Copyright is a good thing but not everyone one agrees. While it exists to save artists from having their work exploited for free, it also exists to let businesses make money from their investments in creative works.
It was, is and always will be a temptation to free ride on someone else’s effort. Copyright is there to check that and give people and enterprises a reason to create.
It is true that not everyone creates for money and hats off to those that want to give away their fruits of effort for the good of mankind.
However not all of us are communists and not all things can be made from the selfless contributions of others.
Apparently the latest superhero blockbuster is going to cost over $400m to get into cinemas. No amount of good will can Kickstart a project of that scale.
It needs copyright protection to make commercial IP.
The problem is, in the modern world, copyright protection is becoming harder and harder.
There are just so many ways to steal copyright material and it is so easy to do so, that the barriers of entry to piracy and freebooting are forever falling.
Soon it won’t just be music, video and images, it will be things.
3D printing is in its infancy, but it won’t be long before you can print out a pair of Reebok trainers or a Gucci handbag.
Some will say ‘hurrah!’ and immediately get printing.
Yet it is hard enough to make a living as an artist as it is and without copyright it would be nearly impossible.
The Beatles can go bust, some would say, but the creative and entertainment worlds we live in wouldn’t exist without copyright.
So it was with some amazement that I learned that an artist was being sued to strip him of his copyright to a photograph he created of a monkey taking a selfie.
The idea is the artist, David Slater, doesn’t own the copyright to the photo as the monkey pressed the button on the camera, so the copyright belongs to the monkey. Well we all know that the photo wasn’t by accident and was setup by the photographer, to capture a monkey taking a photo. As such it is his work. It is as a matter a fact this image is registered at the US copyright office, but Peta and Wikimedia are prepared to deny him of his rights for their own purposes.
It is bullying of the worse kind.
Its a case of a single artist exploited by two huge organizations.
The Artist creates a hit, organizations strip him of the benefit.
Is this what the internet was designed for, the bullying of the artist?
The networked reality that the artist finds themselves in, is one where any non-realtime content is hard to protect and therefore hard to make money from.
99% of musicians can make more money strumming a guitar on a street corner than they can through the internet, because their media has been rendered un-monetizable.
Instead the money flows to the real-time media, the multiplayer games, chats, concerts and candy crushes. These are media’s that can’t be stolen like static media; their protection is in the moment.
However unless we want a world without quality static media it needs to be protected. Letting big organizations run roughshod over static IP in an attempt to render generations of content down in a predatory rights grab is a dangerous road.
Its especially dangerous because it will generate new more powerful monopolies where it won’t only be the artists being exploited but the customer too.
Anyone who has experienced the price gouging of Uber at busy times, or the skyrocketing hotel rates created by the monopoly hotel booking sites will know concentrating monopoly control in to the hands of internet organizations is not a solution for a new utopia.
So in a way it is no surprise that organization in this new world of diminished copyright can attack the rights of an artist and try and demonize them while stealing their work.
Who wants to pay to send a funny picture to a friend?
Sadly the right of an artist to control that is the atomic unit of copyright and without copyright content and their creators cannot flourish.
PETA of course want to make an example for the rights of animals, but artists have feeling and have rights to possess their own lives and work and should be afforded the same consideration.
Whereas the internet was meant to disintermediate middlemen from creators, it is at risk of reintermediating them via giant rights hovering companies that will hog all the benefit. By not supporting artists, all the value of the creative input of artists is sucked into the VC and listed entities that control their free distribution by invisible tolls and advertising.
The content consumer pays through their retail, advert cost inflated prices and likely their investment portfolios stuff with pricey internet stocks, while the artist is left broke and busking for pennies.
IET.
Financial engineering is not to be confused with engineering, at least not much. Financial engineering does however deal with theory, maths and computation but unlike ‘engineering’ engineering it doesn’t deal with immutable laws.
Money is an idea while gravity is a fact. Companies quite often flap their featherless arms and fly in the stock market heavens, while no one has yet soared from the physical earth backed by only pure belief and a group of believers telling the world how their scheme will surely work.
Financial engineers are a lot more like religious dogmatist than people who make engines and build bridges.
While torque is not cheap for real engineers, talk can be for financial engineers.
Financial engineers would hope that their work is narrowly defined but in practice ‘financial engineering’ covers any area where it is the presentation of accounting or finances that materially effects the outcome.
