Ernie's 3D Pancakes

Fighting fire with fire

Encaped, begoggled balloon-blogger Cory Doctorow posts his daily anti-(legal stupidity) rant on Boing Boing, this time about the end-user license agreement imposed by the wonderful (cough cough) web service ApplyYourself:

This is the standard ridiculous EULA junk (we can be as negligent as we want and you can't ever sue us, no matter what), so after I sent in the letter for my student, I immediately fired off an email to the address listed, explaining that I didn't agree to this non-negotiated "agreement" and closing with my standard anti-EULA:

READ CAREFULLY. By reading this email, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Am I the only one who's noticed a reflexivity problem here?

Suppose Alice is the ApplyYourself employee who gets Cory's email. Couldn't she just send it right back? Assuming the anti-EULA actually works, then by reading Alice's reply, Cory would automatically release Alice from her non-negotiated obligation (to which Alice agreed by reading Cory's email) to release Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer (to which Cory automatically 'agreed' by using ApplyYourself).

Of course, Cory could send the anti-EULA right back, thereby obliging Alice to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer.

And then Alice could reply back again, thereby obliging Cory to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer.

To avoid a stack overflow (which could potentially give Cory superuser access to Alice's mind) she'd probably add Cory to her spam filter at this point, thereby ensuring that she could not read Cory's obvious reply, and thus could never be obliged to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer. To be nice, she sets up an auto-reply informing Cory of this fact.

Cory, not content to let the matter rest with his non-negotiated meta-obligations intact, could then change the opening phrase of the anti-EULA from `By reading this email' to `By accepting this email onto your mail server'. Alas, Alice is using gmail, which means that Google is now obligated to release Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to free Alice from her non-negotiated obligation to free Cory from his non-negotiated obligation to Alice's employer.

At this point, Cory drops Alice into his gmail spam filter as well, with the same auto-reply message. Google is now stuck in an infinite loop, forever freeing itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated obligations to free itself from its non-negotiated et cetera et cetera et cetera, ultimately on Cory/Alice's behalf.

The extra network traffic generated by the Cory/Alice anti-EULA loop slows the internet (and thereby the world economy) to a grinding halt. As a result, Cory's recommendation letter does not actually reach the school for which it was intended, and the poor recommendee not get into grad school.

Question: Is ApplyYourself liable to Cory for losing his recommendation letter?

Another huge sadneess

Submissions from both academia and industry are encouraged. Research papers, case studies, lessons learned, status reports, and discussions of practical problems faced by industry and user domains are all welcome. [We'll take anything. Really. Write us a story about your pet parakeet, and we'll publish it.]

Creative License

A cautionary tale from Michael J. Fromberger:

He cleared his throat softly. “My name is Everard Page,” he said, “and I represent the Publications Industry Media Production group, the organization responsible for the publication and distribution of the low-cost academic textbook series I believe you are using.” He nodded in the direction of Alice's textbooks, which lay open on the table amid notebooks and sheets of scratch-work. Alice looked at him somewhat incredulously until he fumbled out a brightly laminated ID card and held it out to her. She didn't take it, or even look closely at it, so eventually he put it away and continued.

“At any rate, the Allison-Eastley Publishing Company, who printed and delivered the textbooks you are currently using, has issued a recall on all of the books in their special low-cost Student Editions. The recall is effective immediately, and I am empowered to collect all outstanding copies of the Student Edition textbooks present on campus.” He looked meaningfully at Alice's books.

There's Gold in Them Thar Campuses

Inside Higher Ed has a frustrating article on skyrocketing textbook prices.

While publishers might have been dissatisfied with the GAO's findings [pdf] on what has happened to textbook prices, they were quite pleased by the agency's explanations for those increases. “The primary factor” driving them, the GAO said, has been publishers' efforts to add technology applications and other enhancements that improve the quality of instruction and learning.

“Publishers told us they have made these investments to meet changing needs of higher education, such as the increase in part-time faculty who require greater instructional support and supplements that will enhance student learning of the subject matter,” the GAO investigators said.

The agency cited examples such as online homework and quizzes “online homework and quizzes that allow instructors to track student progress quickly,” and “more extensive curricular support including lesson plans, homework sets, multimedia lectures, and even workshops on specific teaching approaches.” The report adds: “While these materials are provided at no cost to instructors, the cost of developing them is built into the price of the textbook.”

