Over a year ago, I wrote about the gamechanger. It was the first part of a series of posts of me explaining my views on tv series theory, which I came up with without any prior knowledge of existing theory. Today, I'm finally writing the second part of that series. To recap the previous installment, a gamechanger is when something happens in a tv series that changes it entirely. A good example would be how in the beginning of Voyager's season 4, Kes left and was replaced by Seven of Nine. Today, I am going to discuss another piece of theory I came up with.
The very existence of a gamechanger suggests that there is a game. The game is what I am going to talk about today. I should add that I don't completely know what the game looks like. However, I would like to share my current view of things.
Basically, the game is a collection of properties that hold for the entire series (or at least part of it, as we know that gamechangers may change the game). It is, in a way, the context in which episodes are written. It's the things we know about a series.
I don't exactly know what the game consists of just yet, but there will be a number of things. Examples of things that will likely be part of the game are the goal or drive and the obstacle. The goal of a show is what the characters are trying to achieve and thus what keeps the show moving. The obstacle is the thing that makes sure the characters don't simply achieve their goal and end the series.
One thing I am pretty sure of is part of the game is the group of characters, from recurring upwards. I'll call them the "Family" and I'll leave the discussion of the family for my next topic on tv series theory.
It is an important thing to be noted that the game can change without a gamechanger. As mentioned in the gamechanger piece, there are also gradual changes. However, a change that is in fact minor, isn't a gamechanger either, even when it is sudden. An example would be when a recurring is introduced, which changes the family and thus the game, but may have so little influence on the show that it can't be called a gamechanger.
That's it for today. See you around!
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
The Copyright Debate
Today, I read up for a bit on how the case of MegaUpload was going. As it turns out, they are working on a new service to be released a year after MegaUpload being taken offline. The few details disclosed about the new service are a good example of one of the points in the copyright debate. It inspired me to do a piece on the whole debate.
Basically, the copyright debate takes place in two areas. There's the practical area and the ideological one. I'll start with the practical part because, well, it's more practical.
The whole piracy play is a cat and mouse game. Once a certain way of piracy gets closed down, piracy evolves to its next form that isn't blocked. This effect can be seen when looking at the history of file sharing, like when you look at the stories of Napster and Kazaa.
However, it can also be seen in more recent developments. When The Pirate Bay was facing legal consequences in a number of countries, it started adopting a new technique (magnet links) through which the legal processes against them would become invalid. When you release a new sophisticated form of DRM, it may take a couple of days longer before it has been cracked. And now there's the new mega site is planning to use a technique that makes them unaware of the content of what is uploaded to them, making sure they can't be held responsible for ignoring illegal content on their network. Basically, the copyright industry will never be able to catch up with the pirates.
The proponents of the copyright system as it is right now are eager to come up with a way to more fundamentally tackle the problem. That's basically what the proposals like SOPA and PIPA were all about. They were meant to give more powerful tools to the copyright owners to shut down piracy and also defined piracy in terms very loose as to also encapsulate future forms.
However, there are some serious problems with it. The problems specific to systems mentioned above is that they put amazing amounts of power into the hands of the copyright owners, had systems in which the mere allegation of copyright infringement would be punished very harshly without substantial evidence or the possibility of a defense and finally that it held websites fully responsible for anything posted by users, meaning that it would have become impossible to have user contributions that aren't all moderated by hand before publicizing them.
However, there is a more substantial problem with the whole idea of tackling the copyright defense in any fundamental way that circumvents the whole cat and mouse game. Basically, it's about how bits and bytes don't have a meaning all by them selves. This is what the new mega site is such a good example of. Basically, what it does is that you will create a key and encrypt the data you upload to them with it. As such, the data stored by Mega does not have a meaning without the key. Neither does the key have a meaning without the data. However, a user receiving the key and the data through separate channels will be able to decrypt the data and assign a meaning to it again. In this example, never did any one service ever share copyrighted data and yet the data came from one person and ended up at another person.
This is basically the big problem. The lesser version of this problem is that you would have to inspect everything a user does - like reading personal mails - in order to make sure he doesn't send copyrighted materials. And the bigger version is that even then you can never reliably check what is copyrighted material and what is not as shown with the Mega system. The only thing one could do is put systems in place that invade our privacy by checking everything we do and at the same time taking down any websites that might facilitate piracy, which is nothing short of a full-fledged censorship system.
