Category Archives: View

View 725 Friday, May 25, 2012

The Space Station has caught the Dragon by the tail. It’s the first instance of the success of the new NASA policy. A long time ago some of us said that NASA shouldn’t be running operations, they should create markets and let the industry take care of the rest. The government doesn’t operate the railroads, or the airlines, or the trucking industry, even though a great deal of rail, airline freight and passenger, and highway freight is government stuff. Fort Hood doesn’t operate trucking lines to go out and bring food to the mess halls. It pays for delivery. Thus should it be with NASA, and this was the 1980 recommendation of such outfits as The Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy – sometimes known as one of Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet groups” that wrote the transition team papers on space policy for the incoming Reagan Administration of 1981. One of the papers in that report was “How to save civilization and make a little money,” by Art Dula and Larry Niven after a discussion with the full panel. It outlined how to create a commercial space policy.

Congress passed the Commercial Space Act of 1988 with the purpose of encouraging commercial space development. It was followed by other Commercial Space Acts, and the transfer of commercial space regulation to a special section of the FAA, and over time a generally more favorable atmosphere for commercial space. Henry Vanderbilt’s Space Access Society and other such outfits have annual meetings. Space X, X Corp, Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, Kistler Aerospace, Carmack’s Armadillo Aerospace, and a whole raft of private space companies, some big, some small, some successful and some not so much so have sprung up. The engines of capitalism were turned on, and the successful docking of the Dragon is a major step in the renewal of interest in space.

Government arsenals can do great things. Projects organized to implement a strategy of technology can be very successful, as witness the X projects, and for that matter Apollo; but projects don’t build industries. The best thing government can do to build industries is to provide certain markets, or in the absence of markets, prizes. Of course we’ve said all this before, and many times. See ACCESS TO SPACE.

This is just the first step, but it’s a big one. I have been asked by a colleague why this is different. NASA paid for this, didn’t it?

Yes, but not in the old NASA way, with cost-plus contracts and with NASA trying to run things as they did with Space Station. Dragon wasn’t designed at Marshall or in Houston, and NASA inspectors weren’t wandering around the factory floor and insisting in “testing” components (as Marshall did with the tanks for DC/X, which they managed to break and had to weld back together – it was the failure of the weld that caused DC/X to burn up, thus ending the DC/X threat to NASA’s plans). Just as NASA doesn’t operate the trucks that deliver the chow to Fort Hood mess halls, it’s not NASA’s job to build and fly the Falcon and Dragon. They just collect the cargo. And that cargo was delivered.

It’s a first step but it’s a big one.

Hurrah!

This is supposed to be “Everybody blog about Brett Kimberlin Day” but since I never heard of Brett Kimberlin I can hardly do that. More interesting is that looking for Brett Kimberlin gets a little complicated. His Wikipedia entry is gone, gone gone, although there is considerable controversy over why. It does not seem to be controversial that he was convicted of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 50 years, but was released on parole after some 17 and is out now, possibly unsupervised. He seems to have generated rage among some – see http://wormme.com/2012/05/25/you-are-not-a-terrorist-brett-kimberlin/—as an example – and he is certainly no favorite of Glenn Beck — http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/05/25/glenn-talks-to-bloggers-about-brett-kimberlin-terrorism/ – but finding a news report about him is a bit more difficult. He seems to have friends, some powerful, as well as many enemies. http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2012/05/speedway-bomber-brett-kimberlin-threatens-blogger.html 

I’m not sure I have ever come across a situation in which someone this controversial has no Wikipedia entry. It may say something about Wikipedia and it may not. Of course one cannot rely on Wikipedia since articles there change like dreams, but it can be a good place to start.

