I Get No Kick From a ©

♫ I get no kick when I ski: to practically FLY down some mountain so HIGH, I just TRY not to get black and blue, Yet, I get a kick out of you. I get no kick from TV: though the offerings are RIFE that should jazz up my LIFE, in the end they just STIFle what's true. Yet... I get no kick from herb tea: Raspberry or PEAR, all those flavors are SCARE-y: I really don't CARE what you brew, Originally, it was I get no kick toking tea: to stroll down the LANE with that sweet Mary JANE would just turn my old BRAIN into goo; Yet I get a kick ... but like Mr. Porter himself, who later softened cocaine to champaign, I went to a more innocuous tea. This will just be our little secret... Yet... ♫

Apropos of messing around, I wrote a new verse to the classic I Get A Kick Out of You. However, just one won't do, so I wrote a couple more with the same first-line rhyme and—voilá!—here's an alternative version of the song, just awaiting its breakout interpretation. However, if you decide to vary this Cole Porter standard during a performance, as your combo is swinging through a set in an intimate club in Madison or Seattle, inserting my lyrics or even your own that satirize the mayor's new anti-smoking initiative, for example, it won't matter. The ever-vigilant ASCAP will take its cut for the song's copyright holder (in this case, Warner Bros. Music). You won't really notice it, other than feeling—financially—a little below par.I'm not sure how they collect the money. It's probably some pro-rata formula for a club with live acts, and an estimate of the proportion of standards to originals. In any event, the club pays the copyright holders, by whatever Byzantine means, so the performers get less than they otherwise would. In short, they pay.

If you're young and listen to lots of music, you may have some vague idea of "copyright" as the rallying cry in an amusing and not terribly serious game of corporations vs. citizens, the one side trying to extract rent for something that should be free, and the other—virtuous, numerous, but weak (i.e. us)—adroitly evading their grasping great paws using an ever-shifting array of technical means.Not that we necessarily understand these means: they, too, are part of that great commons we call "the Web". And it, like "nature" in an earlier day, giveth without stint.

There are lots of free things out there in Cyberland, and we have become accustomed to taking what takes our fancy. But should all these free things really be free—can whoever supplies them keep doing it for nothing? We have a sense that advertising keeps the flow going (so we are paying, by being subjected to ads!), or maybe government (which is us!). OK, that explains Google and the National Weather Service's website. But more generally, what sorts of things should be free, and for what sorts should we pay?

Big question. Should knowledge be free—isn't that what science is all about? Scientists do research, find things out, and then tell the rest of us in detail, so we can use their work for our benefit. How noble, how right.

But what about inventions? They are a kind of knowledge. Inventors are known to be in it for the money, rather than subsisting on virtue like scientists. They have an annoying habit of patenting their inventions and then charging for their use—or keeping us from making and selling them altogether, so they can do it exclusively and profitably. How selfish, how wrong.

Should books be free? They're hard to write, so the authors should get some money for them—they have to live, after all. And books are practically costless, anyway: what with libraries and cheap trade editions, for some small amount of money we can get hold of enough reading for a lifetime. So maybe copyright is a good thing for authors: we've got to encourage them to keep writingAfter all, the really good movie plots come from novels. by giving them a little something.

Where do songs fit into this? Should my Cole Porter knockoff be free for you to use in your act? Do you get to doubly impress your audience, both with your mellow voice and with your lyrical inventiveness? Or is it enough that you, in an act of ingratiating candor, simply say: "I found these verses on the Web?" Or should you—does some ethical precept buried somewhere in the fine print of our consciences, tell you to—give me full credit for this lyrical jewel? And, even more than that, should you actually pay me for the use of these lyrics? Didn't I do some work for you?

Actually, I'd love it if you paid me, but it's actually good enough if you just come clean about my contribution. I don't need the money, but even if I did, I wouldn't expect to get paid for such fol-de-rol: some things just want to be free. Or, almost free. If you take the trouble to credit me, as in, e.g., "those variations on that Cole Porter classic were penned by J.R. McCall," I'll be pleased. After all, my ego needs to eat, too.

In fact, I suppose most amateur artists, songwriters, poets, singers, gardeners, and storytellers just want to be known as the creators of the picture, song, poem, performance, flowerbed, or tale in question. Enough appreciation adds up to reputation, which is a buzz to most of us.

