indessed roscivs

The phrase “Daylight Saving Time” never made much sense to me. You’re not saving any daylight—you’re just moving it around in the day. When I told this to N-san, he suggested the phrase, “Evening Daylight Extension Time,” which makes more sense.

DST has never really affected my life too much. I tend to wake up earlier in the summer naturally anyway, when the sun starts rising earlier, so when DST comes around I usually just change both my clock and my alarm, so I’m waking up a nominal hour later, but at the same unadjusted time. (And usually about an hour earlier than I do in the dead of winter.)

I was contemplating the usefulness of DST today, and I realized that most people don’t work like this. Either they don’t really have as flexible a schedule, or they just don’t have the fortitude to wake up earlier without a lying clock, but either way, I think the foundational principle of DST is that people wake up at the same time year round. Once I realized this fact, the other pieces started falling into place.

See, if the time zone is perfectly adjusted, then noon falls at the exact middle of the daylight hours. At a relatively extreme latitude, the variance in daylight hours might be, for example, 9 hours of daylight in the dead of winter, and 14 hours in the middle of summer. That would put sunrise and sunset 4.5 hours on either side of noon in winter—7:30 am and 4:30 pm—and 7 hours on either side in summer—5:00 am and 7:00 pm in winter.

If we make two reasonable assumptions—that people wake up at the same time year round, and that people don’t like waking up before sunrise—then we should find people waking up around 7:30 am throughout the year (and going to bed around 11:30 pm). In the winter months, this is perfect—but by the time summer rolls around, people are sleeping through several hours of sunshine in the morning. Since people (according to our assumption) aren’t going to naturally wake up earlier on their own, we introduce the “lying clock” to pretend that 6:30 is really 7:30. So now people are waking up at 6:30 am and going to bed at 10:30 pm, and they get an “extra” hour of sunlight during their day.

Note that, with this model, switching to use Daylight Saving Time year-round doesn’t help any, because now you’ve put sunrise in the winter at 8:30 am. People don’t want to wake up in the dark, so you’re back to square one.

It’s too bad they don’t, though. I read an intriguing (if tongue-in-cheek) proposal on Slashdot during my reading on the subject. The idea was that, instead of tying winter sunrise to 7:30 am (and the sun’s zenith at noon), instead stick it around 1 pm (with the summer sunset falling around 10:30 am). The thought is that if people could be persuaded to get out of bed and do their daily commute in the dark (which many people do in the winter anyway), they’d be treated with a beautiful sunrise on their lunch break every day, and after they get off work they’d still have plenty of sunlight even in the wintertime (the sun would set around 10 pm), and in the summertime they’d be going to sleep with sunlight to spare even if they partied until midnight. You’d have the core sunlight hours of the day during the hours when you’re most likely to be outside enjoying them.

I’m not quite sure I’m ready to switch to such a novel scheme (as I’m one of those stubborn folks who hates waking up when it’s dark outside), but it certainly would be nice to have as much daylight as I cared to spend, every day, 365 days a year.

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Copyright violation is not “theft”, it is breaching a government mandated monopoly. It is morally equivalent to using Skype in a country where the government has granted one operator a monopoly on telecommunications.

Discuss.

Remember many months ago when I wrote a post called The Tradeoffs of Copyright?

The “sweet spot”—the length of copyright that I think is optimal—is when you take a look at the cost to society of X, compare it to the benefit to society of Y, and maximize the result: in other words, max(B(Y) - C(X)). Where is that sweet spot?

It turns out that a PhD student at Cambridge University has attempted to plug in some real numbers and see what comes out. Ars Technica reports:

He develops a set of equations focused specifically on the length of copyright and uses as much empirical data as possible to crunch the numbers. The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).

Interestingly enough, the original length of copyright terms when the United States was founded was 14 years (although renewable for another 14 years, for a total of 28). But over time we’ve been moving further and further away from that optimal number, closer and closer to forever minus one day.

(Rufus Pollock’s paper, full of equations and calculations, can be found in its entirety on his web site.)

In last Wednesday’s post, I linked to a New York Times editorial entitled, “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” I found the article maddening to say the least. Here’s how it starts out:

What if, after you had paid the taxes on earnings with which you built a house, sales taxes on the materials, real estate taxes during your life, and inheritance taxes at your death, the government would eventually commandeer it entirely? This does not happen in our society … to houses. Or to businesses. Were you to have ushered through the many gates of taxation a flour mill, travel agency or newspaper, they would not suffer total confiscation. … That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren.

Oh my. Where to begin!

