But really, each of these has choices is distinct, and in many cases their use-cases do not overlap. Carrier pigeons, for example, are really point-to-point messaging mechanisms, unless you have a flock — and they take time to breed, so they are a poor choice if you have need to keep people updated on a variety of different topics. And unlike the owls of Harry Potter, carrier pigeons go to places and not people — so tracking down your significant other in either Greece or Italy — why won’t they call? — is out. (You may, of course, find different ways to make these work for you — in the digital age, square pegs can be refactored to fit in round holes, after all.)

Image via Wikipedia

Facebook

Facebook is the ideal place for keeping in touch with real people I’ve really met, especially if I’m likely to lose track of them otherwise. It’s geographically diverse, lets me share enough to give people a sense they’ve got an idea what I’m up to, and (despite its best efforts otherwise) lets me otherwise stay private (with caveats). So who do I connect with on Facebook? Friends (of various levels) from high school, college, postgrad. Friends — not professional colleagues — from work. Tricky decisions of categorization abound, of course: is this colleague enough of a friend for me to connect with them on Facebook, or do they belong on LinkedIn only? Segregating people into groups with various privacy settings help, of course, as does not sharing things I don’t want the public to possibly see. Sure, this is friend-stuff, but nothing I put on Facebook would be too embarrassing, or cost me a job. Facebook has been pushing pages (AP, PBS, BBC, business generally) that share non-personal information, but I’m increasingly finding this a distraction from the reason I use Facebook: people.

Image via CrunchBase

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has been touted as the professional version of Facebook, but that’s only partly true. LinkedIn is not really about sharing day-to-day details about me, but rather about highlighting my accomplishments and work. But beyond that, it’s mostly a Rolodex of up-to-date business cards of people I’ve dealt with professionally. I will connect with any colleague (or one of my undergrads) on LinkedIn without hesitation, unlike on Facebook. In terms of privacy, well, the point is to be visible and findable professionally. So that’s what goes up there. No home addresses, no home telephone numbers, just business contact details.

Image via CrunchBase

Twitter

Twitter is for link sharing and quick conversations (very quick, and very short) with absolutely anyone I find remotely interesting. I don’t refollow anyone who follows me, only those I think are interesting. I share things I want to broadcast with the world (but am too polite to get a bullhorn). Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes professional, but always with the idea that anyone might read it. It’s great for more distant connections with people I may or may not ever meet, but who say and write about interesting things.

Image via CrunchBase

Google Plus

Google Plus is the new player, but it brings in some of the best of both Twitter and Facebook. Yes, I can put my actual friends in circles and easily limit what I share with just them (so that’s a bit like Facebook, but more focused). No, not everyone I know on Facebook is on Google Plus (and may never be). Google Plus also lets me follow people I’ve never met who say interesting things, like Twitter, but it emphasizes longer posts and more detailed, threaded conversations — without forcing me to dance with privacy settings as on Facebook, and without assuming these people are actually my friends (even if they could be). In many respects, I’m finding that it challenges quick-blogging services like Posterous and Tumblr more than Facebook or LinkedIn. It does seem a potential threat to Twitter, which I am finding myself more and more viewing as a social link sharing service as opposed to a discussion mechanism (but it’s GREAT for that).

Summary

So, here it is in short form:

Facebook: real people, real sharing of personal (but not too personal) information. If you actually know me in “real life,” friend me. If not, go elsewhere. I share semi-personal stuff here (what I had for dinner and who made it).

LinkedIn: real people doing real business networking. If I’ve met you in a professional capacity, connect with me. If not, well, tell me why we can do business! I share only professional info here.

Twitter: on the Internet, no one knows if you’re a dog, but we do care if you have something interesting to share. If you do, follow me and I might follow you back. If you don’t, follow me and I won’t follow you back. I share thoughts and links here.

Google Plus: real people (for now) sharing what they found interesting today, including articles, thoughts, stories, and photos. If you actually know me, I might add you to my Friends circle; if not, but you are interesting, you’ll make Following. Please give me commentary with your links!

Maybe next week I’ll explain how I use carrier pigeons.

Related articles

• Google+ will be squeezed out of social world, says LinkedIn CEO – Computerworld (mbcalyn.wordpress.com)
• It’s Google Plus vs. Twitter, Not Facebook (scalableintimacy.com)
• Different social networks for different purposes (inpropriapersona.com)

If you kill someone, you’ve committed murder, right? Yes  —  unless he was about to shoot you first, in which case we call it self-defense. Fair use takes that same concept to copyright law. It is all about justification, and this is a key to understanding it. Fair use allows use of a work that would ordinarily constitute infringement, if that use is justified (or excused, if you like) with some compelling reason.

How does fair-use law work? – By Tim Wu – Slate Magazine.

Recommended reading.

• “I am not making money on it; it’s fair use.”
• “They should be happy with the free press.”
• “I’m making them money, it’s fair use.”
• “It didn’t have a copyright notice on it; it’s fair use.”

via Fair Use FAQ | BlawgIT.

Recommended reading for anyone who cites, quotes, or reuses other’s work – which is pretty much everyone these days.

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A recently published law review article takes an interesting approach to testing the hypothesis that patents foster innovation:

Patent systems are often justified by an assumption that innovation will be spurred by the prospect of patent protection, leading to the accrual of greater societal benefits than would be possible under non-patent systems. However, little empirical evidence exists to support this assumption. One way to test the hypothesis that a patent system promotes innovation is experimentally to simulate the behavior of inventors and competitors under conditions approximating patent and non-patent systems. Employing a multi-user interactive simulation of patent and non-patent (commons and open source) systems (“The Patent Game”), this study compares rates of innovation, productivity, and societal utility.

via Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts.

