…because even though the vegetarian crawled out of the marinade before the Memorial Day barbecue — again (and, of late, as usual) — the world keeps throwing up link sausage ingredients. And I say "up," not "out," on purpose.
- One of the unstated fundamental assumptions of "intellectual property" is that whatever recompense comes to those who create "Progress in the useful Arts" by creating will be sufficient motivation. This necessarily means one of two things: That those who create have some other source of "basic living expenses" completely covered, so that an immediate market failure (cf. the oft-exaggerated story of van Gogh's lack of success in selling paintings during his lifetime) is no more than an inconvenience, else we have artists pushing up daisies instead of painting them; or that the mean, median, and mode compensation does so.
The latter, not so much. This is not news. It's especially not news regarding translations of literary works (and even audiovisual works). Sadly, the implication here is clear: That members of the underclass "aren't allowed" to base their lives in the arts. Limiting or losing that perspective undermines "Progress in the useful Arts" at least as much as Napster did.
- That last point also bears substantial thought for another reason. Too often, in debates regarding the arts in general and intellectual property in particular, the interests of distributors and transferees — as to Napster, record labels, concert promoters, Ticketbastard, ASCAP/BMI, et al. — get conflated with the interests of the actual creators. And that's even before dragging the heirs into it; and those heirs are nowhere as intrusive as these ones, let alone these ones (note the subtle irony of the name of the author of that piece!). This is a separate indictment of the term and transfer mechanisms of copyright that must await another time.
- Shame on you, Navy prosecutors. Leaving aside your ethical duties in general and the overreaching concerning these particular targets of your "investigation" in particular, what is described in this article — and I'm relying on the article precisely because going into "the record" could prejudice someone or other, presuming that in this instance "the record" is more reliable than the article in the first place — isn't even good investigative concept or technique… or, more than arguably, good use of resources. One thing that the article is silent upon is what led the prosecutors to believe that the defense might have been the source of the "leaks" in the first place, and what efforts the prosecution took to rule out other (more-amenable-to-proper-investigation) sources. And that is what is most disturbing: The apparent presumption, on the basis of unstated evidence, that among all of the possible sources of a leak it made any sense to focus on defense counsel at all. Civilian defense counsel, who are not subject in a general sense to military law and by definition are not loyal to the Government. (And for avoidance of doubt, this is no attempt at defending the substance of what's at issue in this trial; if what has been stated in public happened, it's no more excusable than were Medina and Calley, but the damned trial comes first.)
- Normally, articles at The Economist are thoughtful and reasonably well researched, and at least defensible. Even those that nonetheless apply its institutional one-point-five-three-steps-away-from-Smithian prejudices manage that. Not this time, though: This article purporting to discuss the experiences of the top 0.1% of intellectual capability doesn't betray even top 10% of analytical capability (combined with vastly more experience than any of the purported "subjects" have). The faint disdain for the truly gifted that seeps through this article is nowhere near that of, say, damned near anything coming out of Lorre's exploitation machine (and I will not link to any of that antiintellectual, all-people-are-really-ruled-by-their-gonads-no-matter-how-intelligent bullshit). But it's bad enough. Ms Fergusson has completely neglected the normative imperative found in defining "normal intellectual capability and impulse" as good. Just ask any six-year-old who has been incessantly teased by classmates — with adult, and especially teacher, acquiescence — because she has already mastered something (or even just displayed far-more-advanced-than-peers capability) "intellectual" that isn't immediately entertaining. Just ask Hermione Granger… or Alan Turing.
Two marks out of ten, and that much only because it's written reasonably coherently.
The relationship of this link sausage to the first one on the platter is better developed at dissertation length. With dissertation rigor (or, at least, what dissertations are supposed to aspire to). At which time it will be consigned to the dusty bins of the library, probably via University Microfiche, and never considered by anyone other than other nerds.