I was going to write on another aspect of writer loopiness about copyrights, and maybe more, but I’ve been following another long discussion over on Making Light (May 25th). The links to Macaulay, and Legionseagle on Keith DeCandido and amateur law, are hugely useful.
To those I’d add material from Ray Patterson. There’s a link on my Color Cycling article that contains a link to an excellent essay by Patterson that has since been removed, (probably because of Patterson’s death in 2003), so that link is now broken and I need to update the article. I have that linked article of Patterson’s saved somewhere, and I may put some of his philosophy into action by posting excerpts sometime. I imagine that the material is also in Patterson’s book, Copyright in Historical Perspective, and at some point I’ll no doubt read the book for review.
The comments thread on the Making Light entries are quite revealing of the other aspect of writers’ perceptions of copyrights: ego involvement. One writer made it clear that they consider someone else’s use of “their” characters in “fanfic” as akin to rape, and the mere thought of it creates an inability for that writer to function as a writer. This strikes me as being a potentially career ending handicap, similar to horrible stage fright in a performer.
Of course, this is easy for me to say, given my own view that writing itself is a collaborative art, even if it is never published, since I hold that individuals change sufficiently over time that a single individual often collaborates with other selves. For that matter, the idea that a single individual self contains multitudes means that even a solitary soul is a collaboration. When other people are added, when a work is published, in other words, even more people are added to the collaboration (albeit one at a time for readers), and I do not think that I can or should have a proprietary right over what goes on in others’ heads, nor the expression of that in material form.
But cause and effect are tricky here. Do I read things I wrote years ago as if they were written by someone else because of the way I feel about these matters, or do I feel that way because I’ve found that reading old stuff is like reading someone else’s work? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the debate is to a large extent a distraction from the shell game. The arguments are always made predicated on the benefits that will go to “artists” and “creators,” but somehow it is the organizations of lawyers and moneymen who get the lion's share.
Now, for no particular reason, other than the obvious, here's Cab Calloway and Betty Boop:
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Heinlein's Curse
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert Heinlein
Versatility is a curse; one dimensional people make all the money.- Jonathan Winters
I wonder, did Asimov ever ask Heinlein why a Jew would want to butcher a hog?
One always takes some risks writing about Heinlein. A sizeable cult of personality has grown up around RAH, its members being quick to pounce upon errors of omission and commission, and also ready to invoke Heinlein to bolster claims of their own political sagacity. To be fair, Heinlein did at least run for political office at one point (while still part of Upton Sinclair's Socialist movement), which gives him more practical political experience than most of his fans. On the other hand, running for office is not at all the same as governing.
Still, of the Big Three, Heinlein, for all his anti-specialization preaching, was a very specialized writer. Now it's unfair to compare anybody with Asimov in this regard. Okay, maybe Silverberg can pass the I-wrote-more-different-kinds-of-stuff-than-Isaac test, but, Isaac would then reply that he signed his own name. (Which wasn't always true, since he did write some juveniles under Paul French and he had a couple of minor "pulp pseudonyms" that never had books attached to them).
But even ruling out the comparison to Asimov, Heinlein had less range to him than Clarke, whose non-fiction was abundant and interesting to those without much interest in SF per se. Here Clarke's abiding interest in oceanography comes into play. Similar work from Heinlein would have required RAH write non-fiction about politics, naval topics, or non-SF engineering, and he just didn't do much of that.
Also, and I write this with much trepidation, when it came to science and engineering, Heinlein talked a better game than he played. We forgive him for the technical lapses, because he was writing crackling good yarns, but he'd often show basic gaps in his technical knowledge. I have the beginnings of an essay on "The Long Watch" enumerating the large errors in basic radiochemistry contained therein, and the description of the nuclear rocket drive in Rocket Ship Galileo demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of the idea of specific velocity in rockets. In The Rolling Stones he describes a rocket propulsion system as being "almost 100% efficient," which is a bizarre description of a form of transportation that puts the great majority of its energy into its exhaust, rather than its motion. It's not entirely clear that Heinlein ever got Special Relativity; despite using of the time dilation effect in Time for the Stars, he has one of the major characters baffled by a question about relativity that has a pretty trivial answer.
And so forth.
Heinlein's version of authorial versatility was essentially selling the same stories to a broader range of markets. He tired of the limitations of Astounding so he became a regular in The Saturday Evening Post. He wrote juveniles, then wrote off the end of the program with Starship Troopers. He wrote science fiction, and then when he wrote fantasy, it still read like his science fiction.
