Wording of the main text of the Constitution doesn't change in any formal sense with amendments, right? I remember my encyclopedia growing up had obsolete bits like the three-fifths rule struck out, and assumed at first that had some kind of formal status, but Wikipedia doesn't do that, so I guess it was just in aid of understanding.
I was figuring they'd skip the parts with hyperlinks here. I also love that the Archives still calls it "hyperlinking".
You kids stay away from my escaped Persons held to Service or Labour in another State.
112TH CONGRESS 1ST SESSION H. R. ll
"To repeal the job-killing health care law and health care-related provisionsin the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010."
http://www.scribd.com/doc/46236445/ObamaCare-Repeal
Nothing like a little venom to get things started - I wish they'd stuck to reading the Constitution.
It's the process by which the legislative bodies "chuse" their officers that I'd like to have explained to me.
5: Really? Blaming it on the "chuse" in this day and age? For shame, Mr. Pongo.
I told you, it's "Dr. Pongo," and I — wait, are you offering me a job?
7: Sure! You can send in a guest post whenever you like. I think we even let Sifu Tweety do it.
Why not go back to the Articles of Confederation? The ratification process in the Constitution doesn't meet the standards set by the Articles, so technically they're still the law of the land. The last validly passed law is therefore the Northwest Ordinance.
9. Why not submit to the British crown? The whole revolutionary process was, after all, fundamentally illegal, even if the outcome was retrospectively recognised in the Treaty of Paris.
10: One of my favorite profs in grad school: "Just because I'm a socialist doesn't mean I don't think we'd be better off if Princess Anne came over here to rule us."
"Just because I'm a socialite doesn't mean I don't think we'd be better off if Prince William came over here to rule us."
FTFY
14: Noooooo! Anne has far more zing. You can keep Wills.
15. Anne? The horsey woman? I've never associated the idea of zing with her at all.
England already HAS a princess? Then why is everyone making this big deal out of the QILF-in-waiting?
11 should have been a comment from Pauly Shore.
I'd say Queen of England should be an elected office, but the problem is deciding on the length of the term. You don't want Cheryl Cole still in office in 2025.
Then why is everyone making this big deal out of the QILF-in-waiting?
I think it's the "ILF" part that's supposed to distinguish them. Also, by the rules of succession, Anne would require nine of them to die (in mysterious circumstances, of course) before she was in line to scoop the pool.
I'd say Queen of England should be an elected office, but the problem is deciding on the length of the term. You don't want Cheryl Cole still in office in 2025.
Nah. Lottery. 6 month terms. Everybody under 70 entered compulsorily.
(Mind you, if it was a realistic alternative to Charlie, I'd be happy for Cheryl Cole to have the job for the next 50 years.)
"Bring back the British Mandate" is a standard trope for Leftist hipsters here in Israel. I happen to agree, but that's because I'm a Leftist *anglophile*. Then again, the hipsters probably say the same thing. AAAUUGH.
My ancestors didn't do so well with the British.
My ancestors didn't do so well with the British.
That doesn't really narrow it down much...
My ancestors didn't do so well during the period in which they were subjects of the United Kingdom.
I think they should read the Declaration of Independence at the beginning of Congress. Because them everyone would start giggling when they get to the part about "manly firmness."
So your ancestors were Irish, Maltese, Egyptian, Palestianian, Iraqui, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Burmese, Malaysian, Tongan, Fijian, citizens of various small nations in Melanesia or PNG, Mauritian, South African, Basotho, Swazi, Tswana, Zimbabwean, Zambian, Namibian, Tanzanian, Kenyan, Ugandan, Somali, Sudanese, Ghanaian, Gambian, Nigerian, Sierra Leonese, citizens of a dozen or so countries in the Caribbean, Bahamian, Bermudan, Virgin Islanders, First Canadian*, Maori*, Native Australian*, or something I've forgotten.
Gi' us a clue.
*I'm assuming that most white people in the old Commonwealth didn't suffer too badly under British rule.
Speaking of declaring things, the woman at the counter when I got breakfast this morning had acquired a sticker saying "Use First." Either it was inadvertently affixed to her blouse during the course of her duties or she wants everyone to know you are supposed to use the left breast before the right one.
Everybody under 70 entered compulsorily.
If you wanted actually to retain the institution of monarchy, I'd go with 60 and up.
If you wanted actually to retain the institution of monarchy, I'd go with 60 and up.
I don't particularly. But I think it would be fun to give everybody a chance to win a lottery and live like a king/queen for 15 minutes.
If people markered instructions like that all over their body, it would make your first time in bed with someone go much more smoothly.
It's funny that no one took the next step and said that Native Americans should be ruling over us.
33. That isn't the next step. The next step is you shouldn't be there.
34: That's the fault of the English.
That's the fault of the English.
Up to a point, Lord Copper
He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.
36: I was going back to the Irish thing.
England already HAS a princess? Then why is everyone making this big deal out of the QILF-in-waiting?
Princess = the daughter or grand-daughter or sister of a monarch, or the wife of the son or grandson or brother of a monarch. So you can have more than one.
England (or "The United Kingdom") has a few: Princess Anne (daughter of the Queen), Princess Michael (wife of the grandson of George V), Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie (grand-daughters of the Queen), Princess Alexandra (granddaughter of George V) and so on.
The fuss is because Princess Kate will, presumably, in due course become Queen, in about 2030 or so.
37. the Irish wouldn't have targetted North America to relocate if it hadn't already been full of settlers.
(God knows where they would have gone, though...)
"Bring back the British Mandate" is a standard trope for Leftist hipsters here in Israel.
I think that even the most demented Monday Club member is unlikely to support the rebirth of the British Empire if it means taking that collection of horrors under our wing again.
In the 1990s the joke was that Britain should hand back Hong Kong to China, immediately, no strings attached, as long as they agreed to take Northern Ireland as well. That way the Chinese got their own Hong Kong - an enclave of Europe with an excellent deepwater port; the British government would be able to shed a major drain on the welfare and military budgets; the Loyalists would be free forever from the danger of being taken over by the Republic; the Nationalists would be free forever from the Brutal British Occupier; and the paramilitaries of both sides would get to encounter the unique approach to law enforcement of the People's Liberation Army.
Win-win-win-win-win, really.
39: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa? Argentina (like the Welsh)?
41. The Welsh settlement of Argentina was fairly limited. You've been reading too much Malcolm Pryce.
I'm putting that on my list for When the Procedural Liberal Revolution Comes: parliamentary government, PR, abolish the states, and have a ceremonial President who by law has to be Native American (and not one of those "my great-grandmother was a Crow" types). Meaningless symbolism, yes, but a lot more than we have now.
If people markered instructions like that all
If? I thought that was a standard portion of preliminary repertoire.
Meaningless symbolism, yes, but a lot more than we have now.
We must increase our meaninglessness to compete with Japan.
Princess Kate will, presumably, in due course become Queen
Over my dead body!
46:We must increase our meaninglessness to compete with Japan.
(hits MH on head with stick)
Three pounds of flax, hairy Tang!
47: that'll be an interesting addition to the coronation ceremony, certainly.
47: that'll be an interesting addition to the coronation ceremony, certainly.
48: that'll be an interesting addition to the coronation ceremony, certainly.
I honestly don't understand the OP at all. If they're reading the constitution, isn't that exactly what they're doing?
I also sometimes wonder if the American revolution was a bad idea, but Canada is just so fucking lame, despite the socialism.
You're being heavy on the cryptic, ned.
Three pounds of flax, hairy Tang!
I'm at the office, so I'm afraid to google that.
16: Well, Anne's first husband was a bisexual swinger or something who refused his honorary titles, right? That is at least some kicky by osmosis. But maybe he said Princess Margaret. That would have been fun.
55: "Three pounds of flax" is some kind of koan (search the page). This page tells me that "hairy Tang" was a Japanese pejorative for Chinese people and Westerners (Tang as in the dynasty).
57: So I shouldn't mock Japanese culture because I'm foreign (true), hairy (true, my beard is still growing out), and because Buddha was Japanese?
"hairy Tang" was a Japanese pejorative for Chinese people and Westerners (Tang as in the dynasty).
That's immediately what I thought of.
When the Procedural Liberal Revolution Comes
Yipppee! Will there be onerous administrative penalties imposed on the counterrevolutionaries and saboteurs?
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McMegan is now writing wackass things about abortion and adoption and whatnot, because gawdforbid Sullivan">http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/01/unwanted-pregnancies-and-infertile-couples.html">Sullivan be awful on his own in responding to the supreme awfulness of Douthat. I'm hoping I can resist reading or thinking about this any more because I don't have time for fury about lack of logic, facts, heart, and the like. Argh.
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[McMegan | Sully the Pooh | Douche hat] is a jackass.
65: I don't see how you can possibly deny that pregnancy is uncomfortable. That's all she said.
What?
64: The tape will run red in the streets!
65, 67: I don't see what she said that was so unfactual either.
That's immediately what I thought of.
That Ted Nugent song was immediately what I thought of.
I am on the Anti-thorn team on this one too!
Take that!
Mcardle's comments were a little demeaning: "physically uncomfortable" aka toughen up, women!
But, not so bad.
I will add that I think the Crisis Pregnancy Centers are vile, evil places.
69: They're having abortions because pregnancy is physically uncomfortable, and there's still a social stigma on women who carry a baby to term in order to give it away.
This is pretty wackass.
The means to (almost always when used correctly) prevent pregnancy is quite widely distributed through our nation's drugstores, [emphasis added].
This, wackass as well, although false only implication.
Add an 'in' to that, if you would.
72: That is entirely wackass. Also, she radically undersells the the extent to which crisis pregnancy centers are deceptive.
Although her main point, that there's not really much need for the pro-life movement to be encouraging adoption, doesn't seem too far out of whack.
To sum it up: her main point was fine, but she did it in a demeaning way that treated CPCs as if they werent the devil's child.
76: "Need for" or "ability to" do anything, I think was her point. It seems fairly straight forward.
68: Parasites and malingers will be ruthlessly eliminated by means of wage subsidies and vocational training programs! Workers will seize the means of production through tax-advantaged employee stock ownership plans! A determined vanguard with proper revolutionary consciousness will conduct Fed open-market operations with an eye toward achieving the lowest level of unemployment consistent with price stability!
her main point, that there's not really much need for the pro-life movement to be encouraging adoption, doesn't seem too far out of whack
nor is the other half of her argument, which is that the real hypocrisy in the anti-abortion movement is not the failure to support adoption, but the failure to support contraception.
Did I just defend McMegan? Good Lord, it seems I did!
But maybe he said Princess Margaret. That would have been fun.
No, Princess Margaret was a chain smoker who screwed anything in trousers. Quite different. Also dead.
Knecht @79 channeling Tony Blair circa 1996 is a wee bit unnerving.
80: She didn't say that. In fact, she said the opposite:
But I don't think it makes much sense to argue that pro-lifers ought to focus their energy on preventing pregnancy through better birth control distribution,
81: Right. That is what I meant -- maybe he said Margaret, who indeed was a humdinger. And was not dead when he made that comment.
Just six weeks 'til the big day! Who wants to be my valentine?
Psheeew. That that was a close one. I knew I must be misreading her somehow. Thanks, LB!
She didn't say that. In fact, she said the opposite:
"But I don't think it makes much sense to argue that pro-lifers ought to focus their energy on preventing pregnancy through better birth control distribution,"
Yes, exactly. McMegan firmly believes that birth control is close enough to free and ubiquitious as makes no difference, and anyone who thinks there's any real possibility of fewer unwanted pregnancies through increased contraception use is a idealistic featherbrains who needs some hard-nosed Chicago GSB learnin'. I had an blog-spat with her about this years ago, before she joined The Atlantic--it was my first personal encounter with the unpleasant discovery that the arguments are much less importance than the size of the megaphone. Always nice to have her patronizing response the top substantive Google hit for my full name. No, I'm not bitter or anything.
Huh. Would a link be too de-anonymizing?
Or is your last name Compass-direction/R/non-compass-direction?
I'm on the anti-me side in general, I guess. She wasn't as bad as she seemed when reading all three pieces in succession. But I do think she's being a bit glib about adoption, probably because she doesn't understand it. And then she was just glib in general about why people have abortions, but that's probably par for the course. Never mind! She is not as bad as the others, but all of them should still shut up. (As, probably, should I.)
Except without the 'r' in the middle.
Thorn:
She is always glib.
And tall. Very, very tall.
I'm trying to figure out a way to make 88 and 90 more cryptic. Maybe rot13?
That's me, you've got it right. I'm extra-amused by 90, since awhile ago I started using "it's like the directions" as a way to get people to stop inserting an extra "R" every damn time.
Well, I should remember x's name, I've known it in the past. But I'm pretty sure I'm looking at the right post.
Also, don't read the comments to her post. That's where the truly dumb-assed arguments get deployed.
I wonder if there's a commoner variant of the name with the 'r'. I've got a similar problem -- the half of my name that was Buck's is wildly uncommon, but it's a minor variation of a couple of fairly common names, and everyone goes to the normal version rather than actually listening.
She is not as bad as the others.
Wrong. She is smarter and marginally less conservative than the others, but way more fucking annoying.
Also, good lord is she unpleasantly condescending, both in general, and in that post. One thing about having that show up on a real-name google -- for anyone rightthinking it's a recommendation. If I googled someone I didn't know and saw that, I'd buy them a drink on the strength of it.
If you want to feel rage at her glibness re: abortion, this (+ the next 5 or so posts) is a great starting point. (The one that I responded to, though, was this one. Ah well.)
91: I know, I know, I know. That's why I don't read her (well, except the tall part; not that I feel inadequately smaller) and yet then at times like this I do and get angry.
92: Cryptic, and yet I was going to make a joke attempt at solving it that appears to be actually correct.
Whoa, x. trapnel, I was reading you back then and didn't even know it. Weird. But good for you!
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The level of passive aggressiveness I have to deal with on a daily basis through January 28:
The staff meeting was supposed to start at 11. Everyone was here. I had to finish up some stuff. For the last half hour, everyone has been sitting around. [Executive Director] was sitting on his throne*, saying nothing. [General Manager] just left the office after asking [ED] directly if we were going to have a staff meeting and [ED] was like "well, maybe..."
This time I'm losing my mind, that's right.
*When we set up the office, he put his desk up on risers.
\\>
One thing about having that show up on a real-name google -- for anyone rightthinking it's a recommendation. If I googled someone I didn't know and saw that, I'd buy them a drink on the strength of it.
Thanks, that does make me feel a bit better. Though I don't know--I feel like it just shows bad judgement to engage with her at all. I don't think I was familiar with the concept of a concern troll back then.
And of course the problem is that she's not that famous that you can count on reasonable people to have encountered her and formed an informed opinion.
I feel like it just shows bad judgement to engage with her at all.
Yeah, I used to argue with her more (always under this name), and then it started to feel somewhere between mean and pointless.
99: Hah -- check out the first comment on your first link. Shearer being perfectly sensible.
Surely far more pointless than mean.
LB, she looks a bit like your sister!
104: Ha ha ha, I'm waiting for our 3 pm staff meeting that was supposed to start at 9:30 this morning but didn't, possibly because someone needed to gossip rather than run a meeting. I feel some portion of your pain.
Whoa, x. trapnel, I was reading you back then and didn't even know it. Weird. But good for you!
Aww, thanks. Why didn't you buy me a drink? Kidding.
When we set up the office, he put his desk up on risers.
Seriously, he needs help. And a sabbatical. About five years sounds right.
109: Not really, except in altitude. McArdle has that stretched-out look some tall people have; like she used to be my height, and somehow got taller without getting proportionately wider. Dr. Oops is the other kind of tall person; proportioned as if she were of average height.
Both sort of generally pale Irish-ish looking, but no real resemblance.
104, 112: Before you leave, you should steal his risers.
113: Yes, not to the level of features, but of a size and particular flavor of Irish coloring.
I think that being told one has any similarity whatsoever to McMegan is defamation per se, like committing a crime of moral turpitude. Oudemia, be careful or I will sue to defend LB's sister's honor!!!
Eh, maybe. I don't see it at all, but I'm probably too close to Dr. Oops for it.
And 116. (No, actually, McArdle's very nice looking, not a thing wrong with looking like her. I just don't see it.)
Oh good grief. McA *is* nice looking and Dr Oops, at least as I remember her frozen in 1991, is nicer looking. I will be quiet now.
119: Everybody looks good encased in carbonite.
I mean, Reynard Heydrich was a perfectly good looking guy, but I still wouldn't the resemblance pointed out.
Oh, come on! 3.5 teraGodwins there. I have less time for McArdle than most people here, but likening being compared to her to being compared to a guy who was tipped as the next Fuhrer is OTT.
I am shedding tears of shame.
Yeah, I really was only balking because I don't see the resemblance, not because of any insult implied. The main visual impression I had of McArdle is that I could break her in half -- not that she looks unhealthy, but tall as she is, she's a delicate person. The main visual (and not infrequently tactile) impression I have of Dr. Oops is that she could break me in half, and in the past has occasionally demonstrated this.
Look, who cares about how she looks. She's an awful person with a soapbox who shouldn't have one. End of story.
Now I feel a little bad that I brought up something about her physical appearance.
She is perfectly fine looking. And she was very pleasant in person.
I have not read much of her writing, but i have disliked the tone of almost everything I have read.
She's an awful person with a soapbox who shouldn't have one. End of story.
Comity!
On the other hand, I am happy to discuss Heebie's butt. I believe I posted a pic of it with Br's hands on it.
And to be clear, I don't think that McMegan is nearly as bad as Reynard Heydrich, which admittedly is damning with praise so faint as to be invisible to an electron microscope.
I just don't think "hey, you look just like this complete (not ugly) asshole" is what I, personally, would want to hear, and I put the McMster in that category. Not I actually think that Oudemia was doing anything wrong. Bottom line: The hell with McMegan.
well, except the tall part; not that I feel inadequately smaller
Thorn, you're much taller than McMegan where it counts.
McMegan looks just like a jackass. It's uncanny.
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Anyone interested in a online discussion of DFW's"The Broom of the System"?
At any rate, I'm going to start reading it, and I may actually write some words on the subject, and upload them to my web-log.
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I really enjoyed The Broom of the System.
I enjoy pulling out Infinite Jest, reading the first ten pages, then leaving it out for the next month as if I'm just about to read the rest of it when I get a free moment.
132: I reread along with Infinite Summer but didn't participate in a meaningful sense. I'd love to try this, though I can't promise much these days.
130: Thanks! You are, too, and quite probably in height terms as well.
134: I tried so hard to like Infinite Jest. I read and read and read. And then I didn't want to give up because my husband said I'd never finish it and I can't stand letting him be right when he's so sanctimonious about it. But in the end I gave up and now it's being used as a cockatiel chew toy.
And now I'm looking at Broom of the System and it has a picture of a dead cockatiel on the cover!!! That's an insane coincidence. Maybe I shouldn't let the cockatiels chew on Infinite Jest.
I've bitched about it before, but Infinite Jest drove me nuts. At first, it was all effortful and confused and keeping track of what was going on with the stupid dating system was annoying. And then gradually it started coming together into a structure that really worked, and I started really enjoying it. And then it ended in a random, unsatisfying kind of way, and I threw it across the room.
139: Does a cockatiel cost much? Like maybe you can get one at the shelter for free.
143: I've had one of my cockatiels for 21 years. I'm a bit attached.
