Yesterday Free Press launched a Rescue
Internet Radio Campaign to protest the new royalty rates being
imposed on digital audio broadcasters. I think it makes a lot of
sense in this case to take some time to understand what's going
on here, and in particular why those rates are greater than those
rates paid by traditional broadcasters -- those AM/FM guys who broadcast
on some part of the wireless spectrum.
So what happened here was that the U.S. Copyright Office's Copyright
Royalty Board endorsed
a proposal (pdf) put together by the RIAA-associated SoundExchange
royalty organization. SoundExchange's license fees are set by law
and have in the past been pegged at $.0003 to stream one song to
one listener -- what's known as a listener hour. With this decision,
CRB set those rates to $0.0008 retroactively for 2006. They climb
from there, starting at $.0011 this year and increasing each subsequent
year until they plateau at $.0019 in 2010. Under the plan, every
digital audio channel would have to make a minimum $500 royalty
payment to SoundExchange, including non-commercial stations. In
the past, small webcasters were able to pay royalties based on revenue,
with a small minimum fee per year -- something around $2000, I think.
No more. What happens to them now? One
estimate is that while traditional radio stations paid about
$1.50 per listener in 2006, digital broadcasters will pay about
$9 now and about $15 in 2008. The argument goes that for some digital
broadcasters, their royalty obligations would come in at more than
they money they take in. Many will quit broadcasting, most likely.
What's important here is that these are royalties for performance.
The royalties collected by SoundExchange are based on the actual
performance of the song. Half of what SoundExchange collects goes
to the song's copyright holder, who is usually the recording company,
while 45% goes to the featured artist(s) and 5% to backing musicians
and vocalists. There was no performance rights for sound recordings
before the 1990's and especially the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act. and when the DMCA established one, it applied it only to digital
performances. Of late, SoundExchange et al have been pushing
for the application of a performance right to terrestrial radio,
including Sirius, XM, and the like. As it stands, however, traditional
broadcasters are right now exempt from the performance rates that
digital stations have to pay. But both digital and traditional broadcasters
do have to pay a fee to the composer of the song recorded. Those
generally go to one of three composers' organizations -- ASCAP,
BMI, or SESAC.
So the way it stands now is this. If you live in New York and hear
Melissa Etheridge sing her version of Tom Petty's "Refugee"
on say, Z100 at 100.3 FM, then the songwriters (Petty and guitarist
Mike Campbell) are the ones to whom royalties are directed -- via
ASCAP. But if you hear the same song on Pandora.com, then the work
of both Etheridge via SoundExchange and Petty & Campbell
are being licensed. (Fun fact: Petty
says that the inspiration for "Refugee" and the whole
"Damn the Torpedoes" album was his anger with the whole
ferkockteh recording industry.)
Crystal clear, no? All this is fun (and profitable) mental exercise
for lawyers, sure. If you think all this makes it extremely challenging
to take on Internet radio as an entrepreneurial project, you're
of course right. How did we get to this point? Consider that in
2004, the RIAA described digital radio as "the
perfect storm" -- and they meant that in a bad way. The
threat from digital radio is "real
and imminent," (pdf) they said, and they argued that the
greater potential for copying and the like had to be accounted for.
Thus the establishment of SoundExchange. And in theory, the SoundExchange
system was a way of making formal the webcaster model and streamlining
the process by making clear what the costs of doing business are
up front. And it also rewards performing artists. It's a good thing
for performers to get paid, no doubt.
One reading of this situation is that the Copyright Royalty Board
set rates at something shockingly high as a way of opening the discussion.
And in fact, the CRB will
hold further hearings on the royalty rate hike. The Free Press Rescue
Internet Radio campaign is a way to let the CRB know that any
royalty scheme that makes digital radio impossible is bad policy
for all of us.
I set out fairly early -- for a Saturday -- this morning to poke around Greenpoint and Williamsburg, take some photographs. Here's what I came up with. (I just realized while putting this post together that there seems to have been a theme today: street art, grafitti, whatever you want to call it.) First up, an art wall with Manhattan in the distance:
And three more shots of the same wall:
Next up, the view of Manhattan from Williamsburg. I've tried a couple times to capture the feeling that I get when I'm there -- that distance between the gleaming "city" and the gritty borough of Brooklyn is both very short and very great. I haven't done it yet. But I loved the "Sweatshop Labor" tagging here:
Another shot of Manhattan from Brooklyn. Kinda boring, but there's something I found appealing about it:
Then, two shots of a politically tagged water tower at the corner of West Street and Milton Street, the second one simply an inversion of the first:
And last, an extreme close up of this fantastic old Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse on the East River:
When you combine Greenpoint/Williamsburg's industrial roots, waterfront location, and artistic spirit, what's been hard for me so far is figuring out what not to take a picture of.
