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Might a character in your story ever need to open a hotel door in a hotel that uses keycards instead of old-fashioned keys? This article might be relevant to your interests. Even Sam & Dean could afford the components.
“It may be useful to remind ourselves that sacrifice is not a gesture that you make in front of a mirror: The recipients of this sacrifice may not take it in the spirit in which it is intended, and it may, in fact, harm them.” Though after I read the article I did start to wonder what limits Roiphe thought were appropriate to put on one’s children. Limiting TV does not seem to me to crush independence of spirit.
Sad but instructive story of the failure of privatization in Indiana.
I do not understand this Romney thing about exempting tax on Olympic winnings. Where should taxes come from? Only from money that rained down on you without a single drop of effort on your part? Well, no, ‘cause Republicans don’t like inheritance tax either. Oh wait, I get it now …
What if every sport was photographed like beach volleyball? Reminded me of the variants that go around fandom, like the gender-swapped Avengers poster or DC heroes in cover crotch shots.
Christopher Sprigman & Kal Raustiala, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation: Uncompensated and uncontrolled copying is all around us, and it’s not destroying creators’ willingness to create. The core case studies of the book are: (1) Fashion, where norms don’t stop copying, but instead, the authors argue, the inherent desire of fashion consumers for the new and trendy and distaste for the old means that innovation continues even with a lot of copying, though copying may well add a bit of speed to the cycle. Of course, fashion is often despised for this changeability, where we celebrate innovation in many other cases; both fashion’s lack of intellectual property protection and its general lesser status compared to other arts are gendered. (2) Recipes created by chefs, where norms do govern and restrain copying in many circumstances; chefs generally seek credit for innovation but share information readily. Also gendered in its lack of intellectual property protection and rise into higher status; cooking became art when men (“chefs”) started to do it. (3) Stand-up comedy, where there has been a noticeable decrease in acceptance of copying over time, which the authors connect to changes in the technological context—comedians can now reach millions and thus copying a joke is more noticeable and may really occupy the field in a way that vaudevillians stealing from each other didn’t—and relatedly changes in the social meaning of comedy—a shift to identity-based rather than single-joke comedy that is likely to make many kinds of copying more difficult/less funny to the audiences. Louis C.K. can’t tell a Sarah Silverman joke without substantially revising it to make it his own. Comedians reportedly have strong anticopying norms backed not just by gossip but by the threat of violence (again, gendered), and the norms cover far more than copyright would, protecting the premise or idea of a joke that is, under copyright’s terms, free for anyone to appropriate. Based on these three, the authors suggest that “Social norms about creativity probably work best, and are most likely to take root, in contexts that are most social—that is, where individuals are the key actors and where they rub up against each other frequently.” (Interestingly, it would be relatively easy to secure copyright for jokes, but comedians just don’t use the copyright system to protect against copying, almost without exception.)
The book also discusses magicians, who prize secrecy from the public over anticopying; financial products, where innovation is not necessarily a good thing; football moves; fonts; and databases. An epilogue discusses music; the authors suggest that music is transforming, not dying, with money shifting to touring and other forms of production that don’t rely on large-scale record sales. (For football, the discussion of the mixed, often negative reaction to the West Coast Defense, the No-Huddle Offense, and the Spread Offense, all adopted by weaker teams to offset the advantages of the existing leaders, reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell on underdogs in basketball. Whereas the football innovations were all eventually adopted by other teams, Gladwell’s story makes the point that innovations are regularly resisted by people doing well under the current system; in fact they can be crushed if you convince enough people that doing the thing “right” requires avoiding innovation.)
A coding challenge where submissions to a contest are all public and can be borrowed as the contest continues helps illustrate that what the authors call “tweakers” are often directly responsible for refining a leap by a pioneer, and this both incentivizes tweakers and leads to big debates over credit allocation. Copyright and patent don’t favor tweaking, though; and this leads to an unfortunate aside about how it’s maybe a good thing that we all can’t rewrite Star Trek episodes to “explore the romantic possibilities between Commander William Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi,” along with an equally unfortunate footnote noting that, in fact, plenty of people do just this but deeming “almost all” fan fiction to be infringing, neglecting fair use.
One overarching lesson of the book’s case studies is that regimes that don’t rely on intellectual property to incentivize creativity and innovation are everywhere; copyright and patent are more exceptional than we often assume. Things that are relevant to the kinds of copying and innovation that occur include: fads, norms, the ability to sell a different underlying product or experience/performance along with a creative work, first-mover advantages, and branding success (we pay more for Coke than for generic grocery store cola).
