Author: Joey deVilla

Of course, Walt himself is already dead. I’m referring to Disney, the corporation.

I was reading a story in Wired News today, sent there by a link on bOING bOING, a particularly good news blog to which I sometimes provide information and which sometimes links to this ‘umble accordionist’s blog. Being a programmer in the peer-to-peer software world, where issues of copyright and fair use are always close by, this one particular quote jumped out at me. Forgive the extra-large type, but I really want to drive a point home.

“There is no right to fair use…Fair use is a defense against infringement.”

This outright lie was spoken by Preston Padden, who holds the position of Head of Government Relations for the Disney Corporation. I had to make sure I read it right because what he said sounded like insane ranting. He’s declared that the right to fair use — a right that we as people who enjoy creations such as books, music and movies most certainly have — does not exist. Almost as shocking is the fact that an entertainment company needs a deparment devoted solely to maintaining relations witht the government. Goofy (I’m referring to the character named Goofy, not Bush 43) probably has more pull with Congress than Canada, Mexico and the entire European Union combined.

Time for the accordion player to drop a little science…

©

Copyright is the set of exclusive legal rights that creators are given over their works for a limited period of time. The idea behind copyright is to “promote science and the useful arts”. By protecting the works of people who create original works, copyright is supposed to provide a legal mechanism for them to be compensated for their efforts — after all, it stands to reason that creators who can make a living by creating would create more.

The rights of someone who holds the copyright on a work are:

• the right to reproduce the work
• the right to prepare derivative works based upon the work
• the right to distribute copies of the work to the public by selling, renting or lending it
• the right to perform the work in public
• the right to display the work in public
• the right to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission

Copyright law applies to virtually every form of expression that can be “fixed” (as the lawyers like to put it) in a tangible medium that can contain that expression: paper, film, magnetic tape or disks, optical storage such as CDs or DVDs, or even merely in RAM. You see copyrighted works every day: they’re songs, books, software, and movies, to name a few. The copyright on a work lasts from the moment the work is finished and ends 70 years after the death of the creator of the work.

Copyright ideally belongs to the creator of the work, but it isn’t necessarily that way. A creator may hand copyright over to someone else in exchange for some kind of benefit. One example is my friend, Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author (and a good one, to boot). He owns the copyright to his stories, but he licenses that copyright to his publisher for the duration for as long as they publish his book. If he severs the relationship with his publisher, copyright reverts to him. By getting copyright on the book, the publisher collects the compensation (that is, the moolah, the filthy lucre, tha benjamins) that they are legally entitled to as the holder of the copyright, and they toss Cory his “vig” — that’s publisher talk for his slice of the pie. In return, Cory gets the resources of the publisher: editors, printing presses, distribution and publicity. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Some publishers do well by their authors, some don’t.

The publishers whom I believe do worst by their authors are the record companies. The music industry — an oligarchy since there are few enough “big players” to count on a single hand — are opportunistic profiteers who have turned copyright law into a means of fattening themselves. When an artist or band signs on with a record company, the company owns the copyright on their songs forever. It wasn’t always this way; it used to be that record companies could hold onto the copyright for their artists’ songs for 35 years, after which the artists could reclaim it. However, thanks to a change in copyright law in November 1999, the copyright a song published by a record company belongs to the company forever. Initiated by a congressional aide and scumbag Mitch Glazier and backed by the Record Industry Association of America, this bit of legal sophistry was conceald inside the rather innocuous-sounding Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999. It redefined recorded music as “works for hire,” and as such, the legal creators of the works were the record companies. The artists, as far as the law was concerned, were reduced to hired hands.

This bit of legal trickery is, as we street accordion players like to say, complete horseshit. A plumber coming to fix your pipes is work for hire. An architect who builds a building for your company is doing work for hire. A photographer who works for a newspaper or magazine as part of reportage is doing work for hire. A composer who is commissioned to write a song or symphony for some event is doing work for hire.

However, an author who comes up with an idea for a book and then writes that book is not doing work for hire, nor was Ansel Adams when he was taking his black-and-white portraits, nor was the Godfather of Soul when he felt like a sex machine and set it to music.

Next time: I’ll cover fair use, and why they want to take this right away from you.

Recommended Reading

The U.S. Copyright Office’s Copyright Basics page. A good place to start.

The FCC’s page for the Satellite Home Viewing Act. See how recording artists lost their right to their own music.

The RIAA’s not done yet. True to form, they tried to sneak in more self-serving changes to copyright through some post 9/11 anti-terrorism bills. There’s nothing like profiting from the deaths of 6,000 innocent people, isn’t there?

Courtney Love Does the Math. The real pirates, she says, are the record companies. A piece so right-on that I could almost forgive her for killing Kurt (just kidding, Courtney).

Just a little busy right now. An update will appear tonight. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure, may I suggest this is your goldfish, speaking?

