Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#2Sounds like the music industry.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#3> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are.
A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public.
Most of the described contents of the tracker are commercially released products. That's really not "stealing tricks" in any way.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#4This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject? How do you get enough stuff? How do you keep the noise down?
I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley? PEG? Might depend on what you want to parse, which environment you're working in, how much time you may invest… Or say you write a compiler. Will you use OCaml/F#/Haskell for the ease of handling recursive data structures? Or do you want C/C++ because of the speed, and you know tricks to avoid recursive data structures anyway?
One tempting solution is to start a secret society dedicated to hoard knowledge on the chosen subject. It would be hard to get in, but once there you'd only get quality stuff. (Or you might have gotten into a self-delusional sect…) The idea is, maybe if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, instead of merely buried under a mountain of noise, we would treat it with the respect it deserves.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#5> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are. A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public. Most of the described contents of the tracker are comme…
> A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick".
Interestingly, this isn't quite true. People are trying to exert copyright over the specific motions under choreography protection.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#6Who's up for starting a comp sci secret society?
We'll share the best ways to split a cake. The optimal algorithms on how many kittens to have to improve moods, and, best stats how to not forget important anniversaries while trying to boot up a Vulkan pipeline.
:)
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#7> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are. A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public. Most of the described contents of the tracker are comme…
[conplete speculation, by me]
They may be using the copyright of things they don't care about to shutdown the site to eliminate the things they do care about which they have no legal means to eliminate directly.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#8> The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in much the same way that TV shows and films are. A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public. Most of the described contents of the tracker are comme…
My understanding is that tricks aren't copywritable, but performances are. So magicians have sometimes successfully sued each-other over copying not just a trick but their delivery of said trick. That was the justification for the Penn and Teller lawsuit mentioned in the article
But I think the issue with the site discussed in the article is mainly just copyrighted material:, books, videos and the like.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#9This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject? How do you get enough stuff? How do you keep the noise down? I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley?…
Self-evidently it is possible to gather a high quality repository of knowledge; it's been done many times in history.
I suspect that the real solution is an absence of secrecy - indefinite hoarding of information is no help to anyone except those who want their egos stroked by the number of "things" they have, and knowledge that nobody can access is barely knowledge at all.
As far as noise goes, you can never hope to rub it out completely. There will always be transcription errors, deliberate mistruths and gaps - the most you can do is carefully curate the repository to make sure you catch and repair as much as possible.
Essentially, the closest thing we have is probably Wikipedia. I don't know if that's especially complimentary to us as a species.
Re: Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks
#10This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject? How do you get enough stuff? How do you keep the noise down? I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley?…
This was already tried with Encyclopedia Britannica and it doesn't quite work.
The truth is, if you want high quality, more eyes the better. (And the article mentions that magical art was greatly improved by general accessibility of things on the Internet.)