copyright is still broken

 My dad, a published author, held that copyright should be sacrosanct and permanent. He was wrong. I've had a few posts on it.

Now "Skepchick" Rebecca Watson is weighing in. She's right, because she agrees with me.

Why aren't you checking her out regularly?

an irony

 So in my stupid internet ramblings, I came across a number of Youtube posts like this one:

... and this one:

Now, I wanted to look up the songs behind the videos... but they're not credited, and a number of different searches have not turned up the artists or the original recordings.

Since these creators are using the songs without attribution, I'm sure they're not paying for the rights to them, either.

 

I find it ironic that the craftspeople will use the music to argue that they are worth their price, without seeing to it that the musicians are worth theirs.

(I am, however, delighted with the easy profanity in the second one.)

wrenching at the tour de franklin

One of the earliest charity rides of the season each year is the Franklin Township Food Bank Tour de Franklin. They offer distance rides 62 & 50 miles) for those who want them, but also family-friendly short rides, out of the Franklin High School and along the canal at Blackwells Mills.

I used to lead a team of Freewheelers on these rides, but the past three or four years I've manned a tune-up and repair station. I don't charge anything except parts (at cost, and I don't always get that), and I work on any bike that shows up, which means, for example, that I worked on carbon fiber bikes and carbon fiber wheels at one point today; at another point I was doing the adjustments on bikes bought at WalMart that weren't done by the store.

Oh, yeah. Since I'm planning to post this to Facebook, the first picture has to be attention-grabbing. This one's pretty good:

It's a team that came back in the drizzle at the end of my shift, at about 11:30 am. But I digress.

It's my contention that any mechanic can work on modern, high-end bikes where the standards are well-known (and reasonably well adhered-to); it takes a wise hand to work on those old beater toy bikes on which nothing was designed to work together and parts may no longer be available. So I am just inordinately proud of the fact , for example, that I was able to get six out of one guy's seven-gear cluster to respond to the shifterl when he came in, he could use three gears.

The riders who really know what they're doing rarely drop in except to borrow the pump (I keep two pumps going pretty much all day). My first customer had just bought this, and I adjusted his brakes and shifting and lubed up his (badlky rusted) chain:

The carbon bike belonging to the fellow below had few problems, but he wanted just to make sure stuff was working right. It mostly was.

I didn't get a picture because my hands were a mess afterwards, but one guy brought in his bike with tubeless tires. He'd heard a hiss in the car, and it turned out the tire had lost the bead of the wheel. I didn't have the specialty pump that seats the tire back in the bead again, so I put a tube into the slime-dripping wheel, bade him farewell, and went to the lavatory to wash my hands. Remind me that tubeless isn't an infallible technology if I ever start gettning cranky about tubes, OK?

I don't stay for lunch, but the rider feed is pretty good:

Yeah, bagels, but the careful eye will also be able to pick out hard-boiled eggs and orange quarters. The food team is below.

The weather was predicted to be just awful (worse than ti actually turned out), and the area around the entrance bore witness; there were many fewer bikes than previous years.

(The niftiest-lookin' ol' geezer was riding that Kestrel, above.)

I'm not volunteering at the Bike Exchange any more, so I decided to put up my own sign for Mad Horse Bikes, which will be the name of the bike business that I'll probably never have.

I doubt you can read it on the left sign, but the motto is, "A man in a passion rides a Mad Horse". I stole it from Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac from 1749. I'm presuming the motto is in the public domain by now. (The graphic is from a Creative Commons site; they say I can do with it what I want. So there.)

It's a lot of time on my feet, and I'm tired. But it's the right thing to do, and I get to play with some very nice bikes, and meet some very nice people whom I otherwise would not.Do you know any charities that want to hire a bike mechanic?

sherlock holmes & copyright

Long-time readers of this blog know that I've had some words about copyright. Our system is broken.

Here's another example. A judge in Illinois had to rule that Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But only those stories published prior to 1923; there are ten after that that are still under copyright.

Sheesh. Sherlock Holmes? How is that anything OTHER than public domain?

another stupid internet law

As the logo to the lower right indicates, I support the Internet Defense League. Aaron Swartz, who developed some of the technologies on which the web depends, killed himself after being hounded by law enforcement over questionable clauses in the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

According to the Internet Defense League:

The expansive CFAA was first passed in the mid-1980s, before most households had computers, let alone Internet access.  Yet law enforcement has interpreted it to criminalize even mundane Internet use, such as petty violations of websites' fine-print terms of service agreements.  Under this interpretation commonplace Internet use would technically be criminalized, including:

• Sharing passwords for Facebook or other social media sites with friends;
• Starting a social media profile under a pseudonym; 
• Exaggerating your height on a dating site;
• Visiting a site if you're under the stipulated age requirement (under 18 for many sites)
• Blocking cookies in a way that enables you to circumvent a news site's paywall.  (For instance, the New York Times website cannot block those who delete cookies from reading more than the allotted number of free articles each month.)

Additionally, it is under the CFAA that law enforcement has undertaken a recent spate of prosecutions of questionable merit -- including that of our friend and Demand Progress cofounder Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide earlier this year while being prosecuted for downloading too many academic articles from JSTOR.

You can go to this site and easily contact lawmakers with your views about the bill. Check it out.

more gadgetry

Friend Dave C sends over the weekly Gizmag post (that's how I know he hasn't been riding much). He was taken with this sealed gearbox, eliminating the need for a derailleur (which can be a liability on bikes with hard use, such as some mountain bikes):

But the thing that nailed me was this chair that self-destructs after eight uses:

Theres excellent video on the site, but Blogspot won't let me embed it.

I find the chair intriguing, partly because I'm the owner of a Barnes & Noble Nook. I have hundreds of dollars invested in the device, and the books to read on it... but I keep reading about B&N and financial problems, and I wonder if I'm going to lose access to my books. We accept limitations on the uses of music, games, and books, and don't seem to question them... and this project moves that discussion into the hardware space. What would we do if a book, or a CD, disintegrated after eight uses? Or if we gave it to a friend?

(My father, who was an author, was inflexible about copyright... but he was almost undoubtedly wrong.)

Further, the ability to make money from something changes, and SHOULD change, when the surrounding technology changes. The same low-wage Republicans who fight for big-business copyright now, will not support railroads (which I, and most other countries, consider a public good), because rail has been replaced by newer automotive technology. (I don't think it's better, and I'm sure that without the subsidies that go to the fossil fuel industries, it would not be cheaper... but it is newer.)

Go check out that video, not for the eight Eurotrash hipsters who sit on the chair, but for the slow melt at the end of the wax joints.

more on copyright

In an earlier post, I brought up my disagreement with my father (an author) about copyright. C. G. P. Grey makes my argument more clearly than I can:

See more of his videos here.

copyright only goes one way

My father (who's an author) and I have a disagreement over copyright; as I understand his view, he thinks that intellectual property should be sacrosanct forever, or at least for the entire life of the original author (he points to Edna Ferber, original author of Show Boat, who apparently did not get royalties, although I can't find a citation of the copyright story now). However, with more and more intellectual property being created and owned by corporations, there is no original author who can die... so the property never comes into the public domain.

The graphic below, from The Optimist, speaks my mind, more or less:

It's because of this that I'm undecided about intellectual piracy.