I don't know why everyone always complains about Washington...

[malsperanza]

...it's a perfectly lovely town.

Friday: Not at all bad, despite having to take a 6 am train in order to arrive at Agonizing Daylong Conference on Copyright and Fair Use by 10.

Agonizing daylong conference turned out to be witty and informative (for the most part), and even fun at times, despite the fact that whoever claimed that American U. Law School is walking distance from the metro is delusional. Much advantageous networking was done. We all played Can You Top This in the category of Horrible Anecdotes about Fair Use, and the guy from CC won hands down with this

For an essay on the shrinkage of fair use in the digital realm, he wishes to quote the following eighteenth-century poem:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common;
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

He therefore asks research assistant to discover, if possible, the correct attribution of this acerbic little rhyme (having to do with the unpopular English enclosure laws of the mid-1700s). Assistant notices that when this poem is googled, 20 or so websites attribute it to a variety of different sources. Dutiful research assistant therefore writes to all these websites to ask them to please confirm their source and if possible provide a trustworthy citation.

Of these 20 or so websites, about 15 write back to her, apologizing for having posted the eighteenth-century poem without permission and promising to remove it forthwith. Horrified research assistant writes again, assuring websites and their ISPs that the poem is in the public domain and has been for some 300 years, whereupon frightened websites write back with canine humility to assure her that the poem has already been removed and such a terrible infringement will never happen again.

Welcome to the age of the Take-Down Letter.



Friday night consisted of catching up with very old friend who makes amazing documentaries for a living and quarreling about exactly which bits of the US federal govt we hate the most, and why, interspersed with the usual rants about New Orleans, the Supreme Court, and Iraq. Much wine consumed, followed by Thai food with friend's charming teenage daughter and her friend, who tried to explain to me why the Beastie Boys are not a vast rightwing conspiracy after all. Or maybe it was the Backstreet Boys. Either way, I remained immovable on this point.

Saturday was coffee and Barnes & Noble with friend, followed by coffee and Kramerbooks with black_dog (hah, eat your hearts out, flist!), followed by coffee and 4 cats with another friend, also peripherally involving books, followed by train home. This meant that I managed to buy Barbara Ehrenreich's newest screed (that's a BD word, but I intend to swipe it) as well as a new novel by Sarah Waters, Fingersmith in between much caffeination and good chatter.

For those of you who have not read Sarah Waters, I recommend her. She has a pitch-perfect ear for Victorian pastiche, and writes novels that flirt (literally) with the naughty Victorian bodice-ripper form, only just ever so slightly crossing over into postmodern self-consciousness. Just barely (literally). This one was quite a page-turner. (Heh, literally. Or rather, literarily.) Lump it with Charles Palliser's The Quincunx, Ian Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost (to which I think its title alludes, faintly), Hawksmoor and Chatterton by Peter Ackroyd, and maybe Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Only different, because it has lesbian action of the lacy-garters John Cleland sort. Great fun and got me from DC to NYC in record time.

Also, I am reassured by the fact that at least one friend of mine has more cats than I do, and doesn't seem to be bonkers. Not that I'd be the best judge, though, really.

Which is to say that I am down to a mere three cats, having found a really nice home with friends for the unhappy lurker, who has become a sweet and affectionate lady, now that she is Sole Cat. And I have just three--which is hardly any cats at all, really.

Comments

[pinkfinity.livejournal.com]

AU? I went to AU! Different location, then. The place it's in now used to be a Talbots & a liquor store.

[larryhammer]

DC measures "walking distance" by a different standard than most cities. I walked a mile to high school, and this was considered not out of line.

That anecdote about the pome is chilling indeed.

---L.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

And is halfway to Baltimore, at that.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Heidi, I've been meaning to ask: when you hear from fanfic authors who get take-down notices, do you tell them to go to the www.chillingeffects.org website and list them? And do you ever encourage authors to file counter-notices (or make their ISPs do so)? At the AU thing last week, the guys from EFF were talking a lot about teaching users to exercise the safe harbour provisions of 512(g) more aggressively, as an alternative to fair use.

[black-dog.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's a lot of coffee, if you think about it.

My admiration grows and grows. :)