Author: JP

Wondering about damage and repair

Ever since I first heard Clay Shirky talk about the cost of damage and the cost of repair, I have been very taken with the idea. I believe he was talking about Wikipedia at the time. The more I think about it, anything that is a commons will have this tendency to retain and increase value, as long as the cost of repair is kept at least as low as the cost of damage.

I started kicking it around in other contexts and the answer seemed to come out the same. It made me understand more about urban graffiti and about vandalism. Then, more recently, I saw this article, about chewing gum. So it costs 3p to buy a piece of chewing gum and 10p to clean up after it.

And it made me think. Wouldn’t that look a little unfair to a non-chewer? The chewer gets the benefit, the manufacturer makes the profit, and the taxpayer foots the bill.

Maybe it’s time for some radical solutions. Maybe we could try something else. If a good for sale is capable of damaging “the commons” then maybe we should measure the cost of repairing that damage. If that cost exceeds the cost of damage, then we raise a tax on the good until the cost of damage is higher than the cost of repair. Half the tax is payable by the manufacturer, half by the consumer. The taxes so collected are then used to do the repairing.

Permanent marker pens.  Chewing gum. Maybe even anything that comes in packaging that people tend to throw away.

Just a thought.

Pre-release piracy: another appalling term

I’ve been following a perplexingly fascinating case for about a year or so; one of those cases where truth way beats fiction. Simply put, one of the biggest companies in the music business, Universal Music Group, was suing the delightfully-named Roast Beast Music Collectibles, or more specifically Troy Augusto, who trades as roastbeastmusic on eBay, for selling on promotional material.

Last week Judge James S Otero decided enough was enough, threw the case out, and cited the doctrine of first sale as the primary reason.

You can see some of the coverage here and here. The Electronic Frontier Foundation did a great job in publicising the case and fighting in Troy’s corner, here’s an excerpt of what they had to say.

I collect books, and have in my collection many review copies Not For Resale. A small number were actually sent to me, and most of the rest I bought at charity shops (I think they’re called thrifts in the US). Some were given to me by friends who had received them originally. It never occurred to me that someone could even conceive of a reason to claim that what I was doing was illegal. And it is not. Doctrine of first sale.

People have been selling and trading rarities such as promo goods for a very long time, so I tried to figure out why Universal was getting so excited about it. So I looked into it.

I should have known.

Pre-release piracy.

So let me understand this. Universal want to send pre-release promos to people. Why would they do that? So that they could get good reviews of the releases, I would guess. So they must know the people they send it to, at least professionally. But they don’t trust them. They think that the recipients of the promos are going to go into business making copies of the promos and then selling the copies on. So they need a law to protect them against that eventuality.

You know something? If I was one of those recipients of the promo, I would feel insulted and send it back. Maybe that’s what we now need to do, start a movement to get reviewers to send all promos back unheard

Pre-release promos are slow-burning examples of artificial scarcity; the scarcity is non-existent at the point of pre-release….. The promos take time to develop into valued items, time measured in multiple decades. As a result, no one has bothered to create the balancing artificial abundance. What Universal was trying to do was to create that scarcity at the point of pre-release. And they failed.

Musing about the Whose Data Is It question

I’m a pretty gregarious kind of person; I like spending time with people, stay awake all kinds of hours, travel quite a bit (on business as well as pleasure). So I know a lot of people, and a lot of people know me.

Which means I land up with a lot of information about how to contact people: telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and the like. I store this information in all kinds of places, I guess we call them social networks now. And when I store this information, I tend not to think of it as mine. Or as the social network’s. Most of the time I am a trustee of that information.

So when you give me your private mobile phone number, you trust me with that information. I am not empowered to give it to anyone I feel like, you trust that I will use that information wisely. It isn’t my information. It’s yours.

I think a lot of people feel that way.

In the old days, there was a clear distinction between professional and personal, and address books worked that way as well. When job migration was low it made a lot of sense. Now, with security of tenure a distant memory, this is harder to figure out. Quite often people have relationships that last beyond the jobs they were in when they met for the first time.

Which makes me think. Does the average professional relationship last longer than the average professional job?  Have we worked out what the implications are?

The kernel for this post was an article I read on the plane coming over to San Francisco. The headline was amazing:

Court orders ex-employee to hand over LinkedIn contacts

You can find the whole story here. It conjured up visions of this thing called LinkedIn contacts being ceremonially handed over from one person to another.

And for a moment there I thought that the value was in the relationship and not in the contact information.

If there is no relationship then it is just data. Who cares who owns it, it is just commodity. Where there is a relationship, and where the information is scarce, it is usually held in trust and cannot be given away anyway.

All this is about contact information. When we start talking about derived and ancillary information, to do with things like relationship networks, friend wheels, social graphs and so on that’s a whole different ball game. The same is true about patterns of behaviour: buying, selling, watching, eating, reading, listening.

When it comes to contact information alone, the value is not in the data but in the relationship.

Not cricket? Of course it is

I love cricket. [As if you haven’t noticed]. Been a fervent follower of the game for over 40 years, been privileged to watch may great cricketers during that time.

