Before
A chronicle of an American life
3 July 2012 at 3:00pm · Filed under The law
Selected results from the top 50 Google search results for “the next asbestos”:
Next asbestos could be in air | Business Insurance
RID: Hospital Infection Is the Next Asbestos
Are Carbon Nanotubes the Next Asbestos? – YouTube
Underwriting Nanotechnology Risk, It’s Not “. . . the Next Asbestos”
Microwave Popcorn: The Next Asbestos : TreeHugger
Nanoparticles could be the next asbestos, investment managers warn.
Is Cyber Liability The Next Asbestos? – Calfee, Halter and Griswold
Is Silica the Next Asbestos? – Pepperdine Digital Commons
The next asbestos: Carbon nanotubes linked with mesothelioma in …
Are nanomaterials the next asbestos? | Mesothelioma Cancer …
Is Benzene the Next Asbestos?
Superbug infection crisis: Is it the next asbestos? | WCVB Home …
Is Erionite the Next Asbestos?
Is Wood The Next Asbestos? It Shouldn’t Be
Toxic BPA in Your Food: The Next Asbestos? | Savorra – Recipes for …
Benzene – The Next Asbestos? – Catalogues DirectIndustry
Is Stachybotrys Chartarum the Next Asbestos?
Mold is Gold: But, Will it be the Next Asbestos?
Is Wireless the Next Asbestos? | The Solari Report Blog
PVC, The Next Asbestos » Why Travel To France
The Next Asbestos? – The Staten Island Injury Attorney Blog [parking lot sealer]
Home Foreclosures Becoming the Next Asbestos? | Matthew Ferrara …
Global Warming Litigation: The Next Asbestos? | Events | Dechert LLP
Is Football the Next Tobacco, the Next Agent Orange, the Next …
Is Chinese Drywall the next asbestos or lead based paint???
GMOs: The next asbestos? | Green Left Weekly
Quality Quest for Health – High Tech Imaging: The Next Asbestos?
Granite Causing Cancer | Exposure to Radon Causes Lung Cancer ["Is granite causing cancer? Is granite the next asbestos?"]
Actos – The Next Asbestos? | Levin Papantonio Law Firm [yes, even my firm is getting in on the act]
Welding, Manganese Exposure and Parkinson’s: The Next Asbestos?
you wear sunscreen then blow me if someone doesn’t say it’s the next
3 May 2012 at 8:38pm · Filed under Funny stories, The law
Last night I went out to dinner with my mom, who was supposed to meet me for dinner at Continental. But she showed up at Phillips Seafood. These restaurants are right next to each other and they don’t have walls (they’re inside Caesar’s Atlantic City).
She had just ordered a margarita at Phillips. So she smuggled it out wrapped up in a copy of Bartlett v. Mutual Pharm. Co., Inc. (1st Cir. May 2, 2012). When we walked over to Continental, they caught her. But she decided to just set the drink on the floor. Periodically she would lean down and drink out of this glass on the floor. Eventually it was gone so they took it away.
Nobody has a crazy, wonderful, nuts mom like I do. I’m lucky (usually).
22 January 2011 at 10:03pm · Filed under Culture, Law school, Random, The law
I’m watching The Pelican Brief (and I’m only 20 minutes in). Two things stand out. First of all, Cynthia Nixon played one of Julia Roberts’ law student friends, which is kind of hot. I guess she got her Sex and The City J.D. by having a part in this film.
Second, I loved — as I always do — the library scene where Julia Roberts rifles through countless dusty old law books, trying to figure out who might have killed the Supreme Court justices. You can feel the drama. Then I thought about it: in the digital age, there is no dramatic dusty old book scene. There’s just Julia Roberts, staring slackjawed at shitty old Westlaw. Hollywood is never going to put together any frantic iPad research sequence. (“Turn it to portrait orientation! Hurry!”) I hate the iPad and all it is doing to the death of print.
