What if everything you knew about copyright was wrong?

Well, it isn’t. And I’m not here to tell you it is. But I do want to break you out of the spell you’ve been under since Larry Lessig became your secular god.

There really is a way to look at copyright that is not a form of apologia for dying “content” industries, like the music business and Hollywood studios. This new way also has very little to do with “free culture,” Creative Commons, and the teachings of gurus like Lessig and Michael Geist. It’s all about protecting your rights as an individual creator. (Guess what? You matter!)

It’s all going to be laid out in a new book I’m starting to write, The Cranky Copyright Book. It’s going to be a regular print and electronic book from a mainstream publisher. It’s going to take a shitload of time and energy to research, and I need your help to do it.

I find forward-control vehicles scary.

(UPDATED, 2011.03.02) David Mitchell is the author of Cloud Atlas. I had read that this book used some kind of future English, so I got it from the library – again and again, using every trick there was, for 15 weeks or longer. I never finished it. In fact, I could barely get through one of the novellas in the book, which seemed to revolve around a sub-race of cloned servants working in a below-ground Korean McDonald’s. As an example of exolinguistics, I didn’t understand what the appeal was.

The Bat Segundo Show is Ed Champion’s little-known podcast of interviews with authors and a couple of other luminaries. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an interviewer who combines unfettered American boisterousness with solid preparation and research. (It’s what the Reflex Blue kids are going for, whether they know it or not.)

The guy goes a hundred miles an hour with a lot of force and volume (so much so he was asked to cool it in a coffee shop once, right on air). Even though his tone makes you think he’s gonna come back with a glib rejoinder recycled from “ironic” TV shows, he actually checks in with another question about the book in question and its transliterary relationship with some other work.

The Bat Segundo Show “started off a shameless excuse to interview David Mitchell.” Mitchell has a British accent that additionally includes the Elmer Fudd feature of substituting Ws for Rs. Every sentence seems to be the product of great concentration, sort of what you’d hear from a stammerer, which he is. When he has to go off topic, as when he wants to dig up a printed article and read from it, you can hear the gears grinding to a halt and starting up again.

And he’s got a tin ear. You know those people who don’t understand puns because they can’t even hear them? The kind of people who can’t pronounce any kind of foreign word or phrase, even if the word or phrase has an accepted English pronunciation already? (We get a lot of that in Canada. These people tortuously stagger through every phoneme and syllable of a French phrase instead of just pronouncing it with an English accent. Akin to Mitchell, their Titanic hits an iceberg on every R.) People who have genuine trouble with street names, because, outside of New York and Calgary, they are unpredictable proper names of mixed derivation? Who cannot order Indian food because they cannot decipher and utter even short phrases like saag paneer and chana dal (“China doll”)?

I find this group has a hard time telling where one word ends and another begins if the combination is in any way unusual; it comes up all the time, every single day. As an example, a gallery here in Leslieville opened with the name Anytem Gallery, an absurd intellectual trifle that obviously wasn’t going to work. (“Tem” is “time” in Russian. But “any” is pronounced “enny” in English. So we’ve got a non-obvious pronunciation mated to a foreign word originally written in a different script.) But the replacement name was much worse: Parts Gallery. It works OK in writing, but countless people cannot even hear the two words. All they hear is Parr Tskallery. What does that mean?

This is the same class of people prone to mondegreens and eggcorns. The amazing thing is that one member of this class writes books that revolve around linguistics. I couldn’t believe my ears as I listened to this passage in David Mitchell’s Bat Segundo interview:

ED CHAMPION: Are you aware of literary blogs?

DAVID MITCHELL (baffled, shocked): [Pause] Literary… blocs?

— Yes, there’s a whole world on the Internet, and in fact there’s actually been a lot of discussion going on about Cloud Atlas in – have you heard of a blog before, or…?

— Uh, this is a new one on me. Uh, c— uh, could you spell the word for me, please?

— It’s “blog”: B-L-O-G.

— OK.

— It’s short for “weblog.”

— Uhkay.

— And there are actually these sites that are available that chronicle the latest literary trends. I actually have a literary blog of my own if you go to EdRants.com, but there’s actually a number of them. There’s MaudNewton.com, there’s the Elegant Variation, ElegVar, E-L-E-G-V-A-R.com.

Here we confront the difficulty of dictating non-obvious URLs over the phone. Your blog software’s shitty slugs, or your own shitty habit of refusing to trim your slugs when using WordPress, make the matter an impossibility most of the time.

But there are all these literary blogs out there. And in fact, there has been an incredible amount of discussion going on about the Cloud Atlas. And in fact a lot of people I know, myself included, actually obtained your book from the U.K. before it was even published here in the United States. And, uh, because of all the excitement about it. You should really check these out, because there’s a lot of people who are interpreting your book.

— Um, what you… call a blog I may have called a… chatroom in the past. But, uh, I will, have a look with renewed interest. And, um, could you give me the name of yours again?