So, probably too much of an effort just to make a book seem useful.
134, 146: It sounds like it's being useful --providing you with intellectual credibility, and a harmless thing to procrastinate at.
Has there already been a post about Freedom? I love Jonathan Franzen. I know SEK didn't like the book, but I thought it was great.
I've tried to start IJ three separate times. It seemed annoying (does the Quebec separatist thing continue to be a big deal?) and frustrating but kinda interesting. Then, on three separate occasions, I lost the book -- left it in a coffee shop, dropped it from a bike, and lost it in a move. I think that's the Lord's way of telling me not to read it.
(I also am turned off by its canonical book of my generation status, but I realize that's not a reason to actually dislike the book).
Huh. So x. trapnel used to blog with people I knew. The internet is too small!
149: Somebody stole my golf clubs and I took a similar lesson from the experience.
Or more logically, the world of UofC-related people is too small.
I felt pretty underwhelmed by Freedom. It went down smooth enough, I suppose, but felt like fairly empty calories.
Those cockatiels are so adorable. I miss having one. And wow, 21 years, that's a rather elderly bird, no? Mine was definitely less than 15 when he passed away--can't recall when exactly I got him--but then, he probably didn't do his body any favors by flying through the spinning wheel of my father's exercise bike a few years prior to that.
And: whoa, the first chapter of "Broom" is pretty heavy. God, I hate men.
It's nice that it wasn't just a pane of glass. I like to see birds mix things up a bit.
One more against DFW-- there's just not much there in my opinion, and the style doesn't make up for it.
For serious fiction, I recently really, really liked both Bolano's 2666 and Sebald's Austerlitz. I am undecided between Coetzee's Disgrace or something by McEwan next. Oponions about either?
For something set in the US, I liked Lethem OK.Maybe his newest, Chronic City?
No half-measures for that bird, certainly.
My family always had bad luck with birds, though. When I was much younger, my father had a bunch of zebra finches. They would mate and lay eggs in these little nest-baskets, and the eggs would hatch, and the chicks would be adorable and get bigger, and then the parents would kick them out of the nest and they'd fall to their deaths, splattered on the floor of the cage. This happened again and again.
Re: BotS's 1st chapter reminding me of the loathsomeness of drunk guys--huh, the video for LCD Soundsystem's "Drunk Girls" is well-done.
153: Freedom wasn't challenging but it's so well written! I have enough trouble finding books that are well written and not infuriating with their symbolism or prejudices that good writing can be sufficient.
Cockatiels generally live 10-15 years, but the oldest known cockatiel lived until 39. Audrey will live forever. He's certainly slowing down, though. In particular, his balance is messed and he can no longer fly up so he'll pitch forward and fall on the ground. It's a good thing that he's kept in carpeted rooms because hard floors really knock the wind out of him.
I loved 'Disgrace'--but then, I would. I read two chapters of 'Chronic City' for Anglistik Seminar's current-fiction reading group last year, and was not impressed--I much preferred his sci-fi book with the dreams and aliens.
156: Boo! You like too many books that are not available on Kindle.
I affirmatively disliked Disgrace.
Oh, hey, back on topic:
Ugandan High Court issues permanent injunction, awards damages, against tabloid that published--as an article with the headline "Hang Them"--the names, addresses, photographs, & preferred hangouts of 100 people it alleged were homosexuals. Homosexual behavior is currently a crime in Uganda, punishable by up to 14 yrs imprisonment; the death penalty was proposed a year ago, but has yet to be implemented.
If you buy a book in .epub format, you can convert it to Kindle-readable MOBI format with Calibre, and move it to your device that way. If you're buying DRM-locked ebooks from B&N, this guide may help you remove the DRM from them, at which point you can convert to whatever you'd like. Sigh. DRM-locked ebooks are such a pain in the ass.
This is a nice guide to converting other ebook formats for Kindle use.
Why does a book need to be available on Kindle?
166: The new Republican Congress is closing all the libraries in the country?
166: I only read books on my Kindle.
104: Meeting lasted 4 hours. ED shouted. Producing Artistic Director cried. Pretty typical of every staff meeting for the past 20 months.
114: These are theater risers: 4' x 8' piece of 1" plywood supported by an angle-iron frame with 1' legs. It's so bizarre. He doesn't seem to have any notion of how it makes him look like he has a Napoleon complex or something.
EIGHTEEN DAYS TO GO!!!
Was the crying in response to the shouting? Do you work with crazy people?
168: Why? This is the first I've heard anyone say that.
171: I prefer reading on the Kindle because it's smaller and I often read several books at a time so it's easier to switch between books on the same device. I wouldn't like juggling between paper and the Kindle. In fact, I received a book as a present six months ago that's been sitting on my nightstand unread ever since.
Plus, I'm trying to minimize all the stuff in my house so it would be wrong to bring in a book. I have the opposite problem of hoarders - I'm always trying to throw stuff away. The only real books I have left are law books because when I tried to donate them the librarian said that the law changes too quickly for the books to be relevant. Nevermind that my property book, for example, is relying on centuries old case law. Noo, I'm sure the law against perpetuities has had some real changes in the past year. But hey, they look nice in front of the fireplace so whatever.
The only real books I have left are law books because when I tried to donate them the librarian said that the law changes too quickly for the books to be relevant.
Don't they still have the inserts you put in the pocket at the back?
156.last: Read Chronic City not too long ago and it worked well enough to draw me into it, but am not sure how I would rate it beyond that. Same for Lev Grossman's The Magicians (Hogwarts/Narnia with late teenage/young adults who get to fuck and drink). I have no such uncertainty about Pynchon's Inherent Vice which I stupidly got far enough into to want to finish. Christ, what an asshole--and yet I still want to take a crack at Against the Day.
Good motivation to pull out Broom which is the only long-form DFW I've read, but have almost entirely forgotten.
173: Yes. But this guy's point was that the books were outdated a year after purchase because case law changes that quickly.
There's always a reason to pull out the broom.
Oh, I didn't like the Grossman book, thought it read too much like a (meta?)Mary Sue. It definitely hit my "what an asshole!" nerve.
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Holy fucking cow are MCLE tapes like the dumbest and most counterproductive thing ever? I get the principle behind why MCLE is important, but listening to someone drone on for one hour about how "Substance abuse may have serious negative consequences. For example, attorneys with drug and alcohol problems are more likely to miss important deadlines" really isn't helping me. Also, I need a drink now.
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I never understood the big deal about Infinite Jest. I read it when it came out, and I thought it was funny, but didn't amount to much. It weirded me out when everyone was proclaiming it a masterpiece last year.
I tried to buy Cloud Atlas today, when I was paralyzed by the idea that I would buy "the wrong one". I have no idea which one is the right one.
I thought Grossman was trying a Trojan Horse Mary Sue, leading the reader to abjure indulgence in the kind of reading that _The Magicians_ looks like. Interesting, but neither fun nor pleasant.
I tried to buy Cloud Atlas today, when I was paralyzed by the idea that I would buy "the wrong one". I have no idea which one is the right one.
There's more than one? David Mitchell's is the "right" one.
What on earth would be the wrong Cloud Atlas? Or were you torn between Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green, and The Thousand Autumns...?
There is a wrong David Mitchell, though, right?
Every time you guys bring up CA it gets that "Castle on a Cloud" song from Les Mis stuck in my head. GODDAMMIT. I hate that song.
I always thought the one by David Mitchell was the "wrong" one, since I've never heard of him, and the one by Russell Banks was the right one. But it turns out the one by Russell Banks isn't called "Cloud Atlas".
Upon even further inspection I think the right one for ME would be the one "with details of 1940s bomb disposal procedures and provides a thorough anatomy of Japanese balloon bombs. He also establishes Alaska--a place seemingly caught between American and Yup'ik culture--as a space for American magical realism, where spirit animals and Catholic mysticism can cohabitate." rather than the one with a baffling and virtuosic nested structure. But it depends on the writing style.
174:Is Inherent Vice somehow bad? If you've got problems with excessive Pynchonian indulgence, you might want to give AtD a skip. It's not what you'd call concise.
The thing about David Mitchell is that he is a fucking fantastic writer. One might well like one of his other books better than Cloud Atlas, though. (The nested structure is definitely not baffling in any way, however.)
192: I read the wrong one by accident because it's what my library had, and the bomb disposal stuff was indeed interesting, I thought.
194 gets it exactly fucking right.
Anybody read Denis Johnson's writing? Thinking about getting something by him.
168: I only read books on my Kindle.
LizSpigot is the wave of the future.
197: Start with Jesus' Son. I loved it more than any of his longer novels, most of which I didn't finish. But I never finish anything anymore.
Holy fucking cow are MCLE tapes like the dumbest and most counterproductive thing ever?
That California questionnaire has awesome questions.
3. Neglected to process mail promptly?
9. Have you failed to accept or answer telephone
calls because you didn't feel good?
10. Have you gotten other attorneys to make
court appearances on your behalf?
11. Are you avoiding the resolution of problems?
13. Is your ability to perform diminished in the
afternoon?
14. Are you frequently blaming your secretary
for the things that go wrong?
203:
Yea, I can always fall asleep after cry, cry.
I'll check out Jesus' Son. Thanks, mcmc!
13. Is your ability to perform diminished in the
afternoon?
She's a liar if she says that.
NMM to Ali-Reza Pahlavi. Christ is that an unlucky family.
I'm never not avoiding the resolution of problems.
I don't have a secretary to blame, but I don't feel bad about not processing mail promptly. Nobody ever mails me anything.
Many lawyers actually get paid to avoid the resolution of problems.
Presumably, many lawyers must also have secretaries that are to blame when things go wrong.
I'm learning a lot from that site.
About 3 in 10 U.S. adults drink at
levels that elevate their risk for physical, mental
health, and social problems...In the United States, 17.6
million people--about l in every 12 adults--
abuse alcohol or are alcohol dependent.
Alcohol, show me on the doll where the lawyer touched you.
180: I had completed that requirement for MCLE and then I lost the stupid paper! I'm going to do it again so I have proper proof...perhaps while drinking a glass of wine.
I was about to ask what on earth MCLE tapes are, but nevermind. The list of questions in 204 is indeed awesome, and question 14 causes me to rant, or at least kvetch:
Are you frequently blaming your secretary
for the things that go wrong?
Now, I'm not a secretary at my workplace; I am a co-equal. However. Things are really, really busy these days, and I came in to the shop this morning to find a note: "Missed you yesterday. We had 125 orders. I did about half."
Well, no. It turns out he did 36. By 3 p.m. I had done 74. I mentioned this, and my partner was confounded: how can this be? I could swear I did 60! Are you sure? Yes, yes I am, and I'm off now to do another 20 or so, kthx.
I'm a little tired.
(/mumble)
Jesus' Son is good. I also enjoyed his three first novels: Angels, Fiskadoro, and The Stars at Noon, with Fiskadoro being the best of the three*. I haven't read any more of his prose, but I have a collection of his poetry called The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly and while it's hit-and-miss, the hits are very good.
*That's my impression from ~15-20 years ago, anyhow; can't say whether my opinion would be the same at this age.
Also: "A man in possession of the world's greatest license plate has lost his battle with the Virginia DMV, who ridiculously claim it encourages oral sex with kids instead of just cannibalism."
When I had to go to traffic school after blowing through a stop sign, I was pleased to learn that there's an online traffic school that gives you 7 hours of MCLE credit in California while simultaneously fulfilling the traffic school requirement.
I haven't read Denis Johnson, but it was reported to me that Tree of Smoke was entirely disappointing. I have no idea if this is true. I have a copy over yonder, but in the absence of a more positive recommendation, I haven't been inclined to pick it up. Let me know if anyone liked it.
214: If he doesn't answer the phone on the first ring, send him to Betty Ford.
219: Frankly, he and I both have dissed a customer or two recently.
Customer email dated Jan. 4: "If this book does not arrive by January 7, I will be refusing delivery and returning it, with the expectation of a full refund, including shipping costs."
Response: "Since we cannot ensure delivery by January 7, we are canceling your order."
All parties need to go to Betty Ford's Clinic, apparently.
I enjoy pulling out Infinite Jest, reading the first ten pages, then leaving it out for the next month as if I'm just about to read the rest of it when I get a free moment.
I leave Ulysses on the back of my toilet as a little joke.
And I got in deep trouble with a DFW-loving friend for tearing Infinite Jest into smaller booklets because I got sick of lugging it around. The worst of it was I lost patience after two or three little booklets and stopped reading, probably ne'er to finish.
||
Is Too Big to Fail worth reading, while we're on books? It was at the library. I checked it out
|>
222: You won't learn anything -- except, perhaps, for fine-grained details -- that you don't already know. But it wasn't at all bad. Worth the time? It depends how much you care about the subject matter, I suppose.
190: Particularly an awful song as recorded on the I think original British cast album by some kid with the vibrato of an Italian dramatic mezzo. Theeere is a caaaastle on a clow-ow-ow-ow-owd...
Me:Black Swan Green::Walt Someguy:Infinite Jest. Good writing but a little so-whattish.
Tree of Smoke was ok, but a bit --- I dunno? I felt that it was very Orwell does Burma. Quite evocative, I guess.
I leave Ulysses on the back of my toilet as a little joke.
Ulysses and a half-eaten can of Pringle's would be perfection.
Maybe not perfection, but you'd know that none of your guests would mock your wallpaper first.
193: 174:Is Inherent Vice somehow bad? If you've got problems with excessive Pynchonian indulgence, you might want to give AtD a skip. It's not what you'd call concise.
Some Pynchon indulgence I'm OK with, some not so much anymore.I think the "California" ones are no longer possible for me. I'm tired of Dr. Buddy Tubeside and marine lawyers named Sauncho Smilax. And then near the end of the book Trillium Fortnight shows up: early 20s , teaches music theory at UCLA and plays in an early music ensemble; husband Puck Beaverton has a swastika tattoo on his bald head and screws her "California Department of Corrections style". Oh Thomas, really?
My wife, who worked as a secretary in the English department at U of A when DFW was there, has a copy of BotS inscribed "To B—, light of the fourth floor, forever". I picked up the book a couple of times, thinking about reading it, but that's such a nice inscription that I stopped there and put it back on the shelf.
228: oh gosh I love the California ones.
Well, except I only read the one. Maybe it would get old.
Actually, I quite liked Lot 49, never could get traction on Vineland. Some of it is probably me changing as much as Pynchon.
Oh Lot 49 counts? I guess I've read two. And they're my two favorites!
I am reading The Appointment by Herta Müller and, at 10% into the book, can't say that I'm particularly into it yet. I have a book by her from 1999 that I think might be better (and was even signed by her -- I went to a reading way back then, had no idea who she was), but it's not on the Kindle, and so is not getting read right at this moment.
236: Mmm, probably not. Nebraska is already under the curse, you'll have noticed.
I did notice. But my curse only works for Big 12 schools.
never could get traction on Vineland
I got sucked into Vineland and got about halfway through in short order, at which point I hit a brick wall and never finished it. I should probably go back and try again now that I've actually been to Humboldt County.
237: OK, you can turn it on now.
LizSpigot [reading only Kindle books] is the wave of the future.
God I hope not, since, unmodified, that means the wave of the future is one without libraries or book-lending or even multiple bookstores. I read almost everything on my ereader, too, but the Kindle's lock-in design makes me genuinely angry. *takes calming breaths*
Also: the video at that link, which I'm watching now, really is much more thorough than the text of the post, but the gist is the same.
114: These are theater risers: 4' x 8' piece of 1" plywood supported by an angle-iron frame with 1' legs. It's so bizarre. He doesn't seem to have any notion of how it makes him look like he has a Napoleon complex or something.
The legs are a foot long?? That's not a riser, that's a dais! Or possibly a pedestal!
I am swithering between three possible responses to this:
either, as LB suggests, simply steal the risers;
or hacksaw a quarter of an inch off each leg every night, continuing until he is at ground level;
or, trickiest but most rewarding, somehow work out a way to add a quarter of an inch on to each leg every night, giving the impression that he is gradually getting shorter and shorter.
245:Eighth of an inch off one leg, so it all rocks when he shifts his weight.
247: better still, an air cushion platform, so he can be gently pushed out of the door without interference from friction.
Some Pynchon indulgence I'm OK with, some not so much anymore.I think the "California" ones are no longer possible for me. I'm tired of Dr. Buddy Tubeside and marine lawyers named Sauncho Smilax.
The existence of politicians in the real, non-Pynchon USA who are called things like "Newt Gingrich", "Lauch Faircloth", "Arlen Specter" and "Dick Posthumus" implies that Pynchon is really just telling it like it is.
249: Not to mention Dick Armey, Orson Swindle, and Butch Otter.
Butch Otter is my new favorite name.
Butch Otter is fantastic.
"...and this is my wife, Fay."
There's also Rich Pratt, who ran as a Republican for the California state senate, to the delight of Private Eye.
"...and this is my wife, Fay."
True fact: Butch Otter's first wife was named Gay.
253: this has made me happier than I thought I could ever be.
Move to Idaho and complete your bliss.
How does it work? Does everyone in Idaho just think Butch Otter is a perfectly normal name with nothing wisible about it? Or do they all periodically break out in stifled laughter every time he's mentioned?
Since the thread has drifted to books, let me recommend The Wisdom of Whores. My mom got it for Christmas, read it in immediately and gave it to me for the flight back. It's an fascinating look at the intersection of epidemiology, bureaucracy, and politics. Unfortunately Pisani (the author) just stopped handing out the ebook version for free on her website, but you should buy it anyway since she deserves to make some money for writing such a good book. The website also has links to her TED talk and a bunch of other interesting stuff.
More weird facts! Gay Otter's father, Jack Simplot, was an eighth-grade dropout and an atheist who became a billionaire by inventing the frozen french fry and supplying McDonald's.
Kindle 3 handles pdf pretty well. Music had a bunch of proprietary file formats that died and a few open ones that didn't, with an end result of huge personal libraries.
There's an indexing service for pdf books much like early napster. Not much in the way of bestsellers, spotty foreign language coverage (does anyone know of a French equivalent?), but lots of great nonfiction.
256: One assumes the former. I'm sure everybody knows somebody with a silly name, even if most silly names lack the grandiose allure of Gov. Otter.
257: Have you heard of Infections and Inequalities? It's about about poverty, AIDs and tuberculosis in Haiti. I can't recommend it personally because it's not my thing, but I had to read it for a medical anthropology class years ago and other people really enjoyed it.
God I hope not, since, unmodified, that means the wave of the future is one without libraries or book-lending or even multiple bookstores. I read almost everything on my ereader, too, but the Kindle's lock-in design makes me genuinely angry.
Although, you could argue that Kindle's lock-in design makes lending and libraries possible in an ebook-only world. With appropriately designed DRM (ie 30-day expiry, one share at a time) and hardware, you could replicate physical copy lending in a way that an open format couldn't, at least for the vast majority of readers. Not that Amazon are ever likely to do that, of course.
Speaking of weird facts, why on earth did New Year's eve coverage have the weight of the ball in "Snookies". (109, to be exact). I'm totally making "Snookies" my new default unit of measurement.
does anyone know of a French equivalent?
It's "équivalent".
264 was me, but now it just seems pointless.
Kum ba yah, my lord, kum ba yah.
EVERYBODY! OH LORD, KUM BA YAH!
263 is syntactically correct, but does it actually mean anything?
Snookie is a Chilean immigrant who appears on a TV show highlighting why you should never travel east of the Liberty Bell.