T H White (Sword in the Stone) wrote a charming novel suitable for children although it’s not really a children’s book: Mistress Masham’s Repose. There is a Kindle edition and I strongly recommend it not only to all my readers who have children of ten or older, but to readers who like a good story. It is full of White’s observations about the world. One of the characters in the book is The Professor, who has spent his life verifying quotations. He would have greatly enjoyed the Internet, I suspect. Incidentally, children who read this book will not know it’s not a children’s book; like Sword in the Stone there are a number of levels at which it can be read, and most people like every one of them.

Aside: Mistress Masham’s Repose is a fantasy, whose premise is that a small colony of Lilliputians were brought to England in the 18th Century by Lemuel Gulliver after his travels; they were exhibited in a travelling carnival until they escaped and took refuge in a small folly in an island on a great English estate, where they have lived in seclusion ever since. The story is about a little girl who discovers them, Since it’s a Tim White story, you’ll believe it without much effort and be disappointed to realize when you’ve read it that it was just a story. (Or was it? White seemed to know many things…) The Wikipedia article on the book will tell you more.

Anyway have a good weekend. I’ll try to get out a couple of mail bags. I’ve been working on fiction.

View 725 Thursday, May 24, 2012

There is more pressure for the government to get involved in the Facebook Fiasco. I am sure that will build. Government would love to get further involved in regulating IPO transactions since regulation means an opportunity for shakedown. Some “investors” are complaining that they were misinformed about Facebook’s expected revenues. It turns out that the worst misinformation still had the price to earnings ratio of more than thirty.

My only comment remains: anyone who bought stock at more than 30 times earnings, and any financial advisor who touted stocks at more than thirty times earnings, probably has other foolish habits. Facebook may be a wonder, but surely it is not going to grow three times as fast as Apple or Google – or if it is, I at least would like to see an argument more powerful than ‘financial analysts advice”. Why is Facebook going to grow faster? And of course it didn’t. I would still predict that Facebook is going to fall well into the twenties, and probably lower.

scribd – problems and solutions

Regarding problems with scribd takedown notices:

The DMCA almost explicity disclaims any "affirmative duty" (as the lawyers say) to police for copyright infringement, so long as one follows the takedown provisions. The law is perhaps a surprisingly reasonable recognition of the fact that "internet scale" operations cannot possibly police all their content, and is a decent rule for ISPs and web hosts and other general-purpose platform providers. It seems scribd is happy hiding behind this barrier, and is legally, if not ethically, clear in doing so.

The DMCA is pretty old-fashioned, in that it doesn’t recognize (1) the possibility of free and very low-friction copies, and (2) the sheer size of the modern Internet. It also makes no distinction for things like scribd that are not really general-purpose hosts and could, quite reasonably, prohibit the same content from re-appearing, or at least make an effort, especially since it was written before lots of modern pattern-recognition techniques came into common use. But the law, in general, can never keep up with innovation, so none of this is much of a surprise.

So if it’s not reasonable for providers to police and barely possible for owners to police, what’s the legal solution? Possibly providers could be required to prevent material explicitly registered with them; that is not an unreasonable thing for large-ish operations to automate, but it would be a burden on startups and smaller outfits.

Anyway, I’m a tech guy, so I think of tech solutions. It woudn’t be too hard to create a tool to scan scribd (and similar) to automate the search for titles you own, and it could probably even generate the takedown notices. It may be fast and easy for people to post copies of your books, but I bet it’s not fast or easy enough to beat such a tool. Get enough authors on board, and it may actually encourage scribd and similar to put their own solution in place, just to save their time.

There’s probably something like this, but my quick searches haven’t turned it up. Perhaps a more determined effort will show some fruit; if so, I’d like to know, just to take a look. (I don’t think anyone’s re-publishing my book. Both too old and a bit too niche to bother, probably. Though you never know.) If not, and you think it would be of use, I’d like to know that too–in that case I’d probably knock something together, just because someone needs to.

J Cameron Cooper

Thank you for the succinct summary. I have a great deal of mail on this, and most of it will go in the mailbag.

