«The copyright wars are a form of contemporary Lysenkoism, a
farce wherein we all pretend that copy-proof bits are a reasonable
thing to expect from technology.»
I think about giving it to the local public library. I mean, I haven't listened to it lately, whereas if I gave it to the library then somehow it might find its way to another interested listener.
A consideration: the local
public library here is... unfathomable. Who goes there? And does that even matter?
By donating this audiobook, am I casting it into the void-- or is there
any better place to cast something?
"The" library is the main branch, but
maybe it's quite smaller than the other local libraries that it freely
shares with, namely the libraries of the big high school and the not so big
mini-university. But I've only ever been to the main branch; in fact, I used to actually just go there and sit and program, when I used to live around the corner. Now, I'm miles away, so it's back to unfathomable, as I'm rarely there.
But the other day, when I was in that end of town, I noticed that "the" library, that main branch, has an audiobook of DeLillo's
Cosmopolis. Yes, they have shelves of audiobooks,
altho mostly of Important Old Classics (gathering dust). Or are there legions of Local Little Old Ladies
listening to Bleak House on those (dozens of) cassettes?
But what do they think of DeLillo?
Then (back to Cory) there's the hilarious Lysenkoist legalities
involved. I'm sure that somewhere in my stacks of CDRs, I have one or
two, MP3 rips of this audiobook. And because I am, of course,
a scrupulous and fastidious observer of all national and
international intellectual property laws as well as end-user license
agreements, I do have to wonder: Suppose I want to listen to the
audiobook again? Should I go to the library and check out their (my,
donated) CD box of it, and have it sit there, mutely unopened as I listen to
the MP3s?
This is starting to have the feel of sympathetic magic about it, or at
least of pumpkinry.
Or, even more scrupulously, must I discard/efface/zorchify those
CDRs? But of course, there are other things on those CDRs, mail
backups or whatever; so maybe it falls on me to make a copy of
the discs' content, minus the MP3s. Good thing CDRs are cheap.
Or, suppose I do donate the audiobook to the library, and that I do
go and destroy all MP3s I have of the audiobook; and then later I
check out the audiobook from the library-- but suppose my computer's CD drive
(that being how I'd listen to an audio CD normally) is being fussy
today, reluctant to play the CDs. Can I then legally (or not-illegally?)
download MP3s of
the audiobook which I have the real-life, library-lent physical
CDs of, right in front of me? (It is my working assumption that the MP3s
would be effectively identical to what I would get by actually blowing
the dust off my CD drive and ripping the CDs.)
And presumably I can't then return those
CDs even one moment before I'm done listening to the last chapter's MP3.
I leave to scholars of these increasingly Tlönistic legalities this question: Suppose I enter the
library on Friday 4pm, take the CDs from the shelf, rip them to MP3s
with my laptop, THEN go thru the formality of checking out the CDs
right at "last call"; and THEN as I leave the library (along with all
the staff, who are locking up, maybe even for a long weekend-- say, for
Saint Patriot's Birthday (observed)), I immediately drop the CD-pack
into the library's outside "book drop" slot, where in some sense it
immediately (ostensibly?) reverts to the library's possession, but
where actually it will not be found and checked in and reshelved until
well after the weekend/holiday during which I will have listened to
the MP3s? Does this quantum-legal mess get confounded if an
asshole cop is walking by?
~*~
I have heard it said (erroneously, but
let's take that as "mythically") that Rabbinical legalism is the very
genesis of western legal(istic) argumentation. Cue a
Yentl argumentation montage here. For does it not
say in Maimonides 14§3//+ℵ₀ that whoever does not
fail to have the book, does achieve its 'having'? Etc.
Following this legend/metaphor, then that makes IP law into deepest Qabbalah, where all
of the future is already contained in the Torah (and/or the stuff in
the Ketchikan Public Library's book drop slot), but not as such predestined,
because the occult letters are scrambled and DMCA-protected, and only
the movement of the present thru the text will correctly DeCSS it and
give us the world, the universe, or at least tomorrow's
Battlestar Galactica bittorrent.
2007-02-26 (Monday)
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