‘Small earthquake’ lives on

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In his wonderful memoirs Claud Cockburn, tells of his early days on the Times and of a competition that sub-editors ran to see who could come up with the most boring headline. The winner was “Small earthquake in Chile — not many dead.” This clipping from yesterday’s Irish Times shows that the art form is not yet dead.

I knew Claud and his wife Patricia towards the end of his life. They were amazingly kind and hospitable to me when I was a callow undergraduate in Cork. (They lived, in a wonderful kind of rackety splendour, outside Youghal.) When I confided to him that I was thinking of going in for journalism he said: “Just one piece of advice, dear boy: make sure you libel someone famous early in your career!“

Why J.K. Rowling is a hog

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Christopher Caldwell wrote a great FT column about J.K. Rowling’s legal action to resist fair use of her work. Excerpt:

The gravamen of Ms Rowling’s and Warner Brothers’ argument is clear. Mr Vander Ark’s book “is not a reference book or scholarly critique”, they claim, and it lacks “any originality or invention”. Ms Rowling has praised Mr Vander Ark’s website, but calls the book that will draw from it “wholesale theft”. Her attorneys note that “Ms Rowling has allowed fans and scholars wide latitude to comment on, critique, and even create ‘fan fiction’ and art based on her stories”. But of course, nobody in a free country requires authors’ permission to comment on or critique their work.

Lawyers at Stanford University Law School’s Fair Use Project, who are defending Mr Vander Ark pro bono, sought to show in three days of testimony this week that the Lexicon constitutes “fair use” of Ms Rowling’s work. It is a reference guide, of the sort that is familiar (and indispensable) to anyone who has taken a deeper interest in Balzac, Proust, Faulkner or Star Trek.

Ms Rowling “appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides and other non-academic research relating to her own fiction”, according to Mr Vander Ark’s lawyer. Joe Nocera, The New York Times business writer, puts it even more bluntly. He has called Ms Rowling a “copyright hog”.

Whether the lexicon violates “fair use” depends, according to US legal experts, on whether it is “transformative” or whether it just cribs from Ms Rowling’s plot and prose. Much of the testimony missed this issue.

Ms Rowling dwelt on her own plans to publish a Potter encyclopaedia, which is neither here nor there. Literary critics cannot be kept from writing about, let us say, the novels of Philip Roth on the grounds that Mr Roth swears he wants to publish a book called What My Novels Mean. The fact that Mr Vander Ark would profit from his lexicon is a red herring, too. Provided he is within the boundaries of “fair use”, there is nothing illegitimate about his profiting from his work, any more than it is illegitimate that book reviewers be paid if they cite the books they review.

Ms Rowling also demeaned the quality of Mr Vander Ark’s book, which is legally irrelevant. Apparently some puns she was particularly proud of, including a “double allusion” in the name Remus Lupin, went over his head. She came off as condescending (“It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand”), self-involved (the suit, she said, “has really decimated the demands of my creative work for the last month”) and mean.

Good, robust piece. Right on.

The Clinton/McCain Big Idea: a tax holiday for gas guzzlers

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I’ve seen a lot of stupid ideas in my time, but the agreement between Hillary Clinton and John McCain on how to deal with high energy prices takes the biscuit. Here’s Thomas Friedman’s view…

It is great to see that we Americans finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead the United States, it takes your breath away.

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: We Americans borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build the country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

[…]

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Stand by for Boris ‘Bertie’ Johnson’s announcement that the proposed higher Congesion Charge for SUVs is to be reduced.

Fortunately, Obama is still rational about this.

Microhoo: the verdict

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Rory Cellan-Jones’s verdict…

So Google played a blinder, Yahoo was more adept in defence than in previous games, and Microsoft bottled it in front of goal. But I’ve a sneaking suspicion that we may get a rematch before the year is out.

iDeath

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If, like me, you’ve ever wondered about the death wish which seems to afflict teenagers who walk and cycle everywhere with their iPods rendering them insensible to the outside world, then this poster by the New South Wales police may ring a bell.

Thirty years on…

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This morning’s Observer column marking the 30th anniversary of Gary Thuerk’s famous email mistake.

Looked at from the perspective of today, when my spam filter is reporting that it has blocked 5,700 messages in the last month, Thuerk’s unsolicited email seems touchingly innocent. For one thing it actually imparts some useful and interesting information.

If I had been an Arpanet researcher on the west coast in 1978, I would have been genuinely interested to learn that the network’s protocols had been incorporated in the operating systems of a major vendor. In that sense, it provides a stark contrast with the invitations to purchase penis-extending drugs, fake Rolexes and mining shares which nowadays clog my spam filter. And it’s sobering to see how such pernicious weeds can grow from such an innocuous beginning…

Clinton fantasies

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Timothy Noah doesn’t think Hillary Clinton can win the nomination. Here’s why.

Please, let’s stop pretending there’s much suspense about who the nominee will be. As an arithmecrat, I will not consider anyone the winner until a candidate achieves 2,025 delegates. But neither am I obliged to believe Hillary Clinton has a plausible shot. She doesn’t.

His arithmetic is interesting — and plausible.

Bertie Wooster elected!

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Yep. He’s London’s new Mayor. And all the while he thought he was running for the Wine-Tasting Committee of the Drones Club. Much public entertainment lies ahead.

Bad news for the Supreme Leader, though. The game’s over. And it doesn’t have all that much to do with Gordon Brown’s competence/incompetence. It’s simply that Labour’s time is up. Three reasons for this:

  • Events, dear boy, events: the long boom is over; house prices are on their way down; negative equity beckons; the feel-good factor has evaporated.
  • All governments run out of steam. I had dinner recently with a senior civil servant. I asked him what the atmosphere is like in Whitehall. He said that it felt like the beginning of the end — that the government had basically run out of ideas, that ministers were exhausted and becoming demoralised.
  • The great British electorate isn’t very interested in politics: Labour has been in power so long that it’s become boring. The man on the Clapham omnibus thinks it’s time for a change. It’s nothing to do with a belief that Cameron & Co are wonderful, or even competent. There’s no evidence yet that they could run a whelk stall. Their main merit is just that they’re not Harriet Harman/Gordon Brown/Jack Straw/Jacqui Smith/Hazel Blears…