I know the DNC doesn’t much care about the opinions of monarchs, but I would have recommended giving visitor passes to the “delegates” from those two states. Well, most of them. I would have barred those who were in positions of authority in the state parties, those who scheduled the non-events, from even that.

Over the last couple of months Obama has faced real challenges, with Jeremiah Wright  demonstrating his absolute lack of sense and Clinton going for the jugular, but last night’s results show he has the legs to get past that. Both these elements put Obama on the defensive, and distorted the message that put him in the lead. That cost him significant momentum, momentum that will be needed later in the year. It’s time to get back on track.

It doesn’t matter how far out of contention Hillary is, she’s a pit bull and isn’t going to drop out until the last primary is over, if then. But it takes two to tangle, and I recommend that Obama consider the nomination his and get on with the real campaign, defeating John McCain. I see no reason for Obama to spend ten more seconds dealing with the Clintons.

If invited to a debate, he should accept only if McCain will be present. If Clinton attacks, he should simply ignore her. Yes he should continue campaigning in the remaining primary states, but only with his core message. His staff should start mapping out his national strategy, logging time in the big states he didn’t win, such as California, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, because he’s going to need them in the election a lot more than he’s going to need any of the remaining primary states. Wisconsin and Florida have a lot of voters, and he hasn’t campaigned there yet.

Mr Obama, you have an election to win. It’s up to you to set your priorities, and now that you have beat Hillary, she isn’t be one of them.

There are bills in both the Senate and House, currently in the Committee on the Judiciary at this point. None of the Washington delegation is on the committees currently considering the bills, but I wanted my views known before a bill is reported out. In past years, most of the creative community was opposed to the bills, now at least one photographic trade group is willing to accept the House version. It is better than the Senate version, but that is to damn with faint praise. (Imagine, if you will, a law that allowed murder by firearms compared to one that allowed it unless the gun was of small caliber and very high rate of fire.) Specifically, the House version does not exempt infringement in the case of purloined creations involving “infringements resulting from fixation of a work in or on a useful article”. That is, you couldn’t take advantage of the new rules to put the stolen art on a coffee mug. Therefore, one section of my broadside needs to be changed depending on whether it is going to my representative or one of my senators.

The two bills, with links to the full text on Thomas:
Senate: Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S.2913
House: Ophan Works Act of 2008, H.R.5889

Feel free to adopt as much or as little of the text below to communicate with your congresscritters, particularly if they are not the same as mine. (Rick Larsen, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell)

I am writing today to urge you to vote against (insert name of bill), and to communicate your opposition to the Judiciary Committee through personal contact or your staff as seems appropriate.

I believe that a thriving society depends to a great extent on its creative community: authors, artists, and inventors. The framers certainly were of like mind, and were clearly aware of the contract between society and its creative members when they wrote Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.

This contract exists to encourage as much creative effort as possible to be exerted, with the results entering the public domain for all to use after allowing the creative person the right to first commercial rewards. Although I think the current copyright terms have been stretched far beyond any reasonable interpretation of “limited Times”, the Orphan Works Bill would go too far in the other direction, eliminating all copyright protection for many artists.

The Berne Convention, by establishing copyright at the moment of creation without requiring the individual artist to take specific legal action, extended this protection to myriad individuals without the legal savvy, or legal budget, to go through the expensive and time-consuming steps of registration and eventual renewal. For commercial ventures, and for established artists, these steps are trivial. For those starting out, those who might hope to sell a photo for $25, a sketch for $100, or a small art quilt or oil painting for $300, the requirement of registering every piece was onerous and the terms of the Berne Convention welcome when the US became a signatory thereto in 1989.

Under the terms of the draft bill, artists would once again be required to register every creation with a central registry. The details of this registry are not clear, as none currently exists and the bill does not create one. Rather, the bill would leave that function to the private sector, which obviously means that the artists would be required to register their works and presumably pay a fee. Moreover, by not designating a single registry, this opens up the possibility that the artist would have to register each new work with multiple registrars for full protection. Even then, the technology of image recognition that would allow searches of these registries simply doesn’t exist today, although some vendors assert progress.

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Use one of these, not both:

House version:

Given the current quality of digital cameras, a firm that wanted to include in their product an artist’s work can simply walk up to the work, snap a picture, perhaps obscure the artist’s signature, and submit it to the image registry. If there is no match, they are free to go to market with the misappropriated art without fear of penalty. I fail to understand how this could be seen as a significant benefit to our society.

Senate version:

Given the current quality of digital cameras, a firm that wanted to sell coffee mugs or T-shirts featuring an artist’s work can simply walk up to the work, snap a picture, perhaps obscure the artist’s signature, and submit it to the image registry. If there is no match, they are free to go to market with the misappropriated art without fear of penalty. I fail to understand how this could be seen as a significant benefit to our society.

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If an artist discovers an infringement, the limit of compensation is set at the amount a reasonable buyer and seller would have agreed to before the infringement occurred. Eliminating any penalty for innocent infringement may be an appealing feature, but the expense of discovering the infringement and the legal costs in securing relief are likely to be far greater than the actual value that would have been negotiated in advance. Thus the infringer has the a dramatic advantage over the individual artist. At least some infingers would become very casual about their “qualifying searches”, knowing that most artists would simply lack the resources to even attempt to claim their rightful compensation and none would be able to recover legal fees or damages.

It is my considered opinion that the benefits of the Orphan Works Bill, specifically the immediate release into the public domain of works that are truly abandoned by their creators, do not come close to equaling the costs that would be borne by the artistic community, and most specifically those that are young or otherwise new in their careers, or those not yet willing to step out and take up art as a full-time occupation.