Any individual author can send a list of copyright violations as part of a properly executed DMCA takedown notice, and scribd will very likely act on that in a timely manner. The most onerous part of this process is collecting the exact URL of each copyright violation on scribd. That can be quite a lot of work, since not all mentions of an author or of specific titles are in fact acts of piracy. Some are reviews. Some are copies of Amazon “look inside”. Those latter, of course, are certainly copyright violations since Amazon does not obtain permission to allow others to republish their looks inside. Some are incomplete, like the copy of Lucifer’s Hammer that I referred to yesterday. That too is still a copyright violation. And note that once the takedown notice has been honored, there is generally nothing to prevent the same poster from putting the same stuff back up again, and it’s up to the author to find that out and start the process over again. This can get tedious.

In the Lucifer’s Hammer case has that partial (about a third of the book) republishing of Hammer done sales any harm? Probably not. It could even be argued that it might intrigue someone into buying a properly formatted eBook copy. I understand that argument, and I have mixed data on its accuracy. But there is more here than commercial value. Do note that some authors are simply horrified at the notion that someone has the ‘right’ to publish a badly chopped up, horribly formatted, excerpt of the author’s work without regard to the financial consequences.

I like the notion of a software tool that would automatically find copyright violations and generate a DMCA takedown notice. It would certainly annoy scribd, perhaps sufficiently that someone in authority at scribd would actually try to work with authors, agents, and author associations to come up with some meaningful way to let scribd continue to work its business plan without trampling on author rights. As I have said: it is possible that there is no commercial harm and it’s rather likely that there is no great commercial harm from scribd’s activities; but that’s not the point. Authors should have some control over their works. In particular they ought to be able to insist on well formatted pirate copies!

I have this from an author:

The loathsome scribd.com posts XXYYZZ (the single most

valuable thing that I own, not excepting YYXXZZ whose

movie sale made me financially independent) over and over

and over again.

They allow anybody, without identification, to post

anything, but hide behind every clause in the law to make it

hard for writers to get their work taken down when it’s

illegitimately posted. I have to make them take it down

every single damned time.

I got into a nasty Facebook squabble with one of their

toadies a while back (he was promoting "information wants to

be free" and "being stolen from is good for you so STFU and

lie back and enjoy it"), and after several public go-rounds

he sent me a private message to say he had changed his mind,

I was right, but he couldn’t say so in public.

He sounded scared. I have no idea what was going on there; I

merely report.

It’s time for scribd to have a serious conversation with agents and author associations. This isn’t going away, and their habit of stonewalling isn’t really going to help. And there’s this:

Niven + Pournelle = zipper + heroin

Dr. Pournelle:

Another problem with scribd is that once copyrighted or trademarked materials are left in the public domain, the property holders’ rights can be lost. For instance, both "zipper" and "heroin" were trademarks, but once they had fallen into general use without the property-holders’ objection, they became generic terms. Try using Kleenex without the capitalization in a general publication and a stern letter will arrive from Kimberly-Clark Worldwide.

In a kind of related matter: Much has been made about Elizabeth Warren’s "plagiarism" of recipes. Under copyright law, recipes and jokes cannot be copyrighted. That’s one reason chefs are so jealous of their recipes.

Pete Nofel

I hadn’t even thought of that one.

View 725 Wednesday, May 23, 2012

The reverberations of the Facebook IPO continue. Now there’s to be an investigation because the bubble didn’t get larger.

I don’t know what financial analysts do, and after this I understand it even less. I’m an old operations research man. When we projected performance for a new airplane or rocket, we did so based on existing systems, and on visible calculations.

Facebook was offered at a price of 40 times expected earnings. As I have said earlier, Apple and Google were around 10 times earnings. If there was supposed to be a reason why Facebook would grow four times as fast as Apple or Google, I never heard it.

