Sveinbjorn Thordarson

Mér barst bréf frá Reykjavíkurakademíunni í dag þar sem fjallað var um "upplýsingafund um loftslagsmál" -- ég starði á þetta orð heillengi, og var að velta því fyrir mér hvort ég væri orðinn eitthvað bilaður. Loft-slagsmál, hugsaði ég með mér. Hvers konar slagsmál eru það? Það tók svona 3-4 mínútur fyrir þetta að sökkva inn.

Ég var að fá frábærar fréttir -- ég hef hlotið styrk upp á 175 þúsund krónur frá Menntamálaráðuneytinu fyrir sagadb.org verkefnið.

Höfundaréttarlög í dag eru farsi -- smá biti úr grein eftir John Tehranian sem birtist nýlega í lagatímariti:

To illustrate the unwitting infringement that has become quotidian for the average American, take an ordinary day in the life of a hypothetical law professor named John. For the purposes of this Gedankenexperiment, we assume the worst- case scenario of full enforcement of rights by copyright holders and an uncharitable, though perfectly plausible, reading of existing case law and the fair use doctrine. Fair use is, after all, notoriously fickle and the defense offers little ex ante refuge to users of copyrighted works.

In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their email— represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.

After spending some time catching up on the latest news, John attends his Constitutional Law class, where he distributes copies of three just-published Internet articles presenting analyses of a Supreme Court decision handed down only hours ago. Unfortunately, despite his concern for his students’ edification, John has just engaged in the unauthorized reproduction of three literary works in violation of the Copyright Act.

Professor John then attends a faculty meeting that fails to capture his full attention. Doodling on his notepad provides an ideal escape. A fan of post-modern architecture, he finds himself thinking of Frank Gehry’s early sketches for the Bilbao Guggenheim as he draws a series of swirling lines that roughly approximate the design of the building. He has created an unauthorized derivative of a copyrighted architectural rendering.

Later that afternoon, John attends his Law and Literature class, where the focus of the day is on morality and duty. He has assigned e.e. cumming’s poem i sing of Olaf glad and big to the students. As a prelude to class discussion, he reads the poem in its entirety, thereby engaging in an unauthorized public performance of the copyrighted literary work.

Before leaving work, he remembers to email his family five photographs of the Utes football game he attended the previous Saturday. His friend had taken the photographs. And while she had given him the prints, ownership of the physical work and its underlying intellectual property are not tied together. Quite simply, the copyright to the photograph subsists in and remains with its author, John’s friend. As such, by copying, distributing, and publicly displaying the copyrighted photographs, John is once again piling up the infringements.

In the late afternoon, John takes his daily swim at the university pool. Before he jumps into the water, he discards his T-shirt, revealing a Captain Caveman tattoo on his right shoulder. Not only did he violate Hanna-Barbera’s copyright when he got the tattoo—after all, it is an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work—he has now engaged in a unauthorized public display of the animated character. More ominously, the Copyright Act allows for the “impounding” and “destruction or other reasonable disposition” of any infringing work. Sporting the tattoo, John has become the infringing work. At best, therefore, he will have to undergo court-mandated laser tattoo removal. At worst, he faces imminent “destruction.”

That evening, John attends a restaurant dinner celebrating a friend’s birthday. At the end of the evening, he joins the other guests in singing “Happy Birthday.” The moment is captured on his cellphone camera. He has consequently infringed on the copyrighted musical composition by publicly performing the song and reproducing the song in the video recording without authorization. Additionally, his video footage captures not only his friend but clearly documents the art work hanging on the wall behind his friend—Wives with Knives, a print by renowned retro-themed painter Shag. John’s incidental and even accidental use of Wives with Knives in the video nevertheless constitutes an unauthorized reproduction of Shag’s work. At the end of the day, John checks his mailbox, where he finds the latest issue of an artsy hipster rag to which he subscribes. The ’zine, named Found, is a nationally distributed quarterly that collects and catalogues curious notes, drawings, and other items of interest that readers find lying in city streets, public transportation, and other random places. In short, John has purchased a magazine containing the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and public display of fifty copyrighted notes and drawings. His knowing, material contribution to Found’s fifty acts of infringement subjects John to secondary liability in the amount of $7.5 million.

