nonfiction and touting
Random promotion: I love Dropbox. It just saved my hide when I turned out to have deleted some very important footnotes by allowing me to go back about forty versions and nearly a month to find an older file that had the footnotes. If you’re looking for a convenient cloud backup service, I recommend it highly. And if you join using this link, I get extra space and so do you (250 mb to add to your free 2 gigs; they continue to give you the extra if you pay to upgrade, as I do). (I checked out Amazon’s cloud drive and just didn’t get it. As far as I could tell, you couldn’t upload whole folders that weren’t music folders, and then there didn’t seem to be automatic backup. If you just want to store stuff that you don’t alter, maybe it’s a good idea? But if you’re constantly revising files, and if you want to move whole folders around, it didn’t seem that easy, though it’s possible I’m just used to Dropbox. I have not tried Apple’s service.)
Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness : Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril: Another take on recent behavioral psych thinking about why people can do such stupid things: because it’s easier, or feels easier. Abu Ghraib, corporate malfeasance, ignoring infidelity-it’s easy to go along, but not inevitable. Not very deep, but some good accounts of people who spoke up when no one else was willing to do so.
Ray D. Madoff, Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead: This short book covers control of the body/organs after death, control of weath via transfers to relatives and to charity, and control of intellectual property in the form of copyright and the right of publicity. Madoff argues that Americans in particular have given far too much power to the dead hands of the wealthy, both in IP and in distributing their wealth, subsidizing transfers to heirs or charities that might not do much to serve the overall social interest. He would prefer a more Jeffersonian approach denying that the dead have enforceable interests. I’m sympathetic, but the part of the book about actual dead bodies isn’t particularly connected to the thesis-perhaps because everyone, rich or poor, leaves behind a body (cryogenics notwithstanding) and thus the law of dead bodies hasn’t been so much subjected to the distortions that are really about wealth and only secondarily about its perpetuation across generations.
Aaron Schwabach, Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection: I wish I liked the first full book on fan fiction and the law better, but take my meh-ness with a grain of salt, because I didn’t write it! Schwabach knows Harry Potter best, but covers a lot of literary and pop-culture ground, including spending a lot of time on the utterly messed-up topic of copyright protection for characters as such. He also does his best to reconstruct the actual facts of the most famous pro-fan collisions, including Marion Zimmer Bradley and the fan novel that led to her saying that no one could write Darkover fanfic any more. Takeaway: the law should protect a lot of fan creations, but it’s not clear to him that it would.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness : Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril: Another take on recent behavioral psych thinking about why people can do such stupid things: because it’s easier, or feels easier. Abu Ghraib, corporate malfeasance, ignoring infidelity-it’s easy to go along, but not inevitable. Not very deep, but some good accounts of people who spoke up when no one else was willing to do so.
Ray D. Madoff, Immortality and the Law: The Rising Power of the American Dead: This short book covers control of the body/organs after death, control of weath via transfers to relatives and to charity, and control of intellectual property in the form of copyright and the right of publicity. Madoff argues that Americans in particular have given far too much power to the dead hands of the wealthy, both in IP and in distributing their wealth, subsidizing transfers to heirs or charities that might not do much to serve the overall social interest. He would prefer a more Jeffersonian approach denying that the dead have enforceable interests. I’m sympathetic, but the part of the book about actual dead bodies isn’t particularly connected to the thesis-perhaps because everyone, rich or poor, leaves behind a body (cryogenics notwithstanding) and thus the law of dead bodies hasn’t been so much subjected to the distortions that are really about wealth and only secondarily about its perpetuation across generations.
Aaron Schwabach, Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection: I wish I liked the first full book on fan fiction and the law better, but take my meh-ness with a grain of salt, because I didn’t write it! Schwabach knows Harry Potter best, but covers a lot of literary and pop-culture ground, including spending a lot of time on the utterly messed-up topic of copyright protection for characters as such. He also does his best to reconstruct the actual facts of the most famous pro-fan collisions, including Marion Zimmer Bradley and the fan novel that led to her saying that no one could write Darkover fanfic any more. Takeaway: the law should protect a lot of fan creations, but it’s not clear to him that it would.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.