Monthly Archives: May 2004

Do toads hold on?

More than 20 years ago I wrote a song for a friend’s Bachelor Party. He’s a zoologist who does research on amphibians, so the text had to connect somehow with that specialty, and I put quite a bit of mental energy into research and production. This morning I had e-mail from him, asking if I had the lyrics somewhere… and of course I did. It seemed sensible to make them available to broader audiences…

‘core blindness’

This from blog entries at a conference on the Internet and China, at UC Berkeley

Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig spoke about the “core blindness” on press freedom that exists in the United States. It is easy, he said, to see the core blindness in another culture, like China, with its well known attempts to monitor or limit access to the Internet. But it is harder to identify the blindness in this culture.
The American blindness, he said, is the corporate privatization of culture and speech. He described how copyright protection has grown in time, in scope, in intensity, and in what it affects. He described how creative people in the United States, whether computer programmers, musicians, or filmmakers, need to choose whether to obey the law or to be dissidents. “If they obey, they can say much less.” (posted by Wang Feng)