I have posted an all-true tale from my youth in Dixie at our weblog. Old times not forgotten, even in the land of rice and indigo. Didn’t seem quite the CT thing, but you may read nonetheless.
From the monthly archives:
February 2004
If you want to see what’s wrong with copyright and the concept of intellectual property, it’s hard to go past the obstacles being put up by James Joyce’s grandson Stephen to recitations of Ulysses on the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday (June 16 2004) in Dublin. Thanks to the extension of copyright to 70 years beyond the author’s death by the European Union in 1995, Joyce has absolute control over his grandfather’s work until 2011. It’s hard to imagine any moral sense in which Ulysses belongs more to an obstreporous descendant of the author than to the city that inspired it.
The issues are completely obscured by the use of the term ‘intellectual property’ which makes it appear that ideas belong to an owner in the same way that a car or a block of land does. This term, enshrined in mountains of legislation and treaties, deserves about the same amount of respect as the contrary slogan ‘information wants to be free’ (if anything less so, since the latter is at least a half-truth)
In economic terms, the idea of copyright is to balance the interests of the public in the free dissemination of what is, once it is produced, a naturally public good (and therefore ‘wants to be free’), with the need to encourage authors to create works in the first place. The example of Ulysses shows how far we have got the balance wrong. Does anyone seriously believe that Joyce was motivated, even in the slightest, by the prospect of enriching a grandchild who hadn’t even been born at the time. (Of course, he would have needed extraordinary foresight to predict the successive extensions of copyright that would make this possible).
Even taking a forward-looking view, what kind of benefit do authors today get from the sale of copyrights extending up to a century after their death? For a publisher evaluating commercial investments of this kind, a 10 per cent discount rate would be on the low side, but this would be enough to ensure that royalties received 70 years in the future would be discounted by a factor of 1000. From the social viewpoint, on the other hand, the future costs of restricted access to copyrighted works should be discounted at a much lower rate, perhaps 3 per cent, which would imply that costs incurred 70 years in the future should be discounted by a factor of around 8.
All of this is particularly relevant to Australians, as we are one of the few countries still enjoying the benefits of the ‘life + 50 years’ rule, and have therefore been of particular value to public-domain exercises like the Gutenberg project.. Our government has just signed a so-called Free Trade Agreement with the United States. It does little or nothing to free trade, but a lot to protect monopoly rights, including an extension of copyright to life +70 years. Fortunately this needs legislation, which may be rejected. Given that the Irish have signed away their public domain rights, and we are still clinging to ours, the Bloomsday centenary would be an appropriate occasion for celebrating them.
The “Rocky Mountain Progressive Network”:http://www.rmpn.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=home has issued the following “challenge”:http://www.rmpn.org/content/index.cfm?fuseaction=showContent&contentID=53&navID=51 to those state politicians backing the Federal Marriage Amendment, including Rep. “Marilyn Musgrave”:http://wwwa.house.gov/musgrave (R-CO), who introduced the amendement into Congress:
bq. I, __________________________ (name of lawmaker), pledge to the People of _____________________________ (jurisdiction that lawmaker represents), Â that as a supporter of the Federal Marriage Amendment I am committed to upholding fidelity in marriage. I firmly believe fidelity is essential to the institution of marriage and that each person who violates that commitment undermines this institution.
bq. Accordingly, as an elected leader in the State of Colorado I pledge my commitment to uphold fidelity in my own life in order to lead by example and to preserve the institution of Marriage.
bq. ________________ (Signature) ______________Â (Date)
None of the named politicians have “signed”:http://www.rmpn.org/content/index.cfm?fuseaction=showContent&contentID=52&navID=50. “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_02_22_atrios_archive.html#107766485172375008 and Geraldine Sealey at “Salon”:http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/archive.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2004/02/25/fidelity/index.html (by subscription or day pass) think this campaign should go national. If conservatives are going to push the FMA, I couldn’t agree more. (Disclosure: the rabbi mentioned in the press release linked above is my dad. Go Dad!)
bq. *UPDATE*: meanwhile, “Oxblog”:http://www.oxblog.blogspot.com has a running “tally”:http://www.oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_02_22_oxblog_archive.html#107772059078594254 of those senators who are for and against the FMA. As others have been saying, looks like the amendment is already dead in the Senate.
