“Sea of children lost in the supermarket” works

/ Intellectual Property

I actually got a glimpse of the orphan works problem from the other side just a few days ago, when I was contacted by the MIT OpenCourseWare program and asked if I would be willing to grant permission for them to use some of my material in a course they were posting online. In this case, the material was a single PowerPoint slide from a single lecture in the course. I hadn’t made the slide, but it quoted a single sentence from one of my papers and included a photo of me a friend had taken while I was still in grad school. I happily printed out the two-page license giving them the right to use the material, put it in a stamped envelope and mailed it back to them. The license file was slightly over ten times as long as the material I was licensing.

I suppose I can’t call this an orphan-works problem per say, since the slide had my name on it and it’s pretty easy to track me down online — perhaps this was just a child-lost-in-the-supermarket problem. Or in MIT’s case, a whole sea of children lost in the supermarket, each needing individual attention. (As Downward Battle points out, this is the same problem that has kept works like Eyes on the Prize out of the public eye for the past 10 years.) My heart goes out for two (and soon three) intellectual-property coordinators who are trying to dot all the i’s that make up even a single course.

And yet, though I didn’t think of it until after I sent back the forms, even I can’t be quite sure that I owned the rights to that material. It was a friend who took my photo, and we certainly didn’t talk about copyright issues at the time. More significantly, I can’t recall off the top of my head which of my papers the slide quoted from, and whether that was one of the journals or conferences that required me to sign over total ownership of the copyright to them before they’d publish. Should I have consulted my lawyer before giving MIT permission to talk about my work? I don’t have time for that kind of shenanigans, and besides, I’m a researcher — the whole point of my writing papers is so that what I’ve learned can be passed on to others.

“Sea of children lost in the supermarket” works Read More »

Unlocking the orphans

/ Intellectual Property

EFF and Public Knowledge have just set up Orphan Works, an organization dedicated to finding a way out of our current mess where works may have been out of copyright for years, but there’s no way to know because nobody (including the Copyright Office) knows who to ask:

What are orphan works? Orphan works are — broadly speaking — any copyrighted works where the rights-holder is hard to find. Because the cost of finding the owner is so high, creators can’t build on orphan works, even when they’d be willing to pay to use them. In many cases the works were abandoned because they no longer produced any income. In most cases, rights holders, once found, are delighted to have their work used.

The Copyright office is asking for public comment on the orphan works problem until March 25th (you can fill out the form at orphanworks.org). Even if you’re not an artist or filmmaker or the like, this issue probably affects you more than you’d at first think. Here’s the comment I just sent in:

My story is simple, but I expect it’s a common one. I’ve been learning to play piano and I love old music. My uncle gave me a photocopy of sheet music for a 1934 parlor piece that my grandfather used to sing, I found copy of Scott Joplin’s original 1902 score for The Entertainer, and a friend who collects old music gave me a photocopy of her antique sheet music to a 19th-century music-hall song. I’ve scanned them all on my home scanner and I’d like to put them on the Web for others to download, but I’ve no way of knowing if these are actually out of copyright. Plus, copyright holders are so aggressive these days that I’m afraid even if these pieces are in the public domain someone might convince my ISP to shut down my account under the DMCA, and if that happened there’d be no good way for me to prove I was in the right. So instead, I just gave up and have kept these scans to myself. It’s just not worth the risk to share with others.

Update: Larry Lessig has some pointers on writing comments (e.g. be nice, these guys are overworked) and stories people have submitted over at eldred.cc.

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Is ABC’s Primetime Live fleecing the sick and dying?

/ Media

While I’m on the subject of skepticism, James Randi has posted an infuriating article about ABC’s recent Primetime Live program Is ‘John of God’ a Healer or a Charlatan? Searching for Hope and Health in a Remote Brazilian Village. João Teixeira, AKA John of God, is a very successful faith-healer — successful in the sense that he makes lots of money and fame by performing standard carney tricks to con desperately ill patients with nothing to lose, not in the sense that he actually heals anybody. As you might guess from the subtitle, ABC’s spin is along the lines of “Wow, this is really amazing stuff, and while we can’t know for sure we’ll bend over backwards to make you believe it’s all true.”

