Pseudohacker

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• The Future of Copyright

  I am not a copyright lawyer, rather as someone who programs, writes, teaches and creates web pages etc. for an income I have gained an on the job education in copyright. Still I was caught off guard by my answer the other day when asked: "How does copyright work on the web?" My instinctual answer as you may guess is that copyright does not work on the web. Still that did not seem right for I had recently been made aware of a plagiarism case which was about as clear cut as they get and resulted in real and in my opinion fair penalties for the plagiarist. I know you lawyers out there think plagiarism and copyright are two different things and legally speaking perhaps you are right but in my experience they share equivalent function; ensuring that an author/creator is compensated in, fame and/or fortune, for his creation. So my answer was:

  Copyright on the web is accomplish by establishing priority, and the economic value of a copyright is not in selling copies but in being paid to perform or create latter works.

  The more I thought about this answer, the more I have become convinced that I'm onto something. Take the web for example, it transcends national borders and since copyright is a primarily granted at the national level, content on the web may not be in a safe haven but nor is it clear cut how the law applies. Sure there are a few international treaties, some of which are even secret, but if you think about it, the only thing worse than a poorly understood international treaty is a secret one nobody has any chance of following; especially when it involves copyright. The old tradition of strong copyright in local (national) markets is fading away and attempts to rebuff the situation have been met by market forces that loudly proclaim "freedom to share information".

  Still the goal of copyright; rewarding creators is widely considered a Good Thing™. Many of us have our thoughts on the quality of a cover band. Some how it's just not as good as the original but at the same time I don't see U2/Michele Branch/Santana playing my local bar anytime soon, which is why concerts can still command the ticket prices they do. Similar thing in academics, a professor with original ideas can command a better salary with more prestige than one who has never written original works. Also in the realm of book sales, which do you think will sell better? the wholly new book or the one that reads like the book you read last year just with the character names changed around? These are all instances of the market rewarding originality, a form of weak copyright.

  Weak copyright of course takes a key ingredient for it to work, a critical mass must recognize a work to realize it is derivative in order for market forces to work. With bands, the radio and now streaming music / illegal downloads with meticulously crafted meta data fill this niche. With books, it used to be publishers with their lawyers and marketers along with literary critics that brought books into the public consciousness. As I look forward I fear that the publishing industry will be more successful than the music industry in resisting the evolution of the market. Google Books does not need to be evil.

  Term papers and other academic works, unlike music and mass market print works have historically not needed public recognition but rather teacher and peer recognition. Today we are forced to concede however that no teacher can single handedly ensure that a term paper is original. The pool of original works has grown from past papers assigned by the teacher to past papers assigned not just in neighboring school districts but past papers assigned in the language worldwide. We are then forced to conclude that we need new arbiters or at least improved tools for the arbiters. Of course avoiding pitfalls like copyright and false positives, how many papers on George Washington have been written by 5^th graders in the past hundred years? is no easy task. Here again though weak copyright has a role to play. Instead of exempting the act of indexing from copyright via backroom deals with for-profit single purpose databases perhaps we ought to instead encourage students to self publish and allow Google to do the indexing. This way students get the recognition they want from their closest peers and increasingly wired parents. Sure the Google Term Paper index will be sparse, the papers most likely to be plagiarized will not voluntarily submitted but I believe voluntary submission can and will achieve the necessary density. Full text diff'ing has never been an effective plagiarism detection, students get caught when the quality of a paper is completely out of line with previous work, when the paper does not meet the assignment's criteria or when the author is unable to answer followup questions about their research. So the database need not do detection it only needs to prove enough cases to be a deterrent.

  The era of strong copyright is ending and the efforts to stem the tide to date have been miserable failures. Weak copyright is nothing new having precursors in radio and academic publishing but will be taken to a new level in the connected age.

