Artifacts and Natural Kinds: Children’s Judgments About Whether Objects Are Owned “People’s behavior in relation to objects depends on whether they are owned. But how do people judge whether objects are owned? We propose that people expect human-made objects (artifacts) to be more likely to be owned than naturally occurring objects (natural kinds), and we examine the development of these expectations in young children. Experiment 1 found that when shown pictures of familiar kinds of objects, 3-year-olds expected artifacts to be owned and inanimate natural kinds to be non-owned. In Experiments 2A and 2B, 3– 6-year-olds likewise had different expectations about the ownership of unfamiliar artifacts and natural kinds. Children at all ages viewed unfamiliar natural kinds as non-owned, but children younger than 6 years of age only endorsed artifacts as owned at chance rates. In Experiment 3, children saw the same pictures but were also told whether objects were human-made. With this information provided, even 3-year-olds viewed unfamiliar artifacts as owned. Finally, in Experiment 4, 4- and 5-year-olds chose unfamiliar artifacts over natural kinds when judging which object in a pair belongs to a person, but not when judging which the person prefers. These experiments provide first evidence about how children judge whether objects are owned. In contrast to claims that children think about natural kinds as being similar to artifacts, the current findings reveal that children have differing expectations about whether they are owned.” http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/dev-ofp-neary.pdf doi: 10.1037/a0025661

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So What If Corporations Aren’t People? “Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.” http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873158

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Victoria Espinel, the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator

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SCOTUS Affirms High Standard of Proving Patents Invalid “Today the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Circuit’s rule that, in litigation, a patent may only be proved invalid by clear and convincing evidence. EFF filed an amicus brief in the case – Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Limited Partnership – supporting Microsoft’s request that the standard for proving invalidity merely be by a preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) rather than clear and convincing evidence (a high probability). [...]” https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/06/supreme-court-affirms-high-standard-proving

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Richard Stallman

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Microsoft joins pre-emptive patent protection program http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/microsoft-joins-pre-emptive-patent-protection-program.ars

https://articleonepartners.com

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Netflix Is Killing BitTorrent in the United States http://torrentfreak.com/netflix-is-killing-bittorrent-in-the-us-110427/

Competing with free: anime site treats piracy as a market failure http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/competing-with-free-anime-site-treats-piracy-as-a-market-failure.ars

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/the-only-way-to-stop-piracy-is-to-cut-prices

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“[...] how about if Google *did* buy the music industry? That would solve its licensing problems at a stroke. Of course, the anti-trust authorities around the world would definitely have something to say about this, so it might be necessary to tweak the idea a little.

How about if a consortium of leading Internet companies – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Baidu, Amazon etc. – jointly bought the entire music industry, and promised to license its content to anyone on a non-discriminatory basis? [...]” http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-google-should-buy-music-industry.html

Cf. http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/2118220/Why-Google-Should-Buy-the-Music-Industry

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The Continuing Saga of the Gene Patenting Case

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/04/nature-vs-nuture-the-continuing-saga-of-the-gene-patenting-case/73359/

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“Why the US needs to blacklist, censor pirate websites”: “Piracy runs rampant on the Internet, but Daniel Castro says it doesn’t have to be this way. He wants the US government to start creating a blacklist of Internet sites; once approved by a judge, each site would be cut off from American Internet users at the Domain Name System (DNS) level, where readable locations like “arstechnica.com” are turned into numerical IP addresses. US-based credit card companies would be forbidden from doing any business with the site, and US-based advertising networks couldn’t serve ads to the site. [...]

