I decided to do a big pre-holiday organization of my room, and while organizing the closet decided I could no longer deal with having my ties and belts fall off the hangars I was keeping them on.

Fortunately, I’d picked up a couple new dress shirts over the break (in the approved Mock Trial colors: white and white) and I had little bits of packaging lying all over the floor. In particular, these collar stiffeners:

looked like they would be well-suited to reuse.

The rack is dead simple—just a pair thumbtacks driven through stiffeners into the bottom of the shelf, but so far it’s doing a much better job than my previous system of keeping everything off the ground. I decided to hang my belts using thumbtacks as well. Not the most elegant solution, to be sure, but certainly effective (and most importantly, cheap).

The finished product:

As an added bonus, I was able to replace my rapidly-dwindling supply of thumbtacks with the pins that were holding the shirt in place:

All in all, not a bad use of a little extra packaging.

“[W]ith the birth of the Internet,” writes Lawrence Lessig, “[the] natural limit to the reach of the law has disappeared” (19). In the introduction to his book Free Culture, Lessig asserts that American copyright law has grown so out of control that it no longer benefits the public. He begins by establishing a clear distinction between commercial culture and “free culture”: works produced to be sold are commercial; free culture, as Lessig defines it, is everything else. “Reenacting scenes from plays or TV, participating in fan clubs, sharing music, making tapes,” “old men […] on street corners telling stories to kids,”—all these are crucial elements of public discourse, and belong outside of commercial control (7-8). The problem with copyright, Lessig argues, is that it erodes the line between the commercial and noncommercial, turning once-free acts of sharing and retelling into copyright violations punishible by law. But the collective “free” culture, author Jonathan Lethem argues in his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” is a necessary foundation for the creation of all art. By removing created works from the commons the available raw material is diminished, and the entire culture suffers. In his essay Lethem, like Lessig, explores the implications of an artistic heritage increasingly restrictive and commercialized.

When copyright was first written into the American Constitution, there was no need for publishers to worry about noncommercial duplication: the cost of operating a printing press made necessarily made any financially threatening duplication commercial in nature. But with photographs, phonographs, video cassettes, and most recently Internet, the act of copying has become easier and easier. Recent years have seen a proliferation of draconian software mechanisms designed to make copyrighted material impossible to distribute electronically, but these software locks are, at best, marginally effective. Copyright holders have instead turned to litigation to safeguard their intellectual property, and have pushed for an increasingly restrictive copyright to guarantee the continuing success of the current business model.

Such tactics are not without their casualties. Lessig gives examples of students sued for billions for creating software never intended to copy files at all; Lethem cites the case of a scholar prohibited from using any Disney-related images in a scholarly piece about Mickey Mouse (65). Stories like these abound. “The distinctive feature of modern American copyright law,” Lethem writes, “is its almost limitless bloating—its expansion in both scope and duration” (63) Both authors offer countless more examples of innocent consumers and well-meaning artists brought down in the name of intellectual property, and in the end make it clear that something is deeply wrong with the current model. But perhaps out of a fear of being deemed radical—Lethem is quick to assure his reader that he is not a Communist (65)—or even criminal—every time file sharing is discussed Lessig appears compelled to remind his readers “piracy is wrong” (63)—both authors acklowledge the failure of copyright but fail to fully explore its consequences. Although Lessig envisions a future in which the commercial culture swallows the free one completely, he concludes his book with a ringing endorsement of intellectual property law as a means of protecting the culture; Lethem, in turn, asserts that modern society cannot flourish without some kind of intellectual property.

What they ultimately advocate is instead a “thin copyright,” with a shorter term and more limited scope. Such a copyright, they argue, would give copyright holders just enought protection while allowing other artists just enough freedom to create derivative works. They speak, in extremely general terms, about some scope and duration under which all works which should “reasonably” be copyrighted are guaranteed protection and all “reasonable” public uses permitted. But as Lessig himself notes, the Internet destroys any notion of a “natural limit” on copyright law (19). Thin copyright will never be a solution, because the ideal copyright scheme that both Lethem and Lessig speculate about simply does not exist. Although he does not acknowledge it, Lessig’s vanishing line between free and commercial culture works both ways—because ordinary users can carry out noncommercial copying on a scale never before contemplated by the law, copyright owners must fear the individual just as much as the individual must fear the copyright owner.

