Orphan works: what's wrong and how to fix it. Cory Doctorow: Jamie Boyle and Duke U's Center for the Study of the Public Domain have produced two excellent reports for the Copyright Office on the plight of "orphan works" whose rightsholder cannot be located. The reports talk about the real-world problems and suggest practical solutions to them.

"Orphan Works" probably comprise the majority of the record of 20th century culture. These works are still presumably under copyright (only works published before 1923 are conclusively in the public domain), but the copyright owner cannot be found. The default response of archivists, libraries, film restorers, artists, scholars, educators, publishers, and others is to drop copyrighted work unless it is clearly in the public domain. As a result, orphan works are not used in new creative efforts or made available to the public due to uncertainty over their copyright status, even when there is no longer anyone claiming copyright ownership, or the owner no longer has any objection to such use.

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(Thanks, Jamie!) [Boing Boing]

A wonderful Catch-22 our current intellectual property law has provided for us. So the creativity of entire generatons of artists disappears because of IP laws. I wonder if that is what the creators of these works really wanted. To vanish.  11:51:33 PM    

Crooks and Liars: "Stewart brings humor to a humorless situation." [Scripting News]

The Daily Show is one of the more incredible programs on TV. It has been able to take such a difficult, heartrending subject and place just the right perspective on it, so that we can see it with humor and move on. The best example of how important the jester really is.  11:42:01 PM    

Two Important Articles from NEJM on Schiavo. As far as I can tell, the New England Journal of Medicine has posted two articles on its website for free download by anybody.  (I am a subscriber, so it's possible that I am getting to them because of a... [HealthLawProf Blog]

These are very worthwhile articles, written from a medical and a legal perspective. They are free and open to everyone, indicating just how important these doctors feel. Unfortunately, most of the zeolots in Florida will be incapable of understanding the messages contained in these articles. Reason is not what we have heard much of the least few days.

Here are some reasoned words, from Annas' paper:

'Erring on the side of life' in this context often results in violating a person[base ']s body and human dignity in a way few would want for themselves. In such situations, erring on the side of liberty [~] specifically, the patient[base ']s right to decide on treatment [~] is more consistent with American values and our constitutional traditions.

Too bad many do not want to err on the side of liberty. Too bad so many of our supposed leaders err on the wrong side.  11:11:01 PM    

Highly adaptable genome in gut bacterium key to intestinal health. A bacterium that lives in the human gut adaptively shifts more than a quarter of its genes into high gear when its host's diet changes from sugar to complex carbohydrates. [EurekAlert! - Medicine and Health]

Everyone forgets that we have a trillion bacterial cells living in our gut. They feed off of what we eat. And if they do not eat properly, we most likely do not.  10:45:21 PM    

Fla. officials' attempt, fail to seize Schiavo

10:35:39 PM    

Six Emerging Global Pandemics. [This post is from a friend with contacts in the national health care arena.]

Bird Flu is only one of the six emerging global pandemics. They are: Super-TB, H5N1 (Bird Flu), Super-Staph, SARS, Super-Malaria and the major threat is still HIV.

H5N1 is going to be very bad, but (at worst) it will cull out 10% of the healthy human population. That would be over 600 million deaths from H5N1. If it focusses on the weak, just what disease is supposed to do, it may be a very perverse partial solution to the tensions caused by exploding global population and the carrying capacity of the earths natural systems.

The most terrifying pandemic tidal wave is the one no-one is wants to address - (Except maybe China).

HIV, using 20+ million Human Petri-Dishes kept alive with long term "maintain" drugs, is evolving at a rate of 3 generations an hour/host into an indestructible, casual-contact, species-buster. [Greater Democracy]

Of course, when these hit, many will simply call it the end times and wait for the rapture. I do not think it will be that bad. We are already working on an H5N1 vaccine. We are poised to make similar drugs/vaccines for most of the rest. We no longer have the Sword of Damocles of atomic war or nuclear winter over our heads, so some will look to a global pandemic as a scouring event. Something in mankind seems to want a time of retribution, whether is is God, punishing us for our trespasses or Gaia, punishing us for our pollution.

Sorry. It does not work that way. These viruses are just trying to move into a new environmental niche - a human being. If there is any guiding hand behind this, it is the guiding hand that created everything and has watched since. What will happen with a pandemic is no different than events that have hit mankind, and probably every living thing on the planet, at some time or another. We will survive, or we won't. That is truly life on Earth, at least for us. Because long after we are gone, the Earth will still teem with life.  10:16:13 PM    

Umberto Eco essay on Ur Fascism. Our on his Chief Blogging Office blog, Chris Locke has posted an interesting note on Umberto Eco's essay on Ur Fascism. The essay is in his book "Five Moral Pieces".

This is how Eco begins his enumeration. You'll see why I was so excited to find this when you hit the last graf. In what follows, btw, the grafiks, links and emphasis are mine. 1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition. Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of them indulgently accepted by the Roman Pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten languages—in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of the little known religions of Asia. This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice"; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message. [Greater Democracy]

Eco wrote an incredibly prescient article in 1995 entitled Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt, that list 14 characteristics of fascist groups. It is full of things like this, that certainly seem to resonate in the US today:

• The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
• Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.
• In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.
• Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference.
• ...there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.
• For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.
• Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
• Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.

In many ways, the US was saved from fascism in the 30s because it had an administration opposed to it and a President committed to finding another way. I would be more confident of where we were going today if the current President actually came out and condemned the rhetoric of violence spewing from the media, condemned those who clamored for violence, condemned those who want action that will rend the fabric of this nation. How I wish we had a President of the caliber of Roosevelt. We may need such a man to extricate ourselves from the clutches of the current fascist ardor expressed by so many in Florida, and around the country.  10:02:08 PM    

"a bill to stamp out the leftist domination of universities. " [Daypop Top 40]

I think Florida could have a hard time attracting smart students if by some weird chance this bill actually passes. But since the person proposing it is a graduate of Florida education and said this:

Some professors say, [OE]Evolution is a fact. I don[base ']t want to hear about Intelligent Design (a creationist theory), and if you don[base ']t like it, there[base ']s the door,[base '] Baxley said, citing one example when he thought a student should sue.

We can assume that they are already attracting many of the dim bulbs. A student could sue a professor over evolution? If so, anyone actually interested in learning biology, or teach it, will be looking for another state. In fact, the universities could have a hard time recruiting anyone right now because of tis idiocy. i think it will be a long time before i travel to Florida again (even though Disneyworld is one of my favorite places to visit.).  9:17:47 PM