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One more thing. To the person who dies before the copyright expires it is certainly perpetual.

Since copyright extends beyond one lifetime then such perpetuity is guaranteed for the vast majority of works and the vast majority of people. Thus, the original words "for limited times" no longer really apply. That means that in practice, the current law is unconstitutional.

Everyone (with time to read a 300-page book) needs to read this life-changing book containing the most comprehensive treatment of intellectual property out there: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/papers/imbookfinalall.pdf

I used to think copyrights were beneficial before I read it. Now it's clear they are obsolete.

the slippery slope doesn't exist. in any argument. on any topic.

Yes it does. Or do you actually think the PATRIOT Act is only used against "terrorists"?

... these.

OMeta: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/
The more recent OMeta 2.0: http://jarrett.cs.ucla.edu/ometa-js/
And, of course, COLA - http://piumarta.com/software/cola/

Self-sustainment, anyone? ;-)
One more link: http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/s3/

... these.

OMeta: http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~awarth/ometa/
The more recent OMeta 2.0: http://jarrett.cs.ucla.edu/ometa-js/
And, of course, COLA - http://piumarta.com/software/cola/

Self-sustainment, anyone? ;-)
One more link: http://www.swa.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/s3/

Here's something interesting:
http://www.math.ucla.edu/~anderson/JAVAclass/JavaInterface/JavaInterface.html

I've never considered combining this before, but now it seems like it could be a good idea.

A UCLA study shows that people are willing to click on anything.

The point about efficiency in my previous post (parent) is incorrect!

Correction: Pebble-bed reactors have good thermal efficiencies.

At first I read this paper in which they seem to be working with pebbles at 900 C, and I had thought "that's barely lukewarm by powerplant standards."

The problem is I'd been thinking in Fahrenheit, American that I am. We're talking about 1600 F, which is pretty darn hot. Hotter, in fact, than combustion plants, which typically run at about 1000 to 1200 F.

So pebble-bed reactors have higher thermal efficiencies!

That only leaves the waste-management issue, which pebble-beds exacerbate. I'll need to think about this a bit more now before I form an opinion.

From: A Measure of Media Bias
Tim Groseclose
Department of Political Science
UCLA
Jeff Milyo
Department of Economics
University of Missouri
December 2004

unless the factors (birthday, clear sky..) are correlated to the explanatory variables they are just noise. something behaves deterministically if somebody can (predict)determine the result in advance. here is an interesting book about propability and (theory of) science: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/site/1575863332.html .it is also viewable online. don't forget that if you are correct then it simply is not possible to make predictions in this context and this is emirically observable. not in this special case since they are talking about counterfactuals but the principle remains the same. for a treatment of counterfactuals see http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/ .

Anyone wanting to inform themselves about he huge costs of IP laws would do worse than to read this book. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

During the period of Watt's patents the U.K. added about 750 horsepower of steam engines per year. In the thirty years following Watt's patents, additional horsepower was added at a rate of more than 4,000 per year. Moreover, the fuel efficiency of steam engines changed little during the period of Watt's patent; while between 1810 and 1835 it is estimated to have increased by a factor of five.

In the 70's, the growth in the number of transistor on an integrated circuit averaged only 1000 per year, while the thirty years after that, the average growth per year was 333 million per year. Therefore the patent process needs to be reformed.

I am actually in favor or patent reform, but I am just giving my honest feedback on the first page of the book you referenced. Tossing out meaningless statistics hurt the credibility of the argument.

Anyone wanting to inform themselves about he huge costs of IP laws would do worse than to read this book. http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm

The story about how the patents on parts of the steam engine held back the industrial revolution by 30 years is one that needs to be told - often.

Tim Josling

"In order to get a patent in something, you need to fully disclose how it works and the best way to make and use it."

And these ideas are then actually utilized by using them in products in the world, I'm sure? Oh wait, they aren't, because they're now patented. The real way ideas are shared is to actually use and share them alongside their products, products which will be much more common when there are no restrictions. If patents didn't exist, no one would feel threatened that they might violate a patent, and inventors would be truly free to both invent and then share their product. The entire world (or at leas those countries stupid enough to adopt patent systems) wouldn't be subject to the prices and control of a single company, but could actually utilize and share an idea. Ideas which are going to exist, and will exist more rapidly without a patent system, so that ideas truly get shared. When was the last time you saw a video on YouTube of a patent? Instead it's "Oh, yay, an idea we'll never see or get to use for a few decades because it's been patented so it's completely controlled and restricted by some monopoly." Everyone would "share in the discovery" if they actually had access and could freely share and use ideas without worrying about patents.