Now there are rumors of inside information about the expected earnings – and some people thought that Facebook was being offered at only 30 times expected earnings, others that earnings were going to be lower and — and who cares? There never was a reason other than hype and razzle-dazzle to make anyone think Facebook was worth even 20 times earnings, or if there is I have never heard it.

The Facebook thing was a pure speculation. People were betting that other people would be more stupid than they were. The results were predictable and predicted. And now the government is going to investigate? But of course the government never wastes an opportunity to get its nose into another tent.

They are saying now that Facebook has found a stable level at 32. I am no financial analyst – I still don’t know what financial analysts to – but I see no reason why Facebook is more likely to take off than Apple or Google, or why anything more than 20 times earnings can be justified. But that’s just me. Keep remembering, I’m an old OR man, not a financial analyst.

The scribd affair continues. Scribd is a profitable company which advertises itself thusly:

“Scribd is the world’s largest social reading and publishing site”. It is basically a place where anyone can post nearly anything, and people can not only read, but download those posts. They include books and short stories.

This policy gets scribd a lot of traffic. Much of that traffic is perfectly legitimate. Some may be questionable – here is an example I found this morning — http://www.scribd.com/chichocha/d/38435859-1969-Harlan-Ellison-The-Beast-That-Shouted-Love-at-the-Heart-of-the-World-09-10-23 which may be legitimate, but there’s a distinct possibility that Harlan didn’t authorize that.

Here is another I found this morning: http://www.scribd.com/doc/91550228/Lucifer-s-Hammer. It’s not a very good copy – if you want to read the book on a computer or tablet you’d be far better off getting the free Kindle reading app for whatever device you read books on and buying the Amazon copy – but it seems to be complete. There’s no question about it being authorized. It’s definitely not. I suppose my agent will send in an order when she can – she does have other things to do – and eventually it will go away. I make no doubt that it will appear again presently, and we will have to go through all this again.

There are others. A few years ago they had the entire oeuvre of the late Poul Anderson, the late Jack Chalker, and a number of others (as well as just about everything Niven, I, and the two of us together ever wrote). I wrote about that incident at the time, and there was a brief internet storm about it. Eventually that died away.

I recently got reports from a reader that a number of my works and Niven’s works were available for free download from scribd. Rather than get involved I informed our agent to let her handle it.She found that not only were there Niven and Pournelle copyrighted works available for download on scribd, but many from other clients. She sent polite letters to scribd. They replied.

Her experiences were not encouraging. Scribd is perfectly willing to remove any copyrighted material provided that an authorized agent for the copyright holder sends a valid DMCA takedown order, asserting under penalty of perjury that she is the authorized agent for the work, that it is copyrighted, and that it ought to be removed. I am told that scribd is fairly prompt about doing that – but it wants an exact URL for the offending material, and a notification of each and every instance of the unauthorized publication to be removed. If there are multiple unauthorized publications each must be specified.

Without that, scribd will do nothing. And there are dozens of copyrighted documents available for download from scribd. Dozens we know of; I suspect hundreds to thousands.

This in effect declares that scribd posters have the benefit of the doubt: it is assumed that they have permission to post whatever they put up. Authors have the right to “opt out” each time their copyright is violated. Each time. Every time. You cannot, for example, tell scribd that no one is authorized to publish “Higher Education” by Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle, and all instances of it should come down and no new ones accepted. That, apparently, is too much work for scribd; if the authors (well, in this case one author and one widow) don’t want their works posted on scribd, that’s fine with scribd, and scribd will cooperate in removing them: just send a valid DMCA takedown order for each instance of the violation of the copyright. And keep watching the site, because it’s not scribd’s job to see that no one posts it again tomorrow.