Just as an aside to “Belle’s post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001393.html, I think that once people have finished scrutinizing it for blood-libel, the relevance of Mel Gibson’s _The Passion of the Christ_ to current U.S. policy in the Middle East awaits detailed exploration. In fact, I’m surprised that commentators have yet to discuss the foreign policy lessons to be learned from Pilate and his occupying Roman legions. As I’ve “said before”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000344.html, for all his “failings”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate Pilate was at least attempting to bring a tradition of republicanism in politics, pluralistic tolerance of religion in civic life, and “heavy investment in public infrastructure”:http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/python/Scripts/LifeOfBrian/brian-09.html to a priest-ridden, monotheistic, intolerant Middle-Eastern troublespot. History might remember him better had he not had the massive bad luck to run up against a “blowback”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805062394/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ problem the size of the “Son of God”:http://ship-of-fools.com/Gadgets/Kitschmas02/01.html during his governorship.
The Washington Post review of Mel Gibson’s Passion is basically a pan which concedes there is more than a whiff of anti-semitism about the whole thing. (Based on the visions of a 15th-century german nun who “sets out to clear Pilate’s name, describing the famously ruthless governor as a weak and unwilling pawn of Jewish blood lust”? Oh, that sounds good.) But for some reason the author backslides into the trap of “journalistic objectivity”, which quoted item differs from real journalistic objectivity in consisting merely of empty formal gestures towards balance. It can be seen most vividly in articles about Bush economic policies, in which sentences starting “critics claim…” or “some Democrats argue” are followed by incontrovertible statements of fact. See Brad DeLong’s “Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps” series, parts I-MMDCLXXIII. (And while I am digressing, I would like to encourage all readers to adopt the Poor Man’s pithy formulation of the current scandal, which he terms “WhatInTheNameOfAllThatIsHolyAreYouDoingToTheEconomyGate.”) The item I object to is here:
Gibson’s use of Aramaic and Latin is similarly helpful in grounding his story, although it’s been suggested that first-century Romans would more probably have spoken Greek.
Is there anything wrong with just saying “even though the characters in the film would actually have been speaking Greek, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean”? (I realize that as a blanket statement about “first-century Romans” it’s false, but that’s what editing is for.) I mean, you’ve already accused Mel of a pornographic taste for violence, anti-semitism, being a hackneyed director (ooo, Judas tosses the thirty pieces of silver in slow-motion!), and trivializing the mysteries of the Christian faith. Is it necessary to bring out misleading qualifiers like “it’s been suggested” when accusing him of historical inaccuracy?
Via the Volokh lads, news that those tiresome Internet purveyors of laboured satire at Adbusters have made the startling discovery that, in general, Jews are more likely to have strong opinions about Israel than, say, Norwegians. Oy gevalt, as they say up the road from me in Golders Green, who’d have thought it. Christ knows what may happen next week when they spot the connection between the Northern Irish republican cause and the Church of Rome. Jesus.
Actually, what might be a lot more use than Adbusters’ idea would be a list of American pundits who aren’t Jews and have never set foot in Israel, but nevertheless think that they’re qualified to act as spokespeople for the Zionist cause worldwide. (Or for that matter, people who haven’t visited Europe since student days but still regard themselves as experts on trends in anti-Semitism there). I can think of a few names off the top of my head, and I daresay CT commenters can think of others …
bq. “Goddammit, Morris, what are we going to do with this guy Swallow? He claims he ain’t _got_ a field.” Morris has recommended putting Philip down to teach English 99, a routine introduction to the literary genres and critical method for English majors, and English 305, a course in novel-writing. As Euphoric State’s resident novelist, Garth Robinson, was in fact very rarely resident, orbiting the University in an almost unbroken cycle of grants, fellowships, leaves of absence and alcoholic cures, the teaching of English 305 usually fell to some unwilling and unqualified member of the regular teaching staff. As Morris said, “If he makes a fuck-up of English 305, nobody’s going to notice. And any clown with a PhD should be able to teach English 99.”
“He doesn’t have a PhD, ” Hogan said.
“What?”
“They have a different system in England, Morris. The PhD isn’t so important.”
“You mean the jobs are hereditary?”
