Surprise
Wow, I was on an ASF committee, and I didn't even know it.
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I re-iterated the argument on dvd-discuss in favor of compulsory licensing for all copyrighted works in any medium. The basic concern is that copyright can be used to suppress a work, to stop it from being reprinted or reproduced at all. This is not the purpose of copyright; the purpose of copyright is to get money for authors and artists, not to let them (or their business partners, or their employers, or their heirs) keep works away from the public!
It seems scandalous to me that any work should be out of print simply because a copyright holder refuses to allow it to be reprinted. It's hard to understand how this could serve the public interest, which copyright is supposed to do.
I want to collect stories of cases where works were withdrawn from print using copyright. Sometimes the reasons are rather scandalous -- for example, an author's heirs may be embarrassed by a particular work, and want to protect the author's public image by burying something that the author has done. (Sometimes the author would have agreed, sometimes not.) One famous story concerns early Disney comics, which were often quite racist. Historians want to point out how pervasive racism has been in American culture by reproducing some of these comics for everyone to see. But the comics in question are extremely rare (so public libraries wouldn't have them, for example). Disney won't readily grant reprint permissions, presumably because it doesn't want people to see the kinds of attitudes it once shared with much of the public. If historians or critics do reprint these early Disney comics without permission, though, they may be sued.
Can the public interest be served by allowing copyright holders to inhibit the study and preservation of important pieces of history? Sometimes the issue shows up around personal letters: a famous person or the famous person's estate may not allow letters now in someone else's possession to be printed. Privacy invasion? No, copyright infringement. It's easier to sympathize with an individual letter author than with Disney, perhaps, but we know that copyright has hurt historians' and biographers' work here.
I thought I remembered that there was a famous person who died and who turned out to be gay but whose family blocked publication of a letter of his that would have substantiated this. So, as I said, I really need to find some specific documentation to substantiate stories like that.
There's quite a debate about which reforms are most appropriate; I just think it's an absolute scandal of copyright that things, once published, should go out of print if people are still willing to buy them.
Take some thermal printer paper -- I noticed this with a Cala Foods receipt, for example, which is printed on a thermal receipt paper. Make sure you haven't just washed your hands, and find a blank spot on the paper. Now press firmly to leave a fingerprint on the paper. You probably can't see your fingerprint. But now hold the paper carefully over a candle flame. Your fingerprint is revealed!
The oils in your fingerprint must either do something chemically to the paper or else prevent that part from getting quite as hot as the surrounding parts. It's like lemon juice, without the need for a lemon.
Thermal paper is getting much rarer; it used to be one of the most popular printing technologies, especially because it was pretty fast and quiet compared to things like daisy-wheel or dot matrix printers. But now it's mostly been displaced by inkjet and laser technology.
Why was I holding a receipt over a candle flame, you ask? To destroy the credit card information there, of course. A candle flame "prints" on thermal paper with huge black splotches; if you're careful, you could write words by moving the paper quickly. Interestingly, but not too surprisingly, thermal paper doesn't catch fire as readily as regular paper. This feature is very important. :-)
Now, if only I could find that kind of plastic bag that Krazy Glue burns holes in...
Sumana, you can find one version of Leonhard Euler's story in Eric Temple Bell's Men of Mathematics, although where you would find a copy of that in English in St. Petersburg, I don't know. The chapter on Euler is called "Analysis Incarnate".
I added something to "Existence and Uniqueness" which paraphrases the Somnium Scipionis and something by Karl Barth. Amusingly enough, when I searched for "manare nihil" on Google, the very first match was a web page I myself wrote in high school, which provided exactly the quotation I was looking for.
There's a famous line by Linus Torvalds about how he doesn't make backups, he just posts important things on the Internet and lets everybody else make copies for him. Then he's certain to be able to find them again when he needs them.
The passage is VI, 20 in the de Re Publica:
Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."
Three comments:
(After reading my own description of the Fall of Saigon in "Existence and Uniqueness".)
It's amazing that when Hector says "sat patriae Priamoque datum", Aeneas refuses to believe him. But on second thought, it's not incomprehensible; it makes sense. It has everything to do with who Aeneas is, and what Troy means to him.
I've thought about how Hector is telling Aeneas to "keep the faith and run away". The song I mentioned in April, and am now mentioning again, is by Real McCoy and is called "Run Away".
Run away, run away, run away and save your life,
Run away, run away, run away if you want to survive,
It's time to break free, oh, oh, oh, oh, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh,
You better break free, oh, oh, oh, oh, run away, oh, oh, oh, oh
[...]
You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith,
You better keep the faith and run away.
(I want to go buy this song on CD; I miss the New Year's parties at Eric's place where I'd always hear it.)
