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I see that Operation ISOLATE EAST LONDON is in force again this weekend...
Aug. 13th, 2008
Chop Chop Chop
Aug. 13th, 2008 08:00 pmApproaching eight thousand words, and it's become plain that I'm going to overrun the word limit. So much of this afternoon has been spent in ruthless trimming of my admittedly often wordy prose; those brutally short OU assignments certainly provided good training.
It's at this point I sit back and contemplate what I'm trying to do. I'm seeking to produce a learned dissertation on a topic for which a thorough literature search produced no prior papers at all. My intended audience is a hybrid of IP lawyers who need to have the very concept of personal fabricators explained from square one and engineering geeks who have a dim idea that copyright and patent may not be the same thing. I need to convince the former that the idea of printing your own dishwasher spares isn't science fiction, and the latter that there are significant legal issues about doing so (albeit ones with surprisingly positive results). The relevant law is usually summarised in textbooks an inch and a half thick (mere overviews come it at a weedy half-inch), with one of the main bits of legislation having some 300 sections - much of it so poorly drafted as to have to be read alongside twenty or more major legal cases where the courts have sought to interpret it.
And I'm trying to do all this in ten thousand words. What was I thinking?
It's at this point I sit back and contemplate what I'm trying to do. I'm seeking to produce a learned dissertation on a topic for which a thorough literature search produced no prior papers at all. My intended audience is a hybrid of IP lawyers who need to have the very concept of personal fabricators explained from square one and engineering geeks who have a dim idea that copyright and patent may not be the same thing. I need to convince the former that the idea of printing your own dishwasher spares isn't science fiction, and the latter that there are significant legal issues about doing so (albeit ones with surprisingly positive results). The relevant law is usually summarised in textbooks an inch and a half thick (mere overviews come it at a weedy half-inch), with one of the main bits of legislation having some 300 sections - much of it so poorly drafted as to have to be read alongside twenty or more major legal cases where the courts have sought to interpret it.
And I'm trying to do all this in ten thousand words. What was I thinking?