"they are there to reward the first person to PUBLISH something"

Their ideas will get out much sooner if they don't have to go ask a lawyer to search for them through the millions of patents to try to determine if their idea is "free" to actually use first. Patents slow the adoption of new ideas and thus slow the advancements that are based on those ideas by preventing them from being placed into the wild quickly. Even if they are found in the wild to a degree, they cannot be improved upon because they are controlled, and they certainly won't be as common as they could be so that they can be utilized properly. Companies can't sit on ideas when those ideas can be actually used by competing companies and placed into products, so companies in the absence of patents will actually want to use ideas and be first to market with them unlike the current system. In other words, as soon as products and inventions aren't controlled by big mega-corps, everyone will be able to create and utilize them, allowing everyone to have them, and making the quality of life better for everyone quickly, in turn allowing for more free time, and more time to find other problems and to come up with ways to solve them. Patents have put many countries of the world at least 30 years behind in technology, but there's no way to know for sure just how bad it has been.

I agree that the Industrial Revolution, for example, was put behind due to patents. Read Against Intellectual Monopoly if you're interested in these and other arguments against patents.

"And at the end of the 20 (21) years, the entirety of your invention is dedicated to the public."

You hit the problem right on the head. Making the world wait around for twenty years on someone's patent that would have and was thought of by a hundred or more others around the time, earlier, or later, slows technological progress and innovation for many of the reasons I've already presented. The problem is you're making them wait for twenty years. What all this comes down to is would problems be solved if patents didn't exist? Yes, I think there's a lot of proof that technology would move much more rapidly. One historical proof of such is how quickly software progress occurred before patents were added to the mix. What's even more amusing is that these patents aren't even used, because so many companies violate so many other companies patents that it's like a cold war in which no one fires on the other because they each have dirt on one another. They do, however, threaten the little software developers who aren't "part" of these big companies.

P

For anyone interested, here's the email that I received from the author:

Hi John,

Thanks for your message. I was the principle author of the press release, so I will try to answer your question. I should note that the press release was reviewed by numerous scientists. But it was edited at NASA headquarters before it was made public.

In my original draft, I purposefully avoided making the statement that the GRB was 7.5 billion light-years from Earth, because as your message implies, it is problematic to express specific distances when one is talking about events that happened in the very distant past, because the universe is rapidly expanding. Such is the case when trying to express a "distance" to GRB 080319B.

The most relevant direct "distance" measurement is the object's redshift, which was measured to be 0.94. As the press release explained, this measurement tells astronomers how much the GRB's light was "stretched" by cosmic expansion. I used this popular website from a renowned UCLA cosmologist to convert the object's redshift to a light-travel time:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html

When I entered the redshift and the cosmological parameters based on the latest results from the WMAP satellite and large-scale galaxy surveys, the calculator gave me a light-travel time of 7.5 billion years. In other words, the light from this GRB was emitted 7.5 billion years ago.
But at the time the burst occurred, Earth didn't even exist, so how does one express a "distance" between one object and another object that does not exist? In addition, 7.5 billion years ago, the visible universe was a much smaller place than it is now, because cosmic expansion has made the universe much bigger during those intervening 7.5 billion years. The GRB's host galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy would have been much closer back then than they are today (please note that the Milky Way would have been a lot different back then, but it undoubtedly existed at that time). In fact, back then, the two galaxies would have been much closer than 7.5 billion light-years. And yet because of cosmic expansion, the two galaxies are currently much farther apart than 7.5 billion light-years. So there really is not an ideal way to express such a huge distance.

In my opinion, the best way to express such a huge distance in a rapidly expanding universe at the level of a popular audience is to express distances in terms of light-travel time, which is what I did in the original draft of the press release. And because our best current measurements suggest that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, an event taking place 7.5 billion years ago is roughly halfway across the visible universe. Some of the scientists at NASA probably felt that it was important to specify a distance in a unit of distance rather than in a unit of time, so they translated the light travel time to a distance in light-years. I realize this is imprecise from a strict scientific perspective, but the NASA scientists concluded that there is no better way to express it, and I cannot think of a better way to do it.