I’m usually mildly pissed off by junk like this from the press, but something about Randi’s commentary really boils my blood this time. Maybe it’s the fact that ABC so clearly wanted to interview Randi not to give their audience real insight, not even to provide balance (as if it was appropriate for a so-called “investigative report” to give equal weight between a con artist’s lie and facts). They clearly wanted Randi just to provide cover, so they could tell their story and yet still claim to have interviewed a token skeptic (you’ll note that Randi doesn’t even appear in the print version of the story I link to above.)

Then again, maybe it’s Randi’s brief description of the personal tragedy con men like this cause that brought it all home:

It must be easier just not to care, but I can’t manage that. I must care when I know that John of God will claim more victims, and that I couldn’t stop it. Though I earnestly wish it could be different, based on what we know to be the hard facts, David Ames will not recover from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Lisa Melman will most probably die of breast cancer because she’s decided to forego legitimate surgical help. Mathew Ireland’s brain tumor will still be there and will probably kill him, too. But Jo?o Teixeira will continue to flourish and be worshiped as a god.

Folks, I was in Mexico City on the plaza outside the shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe when a young peasant father crawled by me along the rough pavement with an obviously dead infant in his arms, swaddled in a tiny white serape. There were twin tracks of blood behind him from his bleeding knees. He was seeking a miracle. Through the adjacent barred window in the basilica I could hear the coin-sorting machines packaging the money that was pouring into the offering boxes inside. I turned away and wept.

In a St. Louis auditorium I stood in the lobby as paramedics treated a heavy elderly woman who lay in a fetal position on the carpet, white-faced and moaning in agony. Moments before she’d been seized in ecstasy in front of faith healer “Reverend” W. V. Grant, leaping up and down in an adrenaline rush that made her temporarily oblivious to the bone spurs on her arthritic spine that were cutting into her muscle tissues and bringing about internal bleeding. The attendants got her onto two stretchers and into an ambulance. I wept.

Outside an arena in Anaheim, California, my camera crew approached a tiny, thin, Asian boy with twisted legs on worn crutches to ask him if he’d been healed by Peter Popoff, the miracle-worker who he’d told us two hours earlier was “gonna ask Jesus to fix my legs.” When he turned toward us, we saw his tear-streaked face and anguished eyes. The cameraman lowered his camera. “I can’t do this,” he said, and we both turned away and wept.

I’ve had my share of tears and sleepless nights, wondering what I might do to keep people from chasing this chimera. I had another chance in New York City on January 25th, 2005, and I tried.

Rather than expose a fraud, ABC wanted to share his limelight. How many more poor, desperate people will go to Brazil because a “reputable news organization” made it sound like a good idea? How many more head of cattle will João Teixeira be able to buy from what he fleeces off the world’s most unfortunate? How many more rating points will ABC gain from their complicity in his con game?

ABC has blood on its hands — if they were a responsible news organization they would try to undo the damage they’ve done.

Is ABC’s Primetime Live fleecing the sick and dying? Read More »

How do you tell when you’re being spun?

/ Science

An two-year-old speech by Michael Crichton that came across a mailing list I’m on slams scientists for being “seduced by the… lures of politics and publicity,” bringing its skepticism to bear on the growing scientific consensus on global warming. One person on the list asked the obvious question after reading it, namely who is the layman to trust?

My response was that it’s not really that hard (though I should have added it’s a skill that needs to be learned).

Start by being skeptical of anyone who wears being a lone skeptic against a vast sea of consensus as a badge of honor, especially when he’s not an expert in the field he’s criticizing. One in a million really is the genius he thinks he is, but most of the time there’s a good reason everyone else thinks he’s full of it. Then be doubly suspicious of any explanation of an idea or study given by someone who opposes it. (I’m reminded of a born-again Baptist friend of mine in high school who kept trying to explain to my Catholic girlfriend what “Catholics believe” — as described in some Catholic-bashing pamphlet her church was handing out.)

