Grow Public Domain, Grow

I hope for most of you this is old news, but: Fresh from the Supreme Court's decision against his side in Eldred v. Ashcroft, Lawrence Lessig has introduced a new strategy for accomplishing the vital task of moving more creative works into the public domain. The Eric Eldred Act FAQ explains everything very clearly:

Fifty years after a copyrighted work was published, a copyright owner would have to pay a tiny tax. That tax could be as low as $1. If the copyright owner does not pay that tax for three years in a row, then the copyright would be forfeited to the public domain. If the tax is paid, then the form would require the listing of a copyright agent--a person charged with receiving requests about that copyright. The Copyright Office would then make the listing of taxes paid, and copyright agents, available free of charge on their website.

This is necessary because:

We estimate that of all the work copyrighted between 1923 and 1942 (the first twenty years affected by the Sonny Bono Act), only 2% has any continuing commercial value. If a work has no commercial value, then there would be little reason for the copyright owner to pay the tax. That work would therefore quickly pass into the public domain. If the proposal were adopted as outlined, then within three years, over 90% of the copyrighted between 1923 and 1952 would be in the public domain. This would be massive increase of material into the public domain, through a mechanism that would create a cheap and useable record of the material that remains under copyright.

As a teacher, my mind boggles at how great it would be if 98% of work copyrighted between 1923 and 1942 were in the public domain. It would also be good for the economy. Here's how: Right now, teachers can't afford the time or money it would take to track down permissions to use many copyrighted works, but many of those works are out of print so they can't ask their students to buy them either. The solution for many teachers is to simply steal these works instead by photocopying them and giving them to their students. If these works were in the public domain, they could be made available online for free, or someone like the Dover Press could create Dover Thrift Editions (or something similar) of them, and then teachers could have their students buy them, meaning the Eldred Act would create profit where there now is none. More important, it could make accessible thousands of texts (music, poetry, fiction, etc.) that are now out of print.

The Eldred Act is a great idea. Check the FAQ for information about how you can help get it passed.

Posted 08:59 AM | general politics

Shame Utility Vehicles

Thanks to VC for pointing me to his wife's essay, "California Confession: Driving on the Axles of Evil". It's a wonderfully written and candid discussion of how intelligent people rationalize buying these vehicles—boy do I understand that; I've always sort of wanted one but could never afford or really justify it. Anyway, the essay also raises an important point: Thousands of these vehicles are already on the road, so even though they're very dangerous (to their drivers and occupants, to other drivers, to the environment), it's not like we can just melt them all down into doorstops. Whatever problems attend SUVs, those problems will be with us for a long time, and they will probably get worse before they get better. (For example, as the vehicles age, they're likely to get even less efficient and create more pollution than ever.)

Meanwhile, Breaching the Web links to Greg Easterbrook's extensive review of Keith Bradsher's book, High and Mighty: SUVs—The World's Most Dangerous Vehicles and How They Got that Way. It details the federal regulatory machinations that encouraged the growth of the SUV market, as well as the many problems with SUVs—the way they're built, the way they're marketed, the way they're driven, etc. Near the end, Easterbrook asks a serious and disturbing question:

What does it say about the United States that there are now millions of people who want to drive an anti-social automobile? Huge numbers of Americans will pay thousands of dollars extra for vehicles that visually declare, "I have serious psychological problems." (Though maybe we are better off having this declared.) The antagonistic environment of the modern road is linked, of course, to the more general psychological predicament usually called stress. We are all stressed for time or money or achievement or sex, or at least we all view ourselves as being thus stressed; and the road is experienced as both an obstacle to the things that we are in such a hurry to fail to get and an arena for the cathartic release from this strain.

I'd argue that the "antagonist environment of the modern road" is linked to a lot more than just "stress." What about all those advertising campaigns that tell potential SUV drivers that the whole point of driving their vehicles is that they can intimidate and dominate everybody else?

Anyway, Easterbrook's review is great reading—especially if you're not planning to read Bradsher's book but you'd still like to understand why it's so provocative.

UPDATE: SUV Tax Break as Much as $75,000:

President Bush's economic stimulus plan could triple the size of a little-known tax loophole that could mean from $25,000 to $75,000 in tax writeoffs for small business owners — including doctors, lawyers and financial advisers — when buying an SUV for business purposes, the Detroit News reported.

Posted 08:20 AM | Comments (1) | general politics

Peace on Earth

By all accounts, yesterday's protests against war and for peaceful solutions to global problems were a great success. As Michelle Goldberg writes in Salon:

The broad-based antiwar movement many have awaited is here.

