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Reading a post on “Positive Liberty” from back in August, I came across this comment from D. A. Ridgely:
And okay, so we’ll always have people writing bad poetry whether it is copyrighted or not. For the most part, copyright of bad poetry at least could be said to do no harm. The world does not suffer by my refusing to share my high school written poetry with it.
But the world does suffer if real works of good art go uncreated because self-interested artists decide there’s just no point in doing art, better to go get that MBA.
On another blog, Jim Glass wrote:
Say that without copyright you came up with a great, clever cartoon and put it on your web site. What would prevent the scouts from Disney or Fox from just taking it as their own, putting $1 million behind it, making $100 million, and saying screw you. Would you go on to make another cartoon then?
Defenders of our intellectual property system frequently bring this question up: Without intellectual property (in the form of copyrights and trademarks), what incentive will artists have to produce art?
I’m a cartoonist (you can see my cartoons here and here, if you’re curious), and the only art form I know a lot about is cartooning. Most cartoonists are big fans of intellectual property, and get hysterical if we believe copyright is threatened. But copyright and trademark, as they exist in the US, have been a mixed blessing for some of the best American cartoonists.
The problem is, once we have a system of law which says “only entity A can publish stories about such-and-such characters,” then it’s possible for the right of a creator to sell stories about her characters to be taken away. This has, in fact, been the rule for most of comics history. Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, didn’t own Superman – and, decades later, found themselves penniless and legally forbidden from selling comics featuring their most valuable creation.
Jack Kirby is the most commercially important creator in the history of American comic books. Kirby created or co-created Iron Man, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Silver Surfer, Captain America, Thor, and The X-Men, among others. Collectively, Kirby’s creations are intellectual property worth billions, providing huge profits (and thousands of jobs) not only in comics but also on TV, in movies, and in toys.
But during Kirby’s commercial peak, in the early days of Marvel Comics, Kirby was often unhappy with his pay and with his rights as a creator. Furthermore, Marvel had a “gentleman’s agreement” with DC not to poach artists from each other, and no other comic book company had a stable of valuable superhero properties to hire Kirby to draw. As a result, Kirby’s pay wasn’t in line with the worth of his work.
Kirby didn’t stop working — how could he? He had a family to support. Plus, by all accounts, Kirby loved creating comics. But what Kirby did, according to Mark Evanier’s biography of Kirby, is stop creating new characters for Marvel. Instead, when Kirby thought of a new idea, he’d write it down on a scrap of paper and put the paper aside. Many of those papers got lost.
Eventually, Kirby was hired by DC comics, and he went on to create some powerful work. But DC rarely gave Kirby the support he needed (they even went so far as to have another artist redraw Kirby’s Superman faces, since Kirby’s faces didn’t look like DC’s then-existing house style). Even though his work remained artistically good, Kirby never again hit the same peak commercially, and his pay was still lousy. As soon as Kirby found work outside of comics — creating character sheets for Saturday morning animations — Kirby quit comics.
If the purpose of intellectual property law is to encourage the best artists to create as much of their best work as possible, then IP law failed Jack Kirby. Kirby’s interests weren’t protected. The value of his work made it essential to Marvel Comics to legally divorce Kirby from his creations (they even refused to return his original artwork for years). The fact that any character he made up, he would have been giving up the right to control, encouraged Kirby to withhold characters during his most fertile creative period — ideas that might have been worth millions.
Well, you may say, that’s Kirby’s fault for selling the copyright to his work, rather than holding on to ownership. But suppose Kirby had refused to work with Marvel Comics. Who would that have helped? The world would most likely not have had the X-Men, The Hulk, The Fantastic Four, and many other Kirby creations. Again, IP law would have failed to encourage Kirby to create as much as he could create.
Probably if Jack Kirby were here, he would disagree with me. But I think Kirby would have been better off if it hadn’t been legally possible for Marvel Comics to own the exclusive right to publish the characters Jack Kirby created.
Suppose that instead of our current system, we had a system of compulsory licensing for fictional characters. What this means is that anyone could write or draw any fictional character they like — but if they aren’t the original creator, then they are legally obliged to pay the creator a royalty for use of their work.
So to return to Jack Kirby’s case. Yes, certainly, Kirby would have been pissed off because people were using his characters in ways he didn’t like — but that was frequently the case anyway. (For example, Kirby hated what Stan Lee did with the Silver Surfer character). The difference is, Kirby would have had no motive to withhold characters during his most commercially valuable period, because he wouldn’t have been giving those characters away forever by drawing them.
