The following picture appeared in Adventures of Superman #596, which by odd coincidence came out the same week as the 9/11 attacks:
Tag Archives | Science Fiction
Bear Becomes Mushroom; Trout Implicated
So the picture on the left of a girl leaning against a bear is an image that appears on merchandise produced by independent artist Hidden Eloise; and the picture on the right of the same girl in the same pose, leaning against empty air in the vague vicinity of a giant mushroom, is an image that appears, more recently, on merchandise produced by the British stationery company Paperchase.
In Thoreau’s words: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Without IP laws, what would prevent this blatant appropriation of artists’ ideas?
Oh, wait. Britain has IP laws, doesn’t it? So what’s gone wrong?
Well, apparently Paperchase has been ignoring Eloise’s complaints, and she hasn’t felt prepared to lay out the thousands in court costs needed to pursue legal remedies.
This example reveals a certain asymmetry in IP’s vaunted protection for artists; it turns out to be a lot more useful to large businesses than to individuals.
But Eloise (if she has a last name I haven’t located it) recently got some unexpected help. Yesterday Neil Gaiman mentioned the case in passing on Twitter; and Gaiman’s Twitter feed has about 1.5 million followers. Overnight a firestorm of publicity erupted, talk of a boycott was floated, and now Paperchase is running scared and whining about how “dangerous” Twitter is. (You and Ahmadinejad both, guys.)
Now admittedly the case isn’t over, but Twitter has clearly done more for Eloise in one day than IP laws have done in four months. This suggests that IP proponents have not only overestimated the effectiveness of IP laws as protection for artists, but they’ve likewise underestimated the usefulness of voluntary alternatives such as boycotts and bad publicity.
It could be objected, of course, that Gaiman is a big name with a rather fanatical following, making it difficult to generalise from this case. But an institutionalised version of this response might be able to make up in organisation what it lacks in star power. Remember the Law Merchant, which secured compliance solely through organised boycotts.
You’ll Believe a Man Can Dance
Iron Man? Watchmen? The Dark Knight? Forget ’em.
The greatest superhero movie ever is here – and it’s a DC/Marvel crossover, with cutting-edge special effects that make Avatar look like sock puppets and flashlights. I still can’t figure out how they’ve done these magnificent flying sequences. Check it out:
Anarchists in Space
Paul Raven reviews Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic novel The Dispossessed, a tale of the confrontation between an anarcho-syndicalist culture and a state-capitalist culture. (CHT François.) Though Le Guin’s personal sympathies were with the anarchists, she doesn’t stack the deck (unlike most political science fiction): the anarcho-syndicalist culture is actually pretty sucky. But the state-capitalist culture is even suckier. (I didn’t say it was a cheerful book. But it’s a very good book.)
Related whereunto, some random items:
- There’s a book of essays titled The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. I haven’t read it; but apparently Le Guin liked it and contributed an essay herself.
- L. Neil Smith semi-dedicated his anarcho-capitalist novel The Probability Broach to Le Guin and The Dispossessed. (At least that’s true of the first edition; I don’t have the revised edition handy.) He also commends Hayek’s Capitalism and the Historians to Le Guin’s attention in order to nudge her toward a more favourable attitude to property. (I gotta say, that’s not the book I would have picked for that purpose.)
- I’ve long suspected that Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division, with its confrontation between a flawed but functional anarcho-capitalist society and a flawed but functional anarcho-communist society, was partly inspired by Le Guin’s book.
- One of Le Guin’s last works, The Telling, deals with Taoist-inspired communities struggling under an oppressive system variously described by reviewers as a “tightly controlled capitalist government” and a “soulless form of corporate communism.” I haven’t read it yet either.
Addendum: I remembered something else I’d intended to mention: in addition to Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division being partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its theme, I’ve wondered whether MacLeod’s earlier novel The Stone Canal might be partly inspired by The Dispossessed in its narrative structure, with one storyline being told through the odd-numbered chapters while a “flashback” background story, featuring the same viewpoint character – in both cases an anarchist scholar – runs through the even-numbered chapters (though of course other writers have done such things as well).
Like a Tea Tray in the Sky
Two puzzles about the Bat-signal:
a) What happens if Commissioner Gordon needs to contact Batman in the daytime? Or on a night that doesn’t have low-lying clouds? I can see why the tv version installed a Batphone.
b) If I were a Gotham City villain, I’d hole up with a rocket launcher in a building near the one with the Bat-signal. Then when the signal comes on I know Batman will soon be on the neighbouring roof. I watch, I aim, boom.
What You Say About His Company Is What You Say About Society
I’ve been wanting to see Jeff Tucker’s interesting piece on classical liberal themes in Mark Twain in print ever since I heard him present a version of it at the 2006 ASC. Now it’s up!