First off, the comparison with taxation is completely off the wall. Copyrights are not “taxed at 100%” after life-plus-seventy. That would be equivalent to the copyright still existing in perpetuity, but with all royalties going to government coffers.

Expiration of copyright is an entirely different thing—it is restoring the creative work back to its original state, where it can be copied freely by anybody. The shackles of copyright are a temporary nuisance for the greater good, not some natural state of things.

One might assert that the same argument could be made for physical property as well. The natural state of a piece of land is that anyone can use it freely, and only by the use of force can you restrict that use to a single person.

But, unfortunately, the natural state of a piece of land is not that anyone can use it freely. Land and physical property, unlike creative works, are rival goods. My use of a piece of land reduces your ability to use it—I can’t build a house on it at the same time that you’re planting crops at the same time as somebody else is building a parking lot.

The opposite is true with intellectual goods. I can read a copy of 1984 at the same time you’re reading a copy without diminishing anyone’s enjoyment. In fact, if there were some magical way to copy a book instantaneously for free to every person on the planet, it still wouldn’t diminish in any way my ability to appreciate that book.

Furthermore, someone can, at the same time, be creating a musical based on the book, producing a movie version, translating the book into dozens of different languages, and writing music based on the book, all without stepping on each others’ toes.

So Helprin’s analogizing falls flat. Physical property is just plain different from intellectual “property”. The public good from expired copyright and the public good from government-seized physical property are in two totally separate realms.

Finally, Helprin skims right over what I consider one of the core issues surrounding copyright. He quotes Jefferson,

ideas are, “like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and, like the air in which we breathe, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

“But ideas are immaterial to the question of copyright,” Helprin dismisses Jefferson with a single sentence. I find his glib rebuttal amusing.

While ideas are not copyrightable (only the tangible expression of them is), Jefferson’s point goes a little deeper than that.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

The natural state of creative works is to be easily copyable, enriching all of humanity in a way that only nonrivalrous goods can. When you place restrictions on them, you reduce the freedom people have to produce derivative works of ideas that came before them.

The only reason we have such a wealth of new creative works being created every day is because of the rich source of public domain ideas and creativity that prefaced our existence. Do you honestly think that, if every tangible expression that existed in the world today were fully copyrighted, from Mozart’s symphonies to Plato’s volumes, you could manage to eke out the tiniest bit of non-infringing creativity?

I’m ambivalent on the topic of copyright. Not on its current length, of course—I believe the Founding Fathers meant it when they said “limited Times“. I think in today’s fast-paced world, anything past twenty or thirty years would be way beyond the maximum benefit to society.

What I’m conflicted on is where that optimal length lies. At times, I’m tempted to say zero—people are creative animals, and will produce creative works even without guaranteed compensation (I certainly do). And even then, there are many ways to guarantee an income even without copyright (such as the kind of creative work I am employed to do).

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

But then I think of Isaac Asimov, one of my favorite authors, and certainly the most prolific. I cannot deny that he probably would have been less prolific had the copyright terms of his day not existed, providing him with a near-constant stream of steady income from a very young age, leaving him free to do what he enjoyed—that is to say, write.

Perhaps he would have even ended up as a chemist at a university, only occasionally writing bits of fiction here and there. Which of his works would I give up for a shorter copyright term? Would I sacrifice his Foundation series to the gods of the public domain? His autobiographies? Murder at the ABA? My heart shudders to think of giving up even the most mundane of his titles.

But then I think of the flip side of the coin. How many creative works do we daily give up because of copyright’s restrictive terms? I learned just recently that David Bowie, back in the 70s, had planned to write a musical based on Orwell’s 1984, but abandoned the idea “after encountering difficulties in licensing the novel”. A David Bowie musical 1984! The mere thought of it excites me at its potential. And yet it is lost forever—a still-born idea, stolen from the wisps of time by the cruel mistress of copyright.

Where does the optimal point lie? Is it somewhere in the middle, taking a bit of life from both Asimov and Bowie? Is it closer to one extreme? Is it closer to what’s familiar and old, or is it something radical and revolutionary? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

We live in a rapidly progressing society, with technological gains making it cheaper and easier to create everything from food to electronics. Yet every year, everything gets more expensive. How exactly does that make sense?

An excellent question! It’s because of the money supply.

If the amount of money in circulation remains constant, then a single dollar can buy more and more things each year. This is exactly because of those technological and economic gains that make everyone better off. (For example, if we had the same number of dollars in circulation now as in the 1950s, they’d be worth about ten times as much—gas would be worth 30 cents a gallon, and $10,000 would be an awesome yearly salary.)