12 November 2007 at 5:10pm · Filed under Culture
I ran across a very surprising article from the Daily Telegraph that the Labour Government in the UK has decided to allow rising ocean levels to consume British villages and farmland in several vulnerable areas. Under a points-based formula, only certain regions will be “defended” against incursions by the sea. The article leaks some of the details from the official analysis.
Not surprisingly, some people are very cross about this, and some Conservative members accuse the government of sacrificing Conservative districts (literally) while shoring up marginal Labour constituencies that were affected by this year’s massive river floods. Whatever; I can’t pass judgment on that.
It is interesting, though, that Britain has the stomach (or lack of backbone, depending on how you feel) to decide what to save and what to let go. In America, we haven’t made many honest decisions about this, except for a few million-dollar cliffs in Massachusetts. We certainly haven’t faced up to certain geological and physical realities in many places where a decision will be inevitable. I’m thinking of New Orleans, of course, but also North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the Florida Keys, and a scattering of Appalachian hollows and river towns. Our course is always to shore up and rebuild on shaky ground, burying our heads in the sand as it washes away around us.
9 November 2007 at 4:24pm · Filed under Culture, Solely personal
Lately I’ve found the time to read a ton of books in the sort of earthy/environmental vein. That and the impending Florida move have made me just feel a lot “greener.” Let me explain.
When I was growing up, we had all kinds of things in the backyard: apple trees, a cherry tree, a peach tree, grapevines, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries (disgusting), asparagus, tomatoes, potatoes, radishes, carrots, beans, sunflowers, corn, and God knows what else. We had a shed, which my dad built from the ground up to hold all the tools, and a compost pile (a mysterious shaggy creature). We also had some kind of mini-greenhouse on legs, which I think was used to grow herbs. In the front yard we had a huge lilac bush and a ton of flowers.
It’s kind like I’m going through repressed memory therapy here, but I’m just realizing that damn, I grew up with a ton of gardening going on. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. I’m sure I assumed everybody kept a grape arbor in the backyard, if I had even decided to think about it, which I’m sure I hadn’t.
Now I’m thinking that reviving this life would be a great thing to do on my own, but living downtown in a condo isn’t exactly conducive to having a garden and a compost pile. The next best thing is to read about it, so I did.
I went down to the library and picked up Compost, a deceptively small book about composting. The British author says you should actually compost food waste and paper waste in equal quantities — great, because I generate huge amounts of paper waste. I also read The Square-Foot Garden, a classic that eschews the traditional row method of planting in favor of little squares that you never walk on, so as not to compact the soil. (I now am realizing our garden looked like that — another thing I just assumed everybody else did.) For a human perspective, I tried to sift through The 3,000 Mile Garden, a book of sort of gardeny love letters between an Englishman and a Maine cat lady, but it got too creepy. (I tried!) Because it was there (in the gardening section! what a scam the Dewey decimal system was!), I also picked up and devoured Silent Spring, the 1962 classic that helped launch the environmental revolution and crusaded against broad-spectrum synthetic pesticides like heptachlor, dieldrin, and DDT, all of which are now off the market. I read all this stuff in the span of about three days last week, when I should have been studying, then I slept on it. I heartily recommend all these books except the one.
After all this ecological ferment, I’ve decided: I can’t wait to move to Florida so I can grow a garden. Apparently the soil is crummy (either sandy or clayey, and full of nematodes), but you can fix that, and you can grow up to five crops a year because of the wonderful sun, temperatures, and humidity. I also decided I would like to try to never throw anything away, again, ever. According to Compost, you can even compost things like old clothes (they’re cotton, a natural fiber) and cardboard. I already recycle all kinds of stuff, including my cans, paper, electronics, and so on. The only things you really can’t recycle are certain plastics — what else is there to throw out? So, once the move comes, everything’s going on the compost pile or in the recycling. I even researched how to compost meat, which everybody says is a bad idea (rats and flies), and I came across “bokashi,” a Japanese invention involving a sealed bucket, wheat bran, and bacteria, which is a process that anaerobically “pickles” your meat, permitting it to then be composted. Sounds gross, though, to leave a bucket of rotting meat outside, but if it works, why not.