ReadWriteWeb has a good write-up describing the study and its conclusions:

The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents. The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility. Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.

via Study says Patents Hurt Innovation.

The article concludes that experiments with “PatentSim” do not support the general justification of our current patent system:

Data generated thus far using PatentSim suggest that a system combining patent and open source protection for inventions (that is, similar to modern patent systems) generates significantly lower rates of innovation (p<0.05), productivity (p<0.001), and societal utility (p<0.002) than does a commons system. These results are inconsistent with the orthodox justification for patent systems. However, they do accord well with evidence from the increasingly important field of user and open innovation.

This comports well with my own feelings about the patent system after research and work with intellectual property issues during and after law school. As the article points out, the Constitutional basis of our patent system is to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts” – if this isn’t happening, then our system is not living up to its Constitutional mandate, and ought to be rethough (not, I think, abandoned).

Modern treaty obligations that the United States has supported might make this more difficult to accomplish, since now we are also bound by international obligations as well as constitutional ones (although the courts consistently say the Constitution trumps international treaties and agreements). But simply because change is difficult does not mean we shouldn’t consider it – and doing so may well benefit us and encourage business and innovation.

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Michael Nielsen wrote a stellar piece dealing with disruptive changes that doom old business models – specifically, newspapers and science publishers, to mention his examples. He does a particularly good job at explaining how this could happen even without anyone doing anything wrong or stupid.

The problem is that your newspaper has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists’ phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture – like firing your photographers – don’t make your situation better, they make it worse. So you’re stuck gazing over at TechCrunch, who is at an even better local optimum, a local optimum that could not have existed twenty years ago

via Michael Nielsen » Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?

He goes on to describe the impact he sees ahead for scientific publishers, a group fighting against new trends like open access that is ultimately doomed by new economic and business realities enabled by the Internet and other disruptive technologies.

Highly recommended.

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The Uneasy Case for Intellectual Property Rights in Traditional Knowledge by Stephen Munzer, Kal Raustiala:

Should traditional knowledge—the understanding or skill possessed by indigenous peoples pertaining to their culture and folklore and their use of native plants for medicinal purposes—receive protection as intellectual property? This Article examines nine major arguments from the moral, political and legal philosophy of property for intellectual property rights and contends that, as applied to traditional knowledge (TK), they justify at most a modest package of rights under domestic and international law. The arguments involve desert based on labor; firstness; stewardship; stability; moral right of the community; incentives to innovate; incentives to commercialize; unjust enrichment, misappropriation and restitution; and infringement and dilution. These arguments do, however, support “defensive” protection for TK: that is, halting the use of TK by nonindigenous actors in obtaining patents and copyrights. These arguments also support the dissemination of TK on the internet and via other digital media and the selective use of trademarks. The force of these conclusions resides in the importance of a vibrant public domain, and the absence of any plausible limiting principle that would allow more robust rights in TK for indigenous groups without permitting equally robust rights for nonindigenous groups.

I discovered this useful and interesting discussion of the relationship between intellectual property and traditional knowledge thanks to a pointer from Lawrence Solum at the Legal Theory Blog. As he notes there, this has often been a quite confusing area of the law, and this article does a good job of going through the issues in an understandable and useful way. Recommended reading.

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The court … in this case … did not decide that posting a cease-and-desist letter is copyright infringement (which would have required considering the fair use defense). Rather, the court was only asked to decide whether the plaintiff could use a subpoena (under 17 U.S.C. § 512(h)) to discover the identity of the poster. The court concluded that for this, the potential plaintiff only had to show that copyright law presumptively protected his work (which it does); the fair use inquiry would then take place when the merits of the case are litigated, at trial or on a pretrial motion.

If it weren’t for the unpublished nature of the letter, the Supreme Court’s Campbell v. Acuff-Rose decision, on which I rely in my quick analysis above, would make this an almost open-and-shut fair use case. The unpublished nature of the work undermines that in some measure (see, e.g., Harper & Row v. Nation Enterprises); but I still think the copier’s fair use case is quite strong.

The rest of the article is worth reading: Copyright Law and Cease-and-Desist Letters.

Update: a court ruled against the fair use defense.

I have been using OpenDNS for quite a while now to increase the reliability and speed of Internet access. (“DNS” is the system used to translate human-friendly names into computer-friendly numeric addresses.) It’s reliable and invisible. I’m only noticing it again now because I’ve found the Internet service provider I’m relying on at the moment to have less-than-stellar DNS responses, and the switch to OpenDNS has made a subtle, yet noticeable difference.

What does OpenDNS improve?

• Helps identify “phishing” sites that have been set up to try to steal personal information (fake PayPal sites, for example).
• Can be set to block “adult” sites, if that makes sense on your network.
• It’s faster, both because of large caches and because they’ve spread out their servers geographically.
• It helps fix common URL typos. If it can’t fix it, you get a search page that tries to help (and has advertising, which accounts for their revenue).
• Shortcuts are available to make typing URLs easier.
• They specialize in DNS, and I’ve found their servers to be very reliable.

Plus, OpenDNS is free, and they have instructions for many different network setups. Recommended.