When Google decided to scan everything in a number of libraries, and post electronic copies of the works, they gave authors a chance to “opt out” – that is, you could go to Google, get a list of all of your copyrighted works, and tell Google to stop it. The Authors Guild with others sued Google to get them to stop all this, and Google settled with an agreement to make it even easier for authors to opt out, and also to pay a nominal fee – about $60 for each work scanned without authorization – for the insult. I thought that a reasonable settlement, but many did not, Google was denounced as evil, and a judge has thrown out the settlement. The going insistence is on “opt in”, meaning that Google can’t scan a work without the copyright owner’s permission, which effectively ends the purpose of the whole exercise which was to preserve works still in copyright but whose copyright owners can’t be found. These are what is called orphan works, and it is a problem for anthologists. But the general consensus was that authors should not be required to opt out – Google had to get them to opt in.

Note that scribd is given a free pass on this. Not only are they not paying any fee for the insult of their having published copyrighted works – and they are, surely, the publisher of those works posted on scribd are they not? – but authors must opt out, not opt in – and must do so each time someone decides to upload an author’s work. I am not sure why scribd is allowed to do this while Google is not.

The last time we went through this with scribd, the value of eBook rights wasn’t yet determined. Now it’s clear: they’re valuable, and backlists have become important sources of income to authors.

Our agent is painstakingly accumulating a list of URL’s to works by her clients that are up on scribd. It takes a good bit of work on her part, but it will be done, and DMCA takedown orders will be sent on each one. It’s work she didn’t expect to do, but it’s part of the modern world of digital publishing. DMCA sucks dead bunnies.

One question is, shouldn’t Amazon be concerned here? It’s true that the main victim’s here are authors and their estates, but Amazon makes a profit on eBooks too. So does Barnes and Noble. And Apple. Perhaps they should pay some attention to this matter?

From Leslie Fish’s Robbin’ the Poor

What can we do, where can we go?
It takes much coin to learn how to know
Folks with cash can scratch where they itch,
So it’s not that easy robbin’ the rich
And there’s more profit, too, in robbin’ the poor

To be done with scribd, I found this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/23403387/The-Burning-City-by-Larry-Niven . It has a bunch of stuff, then a word file of The Burning City, It’s an early copy, as far as I can tell from one of our drafts. It has significant differences from the published version. The formatting is abominable. If anyone wants to read The Burning City – and if you haven’t you should, it’s a good novel that Niven and I wrote not too long after the Los Angeles riots – it’s available as a Kindle Book on Amazon, and that would be the way to go. I don’t consider this scribd thing much of a threat to our BURNING CITY income (which is small, a couple of dozen copies a month, but it is steady, too). What I do object to is having a badly formatted copy of our book up there – someone might take a look, and decided not to buy the book because it reads badly. Sigh.

I don’t know what ought to be done about scribd, but I do wish they’d be more cooperative with agents and author associations.

And you’ll like The Burning City.

View 725 Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Probably the most important news of today:

spacex and NASA

Jerry,

SpaceX’s historic demonstration flight to the ISS is well underway, and I had a thought after watching the launch video here: http://www.youtube.com/user/nasatelevision/

Look at the pictures of "mission control", at around 10 minutes. Things sure have changed… Long sleeve button shirts and ties are gone, replaced by t-shirts and jeans. Even more telling, given the commercial nature of the program, is the physical layout of the area. No expensive custom built consoles in sight. The room still has the traditional NASA layout of rows of workstations facing a common front where multiple large displays show common information, but the consoles are now sturdy but moveable desks with multiple monitor workstations. While the capability of this setup must be far beyond what was possible even just a few years ago, it is also trivially reconfigurable and probably cost a mere fraction of the original NASA setup.

Flexible responsiveness to business and operational conditions will be a key to SpaceX’s success and I thought it was interesting that my very first impression of their mission control was how they could completely reconfigure it during a lunch break. It looks like a startup operation, but that startup just put more tech into orbit than any private organization in the world has ever done, demonstrating a capability that maybe 4 organizations in the world could match. These guys are still warming up, and their mission control could probably be completely reconfigured for another mission in an hour. That just feels promising.

