Sorry, Writers, but I'm Siding With Google's Robots

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 8, 2014

Sorry, Writers, but I'm Siding With Google's Robots
by James Panero

Copyright laws too often stifle the creativity they claim to protect. Time for a 21st-century update.

How much did mention of "copyright" increase in American books published in the second half of the 20th century? The answer is by nearly a factor of three. How about "intellectual property," a neologism designed to equate copyright with real property? By a whopping factor of 70. But what about "public domain," the term for our creative commons where the arts are replanted and renewed? The answer is almost not at all.

We know this thanks to a new program called Ngram, an offshoot of Google Books that analyzes the metadata of what is now the world's most extensive literary index. Ngram gives us a sense of how ideas have circulated over the past 200 years. And when it comes to creative freedom, the numbers don't look good.

Since the 1970s, U.S. terms of copyright have been extended and tightened at the behest of the film, music and publishing industries in a way that hurts how we can enjoy, share, study and repurpose culture. Don't believe me? When was the last time you saw Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech on television in full? As a copyrighted work zealously guarded and monetized by the King estate, it's still rarely shown.

Technology companies have emerged as the key counterweight to the lawyers and lobbyists of the content giants. And that's one reason November's victory for Google Books in Authors Guild v. Google is important.

In 2004, Google announced a partnership with Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library to begin scanning their holdings, turning the printed pages of millions of books into digital grist for its search mill. The robot scanners ran their eyes over everything, from books in the public domain to copyrighted material, which under current law includes most of what's been published since 1923. The results have been a boon to the culture of ideas.

Yet since Google never tracked down the millions of rights-holders of more recent works, the initiative has been embroiled in litigation over copyright infringement since its inception—even though Google has used copyrighted books only for its search index (as opposed to showing the full text). The Authors Guild, one of the plaintiffs against Google, declared the scanning "exploitation" and a "hazard for every author." U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan disagreed and dismissed the group's claims after eight years of litigation, declaring Google's project a "transformative" fair use. The Authors Guild has vowed to appeal.

As a writer, I'm siding with the robots. Google Books is far from perfect: Even advocates have worried about the consolidation of scanned information, fearing it will lead to a new digital monopoly. But it brings literature into the online world, exposing a younger generation to books they otherwise would never encounter.

Google Books' legal victory can also be seen as a chink in the armor of ironclad copyright laws. Copyright was never meant to be an indefinite "intellectual property." Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power "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." Much like patents, copyright was a utilitarian measure to protect creative work through a temporary government-granted monopoly.

For the founders, that meant a protective period of 14 years with the right of renewal for another 14. Since then, and especially over the last three decades, the terms have exploded. For self-made work, copyright is now in effect for the life of the author plus 70 years. For work-for-hire, the terms are 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation, whichever is shorter.

In Congress, the terms have tended to have the curious ability to grow just as Mickey Mouse is set to exit copyright, effectively locking down America's cultural patrimony to protect Disney. The "Copyright Term Extension Act" of 1998 is commonly derided as "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act," since it extended Disney's control of the cartoon character for another 20 years. The motion picture industry has argued for even more—a perpetual copyright, or "forever less one day." But would this actually be good for the arts? Numerous studies, such as a 2007 analysis by economist Rufus Pollock at Cambridge, have shown that far shorter terms would maximize creative output.

Considering the Democratic Party's ties to Hollywood, Republicans should be the natural leaders on intellectual property reform. Conservatives such as Reihan Salam, Patrick Ruffini, Timothy P. Carney and Jordan Bloom have argued convincingly for it—but so far the party isn't listening. When Derek Khanna, a young policy analyst, wrote a white paper in 2012 for the Republican Study Committee on rolling back copyright, he was shown the door. "The Republican Party hasn't been pro-innovation," he explained to me. "Copyright reform is a vital component of a more forward-leading platform."

At the start of 2014, Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain published a list of books that would be entering the public domain under the laws that existed through 1978. For works ranging from Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" to Dr. Seuss's "Cat in the Hat," "you would be free to translate these books into other languages, create Braille or audio versions for visually impaired readers . . . or adapt them for film." Too bad: Under current law, you can't.

"Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels," wrote the critic Northrop Frye. "Literature shapes itself, and is not shaped externally." The freedom to work with a renewed public domain should be our inheritance—if only we stopped Mickey Mousing around with copyright.

Pete Seeger's symphony of bad ideas

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
January 29, 2014

Pete Seeger's symphony of bad ideas
We should learn to appreciate a man's artistry even when we despise his politics
by James Panero

No other singer could connect with an audience of different ages quite like Pete Seeger, who passed away in New York this week at age 94. The night before he died, my mother, my daughter and I all happened to find ourselves gathered in my living room listening to “Pete Seeger and Brother Kirk Visit Sesame Street,” the 1974 album that was the soundtrack of childhood for my Upper West Side generation and, now, continues to be loved by the next.