I'm reluctant to write this because I've discovered a secret to taking a
good picture/video and I don't want to share it. But it's too good to keep
to myself. It has to do with white balance. White balance, if you're not
familiar, is calibrating your camera or video camera to read true color
by exposing it to something pure white, like a piece of paper or a custom
white card that photographers sometimes carry. The camera uses that white
to then figure out how to render the rest of the color spectrum. The thing
is, digital recording devices can tend to white balance a bit cold, meaning
that a camera calibrated to a pure white card or piece of paper can produce
images that overemphasize blues and whites. The trick is then to calibrate
to a "false white;" that is telling the camera to use a non-white
color to start its color readings from. Calibrating from a card that's a
very light blue will trick the camera into boosting up reds, oranges, and
yellows -- the colors that make a photo look warm and just a bit sexy. It
can be overdone, sure. Any overly warm photo can verge on looking sepia.
Or like a gauzy Lifetime movie. But a bit of blue can set the camera
to produce a look that's similar to the golden hour -- that time of day,
usually late afternoon, where there's a golden cast to the light and things
tend to look their best. A message board post I read said that military
photographers have been using this trick for years by "white"
balancing off of their dress blue shirts. Being a civilian, I found one
company that makes a product called Warm
Cards. I now desperately want a pack. But at $45 for the digital camera
set, I'm going to hold off just a bit. Still, I was able to produce the
effect by balancing off of my mousepad, a paperback copy of One Hundred
Years of Solitude, and other blue things lying around the house.
It was just last night that I was reading Eric Barnouw's
Documentary:
A History of the Non-Fiction Film and I read about Leni Riefenstahl.
Riefenstahl is the German--dancer-turned-filmmaker who created films hergestellt
im auftrage des Führers -- by the order of Hitler himself. Her
most famous works were Triumph of the Will and Olympia,
the latter a documentary of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. And then
today, of course, I stumble across Riefenstahl's name again. This time,
it's Mia Farrow and
her son Ronan in the Wall Street Journal asking "does
Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl
of the Beijing Games?"
Spielberg, you see, is serving
as artistic consultant for the opening and closing ceremonies of the
2008 Olympic games in Beijing, with Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou as the
project lead. Chinese is looking to the Olympics to burnish its image
after recent bad press. Farrow's particular charge against China is its
seemingly unblinking support for the government of Sudan. And Khartoum,
of course, is widely seen as the perpetuators of the crisis in Darfur,
where almost half a million people have been killed. China buys a great
deal of the oil that Sudan ships, money that goes to fuel Khartoum's actions
in Darfur. Entreaties to China to use its leverage in Sudan to do something
to stop that catastrophe have fallen on dear ears. You may as well just
go and read the Farrows' op-ed.
It's actually really well done.
Interesting point in the Barnouw book is that while Triumph of the
Will and to a far lesser extent Olympia where considered
really good Nazi propoganda, bother are actually considered extremely
well-made films, from an artistic perspective. For Triumph, Riefenstahl
managed a crew of about 120 and stage managed every aspect of the 1934
annual National Socialist German Workers party rally. For Olympia,
Riefenstahl and her crew filmed from pits feet away from where the world's
best high-jumpers competed.
Triumph
expertly captured every element of the Nazi operation. Giant precise columns
of German troops lined the field where the Führer was to
appear. Hitler was himself depicted as a near mythic figure, decending
from the clouds to anoint his people. Sweeping shots recorded all the
pomp and circumstance of Nazi pagentry.
In fact, Triumph of the Will was such a feat of documentary
that it became a tool of the opposistion forces -- integrated into the
Allied forces own propoganda. Major Frank Capra's borrowed from it liberally
for his Why We Fight series. As Barnouw puts it, "nothing
else depicted so vividly the demoniac nature of the Hitler leadership,
and the scarely human discipline supporting it."