The Federal Reserve (the nice folks who manage how much money gets printed) doesn’t do this, though. They print more and more money every year. They could print just enough more money so that the amount the dollar could buy remains pretty much constant, but they don’t. Instead, they print a little over-much money so that we get a rate of inflation of a few percent each year. There are a few reasons they do this:

1. (the conspiracy-theory reason)
   It’s a subtle form of taxation. Each extra dollar they print devalues every other dollar by a fraction of a cent (”1/n USD” to be exact, where n is the number of dollars currently in circulation). But most people don’t understand this, nor do they realize exactly how much extra money the Fed prints every year, so it’s a much subtler form of taxation than income tax or sales tax.
2. (the Keynesian economic reason)
   The economy has normal ups and downs, but psychologically the downs are much worse than the ups and can spiral into recessions. This is exacerbated by the fact that wages are usually the first thing to go down, and companies are much more likely to fire people than to simply lower everyone’s wages by 2-3%, which results in increased unemployment and that recession spiral.

   However, if you manipulate the money supply so as to cause a slow but steady increase in inflation, then the economic “downs” are much less visible. Rather than having to lower everyone’s wages by 2-3%, you just don’t give your employees any raises, and inflation automatically lowers everyone’s “real” wage. This prevents the “Boom and Bust” cycle that plagued economies for centuries until fiat money became widely used.

Now, whether or not this actually works is heavily debated. Keynesians think yes. Others think it softens the “boom and bust” cycle but doesn’t actually prevent it. The Austrian School (popular among libertarians and Randians) thinks it can only delay it, and that fiddling with the money supply only makes the inevitable “bust” worse. If they’re correct, then when the “bubble” of the American economy bursts, it will be a disaster much larger than the Great Depression or any economic catastrophe the US has ever seen.

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Recommended for your further reading pleasure:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boom_and_bust
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

(Continuing yesterday’s post.)

Another important difference between physical and intellectual property from the utilitarian standpoint is what I call the “public domain trade-off”. If every patentable or copyrightable idea or work from the beginning of time was patented or copyrighted, with no time limits or expirations, it would be nearly impossible to create new non-infringing works. Nearly everything we see today, from Disney’s Little Mermaid to The Toys’ “Lover’s Concerto” would be derivative works of at least one, if not more, previous creations. And it’s not just a simple matter of finding the copyright owner (perhaps Bach’s great-great-grandnephew) and licensing their content, which would already be prohibitive for most authors and creators. If your work derives from multiple different works, this requires the agreement, cooperation, and licensing of all of them in order for your work to be legal.

Physical property has no such trade-off. When I create a new piece of physical property, I know exactly what other physical property I need to purchase in order to create the new piece, the purchase is a one-time transaction that requires no further records or maintainance, and I can’t accidentally fail to realize that I need something additional to complete my work legally but obtain the physical item anyway. (At least, I have never heard of “accidental theft” being used as an excuse for physical property violations.) It’s simply not a difficult matter to create new, non-infringing physical items, even if every physical item on the planet is privately owned.

But the most vital and most important difference between physical property and intellectual property is the marginal cost of production. According to economic theory, the market price of a good is exactly equal to the marginal cost of production, given a perfectly competitive market. This means that very elastic^[2] goods, such as wheat or beans or generic widgets, are sold for nearly exactly what it costs to make another one, package it up, and get it to you.

The marginal cost of production for copyrighted works, especially in the digital age, is very, very close to zero. Once you have created the work, it costs nearly nothing to make another copy of it. Whereas physical goods require work, labor, and resources to make more of them (they are intrinsically scarce) intellectual works are trivially duplicatable, intrinsically plentiful. Because it’s so easy to make copies (and therefore difficult to exclude people from enjoying the creative work) economists call this a “non-excludable” good. Furthermore, while physical goods are “rival” (to use another economic term)—meaning that if I’m currently using a shovel or a truck or a house, you can’t be simultaneously using that object—creative works are almost always “non-rival”. My having a copy of a song, or a book, or a poem, doesn’t affect your ability to enjoy it.

Economists call things like this—both non-rival and non-excludable—”public goods”. The problem from a utilitarian perspective isn’t trying to produce enough for everyone to have, as it is with physical goods. That’s trivially easy for creative works. The problem is in encouraging people to create new works. Why would I spend my time writing a novel or composing a symphony if I can only sell it for the marginal cost (i.e. nothing)? I’d rather spend my time and effort on physical labor that will reap real monetary rewards.

There are a lot of solutions to the general problem of public goods (also called “the free-rider problem”), and a good list can be found at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good#Possible_solutions. Note that “Legislated exclusion,” or the system we have today with copyrights, is only one possible solution. Many others are possible, and in my opinion should be more thoroughly explored.