None of this is a bad thing. Limitations are not bad, and specializing is not a crime. Nor, for that matter, is it a crime for a specialist to advise his readers to specialize less and be more generalist in outlook. Versatility may not be the most efficient path to worldly success, but it has its rewards, and the specialist is more vulnerable to changes of fortune. If Heinlein had been a totally specialized naval officer, good for nothing else, then he'd have not been able to make the career jump that his tuberculosis mandated. Perhaps that is the source of his dicta about avoiding specializion.
Still, I am bound to note that Heinlein's list that begins this piece seems an awful lot like a list of things that Heinlein himself could do. There are so many things missing from the list. Play an instrument? Sing in an opera? Pilot an aircraft? Explore the Great Barrier Reef? Publish a scientific paper? Prove a theorem? Sketch a portrait? Calibrate a spectrometer? Blow a glass vase? Smith a wagon wheel? Spin and fire a pot. Catch a fish bare handed?
And when you ask me to program a computer, do you want that in Fortran, C, or Java?
Versatility is a curse; one dimensional people make all the money.- Jonathan Winters
I wonder, did Asimov ever ask Heinlein why a Jew would want to butcher a hog?
One always takes some risks writing about Heinlein. A sizeable cult of personality has grown up around RAH, its members being quick to pounce upon errors of omission and commission, and also ready to invoke Heinlein to bolster claims of their own political sagacity. To be fair, Heinlein did at least run for political office at one point (while still part of Upton Sinclair's Socialist movement), which gives him more practical political experience than most of his fans. On the other hand, running for office is not at all the same as governing.
Still, of the Big Three, Heinlein, for all his anti-specialization preaching, was a very specialized writer. Now it's unfair to compare anybody with Asimov in this regard. Okay, maybe Silverberg can pass the I-wrote-more-different-kinds-of-stuff-than-Isaac test, but, Isaac would then reply that he signed his own name. (Which wasn't always true, since he did write some juveniles under Paul French and he had a couple of minor "pulp pseudonyms" that never had books attached to them).
But even ruling out the comparison to Asimov, Heinlein had less range to him than Clarke, whose non-fiction was abundant and interesting to those without much interest in SF per se. Here Clarke's abiding interest in oceanography comes into play. Similar work from Heinlein would have required RAH write non-fiction about politics, naval topics, or non-SF engineering, and he just didn't do much of that.
Also, and I write this with much trepidation, when it came to science and engineering, Heinlein talked a better game than he played. We forgive him for the technical lapses, because he was writing crackling good yarns, but he'd often show basic gaps in his technical knowledge. I have the beginnings of an essay on "The Long Watch" enumerating the large errors in basic radiochemistry contained therein, and the description of the nuclear rocket drive in Rocket Ship Galileo demonstrates a significant misunderstanding of the idea of specific velocity in rockets. In The Rolling Stones he describes a rocket propulsion system as being "almost 100% efficient," which is a bizarre description of a form of transportation that puts the great majority of its energy into its exhaust, rather than its motion. It's not entirely clear that Heinlein ever got Special Relativity; despite using of the time dilation effect in Time for the Stars, he has one of the major characters baffled by a question about relativity that has a pretty trivial answer.
And so forth.
Heinlein's version of authorial versatility was essentially selling the same stories to a broader range of markets. He tired of the limitations of Astounding so he became a regular in The Saturday Evening Post. He wrote juveniles, then wrote off the end of the program with Starship Troopers. He wrote science fiction, and then when he wrote fantasy, it still read like his science fiction.
None of this is a bad thing. Limitations are not bad, and specializing is not a crime. Nor, for that matter, is it a crime for a specialist to advise his readers to specialize less and be more generalist in outlook. Versatility may not be the most efficient path to worldly success, but it has its rewards, and the specialist is more vulnerable to changes of fortune. If Heinlein had been a totally specialized naval officer, good for nothing else, then he'd have not been able to make the career jump that his tuberculosis mandated. Perhaps that is the source of his dicta about avoiding specializion.
Still, I am bound to note that Heinlein's list that begins this piece seems an awful lot like a list of things that Heinlein himself could do. There are so many things missing from the list. Play an instrument? Sing in an opera? Pilot an aircraft? Explore the Great Barrier Reef? Publish a scientific paper? Prove a theorem? Sketch a portrait? Calibrate a spectrometer? Blow a glass vase? Smith a wagon wheel? Spin and fire a pot. Catch a fish bare handed?
And when you ask me to program a computer, do you want that in Fortran, C, or Java?
Friday, May 25, 2007
Keys
When I got to RPI in 1968, they’d just opened a spiffy new Student Union building. Its top floor consisted of a lounge/balcony area that overlooked the Student Union Dining Hall, plus outer offices and meeting rooms. Since those were all on the outer perimeter of the building, practically every meeting room and office had windows. Pretty slick design, I think.
