BC Law IPTF Blog

The New York Times is running an article on the man and the company behind sudoku. Interestingly, the brain power behind sudoku, Mr. Kaji, wasn’t able to make much money because he didn’t trademark the name “sudoku,” but because the IP wasn’t protected he feels that popularity of the game exploded:

While no one knows how much revenue is generated by the global sudoku business, most agree it has easily topped $250 million over the last two years from an estimated 80 million devotees. The New York Times syndicate provides a variety of logic puzzles, including sudoku, kakuro and others, for newspapers and Web sites around the world.

Nikoli received only a sliver of that money. Mr. Kaji says his private company, with just 20 employees, had annual sales of about $4 million.

Sudoku’s popularity in the United States caught Mr. Kaji by such surprise that he did not try to get the trademark there until it was too late. As a result, Nikoli receives no royalties from sudoku-related sales overseas by other publishers.

In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku’s intellectual property rights let the game’s popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off.

“This openness is more in keeping with Nikoli’s open culture,” said Mr. Kaji, who sat on a sofa in his Tokyo office among pillows adorned with printed faces of racehorses. “We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”

While this might just be a good marketing face to show, it’s core aligns with the philosophy of open source, copyleft, GNU, etc. If you don’t control the IP, a product has a chance to explode. If you do it for the love of the product, then maybe your reward will be greater in the end.

Wikipedia to seek proof of credentials - Yahoo! News

But anonymity is also considered one of the main forces behind Wikipedia’s astonishing growth, to nearly 1.7 million articles in English and millions more in dozens of other languages. Wales has said he is an “anti-credentialist” — because anonymity puts a reader’s attention on the substance of what people have written rather than who they are.

Wales said Wednesday that belief is unchanged. But, he said, if people want to claim expertise on Wikipedia, they ought to be prompted to prove it. If they don’t want to give their real names, they shouldn’t be allowed to tout credentials. Had that policy been in place, Wales said, Jordan probably would not have gotten away with claiming a Ph.D. in religion.

This is, whether purposeful or not, a cue taken from Citizendium.

But for a different reason. Honesty and credibility, somewhat paradoxically, is encouraged through anonymity because anonymity means that you aren’t liable for what you think is right and you’re more likely to contribute *anything* rather than your *best*.

This is why blogging is more widespread than essay-writing for magazines. When people blog, they are trying to write things they believe or would stand by in a casual conversation, but they don’t want to be held to the same standard they’d be held by if they were writing for, say, the New Yorker.

Furthermore, the lack of a login requirement and an attribution makes it real easy for me to just hop on and fix something or add something or make a new page. I don’t have to go through any embarrassing

On the other hand Citizendium looks to attribution for credibility and honesty. I wonder if this will discourage participation in the opposite way that anonymity encourages it on Wikipedia.

From the web site of the Second Life Liberation Army :

The Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA) was formed as the ‘in-world’ military wing of a national liberation movement within Second Life. The movement contends that univeral suffrage is a right that should be established within Second Life immediately. As Linden Labs is functioning as an authoritarian government the only appropriate response is to fight. To this end the political movement has dissolved itself and handed over interim power to the SLLA Army council headed by it Chief of Staff. When the SLLA succeeds in its aims it will disband and hand power back to the political wing of the movement. For the time being all military decisions will be taken by the SLLA Chief of Staff and implemented by SLLA fighters.

The SLLA has been exploding “push guns” or virtual bomb blasts that temporarily cloud over the screen so that you can’t see your avatars or anything around them.

From a story on this from the AFP, one of their major demands is for Second Life’s developer, Linden Labs, to go public and allow users to buy shares of stock–claiming this as a “basic right” of Second Lifers.

Is rebellion the same as terrorism? How about on Second Life, where violence has been technologically curbed? In the absence of courts, in a virtual world controlled by a private company, how can virtual citizens demand their rights, especially if they’re in a minority?

Apparently, there was an attempt to establish courts–the Second Life Superior Court–but I haven’t been following this enough to see if there has been anything established.  The blog post linked above is over a year old, and it’s the only mention of it from a Google search, so maybe it’s defunct.

Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia, has launched a pilot site to rival Wikipedia: Citizendium:

The Citizendium (sit-ih-ZEN-dee-um), a “citizens’ compendium of everything,” is an experimental new wiki project. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on that model by adding “gentle expert oversight” and requiring contributors to use their real names.

Sounds look a good idea–but they’re late in the game, late on the meme. It just reminds me of so many examples in technology where “better” just doesn’t win. Mac lost to PC. Friendster lost to MySpace. Et cetera.

The beauty of Wikipedia is ease of participation–anyone can do it. But to use Citizendium, I *have* to register with my name and seek the approval of a “gentle” guide? I just don’t think they can achieve the growth that will drive it off the ground the same was as PCs and MySpace. Wikipedia wins because of its growth–I have a better chance of finding at least *something* there that I can’t find in an encyclopedia.

Maybe Citizendium should just grab all the Wikipedia content and use that as their base. It’s like using a public domain dictionary and adding all your new words to it or fixing the old definitions. That way, they have the size and content, and they can work at their slow growth rate to complete their content in quality.

I remember that Nupedia (the Wikipedia predecessor) had an editorial process involved–but they were just trying to streamline articles for releases. And they ditched this for the anti-editor process involved with Wikipedia.

