Brandymore Castle

I'm not going to name the site that got me starting writing this post. Its a sentiment I've seen on many sites with a traditional publishing orientation. They follow the old tradition from the age of print, where all submitted works are required to be "not published elsewhere," requiring "first print" rights and demanding every "reprint" (copy) should cite the publisher as place of first publication (what is this, vanity?). These guidelines ignore the reality of the new age of immediacy, of information abundance, of venue abundance, the network. There is no scarcity in publication, there is no value in "first publication" or artificial scarcity on the network. The document is the conversation the conversation is the document. The old publishing world is gone, stop trying to hang on. The attitude simply does not fit with a universe of networked information being shared and reshared by millions of people, winding its way in bits and pieces ...

An interesting question about ownership and rights to data in public use has arisen, chronicled in Apple kills Routesy app, my iPhone gets less useful Routesy is an iphone application using data provided by the municipal transit authority, through an agreement with a data provider. The details are in the article, if you care to read them. I have to agree the company has a right to license predictive arrival times, since such information requires investment in research and development, formulating predictive algorithms and such information does not meet the requirement of being "obvious" and thus non-proprietary. However, the ultimate solution would be an application that took GPS data from every iphone riding the metro at any given moment, if it can be identified as to which bus it is, then do the same kind of approximate arrival time calculations NextBus does, only through peer-to-peer networked computation. Let all the iphones on the bus line find their own position, commun...

Increasingly, as so-called intellectual property becomes more prominent in the economy of the information age, is the entertainment industry becoming our government? http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11885 Copyright is beginning to destroy our culture and exterminate the arts until Western art will be an empty shell, if it isn't already. On second thought, this is easy to defeat. Just take an empty media player with you and fill it up from the network once you arrive at your destination...most people will probably fill it up with "pirate" editions since those will be the easiest to obtain. Someday, there won't be any source other than the network anyway. Or, as one person commented, mail your ipod to you. I have to agree with the other comments that this is a futile effort by hidebound executives to put their finger in the dike. What troubles me is that this erosion of our culture has been going on for a long time, since the introduction of recorded media. ...