I'm not shy about the fact that I think New York's Drum Major Institute
does terrific work. I'm not sure I want to hear their answer to the question
above -- sadly, it seems to be leaning pretty close to "no"
-- but still I'm going to attend their
conference on the topic on Monday. It's from 8am to 2pm at the Baruch
College Conference Center at 55 Lexington Avenue on the 14th floor. Speaking
will be Rep. Anthony Weiner, the founder of the Freelancers Union, NYC's
Comptroller, the President of the United Federation of Teachers, Mario
Cuomo, and a bunch of other folks. Oh, and it's free. Plus, there's
free food. But you do have to RSVP.
Man, the things you find on the Internet. In doing my customary pre-screening research before watching Errol Morris' The Thin Blue Line tonight, I stumbled upon a compelling video clip of Morris interviewing Donald Trump on the significance of Citizen Kane. I know I probably shouldn't, but I like the Donald.
Yep, haaard at work today. Recognize the lead singer from this 1985 clip from the hit show "Kids Incorporated"? I remember Kids Inc. well. I thought those kids could rock:
Let's see if this works. Mouse over the hidden text to find out who. It's a ten year-old Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas! Bonus: according to the credits, somewhere dancing in the background is Mario "Dancing with the Stars" Lopez.
There's an important
new bill in Congress that hasn't gotten much attention as of yet.
Senators Dodd, Durbin, and Kennedy, and Reps. Rob Andrews and Don
Young have just introduced the Re-empowerment
of Skilled and Professional Employees and Construction Tradeworkers
(RESPECT) Act, S. 969 in the Senate and H.R. 1644 in the House.
Here's the short summary. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act -- legislation
meant to emasculate the 1935 National Labor Relations Act -- excluded
employees classified as "supervisors" from the protections
of the NLRA. Back in October of 2006, a National Labor Relations
Board's decision in what's known as the Kentucky
River cases opened the gates on employees exempt from labor
protections by deciding that charge nurses are indeed "supervisors."
These are RNs, you see, who have the responsibility to assign other
nurses, LPNs (licensed practical nurses), and other medical staff
to take care of certain patients, and who may generally oversee
patient care in their units during their shifts.
While not a particularly sexy piece of legislation, the RESPECT Act is a structural tweak that would and restore labor rights to a wide swath of workers and, perhaps more importantly, tear down a major obstacle in the union certification process.
Happiness in New York, I've found, has a great deal to do with some of life's
basics -- how crowded the subway is on your way to work, finding a place to
stash your car (if you have one) or that of friends and family who come to visit,
having a nice patch of grass to spend a few quiet minutes away from the world.
If you're in the New York area and care about such things, this event at the
Tank tonight should prove compelling:
Cities worldwide are embracing new ideas about mass transit, congestion pricing,
parking, public squares, mixed used development, and more, yet New York City's
transportation policies often seem as though they are stuck in the 1960s. But
the sustainable transportation movement in New York City is alive in Streetsblog,
StreetFilms, Transportation
Alternatives, the Municipal Art Society,
Project for Public Spaces, and other organizations
along with many individual blogs and community groups.
Meet and mingle with other readers, activists, and supporters of a livable approach
to transportation, development, and public spaces. Get to know the others who
share your values about the kind of city we want to live in. Put faces behind
the screen names online. And have a drink!
At 7 o'clock, leaders from a few organizations will introduce themselves
and say a few brief words about their current activities:
Many of the folks on the panel are the same ones behind the recent pushback
against the NYC Department of Transportation plan to turn Park Slope's 5th and
7th Avenues -- my own hood (we live about a block from 7th) -- into one-way
thoroughfares.
It was such a gorgeous day in New York -- high of about 71, I think -- that I went out this afternoon and took some photographs for a project that I'm working on about the layer of oil and gas sludge laying underneath the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint. I was struck by this "Danger: No Smoking" sign along Newtown Creek, maybe, umm, a hundred feet from an oil containment boom. I guess they're trying to prevent another Cuyahoga River fire:
Here's a wide shot of the oil containment boom behind the Peerless Importers building, the site of the old Paragon Oil terminal, with Manhattan in the background:
The blog Gowanus Lounge has been tracking stories that construction at the corner of 11th Street and Roebling in North Williamsburg has tapped into underground oil pools -- quite a distance from what's generally thought of the boundaries of the Greenpoint spill. I stopped by the Roebling site, and while I didn't find any oil, I did find workers mucking around in the dirt and mud:
Hope the day was lovely wherever you are. I'm certainly a more pleasant person when the weather is this darn nice.
