The argument that copyright encourages innovation is simply a pretense for protectionism. Some protection for intellectual property probably does encourage innovation, as the “Tabarrok Curve” illustrates, but the pretense becomes clear when we see copyright repeatedly extended for works already in existence. Walt Disney was long-dead when his copyright to Mickey Mouse was extended. Rumors to the contrary, Walt ain’t coming back no matter how much we incentivize him with a longer copyright.

The latest case in point is last week’s extension of copyright in the European Union for design:

Mid-century design classics, such as Charles Eames chairs, Eileen Gray tables and Arco lamps are set to rocket in price, following EU regulations which came into force this week that extend the copyright on furniture from 25 years to 70 years after the death of a designer.

…Companies can currently sell replica goods providing 25 years has passed from the date the designer died, but the EU ruling – speeded up by the British government – has extended that period to 70 years. Eames died in 1978, so the new protection extends the copyright of the many chairs, tables and clocks he designed until 2048. For items designed jointly with his wife, Ray, the copyright would extend for a further 10 years, as she died in 1988.

Dead people tend not to be very creative so I suspect that the retroactive extension of copyright will not spur much innovation from Eames. The point, of course, is not to spur creativity but to protect the rents of the handful of people whose past designs turned out to have lasting value.

Retroactive extensions of copyright throw the entire reasoning behind copyright into reverse. The incentive argument for copyright would have to run, We don’t have enough designs so we should increase the incentive to produce more. The actual argument for copyright runs–We have lots of popular designs and we need to keep selling them at a high price.

Moreover, if this nonsense were not enough, how is this for a kicker:

Companies which publish design books may have to get numerous licences to reproduce photos because designs have come under copyright.

Hat tip: The excellent Mark Thorson.

The Visual6502 team reverse-engineered one of the chips used in the early Atari video game system:

…we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate.  Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip’s physical components – about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502.  These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.

This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games.

By the way, this is the same idea that Robin Hanson argues will be used to create Ems of human brains.

Eric Jonas and Konrad Kording then applied the same types of techniques which neuroscientists use to try to understand the human brain to the simulation–including lesion studies, analysis of spike trains, and correlation studies. Could the tools of neuroscience be used to understand the much simpler Atari brain? The answer is mostly no. The authors, for example, looked at three “behaviors”, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Pitfall (!) and they are able to find transistors which uniquely crash one of the games but not the others.

We might thus conclude they are uniquely responsible for the game – perhaps there is a Donkey Kong transistor or a Space Invaders transistor.

Of course, this conclusion would be very misleading but what are we then to make of similar brain lesion studies? The authors conclude:

…we take a simulated classical microprocessor as a model organism, and use our ability to perform arbitrary experiments on it to see if popular data analysis methods from neuroscience can elucidate the way it processes information. We show that the approaches reveal interesting structure in the data but do not meaningfully describe the hierarchy of information processing in the processor. This suggests that current approaches in neuroscience may fall short of producing meaningful models of the brain.

I was surprised to read this:

Granger causality [37] has emerged as a method of assessing putative causal relationships between brain regions based on LFP data.

The BBC has an interesting report on ambulance services in Beijing.  Up until now, ambulance drivers could decide themselves how much to charge people for their services.  I’m assuming these weren’t listed or known beforehand either.  This seems ripe for abuse given that the patient will be desperately wanting to get to the hospital and in no state for bargaining.  According to the article, most Chinese on social media didn’t even know that ambulances charge at all.  That must come as a big shock then when they get hit up by the driver.

So what did authorities decide to do?  Decree that ambulances “be fitted with taxi-style meters in an effort to allay public concerns about overcharging.”  Hmm, this doesn’t seem to be the most incentive compatible policy either.  As one social media cynic (read: realist) pointed out, “Don’t rule out ambulances taking a detour when using the meter.”  At least when you’re in the backseat of a cab, you can watch where the driver is going.  In the back of an ambulance in an emergency situation, that’s not going to be very feasible!  Don’t get me wrong, I’m in no way advocating free ambulance services, but there has to be a better policy than this.

That is from Cherokee Gothic.