copiesofcopies :: webl

I found this ad for 100% authentic Amish heat-turbine powered mantles in today’s NY Metro.  Notice the loving way the Amish man takes his plane to an already-finished fireplace while a fire burns inside.  Notice the natural drop-shadow which was definitely not photoshopped in because the Amish do not use computers.

I know high-tech heat turbines don’t seem like the Amish way either, but they actually operate entirely on the wrath of the Almighty rather than AC current.

The HP multifunction printer at my office consistently wakes up (from sleep mode) on the wrong side of the bed,¹ displaying this self-deprecating message:

1. ”Consistently” here modifying the entire clause “wakes… bed” rather than “wakes.”  In fact, the P.O.S. rarely functions properly and suspend issues are only a subcategory in its hefty catalog of flaws. [↩]

While even we lesser lights among usage snobs know that swapping “utilize” willy-nilly for “use” is wrong, no one ever told me why.  The subject came up tonight when I was editing a cover letter for Carly, so I took the opportunity to utilize the google and educate myself.  It seems “Utilize” means “turn to practical use or account” and specifically to “make do with something not normally used for the purpose.” So while you might utilize watchmaker’s tins to make a spice rack, you would use a dictionary to look up “utilize.”¹

The predictable rejoinder of overutilizers is that the words share at least one dictionary definition (”to make use of”), so they can be used interchangably.  To which I reply that you can utilize a toilet as a punchbowl.  But I’d really prefer that you didn’t.

1. Unless you had an MBA. [↩]

David Foster Wallace, with whose loss the senselessness of our time increased measurably, wrote much during the 90s that is relevant to the present political morass.¹  Most literally relevant is Up, Simba, on McCain’s 2000 primary run and the appeal of that candidate’s character.²  But in the unlikely context of his review of a Dostoevsky biography, DFW also nails the importance of Obama’s campaign:

Our intelligentsia distrust strong belief, open conviction.  Material passion is one thing, but ideological passion disgusts us on some deep level.  We believe that ideology is now the province of the rival SIGs and PACs all trying to get their slice of the big green pie . . . and, looking around us, we see that indeed it is so.  But [biographer Joseph] Frank’s Dostoevsky would point out (or more like hop up and down and shake his fist and fly at us and shout) that if this is so, it’s at least partly because we have abandoned the field.  That we’ve abandoned it to fundamentalists whose pitiless rigidity and eagerness to judge show that they’re clueless about the “Christian Values” they would impose on others.  To rightist militias and conspiracy theorists whose paranoia about the government supposes the government to be just way more organized and efficient than it really is.  And, in academia and the arts, to the increasingly absurd and dogmatic Political Correctness movement, whose obsession with the mere forms of utterance and discourse show too well how effete and aestheticized our best liberal instincts have become, how removed from what’s really important — motive, feeling, belief.

I don’t think I’m a personality cultist devoted to an empty idea of “change,” because of the change I’ve seen already: Obama already reclaimed belief — ideology — from its abusers and made it more believable.  He’s not going to fix everything, in fact his administration is likely to be a disappointment.  But to restore conviction from its debased position in American politics is a real accomplishment and maybe the one I’m really voting for.

1. Full disclosure: all of the “much” I refer to here and in fact all I’ve ever read of DFW I read in Consider the Lobster. [↩]
2. And most timely is DFW’s account of the McCain 2000 campaign’s implosion upon “going negative” against George Bush II. [↩]

Matt Asay today springs to the defense of the widows and orphans over at Google and their comprehensive prosecution of the Google Chrome trademark. Google sent a DMCA notice to the developer of ChromePlugins.org, demanding he stop using their logos and a remix of their adorable comic, and the developer was understandably upset. Asay’s enthusiasm for Google’s cause is characteristic of his business-first approach to the Business of Open Source (though one wonders if he’s confused Google’s duty to police its trademarks for his own), but his high-handed tone is uncalled-for and his conclusions, though brief, are rife with oversimplification.

Asay responds to a rather balanced account of the enforcement with a volley of fake quotes attributed to god-knows-who: open source means “open to pilfer trademarks” and is “a stick-in-the-eye to ‘The (IP) Man’” and that all related rights are “up for grabs.” He bids the unidentified “some” people espousing these non-quotes, “pay attention… you’re wrong.”