I challenge you to read all about how the residents of Washington DC have no elected official who can vote on their behalf in Congress, and to not come to the conclusion that there's something seriously wrong there. Make me so angry. My latest Hearing Progressive Voices interview is up on MyDD:
Ilir Zherka is Executive Director of DC Vote, the force behind the fight for voting rights in the nation's capital. A predominantly black 68 square-mile city whose half million residents voted for John Kerry at a rate of 90%, the District of Columbia has no U.S. Senators. Its sole congressional Representative cannot vote on the House floor. Ilir and I talked about the 'Taxation without Representation' battle cry, the challenge of having low-knowledge supporters and dedicated opponents, agitating for domestic change in the global space, and what we all can do about the failure of democracy in Washington DC.
The House was set to pass a bill on Thursday that would give both Utah and DC one (more) voting representative in the House of Representatives. At the last minute, a congressman from Texas doomed the bill by tying it to the DC Personal Protection Act -- a repeal of the District's strict gun laws. Nice. Read what Ilir has to say about it.
Oh, also, please consider signing up to get an email when new Hearing Progressive Voices interviews go live. I of course would never even consider spamming you, ever. Never.
Domino
Sugar is old New York and old Brooklyn. In 1859, the Havemeyer family
opened a state-of-the-art sugar refinery at 4th Street and Kent Avenue
in Williamsburg, on the banks of the East River. The Havemeyer sugar
empire became Domino Sugar in 1901. According to Mary Habstritt of the
Roebling
Chapter of the Society for Industrial Archaeologists, before the Havemeyers,
sugar was sugar -- a bulk product, sold in barrels under no brand name.
The Domino name was an attempt by the Havemeyers to brand their
pure-white and highly-refined sugar as something special. That distinctive
"Domino Sugar" sign is an NYC landmark.
(The Havemeyers eventually transferred most of their refining activities
to facilities on the more economical Baltimore Harbor. Baltimore's where
I learned to sail a few years back, and I can testify that the whole area
smells like delicious caramel. Yum.)
Last night at the nifty City Reliquary,
the Waterfront Preservation Alliance
held a Don't
Demo Domino Bake Sale and Q&A. The WPA is pushing for the Kent
Avenue Domino facility to be landmarked.
After the refinery stopped making sugar in 2004, it was
bought by the for-profit arm of the Community Preservation Corporation
and Brooklyn developer Isaac Katan. Katan seems to be best known for trying
to gentrify 4th Avenue in Park Slope, though I for one haven't seen much
gentrification on 4th as of yet. Katan and CPC's plan for the Domino building
as are of yet unknown.
StreetFilms has a very nice bit of citizen journalism -- a
5:11 "man on the scene" short film -- on the NYC DOT plan to convert Park
Slope's 5th and 7th Avenues into one-way thoroughfares. (via Steven
Johnson) Many here in the community were adamantly opposed to the idea of
having two high-speed one-way roads running straight smack through our fairly
quiet little neighborhood. DOT seems to have been listening. They scotched
the plan Thursday.
Starting a new project that centers on Newtown Creek, the natural boundary between Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and Hunters Point, Queens. Since the 1950s, more than 17 million gallons of oil have spilled or leaked from oil refineries along the creek's banks.
Two new documentaries that premiered at SXSW, I missed, and (I think) lack distrubution deals as of yet. Manufacturing Dissent is a somewhat critical look at the life and work of Michael Moore by two self-proclaimed liberals. And Helvetica examines typography and "global visual culture" by tracking the global domination of that classic 70's font -- which is just pretty much completely awesome. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to see them both.
My talk last Tuesday in Austin on engaging techies in politics went well, I think. I ran through it like I had my pants on fire, though. Going to work on that. Slides are here and this is the text as delivered:
Hey, everyone. We're going to get started. First of all, thank you
so much for coming. I really appreciate it. Hope you guys are having a
good SXSW. My name is Nancy Scola, and this panel is "The Technologists'
Agenda: Political Activism for Geeks." We only have about 25 minutes,
so I'm going to talk pretty quickly and try to cover a lot of ground.
And I'm hoping to leave a couple minutes at the end for questions.
I'm going to talk about three things. First off, why the political world
desperately needs people who understand technology. Second, how technologists
can get involved in politics. And third, why that hasn't happened yet.
These are the slides for the talk I gave last week at SXSW. The subject was "The Technologists' Agenda: Political Activism for Geeks." The visuals aren't real useful without the accompanying text, but I have audio and once I finish transcribing the talk later today, I'll post 'em both.
