English

1. Me on movies, written about watching "V for Vendetta" in class. Gotta love UNLV:
I suppose I’m a lot like Holden Caulfield: I think actors and the characters they portray are “phonies”. I have a hard time being objective about a storyline when things happen that just don’t in the real world. A claim I often hear is that folks watch movies to escape the real world. My response is that, in movies like V for Vendetta, the whole plot either (a) postulates that “This could really happen in the real world!” or (b) insinuates, if only by some allegorical notion, that “This is really happening in the real world!” I don’t doubt that censorship, hate speech, and fear-mongering in the name of God or other authority happens. I simply have a hard time watching it when the characters are kissing masked men that have tortured them (tortured “for their own good”) and have a backroom that looks like a torture chamber. (Who built the torture chamber? Wouldn’t some dude have told some other dude they built a crazy stone jail for some scary masked man? Where’s Eyewitness News?) For me, it’s credibility-killing. But I’m glad other people like movies. It means nobody bought the music I need when I go to the record store.

2. Closing paragraph of paper written on MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail":
Despite all these powerful examples, King is most effective because his words are like "the Word." Scripture is short, powerful, and usually has dual-ability. In Nephi's words, it can be likened. What has application in a story or an event often has real ethical and moral implications. Here is where his letter shines. On almost every page, King's proverbial observations can be harvested: the result of a lifetime mastery of spiritual horticulture. The reader reaps the seeds King has collected, studied, and sown. His pithy maxims contain truth-gems that, just like scripture, can engender repentance, embody difficult concepts simply, and enrich a sorry life.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for law."
"Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively."
"Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
"The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists".
"There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love."
Just like the sacred texts he loves, King's profundity would engrain itself in the minds and hearts of his hearers. And just like scripture does, Martin Luther King, Jr., aims to bring change to actions, attitude, beliefs, behavior, thoughts, and traditions.


3. Copyright

Stiff copyright protection is rightly directed by the copyright holder. It being their property, they may govern what they have authored. Yet increasingly, fair use has been relegated to the wealthy, while other uses and users are forced to make the most of a public domain that is landlocked and fading from view.
But, for culture’s sake, copyrights will at some point become again the property of all. Just as no one owns or controls performances or readings of Hamlet, Moby Dick, or Beethoven’s 5th, copyrightists’ works become again the public property. The fact that copyright is limited and is then subsequently made available in the public domain suggests that the creator did not create something entirely new, but combined various elements of what was already in their personal culture and then distilled elements to the favor of their plot, characters, or score. Property is often thought of as something one owns. “That is my house, my car, my pen.” It is predictably viewed as tangible and rivalrous. ‘Rivalrous’ means that if Jim owns something, then John cannot own that same thing. Intellectual ‘property’, however, is a bit of a misnomer. If Jim births an idea (or work), and shares it with John, Jim has not impoverished himself, yet has enlightened John. Thomas Jefferson put is best:

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature.”

The Framers respected property and included in the Constitution that government could not take away land unless they provided just compensation for it, yet they did not feel to do the same for intellectual property. Even on physical property is a limit called “rule against perpetuities”. After twenty-one years, a will that proclaims a specific use of land is no longer valid, and allows a benefactor to do what they would with the land. The Framers saw the difficulties in English Feudalism, and did not wish for the dead to control the living. Intellectual property stands to benefit from the same principle. In current copyright law, the dead control their work and its future innovative thought- its culture- for 70 years after their death. In the strange world of copyright, life-after-death expectancy rates are longer than the rates for actual expectancy.