Worldcon
I didn't actually attend Worldcon, but I did go to San Jose to meet with a delegation organized by the UK Publishers Association, which was visiting Worldcon. So I was at least physically present at Worldcon.
The publishers were very nice to us, as were our and their hosts from the U.K. consulate in San Francisco, who helped organize the delegation's itinerary. (I got to see the business cards of some of the other people they'd met with, and I recognized quite a lot of the names.) It seemed to me that U.K. publishers are much less radical and much more reasonable about copyright than U.S. publishers, but maybe that's just because I'm still angry with the AAP about how they handled Dmitry's arrest.
(Amusingly enough, the meeting was held within sight of Adobe headquarters and our parade route from the Free Dmitry march, and in fact I walked past Adobe and walked that very parade route on my way from Caltrain to the meeting. This tended to put me in mind of Dmitry's case, not that it came up during our discussions, oddly.)
I've been feeling that there is a hierarchy of radicalism about copyright within the copyright industries. Movie publishers' trade association (MPAA) is most radical; music recordings' publishers (RIAA) less so; print publishers (AAP) again less so. There are, of course, dozens of other trade associations within the U.S. copyright industries, but none of them seem quite so outspoken as those three publishers' associations.
Print publishers do face a different situation from the entertainment publishers, in various ways. Most of their publishing is not now digital; most of their publishing is not a "recording"; most of their publishing is in a format whose physical characteristics are significant; most of their publishing is not usually considered "entertainment". The ways and reasons people buy books are different from the ways and reasons they buy other copyrighted works.
But I was saying that the U.K. publishers were nice to us and interesting to talk to. I'm glad we got the opportunity. One of the things they're working on at the moment is notice-and-takedown in the U.K.; they'd like to have it, but, it seems, they'd like it to be a little better than U.S. notice and takedown (17 USC 512). We suggested that they take a look at Chilling Effects to see a bit of the variety of the ways 512 is being used today.
What is it with these powers of two? (The CBDTPA is S. 2048.)
The publishers' delegation seemed very supportive of the right to parody and the right to excerpt for criticism, and they were disturbed that notice and takedown was being used against people who did those things. As far as they were concerned, notice and takedown was supposed to be used against people who were copying a work in its entirety.
As you might imagine, we spent a long time talking to the publishers about the evils of anticircumvention, and why any anticircumvention provision should require an underlying act of copyright infringement, or the intent to commit an infringement. We should see if the Publishers Association comments on the implementation of the EUCD.
I had the honor at our meeting of meeting Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and a little later on of meeting Craig Newmark.
(The description below is mostly cribbed from an e-mail message I wrote.)
After the meeting, and a good deal of socializing, I accidentally lost track of the person who'd offered to let me share his hotel room. (I'd missed the last Caltrain during that socializing, and Caltrain service is temporarily suspended on weekends this summer anyway, in favor of some strange bus service.) That meant that I had no place to stay in San Jose and no way home, short of a taxi.
So I walked back to the hotel where we'd held the meeting and asked them if they knew a way back to San Francisco after midnight. They didn't.
I went outside to a VTA bus stop and found that there was a bus from the Caltrain station (which I considered walking distance away, since I'd walked from Caltrain to the hotel) at 6:30a which would take me to the Fremont BART, from which is merely a long BART ride home. So I thought I could possibly stay awake, maybe using my laptop at the hotel to do some writing, or some reading, or some playing video games, as long as the hotel didn't decide to kick me out -- and, if they did, I could try to sit in a public park until about 6:00a, and then walk to Caltrain. However, the "staying awake until 6:30a" part seemed kind of challenging.
So a light rail train pulled up and I asked them how to get to San Francisco. They were a "test train" (no passengers), but the train operator kindly calling in to VTA headquarters to ask them to advise me. They said "take light rail to San Fernando, take the 22 to Menlo Park, and catch a SamTrans bus there to San Francisco".
San Fernando seemed far away -- like Southern California, right? -- but I asked some other people who were waiting for light rail and they told me it was a street in San Jose, two blocks away. While we were talking about this, a 22 bus passed by us. Oops! So I waited at a bus stop where the 22 had gone by for a while until a woman waiting there for a different bus warned me that it wasn't a 22 bus stop, merely a bus stop which happened to be along the 22's route, and that I really should go to San Fernando the way everybody had advised me to.
So I walked over to San Fernando and finally found a bus stop which looked promising. After waiting there for quite a while, I caught a northbound 22 VTA bus. I fell asleep on the bus somewhere around Sunnyvale and missed the Menlo Park stop, and I only woke up at the last stop on the 22 line, which is the Palo Alto Caltrain station. Oops again.
It turns out that there is a SamTrans bus from the Palo Alto Caltrain station to San Francisco, though -- the 397. (I think that's a different bus from the one I was supposed to catch at Menlo Park, which I think was the KX.) One of those eventually showed up, and I fell asleep again, and woke up somewhere along Mission Street in San Francisco, shortly before the 397's last stop at the Transbay Terminal (1st and Mission).
There, as I'd hoped, I was able to catch a 14 Mission MUNI bus and take it (falling asleep again, as you might expect) 23 blocks to 24th and Mission, and walk home, getting in just before 6:00a.
So, my non-Caltrain trip home took five hours in all, including waiting, walking, and riding.
I'm reminded of one time I got stuck without a place to stay in Berkeley and missed not only the last BART train but the last AC Transit F bus. It turns out that there is an all-night bus from somewhere near downtown Berkeley to downtown Oakland (12th Street), and then you can wait a while for the all-night A, which has service to the Transbay Terminal. (And from there, of course, you could take the 14 Mission, although I lived within walking distance from the Transbay Terminal at the time.)
So it turns out that there is actually 24-hour service between Berkeley and San Francisco, and between San Jose and San Francisco, but you're likely to spend at least an hour waiting at bus stops, and maybe several hours. I had some good books, too, but I was too tired to focus on reading.
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