If there are so many practical problems with copyright then you might wonder why it is defended so doggedly. And that's when you come to the ideological part of the debate. Often copyright is taken for granted, but in fact it's very much a artificial construct. Something made by man that should not be taken at face value but instead carefully inspected for its advantages and disadvantages.
Looking at the history of copyright we'll actually see that it is an ancient system created in England centuries ago and having undergone many revisions since. What also springs out is that from the very start it was mostly used to the profit of not those who made the copyrighted material but those who distributed it. That's also who currently profit from it right now, the big music and video companies. The fact that those companies have insane amounts of money is not only a testimony to the unnatural distribution of money the copyright laws cause, but also something that greatly eschews the entire debate, as much of it is fought in courtrooms and through lobbying.
When we look at the arguments against the current copyright system you'll quickly stumble upon the one about shoulders of giants. We stand on those shoulders when doing just about anything. When the field of physics is advanced through new theories, for example, we build upon what previous physicists have done, perhaps most notably Newton and Einstein. This goes for the creation of culture as well. For example, story telling is just about never done without drawing inspiration from other works. Oftentimes, authors state their sources of inspiration or their "influences". Other times, trhe story is even stated to be a retelling of another story. Notable examples include the way the Grimm brothers became the authority on folk tales by publishing them and the Walt Disney becoming big by making films out of fairy tales. Copyright is a construct that limits us in basing our work off of other works and thus can be said to have a negative effect on the development of our cultural heritage.
We have to look a little harder to find the arguments defending the copyright system. This is because it is so often taken for granted and the battle is often fought through implications rather than arguments. There's always the ads we have been given over the past decade or so that say piracy is equal to stealing, but there isn't any argument to be found in that. This is because these ads do not try to substantiate that claim in any way and instead work by trying to instill a sense of right and wrong in people based on emotional value. On top of that, this argument usually completely skips the distinction between software and a car, which is the same as the reason why one is shared through piracy and the other isn't: software can be copied with barely any cost to it, while a car can't be.
The one argument that does sometimes come up is what we stand to lose by abolishing copyright. And there is most definitely some truth to this. There is little doubt about it that some artists would disappear in a world without copyright. However, this can be countered by the sentiment that music or art or writing as a whole won't and other artists that won't show up on people's radars in the current system would be able to flourish in a copyrightless system. In fact, the way some artists are already coping with the fact that piracy is so common these days proves that there are profitable models for - for example - making music in a world without copyright.
Once again, there is no doubt that the current situation would change radically. One example I think it often left out of this debate is the one of single player computer games. It's pretty clear that the landscape of single player games would radically change if there wasn't copyright to protect it. Big companies making lots of money off games created by large teams define what is possible in those realms and those seem likely to be hurt the worst by such a change. The argument goes, though, that we shouldn't judge the current system to be better than the one that we would end up with if copyright is abolished.
The things that we know up front are that the fields where copyright currently exists wouldn't disappear if there no longer were such a thing as copyright and that it is quite probable that distributors won't be making quite as much money. Unless you are in the distribution business, neither of those sounds like a bad thing.
That's the copyright discussion as far as I know it. I have tried to give a good and objective perspective on this all, but I have probably failed considerable since I am a human and I do have an opinion on the matter. I also might be unaware of some of the arguments in this discussion. However, I do think it's a decent overview, even if a bit tainted by my personal view of the matter.
Basically, the copyright debate takes place in two areas. There's the practical area and the ideological one. I'll start with the practical part because, well, it's more practical.
The whole piracy play is a cat and mouse game. Once a certain way of piracy gets closed down, piracy evolves to its next form that isn't blocked. This effect can be seen when looking at the history of file sharing, like when you look at the stories of Napster and Kazaa.
However, it can also be seen in more recent developments. When The Pirate Bay was facing legal consequences in a number of countries, it started adopting a new technique (magnet links) through which the legal processes against them would become invalid. When you release a new sophisticated form of DRM, it may take a couple of days longer before it has been cracked. And now there's the new mega site is planning to use a technique that makes them unaware of the content of what is uploaded to them, making sure they can't be held responsible for ignoring illegal content on their network. Basically, the copyright industry will never be able to catch up with the pirates.
