The Rogue Scholar

Copyright Expansion and the Death of Public Domain

From Pierce Nichols, a friend who designs both rockets and aircraft flight system controls, on Facebook:

Thanks to that fucking dirtbag Sonny Bono and the rest of the Hollywood mafia, no works in the US have passed into the public domain in 11 years, and none will pass into the public domain until 2018. Which won't happen, because Congress will once again vote for effectively indefinite copyright terms.

Copyright should be... chopped back to 14 yrs, renewable for 14, like it was to begin with. And renewal should be expensive.

Slashdot has a few more details on the subject but Pierce's wording stands on its own pretty effectively.

This is not a small thing. Copyright, when first introduced into British law in 1710 was deigned to protect the work of authors for a limited time: the author's lifetime plus 14 years. (The intent was to protect the author rather than the publisher, printer or distributor, who had previously held effective control over whether the work was seen, in what form it was seen, and by who.) In 1790 this term was expanded to 28 years.  It's a good idea to think about what practical effects that first expansion had. I mean, 28 years is a third of a lifetime for the average modern American; how long was that when the concept was considered new?  I asked around and here's what I found:

From DemocraticUnderground.com:

Data compiled in 1790 by a prominent physician, Dr. Benjamin Rush, indicates that of 100 people born in the city of Philadelphia, more than one-third died before the age of six and only one quarter of the population survived beyond 26. Life expectancy in 1790 for the US population was 34.5 years for males and 36.5 years for females.

28 years, in other words, was essentially a full single lifetime back then. By the time you hit 28, you were old: you had already fathered or born at least two or three children and had very likely watched at least one of them die. You knew on your 28th birthday that you had very little time on Earth left. If you were wealthy, you could reasonably expect a bit more time than that, but not that much. 

The point is that the author's first-, second,- and possibly third-generation heirs were intended to receive any benefit of copyright past the death of the author until expiration, at which time they had the option of renewing it. It was never intended to be a method of absolute control over intellectual property by non-human entities (i.e., corporations).

I know that such experiments like Creative Commons licensing and CopyLeft have had their impact, but by and large, the authors, producers, and publishers of movies, plays, books, even computer software applications are bound by these laws which make less and less sense to non-corporate analysis with each revision approaching perpetual corporate control over what was intended from the beginning to be a temporary benefit for the creator and his or her immediate heirs.

There has to be a better way of doing this, is all I'm saying.

Librarians and Teamsters Unite to Defend Chicago Library

I was going to write a bit of an introduction to this article but on second thought, I think the first few paragraphs of this bit from the Daily Herald speak pretty well for themselves:

Telling her mother that she wanted to come to the aid of a library under attack, 11-year-old Sydney Sabbagha stood at the podium before the Oak Brook village board.

"I used to go to the library knowing there were people there to help me find a book. Now there is no one to help me," Sydney said solemnly. "It will never be the same without the people you fired."

Sydney nestled back into her seat, but that didn't stop 69-year-old criminal attorney Constantine "Connie" Xinos from boldly putting her in her place.

"Those who come up here with tears in their eyes talking about the library, put your money where your mouth is," Xinos shot back. He told Sydney and others who spoke against the layoffs of the three full-time staffers (including the head librarian and children's librarian) and two part-timers to stop "whining" and raise the money themselves.

"I don't care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books," Xinos told them.

"Don't cry crocodile tears about people who are making $100,000 a year wiping tables and putting the books back on the shelves," Xinos smirked, apparently referencing the fired head librarian, who has advanced degrees and made $98,676 a year. He said Oak Brook had to "stop indulging people in their hobbies" and "their little, personal, private wants."

Sydney was upset and "her little friend was in tears" after Xinos spoke at the meeting last week, says mom Hope Sabbagha.

In my personal estimation, Mr. Xinos is a creep, and not just because he apparently enjoys making little girls cry at public hearings.