Far better that those artists put the same money into promoting their work, filling their gas tanks, or buying a bag of groceries while they are protected by the current law.

(A signature to rival John Hancock’s will be affixed here, but without all that “your obedient servant” nonsense. I’m sending it to those who are pledged to be my public servants, after all.)

In general I make sure the themes for QOTD change regularly, but there are exceptions. I always feature Christmas quotes on 25 December and Jefferson and Shakespeare quotes on their natal anniversaries. Never before had readers complained. The proximate cause turned out to be an HBO miniseries on Adams, based on David McCullough’s biography, which a lot of folks apparently watched. I’m not about to sign up for cable so I could watch the series, but I did buy the book, finishing it last night.

I feared I was reading a hagiography in the early parts of the book, but by the time McCullough covered the ineffective efforts to secure support from France and Holland for the American Revolution, during which Adams and Franklin were squabbling with each other at Paris, it was clear that the history was being played straight. Alas, the story is not told with any enthusiasm and relies too heavily on long extracts from letters between John and Abigail. Interesting details emerge, and the character of Mr Adams is certainly clear, but the story deserved more narrative elan. I don’t think it will spoil it for you to say that Adams and Jefferson had completely reconciled with each other and were the best of friends by the time both of them died on the same day, the putative 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence which Jefferson wrote and Adams pushed through the convention. (According to McCullough, Adams considers the second of July the proper date, not the fourth, but both Adams and Jefferson routinely appeared at celebrations on 4 July for many years.)

I hesitantly recommend the book. I’m glad to have read it, but it’s no page turner.

Exponential is not a synonym for really, really, big. No one-time change can possibly be exponential, no matter how dramatic. If the proportion changes from one period to another (as in your assets being eroded by inflation) it isn’t exponential. That passbook savings rates are at absurdly low levels doesn’t change the fact that the pathetic balance is the result of exponential growth. If I Were King, educators who fostered the error would be picking lettuce and students would learn to use the word correctly, incidents like the ones I encountered this weekend would decline exponentially. Slowly, to be sure, but exponentially.

Every precinct on south Whidbey caucused at the South Whidbey High School. This might work fine some years, but it sure doesn’t work when the blood is flowing! As inspiration crushed experience (67% to 31% statewide), hundreds turned out, most of whom had never been to a caucus before. People were parking a half mile from the school. Once inside, there were tables for each precinct where participants were to sign up. Little signs were on the tables like place cards to direct participants to the appropriate sign-in. It was a system that may have looked good to the organizers at ten in the morning, but was absolutely useless when the room was filled and you couldn’t see the tables, much less the place cards.

According to a story by Aimee Curl in the current issue of Seattle Weekly, Your Delegate May Not Be Registered to Vote, the nonsense Larkin experienced here was repeated across the state. Some are estimating that as many as 10% of the delegates chosen to represent their precincts were either elected form a precinct they don’t live in, or weren’t even registered to vote. Both of these are cause for disqualification, and around the state there are party regulars burning the midnight oil with their precinct maps, getting ready to compare the lists against the voter roll, and wholesale challenges are bound to be the primary agenda of the next round, where delegates to the district conventions will be chosen.

The Marines have a name for such events: Cl*ster F*ck. One more reason to look forward to my coronation, If I Were King, there would be no state parties.

But wait! There seems to be a fly in the ointment. Apparently, a large number of states don’t have systems capable of calculating the accurate number. Here’s the tricky formula: The number of high school graduates in the current class divided by the number of ninth-grade students enrolled four years prior.  (This gives the graduation rate as a decimal, multiply by 100 and subtract from 100 to get the dropout rate as a percentage.)

Excuse me? There are state departments of education that don’t have the numerical or statistical expertise to handle this? These are large organizations that somehow manage to write paychecks to thousands of teachers, administrators, and non-certificated staff every month. They manage billions of dollars in pension plans for those employees. They may choose to mask their appalling results, but if they claim they can’t calculate those results they are lying.

If I Were King, they’d have until Friday to get it done or lose their jobs. And their pensions.

The answer is, “No way in Hell!” Now before you lambaste me for insensitivity (I really am a caring monarch), let me point out that the lenders are going to be far more unhappy with my response than the borrowers. In a nutshell, what I want to say to the lenders is that they need to grow up and remember that mortgages are long-term instruments, routinely drawn for thirty years. If the market is such that lenders can’t resell the paper right this minute, they need to suck it up and smile.

If I were king, here’s what the deal would be: No lender may impose penalties of any kind or any amount due to late payments on mortgages for  a period of five years, or half of the remaining term of the mortgage, whichever is less. Interest will continue to accrue, and that’s the reward that lenders supposedly were after when they made the loans in the first place. But the current rush to charge a host of fees and penalties are incompatible with the very nature of a long-term financial instrument. Boys, it’s the time value of money we’re talking about here.

Yes, if a borrower loses his job and can’t make the payments for a year or two, that’s the way the world is right now. If he never gets back on his feet, you can go ahead and take the house back. If the property is abandoned, go ahead and foreclose, our neighborhoods do not benefit from empty houses. But if the borrower is in the house, reasonably taking care of the property, then damn it, you can let the clock run.

That thirty-year mortgage might turn into a thirty-five year mortgage as a result, but you’ll get your precious interest in the end. If I Were King, that’s the only recourse you would have. Remember, you’re the one that wanted to be a lender; the nature of being a lender is to hand out money and wait for it to come back with interest. So wait.