It doesn't. The experiment could have been done by the dad and his daughter on their own without a single form. Its when the school and their lawyers get involved. The cynic in me wants to point out that the paperwork exercise might be the part that best prepares the young student for an actual career in science or engineering.
Maybe it's my white privilege talking, but I don't see the racial angle here. Would "Corporations" be any less inclined to appropriate and profit from the creations of white teens? Would the moral wrong of the taking be any less egregious? Sometimes bad behavior directed at minorities is just generally bad behavior and not racism.
The article is implying that corporations take from black teens specifically because they want to seem "black cool" (such as the case with IHOP using "on fleek" in marketing). In America a lot of what's considered "hip" has come from black culture- jazz, hip hop/rap, clothing, slang etc.
A majority of people who listen to and consume rap music are white. In the 90's, tons of white people wore FUBU (a clothing brand whose name is an acronym for "For Us By Us").
So I don't think the article is only getting at corporations stealing black teens' viral content, but corporations taking ideas from black culture in general, with viral content being a specific instance.
The problem is that bad behavior is usually more acceptable and tolerated when directed at the vulnerable and disenfranchised.
I am currently homeless. I face a lot of classicism for being open about that online. The cherry on top: When folks tell me the shitty treatment I get is my fault for being open about it. "No one knows your dog online if you don't tell them." In other words, the prejudice is a-okay. If I want to be treated like a person, it is on me to hide my status.
I have reason to believe this approximates the experiences of a great many other groups that are de facto second class citizens.
Seems like a good a time as any to break out my favorite anti-MBA story.
I took a Masters CS class some time ago, and for our final class project, not knowing anyone else in the class, I got lumped in the "leftover" group with a working engineer and a Wharton MBA student. We meet up the day before the project is due to integrate each of our individual pieces together into a final submission and the MBA candidate shows up empty handed. Turns out he had spent his time trying to "schmooze" the answers/code out of the professor and the TA, who, to their credit, had stood firm. Guess who spent that entire night writing that dolt's portion of the project from scratch.
Why did you write his code for him? You should've just told the instructors he didn't pull his weight, I think. With what happened, he ended up with a successful group without doing any work, which is a great outcome for him.
yeah, it doesn't sound like much of an "anti-mba story", more like a "pro-mba story". facetime with the prof and the nerds did all the work without complaining!
I think the key thing is to identify the "freeloaders" early.
I was once in a group for a university project when we had to implement this piece of software for a real world client. There was software that needed to be built, and documentation that needed to be written, as well as content that needed to be provided, e.g. weekly meeting diaries one is required to do in such university projects. Everyone else in the group had difficulty writing working, useful code, and progress was slow, even when I thought it was an easy project. A few days before the first milestone deadline, I sat down and finished the thing in an afternoon. And so, for the rest of the semester in that class all we had to do was the paperwork, and naturally that wasn't my job because I saved everyone so much time.
Sometimes BS needs to be written...that's when it's useful to have people who's best to do that kind of thing in your group.
Because I'm a stubborn ass who'd rather suffer a freeloader than hand in an incomplete assignment. In hindsight, I guess I should have finished the project and explained the division of labor.
A friend of mine, a solid mechanical engineer, ended up going back for an MBA. He said that in 2 years, he learned exactly one surprising thing, one idea that he couldn't have guessed after a little thought. [1] He said that the valuable part was the relationships built up with other people who, over the course of his career, would be placed in a variety of high-flying companies.
That said, I think the relationship network is a huge advantage too. Reminds me of a story about, if memory serves me well, an economic university student, who was bad at learning but good at throwing parties (with lots of vodka). It was in Poland around the fall of the Soviet Union. The guy apparently got very successful because through his parties, he befriended a lot of people people who later graduated and became directors of private and national enterprises.
It's funny - the only two businesses that have made me use the EMV features on my card are the locally owned butcher shop down the street and Wal-Mart.
I think this was Larry Lessig's position at one point. I think it's a a nice, practical solution that acknowledges that copyright is a political animal - let Disney keep Mickey forever, but the public gets everything of a lesser order of magnitude in value faster.
You don't need a lawyer pro-bono, just one on contingency. If you can survive the motion to dismiss at the outset, you've now entered discovery, and BigCo will now start incurring bigtime legal costs. Settlement offers will be forthcoming. Litigation isn't about winning in the courtroom, it's about inflicting pain until someone says "uncle". (Patent litigation often goes further because the stakes are so high. Your five-figure breach of contract suit, not so much.)
Wow. It's no surprise that rms lacks empathy or social grace, but I'm kind of shocked one man's availability could single-handedly delay a release of a project like emacs. What if the poor chap had got hit by a bus?
I suspect that in this case it was easier to wait for the person to be available rather than transitioning to someone else.
BTW, since then Emacs development has been handed over to other folk and development has really picked up pace, including being (finally!) hosted in Git.
Nuremburg was an exception to the general rule that you couldn't prosecute soldiers for carrying out the orders of their superiors - establishing that the mass genocide of innocent people crosses a line. However, the torture of a handful of active enemy participants might not.
