Posted 21:46 by Evan

Harry Potter and the Sincere Form of Flattery

Slate is running a terrific article defending unauthorized derivative works, such as a Russian series of J.K. Rowling knockoffs about Tanya Grotter and her magic flying double bass. Go read.

I'm immensely happy to see this issue being discussed. The fact that a copyright holder can prevent others from producing "derivative works" is, I think, the one aspect of copyright law that bothers me more than any other (except for its duration, of course, which by the way I urge you to sign a petition about, but I digress). I don't think any other feature of the law produces quite such bizarre distortions of the whole idea of free expression.

Here's one smallish example: Dungeons and Dragons, as I'm sure most readers are already aware, is a game in which players sit at a table and interactively improvise fantasy stories, imagining themselves to be characters. Now, can it possibly be any more obvious than it already is that these stories aren't intended for commercial use, and are rarely, if ever, published? The only aspects of the game which are published are the books of rules, ideas, and statistics that help smooth out game play, and booklets with detailed descriptions of settings in which stories may be placed.

Now imagine you're an imaginative boy or girl, playing D&D for the first time, and passionately in love with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. You decide you'd like to play the game as a hobbit. Get a copy of the rulebook, and look up character types. You can play a human, an elf, a dwarf, no problem... but seek for a hobbit, and there is none to be found. All you'll find is a halfling. Why? Because the Tolkein estate refused to allow TSR Games to use a six-letter word that Tolkein had coined decades earlier and with which millions of people had become familiar. And the law in its infinite wisdom gave them the power to enforce that absurd decree.

Because if groups of teenagers playing role-playing-games were allowed to use the word hobbit with impunity, why, that might... um... reduce the market for the books? Somehow or other?

Oh, come on. While it's certainly true that Dungeons and Dragons and other fantasy role-playing games owe a considerable portion of their popularity to The Lord of the Rings, it is undeniable that the reverse is also true. And in fact, I can't recall ever even hearing the word halfling at any D&D game I played in my geeky youth; we always called 'em hobbits... So the legal requirement to put a different name in the rule book was not just economically ridiculous, but actually entirely ineffective.

This kind of silliness is the default behavior of copyright law. An author actually has to go out of his or her way to permit people to make derivative uses of his or her work (as I have done with regard to this blog, using a Creative Commons license).

There may be situations in which I'd agree that a tribute, pastiche, parody, or outright knockoff really does harm an author or artist, and that it should be forbidden. I can't think of one at the moment, but I acknowledge the remote possibility. But it sure as heck isn't the usual case.

This wasn't how the law worked a century back, and authors weren't seriously hurt by that; in fact, they were arguably better off. Some literary historians claim, for example, that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland became so popular and successful in part because a number of other writers--early adopters of the "Wonderland" meme, as it were--had been inspired by it to write lighthearted stories (often politically topical, I gather) using the same style, characters and settings, and these had the effect of providing free advertising and expanding the market for the original. If fanfic had been a word in 1865, it wouldn't have been a dirty one.

Our national fergodsake anthem is an unauthorized song parody. No kidding, you can look it up--the original is called "To Anacreon in Heaven" and has a completely different lyric. "The Star-Spangled Banner" was originally published as a broadside--a set of lyrics to a familiar tune. There were thousands of these things; it was a thriving genre. If today's laws had been in place in 1814, we'd be singing something else at baseball games.

Nobody owns ideas. When people read a book or watch a movie, and are so enthralled and inspired by it as to write a fanfic and post it on the web, society benefits. Maybe only in a tiny way, but it adds up. Their knockoffs may be dreadful, but they are creating something, which is better than creating nothing, and they're building their skills, growing their confidence, developing their voices, and some of them will go on to produce better original work later.

And hypothetically, what if they produce knockoffs that aren't dreadful? What if they produce something just as good as the original, or hey, better? Do we want to suppress something that's genuinely good because it might eat into the profit margins of an already-successful author or filmmaker somewhere? Yikes.

J.K. Rowling is not being injured by the publication of Russian stories about magical preppies whose names end in "otter", any more than J.R.R Tolkein's estate would have been by pimply kids looking up the word hobbit in the D&D Player's Handbook. Sure, there's something to be said for making sure creative people get paid, so fine, we can establish a mandatory license: Ms. Rowling can have a nickel on the dollar every time someone sells a book set at Hogwarts. But don't, for heavens sake, give her the power to decide that other people can't whisper aloud the daydreams she inspired until 70 years after she's dead.

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Posted 18:16 by Evan

On Politics: A Toe In The Water Oh The Heck With It *SPLASH*

For some reason I've been hesitating for over a week now to post this. I'm really not sure why... I think I may have unknowingly internalized a feeling, back in the days of my childhood, that it's permissible to join a conversation about partisan politics, and to be as fiery and impassioned as you like once you're there... but it's not okay to start one. It's a natural response to growing up in a family where peace is a fragile thing, I suppose: We're all having such a nice time talking about the weather, dear, so let's not spoil it by talking about that stuff, hmm?

Plus, it touches on the whole strangers-on-an-airplane scenario--those taboo subjects that send cold shivers of terror down your spine as soon as your seatmate mentions them: politics, religion, multilevel marketing schemes... If I start talking a little too enthusiastically about a candidate on my blog, will my readers all shrink away from me in their seats and bury their noses in their John Grisham novels? Such an uncomfortable thought.

But screw it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am supporting Governor Howard Dean for president. I'm even volunteering for his local campaign organization in Santa Cruz, which is a first for me, and I'm donating money to the national campaign as well. And what's more, I'm hoping you will, too! Dammit, I don't care who I alienate!