The substance¹ of Asay’s argument is a familiar truism: open source copyright licenses are instruments of copyright law. And as he says, “without copyright there is no copyleft.” But the implication that free and open source software depends upon copyright law (and this must be the implication or there is no point at all) is wrong (and doubly wrong because he italicizes it). Were copyright abolished and the default reset to “no rights reserved,” it would be a trivial matter indeed to allow others to modify my source code — I wouldn’t even need a license, because I would have no right to exclude.  It’s true that under a no-copyright regime, copyleft would break — I couldn’t use my right to exclude to compel others to make available source code they build on top of mine. But copyleft was devised in response to copyright, not in affirmation of it. In the GNU Manifesto which launched GNU and eventually the FSF, rms’s stated goal was to combat the increasing proprietarization of software. If software could not be made proprietary, copyleft may have been unnecessary. Of course, a company could still attain a sort of de facto proprietarization by controlling access to their source, but this would be much less effective under a system that didn’t punish reverse engineering or the use of decompiled or leaked source code.

Maybe abolition of copyright isn’t the answer, but copyright (much less in its present captive state²) is certainly not the only means to software freedom. And the mere existense of exclusive rights, even if similar rights are used to beneficial ends, is no justification for anti-social behavior, whether Google’s or Asay’s.

1. And here more credible claimants to the title “substance,” such as plastic and cocaine, will forgive my lax usage. [↩]
2. My colleague Bradley Kuhn, who has said all of this before, has proposed a regime under which registrants of a copyright in software are required to deposit the entire source and in exchange are given 3 years of exclusive rights to it, after which their code becomes public domain. While not the only solution, or a universally agreeable one, it’s certainly imaginable. [↩]

Finally got my hands on a glue gun today and put together the magnetic spice rack that’s been on my todo list for a few weeks.  I got the materials list from here, but it probably originally came from here.  Basically, you hot-glue magnets to the back of watchmaker tins and fill them with spices, and you get a pretty and convenient way to store your spices, like so:

I’m pretty happy with it, but the instructions leave out a few important details.  First, the hot glue doesn’t bond well to the magnets or the tins if they’re cold — like the glue gun manual says, you’ve got to heat metal before you can effectively hot-glue it.  You could do this by leaving them out in the sun or under a hot lamp.  I didn’t have either option today, so I laboriously heated the magnets and tins with my soldering iron.  I also used “super strength” hot glue, which seems to work better than the garden variety.  Also, I’m no physicist, but I’m pretty sure you can’t just glue either side of the magnet to the tin — if you use the wrong side it won’t stick to the fridge nearly so well.

Also, the watchmaker tins are a clever hack, but they’re not that well suited to the purpose.  The lids are made to lift off without much resistance, so I ended up gently bending the sides of the lids in to keep them from popping off unbidden.  For this same reason, you have to be careful when pulling them off the fridge — if you grab them by the lid, Roomba will be sucking more than his share of allspice.  Screw-off lids would work better.  I would also prefer larger tins (you can get them one size larger) — these don’t hold much more than a couple of tablespoonfuls of spice, so you’ll be refilling your chili and curry powder pretty frequently.  But larger tins would be heavier and would probably require stronger magnets, which would (Catch-22) make the tins pretty tough to pull off of the fridge.

I also got fixed my camera lens, which I broke on the day I took this.  The only problem with it was that I broke two little plastic “teeth” off the lens mount (the part that connects to the camera body) when I dropped it on the floor.  It looked like an easy fix, but when I sent it to Canon they quoted me $100 for the repair.  Looking around online I found one place selling the little plastic piece I needed.  Six screws and $20 (shipped) later my lens was like new.  So I guess the moral is, if it seems like you could fix it yourself, you probably can.

I think I’m going with the angry, inexperienced black guy. I can just never tell where that affable white gentleman stands — is he a hero, or a maverick? You can’t ride the fence forever, McCain!

Thanks, CBS!

I wrote a post for SFLC’s blog, responding to a Law.com article on FOSS licensing:

Law.com recently ran a sensationalist piece by Edmund J. Walsh warning of the impending “dangerous real world business dispute” in store for any for-profit company that uses free software. Walsh points to lawsuits filed by SFLC on behalf BusyBox as a source of this danger, and having worked on those lawsuits, I hope I can provide a helpful counterpoint.