261: I haven't but I'll take a look. Pisani's book looks like it's the start of one of my periodic bouts of reading everything I can get my hands on that deals with a particular topic.
I was delighted to see that the French FNAC (a sort of membership organisation-cum-bookshop-cum-music/video/games-cum-remarkably good geek store) has now got its own Kindle-like device and online bookshop, complete with the prepaid mobile data service (from SFR). I presume you can roam with it as it's a GSM/UMTS radio.
SOMEONE'S THE BEST, LORD! KUM BA YAH!
IT'S MY FRIENDS AT UNFOGGED! KUM BA YAH!
Butch Otter gets a bad review from the Boise Young Professionals, "He offered no specifics, and circumvented every question with the past ... I just kept thinking to myself, how many people in this room are involved in animal husbandry?"
262: Amazon has a lending service now, although it's limited to 14 days at the moment.
Second verse! Same as the first!
SOMEONE'S THE BEST, LORD! KUM BA YAH!
ESPECIALLY APOSTROPHER! KUM BA YAH!
Come on, guys (THE BEST!), don't leave me hanging! We can do a different song.
NOSFLOW ROW THE BOAT ASHORE! HALLELUJAH!
274: Judging from this, it's a pretty limited service. US only, one time only, selected books. It's also really badly designed from a UI point of view. While it should be available from the website, it should also be available on the devices with a simple menu option. Still, it's more than I expected.
If I had a boat, I could catch an otter if the zoo would let me bring in a boat.
Although, you could argue that [only] Kindle's lock-in design makes lending and libraries possible in an ebook-only world.
You could argue that, but it's only even minimally plausible if by "possible" you mean "profitable to the publishing industry" rather than, you know, "possible."
What really needed to happen--still ought to, really--was to have a critical mass of university libraries get together and use their combined budgets and clout to partner with a hardware manufacturer to create a reader designed around making creative works maximally useful and accessible instead of just waiting around to get exploited by Amazon & the for-profit publishers. Sigh. I can't have this conversation today. Just gets me angry and depressed.
It's also really badly designed from a UI point of view.
You say this as if it's surprising. This is Amazon, dear boy, of course it's badly designed from a UI point of view.
278: I just went through the 65 Kindle books that I have and only four of them are enabled for lending. That's so bad as to not even be worth it.
279: Otters have a nasty bite. Very sharp teeth. Also wriggly as hell. Wriggle, wriggle, chomp!
Get it? Ashore? My name is in it! I made a pun like Stanley! Ha ha, he's the best!
Look, guys, my feelings bruise easily and this is starting to hurt a little, even though I'm sure you're not trying to do that. You'll feel better if you sing along. Honest! Just sing! Sing a song! Make it simple, to last the whole day long. Don't worry if it's not good enough for anyone else to hear*, just sing! Sing a song!
*like that's even a possibility with you guys.
What really needed to happen--still ought to, really--was to have a critical mass of university libraries get together and use their combined budgets and clout to partner with a hardware manufacturer to create a reader designed around making creative works maximally useful and accessible instead of just waiting around to get exploited by Amazon & the for-profit publishers.
Well, yes, but they're even more incentivised to use their combined clout in the academic journal publishing world and look where we've got to with that.
Certainly, lending would be possible in an open format world, except it wouldn't be lending, it would be sharing. And libraries, which do pay royalties to authors, wouldn't make much sense in a world where every book is freely available on t'internet. I'm no fan of IP law as currently constructed, but it's a bit weird to proclaim the death of libraries from ebook DRM when it's current IP law and technological constraints that keep people going to libraries.
283: You had me convinced at "nasty bite."
||
This shouldn't be very complicated, but I'm finding the process of figuring out how to do a German-style resume/C.V./Lebenslauf in LaTeX rather overwhelming. Partly this is because I don't even really know what the style ought to be, and partly this is because I'm a total beginner with LaTeX--I know it exists, and have texlive installed on my Ubuntu system, but basically my exposure to it is purely using Pandoc to turn markdown files into PDFs via a LaTeX blackbox.
Any very simple suggestions for me? The goal is to apply to be a administrative assistant at the FfM Normative Orders cluster.
|>
It's a world of laughter, a world of tears
And when you guys talk, you know I'm all ears.
There's so much that we share,
I'm a snuggly teddy bear,
But you guys are THE BEST of all!
it's current IP law and technological constraints that keep people going to libraries.
I sometimes go just to push the buttons that move the giant electric shelves.
You had me convinced at "nasty bite."
I saw Teeth last weekend.
The goal is to apply to be a administrative assistant at the FfM Normative Orders cluster.
I have no idea what this means, but now I'm afraid that the Normative Orders Cluster is trying to take over the world.
Or maybe I should be afraid that it is failing to take over the world.
286: Hey now, your beef is with copyrights not all IP law. Patent and trademark law is perfectly fair. Tying this into the OP, you can blame Congress for the ridiculousness of copyrights but patents and trademarks are protected by the Constitution and are therefore sacred.
In a world where The Big Lebowski had never been made, Inherent Vice would have been tolerable. If The Crying of Lot 49 had never been written, it might have even been good.
I saw Teeth last weekend.
Seems like a film that's heavy on the molarizing.
type "LaTex CV style " into google, or maybe template for style. You seek a usable style file with a sample cv.
I found Lamport's book helpful, though there are lots of other choices. If you prefer not to pay, software books are among the first to be pirated, and the hardest to actually borrow from a library.
289 is delightful.
291: Great movie. I wish I'd seen it in a theater full of teenage boys.
Hey now, your beef is with copyrights not all IP law. Patent and trademark law is perfectly fair
Actually, my beef is with IP law in general, or at least many parts of it.
And libraries, which do pay royalties to authors, wouldn't make much sense in a world where every book is freely available on t'internet.
Two issues here. The first is that ereaders are not [yet?] a perfect substitute for paper ones, and that the best ones are quite costly, and that taking full advantage of them is either costly (amazon) or requires some expertise (unlicensed sites like library.ru, &c) or both. My worry is that the shift to a pay-per-use world as in ESR's "The Right to Read" would have a particularly pernicious effect on those who are already most disadvantaged--who can't afford good ereaders, or can't take most advantage of them. While in the meantime, support for dead-tree libraries erodes, since the UMC doesn't need them anymore, and those who do have no political power. That's my main fear about LizSpigot's 'only reading books on Kindle' example becoming universal. (I said a bit more about related issues here.)
The second point is that, even in a world with 34th generation, cheap, perfect ereaders, and no evil copyright law, we'd still need institutions that one could reasonably call "libraries." They probably wouldn't perform the same functions, not exactly, since the idea of bundling together the funding-authors with the providing-works-repository functions might no longer make so much sense--whatever works were produced would be "out there," somewhere. But getting works into the hands and heads of those who would benefit them goes far beyond simply furnishing a repository somewhere. And we as a culture need to figure out how to craft institutions to do this well, going forward.
299: What's wrong with patents and trademarks?
Patent and trademark law is perfectly fair. ... you can blame Congress for the ridiculousness of copyrights but patents and trademarks are protected by the Constitution and are therefore sacred.
Ordinarily I would assume this to be a joke, but I know you actually do patent law, so I fear there's an element of seriousness here.
1. If there's any line to be drawn between constitutionally mandated and optional forms of IP, it would place copyright & patent on the former side ("To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"; Article I.8.8) and trademark on the other--nothing in there about any "exclusive Right to their respective Brand Names."
2. But this way of framing it is mistaken, because what's at issue in I.8.8 is a conferred power rather than a duty to exercise that power in a particular way. Congress need never have enacted a copyright or patent statute.
3. In addition, it's a power that's explicitly limited, both in ends and means (promoting the progress of S & UA; through limited-duration exclusive rights). There's no doubt in my mind that current copyright law transgresses both limits, and patent law violates the former. The current clusterfuck with everyone suing everyone else in the mobile-phone market is a great example of this.
4. So, amusingly enough, it's actually the area of IP law with the least claim to constitutional status that has the strongest claim to legitimacy--if trademark law were really limited to its core consumer-protection rationale and scope, I wouldn't have a problem with it, whereas I'd abolish all copyright & patent overnight.
OK OK I'm going to stop now before I get myself too stressed. I know you're probably a wonderful person, Liz, even if the patent bar as a whole is--as Jon Stewart said of cable left-v-right programs--harming society.
The current patent regime isn't doing all that well at supporting development of expensive-to-design and cheap-to-copy technologies, with software (patent trolls) and pharmaceuticals as two glaring examples.
288:
There are a number of packages for typesetting a CV in LaTeX. "currvita" is the one that I've seen mentioned most often, but for your purposes some of the others (e.g., "europecv") might be work checking out.
You might also look at some of the threads on de.comp.text.tex about the topic. There's a fair amount of discussion of German conventions for vitae in addition to discussion about producing such in LaTeX. (The second and fourth paragraphs of this post might be helpful, for example.)
If The Crying of Lot 49 had never been written, it might have even been good.
"It would of been a good book," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to not write it every minute of its life."
What's wrong with patents ?
Here's a (freely available by the authors, though published by Cambridge) book arguing for the abolition of copyright & patent; see especially chapters 1, 3, and 4.
For shorter pieces, I'd recommend Tim Lee's work, especially on software patents. He also has a good book review here, and some blog posts.
I can attest that the pharmaceutical patent system makes the development of new drugs far less attractive than just inventing new diseases and formulations to extend existing patents.
As of 11 March 2002 the European Commission has defined a common format for curricula vitæ.
Holy shit. Those are some determined bureaucrats in Brussels.
302: Right, patents and copyrights are supported by the constitution and trademarks are governed by Congress. I know that, I just forgot for a second because the length of copyright protection is governed by Congress.
I'll checkout the links in 306. I'm a big fan of patents. I agree that some companies like to abuse patents and patent trolls are certainly a problem for software companies. I'm very fortunate to have clients that are more interested in obtaining patents and trademarks for defensive purposes, i.e. to protect against trolls and to prevent people from blatantly copying their technology.
If you're looking for articles in support of patents, Gene Quinn published an article recently on how patents are a deciding factor for venture capitalists deciding whether to invest in a company.
308: There is certainly some abuse of pharmaceuticals as well. The whole creation of new anxiety disorders to get people to take drugs for life is problematic. Some of the other techniques, though, like getting a separate patent on Zyrtec-D vs. Zyrtec to extend the life of patent protect is fair. For many people, the decongestant part of the drug is crucial and it did take a lot of research to obtain a stable crystal.
If you're looking for articles in support of patents, Gene Quinn published an article recently on how patents are a deciding factor for venture capitalists deciding whether to invest in a company.
There's no question that having patents is profitable. If I were a venture capitalist and wanted to invest in order to make money, then it would make sense to see whether the target company had patents. I'm glad that you mostly deal with patents as defensive weaponry, but the analogy is quite apt--given that others have them and use them, it's narrowly rational for others to acquire them. That doesn't mean that it's socially optimal for us to have a patent arms-race (though it's certainly optimal for the patent bar!). And the place where the analogy breaks down is that we can't eliminate the existence of weapons by fiat, but we could--and ought to--do the equivalent for patents.
As for the "defensive" use of keeping others from using patented inventions--I'd suggest looking at Boldrin & Levine's book for examples of how companies can and do profitably exploit their inventions without needing patents. My (and their) bottom line is that the threat of competition is a greater spur to innovation than the promise of monopoly rents. Even if one can come up with cases, both theoretical and practical, where that might not apply, the political-economy problem is designing an entire institutional structure that won't be over-inclusive. I have no doubt ours completely fails that test, and until recently, all the political pressure was on making things still worse.
301: My beef with patents and trademarks is somewhat similar to x.trapnel's, but not entirely. I'd agree that the modern Western world has lost sight of what we actually want IP law to do, ie promote innovation/creativity (copyright/patents) and protect consumers from passing off (trademarks). Largely this is a result of corporate lobbying, but also under-resourcing of patent offices etc allowing abuses such as the infamous Edge Games patent trolling which only got shut down when he took on one of the largest IP owners in the world, rather than lots of little guys.
In light of the social goals of theoretical IP law, its current jurisprudence is bizarrely patchy and inconsistent. Why are, for instance, football fixture lists protected by copyright but, say, telephone directories aren't? Football league owners do not need a copyright incentive to arrange fixtures - the league wouldn't exist without them.
Similarly, it's impossible to copyright or patent the rules of a game (beyond the verbatim text), or for that matter a software implemented videogame mechanic (again, beyond the verbatim code). But it is possible to patent, in sufficiently broad terms to stifle genuinely innovative competition, physically implemented game mechanics. The reliance on a fairly narrow interpretation of "industrial process" as a criterion in an age where most of the economy and certainly most of the innovation is not in heavy industry produces nonsensical anomalies.
And I'm not even going to get into biological patents, as the jurisprudence is rapidly evolving and, for once, seems to be swinging back toward the side of sanity.
So I just read the piece LizSpigot links to, and it's a complete non-sequitor, a fallacy of composition. It's really as straightforward as that--he's claiming that since, in a world with patents, having them is better than not having them for individual companies, then we'd be collectively better off with more patents and more relaxed standards for granting them. Once you realize that the exact same argument would go through with "product/service monopoly" substituted for "patent," you realize something has gone awry. (See Ed Felton's great post on "The Pizzaright Principle"--when your argument would apply equally well to an exclusive right to make and sell pizza, you know something's wrong.)
315: He also says that you need patent protection for innovations, i.e. in a world without patents you won't have innovations. Why spend six months creating something that someone else will steal?
Also, I see nothing about relaxing the standards. I see a lot about increasing the PTO's ability to prosecute more applications. For example, Congress should stop taking $70 million from the PTO budget for non-PTO activities. This is perfectly reasonable because at the current rate of examination, more patent applications are filed than are examined so the backlog is increasing. 2009 was the first year that the number of applications awaiting examination decreased since 1997.
Why spend six months creating something that someone else will steal?
You could put a sign on the window of your company. "Time lock on safe. Clerk has no access to intellectual property."
Why spend six months creating something that someone else will steal?
Again, as a general argument, this has to be wrong; why do restaurant chefs invent new recipes, since they don't (generally speaking) get any IP protection, and anyone could just steal them? Or fashion designers? Levine and Boldrin address the topic in more length in chapter 6 of their book, but here are a few mechanisms for profiting from real innovation:
1. When the innovation is embodied within the production process in a complicated way, such that "stealing it" is only that simple on paper. Think about the vast differences in manufacturing quality & fault tolerances worldwide, despite a global market in equipment. An idea isn't useful knowledge unless it's embodied--and even an idea embodied into a physical object is only useful when coupled with a person who understands how to use it. The inventor of an innovation, insofar as it's a real innovation (rather than an innovation in describing something in legal terms), will usually have a real advantage in implementing that innovation.
2. The flipside of this is that innovation is itself part of the process of creating products/services; this is the whole "learning by doing" idea. Think about the way that Intel or AMD constantly refines the chipmaking process even through the product lifecycle of a single chip, as the factory figures out what's causing problems. Even if it were possible to "steal" this sort of innovation costlessly, and hence free-ride, this wouldn't mean inefficiently low innovation, since the whole point is that this sort comes about automatically. If your business is such that it doesn't--that you never learn how to do your work differently and better, in the course of getting it done--then that's the problem right there.
3. For a number of things--especially technology or cultural products--there's a very real first-mover advantage. It's not insuperable, of course--think Friendster--but it's a competitive edge.
4. Similarly, and most obviously with cultural products/services, companies are often able to generate shockingly large value out of trusted brands and/or authenticity. Think of the massive premiums of brand names vs. generics, even when made at the same factories, even when dealing with things like aspirin. Real innovators should be able to leverage this.
I'm not claiming that eliminating patents wouldn't massively disrupt current industry practices; of course it would. Whole industries are built around patent-dependent business models. But technological innovation as a phenomenon is no more dependent on patents than industrial innovation was dependent on state-furnished monopoly. The history of capitalism, if anything, shows the reverse--innovation is what you get when companies are forced to innovate in order to gain a competitive edge, and then forced to keep innovating as others catch up and imitate them.
Dean Baker is always going on about how, for a fraction of drug company profits, you could fund a grantmaking system to research the most needed new drugs, rather than the most profitable. He's got a paper about several very plausible mechanisms for spurring pharmaceutical innovation without patents. Of course they would mean the big pharma companies would go out of business.
1. When the innovation is embodied within the production process in a complicated way, such that "stealing it" is only that simple on paper.
Can't this become an incentive for firms to each have slightly different standards (whether physical or digital)?
For example, Microsoft obviously feels like it's in their interest to keep adding extensions to document formats so that their software will do things that other software doesn't.
This is just off the top of my head so I haven't thought about how the incentives should be balanced, but it seems worth mentioning.
The link in 243 gets into the subject of ebook lending in more open formats than those supported by the major ebook readers.
For example, Microsoft obviously feels like it's in their interest to keep adding extensions to document formats so that their software will do things that other software doesn't.documents are only readable by the latest versions of their own software.
314.1 was actually trademark trolling.
IMO, the main problem with the US patent system is the PTO and the examiners. Same is true with Trademark law (e.g. Edge Games). As well as a number of quirks with federal circuit law that are indefensible.
Most of the abolish-IP folks are just spouting untested, Econ-101 libertarian political theory bullshit, which is about as persuasive in this context as in any other (which is to say, there's a kernel of truth there, but not much more). No one really knows what the effect on innovation of a more liberal IP regime would be, and people love to speculate about their preferred Utopias.
Just to further enrage X, I'm one of the few folks I know who believes that retroactively extending copyright was on balance a good, or at least not obviously terrible, thing, given the state of current IP law. The state of public domain film and music archives is not great, and there's a lot that has been preserved only because it serves as somebodies' back catalogue. I think a compulsory licensing regime for, e.g., sampling is a far better way to go than IP abolitionism.
You go to hell and you die, Robert Halford.
people love to speculate about their preferred Utopias
As in, "No more speculating about your preferred Utopia to ...."
Most of the abolish-IP folks are just spouting untested, Econ-101 libertarian political theory bullshit, which is about as persuasive in this context as in any other (which is to say, there's a kernel of truth there, but not much more). No one really knows what the effect on innovation of a more liberal IP regime would be, and people love to speculate about their preferred Utopias.
This is, of course, largely stupid. Also, the Lakers suck.
The NBA sucks, as does libertarian political theory and IP law.
here's a lot that has been preserved only because it serves as somebodies' back catalogue.
I find that somewhat convincing but I also know that Bil Ivey (former NEA chair) thinks that record companies, for example, are not good custodians of their own back catalogues.
Not because that they may not make it available but they literally don't physically preserve the archives.
I have a basement full of 8-tracks in paper bags. Would Bil Ivey like me to mail them to him?
328: No! They don't suck enough, is the problem. Amirite?
323: Why not go all the way, Halford? Copyright should be eternall! Why should Henry Ford have been able to pass on his company to his kids and grandkids while Mark Helprin's grandchildren will be not able to inherit his life work?
This is the first comprehensive, national-level study of the state of sound recording preservation ever conducted in the U.S. The authors, Rob Bamberger and Sam Brylawski, have produced a study outlining the web of interlocking issues that now threaten the long-term survival of our sound recording history. This study tells us that major areas of America's recorded sound heritage have already been destroyed or remain inaccessible to the public. It suggests that the lack of conformity between federal and state laws may adversely affect the long-term survival of pre-1972-era sound recordings in particular. And, it warns that the continued lack of national coordination among interested parties in the public and private sectors, in addressing the challenges in preservation, professional education and public access, may not yet be arresting permanent loss of irreplaceable sound recordings in all genres.
