Thanks to sethf:
the Library of
Congress (they of the incredibly beautiful reading room,
but sometimes lamentable
statutory duties) is holding another DMCA anticircumvention
exemptions rulemaking. Where did those three years go?
Dan Bricklin argues that
the right to create derivative works is important, in connection
with the Eldred case; I was thinking exactly the same thing as I
watched the oral argument. Sometimes people, including Justices
of the Supreme Court, forget that copyright has expanded to include
derivative work rights and public performance rights and digital
public performance of sound recording rights and now even
anticircumvention paracopyright rights. It's not just about
literal copying.
As we
reported, the time for public comment on the FCC's
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was extended to December 6 (apparently
in response to a request by
Public Knowledge,
CDT, and
Consumers Union).
Via Felten, politicians are saying:
the general purpose computer is
a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.
Maybe we will all get pushdown automata in the future instead of Turing
machines. "Eat low on the food chain, code low on the Chomsky
hierarchy."
At the Indian ice cream place on Valencia between 16th and 17th
Streets, there's a picture drawn in the concrete of the sidewalk
outside. The picture contains two transistors and three
resistors; it appears to be a schematic for some kind of TTL logic
gate.
Update: I'm now guessing that it's an RTL NOR gate, but I have to
go back and take a look at to make sure. My reference is Mano,
Digital Design, p. 410.
("Resolution and Independence", "Existence and Uniqueness" -- someone
should write a poem called "Deposit and Renewal".)
Aaron sent me some comments about Amy's concerns about how renewal
and deposit requirements would affect free software, especially
free software under a copyleft license. Aaron argued that the
deposit is easy if an electronic deposit by e-mail is permitted
(much, I suppose, the way BXA, now known as BIS, permits electronic
notification by e-mail of crypto exports -- a scheme
Bernstein continues to challenge).
I think that's correct. In fact, it's a shame that there is not
even a voluntary electronic deposit mechanism, since so many
works which will some day be lost are being written today in
digital form; I guess simply publishing on the web is a
good first approximation.
But Amy's main concern was about renewal, not deposit. Rewewal requires
an action at regular intervals in the future with respect to every
copyrighted work, and, to be really effective at dissuading people from
renewing copyrights with no commercial value (or with de minimis
commercial value), has to require a nominal fee.
That could be a problem when there are many released versions.
Proprietary software typically has only a few releases, but free
software sometimes has a new snapshot release every day -- or,
with anonymous CVS, published copyrightable subject matter in
the form of patches many times every hour.
Can anybody tell me what a "certificate of division in opinion" is?
Via Crackmonkey,
Oftaj demandoj pri
denaskaj Esperant-lingvanoj (Frequent questions about
native Esperanto speakers). There is a common myth that only
continuously live (sc. "having communities of native speakers")
languages have any native speakers at all today. This is totally
untrue. Hebrew is probably the most obvious counterexample, since
it was deliberately revived as a native spoken language from almost
exactly the current condition of Latin, and is now spoken natively
by millions of people.
But there are also native Esperanto speakers, even though Esperanto
is an artificial language which had no speakers at all before the
19th century. And there are not only Latin speakers, but even native
Latin speakers, and I believe that there have been native Latin
speakers continually for thousands of years. (Michel de Montaigne is
a famous example; although he was born in a French-speaking community,
he learned Latin as his first language and French as his second
language, from adults who spoke Latin as a non-native language. There
is no suggestion that his Latin was awkward or inadequate or that he
had any trouble communicating with other Latin speakers.)
The only reason some people say that Latin is a "dead language" is
that there are no communities of native speakers who regularly teach
the language to their children to produce more native speakers. (You
could also claim that Latin is not the language of any community,
but I think this claim is misleading.)
There are a lot of regional languages in danger of "death" in the
sense that they are not being learned as native languages. I bought
a book on language death (Vanishing Voices: The Extinction
of the World's Languages, by Daniel Nettle and Suzanne
Romaine), which phrases the question of what a language is
in an interesting way:
After all, languages are not living things which can be born and
die, like butterflies and dinosaurs. They are not victims of old
age and disease. They have no tangible existence like trees or
people. In so far as language can be said to exist at all, its
locus must be in the minds of the people who use it. In
another sense, however, language might be regarded as an activity,
a system of communication between human beings. A language is
not a self-sustaining entity.
(p. 5)
So you can see a language as a kind of cultural practice or
activity or pattern which happens between and among people -- the
kind of conventional view of language and speech, the kind
of unmagical view, which fairly shocked me when I ran into
it for the first time in Lee Tien's account:
The relationship of speech acts to language,
however, is not that speech acts must be in a language, but rather
that language constitutes a system of conventions that permits
speakers to perform otherwise purely physical acts like uttering
sounds that hearers understand in virtue of their knowing those
conventions. But because language is not the only system of
conventions that makes intersubjective utterance meaning possible,
nonlinguistic acts can also be speech acts.
(Lee Tien, "Publishing Software as a Speech Act", 15 Berkeley
Technology Law Journal 629, 642 (2000))
("Conventional" here means "consisting of conventions" rather than
"ordinary" or "widely accepted".)
Back to language death: most endangered languages have not been used
to create a famous
literature or other recorded cultural artifacts, so they're not
likely to enjoy the fate of Latin or Hebrew or Sanskrit. People
are still studying Sanskrit and Old English (or
Anglo-Saxon) largely
so that they can read the literatures which were produced in
those languages. But many of the languages dying today haven't
even had a written form for most of their lifetimes.
Lisa Rein says she was actually #2 in line (which makes sense, since
she got there well before Lodrina and Macki did). Yesterday I
mistakenly reported that she was #4.
Reading Ernest Miller's coverage of the Eldred argument reminded me
of one part I neglected to discuss yesterday. It's the
re-copyrighting question.
Justice Breyer raised an analogy
he would repeat with the Solicitor General. He asked whether under
Eldred's argument it would be permissible to recopyright the bible,
Ben Johnson, or Shakespeare.
(For "Eldred", I think, read "Ashcroft".)
The Solicitor General argued that copyright term extension was useful
because it could promote "distribution" (if you have an exclusive right
to publish something, you may have a financial incentive to publish it,
regardless of how long ago it was written). So Breyer speculated that
it might be helpful for public access to works written a long time ago,
like the Bible, if some contemporary publisher were given a monopoly
on them. Would that be legitimate?
Olson struggled with this and didn't seem to give a straight answer.
He seemed to suggest that it might be legitimate to re-copyright public
domain works in order to obtain the distribution benefits.