At the four corners of the top floor were office areas, the main Union office, plus three “special interest” office clusters. One of them was for student publications. Most of the space got taken by The Polytechnic, the school newspaper, because it was, by far, the largest organization. There was also a darkroom (in one of the few spaces without windows), and the Poly guys used that a lot, but all the publications had access to it. There were three other main publications on campus, The Bachelor (humor magazine), The Gorgon (literary magazine), and the Rensselaer Engineer, which was my equivalent of pledging a fraternity (albeit a very small one).
There were three editorial jobs on The Engineer: Features Editor, Managing Editor, and Editor-in-Chief, usually occupied by a sophomore, junior, and senior, respectively. Taking the Features Editor position traditionally set you up for a three year gig, and that’s what happened to me. Actually, the transition usually took place in the spring semester, so there was overlap with the outgoing editor-in-chief for the one semester, at least theoretically.
So I became Features Editor my freshman year. I got a key to the office, and kept it for three years. I spent a lot of time in that office, and why not? It was on campus, in a cool new building, and better than the offices that most faculty members got.
Having the key to that office was a source of comfort, or so I learned when I gave it up. Suddenly, bereft, I had to find other places to store my stuff, eat lunch (or sometimes breakfast; I kept cereal in on of the desk drawers), hide out when I felt like hiding. The office hadn’t been exactly property, but it wasn’t not property, either. I mean, how else to explain the feeling of loss when it was no longer “mine.”
Keys are interesting for a number of reasons, but here I’m interested in the fact that they define and protect property without specific legal recourse. They prevent theft or unauthorized use even in the absence of police protection. Access is both freedom and power. Property is both freedom and power.
When they were planning the new RPI Library, during the time I was in graduate school, there was a suggestion to put one of those electronic theft detectors at the entrance. The new Head Librarian and I were dead set against it. He held the very admirable position that students were part of the University Community, and that one does not begin with the assumption that members of your community are thieves. Trust them and they will reward that trust was his belief.
My own position was that putting a technical barrier in at an engineering school was just asking for it. There would be students who would never consider stealing books who would begin to do so just to show they could do it. I’d known too many students who’d gimmicked telephones, cracked the main RPI keying system, and otherwise gotten into trouble, just because it had been a challenge. Well, okay, the challenge and the getting free phone calls and getting parts for their electrical engineering projects from the labs at 3 A.M.
The two of us won the argument, at least temporarily. I think I saw some of the electronic detectors at a reunion or so back, but at least someone could maybe check to see if it did any good, because we had some years as a baseline.
So we come to copy protection (CP) and Digital Rights Management, both pernicious and foolish ideas, in my estimation, but apparently very seductive to those who want control of “intellectual property.” But CP and DRM differ from the sort of protection that keys provide in fundamental ways, ways that underscore the difference between intellectual property and chattel property or real estate.
The message that is sent by copy protection is that you don’t own what you bought, someone else owns it. So where does that leave you? Wherever it leaves you, it leaves you with less than you otherwise would have. Copy protection is never transparent; it’s a pain to deal with. It makes whatever is being “protected” less valuable.
Now an automobile that can’t be stolen would be more valuable to the owner, not less. So CP and DRM isn’t protection for the owner; it’s just restriction.
How much is that reduction in value actually worth? Hard to say, really, though I note that there is currently a move to sell non-DRM music for about 30% more than DRMed music. So somebody thinks the vigorish is about 30%.
But the other message that is sent by CP and DRM schemes is that anything goes if you can break the protection. And some people have made it their mission to do just that. The result has been an ongoing arms race, with the latest moves being to make such attempts illegal. In fact, the idea is to make even the transmission of information about how to break DRM illegal.
Me, I’m just fascinated at all the different ways there are to invent the Thought Police.
At the four corners of the top floor were office areas, the main Union office, plus three “special interest” office clusters. One of them was for student publications. Most of the space got taken by The Polytechnic, the school newspaper, because it was, by far, the largest organization. There was also a darkroom (in one of the few spaces without windows), and the Poly guys used that a lot, but all the publications had access to it. There were three other main publications on campus, The Bachelor (humor magazine), The Gorgon (literary magazine), and the Rensselaer Engineer, which was my equivalent of pledging a fraternity (albeit a very small one).
There were three editorial jobs on The Engineer: Features Editor, Managing Editor, and Editor-in-Chief, usually occupied by a sophomore, junior, and senior, respectively. Taking the Features Editor position traditionally set you up for a three year gig, and that’s what happened to me. Actually, the transition usually took place in the spring semester, so there was overlap with the outgoing editor-in-chief for the one semester, at least theoretically.
