At the end of a Hollywood blockbuster, when the vanquished villain declares that he should have won and that we haven’t seen the last of him, we all know what it means: the sequel is coming.

So, Hollywood’s top lobbyist, former Senator Chris Dodd, followed a familiar script last week after sweeping online protests derailed the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect IP Act (Pipa), a pair of legislative proposals backed by movie and music distributors. Dodd snarled that his opponents had misled the public and vowed to continue pressing for new laws to combat unauthorized copying of intellectual property. Coming soon to a congressional hearing room near you, it’s Sopa II: Revenge of the Content Industries.

. . . . Even Dodd’s enemies acknowledge that these sites pose a problem, though many question industry estimates about its scope.

Those of us who opposed the excesses of Sopa and Pipa need to prepare for the next round. . . . At a minimum, Congress must address three other problems as well.

First and foremost, Sopa II needs to take due process seriously. . . .

Second, the standards for judging infringement must be clear and must be consistent with existing intellectual property law. . . .

Finally, these bills cannot shift IP owners’ duty to safeguard their own rights onto innocent bystanders like Google, eBay or Facebook. Open online forums enable millions of daily communications from ordinary people. Intermediaries cannot examine every post searching for links to pirates. That’s why federal law exempts them from liability for nearly everything their users post independently – even fraud or defamation. IP already gets special treatment, because intermediaries must remove infringing material if rightsholders complain.

But the struggles inherent in the transition from old and established ways of doing business are ongoing and will continue to be. Today’s example comes from the world of science. As the New York Times reports, “For centuries, [scientific] research [was]cdone in private, then submitted to science and medical journals to be reviewed by peers and published for the benefit of other researchers and the public at large.  . . . Peer review can take months, journal subscriptions can be prohibitively costly, and a handful of gatekeepers limit the flow of information. It is an ideal system for sharing knowledge, said the quantum physicist Michael Nielsen, only ‘if you’re stuck with 17th-century technology.’”

But Dr. Nielsen and others argue that science can happen much more quickly and accurately using the new technologies, and reality is catching up to their ideals (even as established institutional players such as universities and grant-makers still depend on the “traditional published paper” as their exclusive criterion of judgment):

Open-access archives and journals like arXiv and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have sprung up in recent years. GalaxyZoo, a citizen-science site, has classified millions of objects in space, discovering characteristics that have led to a raft of scientific papers.

On the collaborative blog MathOverflow, mathematicians earn reputation points for contributing to solutions; in another math experiment dubbed the Polymath Project, mathematicians commenting on the Fields medalist Timothy Gower’s blog in 2009 found a new proof for a particularly complicated theorem in just six weeks.

And a social networking site called ResearchGate — where scientists can answer one another’s questions, share papers and find collaborators — is rapidly gaining popularity.

Editors of traditional journals say open science sounds good, in theory. In practice, “the scientific community itself is quite conservative,” said Maxine Clarke, executive editor of the commercial journal Nature, who added that the traditional published paper is still viewed as “a unit to award grants or assess jobs and tenure.”

Maybe the money involved will make you believe:

Despite the death of its leader Jerry Garcia in 1995, Grateful Dead Productions continues to generate about $60 million a year in sales and licensing fees. Pretty good for a group that no longer exists.

Surely making that kind of money requires a fierce protection of one’s intellectual property rights, right? Bono, after all, took to the pages of the New York Times to warn that without fierce protection of their copyrights the movie and television industries might suffer the fate of the music industry:

Caution! The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.

A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.

We’re the post office, they tell us; who knows what’s in the brown-paper packages? But we know from America’s noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it’s perfectly possible to track content. Perhaps movie moguls will succeed where musicians and their moguls have failed so far, and rally America to defend the most creative economy in the world, where music, film, TV and video games help to account for nearly 4 percent of gross domestic product. Note to self: Don’t get over-rewarded rock stars on this bully pulpit, or famous actors; find the next Cole Porter, if he/she hasn’t already left to write jingles.

Rather than prevent their audience from taping their concerts, as every other band did, the Dead set it free and encouraged tapers, hence sparking a revolution. You’d think giving their music away would have dampened their success; instead, the freebies propagated it. Even though people could get the Grateful Dead product for free, the band found itself playing in larger and larger stadiums as the fan base swelled and album sales accelerated: 19 gold albums, six platinum, and four multiplatinum.

