Universities and their libraries have a special place in copyright law because they have a special place in society. Courts and even Congress have long acknowledged the essential role of copying in the educational process. That’s why the preamble to the section of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act that outlines “fair use” specifies “teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” as examples of “fair uses”—uses that, although they involve the copying of protected material, are considered noninfringing because they enable essential public goods.Universities are not copyright-free zones—far from it. But they do perform special services that often demand flexibility and liberties that enable them to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” the core mission of copyright as declared by the U.S. Constitution.
Sometimes, as the law professors Kal Raustiala of UCLA and Christopher Sprigman of the University of Virginia have demonstrated in their fascinating new book, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation, the lack of intellectual-property rights or enforcement promotes the progress of science and the useful arts. That is often the case at universities.
But the faithful imagination can’t praise, can’t give thanks to a God who doesn’t judge, because our faith rests on the premise that God wrests justice from even the most horrible earthly circumstances. And this is our praise, that we align ourselves with the one true merciful, gracious, just God, even when pain presumptuously lays claim to our bodies, even when sin posts a writ declaring ownership of our souls. We turn to God in faith even when death’s chilling silence encompasses the good men and women of whom we can’t yet let go. We turn to God, because we know God will vindicate their suffering, their loss, their death — and our quavering confidence defies any powers that perpetuate poverty, any powers that neglect the sick and those who care for them. Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, let us approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need, Remembering all the good hearts who have stood beside us, in sorrow or hardship, our faith defies even death itself — in the risen mercy of Jesus Christ, our Lord.
Even with regards to the leakers, however, the situation is far more complex than Greenberg lets on. He draws elaborate comparisons between the cases of Bradley Manning and Daniel Ellsberg, arguing that digital technologies have expanded the scale and the speed of leaking and made it easier to cover the tracks. But have we entered a truly new era, in which technology provides a robust infrastructure for leaking — a common techno-optimistic view advanced in many books about WikiLeaks? Or is the whole Cablegate episode just a blip in the long institutional march toward even greater secrecy — perhaps an instanceof governments and corporations not taking their network security seriously but hardly a guarantee that they won’t adapt in due time?While the former view dominated most of the early responses to WikiLeaks, it seems excessively cheerful in retrospect. It’s true that one set of technologies has made it easier to release the leaked documents to the outside world, but another set of technologies is also making it harder to get them off the corporate or government networks. A pertinent recent case that Greenberg doesn’t discuss is that of Joe Muto, a former Fox News employee who, convinced of his anonymity, leaked some internal Fox footage to the popular blog Gawker. It took Fox less than 48 hours to out him — by analyzing who on their network had retrieved the footage in question. Likewise, just this past June, the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, ordered that all employees at federal intelligence agencies who take lie detector tests also answer a specific question about their leaking practices. Very little about the heavily policed contemporary workplace suggests that leaking will become easier.
(thanks to Reihan Salam on Twitter)
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I want to go to the Rain Room. Actually, I’d like to have one in my house.
Roger Federer not as religious experience but as terracotta warrior
F. T. Prince, "Epistle to A Patron"
My lord, hearing lately of your opulence in promises and your house
Busy with parasites, of your hands full of favours, your statutes
Admirable as music, and no fear of your arms not prospering, I have
Considered how to serve you and breed from my talents
These few secrets which I shall make plain
To your intelligent glory. You should understand that I have plotted,
Being in command of all the ordinary engines
Of defence and offence, a hundred and fifteen buildings
Less others less complete: complete, some are courts of serene stone,
Some the civil structures of a war-like elegance as bridges,
Sewers, aqueducts and citadels of brick, with which I declare the fact
That your nature is to vanquish. For these I have acquired a knowledge
Of the habits of numbers and of various tempers, and skill in setting
Firm sets of pure bare members which will rise, hanging together
Like an argument, with beams, ties and sistering pilasters:
The lintels and windows with mouldings as round as a girl’s chin; thresholds
To libraries; halls that cannot be entered without a sensation as of myrrh
By your vermilion officers, your sages and dancers. There will be chambers
Like the recovery of a sick man, your closet waiting not
Less suitably shadowed than the heart, and the coffers of a ceiling
To reflect your diplomatic taciturnities. You may commission
Hospitals, huge granaries that will smile to bear your filial plunders,
And stables washed with a silver lime in whose middle tower seated
In the slight acridity you may watch
The copper thunder kept in the sulky flanks of your horse, a rolling field
Of necks glad to be groomed, the strong crupper, the edged hoof
And the long back, seductive and rebellious to saddles.
