The spirit of the post-modern attitude is embodied in attacking the idea of the fixed symbol, in turn creating new definitions to what we assume as absolute. A rub between disparate concepts can create a fertile ground to co-opt and re-purpose symbols in order to produce new forms. In other words, bestowing our respective toolsets as practitioners upon works from a not-too-distant past can manipulate it, now re-rendering it within the present.
Utilizing our self-initiated work as test subjects (images positioned around the perimeter), we (Hank Huang, Vance Wellenstein, Zakary Jensen and Zachary Klauck) created a web of links tracing commonalities in reference within our respective projects (images positioned towards the center). In doing so, we found significant amount of overlap, all of which supporting our ideas of reduced restrictions with regards to intellectual property that we advocated for throughout the duration of the semester. It is through this practice that we as designers are invested into how found elements that function in opposition to one another can become assembled, and through this assemblage unexpected meanings are forced to emerge from the world. It illustrates the fact that the notion of the truly original work is false, and that instead those forms we take ownership in are actually built upon the backs of the generations that preceded us.
For my final project, I wanted to explore collaborative music production and create a piece of music collaboratively here at Yale. Collaborative music production is where numerous individuals who may not know each other, or even be geographically near to each other, contribute to a song in pieces. One person may write a bass line, put it up on the internet and ask someone to record a great sax solo over it. There are many different permutations of this pattern, but has frequently allowed the music to be “copylefted” as each person contributes something new to the piece of music.
Currently, Indaba Music has been put in the spotlight for its increasingly successful website www.indabamusic.com and the collaborative music experience it provides. Just recently even, Wired magazine has asked its readers to crowdsource a song using Indaba’s innovative online software. Check out this link for more http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/help-wiredcom-crowdsource-this-song/
During this project, I got a chance to ask some questions to one of the founders of Indaba, Dan Zaccagnino, and learn about some of the challenges collaborative music making presents, and also the ways they have been able to make it work.
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RepEconomy.com and RepEconomy on twitter is the final project of Andrew Gu, Avi Sutton, Kai Chao, Meryln Deng, Sebastian Park, and Shirley Berry.
The goal of this website is to expand on the growing base of information about reputation economies. This site does not represent all different branches of reputation economies, but it does include different perspectives on how reputation economies are viewed. We also hope to provide information regarding how reputation economies can be studied (in our game theory and experiment section).
Generally defined, a reputation economy is a group whose “currency” relies on a measure of reputation (diversely defined) within a community or domain. Reputation measures, while heterogeneous in type, are based on a collection of opinions that other entities hold about the consumable goods. These opinions come from ratings that are centralized through an algorithm.
On our web site, you will find:
- Legal implications of real-world reputation economies
- Our own “car sales” experiment to measure the persistence of reputation over time
- Examples of real-world reputation economies that span from games to non-profit reputation economies
- Game theory implications of reputation economies
- Additional resources for further reading
- Link to our twitter
- Link to our presentation from class, which includes a summary of our project initiatives as well as questions that need to be considered.
We are more than happy to answer any questions. We encourage you to browse through the website.
For our final project, Logan, Michael, and I created a short film about a normal college student named Jack who tries to go through a day following copyright law. He soon realizes how difficult the task is and hilarity (hopefully) ensues. A scholarly professor type keeps a running tab throughout the day of Jack’s various violations and provides brief explanations of some of the legal issues. The film should illustrate the massive gap between the letter of the law and the way we live our lives.
We were inspired by articles like the Tehranian reading in which a law professor racks up multi-million dollar damages for seemingly innocuous behavior. By portraying the logical conclusion of copyright laws, hopefully we’ve helped in the crusade to unmask absurdity.
It’s been a great class and I hope everyone enjoys the video!
Because of issues with the file size, the video had to be uploaded as 8 separate clips. The following is the link to the first clip of 8. The rest of the clips will automatically play when the first one is complete.
Re:Re:Re:Mix is a project about the issues and implications surrounding fair use and copyright law. In 2007 YouTube released Content ID, a system that enables copyright holders to choose in advance whether they want to track, monetize, or remove their content from YouTube entirely. The system uses fingerprinting technology to identify a copyrighted work by comparing audio and video tracks. If either match, the video will be flagged by the system and the copyright holder will be notified. The problem is that Content ID doesn’t consider fair use. And it can’t, because only a human can discern between an infringing work and one that falls under fair use, a doctrine which allows for commentary, news reporting, research, teaching and scholarship, and criticism.
