm has skipped some species. (Lady gibbons, for example, are out of luck.) In humans, men are far more likely to experience orgasm than women, of whom 1 in 10 don’t ever experience it.
Source: juliasegal
In praise of Joanne Rowling’s Hermione Granger series
An alternate history of the Harry Potter series if Rowling had written the books from the perspective of Hermione Granger. (Kottke)So, before she goes away for good, let us sing the praises of Hermione. A generation could not have asked for a better role model. Looking back over the series — from Hermione Granger and the Philosopher’s Stone through to Hermione Granger and the Deathly Hallows — the startling thing about it is how original it is. It’s what inspires your respect for Rowling: She could only have written the Hermione Granger by refusing to take the easy way out. […]
And what a show it is. In Hermione, Joanne Rowling undermines all of the cliches that we have come to expect in our mythic heroes. It’s easy to imagine Hermione’s origin story as some warmed-over Star Wars claptrap, with tragically missing parents and unsatisfying parental substitutes and a realization that she belongs to a hidden order, with wondrous (and unsettlingly genetic) gifts. But, no: Hermione’s normal parents are her normal parents. She just so happens to be gifted. Being special, Rowling tells us, isn’t about where you come from; it’s about what you can do, if you put your mind to it. And what Hermione can do, when she puts her mind to it, is magic.
Roomba light art (via BB?)