And barracks, fortresses, in need of no vest save light, light
That to me is breath, food and drink, I live by effects of light, I live
To catch it, to break it, as an orator plays off
Against each other and his theme his casual gems, and so with light,
Twisted in strings, plucked, crossed or knotted or crumbled
As it may be allowed to be by leaves,
Or clanged back by lakes and rocks or otherwise beaten,
Or else spilt and spread like a feast of honey, dripping
Through delightful voids and creeping along long fractures, brimming
Carved canals, bowls and lachrymatories with pearls: all this the work
Of now advancing, now withdrawing faces, whose use I know.
I know what slabs thus will be soaked to a thumb’s depth by the sun
And where to rob them, what colour stifles in your intact quarries, what
Sand silted in your river-gorges will well mix with the dust of flint; I know
What wood to cut by what moon in what weather
Of your sea-winds, your hill-wind: therefore tyrant, let me learn
Your high-ways, ways of sandstone, roads of the oakleaf, and your sea-ways.
Send me to dig dry graves, exposing what you want: I must
Attend your orgies and debates (let others apply for austerities), admit me
To your witty table, stuff me with urban levities, feed me, bind me
To a prudish luxury, free me thus, and with a workshop
From my household consisting
Of a pregnant wife, one female and one boy child and an elder bastard
With other properties; these let me regard, let me neglect, and let
What I begin be finished. Save me, noble sir, from the agony
Of starved and privy explorations such as those I stumble
From a hot bed to make, to follow lines to which the night-sky
Holds only faint contingencies. These flights with no end but failure,
And failure not to end them, these palliate or prevent.
I wish for liberty, let me then be tied: and seeing too much
I aspire to be constrained by your emblems of birth and triumph,
And between the obligations of your future and the checks of actual state
To flourish, adapt the stubs of an interminable descent, and place
The crested key to confident vaults; with a placid flurry of petals,
And bosom and lips, will stony functionaries support
The persuasion, so beyond proof, of your power. I will record
In peculiar scrolls your alien alliances,
Fit an apartment for your eastern hostage, extol in basalt
Your father, praise with white festoons the goddess your lady;
And for your death which will be mine prepare
An encasement as if of solid blood. And so let me
Forget, let me remember, that this is stone, stick, metal, trash
Which I will pile and hack, my hands will stain and bend
(None better knowing how to gain from the slow pains of a marble
Bruised, breathing strange climates). Being pressed as I am, being broken
By wealth and poverty, torn between strength and weakness, take me, choose
To relieve me, to receive of me and must you not agree
As you have been to some — a great giver of banquets, of respite from swords,
Who shook out figured cloths, who rained coin,
A donor of laurel and of grapes, a font of profuse intoxicants — and so,
To be so too for me? And none too soon, since the panting mind
Rather than barren will be prostitute, and once
I served a herd of merchants; but since I will be faithful
And my virtue is such, though far from home let what is yours be mine, and this be a match
As many have been proved, enduring exiles and blazed
Not without issue in returning shows: your miserly freaks
Your envies, racks and poisons not out of mind
Although not told, since often borne — indeed how should it be
That you employed them less than we? But now be flattered a little
To indulge the extravagant gist of this communication,
For my pride puts all in doubt and at present I have no patience,
I have simply hope, and I submit me
To your judgement which will be just.
Photography by Matthias Heiderich (via things)
What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? It is as though I play with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he decomposed in the grave like any other man. He is dead and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher like any other and can no longer help; and once more we are orphaned and alone. So we have to content ourselves with wisdom and speculation. We are in a sort of hell where we can do nothing but dream, roofed in, as it were, and cut off from heaven. But if I am to be REALLY saved, – what I need is certainty – not wisdom, dreams or speculation – and this certainty is faith. And faith is faith in what is needed by my heart, my soul, not my speculative intelligence. For it is my soul with its passions, as it were with its flesh and blood, that has to be saved, not my abstract mind. Perhaps we can say: Only love can believe in the Resurrection. Or: It is love that believes the Resurrection. We might say: Redeeming love believes even in the Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection. What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief. So what that means is: first you must be redeemed and hold on to your redemption (keep hold of your redemption) – then you will see that you are holding fast to this belief. So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be ‘no wonder’ if you can do things that you cannot do now.