Deleuzean Potato

It's official: I'm applying to become a judge of our beloved Scavhunt. I emailed my application materials not five minutes ago, and I've recieved a confirmation from head judge Courtney. We'll see how that goes.

The Smart Museum, I'm sad to report, no longer carries Dr Pepper.

Having a car in Hyde Park is a pain in the ass. Steven informed me yesterday evening at the RAS meeting that there was going to be street sweeping today on our side of Hyde Park Blvd. As a result, I would need to move the truck before 9:00 this morning. My plan was then to drive to campus early (~8:00), then drive home after Stat gets out at 3:00 to repark the truck before everyone else reparks.

In reality, I left home at 8:20. Result: I parked on Harper, right about where 58th would be if it went through, at 8:40. So I drove about a third of the way to campus in 20 minutes. Chalk up another one to urban parking and morning rush hour.

We argued over the DMCA in IP class this morning, the DeCSS case in particular. The professor mentioned that the case was appealed to the 2nd Circuit, and that they ruled that Fair Use is not Constitutionally mandated. This is relevant because of the argument I wanted to make.

The case, Universal v Reimerdes is pretty open-and-shut in and of itself. But it does contain this, which points to the major problem with the DMCA itself:

Defendants, however, are not here sued for copyright infringement. They are sued for offering and providing technology designed to circumvent technological measures that control access to copyrighted works and otherwise violating Section 1201(a)(2) of the Act.

It certainly raises an interesting question: The defendents are charged with violation of the DMCA. They are very specifically not charged with infringement of copyright itself. But the action against them was brought under Title 17, which purports to be about Copyright. The court has exactly zero business pretending that this case isn't a copyright case; of course it is.

Now, Congress rewrote all of the copyright statutes in the Copyright Act of 1976. As part of this overhaul, they explicitly defined Fair Use. Fair Use was added to the US Code to make the Copyright Act consistent with how the courts had interepreted copyright law for over 100 years. What I want to argue is this: Fair Use was invented by the courts, long before Congress felt the need to codify it. This at least suggests that the courts felt Fair Use to be necessary in order to reconcile the First Amendment, the Copyright Clause, and Congress's response to the Copyright Clause.

The professor's comment on the appeal of this case got me itching to pursue the history of this argument. Not much effort got me this, which looks like a promising start to the investigation:

Without a fair use defense operating as a safety valve, the DMCA impermissibly grinds against the immutable protections of speech and expression granted by the First Amendment. The appellants and amici did not have the benefit of a Supreme Court decision directly on point, but their contention was not without merit. Although the Supreme Court had never decided the issue, it had intimated through dicta that it could someday recognize a constitutional requirement of fair use.40 Indeed, the Second Circuit itself had also on several occasions indicated a similar acceptance of appellants’ proposition.

Perhaps I'll find time to pursue this further. If so, expect more on this as it develops.

I've decided, for a couple of reasons, to defer graduate school for the time being. The current plan is the Peace Corps; failing that, to dink around Chicago for a year or two. Then graduate school.

The short story is that I'm incapable of putting together any sort of competent grad school application at this time. The long story is that there are a few reasons for this inability. Part of the problem is that I don't really know how to go about doing it. Yeah, I figure it's going to be largely like applying to college was. There's a paper application specific to the school but largely similar to everyone else's, GRE scores, two (?) letters of recommendation, and a personal statement. The problem is with these last two.

The personal statement isn't particularly different from college applications essays. It's given to the applicant to a lesser degree than the college essays were, but that's not a huge hurdle for me. It ultimately comes down to me explaining why I'm applying to the school in question and what I expect to get from them. This wasn't hard to do with my college applications; I knew where I wanted to go and I knew what I wanted to do once I got there. Now I'm here, and I'm doing it. No problem there. But both of these take on a new level when applying to grad school. It's not enough simply to want to do physics; I need to know what kind of physics I'm interested in. Though It's still not even clear to me how much I need to know this. I'm told that there are places where you apply to work with a specific group; in that case, I need to be pretty sure about the particular physics specialty I'm interested in. But I'm also told there are places where you can figure out your specialty after you've been there for a bit. In that case, I'm exactly where I need to be. The problem is that I have no idea how prevalent these two models are.

