On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 9:06 PM, Tom Morris <tom(a)tommorris.org> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 09:11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:
This is not a theoretical risk. This has
happened. Most famously in
the case of Virgin using pictures of persons that were licenced under
a free licence, in their advertising campaign. I hesitate to call this
argument fatuous, but it's relevance is certainly highly
questionable. Nobody has raised this is as a serious argument except
you assume it
has been. This is the bit that truly is a straw horse. The "downstream
use" objection
was *never* about downstream use of _content_ but downstream use of _labels_ and
the structuring of the semantic data. That is a real horse of a
different colour, and not
of straw.
I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the
general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might
reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do
quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world
that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that
(your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more
efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens?
No, just to keep the facts straight, you were not making an analogy, you
were comparing apples with oranges. Even the sheerest imitation of your
argument being an analogy breaks down when you consider that in fact
for it to stand to scrutiny, you would have to believe that looking at
at something, and looking at something and making your mind up over
what it was you were looking at are the same thing. Which of course they
are *not*.
--
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]