A great post-mortem of the Eldred vs. Ashcroft decision is going on Lawrence Lessig’s weblog. I’ve decided to add it to my newsfeeds on the right.
Click through and remain active.

I took the time to post a thank you to Larry and his efforts on behalf of the public. I urge all who come to my modest little blog to do the same.

The story is just now breaking that the Supreme Court has upheld the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act as constitutional in a 7-2 decision. I have only read part of the briefs, but had a couple of quick comments:

I expected this outcome, but I must admit I am still surprised that the Justices abandoned their responsibilty to act in the public interest as directed by the Constitution and hand what amounts to perpetual monopolies for intellectual property to publishers.

My brief skim of the majority opinion shows that the Court chose to focus on two issues, whether the Congress has the authority to extend the term of pre-existing copyrights, and whether such an extension represents a violation of the the First Amendment freedom of speech clause. The majority opinion held that the petitioners would like the “limited time” clause empowering Congress to establish copyrights means “inalterable”. I find this remark to be erroneous: the petitioners clearly argued (quite correctly in my opinion) that if Congress is able to continuously extend the term of copyrights, their powers are not limited. I think the SCOTUS has virtually handed infinite term copyrights to publishers by this action by allowing absolutely no end to the legislation that can extend their terms. The majority opinion goes on at great length to justify the retroactive nature of this application by historical precedent, which will require some additional headscratching before I can make sense of it all.

Overall the Court decided that the CTEA was within the power of Congress to enact, that the Justice department is not in the business of second guessing Congress as to policy.

The Court found as unpersuasive the argument that the CTEA represented an attempt to generate perpetual extensions. I find this rather remarkable, given the comments of Sonny Bono’s widow upholding the idea first voiced by Jack Valenti that they desired copyrights to be “forever minus one day”. They echoed
the earlier court finding that the CTEA was designed merely to bring US copyright law into parity with laws passed in the EU. I guess we will have to wait
another fifteen years or so to see if the Court was correct in their assessment.

The two dissenting opinions by Justices Breyer and Stevens are excellent in
their clarity and insight. It is a pity that more of the Justices could not see their duty to uphold the principles of the Constitution for the public benefit.

I’ll almost certainly rant more when I have more time to think about it.

I admit it. I have a hard time with names.

Actually, that isn’t true. I actually memorize names fairly well. The only problem is that I can only memorize them well when I see them in print. If you walk up to me and tell me your name, without tons of real effort, I can’t keep it in my skull for very long. It helps if I stare at you and write your name a few times. Then it works pretty well.

Of course the world would be a lot simpler if we all took the advice of
Scott. Scott decided
that he’d wear a nametag. All the time. Everywhere. When at the beach he
wrote his name on his chest with a marker.

He’s a bit of a nut, but he’s got a nice philosophy, that we spend far too much
of our time trying not to make eye contact with others, trying to shun the
interaction with others that we end up craving. Why not make the simplest
gesture possible, and make it easy for everyone to call you by name? What
difference could that make?

Apparently it makes quite a bit of difference. He’s got lots of interesting
stories. It is a fairly compelling idea, especially to a borderline recluse
introvert like myself. I might have to give it a shot.

Every once in a while I have a chain of thoughts that connects seemingly unrelated
things together into a new set of ideas. One of those happened to me over the last week or so. I’ve previously complained that the creation of our “culture” is increasingly a manufactured entity: that our music and stories are increasingly the result of commercial interests carefully screened for marketing purposes rather
than the stories and music that we create as individuals. We have become a world of watchers rather than doers.

But there are some interesting counterexamples. One that I’ve begun to find interesting is fan fiction and art. Recently Slashdot ran an interesting story on
Star Wars Second Strike,
a fan fiction story rendered as an audio play in the style of old time radio. It is
a fascinating attempt at collaboration: over 40 actors in five countries participated in producing the first hour long episode. I’ve listened to just a bit
of it (the rest will wait for my anticipated long trip to Monterey next week), but
the production quality is quite high. Audio dramas present interesting challenges for story telling, but this would seem to be an area where amateurs could make
significant and interesting new contributions using the Internet as a collaborating
medium. I dug around a bit, and discovered an interesting set of links for
Radio Drama Resources. The idea of creating new dramatic works in the audio format
seems very compelling, and more within the budget and resources of amateur
productions.

