Mashery (http://mashery.com/) has done this for Netflix, Rotten Tomatoes, and others. I think they're more about providing useful API access technologies than actually doing contract work to get things set up though.
Thanks for the pointer. From what I can tell, it seems like you'd use Mashery if you were building an API for yourself, or for someone else? It seems to be more about the operations of the API that the strategy behind what methods the API should have. Right?
(From their company page, http://mashery.com/company: "We help brands... manage (their) API Powered Platforms..."
I'm not sure how much of each they do, though I'd imagine it's a bit of both, as obviously they're experienced in taking APIs public so they both have the tech to support it and the past knowledge of what users/developers want. Check out http://developer.rottentomatoes.com/ to have a look (it says Masher Made at the top)
CS was likely the most demanding major at my university in terms of workload outside of class. Depended on what classes you took, but the toughest demanded ~30hrs per week of problem sets + coding assignments each. Made being a D1 athlete in a top national program very tough to pull off.
Why is it important to call the green die 'olive'? Both 'olive' and 'green' have 5 characters... I suppose it's because you can spell out MR. BOY with the dice in winning order if you use olive :)
If you watch the video further, James explains that there is in fact a second 'chain' of victory, which is memorised using the colours in alphabetical order.
Unfortunately, I've yet to hear a convincing alternative incentive scheme to that of copyrights and patents. The necessity of copyright and patent law varies widely from industry to industry, and the limited expertise (and interest) of legislators keeps them from taking any bold steps adjust the law to better fit the intricate needs of the people (ie, short/no patents in industries that move quickly and communally, like software, and longer patents for industries like pharmaceutical development, that are immensely costly and provide limited network effects to the first mover (a drug's prices decline by 90% in the US when it goes off patent).
People view copyright as less essential than patents, but the truth of the matter is that without copyright laws, there would be a significant decline in the production of movies, music, games, and many other costly mediums. Without copyright, I could legally create a competitor to netflix that paid studios nothing and played every movie ever made on any device for close to nothing. I could create a competitor to steam that distributed games and was every bit as useful and integrated, and I'd pay nothing to developers. Even if you think online piracy isn't as big of a problem as studios claim it is (and you'd be very right), the laws that keep it illegal are all that stand between today and a collapse of the content development ecosystem.
Even if copyright doesn't maximize for society's benefit because of the monopoly it creates, every copyrighted work sold is a net plus to both the consumer and the producer. Without any copyright framework, there's a significant chance that the producer could never afford to make that beneficial product in the first place. Even if you only eliminate prosecution of people/entities that don't make any money from what they're doing and allow non-profits like wikipedia to host full movies, you still irreparably break the incentive system that exists today. Maybe we don't need new movies and games, but people want them and as long as that's the case they'll want to keep protecting them with copyright.
Maybe someday, systems more like kickstarter could replace copyright, but I highly doubt it. They don't do nearly as good of a job.
That said, I'm all for much shorter terms for copyrights and the elimination of software patents.
…without copyright laws, there would be a significant decline in the production of movies, music, games, and many other costly mediums.
I disagree. What were talking about here is art, and mankind has been producing art since long before government-guarded IP. It isn't because IP laws provide an incentive that we create things; we do it because it's human nature. The ability to freely copy other people's work lowers the barrier to entry, so eliminating IP laws would spur a creative renaissance. The only downside is those big media companies would be forced to innovate.
Would people still create cave paintings without copyright? Absolutely. Songs? Yes. Books? Fewer, but probably yes. Multi-million dollar movies and games? Absolutely not.
Art would still exist, but it would exist much differently than it does today. Free copying does allow for more creative freedom in many respects, though I would argue many of those benefits can already be had through current fair-use practices, which are quite extensive.
I've often heard the argument thrown around that "the world could live without another Transformers 2." I don't know if you fall into that camp, but many people really enjoyed that movie. In aggregate they were willing to pay more to see it than ~99.999% of individuals globally produce in a lifetime. If big-budget movies, pop stars, and games cease to exist, other things will surely take their place, but they won't be the same and most media will start to look a lot more like youtube and less like hollywood. Most people probably don't want that.
People need incentives to do things. Incentives are probably the second most powerful force in the universe, after compounding interest :), and a lack of them is why communism fails. People are not benevolent. They do derive utility from things other than money, but money is able to coordinate the interests of many individuals from disparate backgrounds under a common goal. Other things can too, and the Linux OS I'm running right now is a testament to that, but Linux can exist in a world with copyright while Transformers 2 most likely cannot. At least not until everybody in the world is a lot richer and making Transformers 2 is a lot easier.