The problem, of course, is that the most precise way to express the distance is to state the redshift, which I did in the press release. Unfortunately, the term "redshift" has little meaning to the media and public, and the general public does not have the familiarity with astronomical terminology to be able to translate a redshift of 0.94 into a distance that has any deep meaning.

Best regards,

Robert Naeye, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Go read the thread on NANOG. Or read the timeline here: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/pakistan_hijacks_youtube_1.shtml

The way this happened is the result of a fundamental weakness in BGP. A more specific prefix will trump a less specific one, so anyone who has a valid peer can advertise a more specific route and hijack IP space. This is frequently used by Cybercriminals to squat on unused IP space in larger netblocks.

There have been proposals to address this issue for some time. Maybe, now that a major site has fallen victim, something will actually be done about it.

Of course, we could solve the problem the way it was when the Internet was first designed: only allow trusted entities to connect at all. IMNSHO, if the Islamic world don't want to be in the 21st century, that's their choice, but they can't have their cake and eat it too. Unless and until they agree to the basic principles of the Internet: freedom of association and speech, they shouldn't be allowed to connect at all.

This was discussed yesterday, but somehow the mods didn't control the discussion degenerating into a debate about circumcision.

I doubt that long term studies have been completed. It doesn't seem like ZIFs are extremely new, this process for creating them and this particular variation are new. That said, several other sources provide better information than the CBC link and speak directly to your question. The CBC article states in first paragraph: "the crystals are non-toxic and would require little extra energy from a power plant."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080214144344.htm/ Suggests that this looks much cleaner than existing state of the art:

Currently, the process of capturing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants involves the use of toxic materials and requires 20 to 30 percent of the plant's energy output, Yaghi said. By contrast, ZIFs can pluck carbon dioxide from other gases that are emitted and can store five times more carbon dioxide than the porous carbon materials that represent the current state-of-art.

Yaghi's initial idea of what to do with the material afterwards appears to involve geologic storage.

It's also always useful to hunt down the primary source. I think this PDF is it (I only skimmed).

From the original article at UCLA "synthesized 25 ZIF crystal structures and demonstrated that three of them have high selectivity for capturing carbon dioxide (ZIF-68, ZIF-69, ZIF-70)."

Would someone please tell me how we extrapolate the CO2 capture from 3 crystal structures to an entire liter of crystals and can accurately predict an 83-to-1 capture ratio? The math is never that simple in real applications.

As J. B. S. Haldane, himself a communist, noted in his 1928 essay On Being the Right Size, you can't do that. It simply doesn't scale. It's the bubble sort of economic theories.

Our government is completely fucking out of control in the United States.

I wonder if that judge is living inside the new Lakota Nation?
If so his bullshit fucking (fuck the common sense) laws no longer apply.

http://users.dma.ucla.edu/~estevancarlos/images/lakotanation.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_Nation

You can always pickup a jiggit at http://www.thesheepmarket.com/.

About : http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work/thesheepmarket/
Created with : http://www.processing.org/, http://www.mturk.com/mturk/

Indeed. See Haldane's classic essay On Being the Right Size .

This is at least a decade old, was published in 2000 (I like the breathless "unearthed today", like it was some sort of secret -- the original Hancock paper is listed as having 29 cites) and has rather obvious applications for marketing, billing and security.

Yup. For anybody curious, here's the (slightly garbled) research abstract for the paper published in 2000:

Hancock: a language for extracting signatures from data streams

Massive transaction streams present a number of opportu
nities for data mining techniques Transactions might rep
resent calls on a telephone network commercial credit card
purchases stock market trades or HTTP requests to a web
server While historically such data have been collected for
billing or security purposes they are now being used to dis
cover how customers or their intermediaries called transac
tors use the underlying services
For several years we have computed evolving proles called
signatures of the transactors in large data streams using
handwritten C code The signature for each transactor cap
tures the salient features of his transactions through time
Programs for processing signatures must be highly opti
mized because of the size of the data stream several gi
gabytes per day and the number of signatures to maintain
hundreds of millions C programs to compute signatures
often sacriced readability for performance Consequently
they are dicult to verify and maintain
Hancock is a domainspecic language created to express
computationally ecient signature programs cleanly In this
paper we describe the obstacles to computing signatures
from massive streams and explain how Hancock addresses
these problems For expository purposes we present Han
cock using a running example from the telecommunications
industry however the language itself is general and applies
equally well to other data sources

