Because our system represents extant authorship relationships (as opposed to creating a whole new first-to-file system like some other approaches in the space), we defer to existing authorities whenever possible -- so authorship information provided by MoMA, NYPL, DPLA, etc is considered authoritative, whereas statements by a private individual generally do not carry the same weight. All of this (including conflicting statements) is surfaced at read time and can be subject to different weighting depending on the situation (best-effort attempt to find the author of an image for discovery purposes, versus automatic payment, for example)
Declaring ownership and provenance with complete certainty is very hard, which is why we don't profess to do it. Our approach is to nondestructively aggregate potentially conflicting claims and allow for more nuanced resolution at read time, as appropriate for a given situation. In your particular example, we would have a chain of derivative works.
Obviously, in certain cases (payment routing) a definitive answer is required, but this is already something that PROs and similar organizations deal with on a daily basis, and we can support their arbitration.
If you plan on linking money to content, you better have a really definitive answer. That movement of money is essentially the purchase of a license. If a business or individual relies on your answer as to who that license should be purchased from, they do not want to be hit with a copyright complaint should the real owner appear. And if people end up abusing your system to monetize content that they should not, expect all sorts of legal docs in the mail.
Filecoin is one of several proposed approaches for encouraging seeding ("pinning") in the IPFS network. In our network (Mediachain), we will probably start out by using tit-for-tat pinning between peers for this purpose.
Actually, you could program for the eMate (NewtonScript, which is surprisingly powerful -- you do need a mac to build the app but you could write code on the device itself, there were apps for this), and you could connect to the internet, too -- I had a PCMCIA ethernet card with a pop-out jack in mine. I fondly remember printing to a HP laser printer via the IR port in the library, bypassing normal printing limits.
I can't wait for real animated holography to become available commercially. The static prints that Zebra Imaging makes are already incredible (full color, 90 degree viewing angle, etc) and the video footage of their live table prototype looks nuts, though it needs on the order of 100GBps of hogel data coming into the surface for 3x3ft image...
I'm not sure if this is what you're suggesting, but I can't imagine we will ever see someone producing entirely new Tupac songs based on his phoneme library.
It would be in such bad taste that even the American recording industry wouldn't go near it. People already get upset that they use old entire recordings to produce new songs, and those are actually his lyrics and his voice.
On a much smaller scale, this has already been done. Tupac's posthumous "Loyal to the Game" album produced by Eminem had a number of lyrical phrases constructed out of phonemes.
There was a small amount of outrage at the time of its release, but it mostly focused on the fact that those constructed lyrics were endorsing other rappers (mostly Eminem's protégés also performing on the track), whom some fans felt Tupac would not have endorsed had he been alive.
Definitely, but I think it is a question of scale.
It's one thing to construct some ad-libs, but to actually create a piece of art (i.e. an entire verse) is a whole different ball game. It would be like if someone took fragments of Picasso paintings, constructed an entirely new painting, and called it a Picasso.
I suppose it's conceivable that someone might try to do it, and it's apparently technically possible, but I think it would be roundly rejected.
To paraphrase the well-known maxim, you can never go broke underestimating the good taste of the american public (over a long enough timeframe). The IP status of the voice is a really fascinating question though, given how complex the current songwriting/master/recording breakdown is already.
Be very, very careful when you're using PHP as an example of the proper way to do something, because you're probably at least partially wrong. Semicolons are optional when followed by a closing tag (and likewise, closing tags are optional when the last statement ends with a semicolon -- in this case, whitespace at the end of the file is valid, as well)
Yes. There is one situation in which you may omit a semicolon in PHP.
This does not create a situation like the semicolon insertion in JavaScript, however, and I don't perceive as an ambiguity or inconsistency issue.
Are you saying this detail about PHP causes problems of some sort? I can't think of any. If JavaScript were to work like that, and only let you omit a semicolon before a closing script tag, that would be absolutely fine with me.