Hearing Progressive Voices -- my interview series conducted entirely via instant messenger -- has itself a new web home. It was born a MyDD series and that's where it will stay, but I thought it would be great to have a place where links to the interviews are collected together into a directory of sorts.
I'm super excited about the interview I have lined up this week...
At a session yesterday here at SXSW, the man behind "Supersize Me" and "30 Days" was asked for his thoughts on the way that blogs and other newish technologies are changing the way that we get information. Here's what he had to say:
(Spurlock's now kicking something like a five-inch beard. He's filming a new movie, in part, in the Middle East and he said he makes him feel more comfortable there.)
Let me draw your attention to a remarkable essay by Brooklyn writer Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn) in this month's Harper's. It's about the long history in art of artists appropriating the creativity of other artists. Thomas Mann called it higher "cribbing." It's Nabakov mining the plot of a 1916 by journalist Heinz von Lichburg for Lolita. It's Bob Dylan borrowing lines from a 1958 flim noir, Shakespeare, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's William Burroughs copying snippets from other writers -- what Lethem calls "interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot." It's Henry Darger's strange collages, built from drawings and art of others. Jazz has always been open source. Artist are inspired to create art by art, and art, says Lethem, exists in not only a market economy, but a gift economy as well. And the power of a gift economy, says Lethem, remains difficult for empiricists of our market culture to understand.
Actually, it wasn't Lethem, but David Bollier, who was paraphrasing Warren Hagstrom. Lethem's piece is largely cobbled together from the work of other writers.
It was at SXSW 2006 that Christian
Crumlish brought me to a BBQ party hosted by Mark Warner's
Forward Together PAC, where I met his Internet team. I mentioned
pretty off-handedly right
here on this blog, I was intrigued by a possible Warner candidacy.
A few days later, Jerome Armstrong sent me an email. We met for
drinks, several drinks, in New York City. Forward about three
months, and I was doing a ridiculous commute back-and-forth between
Brooklyn and the Warner HQ in northern Virginia. So I have a warm
spot in my heart for SXSW.
I'll return to Austin tomorrow for SXSW 2007. I'll be giving a talk on Tuesday at 3:30 on "The
Technologists' Agenda: Political Activism for Geeks."
The rest of the time, I'll be mixing and mingling, eating tacos,
and enjoying a heck of a conference. If you're going to SXSW,
come on and get
in touch. If you're on Facebook, join group Political Geeks at SXSW.
Intrigued by Google's new SketchUp, a free modelling program that lets you create whatever you want in 3D. You can take what you made and geo-locate in Google Earth or store it in the Google 3D Warehouse. Next comes GoogleAvatar...
Today comes news that, effective immediately, C-SPAN footage of any event sponsored by Congress and any federal agency -- which the network estimates to be about half of its programming -- will be released under a Creative Commons non-commercial/with attribution license. If you're unfamiliar with it, Creative Commons is something of an alternative to the traditional all-rights-reserved copyright regime. What it does is allow the person who thinks up a creative work to say, hey, I'd only like to assert some of the rights granted to me. It's sort of like a Chinese-menu approach to controlling creative content. So what C-SPAN has done today is to decide that as long as two important conditions are met -- (1) C-SPAN gets credit, and (2) no money is made off of their work -- this footage is free to be used far and wide.
It's important to remember that, when it comes to C-SPAN, we're really talking about two kinds of content. One is the "official events" mentioned above -- that's the stuff recorded by C-SPAN-owned cameras. This includes congressional hearings, press briefings, that sort of thing. What's still a bit unclear today is whether the rules of the game have changed at all for the coverage of the House and Senate floor that C-SPAN also distributes. As we've talked about before, what C-SPAN is doing there is packaging and branding the public domain feed shot by government-owned cameras. More clarity on that content would indeed still be welcomed.
All in all, today's news is fairly remarkable. The dust-up between Speaker Pelosi and the House Republican study group that raised attention on C-SPAN's control issues occurred just three weeks ago tomorrow. The concerted push to comport C-SPAN's policies with the modern use of online video only really ramped up in the last two weeks. What does that mean for the Open House Project? Only good things, I think. Seems as if this is a propitious time to be in the open-government business.
