Author: Benjamin Mako Hill

A week or so ago, I got my copy of 2002. 2002 is a collaboratively authored narrative 2002 world long palindrome. In terms of raw length, it passed George Perec’s 1500+ word palindrome by quite a margin. My French really isn’t up to the task of making a serious evaluation of Perec’s work but my sense is that the quality of his palindrome is, on the whole, a bit better. That said, 2002 is in English and has some really fantastic moments, tells a largely coherent story and and is a 2002 word long palindrome.

You can read the palindrome online at the publisher’s website. You also buy the very small but beautifully illustrated book for $16. I did and was pleased when it arrived in a floppy disk mailer.

There is a cute little set of computer (even UNIX) references in there I think my audience might appreciate:

Type it, Bob; abuse vi and—"Abracadabra! Cabala!" Nitro terminal, .EXEs. Bob, nose Mandelbrot codes! A coder.

Here is the middle and the point of symmetry in the story. The X in "sexes" marks the exact middle. This bit is also about sex, which is fun:

Job? Mocha dude? Non! No. Works at node, wades on. Idée fixe snows Bob’s ass all under.

Pure …

Eligible Babs: flesh self’s eros revolts, rubs. Babs, looted under Bob, seXes Bob. Red, nude tools. Babs: "Burst, lover! Sores. Flesh self’s Babel big. I leer up." Red, null ass, as Bob’s won sex: "I feed; I nosed awe!" (Don’t ask.) Row on, none dud. Ah! Combo joy.

I highly recommend the whole thing.

When I was in ninth grade, I somehow managed to pick up a copy of the Encyclopedia of Usual Sex Practices on a school field trip. I can’t remember where the field trip took us. The book has just about everything in there. It has the standard "unusual" practices like bestiality and pedophilia and a few that are not unusual at all like masturbation. It also had loads of things you have never imagined involving power tools, stretching, burning, costumes and much, much more. Unfortunately the definitions were often complete with little line drawings for those that did not care to use their imagination.

It’s not completely unlike browsing through certain subsections of USENET although the form makes it accessible to a larger audience. In any case, I got tired of the book pretty quickly but because the book was a real hit at parties, I kept it around and even took it to college with me.

When I moved back to Seattle from college, I packed everything in six large duffle bags. My sister and my mother flew out from Seattle to my graduation with only carry-on bags. The idea was that we would each take 2 checked bags on the airplane and I could avoid having to pay to get my stuff shipped cross-country. Having packed up everything, a friend, who was also packing up their stuff and had borrowed the book, came by to return the encyclopedia. Having already shipped my books that week before, I opened a large duffle bag containing my stereo and some computer parts, wrapped in foam and my bedding, stuck the book directly on top of the blankets and zipped the bag back up.

The next day we split up the bags randomly at the airport and my mother took bag with the stereo. Our flight left from Providence which meant that the security teams would scan the checked baggage in the main lobby of the airport right in front of the check-in counters before loading it on the planes. Seeing the amplifier on the X-Ray, the security staff decided that they needed to open up the bag. They asked who owned the bag and my mother raised her hand. We then all watched them as they unzipped the bag revealing the Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices delicately placed — apparently by my mother — on top of a blanket. The security agent read the title and you should see his eyes get large. Not so discretely, he called over the other security workers. The looked at the book, looked at my mother, and then looked at the book again to reconfirm. My mother, remembering how I packed the book the night before, turned red and looked the other direction.

They zipped the bag up again without moving or examining a thing inside and sent us all on our way.

Mika hates admitting she was wrong or beaten. She also hates failure. Who doesn’t? Maybe the only other thing she really hates is flying on airplanes. While I don’t particularly enjoy being squashed in like a sardine in any situation, I’ve never minded flying in particular and Mika and I have had a number of good-natured arguments about her fear of flying. Since she makes a number of international and transcontinental flights each year, it’s a pretty annoying fear.

When I found Flying Without Fear by Duane Brown for a dollar, I snatched it up and then pressured Mika until she started to read it.

Unfortunately, the second page of the book included this paragraph:

If you are trying to overcome your fear because [somebody] is pressuring you to do so, as opposed to wanting to rid yourself of a burdensome fear, you are likely to fail. Why? Because in your heart you believe that airplanes are unsafe. Moreover, you have probably been in arguments with the person or persons who are pressuring you, and to overcome your fear would be to admit that you are wrong and perhaps have been wrong for a long time.

Damn. Thwarted.