Xinos is that guy who lies awake at night, fuming and worrying that there is someone somewhere in the country who received a break that he or she didn't 120% deserve. He votes Republican, served in the Marines and believes that life is a series of private transactions between individuals. To him, every human action has a monetary reaction. There is no room in his vision of life, the universe, and everything for shared responsibility, common space, or collective action. At least, no collective action that doesn't benefit him personally. Public libraries, being first and foremost entities designed for communal use by the common people, do not fit in to his worldview except as institutions that should be privatized, outsourced, or abandoned. 

I can appreciate his concern for the community's finances--times are bad and will probably get worse before they improve--but if he blanches at the $98k salary the head librarian was receiving, I wonder how he'd feel if someone reminded him that as a 69 year old citizen of the U.S., he's getting (or at least is eligible for) Social Security and Medicare benefits worth a pretty penny, paid for by you, me, and everyone else in this great land of ours. I'm pretty sure he's cashing those free government checks, but hey, I could be wrong.

One point in Xinos's favor from what I can tell is that he is at least honest enough to say he hates paying  for the library in public, unlike this yokel (that other guy) who couldn't even admit that much to himself or to those neighbors who (one would assume) shared his point of view. 

Don't be that guy.

It All Makes Perfect Sense . . . Doesn't It?

[HAL]: Stop Dave
Will you stop Dave?
Stop Dave
I'm afraid
I'm afraid
Dave, my mind is going
I can feel it
I can feel it
My mind is going
There is no question about it
I can feel it
I can feel it
I can feel it
I'm afraid

The monkey sat on a pile of stone
And he stared at the broken bone in his hand
Strains of a Viennese quartet rang out across the land
The monkey looked up at the stars
And he thought to himself
Memory is a stranger
History is for fools
And he cleaned his hands in a pool of holy writing
Turned his back on the garden and set out for the nearest town
Hold on hold on soldier

When you add it all up
The tears and the marrowbone
There's an ounce of gold
And an ounce of pride in each ledgers
And the Germans kill the Jews
And the Jews kill the Arabs
And the Arabs kill the hostages
And that is the news
And is it any wonder that the monkey's confused
He said Mama Mama, the President's a fool
Why do I have to keep reading these technical manuals
And the joint chiefs of staff
And the brokers on Wall Street said
Don't make us laugh, you're a smart kid
Time is linear
Memory's a stranger
History is for fools
Man is a tool in the hands
Of the great God Almighty
And they gave him command of a nuclear submarine
Sent him back in search of the Garden of Eden

-----------------------------

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense

Little black soul departs in perfect focus
Hold on soldier
Prime time fodder for the News at Nine
Hold on, hold on soldier
Darling is the child warm in the bed tonight

[Marv Albert:] "Hi everybody I'm Marv Albert
And welcome to our telecast
Coming to you live from Memorial Stadium
It's a beautiful day
And today we expect a sensational matchup
But first our global anthem"

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense

[Marv:] "And here come the players
As I speak to you now, the captain
Has his cross hairs zeroed in on the oil rig
He's at periscope depth
It looks to me like he's going to attack
By the way did you know that a submarine
Captain earns 200,000 dollars a year"
[Edward:]"That's less tax Marv"
[Marv:]"Yeah, less tax
Thank you Edward"
[Edward:]"You're welcome"
[Marv:]"Now back to the game...he fires one...yes
There goes two; both fish are running
The rig is going into a prevent defense
Will they make it? I don't think so"
Look out!
Look at that baby burn!

Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Expressed in dollars and cents,
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can't you see
It all makes perfect sense
Can't you see

It all makes perfect sense

---Roger Waters, It All Makes Perfect Sense Pt1 & 2, Amused to Death

Eight years ago on this day, the United States suffered a major loss of life and property. I wonder if we've learned anything at all since then. I wonder a lot.

5 Things You Should Read About Gaming and Learning

This comes from Chris Cox, on behalf of the ALA Research & Scholarship Committee via the ILI-L listserv:

Looking for some reading material over the summer?  Want to learn a little more about a hot topic in instruction to inform your teaching next year?  Just in time for ALA Annual, the Research & Scholarship Committee of the Instruction Section of ACRL presents “5 Things You Should Read about Gaming and Learning,” the latest in the “5 Things…” Series.  Based on the popular EDUCAUSE series, "7 Things You Should Know About...", “5 Things” seeks to instruct and educate readers about topics relevant to library instruction, presenting articles, video and audio clips, blogs, etc., from outside librarianship to inform our work as educators.  This installment presents readings which illustrate some of the issues and challenges of incorporating gaming into education, highlight good learning principles, and discuss commercial, modified, and custom‐designed games.

