Question (in class)

In a WSU context, which aspects of intellectual property need to be more regulated and which aspects of intellectual property need to be less regulated, and why? 

In the context of education ad WSU there are certain ideas to consider when regulating how we use, create, and share our intellectual property. Let's consider for a moment what intellectual property might look like on the WSU campus. Many students create art, music, writing and other works that need protection under law. However, the use of textbooks, readings, and other materials used for education, brought to the students both by teachers and their own research, are, in my opinion, pieces of intellectual property that need to be less regulated. Where there is a fine line between derivative works and copyright infringement or plagiarism, often the use of material for education is fairly obvious. 

However, it is also fair to say that those who write texts, make videos, develop lectures, etc, all need to get paid for their work in some way. The regulations that WSU has on the way we do pay the authors seem to be slow and inefficient, as course readers take months to both put together, have checked, and then publish, not to mention the money involved in that process. In other words, teachers have to jump through many loops to provide a small amount of material that is generally outdated, and often not the entirety of what they originally wanted to use. I think that, for education, and use of copyright protected work in general, there needs to be a quicker way to go about getting ahold of that material without getting a lawsuit. 

Post 5 - Copyright Code vs Law and Fair Use

In the latest reading, Lessig discusses the power balances, and imbalances between corporations, artists, and the law. Generally there is a pattern in that the more power one has, the more they are able to do what they want, and also restrict the rights of others. Though the RIAA can prohibit circumvention technologies and piracy that harms profit by the artist, they also have ways to prevent fair use, and sometimes giving a large corporation all the money and leaving the artist out of their entitlement completely.

Where Adobe certainly warrants good reasons for having their creative work not stolen, the way in which they execute limited fair use of their product severely limits our ability to learn. Similarly, there is a fine line between the benefits of education from both fair use and piracy, as well as the detriments of prohibiting that education while trying to protect the rights of a corporation or artist. As the movie we watched in class implied, however, it seems to break down to the money. If there wasn't so much profit in making a big fuss over piracy, circumvention technology, and the use of creative material warranted or not, would there be so much bickering?

Post 4 - Communication Facilitator

There are a number of ways to see the internet in terms of value, as there is anything. Is it a good or bad thing, or is it just a tool  used for good or bad? I personally like to vote for the latter, as it has tremendous effects on the way we communicate, in both good and bad ways. Let's look at how Lawrence Lessig sees this tool of the modern age.

“The Internet allows these creations to be shared with an extraordinary number of people, practically instantaneously.” The facilitation of exchange of information on the internet has become integrated so fast and so sudden it is hard not to see how incredibly different things were only thirty years ago. In that light, Lessig gets into the laws of such issues; and the laws are fuzzy at best. Originally the constitution didn't cover such anomalies as the hybrid technology of the internet, so defining stealing music can be difficult. It is also difficult to stop, as the instantaneous transfer to such a wide amount of people makes it as easy to track as the AIDS virus. The problem here is that he never says the internet is bad or good, but looks at the morality of the situation. He puts in perspective how the internet is used, not what it's inherent nature is.

Lessig also states that “blogs create the sense of a virtual public meeting, but one in which we don’t all hope to be there at the same time and in which conversations are not necessarily linked.” This statement, which he seems to brush over, I think is actually quite important. Again, Lessig doesn't point out the value of these things, but states how the internet facilitates them. The availability of information on blogs, and the power play between those amateurs and the main media are dynamics that are humanity based and aren't inherent in the internet. The internet has completely changed how we communicate with people, but the good and bad is in our uses of the medium. Yes, it is true that I can now hold conversations with my brother in California over instant message, at the same time talking with my friend from Florida on the same platform, and simultaneously have my phone on speaker talking to my best friend in my hometown, while I'm in Pullman, at least an eight hour drive away. These conversations, however, lack the depth and feeling that a face to face conversation has. I can't reach out and touch them, read their body language, or even hear their tone of voice. In fact, there is an entirely different way in which we talk to people online, a sort of disconnectedness that is attributed to web talk. How we communicate, I'd think Lessig would argue, is up to us, and any power plays that occur in such communication, good or bad, are a result of our actions, not the internet itself. 

Post 3 - Mechanical Computation vs Cognitive Association

When connecting the readings, most of us, I assume, connected them by meaning. As cognitive association works in our brain, so is information in this vastly accessible, (debatably) infinite, library of information. In "As We May Think", Vannevar Bush goes in depth into the description.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature. Man cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but he certainly ought to be able to learn from it. In minor ways he may even improve, for his records have relative permanency.

Computers are, in ways, storage houses to mechanically process information that we cannot. An interesting distinction made by Gleik was the difference between mechanical and human function. A computer might be able to store obscene amounts of memory and calculate impossibly fast, but only the human brain can create the original, spontaneous ideas that go into the information, and organize it by meaning.

"Only the fearful and superstitious imagined that machines could be creative or original or spontaneous; those qualities were opposite to mechanical, which meant automatic, determined, and routine," (Gleik ch7, pg 1-2).

Ironically, this fear is becoming more and more plausible with the incredible increase in technological innovation. In fact, Artificial Intelligence is becoming extremely advanced. The limits, however, are that computers will still rely totally on the creative input that is provided by human originality. We continue to use technology as a tool to not only extend our memory, but preserve those memories that fade. In ways, computers have given us not only an ability to have wider range of access to information, but also expression.

“'For the first time the snapshot album provided the man on the street with a permanent record of his family and its activities. . . . For the first time in history there exists an authentic visual record of the appearance and activities of the common man made without [literary] interpretation or bias.'5 In this way, the Kodak camera and film were technologies of expression. The pencil or paintbrush was also a technology of expression, of course. But it took years of training before they could be deployed by amateurs in any useful or effective way. With the Kodak, expression was possible much sooner and more simply," (Lessig, pg 47).

Post 2 - Tired rant on Information Technology and Automation

Many of Babbage's ideas were before his time. In fact, the ideas he thought possible didn't come true for quite a while. To think that what we can only imagine now might be actuality in the future. Babbage, at one point tried to make "a locomotive that lays down it's own railway," (Gleik 114). There are, as I saw in Japan, trains that are calculated carefully to navigate multiple tracks carrying multiple trains, all through computer run track controls. The information is calculated through the computer faster than a human calculator dreamed in Babbage's time.

Communication and information through technology is, in this day and age, essential, and so built into our frame work we hardly notice it, and take it for granted. In fact, Information technology is the use of computers and software in processing information. It was made clear in Gleick's reading there needed to be better computers than humans themselves, for it was practically insufficient to spend so much time and mental capacity on such things. This is where automation comes in.

Automation is technology meant to facilitate ease of use, such as automated industrial jobs, the alphabetize function on your computer, and many more. To think that Babbage had the idea of automation in information technology so early is impressive. Such things, nowadays, as said earlier, are taken for granted. We don't think twice about needing our computers for our homework, listening to our music while running on an elliptical in an air-conditioned gym, but all of that technology is automation.

http://jobsearchtech.about.com/od/careersintechnology/p/ITDefinition.htm