Category: Technology

I’ve been interviewing people a fair amount lately. If the discussion gets to the area of workplace environment I often talk about the Netflix Freedom and Responsibility Culture. I’ve blogged about that before so just read it if you haven’t.

Since I forwarded the link to someone I interviewed, I read it again. This time I was struck by this quote:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

— Antione de Saint Exupery

I didn’t recall that in The Little Prince, which is my sole exposure to the author, so I Googled it. Aside from discovering that it’s a bad translation from the original French I found a link to this very old post by Jeff Atwood. It talks about Stack Overflow and Jeff makes this point:

I don’t care how much you pay me, you’ll never be able to recreate the incredibly satisfying feeling I get when demonstrating mastery within my community of peers.

And he links to this video. Which you should watch.

It’s amazing where your thoughts can take you…

(h/t to The Big Picture).

This is a great live graphic showing key economic indicators within the spans of what is typical. For the debt fear mongers, note the Core Inflation number.

Well, according to current law. 15 years ago, a copyright extension was passed. It seems like this extension was largely at the request of Disney and the Gershwin estate. It was a 20 year extension.

So five years from now, if nothing changes, you will be legally able to print a T-Shirt with Mickey Mouse on it and sell it. Disney will not be able to send you nasty legal letters.

Or perhaps the political establishment will balance organizations who can contribute huge sums of cash against regular people and extend the copyright.

Normally I would assume Disney wins this. They will tell senators that not extending this will cause a proliferation of t-shirts of Mickey giving people the finger. Or whatever crazy thing people will come up with. And frankly, that’s true. But so what. Walt died over 45 years ago. Granting copyright for life plus 50 years is surely sufficient to promote innovation. I’m frankly not sure what the +50 is for. Not like the author can innovate once dead.

The one hope I have for this to not be extended is Google. Google has their Google Books project. Copyright is a huge issue for this project. For books, in many cases the author is dead and there’s no one to ask, “hey, can we use this?”. So works that no one really cares about are still restricted.

If I were betting, I’d say Disney gets the extension. But I’m rooting for Google.