The proponents of the copyright system as it is right now are eager to come up with a way to more fundamentally tackle the problem. That's basically what the proposals like SOPA and PIPA were all about. They were meant to give more powerful tools to the copyright owners to shut down piracy and also defined piracy in terms very loose as to also encapsulate future forms.
However, there are some serious problems with it. The problems specific to systems mentioned above is that they put amazing amounts of power into the hands of the copyright owners, had systems in which the mere allegation of copyright infringement would be punished very harshly without substantial evidence or the possibility of a defense and finally that it held websites fully responsible for anything posted by users, meaning that it would have become impossible to have user contributions that aren't all moderated by hand before publicizing them.
However, there is a more substantial problem with the whole idea of tackling the copyright defense in any fundamental way that circumvents the whole cat and mouse game. Basically, it's about how bits and bytes don't have a meaning all by them selves. This is what the new mega site is such a good example of. Basically, what it does is that you will create a key and encrypt the data you upload to them with it. As such, the data stored by Mega does not have a meaning without the key. Neither does the key have a meaning without the data. However, a user receiving the key and the data through separate channels will be able to decrypt the data and assign a meaning to it again. In this example, never did any one service ever share copyrighted data and yet the data came from one person and ended up at another person.
This is basically the big problem. The lesser version of this problem is that you would have to inspect everything a user does - like reading personal mails - in order to make sure he doesn't send copyrighted materials. And the bigger version is that even then you can never reliably check what is copyrighted material and what is not as shown with the Mega system. The only thing one could do is put systems in place that invade our privacy by checking everything we do and at the same time taking down any websites that might facilitate piracy, which is nothing short of a full-fledged censorship system.
If there are so many practical problems with copyright then you might wonder why it is defended so doggedly. And that's when you come to the ideological part of the debate. Often copyright is taken for granted, but in fact it's very much a artificial construct. Something made by man that should not be taken at face value but instead carefully inspected for its advantages and disadvantages.
Looking at the history of copyright we'll actually see that it is an ancient system created in England centuries ago and having undergone many revisions since. What also springs out is that from the very start it was mostly used to the profit of not those who made the copyrighted material but those who distributed it. That's also who currently profit from it right now, the big music and video companies. The fact that those companies have insane amounts of money is not only a testimony to the unnatural distribution of money the copyright laws cause, but also something that greatly eschews the entire debate, as much of it is fought in courtrooms and through lobbying.
When we look at the arguments against the current copyright system you'll quickly stumble upon the one about shoulders of giants. We stand on those shoulders when doing just about anything. When the field of physics is advanced through new theories, for example, we build upon what previous physicists have done, perhaps most notably Newton and Einstein. This goes for the creation of culture as well. For example, story telling is just about never done without drawing inspiration from other works. Oftentimes, authors state their sources of inspiration or their "influences". Other times, trhe story is even stated to be a retelling of another story. Notable examples include the way the Grimm brothers became the authority on folk tales by publishing them and the Walt Disney becoming big by making films out of fairy tales. Copyright is a construct that limits us in basing our work off of other works and thus can be said to have a negative effect on the development of our cultural heritage.
We have to look a little harder to find the arguments defending the copyright system. This is because it is so often taken for granted and the battle is often fought through implications rather than arguments. There's always the ads we have been given over the past decade or so that say piracy is equal to stealing, but there isn't any argument to be found in that. This is because these ads do not try to substantiate that claim in any way and instead work by trying to instill a sense of right and wrong in people based on emotional value. On top of that, this argument usually completely skips the distinction between software and a car, which is the same as the reason why one is shared through piracy and the other isn't: software can be copied with barely any cost to it, while a car can't be.
The one argument that does sometimes come up is what we stand to lose by abolishing copyright. And there is most definitely some truth to this. There is little doubt about it that some artists would disappear in a world without copyright. However, this can be countered by the sentiment that music or art or writing as a whole won't and other artists that won't show up on people's radars in the current system would be able to flourish in a copyrightless system. In fact, the way some artists are already coping with the fact that piracy is so common these days proves that there are profitable models for - for example - making music in a world without copyright.