I quote this passage from David Lodge’s “Changing Places”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140170987/junius-20 in reaction to reading some of “the comments about Simon Schama”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000471.html over at Invisible Adjunct. As is happens, I don’t have a PhD either, and nor do several prominent British philosophers of my generation (such as UCL’s Jo Wolff, a contemporary of mine on the M.Phil at UCL in the early 80s). In the previous generation hardly anyone did the PhD or DPhil, most people got appointed after doing the Oxford B.Phil or the London M.Phil or something similar (these are both two-year postgraduate degrees involving a combination of examination and dissertation).
bq. Greenspan Urges Congress to Reign in Deficit
Says the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Greenspan-Budget.html?hp (though I’m sure the typo won’t last long).
With great power comes a little responsibility. As guest timberwossname, I inform you the best lit/film/culture online journal is Pseudopodium – formerly, Bellona Times. I wandered in one night by accident, while making my drunken way home. Well, it felt more like I fell through the roof, as Indiana Jones might find himself suddenly amongst the treasures of an ancient temple. For, you see, it’s one of those serially updated personal sites/online journals that goes back so far that it’s … older than blogging. Damn, you think, running a fingertrack through the dusty HTML. Place is old. 1999; 1997, even. Crap, some of this stuff was written in 1990. Frankly, it spooked me how good – smart and winning and heartfelt and erudite. Hazlitt and Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Ruskin. I felt about uncertainly in this marvelous terrain, then with increasing delight; finally I was cramming my pockets with treasure to call my own ever after. I have returned regularly and very lately entered into edifying correspondence with its ten-times admirable demiurge, Ray Davis.
Now go and don’t come back until you have read for an hour. I could tell you which are my favorites, but I want you to have your own, that you found yourself.
Here’s the song that gave my title. Hope Ray doesn’t mind me provoking you all to strain his bandwidth.
UPDATE: Just to explain the joke, the connection between the two is, via the world, ‘with a kick to it’.
I’ve been rereading parts of the “German Ideology”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/index.htm , the text where Marx and Engels really start to get historical materialism straightened out. And very fine and interesting it is too. But my purpose in this post isn’t to discuss the content of a work which Marx and Engels did not publish but “abandoned … to the gnawing criticism of the mice”, but to reproduce (below the fold for bandwidth reasons) a page of the original MS which appears in facsimile in volume 5 of the MECW. What readers get, thanks to the intervention of subsequent editors, as a piece of elegant if vituperative prose, appears in the original in the form of a half-crossed out scrawl . The scrawl only occupied about half the page, the rest of which is filled with jottings, notes and many many doodled heads (probably by Engels). Other facsmile pages are in an even worse condition with great chunks consumed by the rodents. [I now discover that the page I’ve photographed and a few others besides are on the “marxists.org”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/index.htm website anyway, never mind ….]
The announcement that Ralph Nader will again run for the Presidency raises the (almost) unaskable question -are there any circumstances under which we should hope for, promote, or even passively assist, the re-election of George W. Bush as against either of the remaining Democrat contenders? I feel nervous even raising this question, but I think it’s worth a hard and dispassionate look.
Regardless of their political persuasion, most people will agree, at least in retrospect, that it would have been better for their own side (defined either in ideological or in party terms) to have lost some of the elections they won. Most obviously, this was the case for the US Republican Party in 1928. Hoover’s victory, and his inability to cope with the Depression, paved the way for four successive victories for FDR and two generations of Democratic and liberal hegemony, which didn’t finally come to an end until the Reagan revolution in 1980. The same was true on the other side of poltiics in Australia and the UK, where Labour governments were elected just before the Depression, split over measures of retrenchment demanded by the maxims of orthodox finance and sat out the 1930s in Opposition, watching their own former leaders implement the disastrous policies they had rejected, but had been unable to counter.
p. So, is 2004 one of those occasions? The case that it is rests primarily on arguments about fiscal policy. Bush’s policies have set the United States on a path to national bankruptcy, a fact that is likely to become apparent some time between now and 2008. Assuming that actual or effective bankruptcy (repudiation of debt or deliberate resort to inflation) is unthinkable, this is going to entail some painful decisions for the next President and Congress, almost certainly involving both increases in taxation and cuts in expenditure. On the expenditure side, this will mean a lot more than the obvious targets of corporate welfare and FDW[1]. Either significant cuts in the big entitlement programs (Social Security and Medicare) or deep cuts in everything else the government does will be needed, even with substantial increases in taxes (to see the nasty arithmetic read these CBO projections, and replace the baseline with the more realistic *Policy Alternatives Not Included in CBO’s Baseline*)
fn1. Fraud, Duplication and Waste
I’m reading a lot of blogs, both liberal and conservative, and seeing copious abuse rained on Bush for his support of the Federal Marriage Amendment. (See especially John Scalzi for a remarkably eloquent defense of equal rights for gays here, here, and here. Also, see the Declaration of Independence*, where it says something about how all men are created equal.)