So I became Features Editor my freshman year. I got a key to the office, and kept it for three years. I spent a lot of time in that office, and why not? It was on campus, in a cool new building, and better than the offices that most faculty members got.
Having the key to that office was a source of comfort, or so I learned when I gave it up. Suddenly, bereft, I had to find other places to store my stuff, eat lunch (or sometimes breakfast; I kept cereal in on of the desk drawers), hide out when I felt like hiding. The office hadn’t been exactly property, but it wasn’t not property, either. I mean, how else to explain the feeling of loss when it was no longer “mine.”
Keys are interesting for a number of reasons, but here I’m interested in the fact that they define and protect property without specific legal recourse. They prevent theft or unauthorized use even in the absence of police protection. Access is both freedom and power. Property is both freedom and power.
When they were planning the new RPI Library, during the time I was in graduate school, there was a suggestion to put one of those electronic theft detectors at the entrance. The new Head Librarian and I were dead set against it. He held the very admirable position that students were part of the University Community, and that one does not begin with the assumption that members of your community are thieves. Trust them and they will reward that trust was his belief.
My own position was that putting a technical barrier in at an engineering school was just asking for it. There would be students who would never consider stealing books who would begin to do so just to show they could do it. I’d known too many students who’d gimmicked telephones, cracked the main RPI keying system, and otherwise gotten into trouble, just because it had been a challenge. Well, okay, the challenge and the getting free phone calls and getting parts for their electrical engineering projects from the labs at 3 A.M.
The two of us won the argument, at least temporarily. I think I saw some of the electronic detectors at a reunion or so back, but at least someone could maybe check to see if it did any good, because we had some years as a baseline.
So we come to copy protection (CP) and Digital Rights Management, both pernicious and foolish ideas, in my estimation, but apparently very seductive to those who want control of “intellectual property.” But CP and DRM differ from the sort of protection that keys provide in fundamental ways, ways that underscore the difference between intellectual property and chattel property or real estate.
The message that is sent by copy protection is that you don’t own what you bought, someone else owns it. So where does that leave you? Wherever it leaves you, it leaves you with less than you otherwise would have. Copy protection is never transparent; it’s a pain to deal with. It makes whatever is being “protected” less valuable.
Now an automobile that can’t be stolen would be more valuable to the owner, not less. So CP and DRM isn’t protection for the owner; it’s just restriction.
How much is that reduction in value actually worth? Hard to say, really, though I note that there is currently a move to sell non-DRM music for about 30% more than DRMed music. So somebody thinks the vigorish is about 30%.
But the other message that is sent by CP and DRM schemes is that anything goes if you can break the protection. And some people have made it their mission to do just that. The result has been an ongoing arms race, with the latest moves being to make such attempts illegal. In fact, the idea is to make even the transmission of information about how to break DRM illegal.
Me, I’m just fascinated at all the different ways there are to invent the Thought Police.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
But What Kind of Dog?
A guy goes into a psychiatrist’s office, first visit, and the psychiatrist says, “I’m going to show you some things, and you tell me what you see.”
The first thing the shrink holds up is a photograph of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position. “That’s a man and a woman having sex,” the guy says.
The psychiatrist holds up the next picture, and it’s the same couple, but this time there’s another woman with them. The guy says, “That’s a three-way; two women and a man are having sex.”
The psychiatrist nods and holds up the next picture. This time there are eight people in it, men and women, all intertwined, halfway between a pile and a daisy chain. The guy scowls and says, “That seems to be an orgy of some kind. It’s hard to tell what some of them are doing, but they’re all naked and having sex.”
The psychiatrist holds up the last picture. It’s the first couple, but there’s also a dog and donkey in the shot. The guy wrinkles his face in disgust and says, “That’s bestiality, man woman, dog, donkey.”
The psychiatrist puts down the stack of pictures and says, “Well, you certainly do seem obsessed with sex.”
The guy says nothing, as it slowly dawns on him that he is in a joke that has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
The first thing the shrink holds up is a photograph of a man and woman having sex in the missionary position. “That’s a man and a woman having sex,” the guy says.
The psychiatrist holds up the next picture, and it’s the same couple, but this time there’s another woman with them. The guy says, “That’s a three-way; two women and a man are having sex.”
The psychiatrist nods and holds up the next picture. This time there are eight people in it, men and women, all intertwined, halfway between a pile and a daisy chain. The guy scowls and says, “That seems to be an orgy of some kind. It’s hard to tell what some of them are doing, but they’re all naked and having sex.”
