Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
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Continue reading "Pluralistic: Down in the (link)dumps (23 Sept 2023)"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: Biden should support the UAW (18 Sept 2023)"
Web-scraping is good, actually.
For nearly all of history, academic linguistics focused on written, formal text, because informal, spoken language was too expensive and difficult to capture. In order to find out how people spokeâââwhich is not how people write!âââa researcher had to record speakers, then pay a grad student to transcribe the speech.
The process was so cumbersome that the whole discipline grew lopsided. We developed an extensive body of knowledge about written, formal prose (something very few of us produce), while informal, casual language (something we all produce) was mostly a black box.
The internet changed all that, creating the first-ever corpus of informal languageâââthe immense troves of public casual speech that we all off-gas as we move around on the internet, chattering with our friends.
The last time I saw the late, great Eric Flint was at the 2018 World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, where we both participated (along with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Olav Rokne and Eileen Gunn) in an excellent panel about the working class in sf.
Eric was an extraordinary writer and an even more extraordinary character. A Marxist meat-packersâ union organizer whose whole labor career was spent in the brutal trenches of Chicago Machine politics, Eric was also a towering figure in the subgenre of historical military science fiction, a field that is otherwise dominated by right-wingers, including numerous out-and-out kooks who endlessly fantasize about Bronze Age battles being re-fought with jets and mustard gas (for the record: Eric isnât the only progressive voice in this field; others, like Harry Turtledove, bring a humanizing, leftist view to their work).
Continue reading "The proletarianization of tech workers"
Last week, a US federal judge handed Americaâs creative workers a huge labor win: Judge Beryl A Howell of the DC Circuit Court upheld a US Copyright Office ruling that works created by âAIsâ are not eligible for copyright protection.
This is huge.
Some background: under US lawâââand under a mountain of international treaties, from the Berne Convention to the TRIPS âcopyright is automatically granted to creative works of human authorship âat the moment of fixation in some tangible medium.â
That is: as soon as a human being makes something creative, and records it in some medium (a hard-drive, magnetic tape, paper, film, canvas, etc), that creative thing is immediately copyrighted (the duration of that copyright varies, both by territory and by whether the creator was working on their own or for a corporation).
Continue reading "Everything Made By an AI Is In the Public Domain"
Continue reading "Pluralistic: When parties fail, movements step up (17 August 2023)"
