We seem to live in the age of the infinitely extended copyright term. The date when Disney's beloved Mickey Mouse passes into the public domain is nominally the start of 2024, but it may well turn out to be, as Mary Bono wanted, forever minus one day. That said, the political climate has changed since the last copyright extension, and there is some reason to think this might be it. If the copyright machine, at long last, stops, we'll just have to make do with somewhere around 100 years.
In the face of these gargantuan terms, heavy-handed copyright enforcement, and de-facto elimination of fair use by automated takedowns, it sometimes seems like this whole copyright malarkey is much more trouble than it's worth. Or maybe we should go back to 14-year copyrights, for which there is some theoretical evidence. But it's important to remember that, as with any investment, there is a balance to be struck between rewarding a contribution and providing an indefinite free ride on the basis of some long-past effort.
Actually, the situation reminds me a lot of startups, where there is a very substantial issue with early equity in a company. That equity is meant to be the compensation that founders and early-stage employees receive for their investment in building the company, which then pays out over the life of the company. The only problem is, what happens if one of the founders just leaves? To avoid this problem, equity is given on a vesting schedule, which means that you don't get all of it right away. But even someone whose shares have fully vested can become an unacceptable burden if they leave. A later hire could be contributing far more to the success of the company and get comparatively little.
And beyond startups, this seems like the general thesis of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Centry: that when the value of having things is greater than the value of making things, you have created a dangerous and unstable situation. You need people to keep making things for your economy to work, but they're unlikely to want to do that if they see other people being rewarded highly for resting on their (or their ancestors') laurels.
Piketty's solution is a global wealth tax. That is, to artificially add depreciation to capital. Every year your existing wealth would proportionally reduce itself, with the result that creating new wealth becomes proportionally more valuable. There is a similar solution to the startup problem. Equity is diluted over time as new investors come in, making the existing shares a lower proportion of the (usually more valuable) pie. It's not unheard of for companies to issue new shares non-proportionally to specifically dilute one founder. Mark Zuckerberg, for example, did this at Facebook (and, in fairness, got sued for it).
I feel like there is a similar solution waiting out there for copyright. It is true that we should reward people for making things, and, inevitably, that will turn into a reward for having made something in the past. But for how long? And, more importantly, why is it a function with a single step from 100% to 0%? Surely Disney's creation in 1928 can't be worth the same in 2023, and then nothing in 2024.
What would an artificial deprecation schedule for copyrightk look like? Maybe the bar for acceptable fair use could lower throughout the life of the work. Or perhaps something like compulsory licensing with a rate that decreases over time. Another interesting alternative I've read is to make holding the copyright beyond some nominal term (14 years, perhaps?) cost increasingly large maintenance fees.
I'm not saying this would remove the need for other kinds of copyright reform, but it would certainly seem fairer if I had a stronger claim to something I made today than Disney has to something made almost ninety years ago by a man who died fifty years ago. Especially when all that old creative wealth, if unlocked, could provide the raw materials for a new generation of creators who are otherwise on their own.
There's an interesting dichotomy I've been thinking about, to do with relatability. Most of us, I suspect, like to think of ourselves as relatable. That is, we believe that the things we feel or observe generalise to the rest of the population. This turns out to be pretty important because you could, for example, observe that you are often tired in the afternoons, and then relate that experience to someone in conversation. If that person has the same experience, you both feel connected by it, and comforted that other people feel the same things as you.
It's also important for reasoning about other people. Let's say you are grossed out by spiders. Do you throw a spider-themed halloween party? Well, specifically, you're grossed out by actual spiders and something in particular about their behaviour, not just by anything that claims to be a spider. People in spider costumes, cartoon spiders, adorable plush spiders and the Porsche 550 Spyder are all fine. This may not be obvious if you do not feel that spiders are gross, or if your experience of spider-grossness is very different from that of others.
So relatability is good. Where's the dichotomy? There's another thing many of us want to be, and that is exceptional. Perhaps most people need 8-9 hours of sleep but you are proud of being able to function fine on 6. You might have a particular aptitude for languages, or instruments, or horses or whatever. Even if it's not some genetic or environmental predisposition, you could be exceptional in what you've achieved, in how hard you've worked and how much time you've put in relative to others. There are lots of ways to be exceptional and being exceptional is usually considered a good thing.
But you can't be both relatable and exceptional. If you're amazing at the violin, chances are you're not going to relate to many people about music, and definitely not the violin. If you're a few standard deviations off the beaten track in intelligence, your thoughts will be less relatable than if you were more average. And if you work hard to hone yourself into someone great, an exceptional person who does exceptional things, the end result will be that it is hard to relate to people who aren't.