This picture taken by one of the marchers in DC gives a good look at the size of the protest—people as far as the eye can see, or as the Washington Post said:

Organizers of the demonstration, the activist coalition International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), said the protest was larger than one they sponsored in Washington in October. District police officials suggested then that about 100,000 attended, and although some organizers agreed, they have since put the number closer to 200,000. This time, they said, the turnout was 500,000. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey would not provide an estimate but said it was bigger than October's. "It's one of the biggest ones we've had, certainly in recent times," he said.

...

Regardless of the exact number, the crowd yesterday on the Mall was the largest antiwar demonstration here since the Vietnam era. For the 11 a.m. rally, much of four long blocks of the Mall was packed, shoulder-to-shoulder in many sections from Third to Seventh streets SW between Madison and Jefferson drives. The first marchers stepped off about 1:30 p.m., and when many had begun reaching the Navy Yard more than two dozen blocks away about an hour later, others were still leaving the rally site.

In addition, the estimated number of people in San Francisco was 50,000, there were local protests of various sizes in towns and cities throughout the country (my local protest had about 60 people in attendance, in a community of about 100,000; there were 20,000 in Portland, OR), and people in cities around the world also called for a peaceful resolution to the Iraqi situation. The U.S. protests were backed by recent polls showing that American support for a war against Iraq is fairly weak and wavering.

(Aside: When I was in D.C. on October 26th last year for the first ANSWER protest, I watched two or three helicopters circling above us almost all day long. I looked forward to getting home and seeing lots of aerial photographs of the event, since only photos from the air would show its true size and allow anyone to make an accurate estimate of the number of attendees. Of course, I have yet to see an aerial photograph of either protest (October's or last weekend's). Why do you think that is?)

Meanwhile, NPR's All Things Considered yesterday (scroll down to "Military Disconnect" link for RealAudio file) reported on research showing that the greatest support for war in America comes from people who feel zero connection to the military—people who don't have family in the armed forces or relatives who are veterans. According to Duke University researchers Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, the likelihood that the U.S. will use military force is also inversely proportional to the percentage of military veterans in the executive and legislative branches of federal government. While findings like this may not be surprising, they remain the most stark and barbaric example of the dire consequences of our country's increasing obsession with the cult of individuality.

The problem of people only caring about themselves or those in their immediate circles of family/friends shows up in nearly every issue of our society—from health care, to education, to welfare and all other social services, to environmental protections and other corporate regulations. At its most crass, the attitude of the cult of individualism is: "I don't give a shit what happens to anyone else so long as things are ok for me; in fact, I don't even care if having things good for me makes them worse for anyone else. My only value and priority is ME (and maybe me family and friends)." So now that our military is completely volunteer and also comprises only a small percentage of the population, it's easier than ever to get a majority to support the use of force. Our rabid selfishness not only encourages us to simply avert our gaze as people die from lack of health care, but now it also enables us to basically sentence hundreds if not thousands of people to their deaths—either through our overt support of war or through our silent acceptance of it.

Bleak as those facts are, they are also why the growing peace movement is so great: It offers hope that an ethic of interdependence can still thrive in our selfish and individualistic society. People who march for peace are people who recognize that there are real and inescapable connections between the pilots in the bombers or the troops on the ground and the people they bomb or otherwise attack. The people who march for peace are people who refuse to accept that the "blowback" and "collateral damage" that inevitably attend violence and force are necessary evils that we just have to learn to live with. The people who march for peace are people who understand that we must recognize our dependence upon and responsibility to each other if we want to live ethically and to advance as a people.

Although nearly everyone agrees that Saddam Hussein is a corrupt and malevolent dictator, and that the people of Iraq deserve better, that doesn't mean we all have to agree that a military invasion of Iraq is the best way to improve current conditions in the world.

(UPDATE: Someone did take aerial photos of the SanFran protest. Impressive.)

Posted 12:02 PM | general politics

Default Affirmative Action?

I keep seeing bits about this whole affirmative action debate that I feel compelled to post; however, my reason for these posts is not that I want to defend affirmative action so much as I'd like to promote debate and discussion and critical thinking about the issues of social inequality and injustice that are woven into affirmative action. With that in mind, take a look at the beginning of this article about the rise of G. W. Bush [link via BuzzFlash]:

Two weeks before he was to graduate from Yale, George Walker Bush stepped into the offices of the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Field outside Houston and announced that he wanted to sign up for pilot training.

