The end of Intellectual Property

Posted on May 22, 2009

This is great.

Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous – The End of Intellectual Property

by Adrian Bowyer

Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you the keys to their car, and you will receive an abrupt and unhelpful reply. Go up to a stranger in the street and ask them to give you their most interesting idea, and fifteen minutes later you will be glancing at your watch and inventing fictitious dentist’s appointments.

This prompts a profound biological question: if information is such valuable property, what is the Darwinian selective advantage in the ubiquitous impulse to give it away?

The answer was worked out a few years ago by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He realised that the human mind did not just evolve as a problem-solving device, it also evolved by sexual selection – like the peacock’s tail – to waste resources in a way that cannot be faked. Peahens admire peacocks with fancy tails, because those peacocks are strong enough to waste the resources needed to grow the tail and to drag it about. That peacock has good genes for strength, growth, and endurance, and so is worth mating with.

Parts of the human mind are for wasting glucose in a way that cannot be faked. Your brain dumps about 20% of your body’s energy budget out of your head every second of your life. You cannot pretend to paint a picture well, or pretend to write a quatrain of iambic pentameters well – you cannot pretend to be witty. You need to waste real glucose to do those things, all of which have no utilitarian value.

“But hang on,” you say. “If that were so, then you would expect only men to be talented, because sexual selection works through the power of female choice selecting the best males. But everyone except the most unreconstructed chauvinist can see that women are as clever as men.”

True, normally: it is the peacocks that have to drag around the tail and the stags that have to hold the antlers aloft. But, to choose between them, peahens and hinds just need good eyesight, whereas the only way for a woman to judge if a man is clever is for her to be equally clever herself – the transmitting device and the receiving device are the same: their minds. That is why the most important four letters in lonely-hearts columns are GSOH, why musicians, painters, authors, and actors (who all do nothing actually useful, and so who waste great mental energy) are so attractive to the opposite sex, why bank managers, engineers and computer programmers (who don’t waste their intellect, but use it for gainful things) are considered geeky and unattractive, and why we all want to tell people any inspired idea as soon as it comes into our head. Showing off cleverness by frittering it away is one of the main things our brains are for.

Read the full article at http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/EndOfIntellectualProperty?skin=print.pattern

Ringtones, copyrights, and more.

Posted on March 26, 2009

Allright, so  i got this cool new cellphone that can play songs as ringtones.  No,  i didn’t go out and buy it (who has money for that kind of thing right now anyway?  not me…)  i got it for free.   One of my clients from my design business ordered a bunch and it turned out he didn’t need as many as he thought he would so he gave me one of the extras as a thank-you because he was happy with work I’d done.  So that’s cool, fancy new tech without the fancy bill.  fun times.  Thing is, when I go to add songs it turns out I can’t use my own mp3’s as ringtones, i can only use special songs that  i have to pay to download.

Now it just so happens that, thanks to the digital distribution my band is currently getting, it is in fact possible to download Beltaine’s Fire songs and use them as ringtones, but in order to do so I have to pay an additional $10 a month in a subscription fee for a service that I’m not otherwise interested in.  All this is done in the name of “protecting the artist” and preventing “piracy”.

Now, granted, it is an additional revenue stream for artists and with the industry the way it is maybe I shouldn’t complain, it’s hard enough to get paid as a musician already and I’d be lying if i said I wouldn’t like to make a living doing what I love.   Still, I can’t help feeling like there’s something fundamentally wrong when I can’t add a song that I wrote about my partner to my phone to use as a ringtone for when she calls me without paying some distant faceless corporation for the privilege.

It’s not like it’s the end of the world or even particularly signficant, but it struck me as a perfect example of how copyright law is twisted to serve the interests of corporations by forcibly inserting a middle  man in between the artist and the listener.

The Boondocks on the Riaa and File Sharing.

Posted on November 22, 2008

Those of you who read this blog regularly know I’m a big supporter of open-source and filesharing, including sharing of music.  The fact that the RIAA had the balls to claim they’re suing people to “protect” artists – when everybody who knows a damn thing about the industry knows it’s really about making it more difficult for independent artists to get heard – leaves me livid.  And the fact that they continue to get away with it burns me even more.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one who feels that way.