Isn't this exactly what Hector is saying to Aeneas?
It seems that part of Aeneas's initial refusal to "keep the faith and run away" is the desire to prove his loyalty:
Iliaci cineres et flamma extrema meorum,
testor, in occasu vestro nec tela nec ullas
vitavisse vices Danaum, et, si fata fuissent
ut caderem, meruisse manu.(II, 431-4)
Aeneas doesn't want to be called a coward for having fled Ilium merely to escape hardships to himself. More than that, he doesn't want to be a coward, even if other people would still have called him brave. He has to prove, both to his various audiences and to himself, that he had to flee, that it was the will of the gods, that he had no choice (so that later when he says "Italiam non sponte sequor" (IV), he is not just referring to leaving Carthage, but also to leaving Troy!). So he tries repeatedly to fall with Troy: "pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis" (II, 317), "moriamur et in media arma ruamus" (353). And his father takes just the same attitude: "me si caelicolae voluissent ducere vitam / has mihi servassent sedes" (641-2). There are many other examples; over and over again, Aeneas either tries to die fighting, expresses a wish to die fighting, expresses regret that he didn't die fighting, or expresses admiration and envy for those who did die fighting: "O terque quaterque beati / quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis / contingit oppetere!"
It's clearly only with vast difficulty that Aeneas accepts the advice of Hector. And this advice is repeated over and over -- by Hector, by Panthus, by Venus, by Creusa, and by others. "Fuit Ilium, fuimus Troes", but who can stand this? "Si Pergama dextra / defendi possent, etiam hac defensa fuissent", but who can stand that? Ilium and its defense are Aeneas's life, up to this point, as he has understood it. Outside those walls is nothing for him. It's strange to expect that he could imagine the value in saving his life if he loses Troy. But here he hears that Troy, his beloved city, is in ashes, is in flames, is shattered, is falling from its height ("divum inclementia, divum!"), and those who stay behind "deseruere omnes defessi, et corpora saltu / ad terram misere aut ignibus aegra dedere"! Troy is not only ruined but has become a trap which will destroy Aeneas if he stays. Yet even when he knows this, when dead Hector and dying Panthus warn him of the trap, his loyalty to the lost city is so great that he can't say for sure that he will "run away and save [his] life".
Aeneid II is incredibly powerful. Not only is the story of the fall of Troy suspenseful, exciting, and tragic, but the story of Aeneas is so real for me: arma virumque. He is presented with the mission of the fugitive hero who must utterly abandon his lost and burning world "dum conderet urbem" and must take up his gods
hos cape fatorum comites, his moenia quaere
magna, pererrato statues quae denique ponto
for another time and place. And we can relate perfectly well to this mission because we've heard all about it beforehand, but Aeneas doesn't know how to deal with it, raised as a warrior and abruptly separated from the fate of the "beati / quis [...] contingit oppetere" fighting for something already ruined.
I could and should say much more about this, yet I'm already repeating myself here; I'm just so moved by the description of his experience. This isn't critical exegesis, really, this is just Seth saying that Aeneid II is real life. It was real for Vergil and it's real for me just the way the epigraph to Gardner's Annotated Rime of the Ancient Mariner says it:
But I do not think "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was for Coleridge an escape from reality: I think it was reality, I think he was on the ship and made the voyage and felt and knew it all.(Thomas Wolfe, in a letter of 1932, included in The Letters of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Elizabeth Nowell, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956, p. 322)
"You gotta keep the faith, you gotta keep the faith..."
I'm probably going to work on the HealthHacker Symptom Tracker project, a free software project Biella is creating to monitor chronic illnesses and injuries. I keep wishing that I kept a health diary, to see what's really going on with my arms, and what it has a connection to, so maybe if I help write some health diary software, I'll end up actually using it, too.
After writing all day, I went off to play an eleventh-hour (OK, actually twenty-third hour) game of Scrabble with Robyn. My arms hurt a bit, but I have a chiropractic appointment tomorrow which could help.
I finally finished the standards paper draft, with much regret that it was later than I said it would be. I've sent it to EFF to see whether it can become a draft official EFF position, instead of a draft proposed official EFF position. :-)
I'm pretty happy with the content, although I think it could use some re-organization. I guess I've been steeped in copy protection debates for a while now, because large paragraphs about the evils of DRM seemed to flow naturally.
Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (briefly mentioned as an authority on the broad implications of design decisions) is quite fascinating.
While I was writing this position paper, I kept thinking of the epigraph to Neil Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology:
Whether or not it draws on new scientific research,
technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.(Paul Goodman, New Reformation)
Contact: Seth David Schoen