I’m not a total nay-sayer. I think that CZ could become a valid rival. But it serves a different purpose than Wikipedia. Wikipedia is like having access to the “crowd”–like being able to talk to friends, friends of friends, etc.–whereas CZ will be more like being able to e-mail a professor who may have a response. With the former, I will probably get an answer, but I don’t know how correct, but if I ask enough I’ll probably get something close enough to correct. For the latter, I might not get a response, but I know the response will be right. This makes a great opportunity for a meta engine that searches CZ first and fills the gaps with Wikipedia.

See CZ’s thoughts on this Big Question on their blog.

Our humble blog made Inter Alia’s Blawg of the Day!

This week, Inter Alia’s covering wikis and law, which I’m pretty excited to hear about. Check out the ABA’s article on Wikis for the Legal Profession.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that anyone should feature the BC IPTF Wiki. I’m not even linking to it, it’s so crappy.

Also, ZiefBrief of the USF Law Library mentions this blog, even describing our posts as “thoughtful and fun.” Who woulda thunk it?

NPR reports on the dangers of mercury in compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs):

Wal-Mart wants to sell 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs this year. The Environmental Protection Agency has almost the same goal. The bulbs save energy and reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.

But there’s a hitch: Each bulb contains about 5 milligrams of mercury, a toxic heavy metal.

The bulbs last a long time, but eventually they burn out. The EPA says that people should recycle them, but most people don’t know they should.

This blog talked about this issue before, and back then I also remarked on my experience in Uganda and the  near ubiquity of CFLs.

If the US doesn’t have the capabilities to safely dispose of mercury in CFLs, and the US population isn’t informed about this or is able to do anything about it, what are the people in Uganda to do? I’m sure people are just throwing these into the trash, sending the mercury straight into the soil and ground water, and back into the people. Bad stuff.

One of the problems with mass recycling is that the bulbs inevitably break and leak, so you can’t just put out bins for people to drop them off or for services to come by and pick them up. Technology may be able to reduce the amount of mercury, but right now there’s no way to avoid it. Maybe in the scheme of things, this isn’t as bad as other solid waste problems–sewage treatment, electronics and circuit boards–and the energy savings are worth it. With rolling black-outs, more people have light more of the time because of the significant reduction in energy consumption. Maybe this is something the world will have to live with for now.

Techdirt: Should Judges Cite Wikipedia?

In fact, the article notes that one case was later overturned when a higher court had problems with the lower court’s use of Wikipedia — though, ironically, to make their point, they too cited Wikipedia (though, they focused on the site’s disclaimers, which are just as editable as any other page so present the same problem the lower court supposedly had in citing them). It appears that most judges that cite Wikipedia do so on mostly unimportant matters, to fill in details or explanations on issues that are not central to the decision-making.

This issue could be helped by using the Harvard suggestion for citing Wikipedia. The Harvard citation format requires one to cite to the time in the article’s history that you are citing. By clicking on the history tab at the top of an article, one may then navigate to the actual text that the clerk has cited. (Also, maybe it shouldn’t be that “judges” are citing Wikipedia, as much as their law clerks are.)

The deeper issue is that encylopedic knowledge is harder to find and less trustworthy than it used to be–back when we had no other “better” option. Other than Wikipedia, my best bets are Encarta or Britannica (both of which charge for usage) or the Columbia Encyclopedia. But none are as exhaustive as Wikipedia.

But for non-essential uses, clerks merely need a source to cite for sub-common knowledge, i.e., knowledge that not everyone knows, but everyone could know if they did a Google search.

People’s knowledge bases are no longer limited to what they have on the tips of their tongues or at the fore of their brains, but common knowledge might also include information one can find from a few minutes selecting links from a Google search result.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6186436.stm :

Sir Cliff Richard appears set to lose a battle to extend the number of years that musicians can receive royalties for their records, the BBC has learned.

He wants copyright to last 95 years, rather than the present 50 years.

But an independent review is to recommend the terms are not extended, a well-placed government source has said.

This outcome would mean the report had “missed a great opportunity” to support the music industry, the chairman of the British Phonographic Industry claimed.

From Slashdot:

“The Chinese have recently been allowed to enjoy the Chinese version of Wikipedia now that the ban has been lifted. And the result is an explosion in use after being banned for a year. From the article, “Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation’s Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation.” No one’s sure how long this will be available to the People’s Republic of China but hopefully the government will recognize that at least a significant part of the populace enjoys a Wikipedia community.”

That’s all.

From Boing Boing, with a link to the actual patent application.

Here’s the abstract of the patent application:

Interestingness ranking of media objects
Media objects, such as images or soundtracks, may be ranked according to a new class of metrics known as “interestingness.” These rankings may be based at least in part on the quantity of user-entered metadata concerning the media object, the number of users who have assigned metadata to the media object, access patterns related to the media object, and/or a lapse of time related to the media object.

Boing Boing mentions that there may exist prior art in this area. The comment says: “There’s a very large number of papers in the image processing and collaborative filtering areas that all define various notions of relevance, interestingness, salience, or novelty. A specific innovative technique might be patentable, but not the general idea of computing how interesting an image or media object is to a person or set of people.”