The psychiatrist holds up the last picture. It’s the first couple, but there’s also a dog and donkey in the shot. The guy wrinkles his face in disgust and says, “That’s bestiality, man woman, dog, donkey.”
The psychiatrist puts down the stack of pictures and says, “Well, you certainly do seem obsessed with sex.”
The guy says nothing, as it slowly dawns on him that he is in a joke that has gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
A Bit of Fast/Slow Sculpture
[Crossposted to We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party]
Several years ago, I was walking up Folger Avenue towards San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. The University of California owns a building that sits between Folger and 67 St. on San Pablo Avenue, or at least they did. They’ve been trying to sell it recently, and I’m not current on its status, but they still occupy a lot of it. The building itself is huge, and, as I understand it, actually straddles the boundaries of not just Berkeley and Oakland, but also Emeryville.
I was headed toward the offices of a non-profit that I was involved with at the time (that backstory is ‘way too complicated), but my path took me by the U.C. Berkeley surplus and overstock sales area, at 1000 Folger St., where they have auctions every Tuesday and Thursday. So there are often people loading stuff into trucks, vans, and whatever, starting at about 9 A.M. on those two days each week. There’s a lot of old surplus computer stuff that gets sold that way.
I was carrying a briefcase, which isn’t important to the story, but it’s part of the “sense memory.” I was passing by a guy who was loading a lot of surplus computer stuff into a panel truck, just as the pile of stuff he’d loaded shifted and began to topple towards him.
The wall of electronics included a lot of monitors. Imploding CRTs and glass everywhere: not so good. I stepped in and put my shoulder in an appropriate spot and halted the avalanche. I looked at the guy, who had an interesting combination of gratitude and terror on his face. I realized that he had no idea what to do next, as we were both holding up a wall of computer monitors that was trying to fall.
Okay, here’s where I get to brag a little. There’s a cluster of mental aptitudes that gets called things like “3-D visualization” and “geometrical intuition” and like that. I am nearly off the charts in this particular cluster of aptitudes. I can pack a car trunk or a suitcase like you wouldn’t believe, and I would have made a very good mechanical engineer.
So I shifted my body to where I was doing almost all of the job of keeping the stuff from falling, and I began giving him directions. Move that one over there. Now take that one down and put it one the ground. Now that one, no not that one, the other one. And so forth. We deconstructed the unstable pile in fairly short order, then I began helping him put the stuff back into a better arrangement, one that wouldn’t shift when the drove the truck to wherever he was going.The whole adventure only took maybe ten minutes.
At the end of it, the guy thanked me profusely, I smiled and said, “You’re welcome. It was actually kinda fun,” and I headed up Folger once more. Spring in my step? Probably.
The idea of altruism is considered to be problematic in evolutionary biology, economics, psychology, and moral philosophy. It obviously exists, yet these disciplines don’t feel that they adequately explain it. It may be noted that each of them also has its own special definition of what “altruism” is, one that excludes a lot of behavior that is normally called altruistic.
Part of this nomenclature problem stems from trying to exclude actions that benefit both others and one’s own self, with the notion of what constitutes “one’s own self” being the real slippery one here. Take my little adventure described above. Let me describe the ways I benefited from it.
There are many things that can ruin a morning, bad traffic, being awakened by a wrong number half an hour before it’s time to get up, seeing a dead dog in the road, or watching a tower of computer monitors come crashing down. That would have been quite unpleasant, even if no one wound up injured, and there was a real possibility of that happening.
Moreover, I got to show off a competency, not only at the time, but in the later telling of the tale.
There is also a very abstract pleasure that comes from making sculpture, and that was what I was doing, taking apart a defective sculpture and replacing it with one that was both aesthetically pleasing (to me, anyway) and utilitarian as well. And the sculpture, taken in the larger sense, was kinetic, deconstruction, reconfiguration, then the later driving and final disassembly. I didn’t get to witness the last part, but I’m pretty sure it turned out all right.
Also, the guy thanked me, which is a form of applause, validation, and better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.
Several years ago, I was walking up Folger Avenue towards San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley. The University of California owns a building that sits between Folger and 67 St. on San Pablo Avenue, or at least they did. They’ve been trying to sell it recently, and I’m not current on its status, but they still occupy a lot of it. The building itself is huge, and, as I understand it, actually straddles the boundaries of not just Berkeley and Oakland, but also Emeryville.
