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It’s a sad day for use rights folk, as Amazon caves to the authors’ group that had insisted that having a computer “read” their work out loud was a protected use (“copy”) that they could prevent.  The legal issues here are somewhat murky, since a public performance of a play is preventable (you have to pay the author each time) while just reading the book (what if you move your lips?) is presumably not preventable by the author.  However, it’s a sad day for creativity when a person who purchases a media item for his or her own use can be prevented with using it by himself or herself in a novel way by the people who created it.  This attempt by the authors’ group to prevent novel uses — of the novel! — is unlikely to create additional value for their members over the long term.  (Or the short term: those who have listened to the voice reading books report that that quality is nothing like a real human reader.)

For those who like to think about the far-out implications: it’s fun to imagine the day in the future when robots can actually read well enough that a feature like this might be useful.  Imagine a software reader that is good enough that some people prefer it to a human reading the same text.  Or: a program that reads a book and then stages a visual version of it as a “play” for the person who wants to “read” the book.  These cases get closer to “performance”, and more interesting as tests for copyright law, I think.

John

Very nice article at Read/Write Web about eBay and its business model.  The theme of the article is that eBay as an auction site is going to continue to face tough competition, which it may or may not overcome … but that some of the other businesses of eBay are doing extremely well, and seem positioned for the end-game.  The author particularly calls out PayPal, which has been solving the problem of doing safe banking on the Internet one country at a time, and Skype, which has been growing 30-40% per year, as great businesses that are undervalued as part of eBay.

The PayPal argument is compelling to me: it’s a great business, and being part of eBay creates complicated relationship issues for eBay competitors who otherwise would be great supporters of PayPay.

Skype I’m less convinced about.  While I love Skype, and use it regularly, its present business model has two serious problems.  First, Skype is bizarre in that it is one of the few communications business to have an inverse Metcalfe’s law effect: the more people who use Skype, the less money the company will eventually earn — because Skype calls are free if both ends use Skype.  Of course, this is only a problem at the end-game, which is likely many years away, but it may be a fundamental problem eventually.

Second, Skype is in a business with relatively low barriers to entry.  They have the lead in the audio and video encoding right now, and have by far the best interface … but the telcos should be well-positioned to compete for the business if they decide to tackle VOIP in a big way.  It would be scary to be Skype and to face several of the baby bells coming fast for your business.

What do you think?  Do you want a chance to buy Skype of PayPal stock, or would you rather they stay safe in the eBay cocoon?

John

A new MovieLens data set was made available today.  Known internally as the 10M100K data set, it contains 10,000,000 movie ratings and 100,000 tags.  Previous MovieLens data sets have all contained user ratings data, but this new set is ten times as large as the last. 

This new release also contains, for the first time, tag data.  Tags are small bits of user generated metadata about movies.  MovieLens first added tagging features two years ago, in January 2006, and has since grown an active movie-tagging community.

Also included in the release is a tool for splitting the ratings data into subsets for cross-validation of prediction algorithms.

The read-me file and the data are available for download on the MovieLens Data Sets page.

An article in Information Week discusses a call from the DoD for proposals to create “virtual parents” to talk to the young children of service men and women while they are deployed, and unable to talk in person.  Though I enjoyed Diamond Age as much as the next person, this idea seems completely bonkers.  Given the limitations on our understanding of AI and child psychology, it seems more likely we’ll do real damage than that we’ll create a positive experience for the child.  This seems to me a great example of the type of research that professionals should just refuse to do.

For the most part I’m a supporter of the view that knowledge for it’s own sake is valuable and should be pursued.  Further, it’s not implausible that eventually we’ll be ready to build applications such as the proposed one.  However, as Catherine Caldwell-Harris, the thoughtful critic quoted in the article, points out, there are plenty of other directions for researchers interested in this problem to pursue in the short-term, many of which are likely to bring short-term benefits, while moving the science forward.  For instance, a researcher might develop a system for teaching a foreign language to a young child.  Simulating a parent seems flat-out dangerous, though!

What do you think?

John