They don't suck enough, is the problem. Amirite?
Mark, from the USA says NO! "Anyway, women in America are basically total sluts and whores, whereas women in other countries have much more dignity, self-respect, and decency. "
The state of public domain film and music archives is not great, and there's a lot that has been preserved only because it serves as somebodies' back catalogue.
The state of copyright protected film and music archives isn't that great either. Obviously, a lot film prints got destroyed by deterioration or fire before their copyright ran out. Less idiosyncratically, sometimes copyright owners are stupid. The BBC destroyed vast swathes of its priceless archive, including some of the best comedy ever recorded, because it ran out of space.
Note that I'm not an "abolish IP law" type. I'm an "ensure IP law is fit for purpose" type. Compulsory licensing would indeed be one of my proposals.
332: Henry Ford's descendants couldn't collect royalties from his anti-semetic tracts.
I'm an "ensure IP law is fit for purpose" type.
Yeah, me too. I just think that discussion of how to do that is a lot more complicated than many think. For example, and this requires too much explanation for a blog comment, the investments in marketing, distributing, promoting and preserving cultural goods like movies and sound recordings are extraordinarily significant -- in some ways, more important than the creation of the good itself, which undermines a lot of the theoretical distinction between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods.
The state of copyright protected film and music archives isn't that great either.
No argument here. Though note that, in the US at least, the biggest losses in film were in the 1960s when the studios were collapsing and IP law was uncertain, and in the recording industry in the same period when rights were less settled. Today folks are very much aware of the value of back catalogues.
Anyhow, my own view is generally that saying sensible things about IP law requires knowing a lot about exactly what right you're trying to protect and why -- and, unfortunately for the generalizers, a lot of this is fairly industry and fact-specific. I do think that in many areas prize systems and compulsory licensing could go a long way. And no doubt that there are currently massive abuses of all three of the main branches of US IP law. I just don't like theory-driven abolitionism.
Also, talk to me in person about Edge Games sometime.
For example, and this requires too much explanation for a blog comment, the investments in marketing, distributing, promoting and preserving cultural goods like movies and sound recordings are extraordinarily significant -- in some ways, more important than the creation of the good itself,
That sounds plausible and, some point, I'd be interested to hear you explain the implications that you draw from that fact.
It certainly seems like the case that companies that have invested in that infrastructure can charge rents to distribute content created by smaller companies or artists.
339 -- put very summarily, once you take marketing and distribution networks into account as part of the "good," a cultural good like a film or sound recording looks a lot more like any other kind of private property because rivalrousness becomes an issue. And so abolishing copyright looks a lot more like abolishing any other kind of private property right.
It certainly seems like the case that companies that have invested in that infrastructure can charge rents to distribute content created by smaller companies or artists.
Yes -- that is basically the business model of the major movie studios, and has been since at least the 1960s.
1. It's easy to say "it's complicated, we need a Goldilocks solution for every domain" but the problem is institutional design; how do you ensure that the balance is not only found but maintained over time, especially when the interests of consumers, the poor, and developing countries are so systematically slighted? The last 100 years of IP developments--especially with the globalization of law in the last generation or two--have all been about as pure an example of rent-seeking as one could imagine. Of course, Halford's in favor of the Mickey Mouse Copyright Extension Act of 1998, but I'm not going to deign to address that one. So long as there's no underlying principle--or rather, so long as the principle is "free competition, except if you can make an argument by analogy to X Y and Z industries about why yours needs monopoly protection"--we can expect that to continue. See recent reports of fashion designers and chefs redoubling their efforts for IP barriers.
2. It's certainly true that current creative-works industries have developed a high-cost, high-return model--"Avatar" is a poster child here; 3d more generally being an example of technology being driven by the goal of maximizing revenue through differentiating the movie theater experience from the home-theater one. But there's nothing about the nature of the universe that says this is what creative works must or ought to be. Perhaps it would be a tragic loss to our culture if our moving-picture industry were dominated by low-budget movies, perhaps not. But it's a big mistake to think that just because the current industry model couldn't survive a copyright-free world, that world would entirely lack the sort of cultural products that industry now produces. Telling stories is about as fundamental a human need as there is. (I wrote a bit on related stuff here.)
the interests of consumers, the poor, and developing countries are so systematically slighted?
I think there's close to zero evidence that this is actually true, especially for the domain of copyright -- cultural products are more widespread and cheap and global than at any previous point in human history, roughly on par with or exceeding material goods, and all of those trends have increased during precisely the period that the information-must-be-freeeeeeeeee types complain most about.
That's not to say that there aren't massive problems with particular areas of IP. I do think that a prize system or compulsory licensing regime for pharmaceutical products makes a lot of sense. But this is an area in which you actually do need to think carefully about what you're regulating and how best to do so, and libertarianism provides about as good a guide to this sphere of life as any other.
put very summarily, once you take marketing and distribution networks into account as part of the "good," a cultural good like a film or sound recording looks a lot more like any other kind of private property because rivalrousness becomes an issue. And so abolishing copyright looks a lot more like abolishing any other kind of private property right.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but I find it hard to understand the argument. Rivalrousness is a property of consumption, not production: whether or not my use/enjoyment/eating/whatever of X interferes with another's potential use of it. The only time this applies to, e.g., films, is in the case of sold-out opening nights, that sort of thing. Even here, this depends on a hard distinction between seeing it that night and the next week; and also depends on asserting that seeing it in a theatre is fundamentally different from At Home. (Of course, the Hollywood model is built around convincing the public of these distinctions.)
If what you're saying is that, given consumer behavior, the legal regime, the history & structure of the studio & cinema industry, etc., the profit-maxing strategy for studios is to invest vast amounts on marketing & distribution, such that these supposedly "variable" costs are quite high, perhaps higher than the supposedly "fixed" costs of filming, well, sure. But this doesn't show anything. The variable costs are a choice taken to maximize revenue, a choice that makes sense precisely because of the exclusive rights granted--a world of no-copyright would hit mega-blockbusters the hardest, both on the supply (only worth commercially pirating sure-things) and demand (less of a "support the struggling artist" authenticity-impulse with Titanic, Avatar, etc.). If those same variable costs were actually necessary to the production--if the guys selling bootleg DVDs on the subway needed to invest in the same marketing campaigns, etc.--then the pro-copyright arguments would fail even on their own terms.
One last thought: it's worth wondering just why it is that movie studios depend so heavily on massive marketing budgets, in a world where amateur & professional evaluations of creative works are so easy to find. The argument that an important good is being produced--that it's, in the old phrase, socially necessary labor--because otherwise consumers wouldn't know what's available--clearly doesn't go through.
Bah. I'm tired and not writing very well at this point. I just want to reiterate: that an industry that produces Y has become dependent on privilege X does not mean that privilege X is, in fact, needed for society to get Y. See also: financiers' bonuses as X, loans to business/homeowners/consumers as Y.
I guess the only 3D movie I've seen aside from the new Tron is Captain E-O, but I continue to think 3D sucks.
The idea that India's interests are best served by WIPO's policy agenda would be hilarious if the latter weren't, in fact, much closer than the former to what wins the day. This is clearly not a conversation worth continuing. Back to "Broom of the System."
To take an exampe, if you have two competitive distribution channels for a single film, they are rivalrous with one another. A world in which there is no copyright (or analagous IP protection), and thus no right to control a distribution channel, creates an enormously strong disincentive for the distribution and marketing of cultural goods. That not only lessens the incentive to produce the good in the first place (the classic IP argument), but makes it more difficult for consumers to obtain any good produced -- so long as you think that distribution channels matter.
You can, of course, choose to not see that as a problem. Most loose IP advocates just assume away distribution and marketing, as something that will either be solved by putting everything on the interenet or that's culturally disreputable to begin with. But those are assumptions with very little basis in reality. In my view, assuming away distribution and marketing provide a very naive and cramped view of how cultural production actually works (or should work, or has worked for most of human history). Marketing and distribution are in fact an enormous part of how people both obtain and consume cultural products, and a critical part of the story of why we now have such an abundance of cultural goods available to so many. Assuming that eliminating them would be possible without destroying a lot of what we value about culture is a pretty risky and unsupported assumption.
But I'm glad to see you're so confident in your theories that discussing them isn't worth your time.
345.last: A chapter a day? Or a more "normal" schedule? Reread Chap. 1 last night and by the end I was sort of remembering it; although apparently it did not make me as palpably uncomfortable as it did this time around.
Who owns the rights to BotS? that's what I want to know.
Getting rid of IP would obviously destroy cultural production industries, but cultural production as an industry is clearly not that important. The fact that US per-capita GDP is $45,000 a year has very little to do with Hollywood. If the movie industry was completely destroyed, the only consequence is that we'd have to find something else to do on Saturday nights.
Yes, killing off a major manufacturing industry that employs about 2 million people, many of them in high-paid union jobs, and that produces an enormous balance of trade surplus for the United States is truly an awesome and progressive idea.
It's more that I'm just not sure you are using rivalrous the way it's standardly used.
It's clear that the film-production process is a multi-stage one, and that marketing & distribution are important parts--certainly from the studios' perspective--of that chain that ends with people watching movies. But the nature of that process is not fixed; some parts are technological (special effects, editing), some are social-cultural (the rituals of how movies fit into life), some are chosen as rational strategies for profit-maximizing (marketing, which films to screen where).
Your claim is that the importance of marketing & distribution make movies rivalrous, and thus they need copyright to enforce exclusion of would-be free-riders; rival but non-exclusive goods being vulnerable to tragedy-of-the-commons style problems. This is what I'm having trouble getting. Is what you're trying to say that, for example, those who watch unlicensed copies of movies on their computers, by reducing expected demand for seeing them in theatres, make it less likely that the theaters will buy those movies from the studios and show them, and thus the public who would have been able to see them don't? Because that's the only way I can interpret your claim.
If so, I think it's an abuse of the term; it's squeezing together the production and consumption side of things, in order to conceal what has changed about the technological possiblities for the latter. Person A's watching the unlicensed copy, after all, does not stop others from doing the same. If anything, it is likely to raise the demand curve, since there's more value of seeing movie X if others have seen it, since now we can discuss it; the standard network effect story of pop culture. What may decreases the demand curve for seeing-it-in-theatres is the availability of a cheaper way to see it--and this was how person A got the copy--but a change in demand due to the introduction of a near-substitute is just not the same as the lack of availability due to the thing being eaten up, which is what rivalrousness is.
I just don't quite understand the story as you tell it, how the importance of distribution channels + erosion of copyright "makes it more difficult for consumers to obtain any good produced."
Yawn. Maybe I'm just not thinking clearly. But are you seriously claiming, for example, that the effective elimination of enforceable copyrights in the Napster-era made it more difficult for people to get already-produced music than immediately previous?
Oh, for goodness sake, that's a little melodramatic. Movies would survive, even if the industry would be quite different, just as fashion & restaurants survive without any real copyright protection. The total production of music is higher than ever, despite the ubiquity of MP3s. The sky is not going to fall.
Who owns the rights to BotS? that's what I want to know.
I think Penguin, at least in the USA. But publishing rights are typically regional--the paperback I ordered from amazon.de is from Abacus.
353: This isn't an area where I know much at all, although I'm generally on the shorter/less IP protection side. But for movies specifically, I could see losing copyright protection making it impossible to make something that expensive. Music is comparatively cheap to make, and people do it for fun, but no one films Avatar for fun.
I think maybe the confusion is over what a distribution channel is. Something -- say, a movie -- gets produced. The question then becomes who is going to watch it and how they are going to do so. Does it get put in a store? Which one, and how? Does anyone see an advertisement for it on TV? Does the book get prominent placement in the bookstore? How does anyone know how to find it? If anyone can reap the profit from marketing and/or distributing a good, no one has an incentive to promote it or distribute it -- a classic tragedy of the commons situation that's really no different for a cultural good than for a physical one.
(There's also a separate question of the effect of the ability to market or distribute the good on the incentive to produce the good in the first place, but since I know you understand that intuitively I won't discuss it further).
The free IP types imagine that the issue of incentives to control distribution or marketing just don't matter, most commonly because of the internet. The theory is something like "just upload everything to the internet and let consumers and amateurs sort it out," making distribution and marketing irrelevant. I would argue that this radically undervalues a key part of cultural production, namely that it's actually quite difficult to figure out easily how to find products from the universe of culture and reach decisions as to which one to select.
The Napster example is, of course, what everyone thinks of in this context, but is somewhat misleading -- because it emerged when the old system was still largely in place, music that had already been promoted and distributed was commonly downloaded with apparently little cost to anyone. If no new deal had emerged, the record labels really would have had little incentive to promote or distribute new music, and for a while it seemed like that might actually happen. In fact, though, that didn't happen, largely because the record companies shifted their models to preserve the right to capture other IP elements of performers, beside sound recordings, through so-called 360 deals that give them rights to the other IP aspects of a performers' career. Today, distribution channels for music are very much subject to promotion and marketing, precisely because IP still very much exists in the recording industry. The takeaway lesson, I think, is not the abolitionist view of IP, but that you need to think carefully about how to maintain and extend IP rights in the face of new distribution technology.
I could discuss other aspects of the music and film industry that make this important, but that's probably enough for now.
I've got to say I don't see the distribution argument. Marketing, sure. Distribution is ultimately incentivised by the end consumer (or, in some cases, altruism, Assange-esque ideology, public welfare and other idiosyncratic motives), not the producer. Distribution methods, and availability, of cultural products have exploded in the era of easily violable IP. Certain distribution methods become less viable, or less profitable, in a much looser IP world, but others become much more viable (and profitable, given the lack of licensing fees). If distribution is a good, it's a good that can easily be provided outside of IP protection. The argument that legally protected distribution rights incentivise production is another matter.
Yes, you know how fashion survives? The purest form of planned fucking obsolescence known to woman. Please, don't suggest fashion is a good place to go.
(Also, of course, aura. Fashion and food put a lot of effort into turning an abstract idea --- a pattern, a recipe --- into a thing. This works, because obviously food and clothing are things very simply. But analogy ban!)
356:And so we get Transformers 3 in 5000 theaters with a promotional budget in 8 figures, and indies and art movies get shown once and only once at film festivals.
And Halford says we need to protect this system.
I guess I can expand on 359, if no one got it.
IP is not important to help consumers find the really good stuff, it is used in the opposite way and for the opposite purpose of ensuring that those who control the distribution system and promotional/informational pipes can profit off fucking dreck.
Thus it has always been.
I think Bob can take over for me from here.
To 357, I take the point, which does (superficially, perhaps) seem to hold true for the internet, where marketing is more important, but two things: First, it really does take a lot of work and effort to get any individual good displayed in a store, theater, etc. -- the traditional mass distribution channels, and still by far the most easily accessible ones. In countries with very loose IP, control over distribution channels is generally (a)protected by mafia organizations who enforce their right to the distribution channels by force or (b) dependent on very low quality goods that can be replicated in a storefront and (c) not a lot like how we sell cultural products in the Western world, with (I think) significant loss to consumers. If we're imagining a world with no IP at all, you'd still need some kind of mechanism to ensure profitability from the distribution channel without being immediately undercut by a rival.
There's also the question of ""what, specifically, gets distributed." Without IP at all, the incentive to distribute any particular good is very different. That ties into marketing, of course, which is why marketing and distribution are really two sides of the same coin.
To Bob, come on, TCM would not exist in current form without the 1998 copyright act!!
362 is a really good point, one I hadn't come across before.
Compulsory licensing is a generalization of Lessig's proposed scheme where owners pay a nominal fee to maintain copyright of orphan works, or is it something else?
For pharma, IMO the issue is not IP, but the steep incentives created by the need for FDA approval and in particular phase III clinical trials (hundreds of millions of dollars for a succesful round) before selling your compound.
TCM does provide the kind of informational distribution service that Halford is talking about, but Halford isn't really talking about TCM, who probably could be funded off the Transformers 3 catering budget, if it isn't already self-supporting.
And any argument that Transformers 3 provides the money to finance Jim Jarmusch movies was lost long ago.
Or take it to books. Is Halford really claiming that publishers spend their promotional budgets on their highest quality projects, in order that the book buying public can make informed choices?
It's about rents, taking the risks out of production as much as possible.
And part of what they want to do shows up in LB's comment above about Avatar. They want to set the terms of what a "quality movie" is, which is new, expensive, seen by everyone else.
They didn't expand the "Best Picture" category from 5 to 10 so that consumers would be better informed.
Like I say, I'm not personally advocating a no IP world. But, even leaving aside the internet, I do think you overly discount the distribution channels that we see in countries with loose IP law, or for products that aren't protected by IP. Is it that much harder to buy a copy of the Bible in Russia than in the US? How many cinemas and bookshops are there in remote towns? How many market stalls selling pirated goods? Does your average consumer in a loose IP country, particularly one without a lot of money, really care that his pirated movie from a market stall isn't crystal clear and subtitled in 20 languages? What about the pirated CD that is identical quality to the official version? Is there not value to both consumer and distributor in an up to the minute laser printed newspaper from anywhere in the world? Why do generic drugs exist at all?
Again, I'm not arguing for no IP. But distribution seems to be by far the easiest part of the equation to solve when it comes to transitioning away from ultra-protective IP.
TCM and Criterion are, as far as I know, doing very well, for a variety of reasons, even on movies that are public domain or widely distributed. They add value.
Just imagine how insanely well TCM and Criterion would do if they could get their movies up on multiplex screens once in a blue moon.
But they can't. Mikio Naruse, Japanese director of the late so-unknown-in-America-she-barely-got-a-NYT-obit Hideko Takamine, has had ONE festival showing in America in 75 years. It's a "I was in Seattle in 1985" kind of thing. This isn't because he made sucky movies.
People prefer Avatar and Transformers 3? Why do you suppose?
in Russia than in the US? How many cinemas and bookshops are there in remote towns? How many market stalls selling pirated goods?
I once asked a guy who works in Russia distribution for a major studio (not a client) how that works. His response was basically "You don't want to know, and we don't want to know." Basically, mob control substitutes for copyright control.
Generic drugs work because they're a physical commodity, and are protected through trademark branding.
But, GY, I do take the larger point. You may be right that distribution is the easiest problem to solve -- certainly easier than marketing or incentives for initial production. But don't underestimate the difficulties of distribution, or how hard it is to do effective marketing without controlling distribution.
This is a great thread, guys -- thanks.
I wonder how many films TCM shows are out of copyright but otherwise unavailable (i.e. not even on DVD/streaming). His Girl Friday is apparently public domain, for example, but it's also widely available for a price.
Face it. Halford does not want you to know about or to see the Naruse. It would cut into the profits.
He wants to drown you in T3 advertising, and keep Naruse out of theatres. The ways this is done is even subtler than the Yakuza thugs Japanese studios used in the 30s, or the vertyical integration everywhere.
He also couldn't care less about TCM or Criterion. They are fucking peanuts to Time-Warner. M & M money. He probably cares little about anything 5 years old at all. The DVD re-releases gotta take of themselves, and do.
He cares about the short window, a year or two, in which he can get the blockbuster to dominate attentions in theatres and DVD's.
What do you think, Hollywood running out of money? They are using up their rents trying to force dreck down our throats, and buying (or being bought) the distribution channels (ComCast, FCC regs,) so they can control what you know about and see.
