about deepleap’s closing. “Deepleap was like us, was like me. They saw something that could exist and the strove to make it happen. This failure shakes my foundation, upheaves my long-held belief that intelligent, hard-working people with good ideas will succeed.”
I’m not 100%
sold on Joseph Lieberman in terms of his views on things – he’s a little loud with his moralizing, for one thing. But at the same time he seems like a reasonable guy who understands the difference between using one’s soapbox to encourage change and using one’s legislative influence to actually force marginally constitutional changes. Lieberman seems intelligent, and capable of making distinctions between shades of grey, which is a positive thing. My big fear is that the ticket is very much a policy wonk ticket – these guys are serious fellows, not a lot of star quality. Which frankly I prefer, but could hurt them in the election. But then again, I don’t have a vote.
What if it were
illegal to buy a copyright, if they could only be assigned for a limited time? What if, unless you were a salaried employee (hence making your work a product of the company paying you), you owned your work, period? If you were permitted to lease it, but not sell it outright?
I’m always torn in a discussion of Napster and the other digital music schemes. I have, from time to time, made my living (or an important part of it) as a writer. My brother’s a musician. Many, if not most, of my friends are writers or artists of some sort or another. These people work hard at what they do. But when I look at a particular acquaintance of mine’s CD, she doesn’t own the copyright, the record company does. When I write an article, I own the copyright – the newspaper or magazine it is published in only owns certain rights; usually the right to first publication.
I think a clearheaded study of how copyright works and a legal expression of how that system should function would go a long way to solving a lot of the current issues. It’s one of those situations, I think, when the road ahead in terms of the specifics will only be apparent when the first principles are reiterated and strengthened.
Trouble is, the pattern is clearly in the other direction – away from privileging the rights of individual copyright holders, towards rights of corporate copyright holders and other businesses involved in such matters. I have personally been involved with a number of publications that have asserted that their purchase of first publication rights includes, with no further compensation, the right to place the work in databases that, essentially, exist in perpetuity. And the DCMA points in that direction pretty clearly as well.
For the moment, I don’t have a huge problem squaring my deep belief in copyright – the right I have over my creative and intellectual work with the free distribution of songs on the net, but that’s only because of the total belligerance and seeming cluelessness of the recording industry, and it won’t hold indefinitely. At some point, I believe that copyrights should be inviolate. So my conclusion, for now, is that the whole concept of copyright must be strengthened and affirmed. Trouble is – I doubt it would be by those with the deepest pockets in this ongoing dialogue.
But there’s this:
Joliet Volume Access for your Mac. I know you’re out there – I check my stats. Over 25% of visitors to this site use a Mac. And I know that a good proportion of you get CDs from other developers or clients that use Win95/98/whatever. Now you can figure out what’s in those files by reading their names, which will no longer be truncated to 8/3 but intelligently displayed with longer names. It’s stable too.
I lost one other entry
on the weekend, which was essentially an ode to Montreal, and my neighbourhood. Last weekend was full of parties, full of art, full of expressive, intelligent, engaged people just busting out with creativity and life. I spoke with 2 newly working filmmakers (doing it locally), a bucketful of artists who are doing a group vernissage next weekend (I’ll try and scan the invite soon – it’s nice), a writer named Yann Martel who’s publishing his second novel Very Soon Now, a guy who does relatively naive watercolors – but then scans them and does minimal, subtle processing in photoshop, which moves the work in an entirely different direction.