It’s also likely that Kirby would have been more successful at enticing another publisher to hire him, if Kirby could have offered not just his own services, but his own services on his hit creation The Fantastic Four. That, in turn, might have forced Marvel comics to pay Kirby what Kirby was worth, in order to keep Kirby from moving to another company.
The down side of this is, Kirby might have found himself in the position of competing against another creator’s version of The Fantastic Four. But would this be such a terrible outcome?
1) Kirby might have been better off being able to create The Fantastic Four, and competing with another version of the same characters, than he was in reality — in which, for his entire post-Marvel career, it would have been illegal for Kirby to create a Fantastic Four comic.
2) Kirby would have welcomed being paid for all the times that lesser creators used his creations in their work. This would have provided Kirby with an incentive to keep on creating new characters, rather than our current system, which motivated Kirby to withhold new characters.
3) Comic book consumers would be better off if publishers had to compete to produce the best Fantastic Four comic. This, in turn, would have raised Kirby’s value to his employers.
When I bring this topic up in conversation, I am inevitably asked how I’d feel if someone other than me started making up their own comics about Mirka, the protagonist of my comic book “Hereville.” Woudln’t that make me furious?
I don’t think it would. I think that my version of Mirka — my particular vision — is what makes “Hereville” worth reading (if it is worth reading). If our laws were set up for it, I’d be happy to compete with other creators, to see who’d produce a Mirka that readers want to read. In the end, I think that the best work sometimes has a competitive advantage, and will tend to be remembered most by readers.
And if someone else ends up having a hit best-seller based on my characters — well, at least I’d get royalties. But I might get more than that, because sales of character-based fiction are not a zero-sum game.
For instance, when popular movies are made of comic book characters, sales of that comic book go up. Suppose Joan draws a best-selling ExampleLass comic. That could easily cause the sales of David’s competing ExampleLass comic to go up, because interest in the character is increasing. If David is the creator of ExampleLass, then he’d benefit twice — once in increased sales of his own comic, and then again when Joan pays David royalties.
I’m sure that compulsory licensing would have problems. But so does any imaginable system. The real question is, might compulsory licensing be better than our current system? For many of the best creators, such as Jack Kirby, I think the answer might be “yes.” (Source: theartofthepossible.net)
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Esperanto is a language introduced in 1887 by Dr. L.L. Zamenhof after years of development. He proposed Esperanto as a second language that would allow people who speak different native languages to communicate, yet at the same time retain their own languages and cultural identities. Esperanto doesn't replace anyone's language but simply serves as a common second language. Esperanto can be learned in much less time than any other language. (Some say that it is four times easier). Esperanto is politically unbiased.
Although there aren't a lot of people who speak Esperanto in any one place, there are some almost everywhere. There are over a hundred periodicals regularly published in Esperanto. There are thousands of books in Esperanto, both translated and original works. There are millions of webpages.
People who speak Esperanto are internationally minded, concerned about social justice and peace, and are helping to preserve linguistic diversity. Meetings and conventions in
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The
The abandonment of the
Thus, the
Communication by speech was a ‘divine’ gift to mankind alone. The ancients knew well the irony implicit in divine gifts. It is the theme of much classic Greek drama, where the audience knows what the hero and his fellows in the play do not know--that the divine gift, whatever it happens to be in the particular play, brings with it the seed and the moment of destruction. We are accustomed to say that science knows no boundaries and no lesser allegiances than knowledge and the search for truth. But of course we should know, from reading sociologists from Marx to Merton, that the notion of science unbounded is mostly utopian foolishness. Perhaps science ideally should know no boundaries, no restrictions, but in fact it knows many. National aspiration, cultural milieu, social philosophy, economic power, political wrangling, and language are but a few.
Language may be a divine gift, but the diversity of language must surely be the tragic irony implicit in this particular divine gift. Is it overly simplistic or even stupid to suggest --like the author of Genesis-- that we would be better off as human beings, and as scientists, if we did “understand one another’s speech, ” if we could more nearly approach one another’s thought ?
Linguistic diversity is the tip of a great mental iceberg. We have been blessed and cursed not only to speak differently but to think differently because of it. Is there any doubt that thought not only shapes speech but, as Whorf suggested that language shapes thought? What is easily expressed in one language may be beyond conceptualization in another. Whether this applies to molecular biology or any other branch of modern science is easily enough appreciated if one were to imagine an attempt to translate The Double Helix into Eskimo.