This arms race between technology and copyright protection, as noted, has been a continued feature of the American copyright debate; what is new is that technology has effectively reached the point where users may make an infinite number of copies at no cost. It is relatively straightforward to count how many copies of a book have been published; considerably less so in the case of electronic documents. Our entire infrastructure relies on our ability to replicate various aspects of files elsewhere. Search engines store summaries of every website they search. Web browsers download from servers a copy of the web page being viewed; these copies remain on individual computers for weeks or even months at a time. Sending an email does not actually move it from one place to another; rather, one copy remains on the sender’s computer while another copy is sent to a mail server, which passes yet another copy to each recipient of the message: three copies, at a minimum. Thanks to modern technology, any electronic document, after being backed up, cached, reformatted, encrypted and emailed, will exist as an uncountable number of copies distributed in countless formats across countless computers, almost all without the consent or even knowledge of the author. Our technology requires this. There is no “natural limit” on the law because any limit inevitably restricts further progress.

In fact, copyright law already forbids many of the aforementioned cases. Every Google search, every website visited and every email forwarded creates copies; all computer technology relies on the fact that every day billions, perhaps tens of billions of copyright infringements go unprosecuted. Lethem writes that “Even as the law becomes more restrictive, technology is exposing those restrictions as bizzare and arbitrary” (63)—we have established a legal system completely at odds with our most important technology. We can never design a copyright for the Internet age, because is not just impractical, but impossible, to prevent the copying of digital information.
There is only one way out of this conflict. Rather than fighting against the inevitable, we should embrace it; rather than struggling endlessly to enforce it, we must abandon copyright altogether. There is no other way to preserve Lessig’s Creative Commons or guarantee Lethem his “ecstasy of influence.” Without copyright we will never risk punishing consumers for participating in the free culture. Without copyright, the impossible struggle to find a “natural limit” of the law, and all the conflict between technology and copyright, simply melt away. So copyright must go. This is the only conclusion which may be reasonably drawn from either text; the only solution, ultimately, that our technology will ever permit.

But what, then, about the rights of artists? Wouldn’t an abandonment of copyright violate their right to profit from their ideas? Both Lessig and Lethem insist that the only purpose of any intellectual property law is to ensure the continued production of creative works for the benefit of the general public. Lethem quotes the Constitution: “The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors but ‘to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts’ ” (68). The law never had any obligations to artists. In a culture still largely taken with a Romantic image of the Author as creator of beauty and meaning from nothing, and a society raised on the recording industry’s nursery stories of starving artists driven to tragic ends by acts of piracy, this is a difficult concept to comprehend. But there is no reason, intrinsically, that works should be given their current level of protection; no historical precedent that says every single person who appreciates a work should pay its author for that right. In both its original conception and contemporary understanding, even copyright was never meant to protect creators.

An artist could be forgiven for feeling outrage at the suggestion that she should not be paid for her work—why would people produce anything if they could not be guaranteed compensation or even credit for it? Why should we insist that our artists starve? Such a mindset is ultimately short-sighted. Our writers and musicians need not be condemned to poverty; indeed, the fact that we insist that artists be paid by each individual consumer of their work is simply because copyright law cannot envision any other motivation to create. But such motivation clearly exists. We have seen, historically and at present, that there are other ways of convincing people to produce. A complete description of how economies outside the realm of copyright function is beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s worth considering a few examples:

Large parts of the software industry, among them Swedish database distributor MySQL and Linux provider Red Hat profit from giving their product to consumers at no charge and then selling technical support. In China, Google’s music store distributes songs for free and shares advertising revenue with record labels. Author Cory Doctorow released the full contents of his first novel online (protected, incidentally, by Lessig’s Creative Commons license) because he understood that it would drive up sales of the book in stores. It has become common for authors of free software to set up PayPal “tip jars” where appreciative users can make donations, and the jars often fill up with surprising rapidity. Bands Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, likewise, have released albums for free in their entirety and allowed listners to pay what they deemed appropriate; in Radiohead’s case, it proved their most profitable release ever. (This, it should be noted, is hardly a new system: patrons have supported museums and opera houses for centuries on a similar model.) Artists and businessmen alike make money selling paper copies, live performances, advertising—what is evident that there are many ways of making money without depriving consumers of the freedom to enjoy works unrestricted.

