Ideas for Free

Problem: English is a hard language, full of homonyms, odd grammar rules, and spelling that is one step above random. When I was a child, I constantly misspelled “their” as “thier”. Even now, spelling and grammar mistakes creep into everything I type.

Solution: A new spelling checker. I learned, quite by accident, that retyping a word helps me to remember its spelling far more than just hitting the ‘correct this’ button on the spell-checker. Also, some words are more likely for me to misspell. I would like an online spell checker with these features:

• Have me retype misspelled words, instead of just hitting “OK”.
• Show me a few words of definition for words as I hover over them, along with alternate words.
• Highlight words that are often misused, such as “their, they’re, there” or “affect, effect”. Vary the color of the highlighting based on my proficiency in the past.
• Provide the basic grammar checking and complexity guidelines from the 1980s program Grammatik.
• Provide some support of english as it evolves, such as checking with Google to see if “Grammatik” has many hits, or comparing “computer aided” to “computer-aided”.
• Show me my most misused words on demand.

In writing this short paragraph, I misspelled “grammar” three times, and “misspell” once.

Problem: Teachers spend a lot of time grading papers, often papers of the “circle the correct answer” variety. One simplistic speed-up is to make a “mask” that shows the correct answers. A mask can be made with a long-arm hole punch, but this takes to much time.

Solution: Make, or find, a pen that eats a small hole through the material used in overhead transparencies. Transparencies come in various chemistries, and pens come in sometimes incompatible chemistries. There should be a really bad match so that a pen could be sold as “hole punch pen for acetate” or the like.

Our charity, TrueGift Donations, packed about 80 cubic feet of school supplies recently leaving the volunteers sitting down and chatting afterwards. The subject came up.

This would be fun.

Problem: Copyright law is absurd because of its scope and duration. People fail to understand how absurd copyright law has become, except for a few industry associations that are enforcing rigorously. People need to see the extent of the problem to be persuaded to change the law.
Solution: Some choice posters are always fun. A poster from the fictitious CIA (Comedic Industry Association) would explain the dire legal ramification of retelling a joke, or of forwarding one in email.

• Forwarding that joke you heard from the Daily Show could cost you your annual salary.
• Retelling a joke you heard on a nightly comedy show is no more legal than singing a copyrighted song in public.
• You wouldn’t rob a bank, so why would you retell that joke?
• Do you have a Clearance of Rights for that joke? Just because your grandfather taught it to you, doesn’t make it safe. Some jokes told back in 1920 are still in copyright.
• We need to enforce this because some comedians are starving in the street.

Like all good parodies, this one tells the truth. Once the joke has been written down or recorded,it is copyrighted. If the copyright is registered, then statutory damages apply. That is, just telling the could cost you a judgement of up to $150,000. On a practical matter, the joke can have its copyright registered just before a lawsuit, guaranteeing at last $750 per infringement, e.g., $75,000 for forwarding the joke to 100 people. Now what are the economics of this?

On one side, suing your viewers might net you fewer viewers. This may be powerful incentive to the currently syndicated shows like “The Daily Show”, “The Tonight Show”, or other valuable properties. On the other side, many comics were hot once and are no longer at the peak of stardom. Hunting down jokes from “I Love Lucy” shows would drawf the value of the lost DVD revenues. The same could be said for any show off the air for more than a year.

Some example of this practice in other areas include:

The Business Software Alliance (BSA) makes revenue by suing employers with pirated software. They operate a tip line, appealing mostly to disgruntled employees.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) makes revenue suing individuals suspected of piracy. Usually, the procure some revenue from the threat of the expense of litigation regardless of merits. The RIAA is being sued for extortion.

This comes back to an unfortunate truth about bad law: it makes what the public feels unethical to be legal and profitable. It is the responsibility of citizens to attempt to fix a bad law.