As makers we feel it is important to highlight these problems and inform other artists of their rights. All creative works are referential to some degree, and to prohibit works from entering the zeitgeist of Internet culture is in direct conflict with the original intention of copyright law: to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
The evolution of Facebook and Twitter has been a tale of two cities. Facebook valued privacy, and in turn, closed systems, for both its users and developers. Twitter, on the other hand, built its site on openness. As a result, Twitter has excelled in public information (like aggregating “real-time” trends, and enabling the Iranian election protests), while Facebook has remained the go-to platform for sharing and consuming private information (like personal photos, small group events, “likes”, etc.). Last week, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new Open Graph platform, which marks a substantial step towards openness for the social network, and could have a profound impact on the rest of the web.
To users, social networks are only as valuable as the number of people on them, multiplied by their willingness to share information. Twitter represents 100 million people who are freely sharing their thoughts with the rest of the world (you don’t need to be “following” someone or logged in to access >99% of tweets), but these thoughts are refined to 140 characters, and typically aren’t very intimate. Facebook, on the other hand, gives you no-holds-barred access to the personal information of your friends, but this group usually doesn’t exceed 1,000 people. And so we’ve ended up with two very different treasure troves of data: a little information from a lot of people in Twitter, and a lot of information from only a few people — from a given user’s perspective at least — in Facebook.
To developers who build third-party apps for these platforms, the difference between open and closed can have an even greater impact. From early on Twitter offered open, flexible, easy-to-use tools to interact with its service, and as a result, today more than 75% of Twitter’s traffic comes from 3rd-party apps. Facebook, in stark contrast, initially adopted a “walled-garden” approach, in which 3rd-party developers were constrained by strict rules, an inability to use Facebook data outside of the site itself, and a dizzying, closed programming interface that made it difficult to code anything for Facebook in the first place. Facebook’s Apps platform flopped (with one notable exception, the social gaming giant Zynga, which allegedly makes more money than Facebook, but that’s another story). The social network tried to play catch-up with a string of services that slowly increased openness at the expense of privacy: its Beacon program allowed the websites of big companies to interact with Facebook directly, but this ignited a barrage of privacy complaints and was shut down; then Facebook Connect enabled any website to replace its sign-in process with Facebook’s, but this didn’t gain particularly widespread adoption; and then last week Facebook finally figured it out.
Facebook’s new Open Graph platform could be the beginning of the end for Twitter. To date, Twitter has competed with Facebook by offering a more open platform, easier-to-use developer tools, and better social integration. With Open Graph, though, Facebook catches up in one fell swoop. Twitter will soon launch its new “Annotations” tool that will enable longer-format tweets more similar to status updates. While this may seem like a step forward, it is a risky move for Twitter, and a sign of the changing tides. At this time last year Facebook was trying to emulate Twitter: they streamlined their posting interface, highlighted the role of public status updates, and emphasized Facebook search. But now the tables have turned, and Twitter is becoming more like Facebook. I worry that for a company that rose to prominence purely on its simplicity and ease-of-use, ANY major feature additions (and Twitter has had virtually none since it started 4 years ago) risk undermining its own reason for existence.
I really hope that Twitter survives the Open Graph wave, because if it doesn’t, Facebook’s singular reign over the web could have some scary implications for users. I’m optimistic, though, because I think Twitter’s true potential — gleaning brand new insights from huge amounts of real-time data — hasn’t even begun to be harnessed.
Facebook’s recently announced Open Graph platform adds a social layer of information to the websites you already use. When you go to a site that incorporates it (and assuming you’re logged into Facebook, which is a pretty good bet considering nearly 500 million people are) you can see whom of your friends have signed-up for the service, or read the article, or bought the shoes, or the downloaded the band’s album. This social context is a new and important step for the web.
Google has defined the past decade of the Internet with its subtle but revolutionary insight that the value of a web page is related to the number of other web pages that link to it (which is at the heart of its famed Page Rank algorithm). Facebook could define the next decade of the web with a related but critically different idea: that the value of a web page is related to how many of your friends link to it.
So what does this mean for the future of the web? Arguably, Facebook’s new Open Graph puts it in a position to become the single most dominant platform on the Internet, and on a scale that we’ve never before seen. With 5 times more users than Twitter, access to deeper and more private information, and now, it’s open policy that enables painless deep-integration with third-party sites, Facebook could become the default standard of the Internet. One could imagine a world in which every sign-in process, every comment, every search, even, funnels through Facebook’s back-end.