Very nice. One suggestion: rather than have each side's dots fall off at the bottom of the opposite side, how about matching up serving requests with the originating referral so that the dots go to the corresponding spot on the right? Also, if you're not familiar with Flight Patterns it's along the same lines. Borrowing from that, it'd be quite interesting to show a 2D map arranged in a hub and spoke model with the center being the site(s) and the spokes representing the top 10 (or 20... configurable) referring sites with a special case for search engines.

Well, perhaps I'll have to learn Ruby and hack this myself. The script certainly looks clean enough.

"There is an issue of terminological accuracy here that needs clarification. The terms orthogonal and uncorrelated (or nonorthogonal and correlated) are used as if they were interchangeable. While this is true if the variables or vectors involved are centered (have mean 0), it is not true in the general case. Formally, two vectors are orthogonal if their scalar product (or inner product) is 0. They are uncorrelated if the scalar product of their centered (mean corrected) forms is 0. All four logical possibilities of these two designations are possible. That is, two vectors can be both orthogonal and uncorrelated, orthogonal but correlated, nonorthogonal but uncorrelated, or nonorthogonal and correlated. Only if the variables or vectors with which one is dealing are by definition mean corrected or centered are the two terms interchangeable. For this reason, the way the terms have been used in this article is at best sloppy and technically simply incorrect." ( http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/spss/library/ssnoadd.htm )

http://users.rcn.com/rathbone/lw70-75c.htm , as an aid to understand the intrinsics of language.

CC.

The problem with block downcoverters is that that is not truly a software radio and limits flexibility immediately, by reducing the spectrum available. This is the limiting factor of an modern day SDR system. Without the block downcoverters though it's hard to keep unwanted signals out (CDMA with a higher signal power then WiFi for example). But with modern day hardware and signal processing capabilities a novel prefilter can be designed, say with 20MHz tuning blocks that are to be completely digitized by an ADC (at a reasonable amount of power, say 10uW).

If you want some real technical info on SDR, check out Dr. Abidi's paper
The Path to the Software-Defined Radio
http://www.ee.ucla.edu/faculty/papers/abidi_JSSC_may2007.pdf [pdf]

I'm surprised that no one has seen/mentioned the work Donald Shoup at UCLA has done covering the very high societal costs associated with free parking. I'm further surprised (although I guess I shouldn't be) that the "progressive" Apple is pushing for free parking given the conclusive evidence that free parking is very harmful to the environment, increases traffic, and wastes everyone's time.

the high cost of free parking in the SFGate. The research behind this article can be found on the professor's UCLA page.

Well, when it comes to small footprint, it's hard to beat Virgil. A complete object-oriented and safe language that compiles down to machine code for microcontrollers with only a few bytes of RAM!

Unfortunately, an N95 mask isn't going to help: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/n95masks.html

If galaxies are close enough, they can collide. Generally, a gravitationally bound system will resist the Hubble expansion (which is why our solar system and galaxy are not expanding at the rate the universe does). Only when the bodies are spread far apart and not gravitationally bound to each other does the universe's expansion dominate. See this FAQ and this and this for details.

Completely true. Here's one shining example. http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/2007/mar/01/ev olution_professor/

It could be productive to think of situations which would cause us to say the thing is broken. Some ideas come to mind: ...
      . If whole industries, scientific progress, or the productivity and well-being of a society can be held up by a patent


Various historians have written about how this has been true since the early days of the patent system. Using our current terminology, the patent system was broken by design. Its supporters always claim that patents encourage improved technology, but history says that patents primarily impede advances. In many cases, this doesn't even benefit the patent holders. Thus, in Levine's first example, James Watt spent most of his life in court, suing people. He made very little money from his big invention, until after his patents ran out, and only then did he settle down to building and selling the steam engines that eventually made him rather wealthy. His patents effectively set back the development of steam transport by several decades.

How can we improve our current system or build a new one which won't have these problems?

