The Free Information Society has links to a bunch of WWII era propaganda posters, including this rather amusing one linking promiscuity with dating Hitler. Holy crap. You can’t make stuff like this up.
I ran across a reference to the patent on the wheel system used by NASA in their Mars Rovers, and thought that Patent 4,840,394 - Articulated Suspension System might be worth noting for future examination.
A vehicle is provided which maintains a substantially constant weight, and therefore traction, on all wheels despite one wheel moving considerably higher or lower than the others, while avoiding a very soft spring suspenson.
Interesting link of the day, courtesy of Boing Boing: FM 34-40-2 Basic Cryptanalysis. The truth is this kind of cryptography is pretty much of historical interest only, but I find historic codes to be, well, interesting.
What can I say? It’s a cough cough classic, brought to you by archive.org.
Sometimes, you just have to shake your head at the stupidity of people. Today’s installment comes from the editorial pages of the New York Times, where we find the following (registration required):
To the Editor:
Re “Google Is Adding Major Libraries to Its Database” (front page, Dec. 14):
While having online access to some great libraries promises to facilitate research in democratizing access to books, it is worth keeping some things in mind.
A digital version of a book - especially a rare one, printed centuries ago - is not a replacement for the hard copy.
Not only has printed paper proved a durable technology, but there is also much to be gained by visiting the libraries, examining the actual books and entering into discussions with librarians and other researchers.
Gaining access to a digital reproduction of an older text makes it easier to take a first step, but little good research will be done simply sitting alone in front of a computer screen.
Lisa Shapiro
Vancouver, British Columbia
Dec. 14, 2004
The writer is an assistant professor of philosophy at Simon Fraser University.
It’s hard to imagine a more stupid response to the news that Google will open up access to potentially millions of books via the Internet. Honestly Professor Shapiro, just what are you thinking?
It is clear (and obvious) that digital copies are not the same as having the real book. But consider this: I have never seen a real Gutenberg Bible. But I know what one looks like. I haven’t seen copies of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelescium, or Galileo’s Siderius Noncius, but I can buy them. Are you saying that my ability to do research is somehow inhibited by the relatively easy ability of inexpensive digital copies of these works?
And for pity sakes, when you say that you are deprived of conversations with librarians and researchers, just what do you think the Internet is for? That screen in front of you? It allows you to communicate with millions and soon to be billions of other people.
And those librarians and researchers? They publish books too. Books that will be made available through digitization efforts like the one Google proposed. I don’t need to be in the same room to them to be influenced by their ideas.
Consider going over to Project Gutenberg’s CD Project website. You can download 600 eBooks onto a CD. You can download 9400 books onto a DVD. If Professor Shapiro thinks that nothing will come of making these works available at literally no cost to anyone within range of the Internet, I can’t help but shake my head at the ivory tower that these academics live in.
Google is embarking on a pilot project to digitize and make available a large number of the 15 million books currently at the Harvard University Library. The goal is to make all of the public domain texts available. Wow. That’s awesome.
The feature film section of archive.org has just released The Charlie Chaplin Festival, including the short films The Adventurer, The Cure, Easy Street and The Immigrant. Enjoy!
This morning Neda Ulaby of NPR reported on Political Speeches and the Public Domain, which covers a dilemma. Public speeches by politicians are normally considered to be in the public domain, but news networks recording such events often copyright their own recordings of these events, causing enormous difficulties for historians, students, and independent film makers to use these materials. They often require written permission before they can even examine this footage, and negotiate the circumstances under which material can be used. Arguing fair use can be problematic and expensive at best, requiring deeper pockets than many independent organizations can muster.
Thought provoking.
Interested in fan films? Then try giving Attack of the Flesh-Eating Subterranean Bog-Monster from the Center of the Earth and Beyond the Moon: Apocalyptic Revenge! a try. (Link courtesy of Kevin).
For some reason, I found a reference to an early patent on Ouija boards, and with a bit of digging, came up with this page of Talking Boards Patents and Trademarks. Most of these early patents declare it a game, rather than a legitimate way to contact the dead.
Using pat2pdf, I extracted a few of these patents as PDF files:
It appears that patent examiners of the past were every bit as diligent as those we have today.
I’m nearing the end of Lessig’s Free Culture, and am at the point in the book where Lessig describes his loss in Eldred v. Ashcroft which challenged the consitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is very interesting on many levels: to see how Lessig strategized, to see what arguments were made and how the justices responded. It’s even somewhat moving to hear his description of his disappointment with the Supreme Court in their ruling, which was contrary to their finding in Lopez, and failed utterly to discuss the merits of Lessig’s argument.
Many of Lessig’s supporters wrote him to tell him that he never had a chance: the Supreme Court simply wasn’t ready to reverse Congress on this matter. So the burden shifts between trying to convince the Supreme Court to trying to convince Congress.