What else brings a family together quite like a sing-along to Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” with Kirk, Big Bird and Seeger — whose soft voice and rooted instrumentation, so recognizable, will continue to be welcome for generations?

That I have come to see the message behind Seeger’s musicality to be so wrong, often terribly wrong, has only made me appreciate his musicianship more. I seem to spend much of my career editorializing against the full range of mistakes he made. From world politics to the environment of New York State, the innocent idealism communicated through his songs would only be destroyed, I would argue, if we were to act on the positions he took in his lyrics. Seeger’s beliefs began with big-C Communism and ended in little-c communism. The fact that his music could be so inviting despite the many bad ideas that went into it speaks to the power of his artistry.

Great artists don’t always have great politics. If we let the politics dictate the art, we let the politics win out. Richard Wagner’s anti-semitism shouldn’t deprive us of the Overture to “Tannhäuser.” Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet sympathies shouldn’t detract from our appreciation of “Battleship Potemkin.”

The same goes for Seeger. He was politically effective precisely because his music was that good.

Despite his hardscrabble, rail-riding demeanor, Seeger was the Harvard-educated son of an American musicologist who studied how to push his ideas out in the guise of a well-tuned folk vernacular.

Some years ago in City Journal, the journal of the conservative Manhattan Institute where I am also a contributor, Howard Husock wrote that, “Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music, Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever.”

This is true especially in the way Seeger could package leftist anthems as children’s songs. Husock does a line-by-line analysis of the political messages in Seeger’s lyrics. For example, “If I Had a Hammer,” Husock writes, “was an extraordinary anthem. It pulled off, with great aplomb, the old Popular Front goal of linking the American revolutionary past with the communist revolutionary future, joining the Liberty Bell with the hammer and sickle.”

Writing in the New York Sun in 2007, Ron Radosh, a one-time student of Seeger’s who has been arguing against Seeger’s ideas longer than I have, struck a similar note: “He never pauses to criticize the communist regimes he once backed, nor the few that still exist, like Castro’s prison camp in Cuba. Mr. Seeger’s cries for peace and his opposition to every American foreign and military policy (even ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan) show that he has learned little from the past.”

(To Seeger’s credit, he responded to Radosh in a letter expressing remorse for his youthful Stalinism: “I think you’re right — I should have asked to see the gulags when I was in [the] USSR.” This story was recounted by the Sun’s editors in a tribute to Seeger this week — one that also pays tribute to his musical legacy separate from his politics.)

Beyond Seeger’s Stalinism and his isolationism, there was also his environmentalism. A resident of Beacon, New York, Seeger had long lamented the pollution in the Hudson River. In “My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)” Seeger wrote of “Sailing down my dirty stream/ Still I love it and I'll keep the dream/ That some day, though maybe not this year/ My Hudson River will once again run clear.” In 1969, he constructed a sloop called Clearwater as an icon of advocacy and went on to fashion an organization around it to campaign for the river’s remediation.

Seeger was right that the Hudson needed help, but his advocacy has at times made it worse. One of Clearwater’s main targets have been the PCBs that General Electric legally discharged into the Hudson from its electrical-equipment plants in Ford Edward and Hudson Falls, New York. GE ended this practice decades ago and had undertaken its own cleanup, leading to dramatically improved river conditions.

Yet river advocates including Clearwater pushed for extensive dredging of the river bottom, which the current EPA compelled GE to do through an interpretation of contamination levels that was more punitive than prudent.

“General Electric’s dredging to clean up 30 years of deposited PCB’s from the river is a direct result of Clearwater activism,” the organization boasted in a tribute to its founder.

Yet as I wrote in a study of this action, the cleanup is “both unnecessary and environmentally destructive . . . Because the river bottom was being disrupted, PCB levels in water, air, and fish all rose dramatically and exceeded federal limits. By every measure, the health of the river and the surrounding community deteriorated, at least temporarily, through the EPA’s intervention.”

The same goes for fracking for natural gas from New York’s shale reserves. As its obituary reminds us, Clearwater is “also active in the battle to pass moratoriums on hydrofracking in the region.” Just last year, Seeger himself marched on Albany to keep fracking out of state. “If you take the money that they want to give you for going along with fracking and injuring people for generations to come,” Seeger says to Gov. Cuomo in a YouTube address, "you will go down as perhaps the worst [governor in the history of New York].”

