Thursday, March 6, 2008

Two Weeks, 24, & SYS

(Re)Reading: Armor, John Steakley
Watching: Minami-ke ~Okawari #8-9
Playing: Professor Layton and the Curious Village (weekly puzzle updates); Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney

Here I logged into my account thinking that it had been a week since my last post, only to discover it's been two. Oh well--baby steps, right?

Today I turned twenty four (hey, like the TV show!). In a lot of ways, twenty four seems to resemble twenty--one year away from the next milestone (here, 25--though instead of being able to imbibe liquors, you're half the way to thirty and can finally rent a car on your own).

For the reasons below, though, the greatest birthday gift I'm liable to get is one I can give myself: a good night's rest.

*

Today was also the deadline for the rough draft of our second-year seminar papers. I forewent sleep the morning of March 5th to finish it up, attending the morning class as a walking (or, I suppose, sitting) zombie, took a four-hour nap, headed back for my afternoon/evening class, then went through the draft from 8 pm to 12 am. (I never realized how long proofreading a 41-pager could take when you're sleep deprived.) I emailed the paper to the prof at 1 am, and called it a night. (Should have called it a morning, in retrospect.)

Headed to school early today to borrow the high-capacity stapler from the law review room, only to have the blasted thing destroy my printed copy with a tangled mess of industrial-strength staples. God bless LexisNexis, which along with Westlaw, gifted the law review with complimentary printers, so I could reprint the paper (on LexisNexis-branded paper, no less) and get the stapler to do its job properly. Turned it in, only to notice by sheer luck the plagarism statement attached to another paper, which reminded me that I needed one too. So, with less than five minutes remaining before the morning class, I rushed back to the law review room, printed out the form, signed it, and clipped it to the draft. Made it to class with a full thirty seconds to spare.

What lessons can we learn from this fiasco? One: never trust a high-capacity stapler (or the bastard who used it before you, gumming it up). Two: thank God for law review's free printing privileges.

*

Speaking of SYS, I suppose a general summary of my topic is in order. In a nutshell: doujinshi and fansubs both constitute cases in which loose enforcement of copyright actually benefit both public domain and the economic and creative incentives for the copyright holder (which, though often diametrically opposed, form the dual purposes of copyright). From those cases, I seek to establish a definition for a class of "fan-based activities," which I then use to propose two addenda to the current four-factor test for fair use, as prescribed by 17 U.S.C. section 107(1)-(4). These addenda expand fair use to include overarchingly beneficial (though technically infringing) uses like doujinshi, fansubs, fan fiction, etc., thereby furthering the purposes of copyright while requiring no legislative change because the addenda aren't for the specific factors described by section 107, but for the courts who employ the four-factor test.


No comments: