Monday News: On technology, access, and failure
Publishing NewsDMCA takedown notice / eBay / failure / infringement / ISPs / safe harbor / scholarship / technologyComments Off on Monday News: On technology, access, and failure
Judge Mocks Public Interest Concerns About Kicking People Off Internet, Tells Cox It’s Not Protected By The DMCA – If I remember correctly, Rightscorp is considered one of those copyright trolling outfits that corporations use to notice alleged DMCA infringers. Except that Rightscorp basically sends a bunch of takedown notices to an ISP and excepts them to furnish IP addresses, so it can go after people directly. Cox Communications has thus far not been cooperative, citing a provision of the DMCA that has historically been applied only to services like YouTube, not to ISPs, which have traditionally found safe harbor as a third-party provider. Rightscorp appears to be making some headway in the courts, however, which could spell trouble for individuals caught in their nets — to the point where they could permanently lose internet service (a penalty for “repeat infringers”). There are just so many issues with judges and knowledge/understanding of the new technologies/intellectual property provisions:
This is a big, big deal. If the case goes against Cox, then it would create a massive problem for the public on the internet. Accusations of infringement could potentially lead to you totally losing access to the internet, which could really destroy people’s lives, given how important the internet is for work and life these days. The details of the case look like they should favor Cox pretty easily. After all, Cox pointed out that Rightscorp only had licenses from the publishes, meaning they had no copyright in the sound recording — yet they admitted to downloading the sound recording, suggesting that, if anything, Rightscorp was a mass infringer. On top of that there was pretty strong evidence that Rightscorp does not act in good faith in how it runs its shakedown practice, telling people that they have to take their computers to the police to prove their innocence (really). – Techdirt
Greek New Testament Papyrus Is Discovered on eBay – This story made me think about the copyright drama around the Anne Frank diary, in the way we are seeing a conflict between texts as historical documents and as privately owned items. In this case the problem isn’t control of copyright, but rather sale of papyri, which is apparently a rising category of eBay sale, even when, as in this case, the piece may be crucial for scholarly understanding of ancient texts and their production (and the very history of books):
The credit-card-size papyrus, which Dr. Smith dates from around A.D. 250 to A.D. 350, contains about six lines of the Gospel of John on one side and an unidentified Christian text on the other. If Dr. Smith’s analysis is correct, it is the only known Greek New Testament papyrus from an unused scroll rather than a codex, the emerging book technology that early Christians, in sharp contrast to their Jewish and pagan contemporaries, preferred for their texts.
That adds an interesting wrinkle, scholars say, to the story of the rise of the codex, the book as we know it today. But the dramatic story of the papyrus’s emergence also speaks to a distinctly 21st-century technological anxiety. – New York Times
Why Scientists Need To Fail Better – As you read this very provocative essay, replace the word “scientists” with “writers” or “readers” or “people” in general. Because the argument is that failure is valuable, in and of itself, not just as a bump on the road to success, but as a way to keep us learning, to force us to confront and battle our ignorance, and to deepen and broaden our knowledge, awareness, and understanding. Failures help change knowledge and societal paradigms. A quote from Samuel Beckett — “Fail Again. Fail Better” — provides the context for the argument, and it’s kind of appealing:
Too often you fail until you succeed, and then you are expected to stop failing. Once you have succeeded you supposedly know something that helps you to avoid further failure. But that is not the way of science. Success can lead only to more failure. The success, when it comes, has to be tested rigorously and then it has to be considered for what it doesn’t tell us, not just what it does tell us. It has to be used to get to the next stop in our ignorance—it has to be challenged until it fails, challenged so that it fails. This is a different kind of failure from that of business or even technology. There, it’s “Make a mistake or two, sure (especially if it’s on someone else’s dime), because you can learn from those mistakes—but then that’s enough of failure.” Fail big and fail fast, the tech guys say. As if it were just something to get out of the way as quickly as possible. Movie executive Michael Eisner said in a 1996 speech, “Failing is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.” Once successful, there should be no backsliding. But failure is not backsliding in science—it moves things forward as surely as success does. And it should never be done with. It should become a habit. – Nautilus
Why I Captured This MRI of a Mother and Child – Take a long look at this very interesting image before checking out the narrative. It has raised many different issues for people:
To some people, this image was a disturbing reminder of the fragility of human beings. Others were drawn to the way that the two figures, with their clothes and hair and faces invisible, became universal, and could be any human mother and child, at any time or place in history. Still others were simply captivated by how the baby’s brain is different from his mother’s; it’s smaller, smoother and darker—literally, because there’s less white matter. – Smithsonian Magazine