Why did the situation at Walter Reed come to light only now? It wasn't a particularly well-kept secret, says Common Cause's Celia Viggo Wexler. My old committee held a hearing on it in 2004, in fact. "The truth is," says Wexler, "with all the cutbacks in both broadcast and print newsrooms, the emphasis on entertainment and 'news you can use,' and the bottom line over solid, investigative journalism, there is little incentive for reporters to go the extra mile and find good stories, stories they might not be able to report because they take too much time or they may rock too many boats, or are 'too depressing' for the demographic the news outlet is seeking to court. Fewer and fewer newspapers have Washington bureaus, and reporters are not encouraged to cover hearings, read GAO reports, or do all the tedious, time-consuming work that substantive journalism requires." For the record, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Anne Hull snuck in and out of Walter Reed for four months before writing their piece. I'm all for the new media revolution we're in the middle of. But sometimes I play contrarian and ask friends and colleagues this: how we're going to support such resource-intensive journalism in the future? Who will have the institutional support and skill set to pull off this sort of investigative reporting? Then there's work like the recent New York Times' series on Diseases on the Brink. What's the 2010 model for reporting on lymphatic filariasis in Nigeria or and iodized salt campaign in Kazakhstan? 2030?
So way back in 1947, when I was but a child of three, the story goes that Warner Bros. demanded that Groucho Marx cease and desist in calling his new movie, A Night in Casablanca. The average movie goer, the studio argued, might confuse his comedic picture with Bogart and Bergman's 1942 Casablanca. Marx responded:
Apparently there is more than one way of conquering a city and holding it as your own. For example, up to the time that we contemplated making this picture, I had no idea that the city of Casablanca belonged exclusively to Warner Brothers. However, it was only a few days after our announcement appeared that we received your long, ominous legal document warning us not to use the name Casablanca.
It seems that in 1471, Ferdinand Balboa Warner, your great-great-grandfather, while looking for a shortcut to the city of Burbank, had stumbled on the shores of Africa and, raising his alpenstock (which he later turned in for a hundred shares of common), named it Casablanca.
...
You claim that you own Casablanca and that no one else can use that name without permission. What about "Warner Brothers"? Do you own that too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what about the name Brothers? Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the inventor's eye, and even before there had been other brothers -- the Smith Brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with Detroit; and "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?"
Warner Bros. responded by asking Marx to outline the plot of his film. He complied, sending along several storylines -- including one where he'd be playing "Bordello, the sweetheart of Humphrey Bogart." As the story goes, Warner Bros. got fed up and dropped the whole thing.
Great story, no? And a classic in the field of the control of creative content.
But nothing's ever easy, is it? Sigh. Couldn't I just have my little story of a corporation going to ridiculous lengths to to stomp out creativity? I just did a little digging, and it seems like Marx was planning to create a straight spoof of Casablanca -- starring "Humphrey Bogus" -- until Warner Bros. began asking questions. Marx then remixed his film some to make it a play on the whole foreign-set romantic film genre. Said Groucho, later, "we spread the story that Warners objected to this title purely for publicity reasons." The played becomes the player...
Just
finished reading McLuhan's much-vaunted
book and, ow, my brain hurts. It reminds me of a lot of the
frustrating anthropology texts I had to plow through in grad school
and, to a lesser extent, in undergrad. McLuhan's full of bright
ideas about the power of media, to be sure. Insights like "the
content of a medium is always another medium" and that Russians
dig the telephone because of the "rich nonvisual involvement
it affords" are intuitively appealing. Least to me, they
are. The problem? McLuhan gets the reader only about, um, maybe
80% of the way towards understanding his stuff well enough to
carry it past the two covers of the book. In my mind, what I'm
paying a public intellectual big money for is exactly
the missing 20% -- to do that heavy lifting for me. For one thing,
it's in that last mile, I think, where you figure out if your
ideas actually make some sense.
Part of the problem, I'm well aware, is that McLuhan was writing
in 1964. Much of how we see media today is "conventional
wisdom" -- or at least, feels familiar -- because McLuhan
broke that ground. And all that said above, I still clipped and
filed something like thirty passages (mostly annecdotes).
I'm working today on building out a presentation I'll be giving next week at SXSW on political activism for the technologist set, and I just finished reading Paulina Borsook's 1996 "Cyberselfish" and 2002 "Cyberself Redux." Borsook on the northern California tech-set circa mid-1980s and early nineties:
Although the technologists I encountered there were the liberals on social issues I would have expected (pro-choice, as far as abortion; pro-diversity, as far as domestic partner benefits; inclined to sanction the occasional use of recreational drugs), they were violently lacking in compassion, ravingly anti-government, and tremendously opposed to regulation.