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $. million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.4 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

Þá er það komið á hreint: Ég verð heima á Skerinu yfir hátíðirnar, og er með flug bókað heim frá Glasgow þann 16da desember. Ég verð fram yfir áramótin, og flýg aftur hingað til Skotlands 10. janúar. Þetta þýðir að ég verð eins og svo oft áður með risastóra afmælisveislu á áramótunum. Þetta var nú bara smá hiksti þarna í fyrra...

Samkvæmt Awstats hefur síðan mín fengið rétt rúmlega milljón heimsóknir síðan haustið 2003, eða að meðaltali um 690 heimsóknir á dag undanfarin 4 ár.

Fyrr í ár gisti vinur minn Þorbjörn hjá mér í London í eina nótt á leiðinni í jógakommúnu í Indlandi, og var svo góður að færa mér tóbak úr fríhöfninni. Ég bað hann síðan um að kaupa einnig sígarettur handa mér þegar hann væri á leiðinni heim gegnum London. Karlinn var svo almennilegur að gera það, en keypti þessar baneitruðu malasísku Marlboro Lights -- virkilega vondar og óreykjanlegar sígarettur sem lyktuðu af taði. Þær voru svo ógeðslegar að ég meikaði ekki einu sinni að reykja þær fullur.

Fyrr í kvöld stóð ég fyrir utan Norður-Afrískan veitingastað og var að reykja sígarettu þegar bíll rúllaði fram hjá. Bílstjórinn skrúfaði niður rúðuna, hélt út kartoni af Marlboro Lights og sagði "Oi, mate, ye wanna boy sum cigarettes?" Ég spurði hvað hann væri að rukka. "Twennie-foive quid, mate." Góður díll, hugsaði ég, en skynsamlega bað um að fá að athuga kartonið, og viti menn -- þetta voru sömu óreykjanlegu malasísku Marlboro Lights sígaretturnar og Þorbjörn hafði fært mér fyrr um árið. Ég afþakkaði og óskaði manninum lukku við að selja næsta sökker þær.

Now, that's induction.

Vil vekja athygli á þessu. Þetta er alveg glettilega gott.

Þeir sem þekkja mig vel vita að ég tala mikið -- allt of mikið -- og að orðin flæða hreinlega í óstöðvandi straum. Hins vegar á ég ótrúlega erfitt með að skrifa nokkurn skapaðan hlut, og þarf að pína hvert einasta orð út úr mér þegar ég leggst í ritsmíði. Af hverju er þetta? Psýkóprófíll óskast.

Um þessar mundir þarf ég að skila 3 ritgerðum, og hver þeirra gildir 100% af einkunn í viðkomandi kúrsi. Það eru 12 þúsund orð. Ég veit ekki hvað ég á að gera...

Merkilega nokk, þá er Hannah Dawson, kennari minn í sögu bresku Upplýsingarinnar, góð vinkona hennar Guðfríðar Lilju. Þær voru vist saman í námi í Cambridge.

Ég hef aldrei verið kaffidrykkjumaður. Ég þekki sjálfan mig nógu vel til þess að vera meðvitaður um hversu mikill fíkill ég er: Ég drekk of mikið af áfengi, ég reyki of mikið, ég drekk of mikið kók, ég ét of mikið af sykri, ég hangi of mikið á netinu o.s.fv. Fyrir vikið hef ég alltaf hugsað með mér að það væri nú algjör skömm að bæta enn einni fíkn inn á þann langa listann af fíknum sem ég er haldinn.

Skynsemin flaug út um gluggann um daginn, og ég er byrjaður að drekka kaffi. Auðvitað geri ég það óhóflega, eins og allt annað, og er nú koffínvíraður frá morgni til kvölds. Því fylgja höfuðverkir, svefnleysi, fráhvarfseinkenni, brjóstsviði og almenn sálarangist -- en það verður ekki aftur snúið upp úr þessu...

Var að uppfæra í Mac OS X 10.5 hlébarðann -- get ekki sagt að mér finnist þetta stórt stökk. Eftir því sem ég fæ best séð hingað til, þá eru þetta aðallega kosmetískar umbreytingar. Það er ekki einu sinni kveikt á QuartzGL by default...

Í gær lenti ég í rökræðu um grundvöll siðferðis við kristin mann. Í kjölfarið skrifaði ég eftirfarandi pistil:

It is a strange fact that most of the world's major religions seek their truths and their moral codes in ancient written records of dubious origin. It is stranger still that the adherents of these religions believe the written records to be sacred and divinely inspired, and that it is possible to glean from them eternal and divine moral truths. Be that as it may, it still seems that even if we grant the unverified and unverifiable assumption that these written records are divine in origin, they remain highly questionable as sources of religious truth and moral instruction due to interpretive problems.