I hasten to add that I have nothing against any of the other democratic candidates. (Well, okay, I'd cringe a bit if I had to vote for Joe Lieberman, but I would vote for him if he took the nomination.) But with the others, the full extent of my support is that they'd be light years better than another four years of President Codpiece... whereas I'm actually deeply enthusiastic about voting for Dean, and I can't remember any other presidential race in my life when that was so true, so early on. I'm excited about the guy. How cool is that?

The other day my friend Larissa, a Kucinich supporter, asked me to explain my ideas for why she should get behind Dean instead, and I gave her a longwinded inside-politics sort of answer--that while Dean is liberal enough to suit me on most of the issues I care about, and outspokenly partisan in a way that energizes the liberal base of the party, he has a mix of moderate positions that could play well among swing voters and make inroads in Bush's centrist support... and furthermore, that while in other years these things might not matter to me so much (indeed, in other years I would probably be supporting Kucinich just to make sure the party's progressive wing is well represented when convention time comes), it's so critically important to the very future of the republic that we beat Bush in 2004, practical considerations have to dominate my decision-making process. So I'm going to pick the candidate I think has the best chance in a general election against Bush, and push as hard as I can to get that candidate nominated, and if that means I have to compromise a bit, so be it.

All of that is true, but on reflection I've realized that it wasn't the right answer--or rather, it was only part of the answer: I had explained why someone might want to, y'know, ahem, <mumble>vote for Howard Dean</mumble>, but not why I personally am planning to vote for Howard Dean, if you see the distinction.

The truth is, Dean isn't a compromise candidate for me. His opinions, attitudes and approaches to policymaking aren't a 100% perfect match with mine, but they resonate more than any other candidate I can remember.

I am, by emotional inclination, an idealistic progressive lefty liberal, but by intellectual bent I am a skeptic and pragmatist (hence the pragmaticrat label I was talking about in my previous post), so when discussing politics with serious progressive/green types, I often find myself in respectful disagreement with them. I'm nearly always in sympathy with them--I wholeheartedly agree with their reasons for taking the positions they do--but still, I often have the uncomfortable sense that those positions haven't been thought all the way through, and so I hesitate to support them fully, even though I share their ideals.

(Continued in next post to work around obnoxious blogger bug.)

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Posted 18:14 by Evan

For example: I understand and share many progressives' dislike of handguns; I can see the harm that they do, especially in poor communities, and my gut instinct is to do something to help. But gun control strikes me as a glib, superficial solution--at best, it only addresses the symptom and not the disease, and at worst, it could promote black markets and other unindended consequences that exacerbate the very problem it was trying to address--and that's not even mentioning the Constitutional and civil-liberties arguments, which are not without merit, nor the research indicating that concealed-carry laws have been associated with reduced crime rates in some states, which I'm provisionally willing to accept. What's more, it's a huge political hot button among a large fraction of voters, and I can't see any reason why I'd pick a fight that size unless I were very, very sure I was right. I like handgun control activists, and dislike Charlton Heston's NRA; I think the former are motivated by a genuine desire to make the world a better place, and the latter mostly by selfishness, hostility, or paranoia. But liking and disliking isn't the same thing as agreeing and disagreeing. I'd rather address the root causes of poverty and crime and leave gun control off the table.

For example: I can see that the WTO and NAFTA are anti-environmental and anti-labor nightmares that undermine the sovereignty of national citizens in favor of international corporations, but I can also see real economic benefits to enhanced trade, and an already-stressed economy that would no doubt be hurt worse by major upheavals in the way business is done, so I don't want us to abolish those treaties overnight; I'd rather see us renegotiate them with an eye toward fairness.

For example: I recognize that single-payer is the fairest way to approach universal health care; I also recognize that it hasn't got a chance, for political reasons that are not all bad. When every hospital and clinic in America is taking money directly from the federal government, what's to stop the next republican president from applying the global gag rule to every single one of them? When it comes to politics, Occam's Razor is wrong; the simplest answer should automatically be suspect.

Ding ding ding, I just agreed with Howard Dean, straight down the board.

I like Howard Dean because I sense in him a kindred political spirit. I don't think the guy's a phony. I don't think he takes centrist positions to pander to the right at the expense of the left, or to fuzz the distinction between the two parties (in a misguided effort to do for the democrats what New Coke was supposed to do for Coke), or to get big corporate campaign donations, or even because he's afraid of being smeared as a "liberal" and losing the next election. I think he takes them, when he does, because there really are times when centrist--or even conservative!--policies are actually a better practical way to achieve liberal goals than the standard-issue liberal policies would have been.

I really, really like that about him.

I don't agree with him on every single issue; for example, he says he'd rather not legalize medical marijuana at this time (though he would support a real FDA study), which I can understand, since he's a doctor--but it suggests he's probably not eager to legalize recreational marijuana either, and that's a pity. (On the other hand, in today's political environment, where are we going to find someone who does want to legalize pot who can get elected?) And there are issues that are very important to me--such as the DMCA and the Public Domain Protection Act--that I don't know his positions on yet.

But close enough. I agree with Dean's positions on foreign policy, fiscal policy, civil liberties, reproductive rights, gay rights (well, gay marriage would be even better than civil unions, but let's be practical), affirmative action, energy policy, environmental protection, education, and I wish he were more firmly against the death penalty but I'll take what I can get.

I'm satisfied. He's a really good candidate. I want him nominated, and I want him to be president.

Oh, and have you heard the good news about Jesus and/or Amway?

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