Quite a few conferences now require that experiments involved human subjects be reviewed by an ethics committee of some kind before being carried out. Universities have such committees and they do oversee themselves pretty effectively.
So no, I do not think that Facebook overseeing its own researchers is so far fetched. The ethical review board would probably consist of a combination of lawyers, PR people, and people with research backgrounds. The lawyers and PR folks would not have seen this experiment as a "great opportunity for research that was previously impossible" so much as "lawsuit bait" and "PR nightmare."
That's a good point. It is possible for a panel of professionals to qualify and limit the kinds of work are ethical. That's what ethics are! Accountants, lawyers, and doctors are all good at that.
The critical difference, in my mind, is that academic research takes place more or less in the public sphere. Even when it's not, an academic can always be counted on to challenge and discredit a fellow academic.
An in-house council of research practice could exist, but it would take a group of professors with reputations on the line. And then again, to my main point, Facebook's central business practices revolve around manipulating users in ways that are even _less_ concerned about the user's well-being.
"it seems to me that it's better, or at least more efficient, to assume everything is copyrighted once it has been created rather than requiring everyone to file a form with an associated fee for everything that a person ever decides to create"
More efficient for what, exactly? Because it is much more efficient for me to just assume that nothing is copyright when I creating something new that incorporates the work of others. It is overwhelmingly more efficient to just ignore copyright on the Internet -- our computers are the greatest copying machines ever made, and spending our time trying to figure out if some data is copyrighted is nothing but a retarding force.
I'm all for free works and the Public Domain. The only problem with assuming that some work is free unless otherwise noted is that an entity with more resources can claim the same rights, and therefore profits, to a given work until presented with a significant challenge. A smaller entity can easily placed on a disadvantage.
If there's a public database of all copyrighted content they can't just assume without checking.
As far as copyrighting is concerned I think it's fair to require you to put some effort into protecting your works.
However free copyright should only last about 20 years after that a small fee should be required on the 21'st year and that fee should grow exponentially[1] every 10 years from then on.
If it's valuable enough to you you will pay the fee but if it isn't you will release it into the public domain.
That will prevent people keeping thing copyrighted for too long and companies like Disney could keep their stuff copyrighted for at least 100 years before the fees get too large.
If it's no profitable there's no point in keeping it copyrighted and you're just hurting the public domain by doing so.
Fair point, and thanks for replying. I was arguing on the supposition that original content creators deserve a right to some time-limited monetary compensation for their works, if truly valuable to society. I'm sure many people would create content irrespective of a monopoly on monetization, but that seems like a step C, where I guess I was suggesting a path from A (current Disney-style) to B (something in between A and C).
Edit: After reading your comment more carefully, I see you were discussing creating something new based on a work, rather than a simple reproduction of an existing work; my apologies. In which case I agree with nthitz's comments in this thread regarding it being transformative, and therefore permissible (in my idealized scenario).
"Illegal digital downloads disrupted everything, and cut profits substantially"
Only because a decade beforehand the RIAA decided that instead of working on ways to monetize the Internet, they would work on ways to make computers less useful for music distribution. Basically the recording industry's shortsightedness and failure to embrace the greatest communications revolution since the printing press led to everything else you described.
To put it another way, the RIAA could have pushed for Congress to set up a micropayments system for music downloading, before most people even knew about music downloading. Instead they lobbied for the DMCA and spent their money developing DRM schemes that failed before they were ever deployed. Their "bad karma" is a result of their response to the complete failure of those efforts: abuse of the legal system on a massive scale.
Are people expected to feel sympathy for these companies? Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P? This situation was created by the labels' own actions, their failure to embrace the Internet early on before these kinds services existed.
"Its disappointing that while technology is making it easier than ever to record and produce music, its becoming tougher and tougher to make a living off it."
It did not have to be that way. We could have set things up so that when a song was downloaded, the artist and recording studio that produced it received a small payment automatically. It could have been a truly innovative revenue stream.
> Have we forgotten that people turned to big centralized services for their music as a direct result of the recording industry's aggressive effort to kill P2P?
We are talking about small independent labels.
> This situation was created by the labels' own actions
I can't help but to be amused by the irony of the NSA systematically weakening computer security and swooping in to help the FBI when American companies become victims of foreign spies that exploit poor security.
What's even worse is creating a market in zero-day exploits. That's like doing biology research by creating a freelance development market in bioterror microbes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corliss_steam_engine#List_of_o...