Sean

The link is to a NASA site, which is interesting because NASA didn’t have a lot to do with this launch. At the end of the video they switch to NASA Houston mission control for ISS which looks a lot like the old days. The video is real time. There was a time when an uneventful rocket launch and burn was something thrilling to watch, but it does go on for a while. If you like, just after 9:45 seconds into the mission you get the final burn, and the scene changes to the Space-X launch control. When you tire of that you can jump to the end to see the NASA mission control center.

It’s interesting to watch. I was present for some of the early manned spacecraft launches, where we never knew what would happen – as Wolfe says in The Right Stuff, in the early days there was the fear that “ours always blow up.” Of course they didn’t, and we got all our people back, but you never knew. And we had our heroes. I said my piece on that when Columbia went down. That link will lead somewhere to a link to Julia Ecklar’s Phoenix, a fitting memorial to the crew of Capsule 12.

But there was no tragedy in this launch. Significantly it showed the reliability of the engines, which a few days ago were lighted up then shut down because one of the engines had significant overpressure – and the bird was retuned, refueled, and lit up again to make a nominal and uneventful flight. Nominal and uneventful is what’s needed if we are to be a spacefaring nation. When I was in first grade I recall the class being led outside to the schoolyard to watch the American Airlines DC/X fly over. We need space flight to be as routine as air flights are.

It will happen. Space-x has obviously mastered the gas generator engine, running on kerosene and LOX. That sacrifices performance for reliability. One of the features of the SSX proposed by General Graham, Max Hunter, and me to then US Vice President and Space Council Chairman Dan Quayle was that we learn more about designing for savability and reliability, not just for performance; that operation be the driving factor even if that means sacrificing payload. (See the Council Report on SSX.) We favored gas generator and expander engines over staged combustion, precisely because gas generator and expander engines can be shut down and fail gracefully. The cost is lower performance.

Today’s launch by Space-X is a significant step towards becoming a space faring nation again.

(For more on this subject, there’s my old getting to space stuff.)

Of course one wonders why NASA is showing the Space-X liftoff. NASA didn’t build the Merlin engines.  Probably because NASA can’t resupply its own space station, and the Russians are charging for filming their rocket launches? And NASA has all the cameras in place.

If you want less of some activity, fine people for doing it. Taxing the activity has much the same effect. If you want more, stop fining them. Lower taxes.

I would think this elementary logic and fairly obvious. It’s what I had in mind yesterday when I suggested that we give dividend income the same tax break as capital gains. One reason we have economic bubbles is that it’s so much more profitable (after taxes) to have your stock grow than to collect dividends from it. That distorts management strategy toward economic manipulations rather than business operations. It also encourages all kinds of razzle-dazzle and hype, including actions that deliberately encourage bubbles. That’s what happened with the big Internet Bubble, and it’s a good part of the genesis of the housing bubble.

I have never understood why dividend income – which is, after all, based on return from the investment of income that has already been taxed – should be taxed at the ordinary income rate. Indeed, if you want to encourage people to work, it would make sense to keep the fines for working low, but of course there has to be income. On the gripping hand, if income tax were pretty well reserved for the States or for the Federal Government in Time of War, that would have an interesting effect too.

More on this tomorrow, but scribd seems to be at it again.

For the scribd story see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view481.html#DMCA and

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view482.html#Monday

I will have more on this shortly. SCRIBD has a policy of allowing anyone to put up anything including the entire oeuvre of an author – including deceased authors, thus harming their widows and orphans – and making it very difficult to get the request to have this taken down submitted in the proper format. And they want a different takedown request for each and every instance, which means that it can be taken down and immediately reposted and that requires another – in other words these profiteers make life fairly difficult for authors.  Their web site makes money largely because it gets a lot of traffic. How much of that traffic is due to their ha having a lot of copyrighted content up that should not be there I don’t know. I refer you to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_scribd_legal

And see  http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/jep_column-326-a.php