danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

On Fresh Air yesterday, Terry Gross interviewed Lawrence Lessing, a law professor who argues that the changes wrought by the internet require changes in copyright law.  One of the examples he cited of copyright restrictions being overly strict involved a YouTube video of a small child dancing in her own, filmed by her mother for her grandmother to see.  In the background you could hear a song by Prince, which is, presumably, what the girl was dancing to.  YouTube was instructed by the record label to remove the video.  (I know some labels and artists are much stricter about these things, and I know Prince is one of the most strict.)  Lessing made the point that this mother committed a crime by posting this video under current law, but asked if this really should be criminal. That is a particularly good example for him to use, because if you consider how much copyrighted music surrounds us each day, it is very easy to run afoul of the law when videotaping in public.  Imagine that you’re having a fine time hanging out on a game day here in beautiful Gainesville, Florida, and you shoot some video of you and your pals throwing a football around while the food is on the grill and the girlfriends are chatting amongst themselves.  I can almost guarantee that somebody in the camper next to you is going to be playing their radio, and that audio bleeding into your video means that you’re guilty of copyright infringement by posting it online.

We live in the age of file sharing.  Anyone who had a computer in the spring and summer of 2000 (which I dubbed the Summer of Napster), will recall what a big deal file sharing became.  I distinctly remember the sense of urgency many felt when the lawsuits against Napster threatened to shut the service down.  Everyone stayed home by their computers that night in a frantic orgy of downloading before it was too late.  I also remember saying at the time that the world would never go back.  The genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and once people saw the benefit of having unlimited access to every song they ever loved for free, there would always be a service or program to satisfy that demand.  Napster did eventually end, but the long Summer of Napster continues.

I say all this to make a point about copyright which relates to yesterday’s Fresh Air.  Some argue that, since file sharing is so common, and copyright holders are “losing” so much money (I use quotes because I think that these artists are “losing” sales they never would have made in the first place: i.e., “people” will download Avril Lavigne for nothing, but they wouldn’t pay for it {I use quotes around “people” because I don’t think real humans could like Avril Lavigne}), that we should change the way royalties are collected.  Lawrence Lessing referred to a system in which file sharing is legal, downloads are tracked, and royalties are paid to copyright holders based on the number of downloads.  These fees might be collected from ISPs according to one proposal.  My problem with that system is that it requires people who do not download songs, or download only a few, to pay for the hobby of those who download hundreds or thousands of songs.

Perhaps the best point that Lawrence Lessing made related to the meaning and intent of copyright itself.  If you are like me, you probably assumed that copyright exists to guarantee that the intellectual property of creative individuals remains valuable through protection from theft.  Apparently this is not what the founding fathers intended.  For them, copyright was designed to ensure continued creativity by offering temporary protection from theft of intellectual property.  As Lessing pointed out in the interview, George Gershwin or Robert Frost write music and poetry with the understanding that their creations belong to them.  But since neither man is alive, the copyright that still exists on their works is no longer encouraging creativity at all.  Lessing points out that the constitution expressly forbids perpetual copyright, but Congress’ continued passage of legislation designed to extend copyrights amounts to an endless copyright.

Most of the music I listen to is in the public domain.  Some of it never was copyrighted to begin with.  Anybody could have passed off Bach’s music as his own, even in Bach’s time, and there wasn’t much that could be done.  That’s obviously a bad system given today’s technology.  Still, lack of copyright protection certainly didn’t slow Bach down.  There are well over a thousand pieces in the Schmieder catalog.  But almost everything created in the last hundred years is still in copyright, and considering the value that corporations place on their intellectual property (Mickey Mouse was created in 1928), it’s doubtful that copyright will ever be anything but permanent again.

