Posted by Pennie Lane on August 30, 2001, at 23:07:11
In reply to PL - methinks ye doth protest too much, posted by Mair on August 30, 2001, at 21:59:28
> >Pennie Lane - why do we have to be the champions of publishers whose copyrighted material may be desseminated on the Internet?
You don't have do be champions, dear, it was just a suggestion. We are the champions of the world if we want to be, but we don't have to be. I was just asking, and somebody already quite bluntly said don't ask or else. But it seems perfectly civil to explain why I asked, since my motives were obviously misunderstood.
> I'm sure these people can take care of themselves without our assistance.
I am interested in my right and your right to publish material and our right to control the reproduction of our published material. The rule of law serves us all.
> I don't like what Sal does because I don't think the kind of information he passes along is very helpful to the lay person, and can, rather, be overwelming, confusing and misleading. I had a pdoc who dumped about 8 different articles from the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry on me when we were considering augmentation strategies.(snip)
> None of this has anything to do with a violation of copyright laws IMHO.
>
> MairI’ll try to explain, then. Copyright laws help to maintain hierarchies of credibility. They are not the only way to sort truth from fiction, but they serve the purpose of protecting the credibility of information.
It’s not that false information cannot be copyrighted; it can. But copyrights allow a person to attach their name to their work and nobody else can claim it. That doesn’t do much to assure the credibility of published information, either, but it does assure the credibility of the relationship between authors, their work and their readers. Thanks to copyright laws, people can’t change your writing or mine then claim you or I wrote it. So if you or I are credible sources, copyright laws serve to help our credibility adhere to our work. Now the real advantage of this adherence is that it makes possible a market for credible work. Credible authors can fetch incredible prices because the law protects the market for their work. Of course, extremely specialized credible information might be beyond reach, both financially and intellectually, of the average person. So this creates a secondary market for people who specialize in understanding and interpreting very credible and specialized information.
When a new market force or technology comes along, such as the Internet, which upsets a vague equilibrium in the market for highly credible and specialized information, we can see events such as you witnessed with your pdoc. Instead of studying the information and developing a secondary specialty in interpreting the information for lay people, some merchants try to find other ways to benefit from the information. A person might just throw a bunch of articles at you. It makes them look informed, and maybe even reinforces their standing as an authority, but it does not inform the client. And it might be illegal, if your pdoc billed you for time spent showing you photocopies of copyrighted articles.
What is happening now in 2001is that there is just too much information going around for markets to effectively categorize it all in a rational hierarchy of credibility. The market is trying, including with medical self-help sites where people share their interpretations and findings from specialized literature. But the equilibrium is in flux, and a lot of useless information is going around. I’m not protesting the quantity of information, I am making an accurate assessment, and suggesting norms that can help to restore some equilibrium.
So in the case of JasonT, I have no underlying objection to his doctrines, though I might personally disagree with them. I suspect a lot of his medical advice is ill informed, but this format allows for that. I am addressing technical areas of his presentation that tend to violate the social institutions the provide for a well-organized hierarchy of credibility among various sources of information. By doing so, I also encourage the study and interpretation of information rather than the use of raw information for its authoritative value.
By pointing out that Jason presents with neither the authority of the publications from which he cuts and pastes or of the Salvation Army, I ask by what authority he defends the credibility of his advice. The obvious answer is, his own. He can reinforce that authority by following accepted practices when presenting specialized information; he can study the information well enough to interpret, then he can briefly cite the sources of information from which he draws his own conclusions. This is a far different approach that saying “You could use some (drug name here)” in one post, and in another presenting lengthy out-of-context excerpts or an entire article with no commentary of his own.
When an author in one post says “illegally access these restricted subscriber web sites,” in another says “illegally send me prescription medications,” in another says “you could probably use some (drug name here)” and in another presents a lengthy unexplained excerpt from a medical journal along with a religious message, the posts can be considered either individually or together in discussing the credibility of the author. The discussion can properly address both the credibility of the individual author and the integrity of the publishing environment.
I hope this helps explain my interest a little more, and I hope you do not find it too fatiguing for you to plod through my detailed explanation.
poster:Pennie Lane
thread:1838
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20010718/msgs/1880.html