“It may be useful to remind ourselves that sacrifice is not a gesture that you make in front of a mirror: The recipients of this sacrifice may not take it in the spirit in which it is intended, and it may, in fact, harm them.” Though after I read the article I did start to wonder what limits Roiphe thought were appropriate to put on one’s children. Limiting TV does not seem to me to crush independence of spirit.
Sad but instructive story of the failure of privatization in Indiana.
I do not understand this Romney thing about exempting tax on Olympic winnings. Where should taxes come from? Only from money that rained down on you without a single drop of effort on your part? Well, no, ‘cause Republicans don’t like inheritance tax either. Oh wait, I get it now …
What if every sport was photographed like beach volleyball? Reminded me of the variants that go around fandom, like the gender-swapped Avengers poster or DC heroes in cover crotch shots.
Christopher Sprigman & Kal Raustiala, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation: Uncompensated and uncontrolled copying is all around us, and it’s not destroying creators’ willingness to create. The core case studies of the book are: (1) Fashion, where norms don’t stop copying, but instead, the authors argue, the inherent desire of fashion consumers for the new and trendy and distaste for the old means that innovation continues even with a lot of copying, though copying may well add a bit of speed to the cycle. Of course, fashion is often despised for this changeability, where we celebrate innovation in many other cases; both fashion’s lack of intellectual property protection and its general lesser status compared to other arts are gendered. (2) Recipes created by chefs, where norms do govern and restrain copying in many circumstances; chefs generally seek credit for innovation but share information readily. Also gendered in its lack of intellectual property protection and rise into higher status; cooking became art when men (“chefs”) started to do it. (3) Stand-up comedy, where there has been a noticeable decrease in acceptance of copying over time, which the authors connect to changes in the technological context—comedians can now reach millions and thus copying a joke is more noticeable and may really occupy the field in a way that vaudevillians stealing from each other didn’t—and relatedly changes in the social meaning of comedy—a shift to identity-based rather than single-joke comedy that is likely to make many kinds of copying more difficult/less funny to the audiences. Louis C.K. can’t tell a Sarah Silverman joke without substantially revising it to make it his own. Comedians reportedly have strong anticopying norms backed not just by gossip but by the threat of violence (again, gendered), and the norms cover far more than copyright would, protecting the premise or idea of a joke that is, under copyright’s terms, free for anyone to appropriate. Based on these three, the authors suggest that “Social norms about creativity probably work best, and are most likely to take root, in contexts that are most social—that is, where individuals are the key actors and where they rub up against each other frequently.” (Interestingly, it would be relatively easy to secure copyright for jokes, but comedians just don’t use the copyright system to protect against copying, almost without exception.)
The book also discusses magicians, who prize secrecy from the public over anticopying; financial products, where innovation is not necessarily a good thing; football moves; fonts; and databases. An epilogue discusses music; the authors suggest that music is transforming, not dying, with money shifting to touring and other forms of production that don’t rely on large-scale record sales. (For football, the discussion of the mixed, often negative reaction to the West Coast Defense, the No-Huddle Offense, and the Spread Offense, all adopted by weaker teams to offset the advantages of the existing leaders, reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell on underdogs in basketball. Whereas the football innovations were all eventually adopted by other teams, Gladwell’s story makes the point that innovations are regularly resisted by people doing well under the current system; in fact they can be crushed if you convince enough people that doing the thing “right” requires avoiding innovation.)
A coding challenge where submissions to a contest are all public and can be borrowed as the contest continues helps illustrate that what the authors call “tweakers” are often directly responsible for refining a leap by a pioneer, and this both incentivizes tweakers and leads to big debates over credit allocation. Copyright and patent don’t favor tweaking, though; and this leads to an unfortunate aside about how it’s maybe a good thing that we all can’t rewrite Star Trek episodes to “explore the romantic possibilities between Commander William Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi,” along with an equally unfortunate footnote noting that, in fact, plenty of people do just this but deeming “almost all” fan fiction to be infringing, neglecting fair use.
One overarching lesson of the book’s case studies is that regimes that don’t rely on intellectual property to incentivize creativity and innovation are everywhere; copyright and patent are more exceptional than we often assume. Things that are relevant to the kinds of copying and innovation that occur include: fads, norms, the ability to sell a different underlying product or experience/performance along with a creative work, first-mover advantages, and branding success (we pay more for Coke than for generic grocery store cola).
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