The years haven’t been short of controversy. The first I can remember was the D’Oliviera incident in 1968, when the South African tour was cancelled after Basil was included in the touring squad. Then there was the World Series Cricket breakaway, the Packer controversy as it was called. We’ve had questions about Tony Greig’s fielding position, Murali’s double-jointedness (leading to his exceeding the elbow extension and flexion limits that most cricketers have never heard of) , Paul Adams’s Frog in a Blender action, Lever’s use of vaseline.

We’ve had Ponting’s bat, Dravid’s ball, Brearley’s helmet (see Q517), all kinds of weird and wonderful things. We’ve even had the Trevor Chappell underarm incident.

We’ve had the limited-overs game introduced and then get more and more limited, as 60 became 50 and now we have 20.

In all that time, I have never seen a more stupid controversy than this one:

Kevin Pietersen has introduced a new stroke into cricket lore. He faces a bowler right-handed, and then, as the ball is released, switches stance and grip to become a left-hander, then sweeps the ball into oblivion past the boundary ropes, for six.

I watched him do this today, twice, as England played New Zealand. Absolutely amazing strokes, great talent, great timing, great strength. And then I heard about the controversy. [While I had read about it briefly over the last year or so, I had dismissed the arguments].

What is the controversy? That Pietersen starts with a right-hand-grip on the bat and then switches to a left-hand grip, and that this places the bowler at a disadvantage.

Pfui, as Nero Wolfe was wont to say. Double Pfui.

Here’s why:

1. The stroke of the reverse sweep has been around for a very long time. Hanif Mohammed is credited with having “invented” it, though some people say it was his brother Mushtaq. Hanif is known to have used the stroke in January 1958, over 50 years ago, in an “away” Test match, against one of the best teams in the world, the West Indies.

2. The “disadvantage” the bowler is placed under is apparently all to do with field placements. Law 41.5, The Fielder deals with onside limitations and potential no-balls. Law 36, the LBW rule, is focused on the definition of the offside.

3. The controversy is apparently around the use of the phrase “striker’s stance at the moment the ball comes into play for that delivery” in the LBW law, and in the phrase “at the instant of the bowler’s delivery” in the Fielder rule

Pfui again. The reverse sweep has been around for 50 years, and it was in use for a very long time before anyone had the talent and power and timing to use it for a boundary, much less a six. Pietersen has moved the standards even higher by having the sheer effrontery (and magical ability) to change his grip and not just his stance.

The two Laws being cited are laws that apparently came into place to correct other weaknesses in the aftermath of controversy, such as the Bodyline tour. If we have to change the law to state that the batsman is considered RHB or LHB based on what he declares himself to be as he takes up his initial stance at the start of his innings, then so be it.

But claim that he’s breaking the law, or that his stroke is illegal? Puh-leease. Nobody said it was illegal when Gatting failed to pull it off, with abysmal consequences, here.

What Pietersen is doing is playing cricket. Gloriously. If, as a result of KP trying the reverse sweep while changing hands, he is out LBW as a left-hander, then let’s have him given out. If, as a result of KP trying the reverse sweep while changing hands, he misses altogether, who is going to claim a no-ball? The umpire’s not going to call it. KP’s not going to ask for it. Maybe critics think that the bowler’s going to no-ball himself?

Enough of this guff.

Musing about Wounded Knee and Wikipedia and the US Open

As a child and as a boy, I’d heard about the Battle of Wounded Knee, about Sitting Bull and about Big Foot, but as seen through the eyes of cowboy comics illustrators. My real knowledge about the battle didn’t amount to much as a result.

Today, reading newspaper reports about Tiger Woods and the US Open, I decided I wanted to know more about it, and quite naturally I went to Wikipedia. I found it intriguing that I did not go first to Google, and thought about why. I decided that there was a class of information where I considered Wikipedia to be my first stop; that this class was characterised by something I could not find anywhere else.

What was this unique thing? A notice that said “The neutrality of this article is disputed“. Sure, I’ve known about Wikipedia’s NPOV principles, and about the use of such notices. What I hadn’t appreciated was how important that notice was. What I hadn’t appreciated was that, for some classes of information, I would go to Wikipedia in preference to other places because of the willingness of Wikipedia to point out its own provisionality.

Anyway. I found the article on Wounded Knee fascinating, and spent some time wandering around related articles.

Talking about wounded knees, apparently Tiger Woods has never failed to win a major after ending the third round with a share of the lead. He’s meant to be recovering from knee surgery; watching him play yesterday, one begins to wonder what it would really take to defeat him when he decides he wants to win. Amazing player.

Some weeks ago I let you know that I’m a big fan of Camilo Villegas. Good to see him performing well (he’s lying 6th), this is the best I’ve seen him do at a major, and I’m going to be rooting for him tonight. Defeating Tiger in this mood is going to take something special from someone, and Camilo has the capacity. Every time he stands at the tee he’s thinking birdie or eagle. All he has to do is improve his driving accuracy, and he could be a contender.