I was headed toward the offices of a non-profit that I was involved with at the time (that backstory is ‘way too complicated), but my path took me by the U.C. Berkeley surplus and overstock sales area, at 1000 Folger St., where they have auctions every Tuesday and Thursday. So there are often people loading stuff into trucks, vans, and whatever, starting at about 9 A.M. on those two days each week. There’s a lot of old surplus computer stuff that gets sold that way.
I was carrying a briefcase, which isn’t important to the story, but it’s part of the “sense memory.” I was passing by a guy who was loading a lot of surplus computer stuff into a panel truck, just as the pile of stuff he’d loaded shifted and began to topple towards him.
The wall of electronics included a lot of monitors. Imploding CRTs and glass everywhere: not so good. I stepped in and put my shoulder in an appropriate spot and halted the avalanche. I looked at the guy, who had an interesting combination of gratitude and terror on his face. I realized that he had no idea what to do next, as we were both holding up a wall of computer monitors that was trying to fall.
Okay, here’s where I get to brag a little. There’s a cluster of mental aptitudes that gets called things like “3-D visualization” and “geometrical intuition” and like that. I am nearly off the charts in this particular cluster of aptitudes. I can pack a car trunk or a suitcase like you wouldn’t believe, and I would have made a very good mechanical engineer.
So I shifted my body to where I was doing almost all of the job of keeping the stuff from falling, and I began giving him directions. Move that one over there. Now take that one down and put it one the ground. Now that one, no not that one, the other one. And so forth. We deconstructed the unstable pile in fairly short order, then I began helping him put the stuff back into a better arrangement, one that wouldn’t shift when the drove the truck to wherever he was going.The whole adventure only took maybe ten minutes.
At the end of it, the guy thanked me profusely, I smiled and said, “You’re welcome. It was actually kinda fun,” and I headed up Folger once more. Spring in my step? Probably.
The idea of altruism is considered to be problematic in evolutionary biology, economics, psychology, and moral philosophy. It obviously exists, yet these disciplines don’t feel that they adequately explain it. It may be noted that each of them also has its own special definition of what “altruism” is, one that excludes a lot of behavior that is normally called altruistic.
Part of this nomenclature problem stems from trying to exclude actions that benefit both others and one’s own self, with the notion of what constitutes “one’s own self” being the real slippery one here. Take my little adventure described above. Let me describe the ways I benefited from it.
There are many things that can ruin a morning, bad traffic, being awakened by a wrong number half an hour before it’s time to get up, seeing a dead dog in the road, or watching a tower of computer monitors come crashing down. That would have been quite unpleasant, even if no one wound up injured, and there was a real possibility of that happening.
Moreover, I got to show off a competency, not only at the time, but in the later telling of the tale.
There is also a very abstract pleasure that comes from making sculpture, and that was what I was doing, taking apart a defective sculpture and replacing it with one that was both aesthetically pleasing (to me, anyway) and utilitarian as well. And the sculpture, taken in the larger sense, was kinetic, deconstruction, reconfiguration, then the later driving and final disassembly. I didn’t get to witness the last part, but I’m pretty sure it turned out all right.
Also, the guy thanked me, which is a form of applause, validation, and better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Playing the Rent VI –Qualms About Copyrights
“No good case exists for the inequality of real and intellectual property, because no good case can exist for treating with special disfavor the work of the spirit and the mind.” —Mark Halpern, The New York Times, May 20, 2007
“When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman asked me what limit [on copyrights] I would propose. I said, ‘Perpetuity.’” —Mark Twain
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."—Thomas Jefferson
Yes, I have been hesitant about writing about copyrights, in part because the idea is apparently so difficult for some to understand, and the “some” to which I am referring includes a large number of writers.
I think the reason why writers are sometime more that a little loopy on the subject is that copyrights are our lottery tickets, chips in the Big Casino. Of course, it’s not just professional writers who are a party to this, and it’s certainly not restricted to fiction. Anyone who hits sudden notoriety has a story to tell, and if the notoriety is salacious enough, it’s worth money, sometimes big money.
But fiction seems to be where the real lure arises. There’s the ego involvement thing. Behold! I have created something where nothing existed before! I am like unto a god, and you should bow down before me, or at least pay me a lot of money, because it’s mine, mine, I tell you! Bwahaha!
Yeah, there’s a lot of that. Never mind that it’s most likely a slightly below average attempt at a bit of genre fiction, derivative, clichéd to hackney’s depths, it took effort to produce and guts to put it out there, and it’s someone’s angel child.