A bundle of mortgages used to be nothing more than a filing cabinet of assets. Now thought financial engineering it is a tradable contract that liquidates those assets and leads to the creation of more.
This is an excellent innovation but financial engineering is more know for its darkside, where good assets are really just a skinned up pile of bad assets. That kind of magic trick is how financial engineering got to be synonymous for any financial slight of hand that makes an accounting silk purse from a sow’s ear.
Financial centers stand and live in denial of the few financial conjectures with logical rigor.
Financial centers are driven by financial engineering and people chasing ‘alpha,’ which is classed as above average return. When it is understood ‘alpha’ cannot be reliably achieved in the long run, it is financial engineering that comes into play.
The classic theories driving financial engineering should be ‘the efficient market hypothesis’ and to begin with it did.
“The efficient market” roughly implies that because every Tom, Dick and Harry wants to turn a buck in financial markets, the profits are beaten down to a little more than the US government will let you have to lend it money. The more sketchy the opportunity in relation to Uncle Sam’s offer, the more you will earn on average for taking the risk. Financial engineers use this rule to value everything.
As a huge number of people are jostling for profit the whole sorry market is churned up into froth so no one can see into the future to beat the odds.
The random walk and the efficient market meshes together so that only cheaters can do better.
And of course they do.
This is where ‘financial engineering’ has become a synonym for cheating. The best way to cheat is to bamboozal everyone with complex maths and that was the short cut that lead to the derivative trainwreck central to the credit cruch of 2007-2008.
If real engineers cheat, the things they produce doen’t work or falls down, but financial engineering can cheat comeuppance purely on the faith put into the product that’s been created but many such constructions come unstuck.
The resultant list of hundred million dollar and billion dollar fines is so long it doesn’t bear reference. Financial service cheating is such a thing that the fines are material funding for government.
I’m only guessing now, but I believe it has been a long time since a new unit of physics has been created, at least one that applies readily to us in our daily lives. Not so in the world of financial engineers. Financial engineers are constantly making up new units of measurement to explain their models.
An important new one is ‘non-GAPP’ accounting.
GAPP means ‘generally accepted accounting principles,’ so giving out your financial information in ‘non-generally accepted accounting principles’ seems an odd way to report on the performance of for example a stock.
Is it cheating though?
Financial engineers would be aghast at the suggestion.
No one leaves money on the table for the next man.
That the efficient market for you but it also means if you can’t cheat, you can’t make much money.
This is why financial service companies have had to be regulated up to their ears and why financial companies complain so bitterly about it.
The only way the finance folks make huge sacks of cash is because they are cheating.
But you knew that. We all know that by now, don’t we?
The whole structure of finance tells you, trust me, we can get you better than the average. Apart from that in itself being obviously false because everyone can’t do it, a quick scan of a Wall street or City of London Skyline will soon tell you that there is a lot of money in that false promise.
The truth is, people who try and get you better returns than the average, get you worse returns and everyone plays along with the lie because their paycheck relies on it.
So to find a cheat simply look for an outfit making too much money. these are likely to be the next lot of financial engineers to crash and burn.
Of course plenty will also get away with it because money is an idea and as such is very malleable.
You probably wouldn’t agree. Your pay is very real and very un-malleable, the idea of money is firmly wedged in most peoples minds. However it is almost an illusion.
Do you believe in Santa?
I do.
Because most years Santa comes to town and rewards all the nice boys and gals of financial services with a happy yuletide rally.
Unless something very naughty has happened Santa will make stock prices rise just enough to give the year end numbers of money managers a jolly seasonal finish.
In December off go the fund managers buying up stocks and shares and up pops the indices. So when investors get their year-end reckonings they are left with a favorable, engineered and misleading impression.
This is not illegal, not yet at least. Its all part of that spectrum of behavior that leaves the world of finance mired.
The stakes are high in this game. Money is an idea to some, an illusion to others, but it is still the thing that makes the human world revolve. Without the lubrication of money in its modern incarnation the global engine of humanity would grind catastrophically to a halt.
As such it is time to stop believing in Santa and dispense with the pursuit of Alpha and instead focus on the optimization on the delivery of averages by the cheapest means possible. Only then will cheating in financial services lose it overwhelming magnetism.