Incoming email yesterday, from my friend Amoy:
Hi Brian
Hi.
Hope all is well.
That would be a bit of an exaggeration, but, to answer what you mean rather than what you say: yes.
[… personal stuff that is not BCB business …]
I reply, ditto. Then …
I have been keeping a bit up-to-date with your life through your culture blog. All of us here at Londoneasy love it and I must say, you've become quite good with that camera – so many of your photos lend themselves to a thousand stories, which is absolutely brilliant. …
Well, yes, indeed, thank you thank you.
… I am sure you know this though.
It's good to be told again, even so.
A few months ago we launched a new Features Section within Londoneasy. I have a team of four who write daily articles. They are very much in the same vein as yours – short, quirky, anecdotal. We look for stories that try to capture Londoners' preoccupations with the city.
And occasionally profound. Don't forget occasionally profound.
Last week one of my journalists had the cheek of borrowing two of your images for articles we have online: one titled Home Truths, and another titled Culture: Empire in the Capital.We have given you credit for the images. This has only just come to my attention so apologies for not asking in before using. If you are not okay with this, I will take them down ASAP.
Seriously, and as I said to Amoy in my email back, this is fine. My line on other people using my photos is: go ahead, but please give me credit for them, as Londoneasy did. Also, please do, if you are making tons of money, give me a tiny crumb – to encourage the others and all that. If not then don't bother. I leave that to you.
The photopostings here that Amoy is referring to are this one about Foxtonspersons, and this one about Bomber Harris.
My plan for personal global domination includes people using my photos for free and me becoming a world famous layabout instead of the mere layabout that I am now, at which point, then, well, I'll take it from there. I'm just another blogger in other words. So copy away.
Besides which, what Amoy is apologising for having done is what I do anyway, namely not ask permission, give credit, and stand ready to take them down instantly if there is any problem or objection. This seems to be emerging as the blogosphere norm. So far, despite numerous featurings of other people's photos, I have had no grief whatsoever from aggrieved photo-posters.
A final thought. Although I did get credits from Londoneasy, I did not, because that is not how they do things, get any links back to my original postings. Fair enough. But, not problem. Ruminating upon this circumstance, I once again found myself being grateful that my name is Brian Micklethwait, rather than something more like Brian Smith or John Smith. Google for John Smith, and the problem is, of course: which John Smith? Suppose you are seeking the John Smith who, during the Peninsular War, married a Spanish Bride (to quote the title of Georgette Heyer's most amusing novel about that gentleman and lady), who ended up being immortalised, or so I recall reading, in the name of the city of Ladysmith in South Africa. But suppose instead that you get deluged with references to a drearily dead Labour politician. You see the problem. But if you google Brian Micklethwait, you get me and only me. Hurrah. (Caution: if you google only Micklethwait, you get a lot of stuff about my Nth (as N tends to infinity) cousin John Micklethwait.) This means that if Brian Micklethwait gets credited by name for a photo, then that, from the point of view of me building my reputation, is sufficient. No need for a link, because google will quickly find you those blog postings anyway.
Are lots of people even now changing their names from John Smith (or similar) to John Cratchetweaver (or similar), or even to Themistocles Cratchetweaver (just to be sure), for this one reason? It would make sense.
My latest CNE Intellectual Property piece is up. It was triggered by the student who is suing Ground Zero architect David Childs for allegedly nicking one of his student designs to use for the big tower at the heart of the scheme. I then talked about academic idea-stealing in other fields, especially science.