Lost a cable channel last night. Oprah apparently paid somebody big bucks.
I'm looking forward to your Japanese cultural studies advancing into the present era, bob. Not that your observations haven't been good, but they tend to be dated.
Halford has been bitten by a radioactive mistake that has granted him the proportional error of an LSD-confused spider.
Bob, you've got me down cold. NO ONE MUST KNOW OF THE NARUSE.
372:The sociology book I read was 2008, and had much to say about the effects of the long disinflation. They are outsourcing, subcontracting, and hiring young women to replace men. Marriage and families are in decline.
The "friendly authoritarianism" that was specific to Japan in the past is slipping away in the tidal wave of globalization. I think they are just ahead of us by a decade or so.
374:Yes, I do.
EVERYONE MUST KNOW ABOUT AVATAR.
Same thing, really.
Bob, to be semi-serious, you're also just dead wrong about the value of back catalogues. The studios (like anyone else) are in love with assets that create value without having to do much work other than market old films. Criterion is possible in large part because the studios have realized this, as is TCM. Actually, TCM exists largely because Ted Turner bought a huge back catalogue when it was cheap to do so and then needed something to do with it.
Obviously you're right that culture industries market on the basis of profit, not selecting out the world's best cultural goods. But without an IP regime you're unlikely to get very good marketing or distribution for art house fare, too, let alone getting such films made at all.
x.trapnel's piece linked at the end of 300.1 is good.
Sorry I'm not adding any value, and in fact sound like I'm making random remarks; this is all fascinating.
If I tell people that the 3D effect in Voyage of the Dawn Treader is an aesthetically pointless way to jack up ticket prices, and enough of them are persuaded to download a non-3D version instead via bittorrent, I will have struck a blow for justice, Halford be damned.
That's all well and good, Halford, but can even you defend the fact that TCM is showing Mr. Holland's Opus right now?
Mr. Holland's Opus
Is that the regular one or the pRr0n one?
Not that your observations [Japan] haven't been good, but they tend to be dated.
1) I don't understand the post-modern or globalized generations, here or there, even though I have read about them
2) Part of my purpose was to understand the "friendly authoritarianism" of 20th century Japan and the elite consensus mechanisms that ran the place during the Empire, thinking the USA might be going there. I decided that there are too many contingent aspects to Japan (neighborhood police boxes) and too many incomprehensible differences (noticeable Socialist and Communist Parties).
3) But I have always thought Japan is neat (beauty and horror), and I was always intending to move backward from the 20th to the Heian, so I could die either reading Basho or Genji, sitting under a tree with the dogs, and ignoring the bad news and the blogosphere. No offense.
Thanks for reminding me. Bye.
I don't know what this has to do with intellectual property, but I've had my TV on with the People's Choice Awards in the background for a while and it's disturbing me. It's all stilted and mannered and there are a lot of things that might be jokes if they had been written by aliens with only a partial understanding of humor on earth. I can't imagine that anyone finds this actually entertaining, but it's sort of a fascinating trainwreck.
I have had the Rush documentary on in the background (and have been feeling a presumably transitory regret at having given away my Rush records in high school).
A Parting Gift for Hideko. Read it last night.
"Three Japanese Actresses of the 50s"
(But she doesn't understand Ozu, and probably not Japan. Shochiku was, and is, pretty damn close to being the Commie studio, and Ozu was its heart. He was just way subtle.)
Actually, TCM exists largely because Ted Turner bought a huge back catalogue when it was cheap to do so and then needed something to do with it.
How did this not totally contradict the rest of the comment? "Oh, well, Ted Turner was a visionary genuis and bought a ton of stuff that everybody realized had a lot of value and was thus preserving for pennies on the dollar."
Other than that, I bow out of this conversation, because one side of the argument is -- no shit -- a hollywood entertainment lawyer arguing for the primacy of intellectual property protections. C'mon, fellas. Bang the rocks together.
385: Oof.
(CA and I semi-recently rewatched Another State of Mind, which documents a 1984 Social Distortion-Youth Brigade tour. It made us both feel extraordinarily elderly and squirmy. Mike Ness talking about Dischord House remains hilarious.)
without an IP regime you're unlikely to get very good marketing or distribution for art house fare, too, let alone getting such films made at all
Okay god help me I can't stop: so this is why the strongest international films have consistently come from developing nations (lately Nigeria) with the absolute weakest IP protections? Well shut my mouth. I had no idea!
386: Subtle people like me and Ozu are hard to understand.
Um, TCM basically exists as a marketing vehicle for the Turner back catalogue. If that wasn't profitable, it goes off the air tomorrow.
I hope we can all attain the strength and enduring high production values of the Nigerian film industry. Actually, Nollywood is a really an interesting story, and I recently met someone who's doing a dissertation on it. But there are Nigerian copyright laws, both those imposed by the government and those effectively imposed by gangsters. But, why bother to listen to what I'm saying, since INFORMATION MUST BE FREEEEEEEEEEEE.
TCM is showing Mr. Holland's Opus right now?
Why? Because it's important to remember that you can learn to love your children unconditionally, regardless of who they are. But it might take some time if you're an asshole.
Halford, do you have an impassioned defense of the pharmaceutical industry in you? That might liven this thread up.
I'm not THAT evil.
At least I'm not a former hacker trapped in an apartment in fucking Boston.
391: I'm actually not a copyright maximalist, much as I might rail against the current system. But that said, 1. widespread piracy is vastly beneficial to rights-holders, and the current situation vis a vis IP (a broken-ass metaphor if ever there was one) is utterly busted 2. rights-holders seem inevitably unable to understand those twin principles and 3. you are kinda arguing that, because your bread is buttered on one side, the other side is inevitably covered in fungus. I am just saying.
I could argue with "facts" and "peer-reviewed research" and "large-scale economic evidence" but I think it'll be more fun if we taunt and mock each other, so I'll stick to that. Also it's late.
At least I'm not a former hacker trapped in an apartment in fucking Boston.
I can leave my apartment whenever. We have two doors and a ton of windows. And a projector, so I could illegaly download some movies and leave via my imagination.
I have three doors, but no projector.
Hey, you guys want to know something funny? Two of the first servers at Napster were named sifu.napster.com and tweety.napster.com. No shit.
Oh, I'm not a maximalist (in the other direction) either, at all. I mostly just hate the lazy Copyright-is-bad talk of the internet.
widespread piracy is vastly beneficial to rights-holders
That is indeed sometimes true and important (in at least some cases) but a lot depends a lot on who and how. Many folks in the industry who understand this, although there are some who would like to see every internet pirate swinging from the gate to the Fox lot. A lot depends on how you bundle the rest of the rights that aren't subject to piracy.
the current situation vis a vis IP (a broken-ass metaphor if ever there was one) is utterly busted
Yes and no (I don't think the "metaphor" is as bad as some do, for reasons I set forth above and other reasons). A lot of the "bustedness" has to do with things that aren't really about "strong" IP law per se but about its practical implementation -- the PTO in particular. I do think that there have been a lot of missed opportunities for expansion of compulsory licensing and fair use.
you are kinda arguing that, because your bread is buttered on one side, the other side is inevitably covered in fungus.
Well, fuck yeah.
Katy Perry on the TV: "I've got two! .... They're so heavy, I wish you could feel them!"
No further comment.
I mostly just hate the lazy [...] internet.
I'm so there, whatever it is they're saying.
No but seriously, you're not going to get me to be proud of making common cause with Cory Doctorow. The dude ripped my (well, mine and my friends') style.
A lot of the "bustedness" has to do with things that aren't really about "strong" IP law per se but about its practical implementation
Mmmmmmmaybe, and of course law doesn't have to have a rigorously coherent foundation to work, but the whole "property" metaphor -- even given that your points (which I only half read, so I'm hedging my bets) remain consistent given technological change -- is so half-assed and doesn't-really-apply-anymore-assed as to be worthy of a constitutional originalist, forgive me. It makes perfect sense that people who make content should have rights to talk about how that content is used, but that this should be a property right, somehow? That's wicked steampunk.
400: not any more, no.
That is indeed sometimes true and important (in at least some cases) but a lot depends a lot on who and how.
I just wanna apologize for this sentence.
You could put in another qualifier.
I'm one of the few folks I know who believes that retroactively extending copyright was on balance a good, or at least not obviously terrible, thing
Slate article forthcoming!
When Tropic Thunder is on basic cable, they discuss the importance of not going "full special.".
Sifu's unforgivable sins are hacking, once upon a time, and living in Boston?
You know what I heard about that Robert Halford? He consumes a moderate amount of yogurt.
Not living in Boston, but living in an apartment in Boston. If he had either a house or a yurt, that would be fine.
It looks like the OP's assumption was right: they will read the expurgated version.
The party on Friday is just a vehicle for Halford to distribute his views on copyright law.
Mmmmmmmaybe, and of course law doesn't have to have a rigorously coherent foundation to work, but the whole "property" metaphor -- even given that your points (which I only half read, so I'm hedging my bets) remain consistent given technological change -- is so half-assed and doesn't-really-apply-anymore-assed as to be worthy of a constitutional originalist, forgive me. It makes perfect sense that people who make content should have rights to talk about how that content is used, but that this should be a property right, somehow? That's wicked steampunk.
Hey, property rights are how shit gets done in a free market economy. Markets without property are kind of mucky; we want a market in cultural production, and so we need to implement property rights in cultural production.
(Socialists & communists & feudalists & so-on are allowed to assert they don't want a free market, but if you generally like the idea of free markets I have little sympathy for your dislike of this one.)
(It's not a metaphor, really, either, any more than a gilt edge is a metaphor.)
Hey, property rights are how shit gets done in a free market economy.
If we could maximalize the concept of property (originally defined (or so I imagine) as in a thing you physically possess somehow) -- and apply it uncomplicatedly to ideas, and cities, and countries, and people -- we could have a maximally free market. What if you could actually own another person's genetic makeup? Much more efficient!
(It's not a metaphor, really, either, any more than a gilt edge is a metaphor.)
I don't disagree with this (given the "really, either" caveat), or understand what you mean, or know what the gilt edge is.
Looks like we have to have the rivalrous/non-rivalrous discussion again.
Smoop smoop smoop. I hope that's an adequate substitute for the rivalrous/non-rivalrous discussion.
Not interested in reviving the rivalrous/nonrivalrous discussion, but yeah Keir see above.
"Intellectual Property" may seem like less of a weird metaphor once you understand that, for lawyers, there's no single right that constitutes "property" in a physical good, either; lawyers talk about property as a "bundle of rights" which really just means that there are are set of things that one can and can't do with physical property, some of which obtain in some circumstances and not in others. "Physical possession" doesn't really define it.
That's neither here nor there for anything substantive, of course.
"Intellectual Property" may seem like less of a weird metaphor once you understand that, for lawyers, there's no single right that constitutes "property" in a physical good, either; lawyers talk about property as a "bundle of rights" which really just means that there are are set of things that one can and can't do with physical property, some of which obtain in some circumstances and not in others. "Physical possession" doesn't really define it.
So I gather, but the internal consistency of the underlying (for lack of a better word) metaphors seems like it might be informative in some cases. I mean, like "murder", I understand it gets complicated, but there is a ground truth most likely. "Intellectual property" and we're already in heady territory.
set of things that one can and can't do with physical property
Cool. What is "physical property"?
Also, original posters -- can we move the party thread back up to the top? Come to our party on Friday and SEE PROFITS FROM INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS TRANSFORMED INTO BOOZE.
Cool. What is "physical property"?
Theft!
Tweety, here's a kinda shitty Wikipedia link to the bundle of rights concept. There's nothing really untoward about thinking of IP rights as a kind of property right conveyed by a certain set of laws, because that's what all property is.
Gilt edges (tho' I think you really call them gilts) are an old fashioned British word for Treasuries. I learnt all my financial terms from British books written in early eighties; that's why I remain convinced that Dsquared's friends don't have to balance their books till the end of the fortnight, all turn up on the floor at the same time and so-on.
Yes: what we have instead of markets in cities and countries is called taxes. Few people seem to suggest replacing copyright with taxes, oddly enough. I'd probably prefer that, on account of being a socialist who likes the idea of getting rid of the free market in cultural things.
Also, that history of property is uh, not what I would call sound. In point of fact, lots of societies have concepts of property in things like songs, dances, etc., things that aren't really physically ownable.
Am I wrong in thinking that "property law" per se is a multi-century tradition of jurisprudence based on reifying traditional feudal notions of ownership and inheritance of, like, land and the shit you could build on it? Because then I'd like to move on to applying that to somebody remixing an mp3 of an autotuned track with the pachelbel progression.
Few people seem to suggest replacing copyright with taxes, oddly enough.
I'm down. Let's raise an army.
Also, that history of property is uh, not what I would call sound. In point of fact, lots of societies have concepts of property in things like songs, dances, etc., things that aren't really physically ownable.
Oh, sure. I mean, you can apply the concept of property to pretty much anything! But at a certain point doesn't it stop being a useful framework? I mean, you could describe almost anything as "dirt" but after a while it loses its explanatory power.
Am I wrong in thinking that "property law" per se is a multi-century tradition of jurisprudence based on reifying traditional feudal notions of ownership and inheritance of, like, land and the shit you could build on it?
Not really, but the concept of property rights in nonrivalrous, nontangible goods is also many, many centuries old.
None of this is to imply that I think it's impossible to apply property law per se to creative and/or digital works. It happens all the time! It just seems insane, like evaluating electrical current by reference to vital humour.
Few people seem to suggest replacing copyright with taxes, oddly enough.
Someone was telling me, but I have not bothered to verify it, that in Canada a deal was worked out where a surcharge was added to blank CDs in exchange for relaxed rules on music file sharing. I keep meaning to compare blank CD prices across the border, but apparently I don't care enough, or buy CDs often enough, to do so.
425: it's the asymptotic nonexcludability that really messes with the framework, I'd think.
Honestly, the "property" argument here strikes me as a total non-issue. You're just describing rights held in a legal regime to ownership of certain kinds of goods. What IP law does is establish a property interest in certain kinds of goods -- you can quibble about whether and how that interest should apply, but what else should we call something that you can own, trade, market, exclude people from, etc. -- spinach??
I'm quibbling with the idea that they're something that you can own, market and exclude people from. You sort of can, marginally, but okay so we're talking about diverting part of a mighty river: shouldn't we work from the premise of water rights?
Eh, I think if I have a song, which I call mine, and which nobody else has the right to use, and that I can sell, then it makes sense to call that property. It doesn't seem any crazier than asserting that I own a patch of a land I have never seen, I will never see, have few rights to exclude people from, and have no interest in, something that can happen quite easily in terms of land.
My theory, which belongs to me, is mine. That is the theory that I have, and which is mine, and what it is too.
they're something that you can own, market and exclude people from. You sort of can, marginally
Huh? Marginally? That's the whole point of having the property right.
I declare that this comment is mine, and assert that nobody else has the right to respond to it, read it, or quote from it, on penalty of maximal possibly legal action, up to and including a suit seeking monetary damages.
Also, I assume that illegal downloading is what people are talking about when -- as they do in EVERY SINGLE FUCKING OK CUPID PROFILE -- they say they are looking for a "partner in crime."
434 -- well, that's not a property right you have, just like I can't declare the high rise I'm working in mine by smearing my blood on it.
Wow, now OK Cupid seems to think I should date someone who says "I own the worlds largest collection of Golden Girls themed erotica." Maybe I should date this person!
Speaking of the party, I'm rapidly losing my will power to drive 800 miles round trip and as of yet have not RSVP'd.
They might go out for sushi and not pay.
||
Hey, Sifu, I just got back to my desktop to find that one of my daughters had typed "robot inventions" into the search field.
|>
Paren, you should come!! Ignore my stupid ranting on this thread. K-Sky will be there too.
437: arbitrarily, no. But if I did, it would be just as asymptotically unenforceable as everything else in IP, because enforcement relies on making information work like property.
439: You could just move to LA.
I know I *should* come, and even that I will regret it if I don't. I just can't quite square it with the idea of being in the car for that long.
443: Good god, no.
They might do coke.
Think bigger and more exciting, like putting up prostitution ads and robbing the johns. Then it's time to do some coke.
Halford, can you email re: floor space at the party? Is that still ok? What should I bring? Email address linked.
I haven't seen Halford's floors, but I understand there are enough of them to have a party.
Heh, I meant for me to sleep on, post-party.
439: No wavering! I'm actually really looking forward to the drive; too bad the carpool didn't work out.
450: I RSVP'd. That'll help with the wavering. And yeah, it is a pity that the carpool didn't work out. If my car breaks down, I'm expecting a ride back.
x.trapnel's piece linked at the end of 300.1 is good.
Sorry I'm not adding any value, and in fact sound like I'm making random remarks
But no; as Halford has told us, marketing is an essential aspect of the production and consumption of creative works!
The party on Friday is just a vehicle for Halford to distribute his views on copyright law.
But does he have a license for the public performance of the music?
What IP law does is establish a property interest in certain kinds of goods -- you can quibble about whether and how that interest should apply, but what else should we call something that you can own, trade, market, exclude people from, etc. -- spinach??
There's a reason that Levine & Boldrin titled their book "Against Intellectual Monopoly"; because thinking of it as monopoly is more natural. Just as with other statutorily granted monopolies, especially back when things like "the exclusive right to sell X in jurisdiction Y" where a lot more common, it's not about controlling what happens with a given object, but what others are allowed to do with their own objects. I'm not allowed to steal Halford's new screenplay, because that's his property; once he sells that (physical) screenplay to me, the idea that I'm not allowed to film something based on it without getting an additional permission from him (the right to make a derivative work) is actually a detraction from the traditional idea of property, which goes to intuitions about, yes, the scope of the bundle of rights that ought to go together. It was this intuitive insistence, for instance, that preserved the first sale doctrine (ie: you're allowed to resell a book you buy), which content industries have always hated, and are in the process of finally destroying in the digital era.
Which is why Halford's "oh it's all just a bundle of rights" is so odd to hear from an IP maximalist--"it's ok to call it property, because 'property' doesn't really mean anything, it's just a set of historically variable rights." That's just to complete ignore how the concept is actually used in public debates over IP, where "property" is used precisely because it brings with it connotations from the world of physical property--in particular, connotations about theft being bad that are driven by rivalrousness. (And RH still hasn't shown why his claims about marketing & distribution have anything to do with rivalrousness as standardly defined.)
A fundamental triumph in the history of capitalism was the legal recognition that revenue loss from competition is not a legally cognizable harm. Sure, it clearly is a harm in an intuitive sense; if you're making widgets for half the price I sell them at, and I'm going out of business, life sucks for me. But having the legal system say, "Sorry, your business model is not our problem" was and is a hugely important part of drives economic growth. And the patent system in particular is all about claiming that no, for reasons A and B and C, that just doesn't apply to our special and precious industry.
Look, no monopolist ever wants to give up its legal privileges. And any industry organized around legally defined rights-to-participate will organize itself around those rights--it will shift to a higher-cost, higher-return model, for example; investors will look for and reward getting those rights, &c. That doesn't mean it's good for the rest of the society. Anyway. I really do recommend the Levine & Boldrin book, it's a good read, despite being written by economists.
so this is why the strongest international films have consistently come from developing nations (lately Nigeria) with the absolute weakest IP protections?
I am not sure if Sifu is being sarcastic here or not. If not, then he has very odd taste in films. (Nollywood, Sifu? Really?)