Lethem gives us a name for these exchanges: “gift economies.” “Art that matters to us,” he writes, “is recieved as a gift is received” (66). Such exchanges are necessarily unequal, even when money is involved, because the value given is “uncommodifiable.” Lethem’s point is that such economies can and do coexist with commercial interactions (he gives the example of a visit to an art gallery); what he misses is that commerce need not even be visible to the consumer for gift-giving to be profitable. And in the end, a gift economy among published works might, like volunteer-only blood banks, result in creations of greater “purity and potency” (Lethem 66) than those produced by our market-driven culture.

Lessig envisions a future in which “Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and creating and cultivating culture” (9), and Lethem’s essay provides may be read as an artifact from such a future. Once we remove the protections of copyright, once we escape from Lethem’s “anxiety of influence,” we give license to perpetrate plagiarisms like his on a grand scale. The best pieces of our culture, recombined and reimagined: we are promised an almost inconceivable intellectual freedom, the right to use not just the works of long-dead authors but every piece of our culture. In Lethem’s gift economy, both production and consumption transcend commercial concerns and the free exchange of ideas is not seen as piracy but rather an act of supreme generosity. This is the promise of a culture without copyright, one in which everyone has unqualified access to the greatest works, and in which everyone, ultimately, profits.

References
[1] Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Available <http://www.free-culture.cc>.
[2] Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Harper’s Magazine February 2007: 59-71.

The topic of his talk was nominally a discussion of what he calls his “trilogy of anti-feminist lawsuits”; while he did spend a lot of time talking about these I thought it was fairly clear that he was here primarily to promote his larger agenda, which evidently has something to do with women’s campaign to enslave the minds of men and the armed uprising that men (lead, presumably, by Hollander himself) will form to reclaim what is theirs.

I imagine that many men (or “guys”, as Hollander would say; he talked about “guys” and “girls” throughout the talk) feel that feminism has gone to far, perhaps even a few to the same extent that Hollander himself does, so what I find much more interesting is the manner in which he proposes to address the issue. So, the lawsuits:

Complaint against the existence of a Women’s Studies program at Columbia University

This was the easiest of his arguments to break down. Hollander has two theories. The first, which he himself admits is extremely tenuous and will probably get thrown out in Court, is that feminism is a religion (evidenced by its practitioners belief in information unsupported by fact and their participation in self-detrimental behavior as a result of the religion, though he was unable to provide any serious examples of either), and thus teaching it in a school violates the Establishment Clause, which he quoted incorrectly. As Columbia already offers a number of religion classes, it is not obvious why finding feminism to be a religion would render it unteachable.

The second argument hinged on Title IX, which mandates equal opportunity for men and women in schools receiving federal funds. Because Columbia offers Women’s Studies, it must either also offer Men’s Studies or (preferably) abolish the Women’s Studies program. I pointed out to him that Columbia does not offer a women’s varsity football team without violating of Title IX, and by extension it should not be necessary for there to be Men’s Studies provided that men at Columbia receive equal educational opportunity across the board. He insisted that the existence of Women’s Studies means that men cannot receive an equal education because women derive more benefit from the class than men do, for instance in networking opportunities. I noted that networking was possible in other classes and asked if he could suggest any other benefits, to which he replied that there were many more that I could look up on his website at my leisure. Then (this was the most gratifying moment of the talk) the thoroughly-prepared members of the Women in Science Council, who hosted the talk, handed him a paper copy of the website and invited him to read that section to the audience. There were no other examples. I just remembered that he also mentioned the opportunity to interact with academics in the field of Men’s Studies, of whom there is (according to Hollander himself) one. Ultimately, I think it was made fairly clear that that argument had little substance.

Complaint Against the Violence Against Women Act

The second lawsuit asserts that the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) unconstitutionally allows alien women to acquire citizenship by making false accusations of violence against their husbands. In short, foreign women who divorce their husbands before becoming naturalized can retain the opportunity to become citizens if they have been abused. This (at least according to a woman in my NSOP group whose father is an immigration lawyer) is indeed true; what doesn’t check out is Hollander’s description of these proceedings. Apparently the accusations are made without the knowledge of the husband, who is given no opportunity to rebut them; that testimony is then entered into a government record which is supposedly accessible to anyone except the accused. I have been unable to find any evidence of this.