This article, linked to today by A&LD, discusses how the expansion of science may have lowered its ethical standards, a matter also touched on by Michael Jennings (recent picture of him there), in the following email which he sent me in response to my CNE piece:
Whilst academia is indeed full of asymmetric relationships in which more senior academics gain credit for the work of younger people, most scientific fields are small enough, and the participants meet each other at conferences and talk to one another often enough, that in the case of any important work everybody knows who actually did it, regardless of whose name is on the paper. In practice, it is usually a case of figuring out which of the multiple people whose names are on the paper actually did the work. Maybe this is changing as academia gets bigger and more corporate, but I am not so sure. For one thing, scientific research responds to this by breaking up into more and more fields with a relatively small number of individuals in them, and I think this is unlike architecture. It varies from field to field though. Some fields consist of large laboratories with hundreds of people, but most are as I describe.
And the most asymmetric relationship that exists in scientific academia is that between a supervisor/adviser and a PhD student. In most circumstances a supervisor has a de facto veto over whether a student gets a PhD. This can lead to abuses of various kinds, and also to somewhat weird human relationships. Nothing bad happened to me personally in this regard, but I have seen one or two slightly dubious things happen to other people.
Rather amusingly if you have done a PhD, science fiction writer Vernor Vinge – a former mathematics professor himself – wrote a story a year or so back about a professor who has a virtual reality simulation of one of his students created and told that he has to get so much work done in the next year, or he will not be allowed to get his PhD and runs it over and over again to get this hypermotivated student to do near infinite amounts of work for him.
And as for your final comment about someone suing Nobel Laureates, the interesting issue is that in the sciences the Nobel Prize committees have credibility, and scientific Nobel Prizes are considered such a great honour at least partly because they are seen to have almost invariably been given to the right people, and that means the committee goes to great trouble to see that they are given to the people who actually did the work. In particularly controversial circumstances, there have been a number of incidents where people have not received the Nobel prize until decades after they did the original work, and where the prize was awarded within a year or two of the death of the more senior academic who laid claim to the work. More senior academics are usually older, so waiting for the
wrong person to die before giving the award to the right person is a workable strategy.
One thing that comes into play here is that there is no limit on the number of authors that may appear on a paper published in most journals, whereas a Nobel prize in the sciences is never shared by more than three people, which means that if the wrong people are awarded a Nobel prize, the right ones usually miss out. Even within this constraint, though, simply giving the prize to the three people whose names are on the paper is never done. In such circumstances the prize tends to be shared between people doing work in the same or closely related fields for different universities/laboratories rather than by people who worked together.
You can actually tell certain things about who did what by the way in which the prize money is split in a three way award. If the three recipients each get a third of the money, this means either that the three of them did related but separate pieces of work, or that the three of them were involved in doing the same piece of work (either as collaborators or (more often) by coming up with the same results independently). If one of the recipients gets 50% of the money and the others 25% each, then this means that the one who got 50% did a separate but related piece of work to the other two, who were involved in doing the same work, either together or independently.
As stated in the previous post, I have become an instant expert on intellectual property, or at any rate I need instantly to become an expert on the expertise of others on this subject. Here's my first shot at it. Tell me what I've got wrong, if you've a mind to. Or if that would be quicker, tell me what I've got right. Be as severe as you like, I won't mind. This is not my Last Word on the subject, it is my first throw of the dart at the dart-board.
So, to begin:
It is often said that we "should see both sides of the issue" as if that was automatically a virtue, and maybe if is, if there are only two sides. But life is seldom that simple, and with the matter of intellectual property rights I believe we can discern a minimum of three sides to the argument, each of which I shall now caricature.
Position One: Capitalism and free markets are wonderful, and are responsible for all the economically good things in the world, and without property that can be no capitalism, and no markets. What is more, property rights in what you (or others whom you have traded with) have created with intellectual effort are no different from property which consists of physical stuff or which has been created by applying physical labour to physical stuff. If you thought of it and wrote it down, or recorded it, or filmed it, then it's yours, and anyone who uses it without your permission is no different morally, and should be treated no different legally, to someone who steals your car or your clothes or your bank balance.
