Addendum
Opponents of open access academic publishing may say that this parable is hyperbole. It is, but only in one respect. When people do not have access to food they die quickly. When they don’t have access to science they die more slowly.
Note this parable works for any incumbent pre-Internet exclusive distribution network or content.
February 9, 2012 The Federal Research Public Access Act, a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies was introduced.
We currently have a unique opportunity to create change. The Research Works Act, a piece of legislation introduced in December that would ban the government from providing the public access to publicly funded research, has galvanized the research community into acting against practices that restrict access to research articles – reaching the pages of the Economist, the New York Times, Wired, the Guardian, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other outlets.
With reinvigorated support from the research community and attention from the mainstream media, now is the time to push for this groundbreaking legislation and let Congress know that students – and the rest of the public – deserve access to the research which they paid for and upon which their education depends.
A tribute to incumbent exclusive publisher sleaze that you could conceive anything else.
The IEEE technical standards body is developing 802.11u and the Wi-Fi Alliance has developed its Hotspot 2.0 initiative to further define and implement the use of the new standard. The new standards will essentially define how hot spots are discovered by devices and also provide a uniform mechanism for allowing subscribers to sign on to the networks, without the user selecting a particular network or entering a password. It also provides WPA 2 security to ensure that subscribers have the same level of security they expect when they’re on a carrier’s cellular network.
Social networking “ This house believes that society benefits when we share personal information online.
“
It isn’t about piracy – It’s about the Music Industry losing the ability to re-sell you the same music over, and over, and over. It’s about the Music Industry’s ever expanding back catalog no longer translating to automatic ever-expanding re-sales. The Music Industry spent a hell of a lot of money to make copyright effectively never-ending, explicitly to protect that re-selling revenue stream…and now the carpet has been yanked out from under them.
—
That huge drop in sales? That’s called market saturation. Most everyone that wanted a Beatles or Stones recording already owns it…on a format they will effectively never replace again.
It’s about the Music Industry thinking, wrongly, that they were in the business of selling toothpaste. Then waking up one day to realize they really are selling cast iron frying pans. You’ll always need to buy more toothpaste…but you’ll never need to buy another cast iron frying pan.
The need for property rights only exist because of the natural scarcity of tangible, physical resources, and cannot apply to things which are infinitely reproducible like ideas or electronic files. Only tangible possessions can be the object of conflict between people and so it is only for them that property rules apply. Thus, patents and copyrights are unjustifiable monopolies granted by government legislation and it is this monopoly privilege that creates an artificial scarcity at the expense of us, the consumer.
These “Intellectual Property Rights” will always and forever violation the individual property rights of the consumer, e.g., to use one’s own tangible property as one sees fit.
IP can never be justified; let us end it, NOW!
I favour the Phoenix model of legislation development. At the very least we should stop making things worse.
The problem for all of us, naturally, is if the certificate system was hacked, allowing the bad guys to forge certificates. (This has, of course, happened before.)
Are we finally ready to accept that the certificate system is completely broken?
I’ve become convinced that understanding how networks work is an essential 21st century literacy. This is the first in a series of short videos about how the structure and dynamics of networks influences political freedom, economic wealth creation, and participation in the creation of culture. The first video introduces the importance of understanding networks and explains how the underlying technical architecture of the Internet specifically supports the freedom of network users to innovate.
Looking at the figuresabove, you’ll notice that the quarter to quarter figures are all overthe place but most noticeably, the Q4 number, instead of increasing,actually decreased. Why was that? Mostly because Apple broke itsusual June iPhone release pattern and made the faithful wait anotherquarter if they wanted the latest and greatest. Which, of course,they did.So sales in Q4, insteadof increasing by a substantial figure, actually dropped and in doingso, created an artificially low base figure for comparison to thefollowing quarter. The net effect of that has been to make the Q12012 figures look iFabulous to the iFaithful and those who couldn’tbe arsed thinking about it for a moment. And that my friends, ismany.
Hamish MacEwan 