I’ve been working pretty long hours every day for the past two weeks, what with the company gearing up to get a test version of our software ready for the investors to try. We finished in the wee hours of Friday morning, and I haven’t touched a computer until now. I thought I’d make a quick posting in the blog, and saw this on the Blogger front page:

Woo-hoo!

Thanks, Ev (the guy behind Blogger)!

I just got the strangest mass-mailing I’ve ever seen:

Time Travelers PLEASE HELP !

message: If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed!!

I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age.

Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in very great danger and need this immediately!

I am aware that there are many types of time travel and that humans do not do well through certain types.

I need as close to temporal reversion as possible, as safely as possible. To be able to rewind the hands of time in such a way that the universe of now will cease to exist. I know that there are some very powerful people out there with alien or government equipment capable of doing just that.

If you can help me I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, Along with hotel stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be provided.

Only if you have this technology and can help me please send me a (SEPARATE) email to:

Robby0809@aol.com

Thanks

I’m thinking about using this as a reply:

Well, here were are again. You have no idea who I am, don’t you?

Not only am I capable of helping you, but I’ve done so twice already.

I can meet all your requirements except one — the one where you retain your memories of everything’s that happened to you up until now. Normally, it would be possible for you to remember the present (and all events leading up to it) when you go back into the past, but you kept insisting that you also want your aging to be reversed. I can only do that by reverting you to your past state, which means that events leading up to what you call “the present” wouldn’t have happened. Which means you’d have nothing to remember. See the problem?

I was willing to let things slide when things went horribly wrong the first time. Initially, it looked as though you were going to live a long and happy life: you had a successful business, you were in the best shape of your life, and you had just married one of the supporting actresses from American Pie. However, you blew it big time when during your honeymoon in Honduras, you caught a butterfly. That butterfly’s wings were supposed to trigger a hurricane that would have devastated the coastline of El Salvador, including the coastal village of La Libertad. Instead, the village was never destroyed, and as a result, a troubled and overindulged little boy grew up to become the Hitler of the 21st century. He managed to turn the eastern seaboard and much of Europe into the world’s largest smouldering graveyards before he was finally stopped. I managed to retrieve you from that timeline — you were under a pile of rubble and half-mad. I decided to try and send you back in time again.

While the course of your life has not been so catastrophic for the rest of the world this time around, you have still managed to make a mess of it for yourself. And this time, you’re resorting to spamming in order to find a time traveller like me. That’s really low.

The biggest shame of it all (and more so because you don’t remember) is that your life wasn’t as bad as you thought when you first came to me for help. You said you wanted to undo your so-called “terrible, terrible mistake“. In retrospect, I should never have honoured your request. Yes, it was an embarassing situation, but “the incident”, as you liked to call it, would have been forgotten soon enough. It’s nothing that a public apology and a little plastic surgery couldn’t have fixed. Besides, while that kind of thing was taboo once, it would have become socially acceptable a few short years later.

I am truly sorry, but I feel that you’re one of those people who will do the same kind of thing over and over, no matter what kind of circumstances they find themselves in. Please do not contact me anymore. If you see me on the street, please do not approach me or speak to me. I will claim not to know you. I cannot be bribed; you will not be able to buy your way into the past again.

In closing, all I can do is offer you some advice:

1. Please try to think before you act.

2. If you don’t do something about that haircut, you and many innocent people will regret it. It may seem trivial, but believe me, I know better.

— Joey

It just occurred to me that in this year alone, I have referred to four different buildings as “the office” and three different bedrooms as “mine”. I’m surprised that I don’t get lost more often.

I’ve already mentioned the current office and the one that came before it; both are located in Toronto. I went to the other two offices during my stint in San Francisco, earlier this year.

Late last summer, the company was flush with good press, and it was decided that we should have an office “where the action is”. One of the founders, Cory, went to San Francisco in September to open the American office, which would largely house the P.R. and business development teams while most of the development would still take place in Toronto. I remember saying something along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be neat to get transferred to the San Francisco office?”, not realizing that I would get the offer about six weeks later.

The first office space was a classic dot-com office: a converted warehouse at the edge of the seedier part of town (San Francisco has these seedy parts in good supply). There wasn’t really a front door — you entered through the loading dock. The entire third floor was being leased by an e-commerce company that specialized in buying stuff in bulk quantities. That company had just laid off people in bulk quantities and were only too happy to sublet half their space to us in exchange for dollars in bulk quantities (the equivalent of taking an Audi TT and losing it in some some teenage rite-of-passage ritual every month).

In a space that could’ve handled 40 people, we were four: general manager Michelle, office manager Robyn, chief evangelist Cory and yours truly as the director of developer relations. My title was just fancy talk for “programmer with ENTP personality profile” (studies have shown that 80% of programmers are INTP). Along with programming, it was my job to take my accordion to developer events, talk to other developers and jump in front of any news cameras. And to think that my Mom once told me that “no one will pay you to be popular.”