I think this is to some extents true for big movies and games but in longer terms some system will build up how to fund these project. No copyright does not mean that there will not be any contracts. You can still produce a movie and sell it to somebody, people cant copy it if they don't have it. For exampe a groupe of movietheaters could get together and fund a project, they will be the only ones who have the movie in a good quality. People still buy stuff even without copyright. Systems like steam would probebly still work, consol games would probebly still work. My pridiction would be: First a downfall to almost nothing then systems develop that still make some of those things possible in a smaller scala, these systems will get better over time.
You should realize that what you're advocating is much worse than the current copyright system. You say that movie studios should produce a movie, lock it up extra tight and only show let theaters show it in high quality. If the movie is never leaked, then you're hurting everyone who would rather have paid to watch that movie on DVD, or through paid digital download, or off of Netflix. You're saying people should hide information and limit how it's disseminated even more instead of sharing it for a price. Yes, with contracts you could still have DVDs and require purchasers of them to agree to the contract and pay if they're caught sharing it. With contracts, you can do everything that's possible under copyright EXCEPT punish the freeloaders. Once something gets leaked, everybody who shares it from then on is free of any culpability, because they never signed a contract. This leaves us in essentially the exact same place we started. Either everything will be locked down tight and less useful to the public or else it will instantly be leaked, and then the leaked information will be sold/distributed legally where now it cannot be and the system will break.
…most media will start to look a lot more like youtube and less like hollywood.
The difference between youtube and Hollywood is such a chasm only because of IP laws. Hollywood is a superstar market. It's filled with aspiring artists waiting tables because the barrier to entry has been artificially inflated.
Hollywood hates innovation. Transformers 3 could be funded in a myriad of ways that have never been attempted. But because they'd rather lock down IP laws, the entire economy suffers.
A world without IP protection is not a world in which there is no money to be made; It's a world in which new business models need to be innovated.
Those movies could still get made, if a large enough group of people pledged to fund the production of the movie. The fact that other people would then get to watch it for free wouldn't deter those pledgers, if their interest in that movie concept was high enough. It would be a different kind of model, but it could work.
Freedom of information is only useful to those who can use it. Most people do not gain much from free information, as they can't make money with it and they're not interested in learning from it. They gain more from the entertainment Transformers provides. In the world we on Hacker News live in, freedom of information is much much more valuable than it is to the vast majority of mankind. Because of its value to us, things like open source and wikipedia exist, where people share things freely because everyone benefits so much from that ecosystem. I'm commenting here right now because I benefit from this ecosystem and want to do my part to keep it going. The beauty is, as I said before, that this can all exist in spite of copyright. Louis C.K. can make a ton of money without needing to use DRM or enforce his copyrights. People can choose not to use the system, and do so to great success. But some things require the system to exist, and those things don't need to be sacrificed. Vote with your dollars not by pirating but by supporting content that is open source, or that doesn't use DRM. Pirating more convinces the powers that be that it's a growing problem, supporting content made by people who aren't draconian hoarders of information will encourage more to be open with their content.
While you might think that, that is not how you want to argument phrasing to the general public. I am completely sure they would choose Transformers 3.
To use software as an example, it's much easier to improve upon someone else's work when their work is open source. You fork it and improve it -- much easier than building it from scratch. This process also aids in learning how to write good software, by becoming familiar with other people's techniques.
On the other hand, if you're afraid that using someone else's work can result in a huge fine, then you're less likely to do the project at all. If you choose to do it anyway, you'll have a lot more work to do. There is a higher barrier to entry.
Software doesn't really make your point, because eliminating copyright would not make all software open source. In fact, it would most likely cause a shift toward closed source as companies could take open source and use it in closed products without having to release their modified source.
"A significant decline", not a total collapse. Prior to IP laws, individuals took matters into their own hands to prevent losses due to plagiarism. I wouldn't be surprised if the removal of legal protection would lead to more ubiquitous and intrusive DRM.
That said, one potential advantage is that if content is being produced simply because creation is human nature, rather than because a similar item sold well last year; it could lead to higher quality output.
I hate to sound like a fundamentalist economist, but ...
There's a demand for movies. If you cut off the source, fans will make their own. They won't be the same (lower budgets), and their distribution will be different (initially theatres, protected by contracts), and they will have more product placements, but they will still be there. You won't have LOTR, but you will still have low budget talky stuff, suspense thrillers, and so on.
Eventually, animation techniques will allow fans to collaboratively make big budget special effect movies.
If movie company's wanted, they could survive quite well on theatre takings, and release stuff on DVD simply as collector items (after they movies are leaked online anyway). They would have to make cutbacks, but they'd still survive.
The main difference is - what a consumer does in their own home should be sacrosanct. Telling a theatre not to leak a movie (as part of a commercial contract) is fine, but attacking consumers for ripping a DVD they bought is not.
There's also a huge demand for flights to the moon. Nobody supplies it because it'd be too expensive. Same thing for a LOTR that you couldn't charge for.