— Oh, yeah, mine is EdRants, E-D-R-A-N-T-S.com.

— E-D-R-A-N…

— T-S.com.

— Uhhh, I’m ever so sorry. E-D-R-A-N-T… X or zed?

Mitchell seems to think:

• that the phrase “Ed rants” could possibly be spelled with an X

• that an X could follow a T somewhere in an English word (or two of them put together: “dulcet xylophone”?)

• that “ess” rhymes with “zed” (it doesn’t even rhyme with “zee”)

— T-S. It’s short for “Ed rants.”

— [Laughs] OK. Uh, dot-com. Thank you.

(Mitchell, incidentally, is a big defender of Amewicanisms and Austwalianisms: “I’m weally impatient with puwist Bwitish English apologists who wegahd Americanisms and Austwalianisms as somehow cowwosive. Theya wonderful and wich and language-bwoadening and therefore concept-broadening.”)

A guy like this needs to be studied. In fact, there seems to be a coterie of semifamous authors with linguistic disorders. Peggy Atwood cannot spell (Jan Wong stumped her with “macaroni”). A.A. (Adrian) Gill is so dyslexic he really cannot write at all; I do not know how he actually composes and edits. Will Self relies on walls papered with Post-It Notes and apparently composes on a typewriter (a rather impressive feat considering his sentence structure).

Who would do the studying? Well, why not Geoffrey Nunberg, American public radio’s de facto in-house linguist? I find his pieces on Fresh Air do not work at all, as they are written pieces read out loud rather than spoken pieces, but that’s a matter of style. What surprised me more was an interview he did (2009.05.11) with Think, the very solid radio show and podcast, in which he disquisited fluently for minutes on end, then died like a ’76 Buick that ran out of gas whenever he couldn’t think of a word. Worst example:

Uh, who was it who said, um, uh… I’ve got it here and uh I’m damned while I find it. Uhhhh… uhhh… my favourite non-apology was [very quietly] um… uh… uhh… uhh… duhhh… uh… [normal voice] I-um-it’s not c— it’s-it’s-it’s-it’s not— it’s-it’s not coming to me. […] Oh! B-Bob Packwood!

Nunberg is the kind of speaker who could use training to just abandon the sentence, pause for any necessary length of time, exhale and inhale, and start a new sentence. That method takes a lot of chutzpah and it’s counterintuitive and scary, but it works. How do I know? I was just like him once, except with fewer books out and no Ph.D.

Linguist, heal thyself; linguist, study thyself.

Shall we add to the list of the ways the Times lies to its readers?

Denny Lee spent a whopping 36 hours in Toronto (much of it in Leslieville) and claimed that “trolleys run like clockwork.” This is false two ways.

1. We don’t have trolleys here. A trolley is a bus. The last trolley buses were exterminated in 1992. A streetcar is not a trolley. It isn’t a subway, either, or a leprechaun.

   I reported this to the error-prone journal. Carl Sommers wrote back thus:

   You… note that “trolley buses” have been discontinued, but there do seem to be trolley cars on rails in Toronto. Those, too, would qualify as trolleys….

   The Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, which the New York Times uses as its dictionary of reference, defines a trolley car as “a public streetcar that gets its motive power from an overhead wire.” It gives a separate definition for trolley bus as “an electric bus that is powered from overhard [sic] wires.”

   So, though you consider “trolley” and “trolley bus” to be synonymous – and perhaps this is a distinction made throughout Toronto – we would not.

   The piece, as written, lies to its readers and claims there are four modes of public transit in Toronto: Trolleys, streetcars, buses, and subways. There are only three. The dictionary is simply wrong.

   Then again, this is a paper that refused to use terms like “Ms.” or “gay” in the senses everyone else used, so I assume Sommers views this as a proper triumph of an outdated reference work over the actual reality of the city being covered.

2. Streetcars do not “run like clockwork.” I am on a first-name basis with the two SAC supervisors at the Russell yard who do nothing but make sure one line stays reasonably on schedule some of the hours of the day.

I fundamentally agree with the points Ezra Levant makes in his book Shakedown: That Canada’s human-rights commissions are violating freedom of speech and are conducting interrogations and investigations outside the rule of law. I adamantly oppose journalists who favour, endorse, excuse, or appease these unconstitutional and oppressive activities. Please do not ever compare me to these unprincipled turncoats.

However.

I come into this knowing a bit more about the human-rights process than most people. I won a settlement circa 1989 for discrimination on the basis of sex. (Yes.) And it set a precedent: Both the discriminating companies had to pay. I waltzed over to Bay-Bloor Radio and bought the highest-end VCR they had. It was a good day.

More seriously, without human-rights complaints in one guise or another, people with disabilities would barely enjoy half the rights they presently do. I assure you there wouldn’t be captioning and description on TV in any significant quantity, for example. That’s why I asked Levant about disability claims when I chatted him up a few weeks ago. I am pretty sure he has no objection to genuine complaints of disability-related discrimination. Now, would those be better off in some arm of the actual court system? For disabled people, yes, I expect so.