Amusingly, these decisions have led me to realize I’m going to have to live on a lot with some sun and some amount of land, i.e., I might actually have to move to the suburbs or the country (!). Cityboy might go on hiatus for a while. But I think it will be enjoyable to come home, change from the suit into the play clothes, go muck about in the garden for an hour or so, then get a shower and have a refreshing drink while admiring the garden, and have a dinner including vegetables I grew myself. That kind of life should give plenty of time for contemplation. Shouldn’t life be relaxing and innately rewarding?
12 June 2007 at 6:58pm · Filed under Technology
Hello for the month of June 2007. To those who complain about the paucity of material: I remind you, this is a free service! Send me on assignment to another country, I’ll post once a day.
There was a good article in the paper today about CAPTCHAs. These are the dumb little visual puzzles you have to solve when you want to do something online to prove you’re not a spam robot. (I sometimes have one on my site, but all you have to do there is check that box. Big woop.) Usually the puzzles are some screwed-up word with lines going through it or funky colors. The paper was pointing at that the spammers are catching on and getting smarter all the time, so these puzzles are now to the point where it might be too hard to solve them.
So the first interesting link is to a site where spammers brag about beating the puzzles. It includes visual examples and humorously bad commentary about how weak the puzzles are. Example: “Work for one hour if work not too fast.”
The other interesting idea was, why not put people to work and have them solve these puzzles as a way to help deal with the problems of digitizing books? (We all know how everyone feels about stealing books.) Since scanning technology can’t read everything perfectly, and people solve these millions of times a day, the idea is a good use of otherwise wasted labor.
10 April 2007 at 12:19pm · Filed under Political, The law
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed riling up my friends on the left, Marcus Banks and Venezuelan Army Maj. Marty Stroodler, over the issue of D.C. voting rights. To Justme, I would retort that holding a sign reading “Will Make Political Commentary for Money,” and actually eating because of it, is a wonderful dream.
Washington, D.C., which the Supreme Court relegated to mere and literal footnote status last week, is clearly a banana republic that should be squelched until it learns its lesson.
Well, I’m kidding somewhat. In all this debate, I have been disappointed that no one took up for Washington as a normal American city. When I criticized the city for having no industry to speak of, I was sure I would hear “XM Radio!” (In truth, I just tried to think of another employer to include here that wasn’t 1) out on I-66 or I-270, 2) government, 3) quasi-government, 4) education, or 5) food, and I couldn’t do it. Sorry, Lady Columbia.) The city does have parks, rivers, boats, schools, etc. It deserves dignity as a regular place to grow up in, that just happens to have the capital. Tragically, its transient residential status caused the thousands of readers and commenters of our web logs collectively to bypass this aspect of Washington life.
“Retrocession,” or as I call it, “digestion by Maryland,” would degrade this unique character. I oppose it. Those who say it would free Washington of certain burdens, such as having to run a DMV, miss the point. This would strip Washington of its dignity as a special city. Further, it is impossible. The point of creating a “non-residential ‘federal quarter’” is to solve the voting problem by putting its population into a jurisdiction that has Congressional votes (Maryland) while leaving the part of the city that belongs to all America under federal control. The problem is that such a zone, at the minimum, would have to be a triangle containing the Jefferson Memorial, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and there are a lot of people living within that triangle. Either there would have to be forced evacuations for the purpose of creating a sterile zone, or those people would have to be left out of the plan to give voting rights to all citizens. Moreover, a sterile non-residential zone goes against principles of good city planning (Jacobs) and further debauches a grand old lady.