  T.K.Egan 2009-09-07

• Remembering File Selections

  Personally, I use a number of workflows where I select a number of files be they trial data sets, photos or whatever as exemplars with that folder and publish them online. Unfortunately, the site that I upload these files to changes the filename and I thus loose the connection between which files I've uploaded and which I have not. My solution has been to use Finder to "label" the files I've used online which works fairly well. Well enough that I've been using it for a few years now. Last week however I had the small problem I needed to select the files I used online and while they were neatly labeled I spent a long time scrolling through folders to select the files. After three folders (I'm fairly stubborn) with several dozen to go I broke down and told myself it was time for some Applescript. Here is my solution for quickly selecting files with a specific label: tell application "Finder" activate set selectables to {} set myFiles to every item of front window repeat with myFile in myFiles if label index of myFile as integer is 6 then -- 6 corresponds to files labeled "green" on my machine set end of selectables to myFile end if end repeat select every item of selectables end telland a variant for selecting files with any label: tell application "Finder" activate set selectables to {} set myFiles to every item of front window repeat with myFile in myFiles if label index of myFile as integer is greater than 0 then set end of selectables to myFile end if end repeat select every item of selectables end tellI saved the above scripts in Script Editor.app as Applications and then added them to the toolbar in my Finder window. Now I navigate to a folder in Finder, click the appropriate script and bang the right files are selected.

  T.K.Egan 2009-05-26

• Simple Decisions

  The other day while I was preparing dinner, my spouse and I talked about wether we ought to buy more jars for canning. Our consensus was yes but we had an awful time coming up with a number. For two people accustomed to estimating numbers well, how much RAM do I need for MySQL? (Depends on your OS and DB size?) How much RAM to run Adobe CS or Microsoft Office? (How much does your machine support?), we were quite perplexed. You see this ought to have been a simple thing look at how many jars we had canned and how many months we will need to buy store brand goods and work the math. What we were missing were the number of jars we canned and when we canned a particular good. What I would have given for a journal…

  Now what hacker, pseudo or otherwise, could let a mental itch like that go unscratched. I use git for version control when I'm programing which really means that I use it a means to annotate changes to my source tree and keep backups of releases. Git is more powerful than that but that's predominantly my use for git. Such as it may be this usage is not something I accepted the moment took up programming but the result of experience. See in my first programming class, source control was never even mentioned. I had a good professor but the course was horrible and as a younger cockier self I as much said so to the professor. What I did not understand at the time was that the course was designed by committee, of which my professor was not a part yet he had to teach what was prescribed. This is important and I will come back to it, many of us will recognize this as a recipe for disaster but, like the younger me, most of us do not! Still today I can only imagine that the thinking of the course design committee ran something like: "How useful would source control be for assignments that are intended to be less than 30 lines? Not much; besides the point is learning FORTRAN not source control."

  Thus schooled it is no wonder that I am a self taught programmer. Thus my usage of version control software is directly related to my experience and my first relevant experience to the story at hand was of my files on the schools computer being deleted in order to stay under quota immediately before realizing I had deleted the wrong file. I was lead by the nose to backups you might say. Backups have come a long way since my first Zip disk but does Time Machine, for instance, let you annotate backups today? So it was only later, when I decided to clean up a program that I wrote for fun in order to release it, that I learned I also needed to annotate versions, how was I to know the code I just deleted would be vital in the next release? Still, for some time ~5 yrs I kept tarballs of each version that just happened to include a CHANGES file. Only after years of toughing it out manually did I eventually break down and master cvs, well as much as anyone ever does, followed by svn and now git.

  But back to the home canning journal, why did I never create one? For much the same reason as I never used source control in programming. At first I did only a single batch of pumpkin butter a year and there were no questions. Then I discovered that the pumpkin butter was not all consumed by the next time I made pumpkin butter, I had made too much, so now I needed versions in the form of dating the lids with the year made. And now, I need annotations. Still I have not answered the question of why none of this was ever taught in schools. After pondering it a bit I have settled upon the fact that the curriculum is designed and set by career politicians and academic educators ie those college education faculty who have not set foot in a K-12 classroom since the week of their high school graduation. The curriculum I know from my education included keeping a journal but devoid of context this activity was filler, a mind numbing task to be completed and nothing more. Compounding this, I remember my journal was graded on my handwriting and only on my handwriting for which I received miserable marks. Somewhere along the lines in some committee, grading journal content must have been deemed akin to confining a student's style and limiting their expression in an otherwise judgement free environment (really? school judgement free? one wonders about educators). Twenty years later, however, I look back with regret that no one graded my content and thus helped my to understand how to use a journal.

  T.K.Egan 2009-03-05