I don’t usually put blog links into these essays, but there was a May 20th thread on Patrick and Teresa Nielson-Hayden’s “Making Light” that was prompted by the Halpern article I quoted in the beginning of this piece. Teresa, I believe, makes several good points in the comments:
Most works are somewhat derivative. Even much-imitated landmark works like Star Wars or Neuromancer are in many ways powerful new syntheses of older material. If you own the rights to such a landmark work, then to the extent that you can keep subsequent works from copyrighting implicit or potential aspects of that synthesis, your own right to such implicit or potential derivative works will be more valuable…
…nibbling-away of the uniqueness of influential works is a normal literary process. How, then, does the entertainment conglomerate maintain its long-term hold on the valuable rights to the source work? The obvious way to do it is to make sure that other authors don't hold the copyrights on subsequent works. Any story or narrative mindspace they and their heirs own is a story or narrative mindspace you don't own. You might have to pay them something for it, further on down the road. Best not to let them lay claim to it in the first place. –Teresa Nielson-Hayden
Copyrights are not “natural.” When scribes did all the copying, there was no further need for state control of copyright, as the labor cost itself was the limiting factor in the spread of information. But with the invention of the printing press, publishing became a lucrative endeavor, all the more so it there could be some sort of monopoly on publishing generally, or, failing that, the publishing of a particular work. Copyrights, in other words, benefit publishers, the Owners of The Casino. We writers are just the gamblers holding the chips in the Big Game. But the Casino always winds up owning most of the stakes.
Without the Casino, there is no Jackpot, so writers often identify their fortunes with those of the publishers. Well, fair enough, without the publishers there are no fortunes to be made.
The Jackpot is a cruel temptation. I’ve said before, in other circumstances, that if you take up all the money spent by would-be writers of fiction, from the creative writing course fees, to the postage spent, to the paper and ink cartridges bought, not to mention the scams, dodges, vanity presses, phony agents, “readers’ fees” and all the rest, add it up and subtract it from every royalty and advance paid by the publishing industry, and you get a negative number. Maybe movie sales push it back into positive numbers, but I have my doubts, since movies don’t pay their writers that much, and it’s work-for-hire besides. And if I’m wrong, if it isn’t negative sum, it’s because of maybe ten writers, starting with J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, and ending with some writer that you’ve also heard of, Grisham, Clancy, the Usual Suspects. And you’d better ignore the vast amounts of time spent staring at the hellish blank screen, (formerly the blank page), or typing words that no one but the spouse will ever read, because if you add up that time and count it as even a quarter of minimum wage, then not even King and Rowling could make a dent in the debit.
So, one way or another, you’d better enjoy writing your stories, or at least enjoy reading them, because the likelihood of your making a living at it is comparable to winning Powerball, and in fact depends less on how well you write than a hundred other things.
Whew. I hope that’s out of my system for a while. Maybe I can get to actually writing about copyrights now.
“When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman asked me what limit [on copyrights] I would propose. I said, ‘Perpetuity.’” —Mark Twain
"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."—Thomas Jefferson
Yes, I have been hesitant about writing about copyrights, in part because the idea is apparently so difficult for some to understand, and the “some” to which I am referring includes a large number of writers.
I think the reason why writers are sometime more that a little loopy on the subject is that copyrights are our lottery tickets, chips in the Big Casino. Of course, it’s not just professional writers who are a party to this, and it’s certainly not restricted to fiction. Anyone who hits sudden notoriety has a story to tell, and if the notoriety is salacious enough, it’s worth money, sometimes big money.
But fiction seems to be where the real lure arises. There’s the ego involvement thing. Behold! I have created something where nothing existed before! I am like unto a god, and you should bow down before me, or at least pay me a lot of money, because it’s mine, mine, I tell you! Bwahaha!
Yeah, there’s a lot of that. Never mind that it’s most likely a slightly below average attempt at a bit of genre fiction, derivative, clichéd to hackney’s depths, it took effort to produce and guts to put it out there, and it’s someone’s angel child.
I don’t usually put blog links into these essays, but there was a May 20th thread on Patrick and Teresa Nielson-Hayden’s “Making Light” that was prompted by the Halpern article I quoted in the beginning of this piece. Teresa, I believe, makes several good points in the comments:
Most works are somewhat derivative. Even much-imitated landmark works like Star Wars or Neuromancer are in many ways powerful new syntheses of older material. If you own the rights to such a landmark work, then to the extent that you can keep subsequent works from copyrighting implicit or potential aspects of that synthesis, your own right to such implicit or potential derivative works will be more valuable…
…nibbling-away of the uniqueness of influential works is a normal literary process. How, then, does the entertainment conglomerate maintain its long-term hold on the valuable rights to the source work? The obvious way to do it is to make sure that other authors don't hold the copyrights on subsequent works. Any story or narrative mindspace they and their heirs own is a story or narrative mindspace you don't own. You might have to pay them something for it, further on down the road. Best not to let them lay claim to it in the first place. –Teresa Nielson-Hayden
Copyrights are not “natural.” When scribes did all the copying, there was no further need for state control of copyright, as the labor cost itself was the limiting factor in the spread of information. But with the invention of the printing press, publishing became a lucrative endeavor, all the more so it there could be some sort of monopoly on publishing generally, or, failing that, the publishing of a particular work. Copyrights, in other words, benefit publishers, the Owners of The Casino. We writers are just the gamblers holding the chips in the Big Game. But the Casino always winds up owning most of the stakes.
