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This reminds me of a golden age blog post, when lists turned out to be an understudied literary device. I'm a fan of "dumps." Some interestingly debatable ones

This reminds me of a golden age blog post, when lists turned out to be an understudied literary device. I'm a fan of "dumps." Some interestingly debatable ones here: "Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time since 1998, works entered the public domain" I think the easy indicator may be the wrong one here. Defined more broadly, the public domain is not being enriched. For example, the web was a lot smaller in 1999, but it was a much more public domain. Today's web and post web internet is more centralised, controlled and therefore private property. Google could crawl pages, links, forums, because they were public, and use that access to create a search engine. Content, connections and signal are, today, proprietary. You can't order the world's information if that information is facebook's, only facebook can. Or patents, more stuff of the last generation is patented than the previous'. Does that mean we invented more or we patented more? What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public. Old copyright expiry deadlines might be a symbolic lead indicator, but they're determining the location of a fence post in county scale land dispute. A tiny, legible, part of the whole. In real terms, Disney's copyright portfolio is worth more, not less.

ghaff 5y ago
>What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public. Or it's kept as a trade secret.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  True. I considered clarifying, but didn't to be concise. I think publication as a reasoning for granting patents is superseded. It's mostly relevant to the history of patents, not the present. You can't be secretive about a UI, or the chemical composition of a drug.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    WD40 formula is famously still secret.
    - dalbasal 5y ago
      I guess that's an example in both directions. WD40 formula is secret despite the existence of patents.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        There are competitors with less name recognition, but arguably a better product (WD40 is great for water displacement, but it isn't very good for most of the things people use it for).
    - echelon 5y ago
      Take GC/mass spec/NMR to it and find out. The tools are available. Do it to Coke/Pepsi while you're at it.
      - kristofferR 5y ago
        Wired did it back in 2009: https://www.wired.com/2009/04/st-whatsinside-6/ https://www.wired.com/2009/04/st-whatsinside-6/
    - tejtm 5y ago
      is it? Though it was kerosene, paraffin and a drop of anise oil to cover the smell of the kerosene. Maybe I should to revisit what I thought I knew
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
majormajor 5y ago
You're only arguing against the claim about copyright terms by equating two separate definitions of "public domain." public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. The "public feeling" stuff of the 1999 internet wasn't actually in the public domain then either. The public domain has gotten larger as has the private domain. But all that private stuff is now on track to expire one day, while in 1999 it was not clear that that would ever happen at all. Compared to 1999, a lot more of that "private domain" stuff is also being made freely available, price-wise. I support copyright expiration, but making Disney's copyright portfolio worth less when they continue to create a bunch of stuff was never an explicit part of that goal for me.
- cma 5y ago
  New public domain on the internet probably peaked with flickr's height.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  As I said, "defined more broadly," which I'm also arguing is the pertinent way to define public and private domain.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I don't think that's a fair extension. The two concepts are really different, and neither is a more broad version of the other.
- andrepd 5y ago
  > public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. Well this is trivially true, but it really doesn't mean anything. If copyright length was 500 years this would still be a true statement. It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm sorry. Works published two years after the end of World War I will enter public domain in 2047 (Agatha Christie's first book). Star Wars will enter public domain in the 2070s. It's mad.
Clewza313 5y ago
One other big change since the 1990s, though, is that Creative Commons is now a real thing. Many publications/sites including Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and open-access journals release everything as CC by default, and Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >can be freely remixed The type of CC matters. NC can't be used commercially--whatever that means. ND, rather ironically, essentially forbids derivatives/remixing therefore prohibiting one of the reasons CC was created in the first place.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Note the full quote was: > Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed. And wikimedia commons does not allow ND or NC licenses.
api 5y ago
I would bet that today's public domain open web is larger than it was in 1999. It's just harder to find because search engines prioritize large closed silo sites and outside those sites search has been largely destroyed by spam. It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles." There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. The reason people think mobile has eaten everything is because growth in mobile has outpaced growth in PCs and there are now far more mobile devices than PCs. The PC market has still grown though, so there are more PCs than ever. Mobile growth is plateauing too. The mobile explosion was the creation of a new computing niche more than the displacement of an old one, though low-end and narrower PC use cases have been displaced by phones and tablets. PCs have become more like trucks vs. cars, machines for "real work." We also have a lot more OS and architectural choices in PCs today than in the 1990s. Linux is pretty usable and MacOS no longer sucks, so with Windows there are now three major choices available. Others like FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also viable but not as popular. You can even get an ARM laptop or desktop in the form of Raspberry Pi style boards in laptop form factors, larger ARM64 "server" chip boards that can work as desktops running Linux, or in the form of Apple Silicon Macs (that can also run other OSes on ARM in VMs), so you now have two CPU architectures in the mainstream PC market instead of just one. Lastly there's a huge market today for cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that did not exist at all back then. A similar comparison by the way applies to the metal server market vs. cloud. There are far more racked up servers today than there were in the 90s. Cloud has just grown really quickly, so there's even more cloud deployments.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles." There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. Well, there definitely are more PCs now than in 1991, but pre covid-WFH era, PC sales were at an all-time low, following a multi year downward trend, thanks to people moving to those closed mobile devices and consoles.

