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Article I of the US Constitution describes the purpose of copyright as follows:

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.

But as Lawrence Lessig argues in his fascinating, provocative, and well-researched text, Free Culture, the scope of copyright has changed drastically since the framers of the Constitution initially supported it. Now, copyright’s reach is much farther than it needs to be to promote the progress of the arts — in several ways, notably in the length of its term. When copyright was first established, a work was protected only if the author registered it as copyrighted — and then only for 14 years, with an option (that most copyright holders declined) to renew it for an additional 14 years. Now, all creative works are copyrighted by default — the only way to avoid it is to specifically release your work into the public domain or under another license. In 1973, when extending the term of your copyright was still an option, more than 85% of copyright holders didn’t renew past the initial term, and the average term of copyright was 32.2 years — in 1998, not only was the term of copyright extended to 95 years, but all current copyrights were retroactively renewed. That doesn’t sound like “limited Times” to me!

Copyright’s extension beyond the length that is useful in most cases leads to situations like this one, quoted from the FAQ of one of my favorite bands:

I really want a copy of Lolita Nation / Tinker to Evers to Chance / some other long out of print Game Theory album. Where can I get them, and will they ever be back in print?

This is the most frequently asked question of them all, and sadly, the answer is: the only way you’ll be able to get a copy of Lolita Nation nowadays is by paying lots of money for the CD on eBay, or by stumbling across one in a used record store (which may take incredible persistence, since they’re awfully scarce). [...] Since Scott Miller’s music has never exactly caught on with the general public, it’s unlikely there will be a full-scale reissue program in the future, but one never knows. (By the way, Scott Miller does not own the rights to Game Theory’s recordings, so it’s not up to him.)

In this case, the longevity of copyright is hurting everyone involved. The record company isn’t benefiting from holding the copyright, since the band isn’t popular enough for them to profit from a re-release; the artist is losing out, since they aren’t legally permitted to fill the small but substantial demand for their music; and I’m losing out, since I can’t legally purchase and listen to their albums.

Like Lessig, I don’t want to abolish copyright, and I agree that artists need to retain some rights to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to produce more. But the current lengthy term of copyright is overkill. Most artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers would have plenty of incentive to keep producing creative work even if they only held the term of copyright for 10 or 20 years. Extending copyright by decades is profiting a few big franchises, but depriving the public of exactly the thing copyright is supposed to promote — access to creative work. A copyright term closer to the original would protect artists’ rights and profits while still allowing later archivists and derivative artists access to perpetuate the creative work’s legacy.

Jesse recently read a few chapters of Joan Williams’s Unbending Gender for school, and recommended that I take a look at them. Although a lot of the more theoretical aspects went over my head, I found it an extremely intelligent and interesting analysis of work/family/gender issues with a lot of practical recommendations that support my own positions about work/life balance.

Williams describes a norm of domesticity based on an “ideal worker” doing market work, who works full-time, is available for overtime, is available for relocation, and takes little to no time off for child-rearing. Especially in cases where children are involved, this ideal worker can only fill this role if supported by someone, usually a partner, who abstains from ideal-worker market work in order to raise children and care for the household (hence the slogan “most women need a wife”). While the feminism of a few decades ago focused (successfully) on giving women access to these types of jobs, it insufficiently accounted for the fact that these workers are intended to be backed up by a partner taking care of family work; most women remain primarily responsible for childcare and household work regardless of their employment status, which leads to a situation in which they can only gain the social power of men through essentially working double shifts, one shift as a market worker and another as a mother and family worker. She describes this as a situation that can and should be legally framed as discrimination. She also points out that divorce laws, which award most of the household assets to the market worker (who “earned” the money) without compensating the family worker who made the market work possible (and who will probably also have to support the children after the divorce).

Williams also argues that this system is not just harmful to women (who disproportionately fill the role of marginalized caregiver, or if they do not, have a hard time living up to the ideal-worker norm because they rarely have partners available for family work), but also to men, children, and society — she quotes both women who “choose” to stay home with children but would prefer to keep working at a schedule that allows them to have time for their children as well as their careers, and men who “would prefer the ‘daddy track’ to the fast track”. While everyone seems to agree that children should have more time with their parents, employers reward the opposite behavior by promoting workers who spend long hours at work and passing over or not hiring workers they think will try to take time to be with their families.

She points out that work hours have increased in the U.S. over the past few decades; not only is there more overtime, but people work farther form their jobs, so getting home at 5 is unreasonable for most workers — but an 8-to-7 schedule for both parents is unreasonable for children, thus perpetuating the situation where it’s only practical for one parent to work (and since societal norms still punish men who don’t work, it’s still usually the man).