Where do you draw the line? Commercial entities? I'm sure I could raise funding for a non-profit that offered every ebook ever written for download. That would single-handedly destroy the ebook industry.
I never said movies would go away, but you wouldn't have Transformers and you wouldn't have LOTR. As you said, you'd have movies that are more locked-down in their distribution and you'd have more ads and product placement in films. All for what? So that you can freely share those films to lower your entertainment budget? So that indie films can take more market share because you prefer them? Because copyright law is already largely unenforceable?
I'm all for more lax punishment for piracy, lower fines, etc. I'm not for eliminating IP law.
> but the truth of the matter is that without copyright laws, there would be a significant decline in the production of movies, music, games, and many other costly mediums
It might seem very intuitive to say such things, but it is not truth. The truth is that the economic evidence is just not there. What do Landes & Posner say?
"Economic analysis has come up short of providing either theoretical or empirical grounds for assessing the overall effect of intellectual property law on economic welfare."
-- 'The economic structure of intellectual property law'; Landes, Posner; 2003. Conclusion, p422, s3.
That means we do not know whether it does good overall. Hard to quite believe? Well there it is.
Landes & Posner also never advocated abolishing copyrights altogether... They just advocated moving to renewable terms instead of automatic 70 years to life.
Regardless of whether there is a decline in production, there would be a certain decline in production of high-quality, expensive content. If you think expensive to produce != high quality, you're wrong. Expensive content is only produced because it earns more money, and thus is better liked by more people. That's the only objective measure of quality I know.
The actual reason is that we have invented radio technology only very recently. Because we are so new to the technology, odds are that our communication partner has had radio for much longer than we have (millions of years probably, given the age of the universe), and thus is far more advanced.
This logical step requires a few assumptions. First is that societies don't destroy themselves soon after the advent of nuclear weapons, which would limit them to a very short window of radio capability (measured in hundreds or thousands of years).
The second assumption is that other forms of intelligence progress their technology at a similar rate to that at which we progress ours.
If the former assumption is wrong, it's extremely unlikely that we will ever talk to any intelligence, even with relatively plentiful life in the universe, because it will kill itself too fast. The latter assumption could still be wrong though, particularly if the method used for interstellar radio communication was in any way evolutionarily derived.
This falls exactly into the scenarios I talked about...
Given how much randomness was involved in our creation as a species, let alone our technological ascendance, it is highly unlikely that other intelligence would develop in exactly the same amount of time elsewhere. It's astronomically unlikely. If they didn't develop at the same time as us, they're either still incapable of radio or have had radio for a long time. A long time in the life of the universe certainly doesn't mean 100 years, it means much longer. Even if it's only 1000 years, if they progress at anything like the rate we do, they'll be massively more advanced than we are.
If a species only has radio for a short period of time (like 200 years) and then disappears or loses it, the odds of overlapping with them are virtually nil (if they die out after getting this far, it says we're much more likely to die out soon too).
And I don't know if they would talk to us before we'd talk to them. Stephen Hawking has a lot to say about why trying to communicate with other civilizations is a bad idea, and they might be smart enough not to try.
Amazing how curriculum focus has changed--in no small part due to the invention of the computer. These topics have almost nothing to do with what most Harvard students study today. There's been so much new knowledge generated since then...
The Classics are timeless and thus always relevant, that's why they're still read today. Can anyone really argue that reading Jimmy Carter over Cicero or Marcus Aurelius is preferable because of temporal relevancy factors?
Exact same thing happened to me when trying to do my first cs problem set. It was some filename that I was sure had a 1 in it but it was an l. It's almost as if courier tries as hard as possible to make the two look the same.
Courier was intended to look like a traditional typewriter font. For many decades, most typewriters didn't have a key for 1 (one), you were supposed to use the lower-case l (ell) instead.
Teletypes did have a one key, probably because they were all-uppercase, so there wasn't a lowercase ell available.
I'm curious whether the info about Harvard students is accurate as well. If there's one university I would imagine gets followed by a lot of non-students it's Harvard.
For a clear illustration, look at their respective facebook place pages:
Harvard: 918,295 likes;
Stanford: 248,574;
UC Berkeley: 86,214;
MIT: 65,339;
Caltech: 2,686;
This clearly isn't about the schools' relative sizes or their popularity among past students but the global reach of their respective brand names.
Some of the things listed for Harvard rang very true from my time there (particularly the interests in consulting, new york, private equity, and famous harvard grads like Conan) while others made less sense to me (Jimmy Fallon?)
Still a very interesting data set though, if only to see what kinds of people are influenced by each school's brand.
I think rewatchability is a great metric for one thing: whether or not someone is going to want to rewatch something...
