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Assorted links
1. Profile of Robert Barro, via Mark Thoma
3. How do magicians do without intellectual property? Via Eric Crampton
4. Jason Kottke, one of my favorite bloggers and now a father as well, is up and running again
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 5, 2007 at 03:49 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
In defense of data mining?
Yep, an instant classic. The author is some sort of statistician at columbia. A cold reminder to me of why I don't blog, the googlebots make such flashes of genius forever...
Posted by: rick at Sep 5, 2007 5:04:58 PM
The magician paper is interesting, but why then isn't Penn and Teller cast out? They reveal the secrets of their own tricks don't they?
Posted by: Sameer Parekh at Sep 5, 2007 7:38:19 PM
in defense of data mining?
www.w3.org/2006/01/tami-privacy-strategies-aaai.pdf
Posted by: juancarlos at Sep 5, 2007 7:49:39 PM
Penn and Teller purposefully create tricks that are outlandish so that they can reveal the secrets to them.
Posted by: John Hall at Sep 5, 2007 9:14:41 PM
The magician paper reminded me of the recent Christopher Nolan movie The Prestige which centers on a rivalry between two magicians and each other's secret tricks. I hadn't thought at the time how important the secrets are to that market, but that paper seems to have hit on something worth thinking about. Fashion is another area that seems to thrive without IP protection/enforcement.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Sep 5, 2007 11:35:28 PM
If the magic paper is any good, and why should it not be, then magicians take the "don't explain" rule much more serious than I thought. In my cynical mind, I thought the fuss around the 'masked magician' was part of the show, with magicians really wanting to advertise it to bolster interest in magic in general. In fact, to some degree I still believe this.
Posted by: Great Zamfir at Sep 6, 2007 4:03:32 AM
Sameer_Parekh: In what I remember from The Onion's parody articles, Penn and Teller *are* hotly
debated within the "magician community".
In any case, I strongly suspect that people see magic shows sparsely enough, and spend little enough
effort researching how magic tricks are done, that public disclosure of how a trick works, really isn't
going to hurt any magician's revenue. And besides (to borrow from Alpha_Centauri):
"What's more important, the trick, or the magic? Sure, sure, information should be free and all that,
but the magic is in how you do it, and it what you do it to. It's in almost getting spotted without...
getting spotted. The trick is just information. The performance is the magic."
Posted by: Person at Sep 6, 2007 9:50:09 AM
The market for magicians as entertainers seems to have really dried up. Is that just my imagination? It seems dominated by superstars - David Copperfield, David Blaine and now this Freakmind or whatever his name is guy. Criss something. Usually, technology enhances a market, and particularly enhances the superstar effect, but in this market, I wonder if it's not done the opposite. If I see someone make the statue of liberty disappear, I yawn - JJ Abrams basically does that in his new movie, and it's much cooler. It seems like technology has both a dampening and an enhancing effect on the market for magicians - why watch this one guy when I can watch David Blaine? But when I'm watching Blaine, I'm also less impressed than I would've been decades ago.
Posted by: jason voorhees at Sep 6, 2007 5:09:55 PM
The alternatives to IP pursued by magicians are interesting, but isn't it time someone looks at the board game market?
Board games have poor protection, a number of trials concerning "Monopoly" (appropriate?) established that a game's mechanics and rules aren't protected by copyright. Different countries have apparently dealt with this in different ways: The US/English-speaking market is large enough (and patent-friendly enough) to make patents viable as clone-protection, but that means few, broadly accessible games. Heavy marketing and spin-offs are also important, since trademarks are especially valuable with no effective copyright.
In some countries, incl. my own, it appears that quiz-style games are heavily emphasized over other games, because the questions are what really add value, and they are copyrightable.
German game publishers have chosen the most interesting approach, by promoting game designs as works of art, and prominently displaying the designer's name on games. I believe this has created strong incentives against plagiarism since any obvious attempt would taint the designer's reputation - and their reputation is what sells their games, since it often is the customer's first way of evaluating an unplayed game.
This has created an immense number of games of far higher quality than anywhere else. This in turn has created the largest board game market in the world (and left "The Economist" wondering why Germans buy so much fewer computer games than expected!).
IANAE. If I was, this is what I would explore in a paper ;-)
Posted by: Harald Korneliussen at Sep 7, 2007 4:24:42 PM
This article includes comments from magic creators (including one of the prominent ones in the original Yale paper on magic and intellectual property and myself) that dispute the claims of the paper: http://itricks.com/news/?p=2061
Posted by: Andrew Mayne at Sep 12, 2007 6:36:42 PM
I think,you say right! I like economics. Although I am now the interior designer室內設計.
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Posted by: Bob at Mar 13, 2008 10:59:05 PM