Once again, there is no doubt that the current situation would change radically. One example I think it often left out of this debate is the one of single player computer games. It's pretty clear that the landscape of single player games would radically change if there wasn't copyright to protect it. Big companies making lots of money off games created by large teams define what is possible in those realms and those seem likely to be hurt the worst by such a change. The argument goes, though, that we shouldn't judge the current system to be better than the one that we would end up with if copyright is abolished.
The things that we know up front are that the fields where copyright currently exists wouldn't disappear if there no longer were such a thing as copyright and that it is quite probable that distributors won't be making quite as much money. Unless you are in the distribution business, neither of those sounds like a bad thing.
That's the copyright discussion as far as I know it. I have tried to give a good and objective perspective on this all, but I have probably failed considerable since I am a human and I do have an opinion on the matter. I also might be unaware of some of the arguments in this discussion. However, I do think it's a decent overview, even if a bit tainted by my personal view of the matter.
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
The Internet Generation
Every title has its stories. The most important story is often the one that follows it, but for this one I also want to give the hi-story. (Sorry for the bad pun.)
This title started off as a comment on facebook. It was formatted for that medium (it had only a single capital letter, and it had a smiley trailing it). I meant it as a funny comment relating to the fact that someone had made a note about having (better) internet access, but it also got me thinking. And that thinking is what this blogpost stems from. As such, it's going to be the more serious discussion of the title.
So.. the internet generation. It's the generation I believe I am a part of. It's the generation that grew up with the internet. Well, that's not entirely true. There may be many more generations (it depends a bit on how long the internet is going to live (which is looking like a very long time right now) and what direction the internet is going to take from where it is now), but I still believe that we are the internet generation. That's because we are the first generation that grew up with the internet.
Defining a generation is never an exact science and even the question "how old can you be while still having grown up with the internet" can lead to many different answers. Nevertheless, there is clearly one thing that defines a generation: the differences between it and the generation that went before it. That's why I say the first generation that grew up with the internet is the internet generation.
(And perhaps it should be interpreted as "the people who grew up with the internet while their parents did not".)
Of course there is more to it than just that. We are also the first to massively adopt things like wikipedia, despite the early claims of it not being very factual. We are also a generation of which the larger part is on facebook. (Well, in the West anyway, but I suppose we were talking about the West anyway.) We are also the first generation to have gotten used to having the internet in our pocket through our smartphones. And we are also the generation that hates not to have the internet at our finger tops (or even just a little less at our fingertops than usual).
There is a number of properties we can ascribe to our generation (again, compared to the previous generations, future generations may well follow in our footsteps in a number of those). One of the most interesting of those properties - in my eyes anyway - would be how we handle information. We are very good scanning and picking out the useful bits of information, as we do whenever we arrive on a website. We are also very good at separating what we are looking for from distractions (well, some anyway) as we read completely around advertisement (the ones that aren't annoying anyway) and barely even notice they are there. And like no other, we can look at a summary like the ones on Google and decide if this is what we are looking for or not.
Another property would be how we handle multitasking. I don't exactly know how much better humans are at "actual multitasking" (doing different things at exactly the same time), but wouldn't be surprised if we aren't able to do that or do it much. However, there is still the fact where fact that we can do different things at the same time by actually just switching between them quickly, which I think we as a generation are pretty good at (and which computers are way better at, even). However, I that's not where we make the big difference in my opinion. The real difference is how we can switch between things consciously almost effortlessly. Tabbed browsing is a good example of this, and not being able to do multiple things at the same thing easily makes us feel restricted.
(And to make a circle out of my whole story again, that's also one of the things the post I responded to on Facebook was about).
If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed my rambling!
This title started off as a comment on facebook. It was formatted for that medium (it had only a single capital letter, and it had a smiley trailing it). I meant it as a funny comment relating to the fact that someone had made a note about having (better) internet access, but it also got me thinking. And that thinking is what this blogpost stems from. As such, it's going to be the more serious discussion of the title.
So.. the internet generation. It's the generation I believe I am a part of. It's the generation that grew up with the internet. Well, that's not entirely true. There may be many more generations (it depends a bit on how long the internet is going to live (which is looking like a very long time right now) and what direction the internet is going to take from where it is now), but I still believe that we are the internet generation. That's because we are the first generation that grew up with the internet.