It was May 27, 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. Bush was 12 days away from losing his student deferment from the draft at a time when Americans were dying in combat at the rate of 350 a week. The unit Bush wanted to join offered him the chance to fulfill his military commitment at a base in Texas. It was seen as an escape route from Vietnam by many men his age, and usually had a long waiting list.

Bush had scored only 25 percent on a "pilot aptitude" test, the lowest acceptable grade. But his father was then a congressman from Houston, and the commanders of the Texas Guard clearly had an appreciation of politics.

Bush was sworn in as an airman the same day he applied. His commander, Col. Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, was apparently so pleased to have a VIP's son in his unit that he later staged a special ceremony so he could have his picture taken administering the oath, instead of the captain who actually had sworn Bush in. Later, when Bush was commissioned a second lieutenant by another subordinate, Staudt again staged a special ceremony for the cameras, this time with Bush's father the congressman – a supporter of the Vietnam War – standing proudly in the background.

That certainly makes it sound like Bush received some preferential treatment in his appointment to the Texas Guard; however, that preferencial treatment was not based on his race, but on his economic and social class. The article goes on to provide many more details about the story sketched above, but at every turn it's clear that Bush family connections and Bush's own cultural knowledge helped ensure that he always had the best options to choose from. So if this is the kind of system that poor and minority applicants are working with when they apply to things like universities or jobs, do affirmative action programs make any more sense?

In more on the connection between economic class and race in education, a recent study from the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University found that:

Patterns of segregation by race are strongly linked to segregation by poverty, and poverty concentrations are strongly linked to unequal opportunities and outcomes. Since public schools are the institution intended to create a common preparation for citizens in an increasingly multiracial society, this inequality can have serious consequences. Given that the largest school districts in this country (enrollment greater than 25,000) service one-third of all school-age children, it is important to understand at a district level the ways in which school segregation, race, and poverty are intersecting and how they impact these students' lives. In our analysis we focus on two important components, race and segregation.

The researchers concluded that:

since 1986, in almost every district examined, black and Latino students have become more racially segregated from whites in their schools. The literature suggests that minority schools are highly correlated with high-poverty schools and these schools are also associated with low parental involvement, lack of resources, less experienced and credentialed teachers, and higher teacher turnover—all of which combine to exacerbate educational inequality for minority students. Desegregation puts minority students in schools with better opportunities and higher achieving peer groups.

The growing national support for "school choice" (via vouchers and charter schools, for example) will only exacerbate these trends, which in turn exacerbate the problems with trying to base university admissions solely on academic "merit" (grades, test scores, etc.) as Bush seems to be advocating. I say "seems" to be advocating, because it's pretty hard to tell where Bush actually stands on affirmative action—his speech last week said one thing, his brief in the Michigan case said another, and now his support for greater minority school funding complicates the issue further. Is Bush just trying to please all the people all the time? It seems he's not really pleasing Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (unless their dissent is another tactic calculated by Karl Rove or someone else to try to mollify potential voters who didn't like Bush's position last week?). Anyway, lots of food for thought.

Posted 10:26 AM | general politics

More on Michigan

He hadn't updated in a while last time I checked, so I missed the fact that gTexts has been serving up some good commentary and discussion about the Michigan admissions case for a couple of days. To catch up, start here. That's a great post, but in my favorite bit, g talks about the question of a kind of affirmative action for students whose parents or other ancestors attended a school, aka "legacy" students (like G.W. Bush). Many on the Right argue that this is a completely different and perfectly legitimate practice. G says:

I think this is unfair -- People who mention legacies aren't making a constitutional point but are offering a reminder of how screwed up our priorities are. Given all the advantages many children whose parents attended elite colleges already have (good schools, expensive test-prep courses, vocabulary-enhancing dinnertime conversation), it seems strange that we're fine with giving them an additional preference on top of that, but we have a national freak-out session if minorities who generally have a disadvantaged starting point get a similar opportunity. While legacy preferences are obviously not worse than minority preferences from a constitutional standpoint, they are worse in terms of things like, say, fairness, a decent society, or equality of educational opportunity.

This raises a question that I'm guessing others have already discussed somewhere, but if the point of Bush's participation in the Michigan case is supposedly to promote "diversity," is it possible that the notion of "diversity" has become something of screen to hide the increasing absence of the kinds of things g points to -- fairness, a decent society, or equality of educational opportunity? In other words, does Bush's support for this rather vague term, "diversity," actually mask his complete lack of concern for the kind of social justice the term tends to convey to many of his listeners?

Posted 01:11 PM | general politics