A bit of theory

Reading Outside Counsel (as ya should) I found the following little gem, ""The doctrine, which has close counterparts in patent and trademark law, permits a degree of unauthorized copying of copyrighted works. Shocking! If a teenager takes a joyride in my car and is arrested, can he defend by arguing that it was a “fair use”? No, but the example points up an important difference between physical and intellectual property, a difference obscured by the use of words like “theft” and “piracy” to describe unauthorized copying. If someone takes my car, he deprives me of its use. If he copies my copyrighted book, I still can read, use, and sell the book, although my publisher’s and my income may be less because one fewer copy will be sold. But maybe not--maybe the copycat wouldn’t have bought the book if he’d had to pay the retail price. And if instead of copying an entire book, a book reviewer quotes a paragraph from it, I may well be better off (in contrast, say, to someone who doesn’t want to drive my car but just store stuff in the trunk); and if he had to get my permission to quote, I might be worse off, especially since reviews would lack credibility if reviewers needed the author’s permission to quote. Unauthorized quotation by book reviewers is an example of fair use."

Now, that isn't Mr. Altreuter, the writer of Outside Counsel, but rather Judge Posner...(US Court Of Appeals, 7th Circuit).

Pretty good stuff.

Thoughts from Gotham City

rm wrote this.

It's part of a much better whole.

"New York beckons people from all over the world for a myriad of reasons. Commerce. Theater. And possibility. The sea and the rivers having done so much to make us what we are, and yet, living here, we rarely see them, surrounded as we are by our buildings and our people. People come to New York City to be the most famous and visible person in all the world. But people also come to New York City to disappear, by choice or by accident, to finally be ordinary, to finally have community or home. We are a city of pride and secrets, of the fallen and of the free. People have always been broken by New York, and people have always been healed by her. Sometimes it just comes in a cataclysm.

And that's what the RNC doesn't understand. That's what the RNC has never understood. That's what the RNC tried to witlessly exploit. New York endures, neither despite ourselves nor despite the things that happened here. New York endures, simply because that is what she does, and it is what she has always done. And that's a thing simple, extraordinary and honest. It's the most American thing about her, and yet we were only ever believed to be real Americans just like anyone else when the fire rained down, so uselessly... so usefully."

don't treat me as if I am something that happened to you (9/11)