Position Two: Capitalism and free markets are evil, and are responsible for all the economically bad things in the world, and without property that can be no capitalism and no markets, and that's good. All property is theft, including "intellectual property". However, the times being what they are, we can't publicly say that we want to smash capitalism, all of it, and expect to get much of a hearing from civilised people. So we must sneak up on capitalism, attacking it at its weakest points. One of which is "intellectual property". People are less willing (see Position Three below) to mount a robust defence of intellectual property, and this is therefore one of capitalism's weak spots, which we should attack it fiercely, making whatever use we can of Position Three arguments, even though we actually despise these arguments as pro-capitalist, pro-free-market gibberish.
Position Three: Capitalism and free markets are wonderful, and are responsible for all the economically good things in the world, and without property that can be no capitalism, and no markets. However, "intellectual" goods are not like the usual sort of goods. If I use your car, you cannot simultaneously use it. But if I use your idea, you are not thereby prevented from using it. You know when someone has stolen your car, but it may be years or never before you realise that they have "stolen" your idea. Ideas are not scarce. What is more, they are now extremely easy to copy. Maybe intellectual property rights were once upon a time necessary to ensure that creators, inventors and innovators were rewarded for their creativity, inventiveness and innovation, but in the new digital age, such restrictions are no longer necessary. If you proclaim an idea, and that idea reaches people with whom you have no contractual relationship whatsoever, by what right may you forbid them to act on "your" idea? And how do you propose to enforce "your" intellectual property rights, if not with a huge apparatus of state power, such as would threaten capitalism and free trade rather than defend it.
Very few people adopt any of these extreme positions in their pure form. Most veer more or less strongly in the direction of one while seeing the force of at least one of the others. For whatever it may be worth, the only thing I am sure of is in rejecting Position Two. I am attracted by the idea of a world dominated by Position Three, but suspect that this may never be either possible or indeed desirable. It seems to me that … But no, I'll leave any more of that for later.
I have just wangled my way into a part-time but actual, real, show-me-the-money job, writing about intellectual property rights, for this recently launched new website-stroke-blog (at their website they call it a "website" so as not to frighten anyone) run by the Centre for the New Europe.
The Centre for the New Europe is run by a friend of mine, but despite that it is an old-school Think Tank, with an office, with a long, winding corridor with lots of different rooms attached to it, lots of computers crammed with databases, several photocopiers, numerous telephones. It holds meetings and organises events. If you play your cards right, it might even serve you a free lunch. It plans months and for some purposes years in advance. It has a Business Plan, full of Objectives, which to an extraordinary degree (i.e. sometimes) it actually achieves. Solitary maniac in bedsit attached to one computer ranting with extreme eccentricity three or four times per day about you-never-know-what-the-hell next (i.e. a blogger) it is not.
I am to do one posting for this new blog-stroke-website per week, and that leaves me no space to indulge in public self-education. My job is to help readers to educate themselves, about intellectual property, by plugging them into useful stuff, not by engulfing them in my own intellectual confusions. (Because frankly, I'm unclear where I stand on this issue.)
I have been hired because of my general blog "presence", and presumably because it is reckoned that I can write, rather than because of any special knowledge of IP. I will help to make this new blog work by linking to from Samizdata, and by reporting on interesting IP debates in the blogosphere generally, rather than by contributing anything very special or original myself. Me being me I am bound to mouth off sooner or later, but I aim to curb that tendency, certainly to begin with.
But I do need that IP self-education nevertheless, and I intend to use this blog (along with all my usual kind of stuff) to do some of that. As I get into the subject I will also do IP self-education at Samizdata, once I've arrived at some genuinely interesting questions.
So, what I'm saying is, I need, if any readers here are able to supply such things, links to recent IP debates and articles and discussions, in blogs and elsewhere (anywhere linkable to), with particular emphasis on recent. Heartiest thanks in anticipation. Even a tiny few useful links would be of immense value (only one posting a week, remember) and even if they don't have any visible consequences over at CNE-IP, they will still be valuable to me and will still be hugely appreciated.
