Big judgment on filesharing.

In slightly more amusing news, Lessig's not running for Congress.

Free.

Ari

In the words of a friend, "Edward Tufte would so approve."

Impressive indeed.

Update: Just noticed they used color instead of a y-axis. Perhaps the y component is density rather than true values, in which case they get a pass (hard to explain density to a general audience).
Update: It's not density. "The area of the shape (and its color) corresponds to the film's total domestic gross."

Ari

Subpoenas for peer reviews. Not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it could easily be abused to stifle science; on the other, IANAL but I can't think of any compelling reason why review should be granted any more protection than many other things that are discoverable, and it may help push towards open review, which I'm more or less in favor of.

Ari

Top-down structure of social media. In some sense this misses the point, though. Who those core contributers are is determined only by their usefulness to the site. It would be more honest to say that upfront, but ultimately that is a better structure. Gladwell (not a big fan, apropos) would say that other mechanisms are simply the result of a human bias towards "potential" rather than past results.

Ari

Harvard is apparently adopting an opt-out OA policy. This mechanism of encouraging OA is brilliant and entirely in line with the research on opt-out in organ donation and IRA adoption. Because there's an opt-out provision, no one can complain that this restricts their journal choices. Because it's there by default, adoption will increase dramatically. The only issue is that I imagine many people will sign traditional journal agreements anyway, and thus wind up placing themselves in legal messes. Not that big a problem though, because journals would be even more misguided than the RIAA to sue. Think that suing customers is bad? Try suing academics for disseminating their works.

Ari

Consilience, a new interdisciplinary journal on development, uses a CC license. Specifically, it uses a "Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License." Perhaps the Japanese watchmaker model of have-it-your-way licensing has gone a bit too far!

Ari

Random meta data source of the whenever.

Ari

Still don't think that "piracy" can be speech? No better time to disabuse oneself of the notion than an election year.

In other news, I got an e-mail from the editor of a paper that was just accepted asking me to sign their copyright agreement. In the past I have hated doing so, but this time I was greeted with a CC lincense. The journal? PLoS Med. Yay.

--Ari