By now you may have heard of Amazon remotely erasing from their electronic books, the Kindle, copies of 1984 and Animal Farm. The reaction has been generally scathing, but it's a different aspect brought to light which I want to comment on. To whit, 1984 and Animal Farm were erased because the copyright holder objected. But...
While the copyright on “1984” will not expire until 2044 in the United States, it has already expired in other countries, including Canada, Australia and Russia. Web sites in those countries offer digital copies of the book free to all comers.
George Orwell died in 1950. Fifty-nine years ago. In the US copyright on 1984 will note expire untill 94 years after he died. The constitution gave Congress the right to set intellectual property laws to encourage people to create new works, but the idea that anyone would care whether or not their work is still under copyright 94 years after they died is ludicrous.
This, in fact, primarily the work of one company. Call it the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, because the law went into effect to make sure Mickey Mouse didn't go into the public domain.
The problem with copyrights, patents and so on is that they stifle innovation and creativity. The ability of everyone to take what has already been done and build on it is at the heart of progress, whether technological, intellectual or creative.
It is also one of the conditions for modern style capitalism and industrialization. Knowledge must be reasonably free, everyone must be able to use it. If it isn't, you move swiftly to a position where IP producers start extracting monopoly profits, which strangles the use of new ideas.
Americans are obsessed with intellectual property because it's one of the few things the US still has a surplus in with the rest of the world. But strangling information also strangles innovation and growth. The price is too high, and it is paid by America as well as America's customers.
Normally, I wouldn't presume to speak for the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, but given Jefferson's reverence for our most precious resource, i.e., the soil, he surely would have appreciated the underlying message of Pixar's latest animated opus-that it's our civic duty to be good stewards of the land.
Yeah, yeah, I know that WALL-E's creator, Andrew Stanton, is insisting that WALL-E is first and foremost a love story, but the whole plot hinges on another relationship: the one between us and the dirt beneath our feet. Jefferson was an early advocate of maintaining soil fertility through such practices as crop rotation, and would doubtless be horrified by the pollution and depletion of our topsoil that's become standard operating procedure since the advent of industrial agriculture.
(Of course, he'd also be appalled that the Fourth of July has turned into a giant meat-fest; Jefferson was an unabashed lover of fruits and veggies who maintained that produce should dominate our diet and meat should be used sparingly, as a "seasoning" or "condiment.")
Set in the year 2815, 700 years after the Earth's been trashed by mindless consumers and a monolithic corporation named Buy n Large, WALL-E depicts a nation whose excesses have launched it into perpetual astro-exile on a fleet of super-duper Buy n Large-sponsored spaceships. Its morbidly obese, infantalized citizens, too fat to stand upright, zip around aimlessly on their hovercraft-style loungers sipping sodas, playing video games, and awaiting the day the Earth will have detoxed enough to be "recolonized."
Some folks are eager to dismiss this cautionary tale of a corpulent corporatocracy as a far-fetched scenario aimed at advancing some eco-extremist agenda, but it's an eerie echo of the warnings from Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer-Prize winning UCLA professor of geography and author of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a precursor to Collapse that Diamond wrote for Harper's back in 2003, he challenged the conventional wisdom that we have to weigh environmental concerns against economic considerations, citing the popular misconception that:
...we must balance the environment against human needs. That reasoning is exactly upside-down. Human needs and a healthy environment are not opposing claims that must be balanced; instead, they are inexorably linked by chains of cause and effect. We need a healthy environment because we need clean water, clean air, wood, and food from the ocean, plus soil and sunlight to grow crops. We need functioning natural ecosystems, with their native species of earthworms, bees, plants, and microbes, to generate and aerate our soils, pollinate our crops, decompose our wastes, and produce our oxygen. We need to prevent toxic substances from accumulating in our water and air and soil...Our strongest arguments for a healthy environment are selfish: we want it for ourselves, not for threatened species like snail darters, spotted owls, and Furbish louseworts.
[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger Leo Casey, and previously posted on Edwize.]
On the Disney Company's corporate website, the reader will find a honor roll of teachers from across the United States who have been recognized by the American Teacher Awards, starting with the first class of 1990 and concluding with the last class of 2006. A close examination will reveal that there is no teacher listed as the 1992 honoree in the category of Social Studies. Two of the three Social Studies finalists are listed, but the teacher who was actually named Social Studies Teacher of the Year is missing.*
I am that missing teacher. My name disappeared some time after I organized a public letter, signed by twenty-five American Teacher Award honorees, protesting Disney's sponsorship of John Stossel's Stupid in America, an ideological broadside against public education and the teachers who labor in our public schools.
