The IPKat – happy to serve the IP communities: Letter from AmeriKat I: Happy Holidays!

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Can anyone point  to more blogs on intellectual property  issues? Most of what I have found is industry-written and one-sided. Pamela Samuelson at Berkeley does not appear to have a blog. This is an area where academics are surprisingly consistent, but we don’t seem to be doing much talking about it. (Most academics I’ve talked to agree that current IP protections are much stronger than is good for society in general.)  Here’s one note that I found:

In Geneva last Tuesday the Obama administration announced before a subcommittee of WIPO that it supported the WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyright Works for Persons Who are Blind or Have other Reading Disabilities. The Treaty would lessen international copyright protection in order to enable cross-border distribution of DRM-protected digitized books that blind and visually disabled individuals can read with tools like Pac Mate and Victor Reader. …..

Such a move, of course, puts the administration at odds with many US industries including software manufacturers and motion pictures.

via The IPKat – happy to serve the IP communities: Letter from AmeriKat I: Happy Holidays!.

Here’s another site that looks relevant:

http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog

Thanks.

How to lie with statistics – example 322

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Paul Kedrosky reproduces some data on supposedly  fast growth industries:

According to a new study, here are the best and worst performing industries of the last decade as measured in revenue percentage change terms. Here are the leaders:

source: http://www.ibisworld.com/

Some of these are doubtless valid, but the top 4 are all industries that had virtually no revenue at all in the 1990s, since they basically did not exist were not measured until Internet companies started to go public.  It’s easy to have an astronomical growth rate if you make the base number small enough. Startups do this a lot – “our revenue grew 1500% in our first 2 years.” That could mean they had $1000 of revenue in year 1, and $15000 in year 3!

“Anonymized” data frequently isn’t

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An in-the-closet lesbian mother is suing Netflix for privacy invasion, alleging the movie rental company made it possible for her to be outed when it disclosed insufficiently anonymous information about nearly half-a-million customers as part of its $1 million contest to improve its recommendation system.

The suit known as Doe v. Netflix (.pdf) was filed in federal court in California on Thursday, alleging that Netflix violated fair-trade laws and a federal privacy law protecting video rental records, when it launched its popular contest in September 2006.

via Netflix Spilled Your Brokeback Mountain Secret, Lawsuit Claims | Threat Level | Wired.com.

(As the article goes on to make clear, this problem has been known for a while. Netflix ignored it at its peril.)

How compressed are computer games?

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The Digital Society blog raises the question of bit rates for computer games.

The study assumed that computer games were effectively compressible to 100 Mbps which the researchers say is 8 times higher than HDTV.  But I don’t know how this number came about since computer games (even the most realistic) are not as realistic as live video due to the lack of details.  This is why even Hollywood has a hard time convincing us we’re looking at live shots instead of computer graphics.  Compression is an arbitrary number because we can choose any level of compression level we want depending on how [much] data we are willing to discard.

Actual 1920×1080 resolution gaming requires 3000 Mbps of data going from the video card to the display and at no time is it ever compressed

We spent a lot of time investigating this issue; as the post says, it has a big effect on our total byte estimate. Continue reading →

The Myth of Dick Fuld « The Baseline Scenario

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Wall Street defenders like to point to Dick Fuld, who supposedly lost $1 billion by holding on to Lehman Brothers stock that eventually became worthless. You don’t get more of a long-term incentive than that, the argument goes.

Lucian Bebchuk, Alma Cohen, and Holger Spamann have exploded this myth in a Financial Times op-ed and a new paper.

via The Myth of Dick Fuld « The Baseline Scenario.

From Art to Science: what it means

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Most of my research right now is about the evolution of technologies. They go from crafts, requiring skilled experts, to “engineering science,” i.e. mostly automated and very precise. For example, firearms manufacturing took 200 years to undergo this shift. Flying took about 100 years to go from the Wright Brothers, to autonomous aircraft (not just unmanned, but self-directed). How does this happen? Is it a good thing?

Here is a talk I gave on this topic. (Caution: 5 MB PDF file) The subtitle is Why old tasks get easier, but everything gets more complex.

Bohn knowledge evolution 2007

I’m working on a book on this subject, which does side-by-side comparisons of:

  • Flying
  • Medical care – several kinds
  • Firearms manufacturing (from Napoleon to 1980)
  • Semiconductor manufacturing

Each of them has undergone major transformations, with similar patterns.

How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed – hmi – Gizmodo

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You probably already saw that the average American tears through 34GB of data per person per day. Here’s how the media has evolved these last few decades (sorry print), and below a way to compare your consumption with Joe Average.

This chart breaks down each activity by hours, bytes, and words for the total population, average per user, and average per American in 2008. There’s a lot to process here, but my first reaction is: that many people still watch TV in standard def?

Send an email to Brian Barrett, the author of this post, at bbarrett@gizmodo.com.

via How 3.6 Zettabytes of Data Get Consumed – hmi – Gizmodo.

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Response

What surprised me is not the amount of standard definition TV, but the large amount of live TV overall. It’s hard for me to find people who watch TV live – they either Tivo it, or watch something on the Internet, or rent DVDs with the shows they want. Unfortunately, the Nielsen TV data that we used lumps anything seen within 72 hours of original broadcast into its “live audience” report. Also, our data is for 2008; by 2010 I expect to find a lot less truly live TV. Finally, it is possible that the people I interact with are not typical. But even my computerphobic father watches recorded C-SPAN.

RB