A fundamental triumph in the history of capitalism was the legal recognition that revenue loss from competition is not a legally cognizable harm.
Eh, untrue. It is very definitely a legally cognizable harm if you are being undercut by monopolistic practices, or by `dumping' of products.
Well, yes; and, obviously, from patent/copyright infringement. I'm talking about the general principle--that one doesn't have a right to one's market share.
But it's kind of a massive caveat. This principle applies, except where it doesn't. And where doesn't it? Where, without intervention, the market fails. Which is, exactly and specifically, the assertion in the case of copyright and patent law. So it doesn't answer that assertion.
I once asked a guy who works in Russia distribution for a major studio (not a client) how that works. His response was basically "You don't want to know, and we don't want to know." Basically, mob control substitutes for copyright control.
Well, yes. When you have IP owners to begin with, who perceive high value in their IP but little legal means to control distribution, they're going to use nefarious means to try to assert that control, especially given that in the modern world lax IP law and rampant gangsterism are frequently coterminous. And to a certain extent that will happen even absent production IP - if distributing content is profitable, then the mob will want in. But that's my point - distribution is profitable or at least incentivised in itself, regardless of the incentives of the producer/owner.
So it doesn't answer that assertion.
I should have been clearer here: I think often, especially with accusations of 'dumping,' accusations of 'monopolistic anticompetitive practices' are really about protecting incumbents from competition. But the underlying point behind antimonopoly laws is precisely to preserve competition, whereas the point of patents and copyrights is to outlaw competition. It's an entirely different model of what drives innovation and growth.
As I've said before, I'm hardly a pure Friedman pere et fils guy; I think the world needs many fewer economists, and many more economic sociologists. But patents aren't some sophisticated social-embeddedness-aware improvement over libertarian naivite; they're about creating a privatized License Raj.
The Permit Raj ended famine in India. Just, you know. Pointing that out.
Saying that the point of patents and copyrights is to outlaw competition is nonsense. The point of patents and copyright is encourage competition: competition in the production of intellectual property.
The Permit Raj ended famine in India. Just, you know. Pointing that out.
Wouldn't it be truer to say "the government that introduced the Permit Raj also ended famine in India"? Because centrally-planned economies can have famines too, and non-centrally-planned ones often don't.
Also, The Bihar Famine of 1966 happened under the Permit Raj.
Which was (a) the only one since independence, and (b) handled comparatively well.
The politico-economic system known as the Permit Raj was the same politico-economic system that ended famine in India. In particular, although this is hazy, I'm pretty sure it was non-market central planning that was used to mitigate the effects of droughts and other interruptions to the food supply.
In general I dislike lazy references to the `Permit Raj' given that if I was able to choose any time in history to be a peasant cultivator in India, the Permit Raj would be a solid second to right now. I also think that as a socialist, it's good practice to point out positive achievements of socialist economic systems, as opposed to the ostensible free market liberalism that preceded it.
Fair point. But I'm really not sure that you could call British India an example of free market liberalism. A country in which a large chunk of the population was still being ruled by hereditary absolute monarchs?
Saying that the point of patents and copyrights is to outlaw competition is nonsense. The point of patents and copyright is encourage competition: competition in the production of intellectual property.
Nice. But in that sense, giving the East India Company a monopoly on importing tea isn't outlawing competition, it's encouraging it; competition in the importation of goods.
Or, more accurately, competition in the conquest of sources of goods.
Ostensible free market liberalism; British India was not free market liberal in the sense that it was an example of shining freedom and so on, but rather in the sense that it was governed by men who knew their Bentham and Mill. (Or, rather, were Mill.)
At least, the Raj was. The HEIC was of course mercantile, and thus shady as hell for a lot of the Smithians involved.
Non-intervention in religion in particular was a very unpopular policy with the liberal (Wilberforcite) element, who felt it was a horrible sin to not help the Indian into the Christian fold. (See also sati & the suppression thereof &, of course, Jane Eyre.)
461
Saying that the point of patents and copyrights is to outlaw competition is nonsense. The point of patents and copyright is encourage competition: competition in the production of intellectual property.
This is kind of silly. Recent US copyright law was largely written by and for entities that control valuable copyrights. The interests of society as a whole were not given much weight. The case of patent law is similar with the addition of the malign influnce of the patent bar.
I thought that when Amartya Sen compared the record of famine of India and China post-colonialism, he credited the free market and democratic elements of the Indian system with preventing the kind of disasters that struck China. Also, China's famines ended with the introduction of market reforms.
In general, I thought the record was good for free markets and free information preventing famine, because government control generally leads to hoarding.
Am I confused? Oversimplifying?
470: confused, I think. It's not so much a free market but an accountable government and a free press that prevents famines, in (a massive oversimplification of) Sen's view.
I think Sen's conclusion was that democracy was good for famine prevention. This was explained as the owing to the role of the government in intervening and fixing problems arising --- i.e. an essentially interventionist approach to the issue.
Given that Sen cites Kerala and West Bengal (i.e Communist) states as examples of states dealing well with poverty, I would be wary of using him to defend `free markets and free information' without caveats around the role of the state.
Eh, I'm mostly sick of this conversation, but Trapnel is mostly just saying ad nauseum that protecting an incumbent's rights isn't sufficient justification for a policy, which is true enough but not really the issue.
The question is figuring out how to set up the legal structure for property rights in culture, and I've been pointing out reasons why property rights are needed not only to incentivize production, which is commonly thought of, but also to preserve systems of marketing and distribution that are protected for IP for similar reasons that we have property in tangible property.
The "competition" idea is kind of neither here nor there. All property rights, in some sense, reduce "competition" as do almost all forms of regulation. Despite what libertarians and law professors love to say, there is no unlimited right to free competition -- we have a highly regulated marketplace that contains all kinds of legal restrictions. The question is whether -- and how -- particular kinds of IP are useful or not for a whole range of interests, including preserving and channeling production, protecting author's interests, etc. That's why you actually need to talk about the right at issue instead of just tooling around in the world of abstractions (which doesn't mean that every IP law everywhere is a good thing).
Here's another vote for "intellectual property" being an unhelpful metaphor. Sure, property is a bundle of rights that can differ over conventional types of property, so it's a comprehensible metaphor -- it's not completely insane. But to the extent it tempts you to think about patents and copyrights by analogy with conventional, tangible property, it's going to warp your intuition unhelpfully.
What I find the most misleading aspect is that the expiration of intellectual property rights is a huge public policy issue -- it would be insane for someone to be able to own, say, the idea of the wheel, or the words and characters of the Iliad. IP has to somehow enter the public domain at some point, or the world grinds to a halt. Conventional property, on the other hand, someone has to own -- there aren't a lot of physical objects that are literally unowned, and as soon as someone starts interacting with them, they usually become owned pretty quickly. (Really, all I'm coming up with are game animals.)
The difference between a regime where the base state of some piece of information, like the text of Romeo and Juliet or how to build an internal combustion engine, is that it's unowned and unownable in the absence of a specific provision of law granting someone rights to control it somehow, and a regime where the base state of any physical object is that someone almost certainly owns it, is huge in terms of how you think and feel about the issues.
474, obviously, is not responsive at all to 473, which wasn't up yet when I started writing.
I don't care if you call it "Francis," but you need to call it something, and valuable rights that you can own and sell are generally thought of as property, which is why I think the usage will stick around forever.
I think 474 is broadly right and gets to the reluctance folks have sometimes to the "property" idea, but it also points out why you have to think about the different rights differently (there isn't just one "intellectual property"). Copyright actually is, with good reason, something you really do own as soon as you've created the work; a patent is not something you own until you go through an incredibly boring process with the patent office that only LS can handle; ideas themselves are never subject to a property right; trademark is, or can be, effectively perpetual. When, how, and why those rights come into being and when (or in the case of trademark, if) they expire are not easy or obvious questions.
Anyhow, I mostly just want to make fun of "Information wants to be FREEEEEEEEEEE" (said in the "we'll beat anyone's price or your mattress is FREEEEEEEE" voice).
I don't care if you call it "Francis," but you need to call it something...
I call it Cincinnatus, but I don't go around insisting that everybody else does.
Anyhow, I mostly just want to make fun of "Information wants to be FREEEEEEEEEEE"
Seemingly because you don't really get what it is supposed to mean.
I don't care if you call it "Francis," but you need to call it something,
It's not going to happen, but I do think monopoly is a better metaphor, and would clarify people's thinking. You patent something, and you have a monopoly on its sale for a limited time period. You create an artwork, same thing. If you're talking monopoly, it feels more like an artificial situation that goes away when the government stops imposing it, as opposed to property, which feels as if it would persist in some fashion under any plausible system of law.
But you're right that messing with the names doesn't settle what good policy is, and while I know which way I lean ("Information is naturally FREEEEEEE except where intentionally controlled by deliberate government action"), I don't have detailed policy thoughts.
Whether taken descriptively or normatively, it's a pretty dumb slogan.
Information was born free, yet everywhere is in chain stores.
Slogans per se are sort of dumb. It is, however, a very useful descriptive phrase. What's the slogan for the pro-perpetual-copyright side? "We must destroy creative endeavor in order to save it"?
480: I dunno, if you take it as addressing my point in 474, that most information is FREEEEEEEE and that unless the IP laws are set up such that information will become FREEEEEEEE at some point, we've got a real problem, then I think it says something true and important.
I'm one of the few folks I know who believes that retroactively extending copyright was on balance a good, or at least not obviously terrible, thing
I'd really like to hear the argument for this. I'm hardly an information wants to be freeeeee absolutist (though I do, as befits a good procedural liberal, favor things like compulsory licensing and stronger protections for fair use). But I can't even conjure up in my imagination a non-bad-faith argument for the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (though one must exist, given my presumption of good faith on Halford's part). Indeed, I'm favorably disposed to the argument (one rejected by the courts, alas) that it was flat out unconstitutional.
a non-bad-faith argument for the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act
It sure stopped "Mickey Meets the Tranformers" cold.
Conventional property, on the other hand, someone has to own -- there aren't a lot of physical objects that are literally unowned, and as soon as someone starts interacting with them, they usually become owned pretty quickly. (Really, all I'm coming up with are game animals.)
YOU WILL SHORTLY BE RECEIVING A LETTER FROM ONE'S LAWYERS.
It is not FREEEEEE to create "information," to produce it, or disseminate it. And throughout human history people have generally treated information in various ways, some subject to government control, some not, that made it not FREEEEEE, of which the current IP regime is but one example. It makes about as much sense, and is about as simplistic and dumb, as saying "the market wants to be FREEEEEEEE."
Like I'm supposed to google things before a spout wisdom.
It is not FREEEEEE to create "information," to produce it, or disseminate it.
Much of the science world works to disseminate information for free. Or really for status points that let them get more money to produce more information. But even the people who write stories about Kirk and Spock going for Teh Gay make more money from writing than I do.
It is not FREEEEEE to create "information,"
As a generalization, I'm not sure what this means. It can be FREEEEEEE to create information in the same sense that it's FREEEEEEE to walk on the public streets -- when I write a blog post or take a walk, I'm incurring opportunity costs, and I need to have spent money on food in the past so that I can be alive while doing so, but there's no sense in which it's necessarily less FREEEEEEEE to create information than to sit around and scratch myself. (Depending on the 'information' created, it might cost -- Avatar cost a bunch to create, blog posts don't cost much of anything -- but there's no necessary cost).
It is not FREEEEEE to create "information," to produce it, or disseminate it.
In the first case, it takes labor, yes. Assigning value to labor: reasonable! So far so good.
In the second case, in many cases it takes materials, yes, although the marginal cost of those materials for many types of information approaches zero.
In the third case, traditionally it has cost quite a bit (in terms of resources and time) to disseminate information, but that changes with the advent of digital reproduction to a world where the marginal cost of dissemination (excluding marketing and promotion, because that's an artifact of the system) again approaches zero.
So this is maybe not so meaningful a statement.
throughout human history people have generally treated information in various ways
Are you an undergrad?
It makes about as much sense, and is about as simplistic and dumb, as saying "the market wants to be FREEEEEEEE."
There is an implicit metaphor here which is 1. banned and 2. doesn't make sense, I think.
but there's no sense in which it's necessarily less FREEEEEEEE to create information than to sit around and scratch myself
Have you deal with an IRB?
As sure as the sun will rise in the east, Disney will engage, or perhaps has already engaged, the brightest minds in the Hollywood IP lawyering trade to come up with a rationale and a legislative vehicle for extending the Mickey Mouse copyright beyond 2028. Maybe Mickey and Donald could be declared sacred national treasures, and Disney appointed as the sole guardian thereof in perpetuity.
Actually, if I had to guess, I'd say they will try to build a case around trademark law -- with additional legislative intervention as needed -- on the theory that the Disney characters are more than a creative product, they are a distinctive character that constitutes the very essence of the brand, and thus cannot be copied without committing illegal infringement.
And throughout human history people have generally treated information in various ways, some subject to government control, some not, that made it not FREEEEEE, of which the current IP regime is but one example.
This, also. Where you're not talking about government control (come to think, I don't know much about IP systems other than those ancestral to ours), I don't know what you mean other than "people have throughout history kept information secret to maintain control over it". Once information is publically known and not subject to government control, what does it mean for it not to be FREEEEEE?
the brightest minds in the Hollywood IP lawyering trade
This is a high but I think appropriate compliment to pay Halford.
Once information is publically known and not subject to government control, what does it mean for it not to be FREEEEEE?
In Sumeria they used a magical wand of forgetting.
498: I'd be embarrassed about not having known that, but, hey, wand.
"That wand was really forgettable" is the type of thing Sumerian women were always saying.
they are a distinctive character that constitutes the very essence of the brand
In the case of the mouse ears, this could have some merit. But they'll probably need to buy another act of Congress to get Ariel and Jasmine covered under the same theory.
To 484, one argument is that, by giving owners control over their back catalogue for a few more years, during just the period in which the studios and publishing firms were starting to take preservation seriously, it increased the incentive to preserve and exploit works that would have fallen into total obscurity or disuse if put into the public domain. I don't totally buy that argument, but it is certainly the case that there are a good number of works that really are being preserved or combed for future exploitation precisely because the rights in them are still valuable.
I'm not arguing that Disney's motives were altruistic.
I think the bigger lesson of the 1998 law is that it didn't matter that much. Yes, there are fewer unlicensed Mickey Mouse knockoffs, but the willingness to exploit the public domain for works outside the copyright period has been pretty limited, and it's not like licensing has ground to a halt.
"That wand was really forgettable" is the type of thing Sumerian women were always saying.
That's why Sumerian men boycotted them in favor of barbarian women from the steppes of Central Asia, and that was the start of the fall of their civilization.
the willingness to exploit the public domain for works outside the copyright period has been pretty limited
Isn't that an argument for maintaining a shorter copyright period? So that the works retain more relevance to contemporary cultural production?
I ain't saying she's a gold digger, but she ain't going with no broke ziggur(at).
the willingness to exploit the public domain for works outside the copyright period
Right, because the works available outside the copyright period are f'in' ancient, often incredibly deteriorated, and well past the point of meaningful cultural relevance. How you get from this to:
the bigger lesson of the 1998 law is that it didn't matter that much
is a bit of a mystery, especially when the willingness to exploit recent works intentionally placed outside the copyright/licensing framework (free software, creative commons) has been enormous.
pwned, but my information was freer.
506 continued: the willingness to forego monetary benefit in order to illegally exploit works still covered by the copyright framework has, not incidentally, also been enormous.
I just mean that there hav always been regimes, some legal and run by the government, some not, for creating things that look like ownership rights in culture. In tribal societies that's often done by custom; in patronage societies, by having works belong directly to the patron; in Europe before the 18th century, through guild restrictions. In the absence of any restriction whatsoever, sure, if I show you something and you copy it it's yours for the cost of making the copy, but there's a pretty strong human instinct to assert some form of ownership right over one's creations, as the indignantt "you're copying me" from a toddler instructs. How that gets translated into law is a different question, of course.
I'm not sure how much we want to highlight the fact that toddlers are the clearest indicators of human instinct.
In tribal societies that's often done by custom; in patronage societies, by having works belong directly to the patron; in Europe before the 18th century, through guild restrictions.
I want to argue about all of this. I don't know what you mean about tribal societies at all -- who specifically would have been prohibited (by whatever means) from making what use of what publicly available information? I'm not looking for a whole anthropological dissertation, but I can't think of how a single example would work. Having works belong directly to the patron? I'm not familiar with this other than as physical possession of an artwork, and the right to physically prevent access to the artwork for copying purposes. I could be wrong, but can you give me an example of a situation where information was public, but nonetheless 'belonged to a patron' such that the patron had a right to control its dissemination?
And guilds, again -- I'm familiar with guild secrets. I'm not familiar with information that was known to the public but over which guilds had the right or ability to restrict the usage of.
To 504, 508 -- the retroactive extension was 20 years for pre-1978 works; I'm just saying that the relative lack of attention to PD works outside that period suggests that there may not have been legions awaiting to creat the utopian culture of the future by showing films or copying books of the late 1920s for free. I guess we'll see what happens when the extension expires.
Of course people want to copy things that are recent more -- that's why the rights are more valuable.
there's a pretty strong human instinct to assert some form of ownership right over one's creations, as the indignantt "you're copying me" from a toddler instructs.
On the veldt, everyone demanded intellectual property rights and enforced them with temper tantrums?
Further to 511 last: Of course there were circumstances where guilds had governmentally granted monopolies on engaging in a given trade, which would be related to an intellectual property regime. But that's not what we're talking about, because it's a governmentally granted monopoly.
Having works belong directly to the patron? I'm not familiar with this other than as physical possession of an artwork, and the right to physically prevent access to the artwork for copying purposes. I could be wrong, but can you give me an example of a situation where information was public, but nonetheless 'belonged to a patron' such that the patron had a right to control its dissemination?
So we're not talking about "I commissioned that van Eyck, it's hanging on my wall, and no, Mr Struggling Apprentice Painter, you can't come into my house and copy it". We're talking about "I commissioned that Bellini sculpture of myself, it's out there in the public square, and the laws of the city will prevent you, Mr Struggling Sculptor, from copying it".
I am instinctively doubtful that this ever happened. In fact, I've just been to an entire exhibition that might as well have been called "Caravaggio And The Dudes Who Completely Ripped Off His Paintings".
Well, yeah. Lots of what I know about pre-modern art is about the culture of copying, and I've never heard about a right to prevent copying other than the right to hide the original artwork from the public. I'm not saying it never happened, but I don't understand what Halford means.
Yes, there are fewer unlicensed Mickey Mouse knockoffs, but the willingness to exploit the public domain for works outside the copyright period has been pretty limited, and it's not like licensing has ground to a halt.
Huh? What about Google Books ? Or the Gutenberg Project? Penguin Classics? The myriad places offering public domain images (42.7m hits on Google)? Oh, look, a a recently released lovingly curated DVD of out of copyright Chaplin films.
This is the part of the argument I don't understand. I get the production incentive side, though I think there's plenty of room for change to the law while maintaining or even improving those incentives. But people exploit unprotected material all the time because the material has value to the consumer.