This future, though, has frightening implications for privacy and competition. What has made the Internet so great in the first place is that it is the most open platform ever. It was set up without an official central governing body, and with no critical closed standards, so that anyone could use its simple tools to broadcast their information to the world. Facebook’s potential role as a backbone in the system threatens this openness. At the end of the day Facebook is a for-profit corporation with its own interests, and nothing prevents it from using its power to squash competitors, or using its data to entice advertisers at the expense of basic privacy.
The idea of adding a social layer to the web is a powerful one, but having it controlled by a single company is scary. Facebook’s Open Graph is less of an Open Graph, and more of a Facebook Graph. We can only hope that a truly open standard emerges so that the future of the Internet isn’t at the whim of a historically closed company.
“Believe it or not, in our patent office — now, this is embarrassing — this is an institution responsible for protecting and promoting innovation — our patent office receives more than 80 percent of patent applications electronically, then manually prints them out, scans them, and enters them into an outdated case management system. This is one of the reasons why the average processing time for a patent is roughly three years. Imminently solvable; hasn’t been solved yet.”
— President Barack Obama, Forum on Modernizing Government, White House, January 14, 2010
While growing tides of patent reform may be starting to roll in through congress, one of the biggest problems facing the state of patents in America has yet to be addressed: the efficiency of the US Patent and Trademark Office.
As it currently stands, the USPTO is in a state of tremendous disorder. It has a backlog of over 1.2 million patent applications. That is up from a backlog of 770,000 applications in the middle of 2009. This growth has been unprecedented, and sadly the USPTO has been unable to keep pace with this exploding growth.
The efficiency of this government agency has long been a joke of attorneys, due in part to the technological gaps that the President noted above, but also due to a long and continuing tradition of underfunding and understaffing. In mid-June of last year, the USPTO had in its employment 6,285 patent examiners. This staff can only process about 450,000 applications each year, which has made it impossible to handle the growling load of patents sitting in their back yard.
The Patent office itself aims for an 18-month turn around for each of the applications it receives, yet the average processing time currently is estimated to be around 3.5 years, with more complex applications taking even longer. At this rate, the USPTO is only going to sink deeper and deeper into a hole of patent filing backlogs without a ladder to climb out.
So what needs to be done?
Congress seems more worried about the lawsuits surrounding patent filings, acknowledged by the current patent reform bill in the works that notably lacks any solutions to this backlog of gross inefficiency. I feel that while their intentions are good, they have their priorities in the wrong place. Right now, we, as a nation, are trying to pull ourselves out of the financial sinkhole of 2008, and we’re actually getting there, slowly but surely. In the grand plan for economic improvement, much attention has been given to the encouragement of small-business growth and how to best achieve that. The fact is, many small businesses rely heavily upon their ability to secure patent rights for new and exciting ideas before deciding to bring their ideas to the market. While the legal battles around patent violations may have gotten a little ridiculous, and congress should step in, these battles affect the few, while small business growth effects the nation.
Those 1.2 million backlogged patents provide an incredible amount of wealth for the American economy and these small business. It is foreseeable then that by processing these applications more efficiently, the economy as a whole may feel a boost from small business finally securing patents for their exciting innovations. Companies will begin. Jobs will be created. Markets will re-expand.
Thus, I believe that the focus of patent reform right now needs to drive towards improved efficiency and funding. It needs a larger staff and resource system that can support the demand being placed on the system. It needs the tools to make the processing of applications not only digital, but also easy to submit, maintain, and find. It needs to become a component of the bureaucratic American government that is no longer a laughing stock of nation. Congress needs to help the USPTO get back on its feet, evolve into the digital age, and help America recover and thrive once more.
The need for patent reform has been repeatedly addressed over the past few years in Congress. The latest bill updating the Patent Reform Act of 2009 is the fourth consecutive attempt to restructure the patent law since 1952. Over the past fifty years, technology has dramatically transformed the market and has highlighted the dire need for patent reform.
Proponents of reform describe how the current system offers low-quality patents with broad claims, thus providing high earnings to manufacturers. With inconsistent court rulings, and common overcompensating damages, patents have in a sense strayed from the innovative purpose they were intended to promote. More recently, the Supreme Court has started to work towards improving patent quality and remedies.
The US Senate lead by Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and NY Senator Chuck Schumer have announced a bipartisan agreement to more directly address these problems. “The Patent Reform Act” aims to improve “patent quality” and to create an efficient system to enable a more strict granting of patents. Moreover, this Act serves to restrict damages calculations in many cases. With this system, broad claims will not succeed in deriving patents and will be prevented from hindering innovation in the marketplace.