Yeah. Right. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

If publishers were really interested in improving the quality of instruction and learning, they would keep old editions of their books in print, allowing instructors to choose a stable, reliable reference, without being distracted by pointless revisions. If publishers were really interested in instructional quality, they would let instructors and students choose which (if any) of the publisher's online resources and "curricular support" is needed or wanted. If publishers were really interested in education, they'd get the hell out of the way.

Don't be fooled. Publishers are interested in making money.

While publishers generally agreed that the revision cycle for many books is 3 to 4 years, compared with 4 to 5 years that were standard 10 to 20 years ago, they said revisions were necessary to keep the materials current for faculty and to recoup their investments.

Keep the materials current? The chain rule isn't any different now than it was when I took calculus 25 years ago. Induction hasn't changed. The Krebs cycle hasn't changed. The Myxolydian scale still sounds funny. Hamlet is still in a suicial funk. Twinkle twinkle little star, V's still equal to IR. Bad beer still rots our young guts, but vodka still goes well. So why are textbooks revised so often?

Ah, that's right. It's an investment.

The publishers defend their rapacious pricing practices by pointing to the rising cost of college eduction. Tuition is already $15000 per year, so what's another $850, right? That's sort of like Mussolini saying "Hey, at least I'm not a Nazi!"

Here's my favorite sentence from the report:

For example, publishers told us that some U.S. textbooks are priced lower in the United Kingdom because they must compete with locally produced textbooks that are less expensive.

AIM pwnz joo!!!!!!!11one

AOL has just published new terms of service, which contain this clever little gem.

Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.

Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Which is it? Do I retain ownership of all right, title, and interest to my instant messages, or do AOL and its tentacles get the right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt, and promote them? It can't be both!

[via MonkeyFilter; hold your nose and see also SlashDot]

Duh. How else would copyright lawyers eat?

Okay, let me get this straight. Compensation does not encourage output. Tell me why we have copyrights again?

Free as in beer

[via Boing Boing]

Intellectual property is intellectual theft!

Without chemistry lawyers, life itself would be impossible.

The American Chemical Society is suing Google for freely giving away something that ACS charges $1000 a year for, oops, I mean infringing on ACS's trademark on the word “Scholar”.

Meanwhile, CNN and The News Corporation are considering suing Google over the word “news”; the American Library Association and Merriam-Webster are contemplating a similar suit over patent violations by Google Suggest; and an unknown party has contacted the law firm of Gorenstein, Lyons & Solomon to discuss Google's potentially infringing use of the word “groups”.

[via Language Log]

Update: Nitish points to an article in IEEE Spectrum about the dismal state of the US Patent and Trademark Office. The article begins by decribing a grocery store being sued for “violating Smucker's intellectual property by selling crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches”.

Freeing the Cultural Memome

John Holbo at Crooked Timber compares the role of the NEA with The Paris Review's DNA of Literature project. John's modest proposal:

There are mountains of works in the Library of Congress that could be bought for a song (including many songs) because they are of little commercial value. But they are not bought for that very reason. But, taken in mass, these troves are of great cultural value. (No one thinks the Library of Congress is a bad idea.) The NEA could be charged with buying up and releasing the cheap stuff into the public domain. (All the other stuff can find its market in the usual way: through the market.) Let the NEA make it available online, in relevant forms: PDF, mp3, maybe even QuickTime. A National Public Library, not just for borrowing but there for the taking. Cultural DNA to be worked into new, rich, strange cultural products.

I can imagine a similar role for the National Science Foundation, as a way to preserve the scientific memome: Buy rights to every paper or book that has not been directly cited in (say) five years, and release them into the public domain. Freeing uncited papers poses little or no economic burden on the publishers. After all (one could argue, a bit disingenuously), no one is reading those papers anyway. But those unread papers may sill be important someday, if only historically. Like cultural and artistic memes, scientific ideas have a habit of lying fallow for years, only to reappear in unexpected contexts when the time is right.

To paraphrase Timothy Burke:

I’m very concerned at the danger of a modern enclosures movement, where the quiet eddies and subcultural nooks of global popularscientific culture get dragged inside giant corporate conglomerates and intellectual property law is used to sterilize rather than liberate the work of cultural creation scientific discovery. It’s a real danger we face, a reason for vigilance. The twin dangers of regulatory zeal and monopoly ownership could kill the beautiful profligacy of global popularscientific culture at the cusp of its greatest achievements.

On the other hand, if the NSF spent all its money buying up old papers on circle-squaring and perpetual motion machines, how would I pay my PhD students?