In the ensuing text, I will use the Christian Bible as an example, and point out the problems facing anyone who sees the Bible as a source of moral instruction. The choice of the Bible is arbitrary; my arguments apply just as much to any other purportedly divine source of meaning and instruction.

Let us suppose that we are devout Christians and believe that the Bible contains some (or all) true, divine moral commands. It is immediately clear that if a given document is a divine source of moral instruction, then we must take the entire document to be true. We must be fundamentalists and interpret everything literally, for if we pick and choose the parts we like, if we write off some parts as metaphors and others as “serious stuff”, we are for all practical purposes building our own moral code. If God provides a text with moral instruction which we subsequently scan for the parts we like, then the divine text is rendered redundant -- the ultimate arbiter of moral authority is no longer God. We ourselves have become the moral arbiter, constructing our moral code from the segments of the document that suit us. In such a case, the role played by God in the whole affair is negligible and we might as well construct our own moral code without going through the process of scanning the Bible for those moral commands that we are willing to accept.

At this stage, a Catholic might reply that there is an institution on this earth, namely the Holy Church of Rome, to which God has given the power of interpreting the Bible. This, however, only shifts the argument one step backwards. Let us for now ignore the fact that the supposed interpretive authority of the Catholic Church is based on a highly questionable interpretation of the Bible (rendering the process circular), and grant our fictional Catholic debator that the Vatican is in fact divinely ordained as the authoritative interpreter of God’s text. In this case, a panel of divinely inspired experts provide the “correct” interpretation of the divine document. How do we know that these expert interpreters are actually coming up with the correct interpretation? They are divinely inspired. Very well. But if they are divinely inspired, if their interpretation is guided by the hand of God, then why is the divine source document necessary? It is again rendered redundant because its interpretation, too, needs divine sanction. We might just well believe whatever the divinely ordained interpreters tell us and make them our moral authority, sans divine document, since their interpretation of the document is in no way necessarily limited by the document itself.

It should now be clear that only a fundamental, literal interpretation of the Bible is viable if we wish to make it a source of moral truth stemming from divine authority. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, that the Bible is a perfectly self-consistent and non-contradictory document -- which I think not even the most dogmatic theologian would seriously maintain. Even so, our problems are far from over, since we also face the task of determining which version of the Bible is the authoritative text. Is it the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgata or the original, scattered Hebrew texts? Is it Luther’s German translation or the Anglican King James version? No matter which translation of the Bible we take to be authoritative, the problem outlined above will still apply -- the translator of the divine document always becomes our moral arbiter, for his translation is an interpretation, albeit rendered into a different language. If we assume that the translator is divinely inspired, it raises the question of whether other translators were divinely inspired too, and if the translations are in conflict, we have no way of determining which is the correct interpretation. If we take it on faith that a single translation of the Bible is the correct one, and that all the others are mistaken, the Bible is yet again rendered redundant, as before, since we are for all practical purposes taking it on faith that the translator himself is the source of divine truth.

A solution to this problem immediately presents itself: We shall say that only a single version of the divine document -- the untranslated original -- is the source of truth. Only a fundamental, literal interpretation of the original, unmediated divine source document is authoritative. Does this solve the problem? Decidedly not. The Bible, of course, is composed of various texts that were chosen and pieced together by a church council in the 4th century AD, and was therefore subject to the mediation and interpretation of men at its inception as a document of authority. But even if we assume that the Bible had a single author who was inspired and guided by the hand of God in writing the original, unmediated divine document, even if we assume that God himself created the divine document tout court and that we are reading it without third-party mediation, our problem remains: Whenever anything is communicated to us, it is mediated by our own, first-party interpretation.

To summarise my point, it makes no difference how we twist and turn, the problem of interpretation always crops up. This is because there is no such thing as an unmediated text -- any textual record of divine truth must pass through the interpretation of a man at one stage or another. Unless we assume that the interpretation itself is divinely inspired at every single stage, the content -- the actual meaning -- of the document cannot pass to us without being tainted and its divinity called into question. This renders the original source document redundant, since all the heavy lifting of actually delivering the truth sought is done by divinely inspired interpretation. In conclusion, this means that the very notion of an authoritative moral code that springs from a divine written source is absurd. Any source of moral authority must ultimate rest in man himself, whether divinely inspired or not.