“It must be remembered that, while there are an enormous number of possible permutations of the musical notes of the scale, only a few are pleasing; and much fewer still suit the infantile demands of the popular ear. Recurrence is not therefore an inevitable badge of plagiarism.” Darrell v. Joe Morris Music Co., 113 [...]

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I’ve been following the debate over ala carte cable TV pricing, and the recent Fox/Time Warner showdown has got it back in the news. Brian Stelter’s NYT article on the topic reveals some interesting revenue figures in the cable industry:
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Apropos of Rob’s post, here is Nicholas Bramble’s very inventive take on learning via Facebook:
[A teacher at a suburban school had found] videos showing students getting into fights with one another. They posted the videos to their MySpace pages and debated who had the better fighting skills. The teacher also found footage from a [...]

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Excellent article in the THES on the topic. Here are some choice paragraphs:
“The argument is that better value can be driven into that system,” says Alma Swan, a former publishing industry employee who now runs Key Perspectives, a pro-open-access consultancy. “Libraries are very angry about the profits made by Elsevier, for example. If Tesco [...]

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I just want to respond to Rob’s and Greg’s concerns about Adam Raff’s “search neutrality” editorial in the NYT today. On the basis of the many articles I’ve written on search (as well as discussions with individuals who have problems similar to Raff’s), I found the editorial both informative and compelling. Principles of [...]

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So here’s some controversial advice:
“So that’s your advice is it? As my agent? On the week my book comes out in paperback, I should produce my own pirated version and give it away free? Why don’t I just punch my publisher in the face? That would be less work.”
My agent rocked back in his [...]

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Earlier this month I had a great time at the conference “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” I focused on the “factory” presentations, and I’ve had a bit of trouble digesting the “play” side of the conference (such as the Bureau of Workplace Interruptions). At first some of the interventions reminded me of the [...]

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Clay Shirky characterizes “algorithmic authority” as “the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying ‘Trust this because you trust me.’” For Shirky, “authority is a social agreement, not a culturally independent fact.” He mentions the poor performance [...]

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Clay Shirky has recently written “A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority,” based on a talk at Yale’s recent conference on Journalism & The New Media Ecology. Shirky noted that “people trust new classes of aggregators and filters, whether Google or Twitter or Wikipedia (in its ‘breaking news’ mode),” and calls “this [...]

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A recent article in the Boston Review by Evgeny Morozov laments the influence of Wikipedia. I found this passage a particularly interesting take on the epistemology (and ecology) of the web:
Wikipedians . . . are obsessed with popular culture and less equipped to document the high-brow. The 711-word entry on nouvelle vague filmmaker [...]

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Trebor Scholz and the New School for Social Research are sponsoring a conference in a few weeks on the political economy of Web 2.0 called “The Internet as Playground and Factory.” Participants have been having a fascinating discussion on the mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity. Here are some ideas [...]

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I’m glad to see all the Google focus here! (And I’m sorry to have been away for so long–a number of writing projects came home to roost, demanding edits, this fall. I’m now finishing number 4 of 5.)
As for GBS: I’m pretty defeatist on the Google Book Search settlement, especially if our enervated antitrust [...]

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Tyler Cowen’s “Good and Plenty” promotes the use of market mechanisms to fund culture. He’s recently turned his attention to valuation problems raised by time spent on the web:
Much of the Web’s value is experienced at the personal level and does not show up in productivity numbers. Buying $2 worth of bananas boosts [...]

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I sometimes wonder if the flipside of the AI campaign to make machines more humanlike is a pharmacological campaign to make humans as quiescent as machines. As global competition increases the value of productivity, an underground world of neuro-enhancing drugs is a growing part of campus life. But what about “emotional enhancements?” [...]

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Here is a very nice NYT profile of Beth Noveck’s work at the White House to use technology to enhance democracy:
The White House made its first major entree into government by the people last month when it set up an online forum to ask ordinary people for their ideas on how to carry out [...]

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Wired “senior maverick” Kevin Kelly has called a wide variety of P2P collaborations a new form of socialism. For example, he points to Craigslist as a collective where the principle “from each according to abilities, to each according to his needs” may well be functioning:
How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society [...]

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New books on Google by Randall Stross, Alexander Halavais, and Jeff Jarvis have been getting a good deal of media attention lately. I highly recommend the Stross and Halavais volumes because they recognize that the unique power of Google is likely to be lasting. Stross notes that the company may be using a [...]

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I’ve been pretty busy lately, but I wanted to link to some recent blog posts of mine that may interest Madisonian readers. On Balkinization, I’ve put up a few posts recently on innovation policy:
Beyond Innovation: The Many Goals of Internet Law and Policy
Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly
Search [...]

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Over the past few days I’ve been dipping into Cory Doctorow’s Content, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, and Larry Lessig’s Remix. I like them all for different reasons; Doctorow is an irrepressible enthusiast for online openness, Weinberger connects that openness to older patterns of information storage and retrieval, and Lessig sings of the creativity [...]

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Chi-Chu Tschang’s article on Baidu illuminates how an unscrupulous search engine can exert a great deal of power once it attains dominance. Baidu has over 60% of the market in China, and can make or break an online business:
Salespeople working for Baidu drop sites from results to bully companies into buying sponsored links, [...]

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