Complaint against “Ladies’ Nights”

This is the tricky one, but I still disagree. The bars are sued for letting women in free while making men pay, based on an early lawsuit in which two women successfully sued a club for denying them entry. I’m uncomfortable assuming that denial of entry is equivalent to differential pricing (Hollander makes absolutely no distinction between the two). While a friend pointed out to me that if Ladies’ Nights are acceptable than so is charging minorities extra (or discounted) rates to get in, I am resolutely in favor of affirmative action and consider this to be a necessary, if admittedly uncomfortable, side effect.

Finally

The reaction that Hollander’s talk ultimately provoked was not anger or indignation, but pity. He is a man who clearly feels trodden upon by the rest of society, who at some level obviously understands that he will never win any of his fights. While I don’t agree with what he says it is hard not to feel sympathy, if not empathy, for a man who has exhausted his fortune in a fight he cannot possibly win.

roydenhollander.com

It still hasn’t completely sunk in that at this time tomorrow I will no longer live in Piedmont. My bedroom will not be the room I’m sitting in right now but a closet somewhere in Manhattan–my bed will no longer my bed. From now on I will always be a guest in my own home.

As much as I railed against growing up in Pleasantville since I first realized that this place is not like most places, I am (finally) coming to appreciate how lucky I am to have grown up where I did. Sheltered–yes, but I sometimes a little shelter can be a good thing. Privileged, and I understand now that privilege is exactly that: not a reason to complain about being isolated from the real world or getting soft and spoiled, but a quality of life for which I should be genuinely grateful.

And the trees. This is a gorgeous city. My lasting memory of Piedmont will be of walking up the hill from the bus stop watching the sycamores burn green and gold as the sun sinks in to the bay. I will be higher up than the trees next year, looking out over a busy street rather than the green lawn I complained about so much. A beautiful view as well, but not the same.

I have been resolutely un-nostalgic about leaving this place, but that broke down at about 3:00 this morning as I was getting ready to make my final goodbyes. A little regret actually feels good; as I zip the last of my bags I’m finally able to admit to myself that I really love it here.

How it works

(Edit: rather embarrassingly, I seem to have accidentally deleted the source code for this project. However, you should be able to figure out everything you need from camshiftdemo.cpp in the samples/ folder. I apologize for the inconvenience.)

A brief explanation: I’m no longer using the library’s object-tracking algorithms. Instead, the mouse is just tied to the position of the “average” red pixel, with some trivial logic for throwing away outliers. Once the bounding box of the glove drops below a certain width, a click event is triggered.

(Edit: I simulate clicks and mouse motion with the XTest library.)

(The interaction is not normally this laggy, but istanbul clobbers performance when compositing is enabled. Disable compositing, you say? I need my exposé: the window buttons on a taskbar would be too small to use reliably. The system’s not perfect. Yet.)

Some thoughts:

The click interaction really needs to be improved. There’s just enough “wobble” between the camera and an unsteady hand to make it very difficult to click without dragging, and perspective makes the rotate gesture almost impossible to execute when not dead center.

In the same vein, it would be good if I could get the program to even roughly judge the distance of the glove to set the threshold for click events dynamically.

Once I get the kinks ironed out of the current setup I’m going to try moving up to two gloves, but I think I have a way to go first. Glove-in-air interaction will never be a good model for desktop use, but I could see this being useful in applications (games in particular) that require only gross input.

A few days ago I was looking for a v4l2 wrapper and stumbled across OpenCV. I’ve been hooked ever since. It’s an open computer vision library that provides a simple interface to a lot of sophisticated image processing.

As a little test of the system I hacked the sample blob tracking application to send signals to Compiz over DBus when the tracked object moves to the side of the screen. The tracking can be a little flaky so I needed a brightly colored object that would stand out against the background. We happened to have some tomatoes lying around in the kitchen, and thus was born CompizTomato.

As you can see from the video, the recognition is not perfect but certainly seems to get the job done. I can use it with only slightly diminished accuracy while sitting right in front of my computer against a busy background. Further testing has also revealed that I can also track my head and wobble from side to side, but it’s not quite as fun and considerably harder on the neck.

