Stuart Freen posted a reply on IPilogue to a Cato Institute article claiming that software patents are analogous to literary patents. I thought I agreed with Stu, but I’m not so sure.

A story has words, literary devices and a plot. A computer program has variables, control structures and algorithms. Literary devices/control structures manipulate words/variables in accordance with the plot/algorithm. There are multiple ways of expressing any plot or algorithm. So you have two things of value: the expression and… I’m having trouble thinking of a good word. Function is too slanted towards programming. But there is something purposive shared by programs and stories. Just like you (probably) wouldn’t run a program that does nothing, you (probably) wouldn’t read a story where nothing happened.

What does the plot of a story do? It holds the readers interest. I may be a weird case, but I seldom appreciate the writing in a book. People tell me how they love the descriptiveness in a certain author’s writing, but when I read it I never notice. I tend to skim the adjectives because I want to know what happens. I don’t care how beautifully George R. R. Martin describes the landscapes of Westeros, I just want to know what happens to Neddard. I would probably find a much more poorly written book that hit all the same plot points to be just as satisfying.

So the argument goes: if you allow a programmer to patent a certain algorithm that solves a computer problem (e.g., compressing a video file) why not allow a writer to patent a certain plot that solves a—the—literary problem (e.g., making the story compelling). I’m characterizing the problem solved by a particular combination of plot points by their effect on the reader. So I imagine the purpose of a literary patent to be a method of sustaining reader interest rather than, for example, a method for explaining how the thief got into the locked room. Stu separates the literary value as being about expression while the computer is about function, but I accidentally convinced myself that both kinds of value are present in either medium.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t agree with his conclusion. The fact that we don’t allow literary patents does not mean we have to disallow software patents for consistency’s sake (I’m stating the Cato article’s point much more plainly than I think the author does). We could just accept it as inconsistency and say that we just don’t want to patent stories. Sorry authors, you’ll just have to live with copyright. But let’s say we do want to entertain the notion of a literary patent analogous to a software patent. The software patent is easy: you express an algorithm in abstract terms and say what it does—find out if a number is odd by dividing by two and seeing if you get a fraction. Somebody could follow that abstract and create a function of equal value (though expressed in different form perhaps). But what would the abstract terms in a literary patent look like? It couldn’t be anything as general as “two star-crossed lovers meet and get secretly married and then commit suicide”. That description wouldn’t allow another person to write a story that has the same effect on the reader as Romeo and Juliet. For that, we would need a description of incredible detail. And if a story infringes at that level of detail, I think copyright would be comfortable handling it (I’ll have to ask my IP prof on Tuesday). And I’m not even getting into a discussion of obviousness or prior art. Therefore, I think we can safely say either that we don’t want literary patents for some reason of cultural values or because they would be impractical and useless.

I hope all that made sense. It was somewhat stream of consciousness (hey, that’s a literary device). I need to start editing these blog posts. By the way, none of this is to say that I’m completely in favour of software patents. It’s one thing to patent a compression algorithm and another to patent a user interface element or simple method (Amazon 1-Click comes to mind).

A music video promoting season three of The Guild. The Guild is a fantastic web series about a group of MMOG players. I highly recommend watching it (each episode is 5-10 minutes long, so an entire season is only about an hour of your time). The video is well produced and the lyrics are funny, though it might be a little NSFW depending on where you work.

The video has sparked a small debate on whether or not it is sexist. One might just say that it was written and produced by a woman, therefore it’s not. I’ve never liked that argument. I don’t, however, think it is actually sexist. I can certainly see how it might be viewed that way [edit: just look at the still frame above] but only if taken completely at face value. One commenter at The Guild’s website objected that it was dehumanizing; as evidenced by lyrics like “You’ll never see my actual face” “You can type commands” and “She’s hotter than reality by far”. I think the commenter misses the point. The song is about dating an avatar—a digital (fake/pixelated/virtual/incomplete) representation of a real person. Of course it’s dehumanizing. An avatar is a dehumanized version of a user. And taken in connection with the web series, I think the video makes a lot more sense. The series is about a group of online friends who decide to meet in real life. And, of course, they’re nothing like their online personae (I think personas is the proper plural form of persona but Apple disagrees with me). Felicia Day (the singer in the video) is a shy recluse who is more confident and flirtatious online. The two guys who rap are nerds who play much more heroic characters in the game. The show and video are satire which revolve around stereotypes of gamers. Stereotypes which most gamers fall into, know someone personally who falls into, or can easily imagine someone they know online falling into.