But whatever the solution, the important thing is to realize that creative works are fundamentally different from physical goods, and thus should have (and have had, in every society in history, including this one) a significantly different set of laws governing their creation and duplication.

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2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

Libertarians are most often seen as those who want small or no government, where enforcing property rights and contract law are its only role. The idea of one’s property as almost sacrosanct is a common theme. But why have property rights at all? Why are they a foundation upon which a society should be built? Surely they’re not innate or natural, but rather a government-created fiction. So why should “intellectual property” rights, which are also a government-created fiction, be any different?

First of all, this doesn’t pose a problem at all for the libertarian of the Randian persuasion, who are mostly in favor of intellectual property. The foundation of this movement is the moral principle of “non-initiation of force,” which means that the use of force or violence is only justified in retaliation for theft of property. They tend to believe that this is equally true for intellectual property as for physical property—violation of either is grounds for retribution (such as monetary damages, prison time, etc).

The libertarian who believes in the non-initiation of force principle but not in intellectual property does have a bit of explaining to do. Why should the use of force be justified in cases of violating physical property, but not in cases of violating intellectual property?

I personally don’t believe in the non-initiation of force principle as a moral absolute (at least not in the way that many libertarians believe it), so I can’t offer a compelling explanation for this viewpoint. I’m a utilitarian, so I look at the question of physical property and intellectual property from a utility standpoint: does invoking force to protect physical property have more utilitarian value than invoking force to protect intellectual property? I believe the answer is unquestionably yes.

The simplest significant difference to see between physical and intellectual property is that intellectual property is a difficult concept to define. Copyrights, patents, and trademarks are all very different beasts, but they all fall under the general umbrella of “intellectual property”. Furthermore, all intellectual pursuits have some commonality—where do you draw the line for infringement? Are only exact duplicates considered infringement? What about borrowing the ideas but creating new material, like fan fiction? What about simply being inspired by a work you read or heard? What about sampling of music? Translations? Format shifting? Each of these have had a different status under copyright law over the years.

Physical property is much easier to define because it can only be in one place at one time, and possessed only by a single person. If you take my watch or my wallet, I do not have them any more and have more obviously been wronged. With land and real estate, you can “infringe” or trespass without actually taking the property from me, but again it’s easy to define. There’s a distinct, visible, definable property line that, when you cross without permission, you are deemed to have trespassed and violated my property rights. No such distinct, obvious line is available for copyrights, patents, or trademarks.

Another difference is the possibility of what I call “infringement at a distance”. To violate physical property rights, you (or some physical agent of yours) always has to be physically located next to that physical property, whether you’re stealing my jewelry or trespassing on my land. With intellectual property, it’s possible to infringe distantly, privately, using only one’s own materials. For example, if I attend a poetry reading, later on that night, in the privacy of my own home, using my own pen, ink, and paper, I can transcribe the poem from memory, make dozens of copies, and give them to my friends, even from hundreds or thousands of miles away. The original author of the poem may have no way of knowing that I’ve even copied his poem without authorization.^[1]

The practical result of infringement at a distance is that enforcement is much more costly and invasive. Perfect enforcement of copyright, I believe, would require nothing less than a police state. From a utilitarian standpoint, this means that the benefit to society of intellectual property must be significantly higher than the benefit to society of physical property in order for it to command the same respect and legal status.

More on this subject next week …

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1. See, for example, Mozart’s similar feat with Allegri’s Miserere.

Some of you may recall my previous post entitled, Boston: We Put The Error in Terror. Well, they’ve managed to do it again.

Newest on their list of items-mistakenly-thought-to-be-a-bomb (which includes Aqua Teen Hunger Force blinkenlights and a traffic counter): a solderless breadboard, friend to hobbyist electronics geeks the world over.

Here’s the story: naive MIT nerd has a sweatshirt that says “Socket to me” and “Course VI” (referring to MIT’s Electrical Engineering major)^[1], along with a breadboard with a 9V battery and some LEDs in the shape of a star (her name is “Star”) that she made “to stand out on career day”. She goes to the airport to pick up her boyfriend who’s flying in, asks a question about the incoming flight at the information desk, then heads back outside the airport to wait for his arrival. The result?

State troopers with machine guns surrounded her at a traffic island in front of the terminal, ready to blast her head off.

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” [Major Scott Pare of the State Police] said. “Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force. … She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.” ^[2]

Currently, Star is being charged with “possessing a hoax device [and] could face up to five years in prison or a $5,000 fine, if convicted”^[3] for wearing her breadboard sweatshirt to the airport. Fortunately, even though the Boston police force has difficulties with these “bomb or not” puzzlers, legal experts don’t think a sensible jury will.