LB, I think it's the "information that was public" in your hypothetical that's causing the problem -- once information is public, it is tautological to say that it's publically accessible. My point, was that almost all societies have had methods for constraining information that are designed to protect or reify the rights of creators or owners of culture -- indeed, the very notion of a "public" that could or should freely obtain information is very much the product o the 18th century and beyond. In the medieval guild system, this was largely done by restricting publishers to a narrowly-limited monopoly and restricting circulation; in patronage socieites, by both guild restrictions and the notion that a particular artist "belonged" to a particular patron, in tribal socieites (about which I know muchless) through rituals that govern who can create and who can display cultural goods. Plenty of these regimes looked quite different than copyright, which is designed to work in modern capitalism, but I think the general idea that cultural production and consumption is controlled and limited so as to convey special rights to creators or patrons is the norm in human history, not the exception. "Here's my creation, go copy it, general public" is not really that common.
I can't tell whether this is the argument you think we're having, but that's the only point I was trying to make.
But that's not what we're talking about, because it's a governmentally granted monopoly.
Either a guild would have to be granted a monopoly or a guild would have to just in general capture the ability to employ force to stop people form copying it. The later probably happened at some point in the past, but that get real close to organized crime (e.g. the mob has special knowledge of how to collect garbage in NYC without getting your truck set on fire).
Actually, my "here's my creation go copy it" point is badly expressed -- there were certainly cultures that encouraged copying but severely restricted who could do the copying (monks, priests, guild certified artists). In capitalism we dint like those kinds of restrictions but have created the right in the work itself.
I'm just saying that the relative lack of attention to PD works outside that period suggests that there may not have been legions awaiting to creat the utopian culture of the future by showing films or copying books of the late 1920s for free
Well, you know, apart from Google's utopian project of digitising and making available for free (in the US anyway) every single public domain book in the world.
there were certainly cultures that encouraged copying but severely restricted who could do the copying (monks, priests, guild certified artists).
The limitation was more a case of books being very expensive and literate people who could copy them very rare. I am not sure that a literate layman in mediaeval Europe who bought a manuscript book and copied it out himself would have broken any laws.
Sure, Google books is out there, but is there really a meaningful or deep sense in which the culture of, say, 1931 is substantially less accessible to folks than the culture of 1919? That's what I mean by "not that big a deal."
523 -- maybe, but if you tried to sew a particular pattern that was the provenance of a particular guild, you sure would have.
is there really a meaningful or deep sense in which the culture of, say, 1931 is substantially less accessible to folks than the culture of 1919?
Apart from being able to get 1919 stuff free, instantly, at will, you mean?
518: I hate to be a jerk about this, but you really seem to me to be blowing smoke without much in the way of facts here, which leaves your conclusion: "I think the general idea that cultural production and consumption is controlled and limited so as to convey special rights to creators or patrons is the norm in human history, not the exception," unsupported.
Put the tribal societies to one side, because you don't seem to be talking about anything specific.
Pre-modern Europe, you're talking about medieval publishers with tightly limited monopolies? Like, before the invention of the printing press? It's hard for me to say that this never happened -- that there wasn't someone, somewhere, granted a monopoly over making and selling manuscripts, but I'll swear it wasn't a norm. Can you give me an example of a country and a century, so I can figure out what you mean?
the notion that a particular artist "belonged" to a particular patron
First, this is an odd way to describe the relationship; a modern employment relationship isn't right either, but it's closer. Second, what does this have to do with restrictions on the right to copy or use artwork once it's been created?
"Here's my creation, go copy it, general public" is not really that common.
I'm not seeing you coming up with actual counterexamples here, much less enough to support your claim that something that serves the purpose of IP protection has been a norm throughout history. (or something like that -- not claiming that this is a perfect paraphrase of your point.)
there were certainly cultures that encouraged copying but severely restricted who could do the copying (monks, priests, guild certified artists)
Were there certainly such cultures? Can you give me a country and a century? I can think of periods where it was really unlikely that anyone other than a cleric would be literate, so essentially all of the copying of literature was done by priests and monks. I'm not coming up with a period where that was enforced in any way such that, e.g., it would have been a problem for the rare literate layman to copy a book for himself.
Sure, Google books is out there, but is there really a meaningful or deep sense in which the culture of, say, 1931 is substantially less accessible to folks than the culture of 1919? That's what I mean by "not that big a deal."
Well, yes. I have to pay (or pay more) for the former. I'm limited to the editions the IP holders have allowed to be released. I can't, beyond fair use, make and distribute my own editions. And so on. To give a more contemporary example, there is/was a thriving abandonware community patching, promoting and distributing videogames which weren't legally available through any means. In 99% of cases it's far, far easier to play a properly abandoned PC game from the 80s or 90s now than it is if the IP holder is asserting its rights. It wasn't until Good Old Games demonstrated, hey, people are actually willing to pay for this stuff, that the vast majority of those IP holders showed any interest in doing anything other than squatting on their rights.
I am not sure that a literate layman in mediaeval Europe who bought a manuscript book and copied it out himself would have broken any laws.
To be slightly stronger than I was above, I am sure that in the vast majority of places and times describable as medieval Europe, he would not have. I can't swear that there was never, anywhere, a no-copying except by monks regulation, but they weren't the norm.
529: even if there were some kind of Guild of Copyists, with a legally enforced monopoly on copying books, that is not an intellectual property protection measure, it's a trade restriction measure. The object is to ensure a good income for the guild members by controlling the number of copyists around - just as with any other guild. It's not to restrict copying of specific documents in order to protect their creators' income and give them an incentive to produce more. None of the copyists' profits end up with the content creator, and there are no limits on how many copies of what you can have made, as long as you can afford the copyists' fees.
No, but there was (and in some places still is) active suppression of literacy of entire groups of people (peasants, women, blacks etc). This was/is less about controlling the right to copy than controlling access to the copied material, but still.
531: well, no, not "but still" - that's not an intellectual property protection measure either, that's a measure of social control. It's got nothing to do with conferring special rights on the creators of specific IP.
And of course none of this speaks to whether any particular modern IP regime is a good or a bad idea from a policy point of view.
531 makes a good point. Guilds didn't control intellectual property in the way Disney does. They did it the way Apple does, by keeping the format unreadable without using their own soft wet ware.
534: Except that there's no sense in which guilds controlled literacy. You could say that the church controlled literacy in a lot of places and times, but that's a different organization.
And there were always literate laypeople.
536: There were always people who had a home threater projection system, but that doesn't mean the $800 VHS wasn't a huge change.
Sure, but we're drifting here.
I mean, the guilds didn't control literacy, but they were operating in a different envirnoment because literacy was so rare.
538: I tried to have a normal conversation with Sumerian puns, but nobody except KR tried to go along.
Right -- literal copying of text was an elite activity, because literacy was rare. Musical performance was common and non-elite, though, and can anyone think of a pre-modern-IP equivalent of any sort of property right in a musical composition?
As fair as I know, if you could walk away whistling it, you could get paid for playing it the next day.
And, again, don't forget that the proposition here is "that cultural production and consumption is controlled and limited so as to convey special rights to creators or patrons is the norm in human history".
A body that restricts literacy among women or peasants or slaves isn't doing so in order to convey special rights to creators or patrons. It's doing so for social control reasons.
The Soviet Union controlled who could own photocopiers and fax machines, but that wasn't an IP protection policy either.
As fair as I know, if you could walk away whistling it, you could get paid for playing it the next day.
Or put it in your own opera without permission. Mozart did that in "Don Giovanni".
525: Again, I hate to keep being a jerk about this, but if this was broadly true in pre-modern Europe, it's news to me. The way fashions moved around, as far as I know, was you saw it, you remembered what it looked like, you made a copy.
Like I keep on saying, I can't say that no one ever had a monopoly on reproducing a particular pattern, but I can't think of anything of the sort, and I'm pretty sure they can't have been all that common.
LB, I'm working from a phone, and I recognize this is a conversation in whih I've compressed a bunch of different thoghts.
Robert Darnton is pretty good on the pre-18th century publishing regime, as are many others. Basically, the story of creating ownership rights is coextensive with the growth of cheap printing; the original notion was to strictly limit the number of printers and set total production numbers, while setting restrictions on the works created. Eventually this led to a too-powerful printers monopoly, and, after England in the statute of Anne, modern copyright law took shape. There was never a moment of unqualified free dissemination of printed material.
The medieval book industry had Production guilds, and was limited by monks and their willingness to copy from one another's library. Ajay is right to say that technology was the primary limitation on dissemination (ie, books were expensive to make) but it is far from the only one -- dissemination of books to copy were strictly regulated by library owners and other authorities.
For premodern artistic creation, a common relationship was the patron-artist connection, in which a single patron would agree to support a single artist in exchange for payment and the possession of his works. Access to the artisti profession, in turn, was limiTed by guild membership. Again, while the restrictions were mostly on the labor side, there was nothing like a free market in artistic information.
Tribal societies often limited the right to create, e.g., wall paintings to a particular group or individual with secret knowledge, but I can't give you a cite from the phone.
Many of these systems look quite different than modern copyright, but in none of them did you have a free and unlimited right to cultural production or borrowing.
For example, publishers were strictly limited in number and in the texts they could publish, and were forced into set negotiations with authors -- no one else could publish a work. But LB, you are missing the point by thinking that I'm arguing that something like copyright was perpetual. The point is that pretty much all societies have had some mechanisms for restricting ownership of culture, whether through the labor side (guilds and their restrictions) or through creating ownership in the objects themselves. All I'm claiming is that the idea that culture is free of claims of possession is not at all the norm of human history.
As fair as I know, if you could walk away whistling it, you could get paid for playing it the next day.
I think Halford's "twas ever thus" argument fails empirically, as LB says. He would actually be on sounder footing by reversing course and saying "The contemporary world is radically different, copying and redistribution is effectively costless, so we need this new-fangled innovation of intellectual property rights, for the same reason patents for inventions became indispensible with the rise of industrial manufacturing."
I'll drift.
Physical property is protected spatially, by restricting access to places and persons. A person's home is their castle, but if you put your couch on the street, don't expect to control who can sit on it. Physical property is protected in private space.
Intellectual property is somewhere else. Buy a book, but don't put sections in your newspaper without attribution or permission. But you can write it on your walls. Intellectual property is protected in public space.
Like the Agora, Forum, market, commons. It feels different and new. Shakespeare had the Globe because he had to keep his work in private space to make money. Intellectual property is a step toward privatizing the commons.
Aggh, that comment got garbled. Sorry. Anyhow, of course premodern regimes don't have restrictions on information that look like copyright -- copyright is designed to look like a modern tradeable commodity and is a product of capitalism. But before copyright, cultural production was severely limited in ways that (whether to impose social control, or otherwise) limited the dissemination of information. That this was mostly done on the labor side (i.e., by restricting the number of artists) rather than through creating an alienable commodity in the work itself tells you a lot about precapitalist societies, but doesn't refute the broader point that folks have always been trying tontine ways to set up ownership regimes for culture.
Musicians had guilds, of course, and monestaries had songs; before the advent of pulished sheet music (which was granted IP protection) musicianship was primarily about performance, not song composition, so guild limits on the numbers of musicians made more sense as a form of cultural control.
All I'm claiming is that the idea that culture is free of claims of possession is not at all the norm of human history.
And I'd say that to the extent that you're making claims that anything with any real resemblance to what we now think of as intellectual property was a norm before our current system, those claims are false, and it would be truer (although probably not universal) to say that historically there has generally been a free right to copy and reproduce anything you were physically capable of accessing and reproducing. To the extent that your claims are broader: rich people could hire artists, guilds could keep techniques secret and restrict hiring, owners of art and texts could physically restrict access to them, they don't seem to me to be terribly significant.
Intellectual property is a step toward privatizing the commons.
This is quite right, and Jamie Boyle at Duke has a solid book on this: 'The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind'; from Yale UP, but available for free DL there.
I found his earlier book, "Shamans, Software and Spleens : Law and the Construction of the Information Society" eye-opening when I read it back in '02 or so.
guild limits on the numbers of musicians made more sense as a form of cultural control.
This is the sort of thing that's driving me nuts. What do you mean, guild limits on the number of musicians? When, where? As fair as I know, a very large percentage of the population of almost all pre-industrial societies are musicians of one skill level or another.
But I should stop haranguing you until you're commenting from something other than a phone.
before copyright, cultural production was severely limited in ways that (whether to impose social control, or otherwise) limited the dissemination of information
OK, you see, presumably, that this is a completely different claim from what you originally said, which was "that cultural production and consumption is controlled and limited so as to convey special rights to creators or patrons is the norm in human history".
If you want to alter that to "that cultural production and consumption is controlled and limited is the norm in human history", then no one's going to argue with you. Not everyone was literate. Not everyone could afford books. Not everyone was allowed to learn to read. Not everyone could afford to travel to Leipzig to hear Bach perform.
But that's such an obvious claim that it's meaningless in the context of IP law.
Robert Darnton is pretty good on the pre-18th century publishing regime, as are many others.
Oh goody. Another excuse to pimp one of my all time favourite books, Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre. Said massacre being committed by members of a pre-18th century printers' guild.
Well, early 18th century anyway.
I'm also just baffled at why RH thinks what he's trying to show would have any relevance for the suitability of modern copyright/patent laws in the context of modern society & technology, but I understand that looking to past practice for rules is pretty central to being a lawyer, so I don't hold it against him too much.
On a lighter note regarding life in a Permission Society: 'You have to have a license,' Herr Kunst informed me in an icy tone. 'Or your dog cannot die.'
556: I think he's arguing that the idea of a creator/innovator having special rights over information isn't a modern innovation, but a cross-cultural norm. I don't think he's gotten there, but I think that's the argument.
Now, it's a sideshow -- if it were a cross-cultural norm, that wouldn't mean our IP laws were good, and if it weren't, that wouldn't mean they were bad. But I think it's emotionally important in talking about this stuff: "Of course an artist owns the right to control their works in perpetuity. Are you going to steal that from them by limiting the copyright period?" isn't that far off from arguments I've heard, and pointing out that there's no 'of course' about it can clarify matters.
pointing out that there's no 'of course' about it can clarify matters.
Classic example: The Economist editorializing against the French efforts to impose their version of droit d'auteur (basically, that the copyright owner and heirs are entitled to a share of the appreciation of a work of art that is resold) on the rest of the European Union. To the French mind, "of course" the poor painter's widow is entitled to a share of the millions that accrue when her late husband's genius becomes posthumously recognized by the art market.
I've been pretty unclear here, so let me try and do a better job of explaining what I mean, and then you can all disagree with me or not.
1) I'm not making a claim that "'twas ever thus" -- its more of a claim that "'twas never free." One view of the world says, "hey, before there was copyright, no restrictions on copyng! Free informartion!" But that's an extremely misleading way of thinking about information dissemination in the premodern world.
Take making a tapestry in, say, 1300. Could you, in Paris, replicate a design that you saw on a Flemish tapestry without paying a licensing fee for use of the protected image? Sure! But you had to be a member of a trade guild whose members were severely limited in number in order to do so -- if not, while the copying per se wasn't banned, the overall production of the item was banned. Or, say you were in the goldsmiths guild and you saw someone unknown to you in a street stall using the process for hammering out gold you'd been using for 20 years. Could you sue for patent infringement for your goldsmiths methods patent? Of course not. But you could sue to stop the production of the good entirely, because the person making it wasn't an authorized person to do so.
This kind of regulation in premodern societies was in part pure labor restriction, but it also solved one of the problems that copyright and patent now solves -- how do you compensate artists and inventors? Creating an alienable interest in the creaton is one way of doing it, but limiting the number of people who can become artists or inventors is another way of doing so.
In fact, the premodern forms of labor restriction actually discouraged, rather than encouraged, the free flow of inforrmation -- if you were in a guild, not only did you want to keep your membership low, but you also wanted to keep your methods secret. This kind of approach worked for painting and sculpture as well, where the "workshop" with carefully guarded technique or the particular, lmited patron-artist relationship limited the diffusion of cultural information.
There's a whole literature on the creation of the "public" or "public sphere" in the 18th century which many of you probably know more about than I do, but the broader point is that the idea that "culture" as a whole is something accessible to a "public" -- as opposed to something strictly limited to a particular social hierarchy and regulated production system -- is quite new.
Musicianship is interesting, but the broad point is that while songs -- the "copies" -- were not subject to legal restriction before the advent of broadly disseminated sheet music (which is very recent) that made sense because music was primarily produced through a single performance. The issue of "ownership" of a musical piece was much less salient when it was the performance itself, rather than the composition, that mattered, and you had patronage systems designed to produce performance.
2) The relevance to modern debates is simply that, in my view, it's very wrong to imagine a past or a state of nature in which information was freely disseminated and strict controls over who got to "own" (in the broadest sense) culture. I also think, and this is more controversial and less supported, that this has something to do with a real human need to claim compensation for the labor value put into creative work. That doesn't really tell you much about how to design any particular property regime for cultural production, but it does suggest that it's not a problem you can simply waive away.
cultural production and consumption is controlled and limited so as to convey special rights to creators or patrons is the norm in human history
Certainly false for visual art in Europe from 1400 forwards. Cheap copies of refined works were the norm; woodcuts sold by itinerant peddlers were everywhere. Also reified markets in relatively well-made copies or imitations that varied from place to place, the best documented being in Italy and the low countries.
Writing is a special case, since libraries and scholars belonged to either monasteries or universities. RH might be interested in Lucien Febvre's The Coming of the Book which goes into some detail about control of copying in universities.
Two other examples to consider are cases where copy control was nuts. One is 20th century communism, where access to typewriters and accurate maps was controlled. The second is dynastic China. The ability to make astronomical observations leading to an accurate calendar was a controlled activity, conducted in secrecy. Calendars had ritual significance, and trying to keep independent records or calculate for yourself was a punishable offense. Extreme secrecy is also a common cultural norm, but not one to emulate.
561.1 is right, but I think not inconsistent with the broader point -- the knockoffs were also the subject of a long-running battle to restrict production, limit dissemination, and create value for individual workshops. You can see that story as part of a broader collapse of the guild system.
The Coming of the Book is awesome.
Two other examples to consider are cases where copy control was nuts.
Not to forget the situation in Europe after the advent of cheap printing. The church and various kings imposed tight restrictions (prior approval) on printing books, more as a way of discouraging production of cultural product than encouraging it.
IMO, the main problem with the US patent system is the PTO and the examiners. Same is true with Trademark law (e.g. Edge Games). As well as a number of quirks with federal circuit law that are indefensible.
Most of the abolish-IP folks are just spouting untested, Econ-101 libertarian political theory bullshit, which is about as persuasive in this context as in any other (which is to say, there's a kernel of truth there, but not much more). No one really knows what the effect on innovation of a more liberal IP regime would be, and people love to speculate about their preferred Utopias.
I am a patent attorney. As far as I can tell, the PTO is doing the best they can given the resources they have. They are pretty good at what they do.
Patents are given to spur innovation. They also restrict competition. Whether they spur innovation enough for the anti-competitive effects to be worth it is a hard question. The answer is going to be different based on each technology area. In general, software patents are not needed for innovation. People don't really write software to get patents.
Patents do spur R&D in pharmaceuticals. I would be hesitant to give up patents totally for that area.
What would really make sense is a patent system that is sensitive to the costs/benefits of patents for the different technology areas. This would have the side effect of totally destroying my career though.
But you had to be a member of a trade guild whose members were severely limited in number in order to do so -- if not, while the copying per se wasn't banned, the overall production of the item was banned.
But this isn't true, or at least isn't generally true. A great deal of textile production, including tapestries, was done within households -- for a luxury good like a tapestry, of course only within very wealthy households. A limit on who could have a business making and selling something wasn't anything like a limit on who could make or copy or own it.