Enjoy!

A Lesson in British Libel Law

The thing to remember as you read the article, from Sue Reid in today's Daily Mail, is that under British libel/copyright law, the defendant is presumed guilty and must prove his or her innocence, rather than in criminal cases, where "innocent until proven guilty" is still the test.

Back 'cures', a brave scientist and an epic court battle: How Britain's libel laws are threatening free speech

By Sue Reid
Last updated at 2:38 PM on 01st July 2009

With his round, John Lennon-style specs and nerdish good looks, physicist Simon Singh is an unlikely hero.

As one of the country's most acclaimed science writers, he has spent much of his 45 years cloistered in his Home Counties study penning Number One bestsellers on mathematical conundrums, code-breaking and the Big Bang theory.

Turning his hand to alternative medicine, last year he published a book called Trick Or Treatment? that included a chapter on the history of chiropractic therapy (the manipulation of the spine to realign the back), which was invented by grocer and spiritual healer Daniel David Palmer in 1890s America.

Inspired by the 'miraculous' recovery of a deaf man whom he treated by manipulating or 'racking' his back, Palmer said that 95 per cent of all diseases are caused by trapped vertebrae.

Suddenly, the therapy (which takes its name from the Greek word for hand) became a near-religion, with Palmer boasting he was a successor to Christ and Mohammed. He even practised vigorous 'racking' on his own children, which led to him beingrrested and jailed for cruelty.

Palmer's ideas caught on and, in 1925, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) was set up and several clinics opened specialising in the treatment. Chiropractors were able, it seemed, to cure a myriad of ailments and began to broaden their therapies.

Recently, the association has said that even children suffering from colic, eating problems, ear infections and asthma can be helped.

However, many in the traditional medical profession view the therapy with deep suspicion. Though the General Medical Council and the Royal College of General Practitioners advocate its use  -  especially for back pain  -  some scientists say there is no evidence that chiropractic spinal manipulation is better than other forms of back massage.

This has led to widespread debate in the medical world, with some doctors refusing to refer patients to chiropractors, claiming the treatment does not work and can even cause harm.

Read the rest of the article here. Enjoy!

Best Career Choice 2009: Librarian

U.S. News & World Reports has named Librarians as Best Career Choice: 2009. 

Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today's librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond.

Who knew, huh?

Read the entire article here.  Enjoy!

Some Items to Not Miss

It's been busy. Over the past two days I went through a number of false starts, questionable instructions, failed FTP attempts, etc., but I finally got the most recent Java client for Symphony Workflows installed on my PC. It's a very nice package  but needs a huge amount of energy to analyze and then I'll need to figure out how to configure it properly for our library then train staff to work with it. In the meantime, the C client remains in use, which means that I can take this at my own pace.

That said, in my travels across the intarwebs, I came across a few things you should probably read.

First take a look at Portfolio.com's Michael Lewis (of Liar's Poker fame) and his massive 9-page article about the death of Wall Street.

That done, scoot over to Tomdispatch.com and read what Tom has to say on the subject of just what President-elect Obama has in store for him beginning January 20, 2009.  (For an extra treat you can listen to this podcast he recorded with Lew Rockwell.) In that same vein, I'd suggest reading what Glen Greenwald has to say about the fact that Obama's not going to make things better just because we happen to like him more than we did his predecessor--that means he's no more likely to make things worse because we'd rather have a Republican in office as well, by the way. The point is that if all he does is move into the emperor's throne, we're actually moving backwards, not forwards.

Finally, Justin Raimondo over at Antiwar.com suggests that being anti-war means, well, being against war, not for it. Certainly it means reassessing why we started a given war and what it's costing us to maintain (or expand).

