# Bookmarks for July 8th through July 29th

These are my links for July 8th through July 29th:

• Should Copyright Of Academic Works Be Abolished? – The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in
a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem.
Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers
would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne
by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees
would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish
would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending
• [0907.1579] The Computational Power of Minkowski Spacetime – The Lorentzian length of a timelike curve connecting both endpoints of a classical computation is a function of the path taken through Minkowski spacetime. The associated runtime difference is due to time-dilation: the phenomenon whereby an observer finds that another's physically identical ideal clock has ticked at a different rate than their own clock. Using ideas appearing in the framework of computational complexity theory, time-dilation is quantified as an algorithmic resource by relating relativistic energy to an $n$th order polynomial time reduction at the completion of an observer's journey. These results enable a comparison between the optimal quadratic \emph{Grover speedup} from quantum computing and an $n=2$ speedup using classical computers and relativistic effects. The goal is not to propose a practical model of computation, but to probe the ultimate limits physics places on computation.