Defining a generation is never an exact science and even the question "how old can you be while still having grown up with the internet" can lead to many different answers. Nevertheless, there is clearly one thing that defines a generation: the differences between it and the generation that went before it. That's why I say the first generation that grew up with the internet is the internet generation.
(And perhaps it should be interpreted as "the people who grew up with the internet while their parents did not".)
Of course there is more to it than just that. We are also the first to massively adopt things like wikipedia, despite the early claims of it not being very factual. We are also a generation of which the larger part is on facebook. (Well, in the West anyway, but I suppose we were talking about the West anyway.) We are also the first generation to have gotten used to having the internet in our pocket through our smartphones. And we are also the generation that hates not to have the internet at our finger tops (or even just a little less at our fingertops than usual).
There is a number of properties we can ascribe to our generation (again, compared to the previous generations, future generations may well follow in our footsteps in a number of those). One of the most interesting of those properties - in my eyes anyway - would be how we handle information. We are very good scanning and picking out the useful bits of information, as we do whenever we arrive on a website. We are also very good at separating what we are looking for from distractions (well, some anyway) as we read completely around advertisement (the ones that aren't annoying anyway) and barely even notice they are there. And like no other, we can look at a summary like the ones on Google and decide if this is what we are looking for or not.
Another property would be how we handle multitasking. I don't exactly know how much better humans are at "actual multitasking" (doing different things at exactly the same time), but wouldn't be surprised if we aren't able to do that or do it much. However, there is still the fact where fact that we can do different things at the same time by actually just switching between them quickly, which I think we as a generation are pretty good at (and which computers are way better at, even). However, I that's not where we make the big difference in my opinion. The real difference is how we can switch between things consciously almost effortlessly. Tabbed browsing is a good example of this, and not being able to do multiple things at the same thing easily makes us feel restricted.
(And to make a circle out of my whole story again, that's also one of the things the post I responded to on Facebook was about).
If you got this far, I hope you enjoyed my rambling!
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Open Source: LZMA
A while back I wrote a single post about the era I believe we are at the doorstep of. At the time, it was more of a crazy theory of which I wasn't sure I believed it myself. It was more of a feeling than anything. Recently I have come to believe it more and more. For those who have missed the installment in question, let me summarize it. I feel that we're on the edge of a new era. Technological progress is slowing down (with computers being one of the notable example). Instead, we now have to go find out what we do with the technology we do have. The new advances will be mostly social, in the way we use our technology. A major battle that will be fought at the beginning of this era is the one for freedom of information and it will shape the entire era.
Now that that is behind us, let me get to talking about the subject of the day: Open Source. This is usually mentioned in the context of software, as that's where it originated and still is the place where it is the biggest by far. However, one could argue it applies to just about anything copyright governs. It is about the freedom to duplicate, spread and modify the content you receive. The thing that relates this to the fight I described above is that very copyright. It is heavily involved in this battle, though mostly as a weapon or a subject, it isn't the wrong-doer itself. Open Source is in fact voluntarily giving up copyright.
Today I saw what I consider on of the biggest victories for Open Source I have ever seen. It is not all that long ago that open source was a thing for nerds who ran this mystic thing known as Linux. This has been changing, and one of the most telling signs may be that current poster boy for linux is barely any harder to use than Windows. (Not everyone may like Ubuntu, especially not all the nerds. Still, it is hard to deny it is currently the poster boy.) However, that is just one aspect of the whole story. I think one of the earlier big victories was FireFox, the browser that dethroned Internet Explorer, who was sitting back while it thought it had won the browser war already.
Since that victory, we have also seem what I would personally dub "semi-Open Source", which was a number of companies (most notably Google) who release their software under an Open Source license because their business strategy wasn't based on selling their software. The most notable example might be yet another example, Google's Chrome. It is clear that one of the major driving forces behind releasing this under an open source was that they wanted to be able to incorporate improvements made by the community into their own product and they do wait before releasing new features under an open source license to make sure they don't lose their "competitive edge". However, it still continued to promote open source. On top of that, it also showed that open source and profit-based companies aren't necessarily incompatible.