It seems unlikely that Washington will ever have the population to support two representatives. The city is atrophying and has lost about 40% of its population in the last fifty years; at the same time, the number of people supporting a single House seat grows ever higher. In 2010, the number of people needed for a State to claim two seats will exceed one million — five hundred thousand more than Washington has. Washington’s House delegation, if awarded proportionally to the other States, would never exceed one.
Senate representation is a great question. Logically, if the basis for granting a House seat is that people deserve an equal voice in Congress, then there is no reason not to grant a “full” two seats’ Senate representation. Otherwise, we’ll still have the “second-class status” argument hanging out there. (It was amusing to see Stroodler willing to bargain down to a single seat. Washington been down so long, it don’t know what up is.) But while the great constitutional compromise between the large and small States was to create two bodies, the House for the people and the Senate for the States, it does not justify granting Washington two Senate seats for the simple reason that Washington is not a State. (And we all agreed to leave at least part of Washington a “local government” rather than a State.)
I also find it interesting that in all this, nobody advanced the legal argument that the “District Clause” of the Constitution, art. I, cl. 17 (go here and search for “District”; also read interesting annotations), which provides that the Congress has broad powers to control affairs relating to the District, gives Congress the power to add a seat without a constitutional amendment. But I think this is a bad argument; it’s clear that the clause provides the power to control land use, building restrictions, police authority, and those kinds of things; it doesn’t let Congress restructure the Congress by changing its membership. I think it’s sad that some, including the Utahns colluding with the Democrats to add the seat, want to justify the change on this weak ground, rather than embarking on the lengthy moral crusade of amendment. By granting D.C. electoral votes, the American people have already demonstrated that if the cause is just, they will amend the Constitution even at the expense of their own interests. That is the surest route to solving this problem, whatever the solution may be.
29 March 2007 at 12:53am · Filed under Political, Random
The organization DC Vote has put up a documentary movie on its web site called “Un-Natural State.” It’s worth the eight minutes. (You can also get a teacher’s worksheet because the video apparently complies with Washington ninth grade history and government class standards.)
If you watch this video, you’re going to learn two shocking things.
First, that DC Vote thinks we should rewrite our Constitution so our government can be more like Venezuela’s.
Secondly, that there is a guy who is the United States Senator for the District. I think it is so cute that Washington has a Senator! And, he’s a white former New Yorker!
If you do watch it, let me know what you think. The best part is when 35 seconds in, the narrator asks, “Are things really as they seem?” It’s quite ominous; the shot of birds flying over the head is pure Hitchcock.
22 March 2007 at 11:49pm · Filed under Political
I’ve been watching the battle over giving Washington, D.C. representation in the United States House of Representatives with some amusement. If you don’t know about this, and you like political arcana, catch up.
As you might know, D.C. license plates proclaim it’s the land of “Taxation Without Representation.” (That’s a great automotive statement easily surpassing New York City’s “Don’t Even Think of Parking Here” signs.) People in Washington think they’re being cheated out of having a Congressman and two Senators, even though they’re free to move to a real State at any time. They do have a non-voting representative, whose sole job seems to be House jester.
People in Utah also feel cheated out of a House seat, too, and they’ve been feeling that way ever since the 2000 census. Why? Because Utah, which has only three representatives, missed the cutoff for a fourth seat by about eight hundred people. They claimed that the Census failed to count Mormon missionaries who were out of the country at the time; they also took issue with a statistical method the Census uses. This bothered them enough to take their case to the Supreme Court, where they lost. (North Carolina has the seat Utah wanted.) This part of the story seems to be missing from the current coverage, and it explains why the Beehive State’s so into this idea.
Fast forward to today. Somebody in Washington (or maybe it was Utah — I’m not sure) got the admittedly savvy idea that if we added one seat for D.C., which would probably go Democrat, we could add one seat for Utah, which would probably go Republican, and keep the balance we have. Everybody wins — Utah’s pacified and Washington’s seat is still as worthless as it is today since it’ll always get canceled out! What a great compromise. (Never mind that it is unconstitutional to add a seats for D.C. — more on that later.)