Which isn't to say that being exceptional isn't worth pursuing. Being in a situation where you're doing so well that it's hard to relate to people is the definition of a good problem to have. But it is still a problem, and in particular it seems worth being aware that your opinions may become less relevant even as they become more advanced. Worth thinking about, too, is that the risk of becoming alienated, or the comfort of being relatable, may hold you back from becoming more exceptional.
In some cases, that could even be the right decision to make.
This was a failure fairly similar in nature to missing my prototype goal last week. I'm basically just a bit overloaded at the moment. Between the prototpes, writing, other work, and that statistics courase I'm doing, it's been very easy to get off track. I generally think being busy is a crutch, but I'm also not convinced that my current level of activity is actually too much if I can learn to manage it better.
I'm also hopeful that in some ways this current time pressure will serve as a testing ground for the way I'm doing things. For something like the prototypes, I would normally like to have a more developed habit before testing it, but I'm happy enough to make hay from this situation while I can.
My solution to my most recent failure, ensuring I was a day ahead, worked particularly well for the week I kept it up. I didn't make the same commitment for the following week because I thought I might not need to. Evidently, that was not the case! So, in the interest of following where the evidence leads, I will once again commit to finishing Monday's post on Sunday.
With any luck, I'll come out of this with better and more resilient habits than before. If not, I guess we'll all need to get used to a lot of failure posts until things calm down. Let's hope for the former!
This week was an incremental improvement from last week's fairly unimpressive effort. I committed to one every day this time around, but I only got 3 done:
I've been meaning to try out Elm for a while, so I thought I'd try to make a clone of EveryTimeZone. I got a bit thrown by Elm's effect model, which was so pure I had to go to some extra effort to get it to use the current time. Figured it out eventually, but it meant the app was basically a single input field and a label with the time in it. Elm seems cool though.
I figured I'd take another look at Rust, which I tried out in a previous prototype. I wanted to build a crappy CouchDB-like web api for a database. This time I used a higher-level web framework called Iron, which saved a lot of messing around with the lower-level http library. I even got the database library working, but didn't manage to figure out how to concurrently access the database from different requests.
This was a pretty fun idea: a Big-O estimator. If you give it a function and a way to call that function with increasingly large inputs, it figures out what the complexity of that function is. I originally tried to write this in PureScript, but its build situation has gotten even worse(!) than the last time I used it, so I just did it in CoffeeScript. Right now it doesn't really distinguish between the complexity classes clearly, but I think if I learned a bit about regressions I could make it neater.
My hypothesis last week was that missing my goal was a one-off issue, but I'm beginning to think that actually the success the week before may have been the one-off. I was still pretty busy during the week, and the main culprit was just simply running out of time. For next week, my plan is to keep better track of that time. I've been off the timetabling bandwagon for a while but I'm starting it up again in the hope that it'll let me keep on top of things better.
With this in mind, I'm going to commit to the same again for next week. If that doesn't work, I'll look at scaling it down to a lower frequency and see if I can build back up from there.
A friend once put me on to this great series of little puzzle games online. Each one had a hidden star for you to uncover, with a slightly different trick and no instructions. The first few you would just move something out of the way to reveal the star, or move things around into a star shape, and so on. But they slowly got harder and more devious. Finally, I hit one that completely stumped me. I clicked everywhere, moved everything, pressed every button I could think of, but nothing happened. My friend was laughing the whole time until I finally gave up. And then the star appeared.
The solution was to do nothing. And, of course, that was the one thing I'd never think to try. When faced with a problem, I want to poke it, prod it, investigate it, test its limits, develop theories, try things, come at it from different angles and, above all, just do something. You don't gain any information by doing nothing, you don't learn from your mistakes by doing nothing, and you don't make progress by doing nothing. Except this time.
And, actually, there are other situations that benefit from inaction. Sleeping, for example, requires doing nothing. That can be very difficult to do, because trying to sleep is still doing something. Meditation, similarly, is mostly the art of not thinking about things. Removing an association only happens by not thinking about and reinforcing that association. And, of particular note, coming up with ideas also requires inaction.
Lastly, there are situations where you aren't able to meaningfully control the outcome. Usually not many and not completely, but there are some situations where the outcome is beyond your control. Faced with something you can't change, or that improves when you don't try to change it, the only sensible reaction is to do nothing. Anything else is just wasted energy.