“The odds of obtaining a conviction are slim,” said legal analysts, including Harvey Silvergate, a criminal defense lawyer. “I don’t think you could get 12 out of 12 jurors to agree this student actually meant for people to think she had a bomb,” Silvergate said.^[4]

Now, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to wear a breadboard with LEDs to an airport, especially in paranoid Boston, even if you’re just there for a few minutes to pick up somebody. If I were a police officer there, I’d recommend that she take off the sweatshirt because it might look to the untrained eye to be something suspicious. She’d probably say, “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!” and a potential crisis would be averted.

But “we almost used deadly force” and “lucky to be in a cell instead of the morgue”?! Absolutely ridiculous. But what’s even more ridiculous are the people saying how the police did the right thing—what if it really had been a bomb? “A suicide bomber wouldn’t wear the thing on their shirt, they’d hide it under their shirt or in a bag,” is the obvious answer. Aha, but then the evil terrorists could simply put some LEDs on their shirts and then nobody would be suspicious!, cry the police apologists.

The fact of the matter is that anybody can already walk around an airport with a suitcase or a backpack full of explosives without anybody being suspicious. If somebody’s walking around with what appear to be explosives in plain sight, when they could be hidden in their backpack, then even if you walk up to them and say, “Excuse me, but what you have might be mistaken for explosives, could you please put them in your backpack?”—they’re not being less suspicious than just hiding them in the first place! It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

But maybe Boston is right. If it’s not an American flag, it’s probably bomb.

There’s a demotivational poster called, “Potential”, that pictures a basket of fries and the words, “Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.”

Sometimes the world seems so hopeless. Sometimes I feel like everyone around is me is so determinist, so anti-tabula rasa. “Some people are just destined to fail,” they say. It’s in their genes, or they came from the wrong family, or from the wrong neighborhood. Maybe they were born in the wrong country, or at the wrong time, or in the wrong race. Perhaps it was the way they were raised, or their teachers in school, or their peers during their formative years.

But whatever it is, some people will just fail—and telling those people that they can succeed is just cruel. Telling them they can be an Olympic medalist when they’re destined for McDonald’s is simply setting them up for disappointment. As a fellow blogger writes:

Have you ever failed at anything despite your best efforts? … there are tasks in this world that you will never be able to perform. Despite the mantra of parents and teachers that “you can do anything if you just stick with it and don’t give up”, not everybody gets to be an astronaut.

Is it so ridiculous on the face of it to truly believe that a person can do anything if they are determined enough? I’m normally one very grounded in reality—am I really so delusional to believe such a statement?

Some people try and try their entire lives just to go to college, and never make it. Gabriela Ocampo didn’t even graduate high school. She took algebra seven times, and failed the class all seven times. Did she just not try hard enough? Was she not determined enough? If I met her and said to her, “You can do anything you put your mind to,” would she break down and weep?

Bryan Caplan writes about an experiment where teaching students that intelligence is malleable improved their performance, whereas teaching students that intelligence is fixed resulted in lower grades and lower achievement test scores. He responds,

Thus, I suspect that students with who believe in malleable intelligence are more likely to go to graduate school despite low test scores. They’ll probably get better grades because of their belief. But better is often not good enough. Belief in malleable intelligence is no free lunch—it could easily lead students to waste years of their lives trying and failing.

Don’t like that example? Here’s another: Know any struggling actors? How many of them should just give up?

An MSNBC article joins the bandwagon:

One of her recommendations is for parents and educators to ditch the self-esteem movement and aphorisms such as “you can be anything you want to be” or “you have to love yourself first,” which she says have become ubiquitous in child-rearing and have contributed to today’s onslaught of unreal, narcissistic kids. Her study asserts that narcissists are more likely to have short-lived romantic relationships, lack emotional warmth and be dishonest, overcontrolling and violent. Moreover, a narcissistic child is more likely to become an angry failure of an adult, says Twenge. When you’re raised to think you’re great at everything, it can be a devastating blow when success turns elusive.

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I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know if I’m just lucky, and that an unlucky version of me would be an angry failure of an adult, because of the noble-sounding aphorisms I was raised with.

But I can’t help but believe that you make your own luck in life, you make your own successes, and that people can change to become something much more than they were born to be. (I think that’s why the movie Gattaca brings tears to my eyes every time.) I know people have vastly changed my life, sometimes just from a simple sentence they probably didn’t even give a second thought to. If those noble-sounding aphorisms can have that same effect on somebody else’s life then, as far as I’m concerned, they’re worth keeping.