Considering that we've had this sort of problem with patents from the start, it doesn't seem likely that we can fix the problems. If we could, you'd think that some country would have stumbled onto the solution by now.

The only approach that seems to have helped at all is the compulsory licensing system that many countries use with copyright. This involves taking control of the "invention" away from the patent/copyright owner, and decreeing that anyone can use it for a standard, fixed license fee. Needless to say, the owners of such "Intellectual Property Rights" don't agree with this, though history shows that it seems to be about the only thing that takes the profits away from the lawyers and gives them to someone else. Of course, the "someone else" is usually a corporation, not the actual inventor, but that's another topic that we could flame to death in another thread. ;-)

The study is talking about probabilistic causation.

Read on wikipedia about regression, gaussian distribution (central limit theorem) and explained variance and it should become clearer.

A good book about causal modelling is: http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/

It's not like we experience determinism in the real world. here are two of the many papers patrick suppes wrote on this topic:
http://suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/article.html?id= 300 about indeterminism
http://suppes-corpus.stanford.edu/article.html?id= 228 about causal analysis

gcc 2.96 was just under a million lines of code -- I've no idea how big gcc 4.2.1 is. In any event, if Microsoft (or whomever) were to claim that gcc 4.2.1 had a back door (here's a famous hypothetical (?) example) but not give any details, then it would be difficult (i.e. very time consuming) for somebody (knowledgeable) to go over all million+ lines of code to certify that it does not exist.

Having source helps take the bite out of FUD, yes, but it doesn't remove it completely. Merely having the code is not enough -- you need to have the skills to understand the code, and the time to properly analyze it. Either that, or you need to trust somebody else to do this for you.

So, yes, I have the source code for gcc. I believe that it has been eyeballed by dozens (hundreds?) of people way smarter than I am, looking for problems. Most of these people probably report their problems to the maintainers, who I assume fix them when they're serious enough. A few are bad guys, looking for holes to exploit. (Well, gcc probably isn't nearly as exploitable as some daemon like Apache, but there are ways it can be abused.) In any event, merely having the source isn't enough to prove to you that it's good (efficient, secure, reliable, not patent encumbered, not copyright infringing, etc.) code. You have to actually look, and know what you're looking at -- and very few users actually do this.

Correct, it's not anything that actually helps everyone, it's something that helps monopolies, that helps the few squeeze even more money from the already heavily-overtaxed populace. I'd like to see the whole thing done away with, and alternate systems take it's place, even ones that may naturally develop, like companies working together to get a good product *into market* to make money. Competition! Amazing concept!

At the VERY least, since throwing it out would send monopolies into convulsions so it'll never happen since they control the government, the patent system reform that needs to be made is one that forces technology to *enter* the marketplace. So many patents are bought up by big industries and sat on because their release would actually better technology for the world and make things *cheaper*, thus taking away their revenue stream. Industries don't WANT many technologies from getting to you, the consumer. You have no clue all the things you don't have right now because technology has been withheld from you. Unfortunately, we'll never know all the things we could have had those technologies gotten out, gotten used by everyone, so that new ideas *could* be thought of to build upon and better those technologies.

http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual /against.htm/ is an interesting read, it's an interesting argument that patents prevented the industrial revolution from occurring for a few decades.

Geezuus, it's not like OpenMOSIX is unusable as is, or that there aren't alternatives. For that matter, while coding one's own cluster controller isn't trivial, it isn't string theory either. Our shop has released (eg. given away) two schedulers, and we've got another that's stayed in house. When I've strolled the booths at the SuperComputing conference, it seems that every other university is giving away their own cluster controller.

OpenMOSIX is neat, but it ain't the end all be all, and it's been my experience that any shop that's serious about running a cluster manages to find/attract someone with the chops to get it up and running. Can just any elementary school pull one together for "free"? Maybe not. For them, there's Pooch or AppleSeed.

"Now they can just insert an item into your credit file, wait until you are denied employment/that mortgage/security clearance/etc/etc and know that you will pay up because they basically have you by the balls."

No they don't

Here's a "kids" page, that addresses the magnetic field of Mars (and Venus). As Venus also has very little magnetic field, perhaps I'm wrong about that whole stripping thing. This site seems to be saying that it's a combination of Mars' low gravity and weak magnetic field. Keep in mind that Titan (with its weak gravity) also has an atmosphere. OTOH, Mercury with a very strong magnetic field does not have an atmosphere. Just some rambling thoughts.