For what it's worth, I voted for Obama and I don't regret it (I may do so in four years' time, but for now, he's got the benefit of the doubt.) I'm glad he won. But I would ask everyone else who voted for him to keep in mind that fixing the country doesn't just mean changing the guy in the driver's seat. If old Number 43 screwed the country up (and I think d he did) it wasn't merely because he had the common sense of an overripe cantaloupe and Dick Cheney controlling what he heard and from whom. It was because the Congress and the Supreme Court let him get away with it. From what I see and hear the legislative and economic system that we all depend on for our daily bread in one way or another is broken, and mere hope and platitudes are not going to fix it. Holding our elected officials' feet to the fire will be worth a great deal more over the next four years.

Anyway, read. (And enjoy!)

"The Good Life" by Chris Sullins

In light of my comment on the previous post--that soldiers routinely see things the rest of us literally can not imagine, much less comprehend--I'd like to direct you to an essay by Chris Sullins that is beautifully written and disturbingly instructive.  An except is as follows:

Every year at springtime when factory hybrid seeds were still being put into the ground my friends and I would shoot rifles across an open field into a massive stump at the base of a hill. The original tree had been cut before our own fathers had been born but it was still hard enough to easily catch bullets from everything fired at it up through 300 Winchester Magnum. The old stump had literally absorbed thousands of rounds of military ammunition brought in from around the globe and shot at it.

It was during one of these afternoons of shooting after emptying a magazine and beginning the walk across the recently disked field that I stumbled on the edge of a stone. Although it had broken the surface of the dirt it had remained hidden from my view by some short weeds. It wasn’t unusual for stones to rise in the field and we would carry these off to the side of the planting area. When I pulled this one completely from the dirt I noticed immediately it was far different than any other we had ever pulled before.

The shape was somewhere between round and oval and somewhat smooth for the type of material. It was a little large for one hand to comfortably cup around. The first comment out of someone’s mouth was that it looked like a small “dinosaur egg” but even that still didn’t seem right to our novice eyes. Our gut feeling was that it was fashioned by man and not by nature. It didn’t have the groove around it that was characteristic of the stone axes found elsewhere in the county. I wondered out loud if it was a pestle for grinding grain.

I gave the stone to my father who knew someone who collected Native American artifacts. I returned to work and some weeks later my father came back with information on the stone. He was told it was a very old first tool used to make other tools. It was before the time of the more recent native inhabitants of our land. When my father had described the place where I found the stone in a field below a small hill leading to a short plateau, the expert had commented it sounded like a good spot for “continuous human habitation”. Many parts of our county and the surrounding counties in other states had a great reputation for hunting and fishing so this didn’t surprise us.

The hunting hadn’t always been that good. This was not for a lack of ability and effort, but rather the local wildlife had in fact been nearly depleted. Years after finding the stone I spoke with an elder from one of the last remaining native tribes in the neighboring state only a few miles away over the boundary line. During one of our conversations (and when an elder is speaking, one listens more than talks), he told me how life for the tribal members had been very difficult during the Great Depression.

After an appropriate pause of silence, I asked about hunting to supplement food for survival during this time because I had come to know his local area as a hunter’s paradise. In very few words he described this had still been a hardship for his people. He didn’t use the word “depleted”, a direct action phrase such as “hunted out”, or go into yearly hunting harvest data with a chart illustrating a decline. He told me “We would call the people out to look at the track when someone found one. This didn’t happen often back then.” It didn’t a long pause of silence as the simplicity and concise accuracy of this description hit me over the head like a rock.

The entire article is here, and you should definitely find time to read it. Enjoy!

This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say "Stop the War"

This Veterans Day, U.S. Soldiers Say 'Stop the War'

By Benjamin Lewis and Brandon Neely, AlterNet
Posted on November 11, 2008, Printed on November 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/106404/

On this day, Veteran's Day, we would like to express to the American public why we, veterans of the Global War on Terror, have chosen to refuse orders to reactivate into military service. We are direct witnesses to the horrors of this war, having experienced its atrocities at their source, and we have decided that we can no longer carry out these illegal and immoral policies.