Filed under: Literature and Books, Music, Rantings, Technology on December 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »

Samuel Johnson, my vote for smartest man who ever lived, is well known for his literary criticism.  Among his best efforts in this vein is the Lives of the Poets, which reviews the work of 52 authors, including Dryden, Pope and Milton.  A complete edition runs to over 2,200 pages.  How much would you expect to pay for such a thing?  If you consider that my Penguin edition of Clarissa, at 1,500 pages, was $16, you might assume that the Johnson set would cost about $30, or maybe a little more if it’s hardcover.  Nope.  It’s $550.

Filed under: Literature and Books on December 20th, 2008 | No Comments »

Yesterday I took two final exams, and concluded my Fall semester, and my first year as a student at the University of Florida.

My first exam of the day was in Professor McCrea’s Eighteenth Century Novel course.  I had been worried about this one for the identification component I knew it would have.  My memory is terrible at best, so recalling obscure quotes and names of minor characters in novels I read in late August or September was bound to be a difficult task.  I was pleasantly surprised that I knew it all, even if I couldn’t remember as much about Captain Tomlinson as I’d have liked.  The second half of the test was an essay, and I wrote mine about the Eighteenth Century meaning of “quality” as it relates to highly individualized characters like Clarissa and Roxana.

My exam in Astronomy was not as brutal as I expected, since many of the questions were recycled from previous tests.  I’m crossing my fingers that I can pull off a B in the course.

Filed under: Literature and Books, School on December 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

I would say that this Fall semester is in its terminal stage, but before it concludes there are tests and reports (papers), so it winds up before it winds down.  I have three papers to write (for a total of about 24 pages), and will take at least five exams by the middle of this month.  This profoundly sucks.

It all means that my writing here will be limited so I can focus on status inconsistency in Oliver Twist and Lady Audley’s Secret; and how Robert Lovelace fails Clarissa Harlowe by viewing her within the narrow prism of his Restoration-era rakish conventions, and neglecting to show her “honest proofs of a feeling heart”.

As I have written here before, Clarrisa is an absurdly long novel.  My Penguin edition is based on the first edition (of 1747-48), and the 537 letters fill 1,500 pages of tiny type, and more with introduction and notes.  It it weren’t for Dr. McCrea guiding the class through it, I’d be lost.  I am worried about his final exam, though.  The essay will be bad enough, but the IDs will be worse.  I know I’ll have forgotten the various minor characters from Joseph Andrews, A Simple Story, The Fair Jilt and The Man of Feeling.  And identifying quotes is going to be similarly impossible.

I’ll let you know how it works out.

Filed under: Literature and Books, School on December 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »

The Supreme Court of the United States meets in a stunning marble building across 1st Street from the Capitol, right next door to the Library of Congress.  Up the steps past the columns and in the long lobby are floors and walls of marble, too.  You’d think they stripped an entire quarry bare to build it.  The ceiling is as similarly elaborate.

On the day I was there it was possible to wait for a few minutes before being led into the chamber for a short lecture about the history and of the court, the building, and an explanation of what happens on days in which the court hears argument.  The lecture was given by a young law clerk.  Photos of the chamber are not permitted, but the Court’s website has some to see.  Elsewhere in the building was an amazing spiral staircase.

The US Botanic Garden is a pleasant diversion.  It sits right on the west side of the Capitol.  It’s not an especially large structure, and many of the plants are of the sort you can find at your local nursery, it’s a pleasant place.  I liked the glass roof.

One of the most amazing places I have ever been in my life is the Library of Congress.  The building is impressive in and of itself, and the lobby is even fancier than the Capitol, but what’s inside is beyond compare.  Right past the front door is a perfect vellum copy of the Gutenberg Bible, one of only four in the world.  Upstairs, past an exhibit that included dozens of historic pages handwritten by Washington, Jefferson and many other founding fathers, is Thomas Jefferson’s own library.  It’s displayed in a circular case, and I spied within a copy of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language in two large volumes.  After browsing, I had to use the bathroom of congress, which, oddly, had no urinals.

Later: the National Archives and the Washington Monument.

Filed under: History, Literature and Books, Travel on November 23rd, 2008 | No Comments »