User:Notes and annotations

This directory is for notes and annotations on themes, current readings and projects, related to my graduation thesis.
mapping_ property :

• The right of property is created by the labour involved in the production.
  

A definition of property according to John Locke, one of the fathers of the liberal state and the ideology behind the private property, is that the property is an extension of one' s ownership of oneself. Since you own yourself therefore you own what you have produce.

• William Blackstone, eighteen century British jurist defined what means by property and the right of ownership as “that sole and despotic domination, which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.”

• Lewis Hyde, an essayist and cultural critic differentiates property as “a rights of action” and “a right of exclusion” – the one stressing the agency of owners and the other stressing limits to the agency of non owners.

• Stuart Banner, a legal historian and property law scholar suggests that “property has always been a means rather than an ends.”

Property law deals with the allocation of scarce resources and therefore is also about the allocation of power.

• "Property is not a right; it is an instrumentality fully subject to governmental control."
  

---

notes on Lewis Hyde - Introduction to Common As Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership
We live in an ownership society. What if the ownership is commonwealth of all, rather than private preserve.
Fair use of knowledge and ideas, inherited from the past they enrich the present.
Since the rise of the internet and the notion of digital copying the claim of the ownership emerged.
Since is so easy to copy and distribute digital files this resonated into significant fights and copyright infringements. For example James Joyce case, where the son Steve Joyce banned the use of the novel "Odysseys".
The government of Ireland suspended the copyright law for one day in order to organize group reading of passages of the novel.
Another instance is Martin Luther King speech "I had a dream" patented by King's son and Martin Luther King's foundation. Any use of the phrase "I had a dream" could lead to a court prosecution.
The notion of ownership has to be reconsider and a transaction system has to resolve the enclosure to common for all.
Hyde cites three core issues to facilitate this shift: "self - governance" common for democratic practices, where people have to discuss, shape and share ideas; "self-sustainable community", where the creative communities emerge and the share of knowledge leading to human progress; non the less "public being", a place which will facilitate the free circulation of ideas.

---

Due to multiple copies of the same file the question of originality and authenticity in the digital format arise, it i hard to determine when things are changed in a period of time.
The ownership of the digital object that can persist by itself and be transported to the physical object, for example a book
Does that mean that owners of the digital objects have to migrate to another platform and whether this will impact the digital commons?
According to Hyde part of the problem with the rise of the internet and digitization is that there is a physical object, which have certain properties: tangible and intangible properties.
The right of the expression of the author in a way is intangible property. It is far more easy to control the tangible object, for instance a book and its production costs, shipping, distribution etc. the same way is applied to films, than to exercise the same control to the intangible ones.
You had the physical container for storing tangible content if you take this physical container away then you have lost the control on the commodity pointed by Hyde.
There are many ways/attempts to bring the digital to the physical space and also laws to try to reinforce the DRM ( Digital Millennium Act Right Management).
The outstanding promise of the digital that the extended fluidity will surpass these laws.

---

---

---

Vanish project research and software bundle developed by Roxana Geambasu, Amit Levy, Yoshi Kohno, Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy

Researchers at the university of Washington developed technology called Vanish that makes electronic data “self destructive” after a specific period of time. Instead of relaying on Google, Facebook or Hotmail to delete the data that is stored “in the cloud “- in other words, on their distributed servers – Vanish encrypts the data and then “shatters “ the encryption key. To read the data your computer has to put the pieces of the key back together, but they "erode" or “rust” as time passes, and after a certain point the document can not longer be read. Vanish does not provide with an ultimate solution how to take control over your personal data ( emails, text, photos or anything posted on the cloud ) but instead suggest the possibility to have certain control / date expiration over the content. The project departures and was developed in partnership with PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) is a system created by Phil Zimmermann in 1991, the aim of which is to provide a public and private keys to encrypt and decrypt texts, e-mails, files, directories, including whole disk partitions.

---

Annotation on Delete:The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

In a recent book, “Delete:The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“ the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder's case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from the past experiences and adjust our behaviour.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people's sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever remember / tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concluded that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult task.”

• note: Stacy Snyder or so called "The Drunkard Pirate" case when a student teacher was denied a teaching degree because of a compromising photo published on MySpace.

see Snyder story

---