My usual rants about copyright law involve unwarranted strengthening of copyright law to protect old works that ought to be public domain by now. This post, however, deals with the drastic weakening of copyright protections by the proposed Orphan Works Act of 2008 (H.R.5889). This piece of legislation would damage the livelihoods of living artists, amending the law to allow anyone to infringe on a visual work’s copyright after being unable to locate its author after a “reasonably diligent search.” In theory, this would allow works whose authors have died or otherwise dropped off the face of the earth to be used commercially, which could only be a good thing, right?
Not so much. The infringer would be allowed to determine what constitutes a “reasonably diligent search.” This goes far beyond fair use; the infringer would be free to commercially exploit the work for any purpose. The entire burden of proving copyright infringement of a so-called orphaned work would fall on the artist. Current copyright protections provide for injunctive relief, payment of attorney’s fees, limitations of damages in a countersuit, and a discovery process for determining infringement; none of these would apply to orphaned works. Even images that directly incorporate copyright and contact information would be easy prey for unscrupulous infringers who deliberately remove such information, because they could claim an orphaned works defense, making it nearly impossible for an artist to prove infringement.
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There are three strips of 520 that have newer pavement on them, laid sometime last summer. They really do make a difference in tire hiss as you drive across them. Assuming traffic is moving in the morning, I get a couple minutes of blessed silence from the road as I drive across asphalt rubber (still the quietest after several months of use), the control section of regular asphalt (always the noisiest, but new enough not to create the roar of older asphalt from other parts of 520), and polymer-extended asphalt (almost as quiet as the asphalt rubber, and seeming to wear a bit better).
I had the geeky good fortune a few weeks ago to follow a department of transportation test car as it traveled eastbound during the morning commute. It had a frame attached to the right side, from which was suspended a pair of microphones that rode only a few short inches from the rear tire. One of the vehicle’s occupants was collecting data on a laptop in the back seat. All in all, it makes the wannabe scientist in me very happy to see things like this.
April 18, 2008 – 10:04 pm
Ah, spring in Seattle. The flowers are blooming. The trees are turning green. The birds are singing. The snow is accumulating.
Yes, snow. Last I checked the calendar, we’re in the latter half of April, and the magnolia in the front yard has a dusting of snow on its new blossoms. The drive home this evening was bizarre, with partial cloud cover and a spring shower in Redmond, complete overcast and please-don’t-strip-the-paint-from-my-car hail on the 520 bridge, and black clouds and a raging blizzard from the U District to Northgate.
Ironically enough, my commute began behind an enormous black SUV, upon which was a large bumper sticker that read, “Global warming is a ‘theory’ - backed up by presumptuous science, not facts.” Presumably, the fact that it’s snowing in Seattle in April is perfectly normal.
Near-constant discussion of City of Heroes / City of Villains on IRC over the last couple of days has chipped away at my will, and I nabbed the Good Versus Evil Edition from the local Gamestop for twenty bucks. I gave up on City of Heroes some time ago, getting bored at level 24 on two separate characters. The best part of the game, honestly, was making new characters. I spent hours clicking through the character designer, filling up four servers with wacky new character ideas.
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It’s shocking how bad the Windows Mobile browser is. Not only has it taken vast amounts of time waiting for pages to load, I’m not entirely certain I’m entering this in the correct part of the WordPress interface. Regardless of whether or not the post even appears, I won’t be able to read it, because this execrable mobile version of IE can’t render nyerm in a useful way. It’s not like this site has particularly complicated design.
This little rant is the result of having used a friend’s iPhone for five minutes. It’s a thing of beauty, that little slab of plastic and circuitry. Not like this clunky chunk of junk.
Or at least with more consistency. I’m firing up the old blog again after leaving it fallow for a couple of years. I’m finding I miss committing thought to text, tossing ideas out into the ether for people to see. Or not. It matters little to me whether or not I have a huge following; I just want my own soap box from which to yammer again.
Speaking of ideas, that’s something I’d like to focus on more this time around. A lot of my past blogging was regurgitation of things I’d run across on other people’s blogs. For that, I’ve got del.icio.us and various IRC channels; I don’t need a blog devoted to sharing the latest internet memes with friends as they occur. I plan to post more things that come from myself, including a smattering of art, most of it likely to be scribbles and in-progress work.
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September 21, 2005 – 11:44 am
Amidst the uproar and ridicule over the wacky new controller design for the Nintendo Revolution, it’s great to see some more level-headed commentary on what Nintendo might be trying to accomplish. Nintendo’s Genre Innovation Strategy: Thoughts on the Revolution’s new controller is an insightful article about how Nintendo has positioned itself as an innovation leader in the gaming marketplace, reaping the benefits of releasing not the most polished games for the most hardcore gamers, but the newest technological and gameplay advances for a wider audience. By creating completely new ways in which to play games, Nintendo manages to keep a place for themselves in the marketplace, creating brand new markets before their competitors can swoop in and refine their concepts into rigidly-defined genres.
September 17, 2005 – 10:40 am
Some of the most clever paper engineering I’ve seen has resulted in the transformation of a pair of Paris Métro tickets into an itty bitty X-wing fighter. X-wing en tickets de métro step by step contains all the instructions you need to convert your Métro tickets into the premier starfighter of the Rebel Alliance.
September 17, 2005 – 10:25 am
As a long-time Emacs afficionado, I find this article rather amusing. Emacs Key Bindings Make You Retarded makes the case that years of being used to abominations such as hitting Ctrl+A to go to the beginning of a line can actually prevent you from using newer interfaces that are probably much better, ergonomically and productively. I can fully identify with this problem. I don’t actually use Emacs itself for everything, but nonetheless, I irrationally expect applications to adhere to its arcane system of strange key bindings.
It would be nice to open a program with a text-editing interface and not get three new documents when I press Ctrl+N a few times to move the cursor down a few rows. Selecting the entire text of a document when I’m attempting to move to the beginning of a line with Ctrl+A would be helpful, as well. Alas, I’ve managed to find ways to lobotomize even the most recalcitrant of Windows applications into using Emacs key bindings, largely through a clever program called XKeymacs. Thanks to this little utility, even Microsoft Word behaves like Emacs most of the time.
Of course, as I’ve typed this, I’ve used Ctrl+B several times to move the cursor back and insert a word, then Ctrl+E to skip to the end of the line again and resume typing, a pattern that is so etched into my motor memory that it will likely never fade away. Computers will be voice-controlled in the future, and yet my fingers will still twitch over familiar key bindings, even as I dictate aloud to a low-sapient AI who is already anticipating my needs and inserting those words I’ve forgotten.
September 15, 2005 – 4:01 pm
Yeah, it’s probably been linked to a jillion times by now, but it’s new and freshly hysterical to me. If you haven’t given it a gander, you owe it to yourself to read The “Holy Crap We’re Moving Saturday And Need To Sell Our Stuff” Sale” over on craigslist LA.