However, there are thousands of singers, composers, and musicians out there who make their living from writing and performing songs and music. They play in clubs or arenas, they make recordings, they write material for others to use in records and performances. They get a small cut of each sale of one of their recorded performances or for the use of their song by someone else in performance. Are we stealing from them when we download songs from a song-sharing site? Are we stealing from them when we take a selection of MP3-format songs that we have actually bought, and pass them on to someone on a flash drive—someone who may, in turn, pass them on to someone else?

Hell if I know. There are a myriad of CDs out there that have been ripped to hard disks, and the songs dispersed to the winds. Are those lost sales? Probably, but the iTunes model of selling tunes by the ones has ruined the CD market already. Speaking of which, I just downloaded (and paid for) an mp3-formatted version of an old Righteous Brothers rendition of The White Cliffs of Dover as well as Vera Lynn's wartime version of the same song. That's royalties all around that never would have been had we not had these nearly frictionless ways of buying songs.What is more, these I can't even give away, so my purchase won't be diluted.

Anyway, these are huge, complex issues.I want to return to them later, particularly in the context of open-source software. But for now, I thought I would take the copyright system out for a drive and see how it handled. I went to the Creative Commons site, in particular the place where you "license" a work. It turns out that you should have some URL referring to the work you intend to license, so I gathered the lyrics neatly into a text file, and put that on a website I run ("walk", more like), puffball.org. I also put in the file some material that indicates the kind of license the content is operating under, and some commentary. To see what I did go here. You'll see that I ask any user of the material in question to attribute it to that particular URL, which not only gives credit where credit is due, but says how one can use the lyrics by referring to the Creative Commons Attribution License.

I own the copyright to my lyrics simply by virtue of publishing them.Unless I unconsciously copied them from somewhere else and am living in a fool's paradise... I could, if I chose, demand that no one use them, that no permission to sing them in public would ever be forthcoming no matter how much money I was offered. Right. In the event, I decided to take advantage of the Creative Commons (free!) service and specify, essentially, that anyone can use my lyrics in any way, commercially or non-, as long as I am not implicated in whatever odd place they may find themselves.

But what exactly is licensing, anyway? The Creative Commons folks do not record my work's URL; they simply have a legal document that I point to, saying, essentially, that this is how I want my stuff to be used. It is up to me to chase down violators of this license, if that's important to me. What CC has done is to get their lawyers to draw up, in airtight legalese, a few different licenses that express rather simple ideas. Mine, the Attribution license, simply wants any user to give me credit. There are other licenses: the "share-alike", the "non-commercial", the "no derivative works" that other owners of material might prefer. C.C. provides nice logos and clean legal documents for them, too.

You might be asking why I should bother, since I own the contents of this blog already, according to Google. Yeah, sort of. If you look at their Terms of Service they get to display this blog as they please. Otherwise, it's mine. Well, it's just a standard default copyright, and perhaps I want to loosen things up a bit. But also, it removes that set of lyrics from the provenance of this blog: it's in here, but not of here. But mainly, it's just to try out this licensing business. It seems silly, but here goes:

For the source of—and licensing terms for—the above lyrics, see this. (And thanks, Jim!)

There. I've written something, licensed it, and used it with attribution in another work. Whew! Ain't intellectual property grand?

Sorry—was your Al Gored?

"What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common? The answer is that Gore and Pinatubo both suggest a way to cool the planet, albeit with methods whose cost-effectiveness are a universe apart."

(Levitt and Dubner, Superfreakonomics, p.196)

In 2005 Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago (gasp! not that sort of economist?), and Stephen Dubner, a writer, published Freakonomics. This year, drafting on the popularity of that book, they published (with a self-conciously horrible title) Superfreakonomics. Both books are written in a popular, accessible style, and talk about economics at street level, rather than droning on about central banks, the money supply, the balance of payments and other such high-falutin' stuff. They give us transparent, down-home economic reasoning about ordinary life.

I skimmed the earlier book. It was fun. I could see why it was so popular: it is a revelation to many people that so many day-to-day issues can actually be grappled with—and answered—if you mind the money.And, by the way, if you happen to know about, have access to, and cleverly apply certain arcane, but suprisingly relevant, data sets.