Once again, Seeger came out on the wrong side his own ideals. New York’s fracking moratorium is actively hurting the poor workers of New York’s depressed Southern Tier, as opposed to just the fictional ones Seeger liked to sing about. Environmentalist opposition to fracking, based on a host of dubious claims, also negatively impacts the environmental gains that would result from further gas exploration, especially when it comes to airborne pollutants.

“Displacement of coal-fired power by gas-fired power . . . is the most cost-effective way of reducing CO2 emissions in the power sector,” concluded a recent study by MIT. As I recently documented, the gas from fracking in fact “helps protect the environment by replacing coal in power plants, since gas produces far less carbon dioxide, sulfur, carbon monoxide, and ash than coal does.” The same would go for converting the dirty basement boilers in New York City from oil to gas — if only environmentalists wouldn’t stand in the way of gas exploration and distribution.

If you really want to understand the appeal of disagreeable positions, there's sometimes no better way than through its art. In this regard, Seeger could be a teacher without equal. The simplicity of his songs, perfect for a child's call and response, is also what made them ill-equipped to deal with complex issues. It is certainly true that his artistry was dictated by his politics. That doesn’t mean we must be dictated by it, too.

Put the pedal to the metal to save pedestrians' lives

Noshat Nahian didn’t have to die.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
January 16, 2013

Put the pedal to the metal to save pedestrians' lives
But 'Vision Zero' is a shared responsibility; don't leave it to de Blasio and Bratton alone
by James Panero

Crossing the street shouldn’t cost you your life. But that’s just what happened to two New Yorkers last Friday evening, blocks away and within an hour of each other on the Upper West Side.

Alexander Shear, a 73-year-old father of two, was walking to dinner when a tour bus ran him over as he crossed at 96th St. and Broadway. The bus dragged his body to Amsterdam Ave. before horrified witnesses were able to hail down the driver.

A half-hour later, Dr. Richard Stock, a radiation oncologist, was holding the hand of his 9-year-old son, Cooper, when a taxi making a left turn from 97th St. onto West End Ave. struck both of them in the crosswalk. Cooper’s body was crushed when the cab rolled over him, according to a witness account, and Stock cradled his son as he bled out on the street.

For a city of walkers, New York has long allowed drivers to dominate its streets. The result has been a tragic disregard for public safety. In 2012, according to police data, motorists killed 150 pedestrians in the city and injured more than 11,000. Annual totals declined over the Bloomberg years, but that’s small comfort to the thousands whose lives were affected.

Many of these crashes took the lives of children. A study by Transportation Alternatives and the Drum Major Institute reports that being struck by a car is the most common cause of injury-related death for city children.

Last February, a truck killed 6-year-old Amar Diarrassouba in a crosswalk in East Harlem. Last June, 4-year-old Ariel Russo was walking with her grandmother on W. 97th St. near Amsterdam Ave. when a teenager in an SUV, who was fleeing police, jumped the curb and struck them both, seriously injuring the grandmother and killing Ariel. In December, a truck killed 8-year-old Noshat Nahian in a crosswalk in Queens.

On Wednesday, Mayor de Blasio, Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and other officials promised a new, “comprehensive road map” to eliminate deadly crashes. It’s inspired by a movement called Vision Zero — with the goal of eliminating traffic-related death and serious injury.

The mayor formed a task force, due to report back to him in a month, and Bratton has devoted more resources and manpower to combatting traffic fatalities.

Good. Urgent action, with follow-through, is in order.

The first step is aggressive policing of traffic laws. Even in cases of serious pedestrian injury and death, law enforcement has rarely charged drivers with serious crimes. According to Streetsblog, nearly half of all drivers who take the life of a pedestrian or motorist in New York do not even receive a citation for careless driving.

In Albany, police unions have stood in the way of allowing speed cameras on city streets. After a decadelong battle, the first cameras have only recently been installed around a handful of school zones in a five-year pilot program. De Blasio wants more, and said that those already in place would immediately start issuing tickets.

The second step is redesigning traffic laws to reduce the number of vehicles cruising the city — and to redraw the streets to take into account their full uses by drivers, bikers and pedestrians.

De Blasio plans to push for more residential streets to come down to a 20-mph speed limit, and that can make a difference.

The most dangerous places for pedestrians are not a mystery. In 2008, an extensive study conducted by the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance campaign identified the very corners and very turns where Alexander Shear and Cooper Stock lost their lives, recommending traffic calming measures to slow cars down.

These are vitally important steps. But ultimately, there’s a third — and for this, the onus is shared. Creating safer roads means changing the behavior of those who use them — to ensure that those who speed, or drive carelessly, or even, as bicyclists and pedestrians, veer into traffic, keep one another in mind.

To get to Vision Zero, we must all rethink our relationship to shared space and put safety first, even if it costs us a few extra minutes on the road.