In the last two months, I’m managed to pick up three review copies of books on IP at the Strand. Review copies are basically available for any books that you might see reviewed in places like the New York Book Review and are always published by big mass-market (i.e., non-academic) publishing houses. The first two that I got to were Kembrew McLeod’s Freedom of Expression and David Bollier’s Brand Name Bullies. Both were alright. I like Bollier’s much more and would recommend strongly although it was not a whole lot of new information for me.

Having heard that Knopf had put out a more entertainment and publishing industry friendly book, I descended into Strand’s basement and picked up a review copy of Pat Choate’s Hot Property: The Stealing of Information In an Age of Globalization. Choate is a economist and D.C. think-tanker who is probably most well known for writing a handful of books with Ross Perot and running as his V.P. in 1996.

The book’s description of the German patent strategy before, during, and after the second world war and how that model is being applied by other countries today was both well written and illuminating as were other parts of the book. One chapter pulled heavily from Drahos and Braithwaite’s Information Feudalism which I am convinced is the best and most underappreciated book on IP written in years.

Like Perot, Choate’s position is not as simple as high-protectionist or low-protectionist — right or left. On the one hand, he cries out about how IP piracy, especially on an international scale, is threatening our ways of life and our lives themselves in some cases. He claims that strong IP protection and iron-fist enforcement is the only way out. On the other hand, he is very critical about the role of large corporations in manipulating IP to screw over the little guys.

Basically, he seems to have listened to everything that the industry says about IP promoting art and science, Romantic conceptions of authorship, stories of the self-made inventor working through the patent system and, while critical of the way that corporates are abusing this system, Choate completely buys into the underlying arguments that the industry has create and employs to prop up their behavior. In this sense, I think Choate is well intentioned but a bit naive.

If naivete was Hot Property’s greatest sin, it might be excusable. It’s not. Particularly in the introduction, the way that Choate argues for stronger IP enforcement (although notably, not really for strong IP protection) is through scaremongering that, while justified in some cases, degenerates into tactics that are unnecessary and in some cases dishonest.

In one section, Choate talks about baby formula and about how counterfeit baby formula is putting our children at risk. He lists quite a few stories. The most egregious of these involved counterfeiters taking normal or substandard dairy-based formula and putting labels on it for a more expensive brand of dairy-free powder. The effect of this formula on lactose intolerant infants could be sickness or worse. Choate implies that we risk paying the price for trademark infringement with our children’s lives.

While Choate is correct that the relabeling of this formula is an act of counterfeiting and trademark infringement, there’s also a lot of other things wrong and criminal with it. Cleary, the actions of these counterfeiters constitutes fraud. It probably also boils down to criminal neglect, reckless endangerment, and potentially to attempted or actual homicide. We do not need trademark law to prosecute these sorts of crimes except it to add it the end of a long list of other, more egregious, charges. If punishment for trademark infringement is the best or only way to punish people who lie to make a buck and end up killing our children, our legal system has bigger problems than weak IP protection. While the presentation of the baby food issue is misguided, I do not think that it is necessarily dishonest.

However, Choate crossed that line with the way he conflated trademark infringement with other types of business fraud to basically use scaremongering to drive his point home. Choate points out that one frequent cause of plane crashes is "bogus parts." One would imagine that he would have examples of trademark violations at the root of these parts but these examples are nowhere to be found. Instead, he lists a handful of examples of companies who misrepresent the quality or age of their own parts. Choate describes how companies have sold cable to airlines that they knew were substandard or hoses that companies knew would deteriorate under high pressure.

These companies cannot infringing on their own trademark and they are not infringing on anyone else’s. They are acting fraudulently and and are putting people’s lives in danger in the process. This is already criminal and it has absolutely nothing to do with IP. Choate ends his sections on airplanes with this:

Now imagine this. You are on an airplane six or seven miles up in the sky with your seat reclined, happily reading a book or watching a movie, when the pilot comes on the loudspeaker and announces:

You attention please. We are experiencing some flight difficulties because (a) one of the cables needed to the fly the plane has snapped; (b) an essential [fuel, oil, hydraulic] hose has ruptured; or (c) a key structural part has just broken in two. Our flight crew will help you prepare for an emergency landing. Please stay calm.

Then, an emergency oxygen mask drops from the ceiling and you just hope that yours is not one of those contaminated hoses sold by Air-Pro. At such a moment, pirating, counterfeiting and bogus goods take on an entirely new importance.

None of the example he alluded in that passage had anything to do with pirated or counterfeit goods and the bogus goods had nothing to do with IP violations of any sort. In the context of a call for IP enforcement and protection, this is sneaky, dishonest, and wrong.

Choate may have some good points. However, packaged and presented as disengeniously as they are here, it was hard for me to get past the first chapter..