Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

I had lunch yesterday with our scholarly communications officer – basically, copyright guru. We were meeting because I (and apparently a few other people in IT) had commented that we were looking for the scholarly communications officer to take the lead in positioning the university on different copyright issues. He thought that was interesting because that’s what he thought he had been doing.

We discussed a number of issues, only a few of which he had been working on. From memory, the following are the copyright concerns that I have and that I would like the university to take a position on:

1. increasingly longer copyright terms that damage the growth of the public domain, becoming, essentially, permanent
2. the Library of Congress’s exemption process which only grants exemptions for three years at a time (iirc, we lost a few exemptions this year)
3. A loss of the initial focus of the purpose of copyright (“to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” by providing an incentive to create)
4. the push to copyright databases and collections of facts
5. the ratchet effect in copyright law where the U.S. tries to catch up with another country (e.g., the EU), but instead surpasses them; then they do the same to us
6. meta-data: can it be copyrighted? should it? who should own it? is it a derivative work? etc.
7. DMCA section 1201 on anti-circumvention may prevent the creation of software that would be legal to use
8. the MPAA’s region codes (an example of the issue above)
9. General problems with copyright law harming consumers (loss of fair-use).

I’m sure there were other things; but what else am I missing?  A question I used to ask students was, if you could rewrite copyright law, how would it look?

If you’ve read Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, it’ll be pretty obvious why Walmart’s continued quest for efficiency is bad for employees and workers.  The latest example?  High-tech scheduling software designed to dynamically tune employee schedules to meet real-time fluctuations in the number of customers.  The result will be low wage workers on-call to meet customer surges and the possibility of being asked to go home during lulls.  This will make paychecks even less stable.  Add to that, dynamic checks on whether an employee is reaching full-time status or overtime so that their schedule can be scaled back, and you have the makings of an increasingly unfair workplace – regardless of value of the minimum wage.

I’m reading the collected writings of Ben Franklin from the Library of America (yes, all 1600 or so pages of it), and I ran across the following passage:

It is remarkable that soldiers by profession, men truly and unquestionably brave, seldom advise war but in cases of extream [sic] necessity.  While mere rhetoricians, tongue-pads and scribes, timid by nature, or from their little bodily exercise deficient in those spirits that give real courage, are ever bawling for war on the most trifling occasions, and seem the most blood-thirsty of mankind.

That was written almost 240 years ago and yet is a perfect description of the op-ed writers in today’s papers (e.g., George Will, Charles Krauthammer, etc.).  I would say that Franklin’s prescient, but since people don’t ever change, I’ll settle for ‘keen observer.’