ghaff 5y ago

>What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public. Or it's kept as a trade secret.

dalbasal 5y ago
True. I considered clarifying, but didn't to be concise. I think publication as a reasoning for granting patents is superseded. It's mostly relevant to the history of patents, not the present. You can't be secretive about a UI, or the chemical composition of a drug.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  WD40 formula is famously still secret.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    I guess that's an example in both directions. WD40 formula is secret despite the existence of patents.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      There are competitors with less name recognition, but arguably a better product (WD40 is great for water displacement, but it isn't very good for most of the things people use it for).
  - echelon 5y ago
    Take GC/mass spec/NMR to it and find out. The tools are available. Do it to Coke/Pepsi while you're at it.
    - kristofferR 5y ago
      Wired did it back in 2009: https://www.wired.com/2009/04/st-whatsinside-6/ https://www.wired.com/2009/04/st-whatsinside-6/
  - tejtm 5y ago
    is it? Though it was kerosene, paraffin and a drop of anise oil to cover the smell of the kerosene. Maybe I should to revisit what I thought I knew

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

majormajor 5y ago

You're only arguing against the claim about copyright terms by equating two separate definitions of "public domain." public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. The "public feeling" stuff of the 1999 internet wasn't actually in the public domain then either. The public domain has gotten larger as has the private domain. But all that private stuff is now on track to expire one day, while in 1999 it was not clear that that would ever happen at all. Compared to 1999, a lot more of that "private domain" stuff is also being made freely available, price-wise. I support copyright expiration, but making Disney's copyright portfolio worth less when they continue to create a bunch of stuff was never an explicit part of that goal for me.

cma 5y ago
New public domain on the internet probably peaked with flickr's height.
dalbasal 5y ago
As I said, "defined more broadly," which I'm also arguing is the pertinent way to define public and private domain.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I don't think that's a fair extension. The two concepts are really different, and neither is a more broad version of the other.
andrepd 5y ago
> public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. Well this is trivially true, but it really doesn't mean anything. If copyright length was 500 years this would still be a true statement. It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm sorry. Works published two years after the end of World War I will enter public domain in 2047 (Agatha Christie's first book). Star Wars will enter public domain in the 2070s. It's mad.

Clewza313 5y ago

One other big change since the 1990s, though, is that Creative Commons is now a real thing. Many publications/sites including Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and open-access journals release everything as CC by default, and Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed.

ghaff 5y ago
>can be freely remixed The type of CC matters. NC can't be used commercially--whatever that means. ND, rather ironically, essentially forbids derivatives/remixing therefore prohibiting one of the reasons CC was created in the first place.
- bawolff 5y ago
  Note the full quote was: > Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed. And wikimedia commons does not allow ND or NC licenses.

api 5y ago

I would bet that today's public domain open web is larger than it was in 1999. It's just harder to find because search engines prioritize large closed silo sites and outside those sites search has been largely destroyed by spam. It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles." There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. The reason people think mobile has eaten everything is because growth in mobile has outpaced growth in PCs and there are now far more mobile devices than PCs. The PC market has still grown though, so there are more PCs than ever. Mobile growth is plateauing too. The mobile explosion was the creation of a new computing niche more than the displacement of an old one, though low-end and narrower PC use cases have been displaced by phones and tablets. PCs have become more like trucks vs. cars, machines for "real work." We also have a lot more OS and architectural choices in PCs today than in the 1990s. Linux is pretty usable and MacOS no longer sucks, so with Windows there are now three major choices available. Others like FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also viable but not as popular. You can even get an ARM laptop or desktop in the form of Raspberry Pi style boards in laptop form factors, larger ARM64 "server" chip boards that can work as desktops running Linux, or in the form of Apple Silicon Macs (that can also run other OSes on ARM in VMs), so you now have two CPU architectures in the mainstream PC market instead of just one. Lastly there's a huge market today for cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that did not exist at all back then. A similar comparison by the way applies to the metal server market vs. cloud. There are far more racked up servers today than there were in the 90s. Cloud has just grown really quickly, so there's even more cloud deployments.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles." There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. Well, there definitely are more PCs now than in 1991, but pre covid-WFH era, PC sales were at an all-time low, following a multi year downward trend, thanks to people moving to those closed mobile devices and consoles.