These are the inheritors of the greatest government subsidy of technology and expansion in technical education the planet has ever seen; and, like the ungrateful adolescent offspring of immigrants who have made it in the new country, they take for granted the richness of the environment in which they have flourished, and resent the hell out of the constraints that bind them. And, like privileged, spoiled teenagers everywhere, they haven't a clue what their existence would be like without the bounty showered on them.
It's a powerful and still-present undercurrent in the American political system, I think, that's not given the attention it should be. Yet.
Liza Sabater has a great collection of shots from Saturday night's panel at the Tank. Man, it looks all sexy and dramatic, will all the dark lighting and shadows. In real life it was only kinda sexy and dramatic...
Jason Kottke points to this stressful yet fun test of how many country names you can recall in 10 minutes. I did all right -- knowing the map of Africa really helps -- but can you believe I forgot "Italy"?
Loved this Erik S. Lesser photo from the cover of the New York Times this morning. But the politician we should be celebrating is Rep. John Lewis, to Senator Clinton's immediate left.
Jefferson Smith is executive director of the Bus Project, a volunteer-driven progressive organization based in Portland, Oregon. Since 2002, the Bus Project has been touring the state, registering thousands of voters, and knocking on thousands of doors. For our interview, Jefferson was brave and kind enough to tackle Gmail chat for the very first time. We talk about raging for progressive change, why the "Vote, F*cker" message works, taking a Moneyball approach to politics, and the need for a little "benevolent irrationality."
It's probably the stunted anthropologist in me, but I have a somewhat obsessive need to map out how the various people and projects of progressive politics fit together. HPV helps.
A reminder that tonight at the Tank, 279 Church Street, we'll be having a panel discussion with Amanda Marcotte of the Edwards' blogger situation. Also on the panel will be Ari Melber, writer for the Nation, and Scott Shields, a blogger on the Menendez for Senate campaign in New Jersey. And I'll be moderating. Starts at 7 and drinks will follow.
I'll leave it to others to figure out whether Hillary
Clinton's senior thesis from Wellesley makes her a closet
conservative or "Saul Alinsky's daughter." But take
note of one element in these efforts to keep it underwraps --
the fog of ownership:
[Then-Wellesley President Nan] Keohane closed access to that
thesis in early 1993, [assistant VP for public affairs, Mary
Ann] Hill said, because "there was enough ambiguity about
the application of copyright law, and the decision was made
to err on the side of caution."
Ambigous, you say? Well, let's see. To start, if Clinton had written
the paper today, her ownership would be clear. The Sonny
Bono Copyright Extension Act(signed by President Clinton, actually, in 1998) would apply.
Clinton's copyright would be automatically confered the second she
wrote it. Since she's an individual author, her copyright would
extend for 70 years after her eventual death.
But she wrote this in 1969, right? Okay, so the Bono Act
has something to say about that. For works written before 1978,
copyright is extended for 20 beyond whatever the term would have
been before the passage of the Act. Prior copyright law on a work
like Clinton's assigned it a term of 50 years. So in this case,
under currently law, the term is again 70 years after death. There.
Settled.
Except, well, the Sonny Bono Copyright Act has a special provision
for works created before 1978 but not copyrighted at the
time. And while copyright is automatic now, it wasn't always. Before
the U.S. agreed to the Berne
Convention in 1986, the author had to take proactive steps
to assert it. Clinton didn't, as far as we know. Luckily, there's
a special section of the law that covers this -- section 303 of
Title 17. But because Clinton never published, we're kicked
back to section 302 of the law that applies to newer works published
post-1978. So we're back to 70 years after the death of the author.
For the sake of argument, say Clinton had chosen to publish her
paper at some point along the way. Maybe she neglected to attach
a copyright notice. Again when she was toiling away at Wellesley
in 1969, copyright notice had to be posted. If that were
the case, well, then, it seems, the work would now
be in the public domain as of today. But if she had
registered copyright before publishing it, then it would enter into
the public domain 95 years after date of publication, so that's
2064.
Oh, and then there's this. While Clinton never asserted copyright,
someone else did on her behalf:
[T]he front of the library's copy is marked "c 1969 Hillary
D. Rodham." That note, in a different typeface than the manuscript
itself, was added by the university's archivist, Wilma Slaight.