However, in Superfreakonomics they deal with, among other things, global warming. Oops. This is a fraught topic these days, and their breezy style and agnostic approach were bound to tread on some toes.Remember poor E.O. Wilson? He wrote that last chapter in Sociobiology almost as an afterthought, and was astounded to find himself roundly censured, and even viciously attacked (in print, that is), by his own colleagues—and, for good measure, by the entire political left...

Elizabeth Kolbert reviewed Superfreakonomics in the November 16th issue of The New Yorker. She is a journalist who recently (2006) published an eloquent bookOr so legions of amazon.com reviewers believe; I haven't actually read it. called Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. The editors probably felt she was a natural to review a somewhat controversial and irreverant new book with a chapter devoted to a "solution" to global warming.

Maybe that wasn't such a good idea. In the event, she did a hatchet job on their book. The "solution" chapter of Superfreakonomics gored her ox, so she was out for sanguinary compensation.

Judging from others of her reviews, Kolbert is not normally unfair, dismissive, and insulting (see, e.g. Flesh of Your Flesh). But her 2006 book was an exhortation to collective action—a moral demand, if you will, to halt global warming because of the wrongs it will inflict on people and animals. In this she is of a mind with Al Gore: we must work together to solve this problem, because it's the right thing to do.To be fair, this is actually the prevailing attitude of practically everyone—weakly and occasionally for most people, of course. But like belief in God, belief in our moral imperative and our ability to solve anthropogenic global warming is given lip service even as people continue driving everywhere, overheating large houses, and consuming other energy-intensive goods and services just as fast as they can.

What a shame it won't work. And how unwise of Dubner and Levitt to mention that.

People say they believe in the coming catastrophes that will accompany global warming, and quite properly deplore them. Yet they carry on their day-to-day activities every bit as wastefully as they always have. They seem quite immune to the calls for collective action. So are we doomed?

Maybe, but what if we could cool the planet back to "normal" cheaply and on demand, before we ever actually solve the problem of too much CO2? Wouldn't we want to do that? Apparently, if you listen to Gore and Kolbert, no, we would not.

Levitt and Dubner pay a visit to Nathan Myrvold and his company, Intellectual Ventures, in suburban Seattle. Myrvold is a brilliant engineer, and has surrounded himself with others of the same stripe. They invent things, all sorts of things. They get patents on these things, and buy other patents that interest them. They own lots of intellectual property, which fuels their research, and allows their not inconsiderable pro bono work, which includes saving the earth.

Myrvold et al have come up with a scheme to cheaply cool the earth by mimicking what big volcanic eruptions do—put sulfur dioxide droplets into the stratosphere. They propose using a hose 18 miles long but just about 2 inches across, and held up with balloons, to pump SO2 into the stratosphere. It turns out we have great piles of practically free sulfur accumulating in Canada as a bi-product of getting petroleum out of oil sands (ironic, eh?). So, using these cheap, abundant inputs and that low-rent technology a full-blown solution, with pumping stations at a half-dozen places on earth, would cost about $150 million to set up, and about $100 million annually. Compared to the more than one trillion dollars (a year!) that such worthies as Sir Nicholas Stern have proposed we spend to avert warming, this is pocket change.

Ok, that's basically the freight of the book's global warming chapter. If one had just read Kolbert's review one would not know that. One would, in fact, probably think the entire book was about global warming, and devoted to wacky schemes for modifying the climate. One would also think that these schemes were so beyond the pale that they were not worth explaining, other than to call them "horseshit". Further, one would have the distinct impression that Dubner, the writer, and Levitt, the economist, came up with this sulfur-spritzting plan and so, in their cosmic arrogance, were seriously proposing something they were stupendously unqualified to propose."Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind." (Kolbert, from the review) It is perhaps unkind to mention here that Kolbert has but an undergraduate degree, in English. (But is is from Yale...) One would not have any idea that knowledgeable, experienced, well-thought of engineers and scientists were actually behind it. Myrvold and his engineering associates were never referred to in any way in Kolbert's review.

It's sad really. I realize that this is a case of a popular book being reviewed in a magazine more used to art and literature than science, but still. Could we at least have some civility, some fairness?What is more, in his op-ed column Paul Krugman, of all people, gloated over her abuse. Certainly, the public discourse is polluted enough by disingenuous loudmouths. I'd like to think The New Yorker provides a haven from that.