Posted Tuesday, March 4 Eugene Volokh has posted some thoughts about copyright reduction. I am the proximate cause for the good professor’s meditations, having sent him an inquiring email, which was basically a condensed version of an admittedly somewhat incoherent posting I made last week. (Incoherent because I keep using words like ‘surely’ when I surely mean ‘just barely possibly’, or even ‘certainly not, but wouldn’t it be funny if’ – a sure sign of mild inebriation or over-caffeination on my part.) So don’t go read that old posting, folks. Just me swinging wildly, not landing a solid punch. Nothing to see there, folks; move along, move along. Let’s begin again, taking it from the top. Eugene basically argues down a position I tentatively advanced. But really I was just asking a question, and trying out a possible answer experimentally. Let me persist in my experimentation as follows. The occasion for my question was the Economist’s modest proposal for a return to 14-year copyright terms. The question was: could such a change be made retroactively? The experimental answer was: yes. But looking down the slippery slope before us: if congress could reduce a sentence of life+70 years to 14 years, why not 14 months, 14 minutes, 1.4. seconds; aw, hell. . . let the whole Disney menagerie out of their cages right now! Congress says: copyright is abolished! Of course, they would have to cover themselves with arguments about ‘arts and useful sciences’, but it is now well settled that the arguments do not have to be good. Indeed, I think it is no exaggeration that no one accepts the utilitarian arguments for life+70. Those who approve the extension do so – if not out of naked, financial self-interest - then on the grounds that artists and creators ought, in principle, to have outright, perpetual ownership of their works. This is a respectable view, but flagrantly unconstitutional; ergo, the necessary concealment behind economic arguments no one can take seriously. At any rate, I feel confident that I could come up with arguments for the artistic and scientific benefits of abolishing copyright that would be, admittedly, horrible; but hardly horribler than those for life+70. So on we go. (I'll make this one a GIANT THOUGHT) Posted Tuesday, March 4 We are a small operation here at 'special new blog'. Our loyal readers are ourselves, and we count on a steady trickle of moderately to completely mysterious search engine hits to produce even the least soupcon of a hint of a facade of a potemkin village of traffic. (I get up every day half expecting an email from Extreme Tracking: 'dear sir, you are not worth our trouble; you are the only one visiting your site; do you really need us to tell you that?') Yet there is a mournful, idiot poetry to search-engine hits: a Boolean sound + fury, if you will. The first we received was: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=anarchic+footwear. Whatever. Then, this morning, the other shoe dropped, as it were: http://www.google.com/search?q=shoe+copyright+protection &hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&start=20&sa=N So, without having intended anything of the sort, we have achieved a quiet lock on the whole range of things-to-wear-on-feet-related political positions. The open-toe, 'shoes want to be free' folk come to us; and the Ashcroftian, 'total footwear awareness'/'digital [are toes digits?] millenium copyright act' crowd seek us out for advice as well. If complete strangers force the shoe on your foot, wear it. (It's metaphors like that that led to this lamentable of affairs in the first place, as you can well imagine.) Posted Monday, March 3 Delighted that d-squared is losing the controversial postings. May many more be lost in days to come. I've never been a den Beste fan - life is short; his posts are long. And the occasional, testosterrific whiff of weapons fetishism, conjoined with the trekkie motif? Not my cup of earl grey, hot; but, hey, it's a free country. Be civil. The guy isn't an idiot, even if you disagree with him. (Where's the fun pretending otherwise?) The escalating vituperativity of SSdB has been making me itch for 'shorter fat young man without a good word for anyone, only fewer of them' payback. Which, of course, would only feed the flames of bloggy ressentiment. Do I resent d-squared? Not hardly. I like him. I like him long and leisurely. Loved the lighthouses. Ezra Pound I can give up any time I like. But the contrarian principle is sound. Blog that which others never, ever will. When I first discovered d-squared I thought to myself: self (I thought), I feel here is a fellow who's sure to like Iain Banks novels and Iain M. Banks novels, but the former more than the latter; and his favorite Iain M. Banks novel is Consider Phlebas. And that's not a feeling you get everyday. Posted Sunday, March 2 Turkey to US: Yes, we are buying no Kurds today. And right after we tried to sell them some Kurds. How awkward. So let's talk about something else. The Policeman's Blog is Half-Constructed Here is my lazyweb notion of the week. Some AI researcher (anyone who spends their life teaching machines to fail Turing tests less badly would do) ought to combine their work with blogging. Build roboblog, autoblog, whatever domain name is still available: a blog that autonomously searches the net for likely stretches of text and attempts to comment with some semblance of intelligence. (Lots of people do it every day. Why shouldn't machines horn in on the action? Yes, but