Technology

Are  NFTs a new shift in our understanding of intellectual property?  Nonfungible tokens enable artists to create digital one-offs, among other things, that allow them to sell a unique image, video, etc. that itself can become the source of multiple non-original, non-unique digital copoies.  But could NFTs also be used to create temporary, unique, customized copyright licenses tor artists?

A new paradigm for intellectual property assets?

From cointelegraph.com
2021-08-14 07:12:00
Cointelegraph By Greg Gerstenzang
Excerpt:

 

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are digital records of the ownership of assets. The asset types most commonly associated with NFTs are digital assets, such as artwork like memes, GIFs, or gaming characters or properties. Assets represented by NFTs, however, may be digital, physical, tangible or intangible. Examples of asset types that have been transferred or that have had their ownership recorded utilizing NFTs include sports memorabilia, copyrights in music, artwork and real estate. Intellectual property assets and, specifically, the ownership and transfer of ownership of patents may also be recorded and transferred as NFTs.

Related: Nonfungible tokens from a legal perspective

The ownership of real estate may be recorded in a registry of deeds, the ownership of patents may be recorded in the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and the ownership of written works or music may be recorded in the Library of Congress through the copyright system. Because similar systems for…

 

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China has begun its crackdown on its own wanna-be corpo-statees such as have emerged in the US primarily, but in other nation-states as well, mostly in Europe.  These corpo-states are the new big biz giants of current year, Big Tech, especially Social Media and eCommerce Sites.  But while the big tech companies outside of China celebrate the taking down of some of theri competitors, they should pay attention to how China is treating their own companies to consider maybe potentially giving up on attempting to dance with the CCP for the promise of gaining access to that massive market.

A Chinese Warning for U.S. Tech

From www.wsj.com
2021-08-15 17:08:00

Excerpt:

 

Big U.S. tech companies must be watching with glee as China cracks down on its homegrown technology companies. They are thrilled not only because they are seeing potential global competitors in e-commerce, music licensing, ride sharing, food delivery and more weakened, but because they now have a powerful card to play at home.

It started last October when Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Financial, complained at the Shanghai Bund Summit that regulators were too cautious: “There is no innovation in this world without risk.” He also said Chinese banks have a pawnshop mentality, requiring collateral before they lend, unlike Ant, which was about to go public, which uses algorithms to assess creditworthiness. Mr. Ma’s criticisms were correct, but he angered the powers that be. Even though shares for Ant Financial’s initial public offering were 870 times oversubscribed, the Shanghai Stock Exchange effectively canceled the IPO in early November….

 

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In a move that should frighten no one who isn’t frightened by the notion of a state using technology to classify you as a pyschotic by merely documenting your head gestures while you walk to your car, scientists have now enable police to determine if someone is psychotic by merely tracking their head movement in a crowd and having it analyzed by artificial  intelligence algorithm finder who will be able to faithfully determine that yes, indeedy do, that person is, in fact psychotic.

Ok, so they’re not quite sweeping crowds and figuring this out, yet, but they are using this device to analyze the head  bobs of people being interviewed by the police at  hq.  The experiments have begun right here in America, in New Mexico, with a study done among prison inmates.

AI could detect signs of psychopathy based on head movements, study finds 

From www.dailymail.co.uk
2021-08-10 09:17:30

Excerpt:

 

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can detect signs of psychopathy based on head movements.

Using head tracking algorithms, experts in New Mexico found evidence that male prison inmates with higher levels of psychopathy kept their head more stationary during police interviews…..

The study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, represents an ‘important first step’ in demonstrating the feasibility of using computer vision in conjunction with psychology, the authors claim.

‘I’ve been interviewing individuals high on psychopathic traits for more than 20 years,’ study author Kent A. Kiehl, a psychology professor at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, told PsyPost.

 

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China is exposing the private medical information of minority families and exposing experiments being done on these families without their consent in a series of genetic studies published in Chinese scientific peer-reviewed journals.  This is what was alleged in a paper discovered in 2017 bio bioinformationist Yves Moreau.  What Moreau discovered was a paper called “Human Genetics.”  In this paper, Moreau discovered what seemed to be basic ethical standards violations, which led him down a rabbit hole of other such Chinese genetics reports with even more ethical and scientific issues created for reasons that don’t appear to reflect objective scientific curiousity.

Genetic papers containing data from China’s ethnic minorities draw fire |

From www.sciencemag.org
2021-08-10 05:00:00

Excerpt:

 

When Yves Moreau, a bioinformatician at KU Leuven in Belgium, noticed a 2017 paper in Human Genetics that described the “male genetic landscape of China” based on a set of almost 38,000 Y-STR sequences, he saw a red flag. Y-STR stands for Y-chromosomal short tandem repeat polymorphism, bits of repetitive DNA often used in forensic investigations. Some of the samples came from Uyghurs and other minorities in China, and Moreau was skeptical that they had given informed consent for the use of their genetic data or understood that China might use it to profile their people. In June 2020, he asked the journal’s editors to retract the “indefensible” paper.

Springer Nature, its publisher, launched an investigation that is still ongoing. So last month, Moreau stepped up the pressure: He wrote to the journal’s entire editorial board to complain about the lack of progress. For Moreau, the paper is just one of many studies, primarily in forensic genetics, that deserve scrutiny because of consent problems in China and the potential for abuse of the data. He says he has flagged about 28 papers at six journals over the past couple of years.

And his campaign is gaining traction. Eight of 25 members of the editorial board of Molecular Genetics & Genomic Medicine, published by Wiley, recently resigned to protest the lack of progress in investigating a number of papers flagged by Moreau, as The Intercept reported last week.

 

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