We’ve got a tough row to hoe. The entertainment industry is a powerful lobby and contributes a great deal of money to preserve the monopoly power that long (or practically infinite) terms grant them. It’s hard to see how your average yutz can go toe-to-toe with their interests and come out ahead.
What can we do then? Well, we could try taking a cue from the Open Source world. Open source exists solely because people choose to donate their works to greater the common good. People give up their rights to maintain exclusive rights so that people can build on their work and expand its scope and utility. The Creative Commons provides a useful framework for giving up some of your rights (or all of your rights) and making them available to all. By granting people specific rights under a Creative Commons license agreement, you are saying “I don’t need all the rights granted to me, I’m happy with less” and you encourage others to build upon your creative work.
Another thing you can do is help educate others on the power of public domain resources. For instance, consider the following list of 100 great books in the public domain. You’ll see many familiar books there. How many have you read? (I’ve read 29 of them, 30 if you could the Bible). All of these books are available on Project Gutenberg. Moreover, most of these books are still in print because publishers don’t have to pay royalties for their use. Publishers like Penguin Classics or Dover are free to republish these, often in inexpensive editions which are terrific. If they still had to pay royalties, many of these works would be out of print.
Don’t believe me? Let’s examine a book which is in the public domain, like Alice in Wonderland. Searching on amazon.com, we find that the Signet Classic edition of this book runs for $3.95. Actually, that’s a pretty good buy, because it includes the book Through the Looking Glass as well. Compare this to The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925 and is therefore still under copyright. We see that the cheapest edition of this book is $9.06, with a list price of $12.95. The Puffin Classic edition of The Three Musketeers costs a whopping $4.99. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (still under copyright) lists for $10.40, with a list price of $13.00. You could work out the cost of the CTEA by multiplying the number of years by the average increase in cost for a book like The Sun Also Rises and the number of copies, and see what that total is. This particular book ranks 2,333 on amazon.com, so you’d imagine that it’s still selling pretty well. Let’s assume it sells ten thousand copies a year, the terms were expanded by twenty years, and the average cost is $2.00 more per copy. The cost (not assuming any kind of inflation) is then $400,000. The CTEA robbed the public out of $400,000 worth of value to perpetuate a monopoly for the copyright holders. Try multiplying that out by all the books which had their terms extended, and you see that Congress handed millions and millions of dollars to copyright owners. The Sun Also Rises would have entered the public domain twice in the last few years except for the laws enacted by Congress to extend terms for which the public at large derived absolutely no tangible benefit. The CTEA was nothing more than the extension of a monopoly for which we all pay.
This message can be brought home by reiteration (perhaps even better and more clearly expressed than I can), but also by making good use of available public domain resources. For instance, if I want to know which Shakespeare play contained the words “If the cause be not good”, I can access a Shakespeare search engine, and find the speech by Williams in King Henry V. This search engine exists because someone saw a need, and there was no need to license the underlying work to achieve it. Try to find a Hemingway search engine. Go ahead.
Well, I’ve run out of steam for today, so I’ll just sum up. What can we do? We can carry on, using the resources that are available to us, and we can choose not to pursue the culture of exclusivity and ownership that current copyright practice promotes. In other words, we change society not by legislating the change, but by changing ourselves.
Addendum: the image illustrating this entry came from Project Gutenberg.
Slashdot is running a story about a N.Y. Times article (registration required, yada yada) that details Guerrilla Drive-Ins, mobile parties that use a DVD player and an LCD projector, and show movies projected against a wall in impromptu locations. This is of course of questionable legality, given the warning that most DVDs specify (that they are for private use only). But here’s a kooky idea: why not use the techniques to show and promote films that are in the public domain?
If you surf on over to archive.org, you can download a bunch of films that are in the public domain, films like:
Besides the obvious impromptu MST3K-like possibilities, you could use it as an opportunity to show many classic movies and to educate the public on copyrights, fair use and the public domain.
While at the ballgame earlier this week, I found myself wondering whether the classic 7th inning stretch song, Take Me Out To the Ballgame was in the public domain. It is, having been written in 1908. You can read the Wikipedia entry for more information, and can even get a PDF of the sheetmusic or as a MIDI file.
After penning the article below, I was looking for a picture of the elusive Walter Carlisle (didn’t succeed), but I did find a nice page at the Library of Congress Website that has some nice pictures that you can download. Digging around more, you can find their collection of 2100 early baseball cards. I’m listing this under public domain resources, but you should be careful when downloading these to research and obey any license restrictions that are placed on these images. Enjoy!
Kevin Kelly had a very nice New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled Making My Own Music, which clearly elucidates the way that I’ve come to think about copyright issues and the value of the public domain.
One small quote:
Given the benefits of digitized films, there is little question that film buffs, powered only by passion, would rush to convert the 500 to 1,000 films that fall out of copyright each year — if the copyright period is not extended.
This is an old article, written before the decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and unfortunately for the country (although perhaps good for the Mouse), the arbitrary and excessive extension of automatic copyright protection was held to be consitutional.