Sen. Leahy
Among the various reforms, this Act creates a “first-window post-grant process” which is meant to provides a method to challenge patents that should not have been created in the first place. Additionally, the Act changes the law to give a patent to the first inventor that files for one and gives permission for other parties to challenge any of the pending applications. Furthermore, this Act will change the troubling and ineffective administrative review of patents; an adversarial inter-parties review led by a group of patent judges serves as a potential alternative to litigation. This Act hopes to restore the value of patents to serve their purpose. By reducing costs and creating a more productive process, the bill plans to create more jobs, and more freely allow for innovation.
Among the congressmen supporting the Act, various high-tech, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing companies as well as universities support this reform. According to Senator Leahy, the Act “is fair, reasonable and necessary for our continued economic development.”
Critics of the bill maintain that these revisions will work in favor of patent violators instead of inventors, and thus impede future innovation in America as it limits the patent owner from enforcing certain rights. Some argue that this reform should remain the task of the courts and not the congress. Others argue that the bill does not go far enough and lacks the proper reforms necessary to affect change.
If this bill passes, time will reveal as to how well these reforms advance the goals of promoting innovation and will demonstrate what reforms are still necessary. But until then, the debate will likely go on for some time.
On March 4th, United States Senate Judiciary Committee bipartisan leaders released the details of legislation aimed at reforming US patent laws. The new bill makes significant steps toward resolving longstanding conflict in efforts to revamp US law for patent quality and efficiency, and make it more compatible with international laws. The new bill, referred to as the “managers’ amendment“, is being said to provide a much needed boost to innovation. However, the bill must go to the full Senate for a vote, and must be passed in the House of Representatives as well.
The “Managers’ Amendment” includes nearly all of the improvements to the patent laws that were part of the Patent Reform Act of 2009, and contains changes to greater balance all users of the patent system. One of the reforms is particularly intriguing, the transition to a first-to-file system.
Currently, the USPTO runs under a “first-to-invent” system, which as the name suggest, gives rightful ownership of the patent to the first inventor of the innovation. Under this system there is the potential for the person who invented the innovation first, but failed to file it with the USPTO to be retroactively awarded the patent, thereby possibly leaving the person who filed the patent first to be stripped of it. This system creates many situations where patents must be disputed between two parties (or more). The complications of the first-to-invent system are outlined in this example provided by Wikipedia:
Assume Tom conceives of a new mousetrap on January 1, 2006. Tom works diligently from January 1, 2006, to February 1, 2006, to prepare a patent application, and Tom files his patent application on February 1, 2006. Thus, Tom constructively reduced his invention to practice on February 1, 2006. Assume Jerry conceives of the same mousetrap on January 10, 2006, and diligently files a patent application on the new mousetrap on January 20, 2006. Under the first-to-invent system, Tom is entitled to the patent on the mousetrap, because he conceived the mousetrap before Jerry and still worked diligently to reduce it to practice by filing. Actual and constructive reduction to practice should be distinguished. Filing a diligently prepared application constitutes constructive reduction to practice only and can be antedated by evidence of an actual reduction to practice. If both Tom and Jerry claimed the same invention, the USPTO would institute an interference proceeding between Tom and Jerry to review evidence of conception, reduction to practice and diligence.
As a further extension of the example, assume Tweety conceived of the same mousetrap on December 31, 1990. Tweety never told anyone about the mousetrap and did not work on reducing the mousetrap to practice for many years due to financial reasons. Tweety finally actually reduced the mousetrap to practice on February 15, 2006. Because Tweety did not diligently work to reduce the invention to practice in the period before others’ conception of the same invention, he is not entitled to a patent over Tom or Jerry.
Proponents believe that this transition will serve to rid the confusions of patent ownership leading to interference proceeding, which take away from both USPTO funds as well as degrade the overall efficiency of the US patent system. Under this first-to-file system, the argument of who initially invented the innovation is moot, thereby allowing USPTO funds and time to be diverted towards further review of the influx of patents. The trainstion also enters the US into the same system that many of the worlds leading nations (UK and Japan), which relieves a major complication to a transition to a more internationalized patent system.
However, there are plenty of potential drawbacks to this system transition. Having a firs-to-file system gives incentive for inventors to file patents for innovations which may not be at a quality high enough to deserve a patent. From a practical standpoint, if emphasis is placed on the speed at which a patent can be filed, the overall quality of the innovation may decrease as a factor of speed. The bill has not been passed yet, so only time will tell if the pros outweigh the cons, hopefully it doesnt turn patent seeking into one big rat race.
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