Just because the data better fits your desired skews, doesn't mean it gets at what the users actually want.
I think a major issue at hand is that people often rate things as they expect a critic to rate them. If you would give Transformers 2 a 5-star rewatchability rating, you should be giving it at least 3 or 4 stars for quality, because obviously you enjoyed it very much. Instead, many people pretend to be film critics, whose jobs are very different, and assign an 'objective rating'. A film critic can not give personal opinions because he's supposed to speak for the masses--to appeal to some higher taste he aspires to have and that he hopes society would have. If you loved Transformers, rate it 5 stars--period. The rating isn't meant to be read by others, it's not meant to appeal to an idealized world, it's just how you felt about the thing. Convince your users to rate intelligently with that mindset and you'll start to see good data.
All that said, more data is better than less, and if you could convince your users to double their average rating-time investment and give you ratings for both, awesome. I'm skeptical that users would bother to rate two metrics for everything they've seen...but I think it's certainly possible they would. Be interested to see.
The US wields all kinds of influence over a nation like Sweden. If the US raised a few barriers to trade with Sweden, it would have a drastic effect on Sweden's economy. Many Swedish industries depend on exporting to the US, and while US citizens could just import similar goods from elsewhere if Swedish goods became more expensive, Swedish businesses would lose a gigantic and wealthy market that they depend on selling to.
I'm sure that Sweden depends on the US as a military ally as well, it provides visas for many Swedish citizens regularly, and much more. At the end of the day, Sweden just needs the US more than the US needs Sweden, and that's why the US can argue from a position of power for its own industries.
I think Sweden might overestimate their dependence on the US. The military threat to Sweden is currently rather low, (and there's always the rest of NATO).
Countries just need to all agree to start ignoring the US. I bet doing so would be a positive gain for economies in the long run.
Ignoring the US effectively means shutting yourself off from the global culture, because like it or not, America's entertainment industries are the biggest in the world. American movies play everywhere. American music is heard everywhere. Last I heard, America is about half of the video and computer games industry. And even the Internet is dominated by America unless you're Chinese or somewhere similarly insular (this site you're on right now? American).
Some examples of things you'll have to boycott to truly ignore America:
You don't need to ignore products of American companies to ignore the American government. I'm sure Google or facebook won't stop refusing service to Sweden, no matter what happens in politics. Physical products will still be available through other countries, if you really need them. Of course other products will be probably easier to acquire, hence the boon to friendlier economies.
Furthermore, if countries start doing this en mass, like I'm suggesting they should, one of two things would happen:
1) Companies would move their Corporate HQs outside of the US. Most already have significant resource outside the US (like for instance, their factories..).
2) or, Enough lobbying pressure would be put on the government that the bully-tactic legislation would stop. If other nations stop responding the way that American corporate lobby groups want them to, they will have to change their tactics or suffocate.
"America's entertainment industries are the biggest in the world."
Well that's kind of the point of this discussion isn't it? Just let your people download what they want, and give the US the finger.
Don't forget, there are many reasons why American businesses are so successful. Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. You may disagree, but there's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement. Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. If getting everything for free is more important to you, then only consume open source content.
America doesn't want to force Sweden to obey copyrights just because Microsoft needs Swedish business, it does so because Sweden backing pirates sets a standard for the rest of the world that could very easily lead to a global breakdown of copyright law and less high quality content for everybody, whether they can afford it or not.
"here's a very strong argument that movies and music of the quality that comes out of America would be impossible without such strong global copyright enforcement"
>Most of those reasons have nothing to do with government intervention or bully politics. //
In the UK I expect a lot of it is to do with mobilisation of GIs in WWII.
>Every time you consume a movie, you're the direct benefactor of a massive global economy and copyright system that can fund content costing tens of millions of dollars to produce and give it to you for $10. //
Well actually it's more like £15 GBP which is >$20 ($25-23 this year, I think being out by a factor of 2 is notable) for some of us.
That aside it's not exactly an efficient process and the capitalist system appears to have no interest in making it more affordable. Why do actors get paid multi-million dollar sums for doing a movie, why do we support this sort of thing through copyright. Yes I know that's not the limit of it, there's much much more to copyright but you picked on big-budget movies.
If the copyright term on a blockbuster movie was 10 years do you think that movies wouldn't be made any more? Absolutely not. There would be more of them IMO with more drive to creativity. Why on Earth do we protect movies to such an extent when inventions are limited to c. 20-25 years.
I think you have it backwards. To not comply with US diplomatic interests doesn't mean the US stops exporting into the country but means that US will make it harder for the country to export to them. The US is a huge factor for every country whose economy is based on export, like Sweden. The reverse is not true: Sweden (or every other small country) is not a crucial market for the US economy, which makes it possible to ignore them as long as they act on their own.