I’ll ponder it some more…

While reading slashdot, you can’t escape the

rants like this about the evils of the MPAA and RIAA. People respond in great numbers to postings like this, and everytime they do, I am baffled by the lack of clear thinking on the subject. This rant will try to isolate a few of the ways that they are stupid and wrong thinking and I am correct and right thinking.

The first set of wrong thinkers are just thieves. They oppose the RIAA and MPAA by stealing their copyrighted works
from them. They typically say things like “if they made stuff that wasn’t shit, I would pay for it”, as if that actually is an excuse for
larceny. I actually have more respect for those who merely admit that
what they are doing is illegal, they know it, and just don’t care.
At least they avoid the hypocrisy of having collected 57 gigabytes of mp3 files, all of which are crap. I have
better uses for 57gb of disk space.

The second group of wrong thinkers are what I call recyclers. Recyclers refuse to by CDs and the like from
retail outlets, and instead buy them from used stores and friends. They think that because they are buying their CDs from
used dealers, they are hurting the profits of the record companies but still getting the music they want.

This is wrong on two levels. First of all, record companies only promote artists which make them money. It isn’t because they are evil, it is simply that they are in business, and businesses exist to make money. When you choose not to buy a record of an artist you enjoy, you decrease the incentive of that artist to produce new works and the incentive of the record company to promote them. Net result: you don’t hear as much of the music that you enjoy.

The second thing wrong with this idea is that even if you do buy from second hand outlets, you are still creating demand for the record. Some people will buy records and
enjoy them for a time, and then pass them onto the used market and recoup some of their initial investment. If you didn’t
buy these records in the secondary markets, retailers wouldn’t
buy them, and demand for them would fall off in the primary
markets as well.

The third set of people are fatalists. Fatalists believe that people just can’t live without their influx of music and artists, and therefore nothing will ever change. Therefore, they go out and spend their money and then come back to their keyboards and complain about the state of affairs on slashdot.

In the end, the fatalist merely complains, but has no new ideas to offer. His thinking is too limited to actually imagine other solutions, but that doesn’t keep him from complaining about
the problems.

My own views on this matter is one of pragmatism. If I want to go see the new Two Towers movie, I go see it, and I don’t complain about the vast media machine that builds such movies. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how such epic movies are constructed without the backing of immense media empires, so I accept that as the cost of entertainment. Do I think that Tom Clancy or Stephen King deserve the huge amounts of money they earn? Well, I’m willing to buy paperback editions of their books, so I’m willing to trade my six fifty for their book. If a few
million people think the same way, then I guess they really do deserve the millions that they get paid.

Lastly, we should realize that much of the human experience has become watching rather than doing. In older cultures, activities such
as singing, music, cooking, painting, sculpture and the like are
things that are done by people, not watched by
people. I volunteer time to teach telescope making each week
because I want to encourage people to build and use telescopes, and pursue their own understanding of the universe
around us. My friend Tom schedules and performs music concerts for small audiences so that he can participate in music rather than merely consume it.

If you are opposed to the music industry and complain about
the quality of acts that they promote: make some different music and promote and distribute it yourself. The internet makes such
distribution very inexpensive. Yes, you aren’t going to be the next Britney Spears, but we already have one of those. If your
interest is in making music and sharing it with others, then make music and share it with others. Join the producer side of the equation rather than the remaining on the consumer side. The RIAA exists only because they think they can monopolize music production, and for the moment, they seem to be correct. If you
change this supply vs. demand equation, the viable business models that the record companies rely on will change as well.

Well, as I place the sage and thyme stuffed bird into a toasty oven, I am reminded that it is Thanksgiving and that I have much to be thankful for. To all of my friends and the odd individual who happens here by random link, I hope that you can sit back and think of what you should be thankful for, and spend a nice day with your friends and loved ones.