Even given that, I'm still not sure if that would solve my problem. If I knew to expect most schools to be more like the former, I wouldn't be able to tell them what I want to do. If I knew to expect most schools to be more like the latter, I would still be uncomfortable applying; I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of asking for membership/employment from a group when I don't know in what capacity I'd like to be involved with/employed by that group. It feels fraudulent.

All of this comes up with the letters of recommendation as well. How am I supposed to ask someone to recommend me for something when I don't know what it is I want them to recommend me for? There's another issue too, though I feel both that it's not as serious an issue and that I know how to fix it: I don't know anyone well enough to ask for a recommendation from them. I feel like I'm supposed to have at least two faculty members recommend me. I could ask my former boss in the Teaching Labs. But she's not faculty, so I feel that I shouldn't send just a recommendation from her and another from one facutly member. I certainly can ask Mark Oreglia, as I spent the summer working for him. So that's one.

As I said, this problem with finding people to write letters is more fixable than the other. In fact, it's closely related to my problem of finding a job on campus. That gets its own rant.

Ultimately, I'd like to complain about the complete lack of advisement resources in the Department. I'd like to complain about the fact that CAPS seems unable to acknowledge the existance of employers other than financial firms. I have some idea of what I'd like to do with myself, both in the immediate future and the more long-term future. But there are specifics about what's available to me, and what's teh best way of getting at it, that I don't know. I'd like to complain about that ignorance of mine.

Here's the problem with complaining about all this. If I'm the only one that's clueless (or very nearly so) about all this, then it's almost certainly because there is information available to everyone, and everyone else has found it, and I haven't. If that's the case, it's my own goddamn fault and I have no business bitching about the situation. If I'm not the only one with this problem, then it's fair of me to complain about it, as it then becomes an institutional problem. Now here's the kicker: Nobody in my class talks to each other about this. At least, not that I'm aware of. I'd like to think that I know what's going on at least as well as everyone else. I should, if I'm in class and around just as much as everyone else is. But what if I'm just completely out of the loop? I don't know how to tell the difference between the two.

Chemistry too, it appears. I know even less about this than the Physics prize, so I'll just link to the University News Office report.

Perhaps not the best day to stop going to the Topics in Current Research class (PHYS 28000). I guess to miss all the talk in class about the Nobel Prize.

Now, one might be tempted to think that I would have something to say about this. Alas, one would wrong. But it's almost certainly unnecessary for me to have anything to say about it, as Sean Carroll knows much more about this sort of thing than I do, and can both discuss it himself, and point you to anything he doesn't say.

UPDATE: The Chicago Weekly is inept beyond belief.

From cmcfaul@midway.uchicago.edu Wed Oct 6 15:23:07 2004 -0500
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Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2004 15:23:07 -0500 (CDT)
From: Colin Alfred Mcfaul
X-Sender: cmcfaul@harper.uchicago.edu
To: cw-edit@newcity.com
Subject: letter to the editor
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Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

To the Editor:

The current Chicago Weekly (7 October 2004) contains an obvious and highly egregious error. So obvious, in fact, that it is contained in the first word I saw upon picking up a copy of the paper. The first piece on the front page of the paper ("Chicago Nobel-ity") concerns the recent announcement of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. The piece incorrectly identifies the U of C alumnus to recieve the award as James Wilczek. His name is actually Frank Wilczek.

This might be understandable if one of Wilczek's co-recipients were names James, but this is not the case. Both are named David. Even given that, it might be forgiveable if not for the obviousness of your reporter's source. The information contained in the piece, and the order in which it is presented, makes it clear that the only source for this piece is the University of Chicago News Office
(http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/04/041005.wilczek.shtml). Wilczek's name is correctly given there in the headline, "Alumnus Frank Wilczek recieves 2004 Nobel Prize in physics." It is difficult to see how anyone could possibly misconstrue this information.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm aware that the intent of the piece is simply to forward the information about Wilczek's prize to a larger audience in the University community. It is entirely acceptable for the CW to summarize the University News Office in this manner. But your paper demonstrates incompetence beyond my comprehension in its inability to correctly repeat information so basic as the first name of a Nobelist. I should like to hope that in the future, both your writers and editors will conduct themselves with more competence.

Colin McFaul
Fourth Year in the College