Williams has a solution to this: more flexible work hours for everyone. She points out an example of a family that decides that someone should be home with the children two days a week; if one parent asks for a three-day week, an employer will usually consider that unreasonable, but if employers were more open to giving both parents a four-day week they could both keep working and still give their children the time they need. She approaches this from an explicitly pragmatic perspective, pointing out that flexible schedules need not disadvantage employers. My position is that this would even be advantageous to employers, who would have a broader pool of qualified workers to choose from and happier (thus more productive) workers at work if they were more willing to give out schedules that accommodate employees’ values and non-market priorities.

The book focuses on families with children, but she briefly touches on how a more flexible work schedule would be advantageous for single or childless people. This is something I feel particularly invested in — as the text points out, the work-hours it takes now to produce a 1948 standard of living are less than half those it would have taken then, yet people are working longer hours and consuming more, in large part because employment structures discriminate against part-time workers, denying them benefits, fair pay, advancement opportunities, and respect. With more flexible opportunities, all kinds of people who are satisfied with a lower standard of living could work fewer hours and devote the extra time to community service, personal projects, travel, family, or any number of other worthwhile pursuits. I’ve seen a few news articles in the past few years incredulously describing the expectations of “Gen Y” workers new to the workforce — we want “work/life balance”, they scoff. How selfish! Imagine! Market work is not necessarily the most important thing in our lives, and we’d prefer less money to longer hours!

In fact, almost everyone hopes to balance their time between market work, family work, community work, and personal time — but employers almost never offer schedules amenable to such balance. If they did, everyone would be better off.

Tomorrow, I’m voting for Barack Obama. I’m thrilled that in this year’s Democratic primary, I get to choose between two candidates who are intelligent, competent, competitive against Republican candidates, and committed to issues that I care about. In the general election, I’ll enthusiastically support whichever Democratic candidate gets the nomination.

That said, I’m behind Obama. As xkcd points out, Obama’s technology policy is a well-informed articulation of the steps government will need to take in the near future to preserve the open internet and leverage existing and new technology for the benefit of our entire society — as far as I can tell, Clinton has no comparable plan.

And: style matters.
There’s that old chestnut, electability in the general election; if Clinton ends up running against McCain, she’ll have to quickly switch tactics from her current platform of “experience”, and the irrational personal animosity that some voters have toward her could hurt, whoever the opponent.

But more importantly, style matters even after the election is won.
If Barack Obama becomes our next president, not only can he help bring a respectful, cooperative tone to the divisive status quo of American politics, but his charismatic style will multiply his influence far beyond the legislation he enacts. His enthusiasm is contagious; more than any other candidate, he has a chance to dampen political cynicism and engage large numbers of ordinary citizens to participate in democracy. An Obama presidency would encourage and inspire citizens to mobilize, participate, and act — and enthusiastic citizens can accoumplish a lot.

Even leaving aside the tacky-at-best practice of referring to people with a strong thinking preference as “Vulcans”, something’s a little off with David Brooks’s review of Al Gore’s new book. Most notably, this phrasing struck my attention (emphasis mine):

As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This sentence doesn’t sound like something only a graduate student could come up with; in fact, it sounds like the sort of reasonable yet straightforward analysis tht you might find in an intelligent high schooler’s paper. Curious, I did a little Wikipedia-ing; as if we needed confirmation that Brooks should know better, he has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago! I’d assume that even in 1983 they don’t hand out such degrees to students who can’t write clear sentences about simple historical trends. So Brooks is presumably aware that the “graduate school” epithet is a little silly here. Throw in descriptions of Gore’s prose as “pomposity” that the reader needs to “steel yourself for”, and it’s clear that Brooks is taking a deliberately exaggerated version of the position that Gore is too intellectual to represent the American people — and in the New York Times, a publication popular primarily with educated liberals. My interpretation of “graduate school” in particular is that he’s trying to play up Gore’s supposed over-intellectuality for a mostly college-educated audience; they wouldn’t be intimidated by a more realistic description, since it would sound close to their own backgrounds. I wonder what makes Brooks think alienating (literally, with the Vulcan reference in the article’s title) Gore from NYT readers is so important, and if it’s working.

Meanwhile, over in Slate, William Saletan, whose straightforwardly factual presentations I usually admire, ends up saying something a little weird when talking about the new no-period Pill:

The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won’t shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They’ll do it to satisfy others. On menstrual-suppression Web sites, you can find testimonies from women who hate their periods for making them too moody for their boyfriends or too tired to go to the office. Their menses are getting in the way of their men.

The boyfriend comment I can understand, but if I can’t go to work or can’t work effectively because of low energy from blood loss, not to mention crippling pain, that’s far from my “menses getting in the way of [my] men”. That’s another example of how menstruation’s side effects can be a more than minor obstacle to the “emancipation” that comes from being able to perform at your best in any job or activity, regardless of whether men are involved.