From there, I want to talk about the latest victory I have seen lately: LZMA.
I don't blame you if you just scratched your head and wondered what that abbreviation meant. However, the meaning isn't the important thing. The important thing is what it is the name of: the successor to rar. Besides zip - because of its integration in Windows - rar has been the leader in compressed archives. The open source communities have always used alternatives to it, but never did those other options make the cross over to Windows users.
LZMA has already become somewhat of a new standard in the open source world, where an important reason is just that its compression rates are really good. Of course, there it also met the hard requirement of being open source itself. Slowly, I have seen it seep into the more nerdy communities of Windows users as well. However, today I saw mention of it by a "software cracker". Oh, don't get me wrong, that's still a nerdy bunch, but they are making software for the uninitiated in the arts of computerfare (well, the technical part anyway, these people are good at playing games). And yes, he was merely talking about the next version of something and he was still going to hide lzma archives behind an "auto-extractor" so the end user would not even get to see it was there, but I still think that slowly but surely lzma is moving into a a really good position in the non-open source world. From that position, I think it will be able to take over this hill from rar and become king of it.
Imagine downloading a file from the internet that is compressed. Without spending a second thought, you open the lzma file it came in. Without even realizing, you just use open source in your normal usage. If getting that deep under the skin of the non-open source user isn't a major victory for open source, I don't know anymore.
Now that that is behind us, let me get to talking about the subject of the day: Open Source. This is usually mentioned in the context of software, as that's where it originated and still is the place where it is the biggest by far. However, one could argue it applies to just about anything copyright governs. It is about the freedom to duplicate, spread and modify the content you receive. The thing that relates this to the fight I described above is that very copyright. It is heavily involved in this battle, though mostly as a weapon or a subject, it isn't the wrong-doer itself. Open Source is in fact voluntarily giving up copyright.
Today I saw what I consider on of the biggest victories for Open Source I have ever seen. It is not all that long ago that open source was a thing for nerds who ran this mystic thing known as Linux. This has been changing, and one of the most telling signs may be that current poster boy for linux is barely any harder to use than Windows. (Not everyone may like Ubuntu, especially not all the nerds. Still, it is hard to deny it is currently the poster boy.) However, that is just one aspect of the whole story. I think one of the earlier big victories was FireFox, the browser that dethroned Internet Explorer, who was sitting back while it thought it had won the browser war already.
Since that victory, we have also seem what I would personally dub "semi-Open Source", which was a number of companies (most notably Google) who release their software under an Open Source license because their business strategy wasn't based on selling their software. The most notable example might be yet another example, Google's Chrome. It is clear that one of the major driving forces behind releasing this under an open source was that they wanted to be able to incorporate improvements made by the community into their own product and they do wait before releasing new features under an open source license to make sure they don't lose their "competitive edge". However, it still continued to promote open source. On top of that, it also showed that open source and profit-based companies aren't necessarily incompatible.
From there, I want to talk about the latest victory I have seen lately: LZMA.
I don't blame you if you just scratched your head and wondered what that abbreviation meant. However, the meaning isn't the important thing. The important thing is what it is the name of: the successor to rar. Besides zip - because of its integration in Windows - rar has been the leader in compressed archives. The open source communities have always used alternatives to it, but never did those other options make the cross over to Windows users.
LZMA has already become somewhat of a new standard in the open source world, where an important reason is just that its compression rates are really good. Of course, there it also met the hard requirement of being open source itself. Slowly, I have seen it seep into the more nerdy communities of Windows users as well. However, today I saw mention of it by a "software cracker". Oh, don't get me wrong, that's still a nerdy bunch, but they are making software for the uninitiated in the arts of computerfare (well, the technical part anyway, these people are good at playing games). And yes, he was merely talking about the next version of something and he was still going to hide lzma archives behind an "auto-extractor" so the end user would not even get to see it was there, but I still think that slowly but surely lzma is moving into a a really good position in the non-open source world. From that position, I think it will be able to take over this hill from rar and become king of it.
Imagine downloading a file from the internet that is compressed. Without spending a second thought, you open the lzma file it came in. Without even realizing, you just use open source in your normal usage. If getting that deep under the skin of the non-open source user isn't a major victory for open source, I don't know anymore.
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