"I added that in 1992," Slaight acknowledged. "That
was my attempt to indicate that she might have copyright protection."
In a case where copyright is asserted in 1992, which is after 1989,
on a work created in 1969...man, I'm just confused at this point.
Some clarity:
The attempt was unnecessary, said a copyright specialist, professor
Laura N. Gasaway of the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill. With or without the mark, an unpublished work is protected
as soon as it's written, and the protection extends until 70 years
after the author's death, [UNC professor Laura N.] Gasaway said.
Readers can comment on the thesis, or publish limited quotations
from it, but anyone who publishes the text could be liable for
statutory damages of up to $150,000.
So if we accept Professor Gasaway's reading, and Senator Clinton
lives to the rip old age of 90 and there's no extension of U.S.
copyright law in the meantime, her senior thesis will enter the
public domain in the year 2109.
See? It's all perfectly clear and innovation-encouraging and all.
Just like the
Constitution mandates.
Ezra's
absolutely right. And the end of the day, the House vote on the
Employee Free Choice Act comes down to simply, which side are you
on?
It's a bit uncomfortable for me to frame things as "you're
either with us or against us." But the more you dive into this
fight, the more it's perfectly clear that those are the real terms
of this debate. Opponents of card check -- the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
the National Association of Manufacturers -- have been arguing for
months that their opposition is based in the American worker's sacred
right to a secret ballot. Card check means that the scary, sweat-inducing,
union bosses will intimidate workers into doing something
they don't want to do. The strength of an argument like that is
that, on its face, it makes some sense. It's emotionally appealing.
And you can send around funny cartoons to make your point:
But here's where you have to vigorously shake your head clear,
and remember that today's debate on Capitol Hill over card check
just isn't about those things. History and recent events
leave no doubt that there are those among us who really don't like
unions. There are national interests committed to ripping the heart
out of the labor movement. They want to, in the words of Grover
Norquist, "to crush labor as a political entity" and
eliminate unions. That's all that this debate is about. That's
it. There are anti-union interest groups, union-busting law
firms, there's an industry in this country of trying to cut the
legs out from the labor movement. It's an undeniable part of the
American political landscape. It has been as long as there have
been unions.
From where I'm standing, the union movement is a fairly remarkable
human experiment. In America alone, millions of people have harnessed
the collective strengths of their co-workers to give them all better
lives. Amazing, really. But when we got into the human experiment
this big, we had to have know that nothing is going to work out
perfectly. Especially when we're dealing with the economic lives
of millions of human animals, there's something "wrong"
that can be pointed out with every step taken. We've seen
anti-union interests go after Davis-Bacon, suspending it after Hurricane
Katrina. What's wrong with Davis-Bacon? It's
racist. Federal employees have long been unionized, so why not
allow 170,000 employees to keep their union rights as they get shifted
over to the Department of Homeland Security? Puts
America at risk.
In a perfect world, what would happen is that every American worker
would be a fully-educated consumer about the risks and rewards of
unionizing. Then the great god of employer-employee relations --
maybe even the NLRB -- would divine the collective will of workers
and either hand them union cards or not. But that ain't gonna happen
any time soon. H.R. 800 doesn't get us there. But politics is the
art of the possible, and card check is a tool within our grasps
that gets us several steps closer to that world. We're suckers if
we let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Now, I acknowledge that I am sucking on the AFL-CIO teat on card
check. They're paying me for my work around the legislatively prospects
of the Employee Free Choice Act. Why would I do that? -- I'm not
much of a joiner by nature. I don't really like big groups, and
don't care much for party labels. I didn't much like presidential
politics because I was uncomfortable subsuming my will to one single
candidate like that. I agreed to ally myself with the AFL on this
bill because I did some reading (including Thomas
Geoghagen's book), talked to some folks, and came to two conclusions:
1) the labor movement has done a remarkable amount of good, helping
to build the working and middle classes in America, and 2) I could
take the route of keeping a polite distance from organized labor
and their battles -- being supportive here and tut-tutting their
missteps there. Or I could jump into the fight.
Domino
Sugar is old New York and old Brooklyn. In 1859, the Havemeyer family
opened a state-of-the-art sugar refinery at 4th Street and Kent Avenue
in Williamsburg, on the banks of the East River. The Havemeyer sugar
empire became Domino Sugar in 1901. According to Mary Habstritt of the