I spoke to him recently about Web blocking, censorship, and why he believes that deep packet inspection (DPI) of Internet traffic by ISPs is more like Gmail than wiretapping. As for due process, Castro says COICA is fair—but he’s open to some tweaks”: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/04/why-the-us-needs-to-censor-pirate-websites.ars

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6Reasons Google Books Failed + Judge Chin’s original opinion:

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/mar/28/six-reasons-google-books-failed/

http://thepublicindex.org/docs/amended_settlement/opinion.pdf

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7 kinds of objections to the Google Books settlement: http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/03/22/inside_judge_chins_opinion

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Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie? The Supply of New Recorded Music
Since Napster: “In the decade since Napster, file-sharing has undermined the
protection that copyright affords recorded music, reducing recorded
music sales. What matters for consumers, however, is not sellers’
revenue but the surplus they derive from new music. The legal
monopoly created by copyright is justified by its encouragement of
the creation of new works, but there is little evidence on this
relationship. The file-sharing era can be viewed as a large-scale
experiment allowing us to check whether events since Napster have
stemmed the flow of new works. We assemble a novel dataset on the
number of high quality works released annually, since 1960, derived
from retrospective critical assessments of music such
best-of-the-decade lists. This allows a comparison of the quantity
of new albums since Napster to 1) its pre-Napster level, 2)
pre-Napster trends, and 3) a possible control, the volume of new
songs since the iTunes Music Store’s revitalization of the single.
We find no evidence that changes since Napster have affected the
quantity of new recorded music or artists coming to market. We
reconcile stable quantities in the face of decreased demand with
reduced costs of bringing works to market and a growing role of
independent labels.” http://papers.nber.org/papers/W16882

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“The only way to stop piracy is to cut prices. That’s the verdict of a major new academic study that reckons copyright theft won’t be halted by ‘three strikes’ broadband disconnections, increasing censorship or draconian new laws brought in under the anti-counterfeiting treaty ACTA.

The Media Piracy Project, published last week by the Social Science Research Council, reports that illegal copying of movies, music, video games and software is “better described as a global pricing problem” – and the only way to tackle it is for copyright holders to charge consumers less money for their wares.

The three-year study into media piracy in emerging economies concentrated on countries such as Russia, Mexico and India, where piracy is endemic.

The academics concluded that societies where piracy is rife are no more immoral, or less willing to pay for content – the problem is that in those parts of the world, legitimate CDs, DVDs and software are five to ten times higher relative to local incomes than they are in the US and Europe.

No amount of anti-piracy enforcement will change the economics that drive copyright theft, say the report’s authors. They claim to have seen, “little evidence – and indeed few claims – that enforcement efforts to date have had any effect whatsoever on the overall supply of pirated goods. Our work suggests, rather, that piracy has grown dramatically by most measures in the past decade. [...]

The report condemns what it calls the “strong moralization of the debate” about an issue that the authors claim is really a matter of price and consumer demand.

Interestingly, the report itself is distributed under a ‘Consumer’s Dilemma’ licence that charges $8 to residents of ‘high-income’ countries – but offers it free for non-commercial use everywhere else.” http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/3/15/cutting-prices-only-way-stop-piracy/”

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“[...] get rid of the power. Political power is, in fact, the source of the wealth concentrations that fund the industry lobbyists and the campaign contributions. The wealth of big business and the plutocracy is funneled to them by subsidies, protections, oligopoly markups on state-cartelized markets, scarcity rents from artificial property rights, etc., none of which would exist without the state.

Getting rid of the power seemingly involves a Catch-22: How can you dismantle the state policies underlying the political means to wealth, when you’re outspent and outgunned in the policy-making process by those who profit from it? How do you change the system to prevent their making money off it, in a system rigged in favor of the big money?

The answer: Get rid of the money. At first glance this seems to be a circular argument, since — to repeat — we can’t challenge their control of the political means to wealth.

No, we get rid of the money in politics by undermining — at the economic level — the means by which the plutocracy makes its money. For example, we destroy the proprietary content industries’ ability to make money — not by contesting their power in the political arenas where legislation like the DMCA is passed — but by combating their ability to enforce the copyright laws they make money from. We’ll probably never secure the repeal of DMCA in Congress. But we can destroy the record and movie industries’ profit economically, with weapons like torrent download, strong encryption, and proxies — and laugh ourselves silly at the blustering of clowns like Lieberman and Biden. [...]

We solve the problem of money in politics, not by contesting money’s control of the political process — but by economically destroying the political profiteers’ power to make money, and rendering their political power useless.” http://c4ss.org/content/6416

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