3 ms·

This is the kind of headline (and analysis) that drives me a little crazy. It brings, in my opinion, completely corrupted versions of the two key words: "Owns"

by jMyles 10y ago

This is the kind of headline (and analysis) that drives me a little crazy. It brings, in my opinion, completely corrupted versions of the two key words: "Owns" and "Face." Despite the article's scary posturing about the matters of intellectual property that arise from all humans having a face, it fails to remember this basic concrete fact: My face is a physical object - bone structure, musculature, skin, and the like - that is attached to me. And I unambiguously own it. Anybody who literally tries to steal it will be met with the wrath of actual facial self-defense. On the other hand, once photons have bounced off this physical structure and made their way into a CMOS sensor it turns out that I don't own the content of the storage media contained by the devices doing the capturing. Then, when someone take this same media and publishes it online, its ownership, in an organic sense, becomes wholly unclear. The only reason anybody can "own" a piece of media on the internet is because the state, via (often capricious) enforcement of intellectual property laws, says so. In a more concrete sense, it seems quite clear that anybody can own and use any piece of media on the internet for any purpose; they just need to be informed that, for the moment, the state may exact violence upon - you guessed it - their face and other body parts - for doing so. In fact, a much better case to use for analysis of the literal question of "Who Owns Your Face?" are laws banning gas masks, such as the emergency order at the WTO protests in Seattle in 2000. The implication of such an order, obviously, is that the state owns your face, and may use your mucus membranes as an attack surface for irritant chemicals to control you, and that you don't own your face in sufficient measure to take preventative action. What I'm saying is: a crucial piece of thinking critically about civic virtue and property in the information age is to distinguish a thing from a representation of that thing. The former can clearly be owned and its owner is usually obvious. The latter probably cannot, and states who fail to recognize this will increasingly fall behind.

hashmal 10y ago
the whole concept of "intellectual property" is ridiculous to me.
qntty 10y ago
I don't think that people having this conversation fail to make the distinction that you're making. They talk like that because language is metaphorical. In fact, if you pay attention, you'll notice that you do the same sort of thing all the time. Speaking about it differently will frame the concepts differently, but the way that people frame a concept is an intentional choice (it's not an error because there's no right way to do it). You can disagree about the way to frame the debate (that is, the way to think about the concepts), but understanding the physics of light sensors doesn't automatically lead to framing this particular conversation differently. There are lots of valid ways of thinking about the issue that doesn't rely on understanding physics.

by jMyles 10y ago

hashmal 10y ago

the whole concept of "intellectual property" is ridiculous to me.

qntty 10y ago

I don't think that people having this conversation fail to make the distinction that you're making. They talk like that because language is metaphorical. In fact, if you pay attention, you'll notice that you do the same sort of thing all the time. Speaking about it differently will frame the concepts differently, but the way that people frame a concept is an intentional choice (it's not an error because there's no right way to do it). You can disagree about the way to frame the debate (that is, the way to think about the concepts), but understanding the physics of light sensors doesn't automatically lead to framing this particular conversation differently. There are lots of valid ways of thinking about the issue that doesn't rely on understanding physics.