Next, see what parts of what they’re saying you do know something about, or can find out through a quick Web search. I can’t speak to everything Crichton’s complaining about, but I do know he’s wrong that SETI isn’t science (regardless of whether they’re barking up the wrong tree), he’s either wrong or highly selective on second-hand smoke and he’s wrong when it comes to lack of scientific debate about the existence of global warming (there’s been plenty of debate over the years — I gather he just doesn’t like which side is coming out on top). He’s also wrong in his defense of his fellow lone wolf, Lomborg. Lomborg wasn’t attacked for coming to the wrong conclusions, he was attacked for “selective use of data, misuse of data, misinterpretations, inappropriate precision, [and] errors of fact.” I’d say the fact that he was shouted down in the scientific community, in spite of economic and political pressure on his side, is a sign of something right with science. (Crichton’s insinuation that Lomborg’s critics don’t substantiate their attacks in detail is nonsense — see the above-linked review for one of many examples.)

As a side-note, Crichton’s comment that “to predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd” is strange coming as it does from a science fiction author. It’s also yet another straw-man — computer models don’t make predictions, they assign probabilities based on our best guesses and based on different choices we might make. It’s impossible for anyone to predict whether a fire will start while I sleep, but that doesn’t stop me from upgrading old electrical wiring and getting fire insurance based on my best guess at the likelihood of a fire. Ray Bradberry once said the function of science fiction is not to predict the future, but to prevent it. In this case, that’s probably a good function of science fact as well.

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Bruce Schneier foreshadows Paris Hilton’s woes

/ Security

Sounds like the security violation that led to the posting of Paris Hilton’s private list of celebrity phone numbers was pretty straight-forward: they Googled the answer to her secret question (what’s your favorite pet’s name?) to “recover” her password on T-Mobile’s online web account. Ironically enough, Bruce Schneier blogged about this very problem just last week.

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Copyright as bludgeon against critics… again.

/ Intellectual Property

The Tulsa World newspaper is threatening BatesLine, a blog that’s been critical of their activities, with copyright violation for quoting their editorials and “unauthorized linking.” (As BatesLine points out, one of the mainstays of Fair Use is the ability to make comment and criticism, and linking isn’t a copyright violation because it’s not copying.)

Why don’t they just come over and threaten to torch the place like honest extortionists would?

(By way of Political Animal)

Copyright as bludgeon against critics… again. Read More »

Intelligent Design

/ Philosophy

Intelligent Design proponent Michael Behe asks us to eschew logic and evidence and instead to “trust our feelings” in a recent New York Times Op-Ed. But even when I follow this dubious advice, Intelligent Design feels like nothing more than hubris to me.

Behe looks at the complexity and grandeur of life and thinks “an intelligence must have created this.” I look at the complexity and grandeur of life, and I know in my heart there is no way mere intelligence could have produced something so wondrous.

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Widespread political pressure on US Fish & Wildlife scientists to fudge their data

/ Big Brother

The Union of Concerned Scientists just released the results of a survey of US Fish and Wildlife Service field scientists that reveals serious political preasure to self-censure and even exclude or alter technical information that might lead to species being protected. (It’s telling that there was a 30% response rate even after a directive was sent out instructing scientists not to respond even from home on their own time.)

From the executive summary:

  • Large numbers of agency scientists reported political interference in scientific determinations. Nearly half of all respondents whose work is related to endangered species (44 percent) report that they have been directed for non-scientific reasons to refrain from making findings that protect species. One in five have been instructed to compromise their scientific integrity, reporting that they have been “directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from a USFWS scientific document.” In the Southwest region, that number was even higher—closer to one in three.
  • Agency scientists reported being afraid to speak frankly about issues and felt constrained in their role as scientists. 42 percent said they could not publicly express “concerns about the biological needs of species and habitats without fear of retaliation,” while 30 percent were afraid to do so even within the agency. A third felt they are not allowed to do their jobs as scientists.
  • There has been a significant strain on staff morale. Half of all scientists reported that morale is poor to extremely poor; only 12 percent believed morale to be good or excellent. And 64 percent did not feel the agency is moving in the right direction.
  • Political intrusion has undermined the USFWS’s ability to fulfill its mission. Three out of four staff scientists felt that the USFWS is not “acting effectively to maintain or enhance species and their habitats.”

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