However, two revelations in Levant’s book surprised and disturbed me.

1. Did you know that Canadian Human Rights Commission staff troll white-supremacist and hate sites? Maybe it would be OK to read them (anyone should be able to read any legally available material). Maybe it would also be OK to read them at work. But they go much farther than that: They post hateful messages, themselves illegal, in the hopes of goading other white supremacists and hatemongers into saying something incriminating. They commit the same offences they prosecute. Quite simply, is that not entrapment? (This shouldn’t be surprising in retrospect. A report on the workplace culture of the Ontario Human Rights Commission found it rife with hatred and racism. Despite searching newspaper databases for quite a while, though, I can’t put my finger on a citation for that report.)

2. In a failed stunt to demonstrate the folly of anti-speech human-rights laws, Levant documents how someone filed a complaint against Kenny vs. Spenny, thereby putting everyone involved in that show at risk of extralegal government investigation and harassment at their own risk and expense. Not merely false and vexatious, that action shows outright malice.

I should also add that Jan Wong, in a recent presentation at the library, complained that not a single journalists’ organization had offered any support for her when she stated, quite truthfully, that Quebec is pretty much the last place on earth that still openly talks about people with pure bloodlines being better than everyone else. I ran right up to her afterward and told her I supported her.

Joe·My·God. It’s so bad that its grizzled owner, Joe Jervis (q.v.; q.q.v. [guess]), actually encourages you to upgrade to whatever the hot new browser is so his site maybe won’t crash it.

This is one of those many occasions when gay men’s girlish inability to wrestle with anything technical or practical impairs other people’s lives. Do the opposite of whatever this guy does.

Marco Arment is the lead developer of Tumblr, preferred “blogging” platform of copyright infringers and the backstabbing New York literary scene. (People later discovered that Twits were an even more efficient method of cyberbullying.) I gave it a whirl, but threw in the towel after realizing the following two facts, which I posed to Arment thus:

• Why are the semantics and codebase of Tumblrs such shite?

• Why don’t you have a nice easy export mechanism to services like Delicious?

Via top-posting, Arment decried my “tone” and refused to respond. “Tone” doesn’t fix code like DIV H3 DIV P.

The Ontario College of Art, which long ago added & Design to its name, holds an exhibition of graduating students’ designs every year.

Do you ever hear about it? Or read anything? Or see any pictures? No.

Why not? Because OCA is hostile to the press, lies about copyright, and impedes critics from actually covering the event.

I know this for a fact, since I was one of the few people to cover the 2007 grad exhibit and the only person to cover it in detail. I missed last year’s event. (Did it even happen?)

In ’07, I went around photographing whatever works I felt of interest, for later review and commentary. Not enough people know that you can reproduce copyrighted works insubstantially for review and commentary without anyone’s permission up front. It’s part of fair dealing, which Canada and many countries have and the U.S. doesn’t. (We don’t have fair use; they don’t have fair dealing. The two concepts are not the same and you can’t use the terms interchangeably.)

For some works, including photographs, paintings, and layouts, duplicating the whole thing is the only way to review or comment on it and does not constitute substantial reproduction.

Among the people who don’t know about fair dealing are the students and docents who try to keep order during the grad show. I got endless grief from these people. After the first hour and a half of full-on harassment, the minute I entered a new room I asked who was in charge and explained the facts to them. This did not always stop them from harassing me.

This year’s grad show, entitled OCAD+, opens tomorrow night. The institution has taken out print ads in numerous newspapers to promote it. I wrote OCA’s head of marketing and communications, Leon Mar, to ask if the 2007 fiasco was due for a repeat. He top-posted a reply thus:

The following information is being distributed to all visitors: “As you visit the Graduate Exhibition, please respect our students and refrain from photographing their work without first seeking their permission.”

We don’t need anybody’s permission, and nobody, including the copyright holder (in this case the student creator), can deny permission or turn us down. As the Supreme Court explained, fair dealing is a right. What was Mar’s response to that? “We simply hope that all visitors to our Graduate Exhibition will act respectfully towards our students and the work that they will be showing.”

I’d prefer that this publicly-funded institution of higher learning respected Canadian law and my rights as a writer. OCA thus joins the Art Gallery of Ontario in deliberately misstating copyright law and thwarting legitimate expression.

Really, this is pretty simple: Instead of issuing a handout that offers mealy-mouthed mendacity, tell people they can photograph works if and only if their purposes are permitted by copyright law. Then train the attending staff and volunteers to ask each person with a camera what they’re doing just to make sure. Rocket science? Hardly. Feelings and respect have nothing to do with it.

You wonder why these grad shows come and go like a neutrino whizzing through the earth, as I like to say? Because the sponsoring college lies about copyright, refuses to train its staff and volunteers, and interferes with and harasses the press.