In a successful bid to horrify myself, I ran my favorite Chipotle order through the Chipotle Nutrition Facts Calculator.  No wonder I’m so thirsty!  And… fibrous!

Like many copyright lawyers, I often begin my research into a given question of law by turning to Nimmer’s treatise. I approach Nimmer exactly as I approach Wikipedia — I anticipate a solid overview of the relevant issues, direction of my next steps, and some wrong or incomplete information. A high school student would be remiss to rely on Wikipedia alone for his paper research, and I would commit malpractice if he relied solely on Nimmer’s summary of a point of law, but both of us can save some time by referencing these meta-sources on our first pass.

An outline of the possiblities

These superficial similarities prove little, but they at least raise the question of whether we could make a treatise like we made Wikipedia. In broad strokes, the projects are identical: take an enormous information resource historically prepared by a small number of experts (in this case only one!) and subdivide the work between a large quantity of lesser lights. None of these could write the thing on his own, and many of them will contribute one sentence or dependent clause that is dead effing wrong. But their efforts in aggregate will produce more and timelier information on a wider variety of topics than those of the sole treater, and obtain a relatively high average quality.

Particular problems and solutions

On closer examination, the legal treatise is different from the encyclopedia in a few important ways. First, the knowledge necessary to contribute usefully to a legal treatise is concentrated in far fewer noggins than that necessary to contribute to an article about… anything at all. Second, lawyers may have on average less disposable time in which to edit wikis than the general population. But hough we like to consider ourselves something of an elite class, everyone else knows that there are a lot of goddamned lawyers in this country. More importantly, there are a lot of goddamned law students in this country. And all self-aggrandizement about our heroic struggles through law school aside, those students have a lot more free time than lawyers. Avoidance of homework is the single greatest motivator of YouTube video-reply generation and Facebook profile-padding among high school students; law students are no less eager to join the prosumer former audience. What’s more, law students (particularly around finals time) are turning out treatise material nearly every day. Yes, it’s simplistic, latin-engorged, low-grade treatise material, but these deficiencies are more than made up in volume. And Clay Shirky told me these things are supposed to start bad.

Lawyers do this too. The low-level associates who are not combing warehouses for receipts are endlessly summarizing the most basic points of law for lazy partners — this stuff is treatise gold. Which brings me to the third important difference between lawyers and encyclopedists, which is that much of a lawyer’s work is protected in one way or another by privilege. But this objection seems to me easily overcome. Publishing notes from or even sections of documents prepared for clients, to the extent that they contain simple summaries of the law, need not raise any confidentiality concerns or expose the entire document to discovery (this is why we have redaction, right?). Besides, one need only quickly survey the wretchedly-named blawgosphere to see that lawyers are constantly blathering about the general issues they encounter in their work for clients (simultaneously demonstrating that lawyers aren’t really so hard-up for Internet dicking-around time).

Previous efforts and missteps

This has all been suggested before (and again). It has sort of been attempted. The Cornell Legal Information Institute’s Wex and the Wikilaw project are legal information wikis, but seek to provide more general legal information to the general public. EFF’s Internet Law Treatise is the closest thing to an actual test case, but the approach taken so far has maybe missed the point. The ITL has been online for a nearly a year and a half, but write access has been “invitation only” that whole time. The predictable consequence is that all of the edits in the last month except for two were made by Kurt Opsahl, the ITL’s founder. The rationale for this cautious approach is likely related to the project’s disclaimer — a (usually healthy) fear of a malpractice suit by someone who relies on the treatise as legal advice.

But there is no “right” time to open a wiki to public editing, except “right away.” As Shirky puts it, “the key to creating [the] individual actions [from which collective information resources are built], is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.” Anybody needs to be able to add a stub, update a page to include a summary of a recent decision, or introduce factually or legally erroneous information. If it doesn’t start bad, it probably won’t start at all (as Shirky’s case study of Nupedia illustrates). The need for the disclaimer is undeniable, but if it’s inoperative on a small scale, it will be inoperative on a large scale and the legal wiki created by lawyers is a non-starter. But I think such disclaimers are adequate, and need to be adequate if the legal profession is ever going to do anything interesting with new information tools (a potential alternative is truly anonymous posting, but this introduces policing problems and will probably discourage contributions as much as it encourages them).