Maybe that’s the problem. With any instance of satire, a little background knowledge is necessary to get the joke. Imagine reading Animal Farm and having no idea the author was talking about capitalism. It wouldn’t make sense. You can’t get the point if you don’t know what they’re satirizing. In this case, it’s relationships with people that don’t exist and the divide between avatar and human being. As someone who has done a fair amount of online gaming and spent plenty of time in bulletin boards and Usenet, I find the video hilarious (both for nerdy references and the underlying meaning). But if you’ve never made friends with someone who existed to you only through a video game, I can understand how you’d miss the humour.

[Edit: the YouTube version was much better quality.]

I just finished the TIP Group website a few days ago and realized that I (unconsciously) borrowed some design elements from this website. That just won’t do, I thought. And anyway, my old design was getting old. So over the last two days, I redesigned this site from scratch. What makes this noteworthy (to me) is that I did it using HTML 5 and microformats and I’m intending to figure out ARIA this weekend and make the site accessible. More on this after the screenshots.

The old design

The new design

As you can see, this is a very plain design. No more sunburst or whatever the rays of like background I used to have is called. I’ve always loved minimalist blogs. It’s harder to do than one would think. I’ve tried several times but they always come out looking amateurish or get crowded and turn into the last design (which started out very austere). But I think that this one turned out quite well. The site uses Helvetica Neue and Verdana (though I might try Arial and see how that works, Verdana is getting overused online and it makes Arial actually look unique when you see it). The icons are modified versions of these dark denim icons. I don’t have all the sidebar space that I used to have, so I’ll be integrating my Twitter stream into the post stream. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while anyway.

To update to HTML 5, I followed these wonderful directions from SmashingMagazine. It’s not really a huge change from XHTML 1.0. I still code XML style though you have the option of HTML-style coding. I figure that as I went to all the trouble of breaking the HTML 4.0 habits, there’s no point going back. Plus, I like lower case tags. The new elements are nice, but <article> isn’t really all that different from <div class="article">. I really only did it because I could.

I don’t know how much work accessibility will turn out to be. I gather that (for a blog) it is mainly just a matter of tagging certain elements with role attributes. I don’t need to figure out keyboard accessibility like I would in a more interactive site.

My latest IP Osgoode post discusses a mistaken New York Times story that sparked a wave of “Wikipedia is locking out new people” stories. I wrote about the mistake in what may be one of the few correct articles on the subject. I also linked back to the NYT article. This has the problematic effect of increasing the incorrect article’s page rank on Google.

It’s odd. In the course of pointing out a mistaken article, you probably will link to it. So the more people that point out a mistake, the more likely that article is to show up in a search. The PageRank system is based on the idea that the more links a site has, the more relevant it is. I had two thoughts on how to address this problem. My first idea was use something like the “rel” attribute to implement a voting system. Search engines can then incorporate this into their ranking or results. For example, you might link to a site using rel=”correction” and then Google could count it as a thumbs down or show a little warning next to the entry if there are many corrections. But that’s too easy to abuse and needs to be implemented by search engines. My second idea was more practical: when correcting another article use rel=”nofollow”. Which I didn’t do. But in the future I will.

None of this addresses the greater flaw of PageRank style ranking which is that it grants an advantage to the early reports over later ones. IP Osgoode, for example, is generally pretty late in writing about any subject. By being late, however, it has an advantage over those blogs that rush to report on breaking news. In theory, the IP Osgoode post ought to be better than the one that broke the story. But by that time, most people have moved on and fewer people link to the IP Osgoode post. Therefore when some person in the future looks for information on the subject, they don’t get the best information (theoretically, again). I’m probably being too simplistic about PageRank. Maybe Google has done something about this. They’re pretty smart.