The office space was made up of two large areas: the front office, which had the kitchen, and the back office, which had the meeting rooms. The place had high ceilings, tall windows, office-grade wall-to-wall carpeting, exposed pipes and ductwork hanging from the ceilings and a nice (if somewhat out of place with the rest of the industrial look) kitchen. The desks weren’t really desks, but unfinished doors placed on “Burro Brand” sawhorses (the e-commerce company sold them to us for almost nothing). Cory and Robyn were both Disneyphiles and provided some of the decor in the form of Disney theme park memorabilia. A lot of my stuff hadn’t arrived yet, but at least I had my religious clock — a clock that showed a picture of either Jesus or Mary, depending on the angle of the viewer. All of us worked on laptops and listened to music on computer speakers. The neighbourhood was a little rough, so we always took our bikes inside the office, preferring to do it using the freight elevator. Most of the space was unoccupied, and we took advantage of it by either letting the EFF use the space while their offices were getting fumigated or using it as a makeshift velodrome. Simply put, it was the kind of hipster doofus office you’d read about in every new-ecomomy-porn article in Fast Company.

I took the northwest corner of the office. Nobody wanted it because it was too far from the door and the kitchen, but it put me close to two windows, one facing downtown, and the other facing the highway. It also put me a safe distance from Cory’s speakers, which constantly played Disney theme ride music or 1940’s novelty numbers (“goddamned clown music,” my co-worker John called it). The plan was to fill the remainder of the space with business development types, PR flacks and “local talent” — that is, programmers from the Bay Area who didn’t want to move to the Toronto office.

I remember sitting at my desk and surveying the area, thinking Not bad, Mr. deVilla. Not bad at all. I’m going to like it here.

We were out of there two weeks later.

…and that’s why this entry’s a little late. Right now, I’m a little too short of free time.

We are in serious crunch mode. Everybody at the company is in early and leaves late. I’ve heard tell that if we don’t deliver by the deadline, Terrible Things Will Happen.

See you folks in a little while.

The office used to be in the downtown area of Toronto, near the intersection of Bloor (the major east-west street) and Yonge (the major north-south) streets. From my house, it was a twenty-minute bike ride that went through diverse neighbourhoods: first Chinatown, then the University of Toronto campus and finally, a chi-chi stretch that used to be known as the “Mink Mile” in the ’50’s. While the office building in which we worked was an unremarkable glass-and-steel box, it was located near interesting places. Working late wasn’t so bad because home was close by and it was possible to run all kinds of errands while you were there. When we were close to a deadline, I’d call it a day at 11:30 or midnight and still be able to hop in a cab and meet my friends at a club or bar ten minutes later. It was possible to work start-up hours (hopefull, only near deadlines — most of the time, the hours were sane) and still have a life.

That changed in September. Along with the company’s meltdown came some nastiness from the building management. Before the company was a P2P software development shop, it was an advertising agency. The lease for the office space was under the agency’s name, not the software shop’s name. The building management said that technically, we didn’t have a contract with them; some advertising agency — which was shut down so that the founders could focus on software — did.The company was presented with a new, unaffordable lease. We had no choice but to find new digs.

Given our money woes, I can appreciate the need to find a cheap place, and I knew that might mean moving out of the downtown core. What I can’t understand is why “cheap” had to imply “the most remote, desolate, out-of-the-way, inaccessible-by-real-public-transport, characterless office park hell straight out of Office Space.” Silicon Valley without the benefit of being hyped up. “Cheap” also implied “close to the most of management’s burbclaves.”

The new office is on a street named after the first company to build an office there, off Highway 7, an east-west road north of the Toronto city limits. A good chunk of the area is still open space punctuated by billboards announcing future housing developments, office complexes or outlet malls and warehouse-sized stores. The remainder is filled by — you guessed it — housing developments, office complexes, outlet malls and warehouse-sized stores. They all look identical. The houses, in an attempt to maximize interior square footage, have been built so that they take up as much of their lots as possible, creating the kind of apartment-like crowding that most of the homeowners were trying to escape in the first place. The office buildings are boxes devoid of character, glum IT castles with moats full of Civics, bimbo boxes and asphalt. The area is so dull that my co-worker John’s GPS software can list only three nearby places of interest within a ten kilometre radius, one of which is a franchised theme restaurant.

The one bright spot in this dismal neighbourhood is a bone of contention for the locals: the Chinese community. In the early ’90’s, as the British lease on Hong Kong was running out, there was a mass exodus of Hong Kong Chinese (the HK’s, as they were known) to cities like Vangroovy and Toronto. They followed standard immigrant procedure: if you’re poor, you live in the inner city; if you’re rich, you live in the ‘burbs. As the HKs came in, so did businesses that geared towards them. Chinese restaurants, stores, movie houses and malls. There’s Chinese signage and Hondas everywhere. While this cultural invasion seems to have gotten some people’s dander up, I think it’s the only bit of character in this bland, franchise–heavy desert.

It’s not a nice place to work, and I’m glad as hell I don’t live there.