the competition for eyeballs is fierce enough already! Yes, but think how many more readers you will have the chance to attract after 500,000 version 1.0 roboblogs flood the blogosphere 24-7, reading, reading, reading, the better to write, write, write. But they won't really be intelligent, you object, even if they post intelligent postings approving my intelligent postings! Whether they will be or not is, of course, a subject of great debate.) The first thing you could teach the machine, for example, might be generous use of the Instapundit 'Indeed'. Figure out a heuristic for picking out passages that have thesis statements. Cut, paste; type 'indeed'; post. After that, things would get a bit trickier, admittedly. (Full disclosure: Instapundit is indeed my first stop every morning.) But seriously. The thing is not un-feasible, surely. Just a matter of hooking already existing expert systems up to sufficiently MovableType, a preprogrammed blogroll; some news sources; some heuristics for allowing all this to evolve over time. (The hard part, I am quite sure, is designing the expert systems. But those maniacs exist already. I am not instigating any new mania, merely channeling an existing one in somewhat more semi-social directions.) Indeed, I make no claims for the metaphysical significance of the proposed project (read more about that here). Indeed, the results of attempting to implement an AI weblog would be both edifying and (I am quite sure) indeed amusing. The Turing test would, of course, become a mere popularity contest, or whuffie index (or pseudo-whuffie index, depending on your philosophy of mind.) Any blog that managed to fight the power laws that be, reaching the top 20%, hits-wise, would be deemed 'intelligent'. (See Clay Shirky's interesting article on "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality".) Of course, if it's actually going to be a test, with researchers concealing the non-human nature of their creations, then things would get really interesting: folks accusing each other of being robots; accusing each other of reading robots; of posting comments to things robots have written; of being as dumb as robots; dumber than robots; of being so dense as to be algorithmically incompressible. In short, nothing much would change (see this d-squared digest posting and associated comments). And yet, everything would change. Indeed, once the bugs were worked out, the thing would be generally released. But then, if everyone could have their own autoblog to set and tweak and modify as they liked, it would obviously take off as a sort of Tamagotchi-style craze, with everyone fretting lest their creature starve for lack of hits. Blogging is already one of the greatest anti-productivity tools of all time. If yet more time were wasted, civilization might well come to an end. And, eventually, there would have to be a showdown (I take my inspiration from this version): Glenn Reynolds was a little baby Sittin' on his papa's knee He picked up a keyboard and a PC Said, "Bloggin’s gonna be the death of me, ......Lord, Lord! Bloggin’s gonna be the death of me." Web-geek said to Genn Reynolds ‘Gonna release that autoblog Gonna let that auto-beta out Gonna post that blog right up, Lord, Lord! Post that blog right up. Glenn Reynolds told the web-geek "A blog ain't nothin' but a blog But before I let you autoblog me down I'll die with a keyboard in my hand, Lord, Lord! I'll die with a keyboard in my hand." Flourescent light was hummin’, Wer'n't no A-C a-tall, Sweat ran down like water down a hill, Dat day Glenn Reynolds let his keystrokes fall, Lord, Lord, Dat day Glenn Reynolds let his keystrokes fall. Glenn Reynolds started from the right-wing, De autoblog started on de lef'--- “Geek, bet yo' las' stock option on me, Fo' I'll beat it through the web or I will die, Lord, Lord, Fo' I'll beat it through the web or I will die. Glenn Reynolds said to his blog-child, "Boy, why don't you clap, I'm strokin' ‘bout a pound from my wrist on down, Jes' listen to that keyboard tap, Lord, Lord, Jes' listen to that keyboard tap." Oh, de web-geek said to Glenn Reynolds "I b'leve hit counter’s giv'n in," Glenn Reynolds said to the web-geek, "Oh, my, Ain't nothin' but my bandwidth suckin' wind, Lord, Lord, Ain't nothin' but my bandwidth suckin' wind." Glenn Reynolds tol' the web-geek, "Looka yonder what I see - Yo’ buggy code, and yo’ page won’t load, H'it just cain't blog like me, Lord, Lord, H'it just cain't blog like me." The man that invented autoblog Thought he was mighty fine But Glenn Reynolds made fifteen posts Autoblog only made nine, Lord, Lord! Autoblog only made nine. Glenn Reynolds blogged through the whole web His keyboard was strikin' fire But he blogged so hard, he broke his poor heart He laid down his keyboard and he died, Lord, Lord! He laid down his keyboard and he died. They took Glenn Reynolds to a hillside, He looked to the heavens above; He said, "Take my keyboard and wrap it in gold, And give it the Instawife I love, Lord, Lord, Give it to the Instawife I love." Well, every Monday mornin' When you drink your Starbucks’ capp’ You can hear Glenn Reynolds’ a mile or more You can hear his keyboard tap, Lord, Lord, You can hear his keyboard tap. Of course, if, as some suspect, Instapundit already is an Artificial Intelligence. . . well, then, this far-fetched scenario will never come to pass. Indeed. But I'm quite serious about how I would like to see someone try to come up with a Turing-test candidate autoblog.