I don’t believe that English is the language most suited to science because it is the best language. It is simply the language that scientists as a whole now best understand. We must goon from that fact. English is by no means a simple language. It does not have that to recommend it. Even though it can claim the grandeur of Shakespeare and the glory of the King James Bible, it also carries the stigma of having been the oral and administrative instrument of unparalleled colonial exploitation. It may not be as lucid as French, as vigorous as German, as musical as Italian, as subtle as Russian, or as tender as Spanish. I am told it is not as deceptively concrete as Chinese, nor as heart-easing as Gaelic, but it is the language now best understood by scientists. The overwhelming superiority and recommendation of its being best understood should not be underestimated. The government of
The chauvinists of particular languages would perhaps prefer French because it was the language of
The urge to be once again’ ‘of one language and one speech,” in and outside of science, should not be dismissed as anti-cultural. It is a powerful urge that expresses itself in many forms, such as our delight in a “silent” movie by Charlie Chaplin, or the universal embracement of the modern television broadcast. The urge has also been powerful enough to spawn numerous “artificial” languages like Volapuk, Esperanto, lnterlingua, Novial, etc. In retrospect, it may seem remarkable that people of so many nations grasped so eagerly at the ‘linguistic’ monstrosities frankensteined by idealist inventors.
Looking today, for example, at a page of Volapuk, a once popular and now ‘dead’ artificial language, one finds it hard to believe that anyone could ever have taken such a WorldSpeak (the name Volapiik meant that) seriously. But in the l9th century a great many people did. On the other hand, artificial languages have not been solely the product of amateur utopians or entrepreneurial egotists, as was often the case. Distinguished linguistic scientists like Otto Jespersen tried their hand at it as well. Some rate Jespersen’s Novial the best of the lot. The time may come when English will be universally understood. I join with Professor Steiner (1) in expressing the hope that the universality of English will be accompanied by an increasing bilingualism or trilingualism. A world of bilingual nations will be better off for its ability to share the benefits of different linguistic cultures, as well as those of technology.
(1) Steiner, G. What is an educated man now? (JZOmion) ZYmes Higher Education Supplement 11 October, 1974, p. 13
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>>> The essay appeared on garfield.library.upenn.edu
The wealthier a country is, and the larger its CO2 emissions, the less worried its citizens are about global warming.
It’s the same across the globe: the level of concern in a country’s population is precisely correlated with two things: that country’s gross national project (GNP) and the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. The more a country has of both, the less worried its population is about the consequences of global warming, according to a global study conducted by Hanno Sandvik, a postdoc at the
Dutch are least worried
Sandvik used the results from an electronic survey that was conducted in 46 countries as the basis for his work. The survey encompassed countries from every inhabited continent and with different economies – aside from poor developing lands where an internet-based survey wouldn’t work.
The survey showed that the world’s least climate-worried population lives in the country that will be the first to notice that sea level is rising – the Netherlands. Next in line were
Most of these people have access to all the information they could possibly want – and then some. Why the lack of concern about climate change?
Other researchers have looked for explanatory reasons and variables that are inherent in the country itself: gender, age, education level, family income, political views and so forth. Sandvik is the first who has looked for explanations at the national level.
Repressed responsibility
“People are all too willing to repress unpleasant truths, particularly if one is responsible for something that’s not good. I had a theory that the countries that contribute the most to global warming might perhaps have a population that would rather not believe so much in the dangers from climate change,” Sandvik says.
When Sandvik compared data on level of concern to data on emissions, he found support for his theory: the more responsibility a country had for causing global warming, the greater the tendency of its citizens to explain away or ignore the problem. And as a country’s emissions levels increased, the level of concern sank even further.
The biggest emissions bad boys in the world, by population, are the
The rich would rather not share
The most striking connection came when Sandvik compared the level of worry data to the GNP for the 46 countries: the richer the land, the less worried its population.The five richest countries in the dataset were Norway, the United States, Ireland, Denmark and Canada. All of these countries are also considered to be among the worst in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. That consequently doubles the fertile ground for the lack of worry. Researchers were not particularly surprised by the findings. All “idealism research” shows that those who are most well off are always the least willing to contribute.
“If you take global warming to heart, you understand that you have to sacrifice something. And the richer you are, the less willing you are to sacrifice. It’s far more pleasant to decide that you actually don’t quite believe in the climate threat,” Sandvik says.
The study is being published in the journal Climatic Change.
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(*) Lisa Olstad writes about science for the
--> This article appeared on fleshandstone.net
© 2008 - Ben Heine
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Murat Yilmaz by Ben Heine
