Nonfiction
Churchill, arson, and a free book about free culture:
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity: I really like Larry; among other things, he gave the most effective PowerPoint presentation I've ever seen, when a lot of people treat them like an excuse to turn their talks into lists. He's made Free Culture available for free here, and I encourage everyone with even a minor interest in technology or popular culture to read the book, which is well-written and not very lawyerly (in the bad sense in which the term is so often used). In general, he has a good sense of humor; arguing for freedom to copy ideas, he says, "I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress - though I might seem weird if I did it every day, and especially weird if you are a woman." He argues that changes in technology are being used to suppress creativity when they could enable it. His discussion of doujinshi, unauthorized manga/fan fiction, which is well-accepted in Japan despite the potential that it's copyright infringement, provides a neat contrast to American copyright owners' take-no-prisoners attitudes. As with his earlier work, he emphasizes the risks of replacing law (which one can decide to break, or operate on a small enough scale to be ignored) with anti-copying code, which has no exceptions for tiny uses. Larry also claims that the major content industries - publishing, music recordings, radio, cable - were built on "piracy," that is, not paying for the intellectual property they used. Ultimately, once they were established, they began to pay, many of them using compulsory licenses so they could use any content they wanted, regardless of the copyright owner's consent, as long as they paid. This argument concedes that total freedom to copy is unsustainable in the long term - we've had our buffet, and now the Internet is well-established and it's time to start paying. He thinks that some form of compulsory licensing would be a good compromise, a "space between zero and one," in his words. Nonlawyers (actually, everybody) could easily skip his mea culpa over losing Eldred, the unsuccessful constitutional challenge to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which ensured that no works will enter the public domain until 2018. He blames the loss on a poor choice at oral argument, but in my experience oral argument rarely changes the outcome of a case, and with a 7-2 vote in favor of upholding the law, I don't think there was ever much of a chance. Which is really too bad, though it does provide me with fodder for law review articles from here to eternity. Anyway, it's a fun read, and easy enough to download.
Joseph Wambaugh, Fire Lover: A True Story: John Orr was a fireman, noted fire investigator, trainer of many other California fire investigators - and a serial arsonist. He always wanted to be a cop, because while everyone loves a fireman, everyone respects a cop. The book tells the story of his crimes, the investigation thereof (botched early on when his fingerprint was misidentified) and his several trials in state and federal court. It never really takes off. The writing is clumsy, with strained and repeated metaphors, and Wambaugh is ultimately unable to put us in Orr's head or in the minds of the investigators. Most chilling are excerpts from the novel Orr wrote, detailing his crimes, told from two perspectives: that of a serial arsonist, and that of the noble fire investigator who hunts him down. Both of them represent Orr himself, and he apparently never saw the contradiction.
Winston S. Churchill, The Great Democracies (v. 4 of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples): This volume, which I got at the wonderful St. Agnes book sale, covers the period from 1815 to the 1890s, with an understandable focus on British history. Highlights for me included the Crimean War, into which Britain simply drifted, and other things I didn't know much about but have heard of, like Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer rebellion. The period was one of huge change for Britain, from the role of government in social policy to the basic change in the franchise, which expanded in big jolts to universal manhood suffrage. Churchill also covers the U.S. Civil War, with a lot of sympathy for the Old South; one gets the impression that he thinks that slavery was just as much an evil for whites as for blacks, but too bad about the lost aristocracy. (There are also uncomfortable references to things like "the empty lands of the globe," by which he meant the places no white folks were.) And when he chides Lincoln for civilian interference in military affairs, it's hard not to feel a certain ironic charge, though Churchill doubtless never thought of himself as a civilian. As usual, the real reason to read Churchill is his unfailing sense of rhythm, honed on the King James Bible and other classics. So we get "plain Tory politicians resolved to do as little as possible as well as they could," and "He had lost only two guns, and the war."
Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity: I really like Larry; among other things, he gave the most effective PowerPoint presentation I've ever seen, when a lot of people treat them like an excuse to turn their talks into lists. He's made Free Culture available for free here, and I encourage everyone with even a minor interest in technology or popular culture to read the book, which is well-written and not very lawyerly (in the bad sense in which the term is so often used). In general, he has a good sense of humor; arguing for freedom to copy ideas, he says, "I don't take anything from you when I copy the way you dress - though I might seem weird if I did it every day, and especially weird if you are a woman." He argues that changes in technology are being used to suppress creativity when they could enable it. His discussion of doujinshi, unauthorized manga/fan fiction, which is well-accepted in Japan despite the potential that it's copyright infringement, provides a neat contrast to American copyright owners' take-no-prisoners attitudes. As with his earlier work, he emphasizes the risks of replacing law (which one can decide to break, or operate on a small enough scale to be ignored) with anti-copying code, which has no exceptions for tiny uses. Larry also claims that the major content industries - publishing, music recordings, radio, cable - were built on "piracy," that is, not paying for the intellectual property they used. Ultimately, once they were established, they began to pay, many of them using compulsory licenses so they could use any content they wanted, regardless of the copyright owner's consent, as long as they paid. This argument concedes that total freedom to copy is unsustainable in the long term - we've had our buffet, and now the Internet is well-established and it's time to start paying. He thinks that some form of compulsory licensing would be a good compromise, a "space between zero and one," in his words. Nonlawyers (actually, everybody) could easily skip his mea culpa over losing Eldred, the unsuccessful constitutional challenge to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which ensured that no works will enter the public domain until 2018. He blames the loss on a poor choice at oral argument, but in my experience oral argument rarely changes the outcome of a case, and with a 7-2 vote in favor of upholding the law, I don't think there was ever much of a chance. Which is really too bad, though it does provide me with fodder for law review articles from here to eternity. Anyway, it's a fun read, and easy enough to download.
Joseph Wambaugh, Fire Lover: A True Story: John Orr was a fireman, noted fire investigator, trainer of many other California fire investigators - and a serial arsonist. He always wanted to be a cop, because while everyone loves a fireman, everyone respects a cop. The book tells the story of his crimes, the investigation thereof (botched early on when his fingerprint was misidentified) and his several trials in state and federal court. It never really takes off. The writing is clumsy, with strained and repeated metaphors, and Wambaugh is ultimately unable to put us in Orr's head or in the minds of the investigators. Most chilling are excerpts from the novel Orr wrote, detailing his crimes, told from two perspectives: that of a serial arsonist, and that of the noble fire investigator who hunts him down. Both of them represent Orr himself, and he apparently never saw the contradiction.
Winston S. Churchill, The Great Democracies (v. 4 of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples): This volume, which I got at the wonderful St. Agnes book sale, covers the period from 1815 to the 1890s, with an understandable focus on British history. Highlights for me included the Crimean War, into which Britain simply drifted, and other things I didn't know much about but have heard of, like Home Rule for Ireland and the Boer rebellion. The period was one of huge change for Britain, from the role of government in social policy to the basic change in the franchise, which expanded in big jolts to universal manhood suffrage. Churchill also covers the U.S. Civil War, with a lot of sympathy for the Old South; one gets the impression that he thinks that slavery was just as much an evil for whites as for blacks, but too bad about the lost aristocracy. (There are also uncomfortable references to things like "the empty lands of the globe," by which he meant the places no white folks were.) And when he chides Lincoln for civilian interference in military affairs, it's hard not to feel a certain ironic charge, though Churchill doubtless never thought of himself as a civilian. As usual, the real reason to read Churchill is his unfailing sense of rhythm, honed on the King James Bible and other classics. So we get "plain Tory politicians resolved to do as little as possible as well as they could," and "He had lost only two guns, and the war."