This may seem like a Fake Jeff Jarvis post, but it’s real-life Jeff Jarvis:
Creators don’t need protection from copying. That’s futile. Copying can’t be stopped. Thus copying is no longer a way to exploit the value of creation.
People don’t need protection from stealing. That’s futile. Stealing can’t be stopped.
So what do creators need protected? What are their interests?
I’m thinking they need credit for their creations so they can build reputation or relationships they can exploit through many means: speaking for money, for example, or gaining social credit.
Funny enough, that’s how Jarvis makes his money, which might explain why he thinks it’s possible to have “a right to be credited” but not to have “the right not to be copied.”
For the vast majority of writers who make their money selling their writing instead of getting to paid to blab about their writing, Jarvis’s idea of turning copyright into “creditright” is silly and dangerous.
Last word to Fake Jeff Jarvis, who was kind enough to turn out a gem on this:
Creditright is a cornerstone of Journalism 3.0. Klout score is the new salary.
— The Financial Times‘s Martin Wolf harshly reviews Paul Ryan’s budget plan:
Representative Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s new vice-presidential running mate, is, we are told, the man with the deficit-cutting plan. Not for this conservative policy wonk are the phoney figures and evasions of cowardly politicians. He is a man whose integrity his opponents have to respect. Yet this story has one drawback: it is false.
For instance:
Indeed, the “starve the beast” theory explicitly aims at cutting taxes, in order to increase deficits and so justify cuts in spending. From this point of view, the financial crisis has been a boon. The crisis, which occurred on George W. Bush’s watch, is far and away the most important explanation for today’s huge deficits. But it came after unfunded tax cuts, unfunded wars and the unfunded prescription drug benefit (Medicare D).
Paul Ryan voted for them all, and “the Congressional Budget Office’s meticulous analysis of the initial Ryan plan demonstrated that it is smoke and mirrors,” as Wolf writes, so that “deficit hawk” portrayal in a good chunk of the press is hard to justify.
— Read John Markoff’s excellent New York Times piece on how advances in robotics are continuing apace, and increasingly replacing low-skill labor.
This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
Here’s a snapshot of the new workforce:
Ryan Chittum is a former Wall Street Journal reporter, and deputy editor of The Audit, CJR’s business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu. Follow him on Twitter at @ryanchittum.The Tesla assembly line is a stark contrast, brilliantly lighted. Its fast-moving robots, bright Tesla red, each has a single arm with multiple joints. Most of them are imposing, 8 to 10 feet tall, giving them a slightly menacing “Terminator” quality.
But the arms seem eerily human when they reach over to a stand and change their “hand” to perform a different task. While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function, in the new Tesla factory a robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component.
As many as eight robots perform a ballet around each vehicle as it stops at each station along the line for just five minutes. Ultimately as many as 83 cars a day — roughly 20,000 are planned for the first year — will be produced at the factory. When the company adds a sport utility vehicle next year, it will be built on the same assembly line, once the robots are reprogrammed.