Apparently an interally generated magnetosphere is not required to for a planet to have a significant atmosphere. Venus does not have a magnetosphere, yet it has a very dense atmosphere. http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/pap ers/venus_mag/

For an interesting essay on the topic, read Boldrin & Levine: Against Intellectual Monopoly. Actually, just read the first couple of pages, describing the effects of James Watt's patent had on the development of steam engines in the late 1700s. It seems that his rabid enforcement of his patent pretty much blocked all further progress in the technology until his patent ran out in 1800. He didn't even profit from it himself until after his patent ran out, when he switched from patent enforcement to steam-engine manufacturing. And his own development was blocked by others' patents on other parts of the mechanism.

There's plenty of historical evidence that things like patents and copyrights are primarily a barrier to progress, unless the government steps in a second time and decrees some sort of mandatory licensing. (But this doesn't have much effect on the doctrinaire arguments that we read here so often. ;-)

I wrote a law review article on this here: http://www.eplaw.us/data/ComputerSecurityPublicati ons.pdf

My analysis was pretty economics-based, if I remember correctly (it was published in 2002).

The best First Amendment-side analysis was done by Eugene Volokh. Gene's paper considered much broader issues than our own paper.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/facilitating.pdf
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/facilitatingshorter .pdf

His paper, if I remember correctly, would expand liability further than I would, but he's a UCLA law prof and I'm a class action attorney, so draw your own conclusions.

I wrote a law review article on this here: http://www.eplaw.us/data/ComputerSecurityPublicati ons.pdf

My analysis was pretty economics-based, if I remember correctly (it was published in 2002).

The best First Amendment-side analysis was done by Eugene Volokh. Gene's paper considered much broader issues than our own paper.
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/facilitating.pdf
http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/facilitatingshorter .pdf

His paper, if I remember correctly, would expand liability further than I would, but he's a UCLA law prof and I'm a class action attorney, so draw your own conclusions.

Indeed, since copyright is a violation of Laissez-faire economics by being a coercive monopoly (specifically a government-granted monopoly), it is obviously anti-capitalist. It may be fruitful to contrast your opinion of copyright as "anti-capitalist" with the Copyright Act of 1790, which begins with the introductory words "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". Its motivation was stated in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, but looking at the rationale (see Senate Report No. 104-315) for its extension (see Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) from the original total of 28 years to today's 95 years (corporate ownership), "the continued economic benefits of a healthy surplus balance of trade", there is an obvious shift towards a economic mindset. Actually, there is a complete shift I would rather say. When devised, copyright was never intended as a direct instrument of economics, so its effect as "anti-capitalist" would have been subordinate to its original goal of being an instrument "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Instead, what we see today is rather bizarre. For a truly eerie prospect of what to expect, consider this statement by Mary Bono (see Congressional Record No 139, pages H9951 and H9952):

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed of by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

(Yes, the evidence is there, despite denials). In plain english, and for all practical purposes, there is no limit to copyright protection anymore - by 2018, both houses of the United States Congress will pass a new act to further extend copyright, as a formality. How one concludes that "securing for limited Times" should mean "forever less one day" rather than a reasonable amount of time, as in reasonably within ones life-time, or more meaningfully as in reasonably useful within ones life-time (such as, say, 6 years for software), is beyond me. The economic reasoning behind perpetual copyright is explained by professor Neil W. Netanel (see Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society):

This "neoclassicist" approach posits that, far from simply inducing the creation and dissemination of new expression, copyright serves as a vehicle for directing investment in existing works. Neoclassicists would accordingly treat literary and artistic works as "vendible commodities," best made subject to broad proprietary rights that extend to every conceivable valued use. In this manner, neoclassicists contend, market pricing can direct resource allocation for the marketing and development of existing creative expression in an optimally efficient manner.

I would be inclined to conclude that, in a world of conglomarates, market forces replace Learning as the "optimally efficient manner" by which creative expression can be developed. Obviously, this is utter nonsense, but I would say it captures the essence of what proponents of perpetual copyright would have us believe. The true and unstated objective is, of course, to preserve existing monopolies. As pointed out by Timothy R. Phillips, "The framers assumed, as did Adam Smith, th