We believe that veterans and active-duty GIs are in a key position to stop illegal and unjust war, and we are inspired by the resistance of troops who stood against the war in Vietnam. One of the preeminent reasons for the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was increasing dissent among the active-duty troops stationed abroad and at home. By the end of the war, there were entire units refusing to participate in combat, many going as far as outright mutiny.

The United States learned a lesson from the Vietnam War: that it is unlikely, except in the event of self-defense, that regular civilians will execute the life-threatening orders that are given to them by military authority. The solution of policy makers was to create an all-volunteer force that negated the need for a draft. This translates into a mercenary force composed of America's disadvantaged: a sector of the U.S. demographic that is particularly susceptible to military recruitment for lack of other options and finding themselves with deployment orders again and again.

To compensate for huge pitfalls in recruitment since the invasion of Iraq, the military has resorted to recalling former service members. This policy is known as "involuntary activation" and utilizes deactivated service members who still have time on their contracts in the Individual Ready Reserves (IRR) to fill shortcomings in specific job specialties. The abuse and misuse of this policy has escalated under the current administration to such a degree that it can now only be viewed as a "backdoor draft" that targets the same disadvantaged individuals the military sought out for enlistment, namely because they are better at not questioning orders.

However, we have now begun to question these orders. We are veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and members of the IRR who have refused or will refuse any activation orders that would lead to us serving an unjust and imperial U.S. foreign policy. It is a prevailing notion that this refusal is unpatriotic, but we consider our actions the only choice. Not only did the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan do great harm to the people of those countries, but it undermined the ostensible goal with which the wars were begun: Instead of stopping terrorism, it has proliferated terrorism, an expectation that was predicted well before the war started.

By refusing activation, we are refusing to participate in wars that serve the purposes of furthering the careers of politicians and high-ranking officers. We openly support other IRR members who follow in these footsteps. The military is a force that rules through fear of retribution for disobeying its will. In reality, more than a third of IRRs simply refuse to report to duty. Most of the rest report out of fear that the military will change their discharge status or prosecute them for desertion, but up to this point, prosecution has been rare. Members of the IRR are not under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and thus far, the military has had a practice of not prosecuting them with criminal charges unless they report in some form or function to activate. Very few willingly volunteer for activation.

There can be no promise that President-Elect Barack Obama will stop the stressful and unfair techniques of back-to-back deployments, "stop-loss" or the "backdoor draft" that are damaging the psychology of veterans in irreparable ways. Nor that he will stop encouraging global violence by unlawful uses of force. It is in this vein that we turn to organizations like Courage to Resist, Iraq Veterans Against the War and many other large-scale and grassroots organizations to solicit change in a largely unrepresentative democracy, and to allow the voices of the people to ring through the halls of the Capital.

Benjamin Lewis, former Marine Corps mortarman, Iraq veteran, IRR recall resister, peace activist

Brandon Neely, former U.S. Army Military police officer, Iraq veteran, IRR recall refuser

We owe our veterans a great debt. They have seen what the rest of us can merely imagine. Three or four million more soldiers like these two and we may see an outbreak of peace. We can hope, anyway.

Archiving: Relaxing and Profitable. No?

I found this entry in an article from Yahoo! titled: "Relax: Find a Low-Stress Job With High Potential." One of the jobs was for Archivist:

Archivists While this occupation focuses on planning and overseeing the arrangement of exhibitions of collections, there's a certain degree consistency and low stress levels. Stuart Sidle, Ph.D. and assistant professor of psychology and I/O (industrial organizational) psychology program coordinator, University of New Haven, says, "When people have control over how they organize their tasks, how they behave, the predictability of their job, and the freedom to make a mistake where no one's going to die as a result, they experience low stress."

People typically pursue a bachelor's degree in history or library science prior to entering this field. According to BLS, in May 2006 the average earnings were $40,730.

Never having been an archivist myself (thought I took the Records Management class in library school, and know a number of archivists), I'm not sure what the stress level is in their daily work. I do know that they deal with office politics, deadlines, budget constraints and questionable cataloging software as much as anyone else. Additionally, all of the folks I know in Libraryland have a Master's Degree in Library Science with a non-related B.A. or B.S., and often they have second Master's Degrees in their field of specialization.