And so on the official Grateful Dead web site you can listen to any of the weekly Grateful Dead Radio Hour, which, “[s]ince 1985, the show has featured exclusive interviews, music from the roots and branches of the band’s musical family tree, and of course a generous helping of unreleased live and studio recordings.” At the Internet Archive, you can listen to a seemingly endless number of those bootleg recordings the Grateful Dead encouraged, and you can download for free those that audience members made. And if that’s just too much to  begin to comprehend, don’t worry! The Grateful Dead Listening Guide is a series of podcasts you can download to hear an expert’s introduction into the Work.

Perhaps it is not such a surprise, therefore, that we have articles like  the one entitled “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.”

And you can even listen — right here below — to a recording of the Grateful Dead concert I attended 33 years ago this week, on January 18, 1979, at the Providence Civic Center

There are instances in which there are clear rules that are easy to apply. But if that were the whole of the law, we wouldn’t need lawyers, and law students certainly wouldn’t have to pay $45,000 a year for three years to earn a law degree.

Instead, convincing someone that your view of the law is the correct one requires not only finding and applying the correct rule but also in convincing whomever you are trying to convince that the rule and your interpretation of it make sense, are just, are convincing at a gut level. If you can’t do that, you’ll never become a good lawyer.

An inability to get over the stumbling block posed by the desire for a legal system consisting of clear rules that answer every conceivable question, of course, is not confined to some law students. As Jon Krakauer explains in Under the Banner of Heaven, “literalism” — the conviction that there are rules set forth in hallowed texts (which need not be religious, as strains of constitutional “originalism” demonstrate) that answer all the important questions one encounters makes people resistant to the idea that answering the tough questions requires a considerable amount of creativity, acknowledgement of ambiguity, and sensitivity to situational specifics:

For people . . . who view existence through the narrow lens of literalism, the language in certain select documents is assumed to possess extraordinary power. Such language is to be taken assiduously at face value, according to a single incontrovertible interpretation that makes no allowance for nuance, ambiguity, or situational contingencies. As Vincent Crapanzano observes in his book Serving the Word, [this] brand of literalism encourages a closed, usually (though not necessarily) politically conservative view of the world: one with a stop-time notion of history and a we-and-they approach to people, in which we are possessed of truth, virtue, and goodness and they of falsehood, depravity, and evil. It looks askance at figurative language, which, so long as its symbols and metaphors are vital, can open—promiscuously in the eyes of the strict literalist—the world and its imaginative possibilities.

Perhaps this is why literalism rarely carries long-term appeal in a functioning democracy. The majority cannot be convinced for very long without the use of force that there is good reason for elevating the particular hallowed text (much less the literalists particular reading of that text) above all other “reasons.”

I’m reminded of these things by the TED talk embedded below, in which Simon Sinek explains that success in realms as diverse as commerce, invention, and social change depend on making the why of what you do your principle focus.

Thus, in the commercial world, for example, people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. Nevertheless, companies and people typically sell their product or services by explaining what they do and how they do it. They don’t typically even know why they do what they do, and they certainly don’t explain it well.

But the most successful people sell first and foremost why they do what they do. Apple, for example, explains they do what they do to challenge authority. They explain what they do as designing beautiful products that are easy to use. What do they do? They happen to sell computers. That message convinces buyers in ways the typical computer seller’s approach — (1) we sell computers, (2) we make them user friendly — does not.

Simek explains the phenomenon in market terms: the only way to get the majority of consumers to buy a new product or service is to first convince innovators and early adopters, and those people are only persuaded by the conviction they share the seller’s convictions.

But his message about the market is one applicable in all contexts in which one is trying to convince an audience:

People buy what they buy to confirm what they believe about the world.

As I’ve previously written, research “is barely begun, if even begun at all, by merely finding a source or set of sources in which answers might lie. The real art of research lies in ‘careful consideration, observation, or study’:

Research that is genuine research not only requires Sisyphean patience in combing through the sources, it requires also consideration, observation, and study of what one finds within those sources so that one can, first, identify the elements that matter, and, second, put those important, buried, and isolated elements together in some useful and novel way.

Perhaps more importantly, the identification of the elements that matter cannot be done without simultaneously developing ways of putting those elements together in some useful and novel way. How can you know what matters without knowing what purpose you are putting it to? And how can you decide what purpose you are trying to accomplish if you don’t know what elements you’ll have to use?

My belief that there is a decreasing recognition of the complexity and creativity of research is only compounded by the following talk by Eli Pariser, who explains in graphic detail the ways online search engines are constraining our abilities to use them effectively by filtering the results pursuant to algorithms that seek to give us what the designers believe we are looking for. If they know — algorithmically — what we are looking for before we even see the results of our initial searches, what hope do we have beyond even redoubled persistence and imagination of finding anything new?