Without further adieu, the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD9ZMjy_rkE

Enter Shyloc. After the disastrous little project I called deX I decided it was about time I learned to do PHP properly, and my financial dilemma seemed like a perfect subject for the project. Shyloc has been slowly evolving over the course of lazy afternoons suddenly not occupied by swim team or Midrasha, and I think it’s about ready to be released to the world. I’ve actually been using it myself for a little while and have found it remarkably handy. It is a very simple application designed to do one thing well, in the style of the various 37signals apps.

Shyloc provides both a web interface and a twitter interface for recording new transactions, and provides a convenient way of recording immediately whenever you borrow or loan money. You can make your profile private or public, so you have the option of letting your friends check their current debts themselves. You can see my user page in action here.

Now it’s your turn to sign up - just go to shyloc.jacobandreas.net and hit register. There are probably a few kinks that need to get ironed out and possibly some pretty big bugs, so I would especially appreciate signups from people who have, you know, lots of angle brackets and backslashes in their names.

If you discover anything out of the ordinary, please contact me immediately at jda2129 [at] columbia [dot] edu. If anyone desperately wants to contribute I would also be happy to make the codebase available. I love feedback.

These instructions assume you are using the beta drivers 169.04 or better (available here). It’s possible that they will work for other driver sets as well, but I haven’t tested them.

nvidia-settings

This program a swiss army knife for all of your display settings. It is installed with the driver and invoked as nvidia-settings from a CLI or in System Tools > NVIDIA X Server Settings. Of particular use is the X Server Display Configuration Page, which allows you to set up your monitors in any arrangement you want.

None of the following instructions do anything that you can’t do using this tool, but it can be a hassle to have to page through all the settings when you just want to turn on another monitor, and I’ve found that it generates xorg.conf files unintelligently and can mess up some of your other system settings. However, when all else fails you can always use nvidia-settings.

XRandR

XRandR (X Resize and Rotate) is an X extension that allows you to dynamically change the size and orientation of your desktop. It can be used to make on-the-fly changes to your resolution and monitor setup.

TwinView

TwinView is NVIDIA’s system for allowing your desktop to span multiple monitors. TwinView is not Xinerama (the standard X “big desktop” solution), but it can pretend to be in order to pass correct information to your window manager.

Configuring xorg.conf

I have found a very simple xorg.conf setup to produce the most useful multimonitor configuration. To your “Device” section, simply add:

Option "TwinView" "1"
Option "TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-0"
Option "MetaModes" "CRT: nvidia-auto-select, DFP: nvidia-auto-select"


This tells the driver to:

1. Enable twinview
2. Make your laptop’s screen the primary monitor
3. Automatically choose the best screen configuration when X is started

With this setup, your desktop will automatically extend across onto an external monitor if one is connected, and keep your display limited to the laptop’s LCD if there is no other screen. With this setup, all you have to do is plug in your new screen and restart X to get a good TwinView configuration

Dynamic TwinView

If, for whatever reason, you don’t want to restart X every time you change display configurations, the driver also makes a “Dynamic TwinView” extension available. If you plug in the new monitor after X has started, the computer won’t know that the screen exists and so can’t extend on to it. There are two ways of forcing a re-scan of available displays: using the previously mentioned nvidia-settings tool, or by using a smaller command-line utility called nv-control-dvc that comes with the nvidia-settings-source package.

To get nv-control-dvc, download the nvidia-settings source package (’apt-get source nvidia-settings’ on Debian-based distros) and run ‘make’ in the samples directory. You can then make a launcher that calls ‘nv-control-dvc –dynamic-twinview’ that will give you access to new monitors whenever they are connected.

After a new monitor has been detected, you can enable it by opening your favorite resolution-changing program and selecting the resolution that is the combined size of the combined desktops.

A note for compiz-fusion users: this will incorrectly broadcast the size of your screen, and compiz will end up trying to maximize your windows across two desktops. You can manually set your screen configuration with gconf-editor in ‘/apps/compiz/general/screen0/options/outputs’.

Cloning output (”presentation mode”)

Compiz users can use the “clone” tool to mirror one display on another; at the moment I don’t know of any other way of doing this without setting the other screen’s position to “Clone” in nvidia-settings.