I read in the Post, however, that yesterday House Republicans attached an amendment to this bill. Now, if the bill passes, the amendment repeals D.C.’s very strict gun laws. This is an even more savvy political move than the original idea, in my view. If liberal Democrats vote for it, hoping to give D.C. its representation, they repeal its gun control laws. Some liberals will now vote against the bill because they’d rather keep the gun control. Realizing this, the Democratic leadership stalled the bill. Now Republicans can say they refused to support the constitutional right to arms.
All this manuevering puts me in the mind of my law review article (which I certainly hope can be described as “forthcoming” someday). I wrote on legislative silliness, and one case in point was LBJ’s 1956 manuevering to get senators from the Pacific Northwest to support an amendment that weakened the civil rights bill so that the South would accept the bill. In exchange for that support, he promised the Northwest his support for a series of federal dams — which actually passed the Senate. The cunning part of this plan was, Johnson’s dam support was worthless because the House never passed the dam bill. The President would probably have vetoed it anyway. It cost nothing to keep his end of the deal, and in exchange, the Northwest gave LBJ his greatest legislative victory.
Republicans have the opportunity to pull the same trick here. Suppose the combined D.C. voting and gun-rights actually passes. It will immediately be challenged by some Republican somewhere, and one of two things will happen. One possibility is the courts will strike down the part of the bill giving D.C. the vote, because D.C.’s not a State and the Constitution gives representation only to States; Utah, however, will probably keep its representative because Congress can change the number of seats at any time. The other possibility is the whole voting part of the bill will go out the window, leaving the gun control repeal on the books. Either way, Republicans win.
I can’t believe Democrats are falling into this trap, except that they are giddy with the intoxication of their big November wins.
The most interesting part of this is why it’s such a big deal for Utah right now. There is another census coming up in three years. At that point, the whole Congressional deck is reshuffled. It would be impossible to predict at this time which State will be in Utah’s position — being the very next in line for a seat, if only the House had room for one more. The thing is, though, there will always be that one State that just didn’t make it. And because of the way the math works, it’s essentially random (but it is always most likely to be California). All this work now, just to get a short-term gain that Utah, with its high growth rate, will almost certainly have outright after 2010 anyway, seems a little late. Where was this idea in 2000?
20 June 2006 at 10:28pm · Filed under City life, Connextions Lofts, Funny stories, Random, Technology
I’ve decided that when food rots in the fridge, it’s very psychically damaging. When food goes bad, for me it’s more like a betrayal. I look in there, I see a never-touched bag of salad greens or box of strawberries that one time held such promise — I feel such disappointment, like my children, they desert me. It hurts. It also doesn’t help that Officially De-Trucked Country Boy Arnie continues to buy these items, thusly compounding my sorrow and anguish. There are two walleye filets in there. We were informed, he says, that they would last only two days. I attempted to hide my emotions, but an arch remark escaped my lips. The walleye lie there, stillborn, markers of what never would be.
Fortunately we are seeing “eye” to “eye” on other issues — take the Pet Shop Boys, for example. So I happen to think Fundamental (and remix album Fundamentalism!) are some of the best CDs ever released in the last hundred years. I purchased about $100 of import singles through the mail — some new stuff, some old stuff. Arnie liked Flamboyant so much he had to hear it twice! Fundamental is quite the album. The first single was I’m With Stupid, about the love relationship between G. W. Bush and Tony Blair; “No one understands me / where I’m coming from / why would I be with someone who’s obviously so dumb?” The other great lines are “fly across the ocean / just to let you get your way” and “Do we really have a relationship so special in your heart?” Everything on the album is good. Buy it.
In other news, I guess I realize what a computer dork I still am, and I like it. Just today I ran into somebody in the hallway who wanted to know if I still liked IT as much as law, and I wound up teaching her AJAX in a nutshell, and actually got all excited! I also ran across an old 3.2GB drive and thought I’d put it into my ancient Pentium II Linux beater box, Passaic. (All my hardware is named after Jersey places.) Well it turned out to be the hard drive I used in college, and I found all this awesome Win98 stuff on it. “You last defragmented this drive 2,528 day(s) ago.” It has the NeoPlanet browser installed and I’ve got the horrible “Active Desktop” running now. I’m using the old “baseball” theme with the swinging bat instead of the hourglass. After I upgraded it to IE 6 I was able to run Windows Update. I need to run 25 critical updates and there are 40 more patches!
This is nothing. Last week I also decided to drag the old beloved TRS-80 Model III out of the basement and I found some of the old programs — Android Nim, computer bridge, and even CompuServe, that you had to use with the 300 baud external modem (in ANS or ORIG mode, please). Even ORCH-90 is there. It is so awesome.
And finally, last week I was also elected President of the Board of Trustees of the Connextions Lofts Homeowners’ Association. I am elated to be serving the building in this capacity! I advanced a capital plan that outlines spending almost $50,000 in improvements for our building, which should really improve the appearance and value of the units here. And, I got to meet some of my neighbors including the person who bought the unit next door. It was a great time and I look forward to a great year.
11 April 2006 at 7:47pm · Filed under Culture, Random
Those jerks at HBO have turned down my latest idea for a TV show, which would compete with a certain Sunday night megahit. My show would be called Disparate Housewives. Each woman character would be totally unique.
3 February 2006 at 10:37pm · Filed under City life, Culture, Funny stories
Just thought I would inform everyone that The Happy Greek, Columbus’ 2nd-best hummus provider, has again taken the prize for slowest possible hummus sale. A phone call to that jocular Mediterranean to order the famous food yielded no clue that the order was going to take a record 26 minutes to be prepared. Allegedly, the hummus is made while you wait. Oddly, though, when you order it at the dinner table it comes almost immediately. Why does this restaurant hate its loyal call-ahead customers, who don’t tie up the limited table space or bother the help?
28 January 2006 at 12:40pm · Filed under Culture
Much ado has been made lately over the case of Winfrey v. Frey, the public tiff between the Queen of Pages and the author who fabricated large parts of his criminal history so as to arouse the sympathy of his readers. While I thought the whole affair was a carnival sideshow to begin with, I am pleased that The O had a change of mind and brought James Frey back to justice. While her sheep are hers to command, I’m glad she is herding them back to an appreciation of the truth. It will be interesting to see whose stock rises faster now, hers or his.
Predictably, the evil publishing industry and its media minstrels have been falling over themselves to “debate” the issue of whether nonfiction should be true. I find the whole thing rather distressing, because I believe that books are sacred and not to be trifled with. Call me naive, but the idea of an author, editor, or publisher knowingly permitting outright lies to go into a book offends me deeply.
On the other hand, it is amusing for bookwatchers to act as though this kind of thing has never happened before, and that’s the main reason for this post. I was reminded by some of the Frey coverage that John Berendt was similarly involved in a controversy over his book, Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil. Not only did I buy this book, it inspired me to take a trip to Savannah so I could see it for myself. Only after I got back did I learn just how much had been made up in his story. This Columbia Journalism Review article from 1998 lists some of Berendt’s sins (not all, I should note, are admitted by him). The most egregious in my mind is the allegation that he did not really start hanging around Savannah until 1985, four years after the murder that is the central event of the story, but there are several other slips and misstatements. Several of these problems, I researched, made it into national newspapers.
I think it is interesting to compare this historical book “flap” (pun couldn’t have been avoided) with today’s. Both authors were embarrassed in the national press. Both prompted a nominal “debate” over the fate of nonfiction. And both sold like a jillion copies. Nothing much changes, it seems.
