Day: August 9, 2002

When Copyright Attacks

I’ve been waiting to add this link until I found out more about the case, but I’ve finally linked to the website of Eldred v. Ashcroft over the issue of the challenge to the Sonny Bono Extension of Copyright act, which extended by 20 years both existing and future copyrights. The tradeoff of copyright is between the rights of the creator and the rights of the public, a balance which this suit alleges has been tipped unfairly in favor of the creators at the expense of the public’s rights. I urge you, if you are a creator or consumer of any kind of content, a user of libraries, or a reader of electronic texts, check out the site. The archive of materials about the case is richer than anything I could possibly say here.

Except to point to Aaron Swartz’s summary of the Justice Department’s response to the suit, which was essentially to say, “You don’t have a right to question this law.”
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Visitors from the East

My in-laws flew into SeaTac last night. Unlike our last flight, there was no lost luggage. We loaded them into my car and swept them to our house so they could ooh and aah before we tucked them into bed.

This is a big visit for a couple of reasons:

  1. This is the first visit by any of our family to the house.
  2. My father in law is the reason we went through all the renovations on our guest bathroom. It’s kind of a payoff to have him finally using it.
  3. This is also the first time that the older portion of the house (the guest bedrooms) gets a real shakedown.
  4. Finally, Lisa’s mom can help us figure out what the heck to do in our garden. We don’t know very much about gardening; she ran a $500K gardening budget at their retirement community.

They’ll be here for a couple of weeks, so my late night blogging activity will be curtailed. (It probably would be anyway, as AT&T Broadband has been really flaky recently–download speeds of 1.5K/sec last night, no connection at all this morning!)