We must laugh for humanity, lest we cry

“I find it truly stunning how many people can shrug off stuff like this, preferring instead a tiny, cramped cosmos just 6,000 years old, scheduled to end any-time-now in a scripted stage show. An ancient and immense and ongoing cosmos is so vastly more dramatic and worthy of a majestic Creator. Our brains, capable of exploring His universe, picking up His tools and doing His work, seem destined for much more than cowering in a corner, praying that some of our neighbors will go to hell…”

– Blogger David Brin, on self-righteous creationists

“See, the way it works is we dangle the carrot, then when a file-sharer reaches for it, we wiggle the stick so they know what we’re packing, We ask them, ‘Are you sure you want to do that? Didn’t you see the stick?’ And if they insist on going for the carrot, we beat them to death with the stick, you know, just until we can see a little brain through the skull. That’s why you need the stick and the carrot both. It’s really hard to kill someone with a carrot.”

– MPAA spokesman Dan Glickman, on his “holistic approach” at dealing with movie piracy.

“We are dancing the tango. When you are dancing the tango and your toe is stepped on, hurting your toe, you complain. If it is stepped on harder, you complain again. There’s a whole game, but we are prepared to continue dancing the tango.”

– Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jesus Perez being glib about the 2004 US election results

An academic look at innovation law

I had the pleasure of attending a Bell University Labs lecture entitled, “Intellectual Property, Innovation and Efficiency in Information Economies” hosted by the Professor William Melody. Melody is, among other things, a former FCC member in the late 1960s and a visiting law professor at the University of Toronto. The seminar was specifically hosted by the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy. And yes, I’ve been slacking, this lecture was on October 20th.

He started off by telling the audience that eventually, the only economy left will be the “e-economy”, driven by market liberalization and intellectual property laws. Regulation has not always lagged behind technology; the introduction of deregulation policies has been the driving force behind many of the market’s innovations. Several decisive laws put in place since the US Reform Act in the 1960s has, in addition to breaking up AT&T, have broken down barriers to entry and unbundled services. The result was that the layers of infrastructure, hardware, protocol, software, and content has been peeled apart, stimulated competition at each layer.

Today, regulation has been brought back to table, as the various information technologies begin to converge. Monopolies, such as the ILECs, IBM, Microsoft and others have manifested themselves. Meanwhile, intellectual property rights have become more restrictive than ever. Meanwhile, the ITU and WSIS have been slow to turn any matching policies into actual rules to abide by. Melody urges a reassessment of current laws and policies to address these issues.

While Melody does not have a technical background (he didn’t distinguish between infrastructured-based VoIP solutions with VoIP Internet applications). Intellectual property issues were not discussed in detail either. However, this lecture provided an interesting insight from a law academia point of view.