This is right and good. I agree with Andrew and Michael that this could be a major disaster for Bush. Even DeLay is slowly distancing himself from the FMA.
But it’s entirely appropriate to ask for more from the Democratic candidates. It seems to me that they’re missing a huge opportunity. I think that these points would be fairly uncontroversial:
1. There’s a significant trend in the United States is toward legal recognition of same-sex marriage. We may very well be all-but-there by election day. Here’s Nick Confessore:
The one thing that most polling shows on the issue of gay marriage is that the prejudice against it is rapidly dying off. According to that same Gallup poll I mentioned earlier, 39 percent of those respondents aged 18-29 support full marriage rights for gays, versus 24 percent of those aged 30-49 and just 15 percent of those 50 and older. Add up those in the younger bracket who support either gay marriage or civil unions, and you’ve got 59 percent. In a decade or so, full marriage rights for gays may well command a strong majority of Americans.
Many conservatives acknowledge this, although not all.
2. Democrats have enjoyed tremendous goodwill as a result of the stance that the national leadership took in the 1960s regarding civil rights.
If I’m right, then the national Democratic leadership has an unusually clear opportunity to get on the right side of history with a clear statement about fairness and equality.
In a few years, I’ll be able to say that the left led the way on the question of gay marriage. But as of today, I won’t be able to say the same thing about the national Democratic party.
Make me proud, John. Or, if you won’t, John.
* Not the Constitution. How embarassing.
Keynes famously “quipped”:http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=K “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?” G.W. Bush’s riposte – Why sir, I “change the facts”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_02_22.html#002598.
I drafted the following post yesterday, when it had a more anti-Nader feel to it. But two people subsequently approached me about my thoughts about Nader, and told me they supported him standing, giving pretty good reasons, so I have modified my thoughts in the light of that (an indication, perhaps, of how fluid my views are right now). However, one of them said she would have to be a closet Nader supporter, because she didn’t want to deal with the unreasoned anger she felt that open support would make her vulnerable to in her workplace, which, I think, supports my main point.
bq. UPDATE interesting stuff here from unrepentant 2000 Nader supporters Chun the Unavoidable and Russell Arben Fox. See also Chuck at the Chutry Experiment. And a fun rant from Timothy Burke
When I was a kid, I really liked Sesame Street, and now that I have a little girl, I still like it. Timothy Burke, for one, finds it a bit too cloyingly pro-social (he complained of this in a comments thread that I am too lazy to find here). One of my favorite animated bits as a child was one in which three plainly dressed workmen emerge from, clean, and retreat into a giant letter I, accompanied by the following song in a minor key: “We all live in a capital I/in the middle of the desert, in the center of the sky/and all day long we polish on the I/to make it clean and shiny so it brightens up the sky.” Imagine my surprise when I read Ulysses at 17 (yes, I was trying too hard; don’t worry, I re-read it later) and found the following passage:
(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new, clean soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.)
THE SOAP:
We’re a capital couple, Bloom and I;
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky
Those jokers at the Children’s Television Workshop. I have also always liked the look of it. Even when I lived in NYC in a terrible place between Amsterdam and Columbus on 109th — I recall holding the phone out the window for my brother to hear the small arms fire before I retreated into the tub — I was always tickled by the resemblance to Sesame Street. Only there were fewer muppets and more crack dealers.
Finally, they sometimes address the big issues. On a recent episode, Big Bird and Snuffleupagus were investigating whether various things (toasters, plants, small children) were alive or not. By the end, they had worked themselves around to some serious questions. Is the letter “A” alive? No. Is the Children’s Television Workshop alive? Indeterminate. Is the word “alive” alive? No, because it doesn’t grow or change. Take that, Platonism!