Without the Casino, there is no Jackpot, so writers often identify their fortunes with those of the publishers. Well, fair enough, without the publishers there are no fortunes to be made.
The Jackpot is a cruel temptation. I’ve said before, in other circumstances, that if you take up all the money spent by would-be writers of fiction, from the creative writing course fees, to the postage spent, to the paper and ink cartridges bought, not to mention the scams, dodges, vanity presses, phony agents, “readers’ fees” and all the rest, add it up and subtract it from every royalty and advance paid by the publishing industry, and you get a negative number. Maybe movie sales push it back into positive numbers, but I have my doubts, since movies don’t pay their writers that much, and it’s work-for-hire besides. And if I’m wrong, if it isn’t negative sum, it’s because of maybe ten writers, starting with J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, and ending with some writer that you’ve also heard of, Grisham, Clancy, the Usual Suspects. And you’d better ignore the vast amounts of time spent staring at the hellish blank screen, (formerly the blank page), or typing words that no one but the spouse will ever read, because if you add up that time and count it as even a quarter of minimum wage, then not even King and Rowling could make a dent in the debit.
So, one way or another, you’d better enjoy writing your stories, or at least enjoy reading them, because the likelihood of your making a living at it is comparable to winning Powerball, and in fact depends less on how well you write than a hundred other things.
Whew. I hope that’s out of my system for a while. Maybe I can get to actually writing about copyrights now.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Birth of a Catchphrase
In 1978, I bought a new car, the only dealer-new car I’ve ever bought. I drove it for the next twenty years.
It was a Honda Civic, two doors, with a luggage rack on top that I used a number of times. I didn’t carry a weight equivalent to the car, but it sometimes felt like it. It got 35-40 miles per gallon, doubtless assisted by the fact that for much of the time, 55 was the speed limit, and I didn’t drive much above the speed limit, because I got the 4 speed model.
I got the Honda in part because I was impressed with the engineering of the CVCC engine. I’d just recently done a survey on nitrogen oxide emissions into the atmosphere, and part of that involved reading a lot of Society of Automotive Engineers publications on IC engines and emissions. The CVCC stratified-charge engine was one of the most intrinsically clean designs ever, low in hydrocarbons because it was “lean burn” but also low in NOx because of a very clever “slowly moving flame front” technique they’d developed, that kept the NOx from being “frozen out” by a sudden quench in combustion temperature that usually went along with the IC cycle.
Of course, the low emissions thing kinda stopped when I finally blew one of the valves and began running the thing on three cylinders for the last 18 months of its life.
Anyway, my own personal auto has been a Honda since that first one; Amy drives a minivan, because here show has a lot of stuff in it, and besides, minivans are handy for cross country trips. Still, I drove more times across the country in my ’78 Honda than I’ll probably ever do again.
I got my most recent Honda Civic about five years ago, and I didn’t drive it much for a couple of weeks, because I still hadn’t gotten rid of the previous one. When I finally did make the changeover, I noticed an odd smell in it, something that hadn’t been obvious when I originally test drove it. It took me a day or two to investigate, and when I did, I found a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.
I surmised that the last trip by the previous owners had been to go fishing, and one of them had “gotten away,” just not into the water. So it lay under the seat, probably buried in whatever freshener they’d used as part of the “clean the car so we can sell it,” endeavor. But the time I touched it, the catfish had gone slimy and, well, pretty disgusting, really. I got some paper towels to pick it up, then tossed it into some bushes behind where I worked. I looked for it the next day, but it was gone, I assume to some animal, domestic or otherwise. My workplace bordered a Bay Area Nature Area.
It took no small amount of effort to clean up the residue. I used soap, ammonia, vinegar, and bleach in sequence (not together, I’m quite aware of the hazards of ammonia and bleach), as well as substantial amounts of rinse water. The smell still lingered for a week or so, but then faded.
Some people say about some minor boon, “Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.” I sometimes say, “Better than a dead catfish under the driver’s seat.” If you ever hear anyone else say that, they got it from me.
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