27 January 2006 at 12:12pm · Filed under Culture, Technology, The law
I couldn’t help writing a rejoinder to those defenders of Google Book Search and, of course, good old Banks. Because everyone should have the right to own their own content, however, I’ve posted it here on Before. Why should World get all the good material? For those who haven’t been following this storyline, start at Marcus’ original post on Google Book Search, then read my comment, followed by his “redux” second posting.
I’m glad we can open this debate because I think it is a very interesting issue lying at the intersection of the law, technology, and books, which are all topics Marcus and I enjoy. By way of flattery, I should note that Marcus Banks has always been my favorite published book author and I am aware he’s representing himself both as a writer and a reader. Now on to the discussion.
I’m still troubled by some of the arguments advanced in Google’s favor. However nice or wonderful it would be to have every book in the world instantly searchable on the Internet, we cannot ignore the steady policy and laws of all the world’s democratic governments just because somebody would like to have that index.
Marcus claims that because some of the books have “absolutely no commercial significance to the publishers” somehow immunizes Google from abridging the copyright of the publisher or author. Unfortunately, our laws don’t permit an infringer to make their own assessment of a work’s commercial significance and, if they find it to be zero, to use with impunity. Further, I think the fact that the books are scanned shows they do have some commercial significance to Google. And perhaps many of these titles have been out of print for years: as Google clearly plans to demonstrate, these old books have a value that can be unlocked by the technologies of scanning and indexing.
And, since each book does have indisputable value, why should Google be the one to profit from the unlocking of that value? They’re not the author who wrote the book. They’re not the publishers who took a chance and made an investment in the book. They’re not even the libraries who shelled out a few bucks to buy the book. They have no stake in the business of writing books at all. So why should they benefit to the exclusion of the authors and publishers who do? It’s argued that our copyright laws are out of date, so there should be some special exception for the Googles of the world. But inventing a new technology is not some magic wand or shield that, when produced, defeats all claims held by the original creator and owner of a work. The MP3 pirates learned that the hard way.
And I have to disagree that the appropriation of property with no monetary value can’t be “theft” or even just plain wrong. I myself have been a victim of copyright infringement, so I know what it’s like. I posted a rather ridiculous video of myself on my web site scaling down the face of an artificial climbing wall. Months later, I went to the City Center mall and found it was showing on a fifteen-foot-high screen in a continuous loop! This was part of a video advertising all the fun things that might be found in a great downtown (for the record, the rock-climbing happened at Easton). Did my video have any monetary value? No. Did the company that stole my work and aired it thousands of times in a very public forum derive a commercial benefit? Yes — else why do it. Did they have, at the very minimum, the courteous obligation to ask whether they could use it? I think the answer to that is clear.
Google argues it would be impractical for them to ask the author or publisher of each book for the rights to scan the book before including it in their permanent digital archive. Therefore, they’re just going to do them all, copyright be damned. A simple analogy to the physical world points up the absurdity in this logic. Google’s stance is like my saying I can drive my car across the backyard of every house in the neighborhood, because it would just take too long to get permission from each homeowner.
Our system of copyright could not be more liberal. In order to claim the copyright on an original work, all the author has to do is put the word “Copyright” and the year on it. Unlike with patents, there is no central registry that authors have to apply to for permission: we just want to encourage creative endeavors by giving them reassurance that they’ll earn the fruits of their labors without interference. No high-flying tech company should be permitted to swoop in and take that away.
25 January 2006 at 10:02pm · Filed under Culture, The law
Marcus has written on the legality of the Google Print program, now renamed to Google Book Search. He cites a six-page Congressional Research Service report that looks at the issue from a lightweight legal perspective. Partly because of my membership in the Young Conservatives Union, partly because I enjoy taunting the techno-establishment whom I’m supposed to be digitally brainwashed by based on my age and occupation, and partly because I think I’m right, I’ve written a comment digesting the issue and generally opposing the project. If you’re interested, read all three writings and comment over at Marcus’ World (or here).
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