Movie spoilage?

Been meaning to write this for a while, but I keep forgetting.  Gruber quoted a piece by JJ Abrams not long ago, giving Abrams' thoughts on movie spoilers.

As an avid fan of movies and TV myself, I completely understand the desire to find out behind-the-scenes details in a nanosecond. Which, given technology, is often how long it takes — to the frustration of the storytellers. Efforts to gather this intel and the attempts to plug leaks create an ongoing battle between filmmakers and the very fans they are dying to entertain and impress. But the real damage isn’t so much that the secret gets out. It’s that the experience is destroyed.

That might be Abrams' opinion, but it isn't backed up by evidence.  As a careful study reveals, it generally does not ruin the experience.  Changes it, but not ruins it.

It's pretty standard these days for people to offer up "spoiler alert" warnings when revealing a surprising twist in a story that some might not have read/seen/heard. However, a new study, that tested a variety of books both with and without key points "spoiled," found that people actually seem to prefer a book if they've been told a spoiler ahead of time.

I generally avoid spoilers, myself, but I can certainly understand what they're saying.

Patent-ability

I just listened to Planet Money's latest podcast, The Case Against Patents, and had several comments on it.  (And perhaps I should preface this by mentioning that I'm a regular reader of TechDirt, and if you search for patents there, you'll find a lot of problems with the system.  And probably links to the works of the economists interviewed for the show.)

My biggest problem with the podcast has to do with the language used.  In particular, referring to working from someone else's patent as "stealing".  It isn't stealing; nothing is being taken.  And if I invent something, and can't use that idea better than someone reading my patent, I deserve to lose the possible opportunity cost losses from that person using that idea.  That opportunity loss is the only thing "taken", and under no circumstances should that be referred to as stealing.

Further to that point, developing a patent is roughtly one percent of the cost of developing a product.  If I develop that patent first, I've got a leg up on doing that other 99%; I've started first.

And frankly, if the market opportunity itself isn't enough incentive, in its own right, to turn that idea into a product, then the idea isn't worth a patent anyway (or shouldn't be).

And a note on drugs: putting the government more directly in charge of choosing directions would certainly have some downsides, but here's one upside.  There would be development on antibiotics again; right now, there's almost nothing, because it doesn't pay well enough.  They'd rather develop drugs for chronic conditions, because it forces people to keep buying the drug.

Also, the governments review all the studies that drive approval forward already, so the government knows how it's done.

There's another benefit as well.  When studies show bad side effects, they are sometimes re-done to try to avoid those showing up (which is one of the reasons we get things like Fenphen and Ephedra going on the market, even though they'll sometimes kill people.  Not the only reason, but it does happen).  When those studies are re-done, the government usually doesn't see the bad studies until after the fact (if ever).  If the government is directly running the studies, they'll see all of them.

Blast from the past

I was reading techdirt, today, as I frequently do, and ran across this article on execution. While the whole article is interesting, I was especially caught by the comic used as an example. Aside from being very funny, it's a web-comic I used to read a number of years ago. And for some reason, I apparently stopped reading it, and had long since forgotten it. So now I have several years (I think it might be as many as five) to catch up on. Nifty.

Patent as invention stifling

I read this post over at Techdirt with some curiosity. The interesting part, to me, isn't the case itself, but rather that the judge implicitly recognized that patents actually stifle innovation (if only for "short times").

I've been moving more and more over the past few years to feeling that the entire patent system is useless. It started with the realization that there is no societal benefit to software and business method patents (where an idea, rather than an implementation, is patented), but more and more I'm feeling like there is no benefit to any patents.

And the "short time" bit? Well, if the judge feels that twenty years is a short time, then I would posit that he hasn't been paying much attention to how quickly technology is moving forward these days.