Overall, I think you're wildly exaggerating the degree of economic control guilds had over production of goods in a world where a great deal of production was outside the money economy. Guilds were powerful in limited time periods and limited areas, but not everywhere and at all times in 'medieval' and early modern Europe.
it's very wrong to imagine a past or a state of nature in which information was freely disseminated and strict controls over who got to "own" (in the broadest sense) culture.
This sentence got cut off, but I still don't think you've said much to support it. You've identified some specific local circumstances that involve controlling the dissemination of culture, but nothing that establishes a general norm that cultural information can't be freely reproduced where available.
I'm sorry that I missed this conversation.
Is it worth trying to jump in at this point, or is everybody tired of it at this point, since my interests are somewhat orthogonal to this discussion (I have a personal interest in their continuing to be an active market in the distribution of high quality recorded music on CD, which I recognize is an idiosyncratic desire).
Also, I feel like somebody (way) above asked what Compulsory licensing was, and I'd be happy to talk about how that works in the music industry.
Sure, Google books is out there, but is there really a meaningful or deep sense in which the culture of, say, 1931 is substantially less accessible to folks than the culture of 1919?
Yes, and it's clear to anyone whose trying to do research around that period. It's less apparent to people who have affiliations that let them into extremely expensive proprietary databases. But there's a big difference between being able to download a source and having to get it through interlibrary loan, or travel to see it, or otherwise drop a bunch of money to get access for a limited time.
You could dismiss all historical research, of course.
565.1 -- nah, not really, while there was surely general home production of clothing, artistic production of tapestries and the like were heavily guild restricted from an early period. See e.g. this. But the broader point is that when you had a society of orders and inherited professions, you could solve a lot of the ongoing compensation-to-the-creator problems that exist in the modern world -- which is a solution, but not a "free information" solution.
which is a solution, but not a "free information" solution.
It's really not a solution that has much to do with any kind of rights over information -- it's control over labor. Saying that it solves compensation to the creator problems by creating a labor cartel doesn't get you to establishing that there was any kind of norm that you couldn't produce anything at all that you could figure out how to copy, so long as you were permitted to engage in the right kind of labor.
And again, guilds were powerful in Europe in the later middle ages and the early modern period. That doesn't get you to covering all, or anything like most, pre-modern societies.
Also, the argument that the extension of copyright made it more, rather than less, likely that work that was about to go public domain would be preserved, is probably only accurate for the small amount of material that was already considered profitable.
Current copyright law actually makes a lot of preservation for archival/library purposes illegal - unless it's done by the rightsholder. Have a some copyrighted film/audio but not the rights to the intellectual property, and need to migrate it to a digital format because the physical film is going bad? It might be technically illegal to make that copy. You probably won't get prosecuted, so people do that sort of thing, but in many cases the law needs to be reformed to allow that sort of third party preservation.
If you're a wealthy company and your goal is to make it more likely that your back catalog, rather than someone else's, who doesn't have the preservation resources to keep their material preserved, or who isn't even around to exert their rights, will be profitable, then by all means, the extension of copyright is great for preservation. The stuff that's rotting isn't really important - if it were, someone would have the rights to it and it would be profitable.
norm that you couldn't produce anything at all that you could figure out how to copy, so long as you were permitted to engage in the right kind of labor.
That's not my argument -- I think you're missing the point. I'm just arguing that the distinction you're drawing isn't particularly illuminating given other methods of creating ownership of culture.
And I think that the various social structures you're describing as creating 'ownership' of culture generally do nothing whatsoever of the sort.
in many cases the law needs to be reformed to allow that sort of third party preservation.
I agree. That's exactly the kind of IP reform that I strongly support.
So if you have the ability to copy, but can't exercise it, you've got . . . . ?
I don't think that the argument that there were tight, artificial controls on premodern cultural production should be particularly controversial, but you can disbelieve it if you'd like.
If you're a member of a guild from a different city, you can copy. If you're another guild member in the same city, you can copy. If you're a court artist or artisan, you can copy. If you're an artisan in a time, place, and profession where guilds didn't have tight control, you can copy.
I don't think that the argument that there were tight, artificial [glad to see this, at least] controls on premodern cultural production [in certain times, places, and professions, but nothing like universally] should be particularly controversial,
With my additions, it's not. With the presumption of near-universality you've been making, it is.
Now that I've caught up, I'm surprised the 19th century US as a pirate nation hasn't come up. Before the international copyright regime came into place, it seems like you could pretty much do what you wanted in the US with books published in Britain. It really pissed Dickens off.
Meanwhile, a lot of early US technology was ripped off from the UK. Factory owners would surreptitiously send out operatives to either conduct industrial espionage or to recruit and smuggle out British workers who had technical knowledge in order to implement it in the US.
What's the premodern society that doesn't tightly control cultural production? Not China. Not Japan. Not medieval or early modern Europe. Not tribal socieities that limit, e.g., medical knowledge to certain ritualized individuals. I'm sure we can find some examples in the broad span of human history, but there's not much.
576 is pretty much my understanding.
Not medieval or early modern Europe.
This whole argument we've been having hasn't suggested to you that maybe this isn't an uncontroversial example? So long as you're going to point to any example of a social structure relating to cultural production as 'tightly controlled cultural production' the argument's not going to go much of anyplace.
But if we go back to where you started, "almost all societies have had methods for constraining information that are designed to protect or reify the rights of creators or owners of culture", I'll say that it's absolutely untrue of medieval and early modern Europe. While there was at some times and places control over entry into professions, there was generally no method other than secrecy of protecting one artist/artisan/professional's rights in his or her innovation or creation as against any other artist/artisan/professional.
One view of the world says, "hey, before there was copyright, no restrictions on copyng! Free informartion!"
I don't think this is an argument people really make. A different but valid argument is: when almost all cultural artifacts now exist as files of 1s and 0s, and every use of them necessarily involves a copy (into RAM), the potential scope of copyright law as it existed in the 20th century has shifted from something that primary concerned production and distribution to something that implicates use and consumption, too. This is what folks like Boyle are worried about, or ESR with his "Right to Read" polemic: industry incumbents using the fact that existing laws happened, for complicated historical and technological reasons, to target the moment of copying, to leverage their control from mere production/distribution into a thorough-going "pay per use" model of how people experience culture. (If you don't find the idea of pay-per-use culture--that a child's exposure to the culture that surrounds her must always be metered--horrifying, I'm not sure what to say.)
If you look at how content industries actually use copyright and copyright-like stuff (the DMCA), it's not mainly to stop unlicensed copies from becoming available (since it only takes one copy escaping, and one always does)--it's to, as RH basically admits, control distribution mechanisms. It's to shape what kind of gadgets get made, to bully Netflix into not releasing movies immediately to preserve different release windows, to force you to buy refillable ink from the printer company instead of a cheap competitor.
I honestly don't understand the worldview of someone who thinks without this kind of protection--without the legal right to throw someone in jail for taping a film in a cinema, or to fine someone $150k per CD track uploaded, penalties that are all the more barbaric because they can't help but be rarely and thus unequally applied--we'll somehow lack culture. It takes a very odd view of human nature to think that the urge to create art, to tell stories, to create meaning, is somehow less fundamental than the wealth-maximizing of homo economicus. (It takes, too, an absolute refusal to look around and see the variety of motives and structures through which culture gets produced.)
So on the one hand, there's a worry over the way that a shift to digital has made legally possible a sort of new enclosure movement. At the same time, and this is perhaps the bigger issue, it's about opportunity costs--to not let the enormous potential of digital reproduction be lost. The Google Books project, Project Gutenberg, the Open Library, etc., all arise from the emerging technological possibility of realizing the ancient dream of a universal library--mankind's collected knowledge and culture, available to all. And the main thing standing in the way is copyright and its use by the content industries.
Would asking for opinions about the new Kanye West album be a non-sequitur? I hear that he samples.
He had Bon Iver for vocals on a few tracks, which seemed really silly, couldn't possibly work out well. But so far it really seems like a succesful ambitious record with great beats. Also more than one or two good tracks and mediocre filler.
The idea of a universal library looks very different with no barrier to entry and no gatekeeper. The question of how to curate and present applies not just to art but also to science, where the large scale automated production of knowledge has long been a reality in physics, astronomy, and biology. Should every raw data run from every telescope or mass-spec machine be archived and made public immediately?
I wish people would stop mistaking Google Books for a library. It's great to have what they make available, but they're in it for profit (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that).
582: Still could be a library, just not a public library.
I want to re-emphasize that anyone who finds this thread interesting is far better spending their time reading some of the many books available on the subject than hashing it out in blog-comments.
Oh, the other point-- documents most in demand (aside from current hit entertainment) are not timeless classics cruelly restrained by copyright, but term papers just good enough to earn a grade, but not so smooth as to excite suspicion.
Scribd or these pay archives are part of the universal library as well.
OH MY GOD WE"RE COMING FOR YOUR SOUL. Not only does 580 hysterically conflate about 30 things at once, it completely ignores how things actually get done, which is through licensing. Has anyone noticed that it's not actually very difficult to get cheap books, film, or music? As I've said a bunch before, I support compulsory licensing, but the idea that a rights regime per se is
Ah, I've been commenting way too much today. Time to do some real work for EVIL.
Virtue of reading seconded. I like Lessig a lot:
http://www.free-culture.cc/
579.2 makes exactly the point that has been made several times before and never answered, at all, by Halford - that there have almost never been controls on cultural production THAT EXISTED FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE ORIGINAL CREATOR. There were lots that existed for the benefit of the king, or the state, or the printer, or the church, or the goldsmith. But that's different.
there was generally no method other than secrecy of protecting one artist/artisan/professional's rights in his or her innovation or creation as against any other artist/artisan/professional.
Well, there murder. I hear that the guilds in present-day Italy were awfully murderous.
Just Cellini by himself was a one-goldsmith/sculptor-crimewave.
We have too many musicians and poets already, as has every society more organized than a band of starving peasants. Why should they be encouraged? The structure of these very pages is set up to ensure that machine-generated profitable comments are excluded. Why is that?
We know Gutenberg's name because he had a dispute with his funders leading to a lawsuit, which was of course archived.
590: Man those Italian artists had some hot blood. But I was thinking more of the dyers' guilds.
583: Maybe, under an expansive definition of library. They don't seem inclined to be a subscription library or a special library (like a corporate library, or private library). Instead, they seem to be going for a combination bookstore/subscription database that happens to allow access to some of the material for free. They aren't any more a library than EEBO or ECCO are.
Sure, back before mechanical or digital reproduction you could copy, but odds were that you were going to get a crappy, crappy copy. When you have to buy the color blue from skilled artisans who bought it from tradesmen from dude who carted that shit by donkey from Afghanistan, you aren't going to use blue unless you've 1) got money, 2) got a patron, or 3) got to. Most copyists are going to take the cheap and easy route---and that shows. The copies are degraded versions of the original.
Similarly, the dyers guild. Dudes had to obtain CRAZY original ingredients, often trekked in from far away, and then had to understand how to treat them in pre-scientific chemical processes that could literally explode in your face if you didn't know what you were doing. I might be interested in learning and selling their trade secrets, but damn, would I not be interested in attempting to reproduce any of them myself.
Sure, back before mechanical or digital reproduction you could copy, but odds were that you were going to get a crappy, crappy copy.
Frankly, the early period of mechanical and digital reproduction often gave you a crappy, crappy copy. The kids today, with their high resolution scanners and DVDs, they know nothing of using a Ditto machine or recording Elvira from the radio.
Or skips in a record. My copy of the White Album, when I was teenager, was taped from a friend's record, and had a five minute skip in "I Will". I still expect that song to go "Sing it loud, so I can hear you nI can hear you nI can hear you nI can hear you..."
Really, it goes, "Sing it loud, so I can hear you giddy-up a boom bop a boom bop-a-boom now."
The recording industry is still not without its preservation problems, even in the digital world.
Man, that kind of thing just amazes me. From a position of total lack of understanding of the difficulties, how hard can it be?
I'm going to have to carve the entire collected works of the Oak Ridge Boys in 0/1 format on a big rock. Just to be safe.
588: and, given the history of the record industry, there still aren't!
Seriously, I figure the SETI people have developed a whole theory of how to make a file format self-explanatory such that aliens receiving it could, by analyzing the file, figure out how to play it back as sound. (I have faith in the SETI people, whoever they are. There must be SETI people somewhere, right?) Surely there must be some way of applying that knowledge not to communication with aliens, but to communication with near-future recording techs?
Rereading 602, I probably should have left that first word off.
Or the entire comment, come to think.
602: I just hope honda didn't get the contract.
Aggh. I'm so sick of this that if I comment again after this, I might shoot myself, but the point wasn't that controls exist for the benefit of the original creator -- copyright itself, in some ways, created the notion of the "author" -- but that in the premodern world you had a series of systems in place that (a) solved the problem of compensating the producer or original owner of the work and (b) created some form of strict control over the market for cultural production that made it not, in any meaningful sense, "free."
The guild systems and other restrictions were set up so that producers, printers, monarchs, etc., could control and limit cultural production.
I don't think any of that is very important to modern copyright law, frankly, but there you have it.
602: Record your files on a gold medium, and hope that extraterrestrials have record players.
created some form of strict control over the market for cultural production that made it not, in any meaningful sense, "free."
As long as you leave out music, theater, narrative, anything produced in the household, anything produced in a region or at a time when guilds weren't powerful. I mean, if you define "strict" "control" "cultural" "production" and "free" however you like, then I suppose the statement can't be false. But it's not terribly meaningful.
I do agree with you that it's unimportant to modern copyright law, which is an artificial creature of statute with no continuity with or significant relationship to much of anything before the Statute of Anne.
which is an artificial creature of statute with no continuity with or significant relationship to much of anything before the Statute of Anne.
Which nonetheless has adopted the language of feudal land tenure.
Sorry, I know I'm repeating myself. But I just love that part!
Enough IP conflict. Have some I/P conflict! It's funny and only a little bit depressing.
H/T Sullivan
urely there must be some way of applying that knowledge not to communication with aliens, but to communication with near-future recording techs?
The same sort of research is aiming at finding a way to communicate to future generations who might stumble upon our high level nuclear waste storage deep under Yucca Mountain to STAY THE FUCK AWAY!!!!
We could program robots to argue with them about IP? Or I/P, either one. That'd keep them out.
So what's with the cockatiel in 'Broom of the System' being pale fluorescent yellow with a pink crest? IFAIK, that isn't an actual coloration for cockatiels. And yes, I realize that there isn't actually a Great Ohio Desert, either.
607: I'd assumed that when a record goes gold, that is what they did.
God lord. Can I just put myself down as utterly opposed to anything called `artistic freedom vouchers', and with extreme, extreme, prejudice?
613.last: Never been to Dayton, have you.
Also, copyright hasn't adopted feudal land tenure ideas; it's adopted early modern bourgeois ideas of property. If copyright were feudal, I'd have to provide continuing service in exchange for my use of it.
But you have properly taken seisin of your mp3 collection, right?
602: Digital media last forever or five years, whichever is less convenient.
Roughly, yep.
(Now DRM, that shit's feudal.)
If copyright were feudal, I'd have to provide continuing service in exchange for my use of it.
Just you wait.
No fair pwning somebody who's responding to your comment.
613: So what's with the cockatiel in 'Broom of the System' being pale fluorescent yellow with a pink crest
You're reading ahead; aren't you, you little apple polisher?
You're reading ahead; aren't you, you little apple polisher?
Hrm? I thought a 'more normal schedule' meant finishing the book in a day or two. Now that my sister gave me a rice cooker, I don't really leave the house.
I fear my hostility towards the patent bar have made it less likely LizSpigot will enlighten me re: cockatiel coloration, alas.
625.2: Use a Sharpie, but don't push down too hard on the feathers or you'll hurt the bird.
625: Oh, you never responded to that. I was further in as well, just not to the cockatiel yet.
581 The question of how to curate and present applies not just to art but also to science, where the large scale automated production of knowledge has long been a reality in physics, astronomy, and biology. Should every raw data run from every telescope or mass-spec machine be archived and made public immediately?
This is a can of worms on which I have much to say, but I'm a little too worn out right now to try to put together the lengthy comment it would take. One thing to note is that making raw data archived and publicly accessible is potentially a vast expense. Large experimental collaborations sometimes struggle just to make data available to their own members. Another point is that raw data is generally useless to people who didn't design an experiment.
I'm thoroughly and enthusiastically on the side of making any completed science as widely available as possible. There are various things in between "raw data" and "completed science" that I have very mixed feelings about.
In general IP mystifies me in that I tend to think "if you created something cool, why wouldn't you want everyone to have access to it?" But then, the money-making instinct is weak in me.
We tried to enforce non-competition in the making of suckers, but it turns out there's one born every minute.
Cockatiel colour genetics. And although there are lemon yellow ones, none seem to have pink crests.
Yep, saw it. Perhaps others will find it of interest, though.
The other thing is that Vlad the Impaler is described as having "enormous hooked and scaly feet," which seems to far better describe the feet of a cockatoo than those of a cockatiel, the latter being rather delicate. I couldn't find any examples of lemon-yellow-with-pink-crest cockatoos in a bit of googling, but I do wonder ...
584: I want to re-emphasize that anyone who finds this thread interesting is far better spending their time reading some of the many books available on the subject
But sweetheart, you've all filled me in on the language and concepts in play much more quickly than I might be able to read a whole book or three. I appreciate it. "Rivalrousness" -- who knew?
I've crapped out on this thread by 584, shortly after Trapnel pointed to the elephant in the room, namely Halford's attraction to a homo economicus construction of human history, inclination and intuition with respect to creativity, captured here:
560.last: I also think, and this is more controversial and less supported, that this has something to do with a real human need to claim compensation for the labor value put into creative work.
It is controversial.
Oh, my. This thread was so damned long that I hadn't realized it was ended. Good work.
More bothersome to me than the colors of the cockatiel is the fact that when introduced the Great Ohio Desert is said to be 100 sq. mi. (so let's say, 10 x 10) but then immediately described as a "hundred miles of sand" which might fit if it were 100 x1*. And I do now recall this annoyance from before--the reading of not-so-memorable books from way back in one's past are a little like mental archeological digs.
*Not that this would ever come up, but I think intuitively a 100 x 1 mi area would seem much larger than a 10x10 one.
635.last: Chile seems like a much bigger county even though it is only 458 square miles.
636: Good example ... qualitatively.
638: gswift didn't give you one for the corpse in your trunk?
A Citation is a hatchback. There isn't a trunk.
Also, copyright hasn't adopted feudal land tenure ideas; it's adopted early modern bourgeois ideas of property. If copyright were feudal, I'd have to provide continuing service in exchange for my use of it.
The ancient rights of Mixage and Scratchage.
Can I just put myself down as utterly opposed to anything called `artistic freedom vouchers', and with extreme, extreme, prejudice?
Do you have a criticism of the substance, or would you just prefer to rename it the Kittens Act?
Substantially, I am rather opposed to the idea, given that it (a) seems to make the overall funding of media in general entirely dependent on the value of the voucher, which seems a bit off to me, and (b) involves a group of ideas I really dislike, viz. vouchers, weird pseudo-market schemes, and the Government handing out money without just handing out some money.
If you want government funded arts, paid for out of the general taxation, there's nicer ways to do it.
Also, the combination of the words artistic freedom and vouchers is actually literally obscene.
