How Perl and R Reveal the United States' Isolation In the TPP Negotiations 152
langelgjm writes "As /. reported, last Thursday Wikileaks released a draft text of the intellectual property chapter in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Since then, many commentators have raised alarm about its contents. But what happens when you mix the leaked text together with Perl regular expressions and R's network analysis packages? You get some neat visualizations showing just how isolated the United States is in pushing for extreme copyright and patent laws."
Perl? Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Here [wordpress.com] is the original article with a little more technical detail. To those interested (like me) what was Perl doing there, it was just a single line script with regex. The rest is R.
Re:What a poor commentary (Score:3, Informative)
I can only assume that they must have meant it sarcastically. I analyzed the data they presented and came up with the conclusion that the US and Japan are "up to something," while Canada just seems to have a lot of friends and new ideas. But I didn't read the actual drafts either.
Re:What a poor commentary (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, this one-page article clearly represents the entirety of his knowledge on the subject, he's obviously not a political science professor or anything.
Re:Go Canada (Score:4, Informative)
Up until this point a lot of our copyright policy seems to have been dictated by the US. In the last couple of years, I think the US copyright lobby was actually found to be sending the exact text of what they wanted included to the people in Canada responsible for it.
Re:Go Canada (Score:5, Informative)
That is why the talks are being conducted in secret. What the people don't know about, they can't protest over. Until it's too late.
Thanks (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link (Score:5, Informative)
Here's a link [wordpress.com] with more technical detail. I had to tone down the technical aspects for the Washington Post.
That link does not have full code, but if you want, I can e-mail it to you (I already have for two other people). I didn't post the code online because I wanted to keep track of who was asking for it. But I'm happy to share it.
New visualizations with D3 (Score:5, Informative)
Author of the article here. Michael Simeone from the University of Illinois asked for my data and code so that he could experiment with some D3 visualizations. He did a little bit last night, and I thought I'd share [illinois.edu] the results. [illinois.edu]
Re:The US creates more than the rest combined (Score:4, Informative)
It isn't like its the wild west out there; we already have strong copyright legislation. What the TPPA is seeking is corporate control over the ability to exclude people from the internet at will, with no judicial oversight. To a large extent it already does; I dared to critique the Business Software Allience on YouTube and my account was closed. No comeback here - to challenge it I would need to agree to defending myself in California. Unless you are a U.S citizen there is no fair use or free speech on YouTube, Facebook, Google, Yahoo etc. You are there at their pleasure, and easily ejected.
The TPPA seeks to extend this power to your local ISP; to actually cut you off from the net totally if you are saying things they don't like.
It isn't about protecting works, it is about controlling the channel. The Internet was a danger to corporate control of how people got their entertainment and information. They are now getting the people back under control, subservient to their masters like they should be. The thing is that most are happy with having their entertainment and information fed to them, told what they should be angry about.
The risk to Hollywood isn't that we will steal their content - it is that we will discover their content is gilt covered crap, and that we can beginb to express ourselves without getting one hundred million dollars from a VC. What the RIAA and MPAA care about is making sue that they control the music we listen to and the movies we watch.
That is the focus of the TPPA. Control.