→ August 22, 2009
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On copyrights.

A week or so ago I pointed out to reader BSK that his practice of copying CDs to his hard drive and then trading thephysical disks on swaptree was both illegal and unethical. He didn’t accept my argument, so I contacted the Copyright Alliance to get a professional opinion.

The response I received was unequivocal: This practice violates federal copyright law. Excerpts of the reply, interspersed with my comments:

The RIAA explicitly states on their website that this is illegal. (Scroll down to the bottom under “copying CDs”).

The most relevant part on that RIAA link, about copying CDs you own for your personal use: It’s not a personal use – in fact, it’s illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.

You may, of course, trade a CD or book or DVD that you own (the “First Sale Doctrine”) as long as you do not make or keep a copy.

But, would someone agree that it is okay to buy a
book, scan it into your computer, and then sell the hard copy? Probably
not (I hope not). So, why is music different? It’s not – the law is the
same for all creative forms. Consumers have asked to be able to buy a CD
or a song from itunes and listen to it in their car, on their computer,
or ipod. So, with music it is generally accepted (though not technically
legal) that one can use music on multiple devices for personal use.

As long as you’re keeping all the copies, you seem to be in the clear.

It is also not legal to download a digital copy of a work and then print
it out or put it on CD and sell that. So, why would the opposite be
true?

Well, it wouldn’t, and I think this is just common sense.

I’ve run into a similar issue with people copying articles found online and pasting them into emails. Again, this is illegal, and no, it is not “fair use” – it is patently UNfair use. (It fails fair use on two grounds – the sender reproduced the entire work, and by reproducing and sending the entire work the sender impacted the market for the work because the recipient no longer has to click on the original site or pay for access to the article.) Pasting a link to the original article is legal. Pasting the entire article is copyright infringement, and while your potatoes are probably too small for the copyright owner to sue you, that doesn’t make it any less illegal. One longtime friend sent me an email like this, and copied so much text that he included the copyright notice at the bottom of the article … but sent it anyway. And he was offended when I objected to the practice.

In addition to being illegal, it’s completely unethical. If you make a copy of a CD, then sell or barter the CD (or even give it away), then two people have use of the copyrighted material while the copyright owner has only been compensated once. Isn’t it obvious that this is wrong?

Final point: BSK argued that this was about “freedom.” We do, in fact, have exceptional freedom in our ability to create, distribute, and purchase copyrighted works in this country today. If you want access to formerly banned books like Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath, to hardcore pornography, to Pungent Stench’s Been Caught Buttering (if you’ve seen the album cover, you know what I’m talking about), you’ve got it. That freedom does not mean the freedom to make unlimited copies of these works and sell them or barter them or give them to your friends. We have laws designed to protect the rights of those who create intellectual property so they’ll be financially able to continue to do so. If you don’t like the laws – and I wouldn’t argue that they’re perfect, particularly the ever-increasing time of protection for copyrighted works – try to change them. But don’t steal from the authors and musicians whose works you enjoy.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: , ,
→ August 18, 2009
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San Juan card game.

Chat 3 pm EDT on the four-letter. ESPN 710 Seattle at 2 pm PDT. AllNight later on tonight. Waiting for confirmation but I should be on ESPN 1250 Pittsburgh tomorrow at around 11 am EDT.

Back when I did my original post on board games, several readers recommended Puerto Rico, a 3-5 player game that can be played with two players but that is apparently better with more people involved. When I pointed out that my wife and I play a lot of these games ourselves, at least one of you recommended the 2-4 player spinoff, a card game called San Juan.

The game takes a while to explain but is very simple to play. In each round, there are phases (one per player) that allow players to build new buildings, produce goods, sell goods they’ve produced, or draw extra cards from the deck. The cards serve several functions: a player can use them to pay for buildings, a player can build the building on the card’s face if he has enough cards, and a player can stash them under a Chapel to sock away some bonus points for the end of the game. The game ends when one player has built twelve buildings in his settlement, after which the player with the most points is the winner. Having the most buildings doesn’t mean you’ll have the most points, as different buildings have different point values, and some buildings are worth bonus points based on what else each player has in his settlement.

Once you’ve started the game, it’s easy to follow and moves pretty quickly; as you add to your settlement, the rate at which you can produce, build, and sell improves, since each building has some bonus feature like reducing the cost of certain buildings or allowing you to produce an extra good during the production phase. All of the other two-player games we regularly play take far longer, so it’s great to have a fun alternative when it’s late and we want to play something fast.

The game also has a good mix of strategy and luck. There are clearly better and worse ways to build your settlement, and you have to make major decisions like whether to build another production building or whether to start building the violet-card buildings, which have the bonus features I mentioned above and are generally worth more points. You have to decide which cards in your hand to use as currency and which to keep so you can ultimately play and build them. The prices of goods change slightly from turn to turn, leading to sell-or-wait decisions. But you’re also at the mercy of the cards you draw, making the game different each time but also perhaps preventing you from always using the same strategy.

And since it’s just a big deck of cards and a few cardboard pieces to mark phases and prices, it’s extremely portable, which never hurts.

I still have to write about Carcassonne, after which it’ll be time to revise the board game rankings.

Filed Under: Games Tagged With: , ,
→ August 18, 2009
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Signing deadline radio/TV.

I’ll be on the Brian Kenny Show tonight at 9:24 pm, then on ESPNEWS via phone at 11:30 pm and 12:15 am, all times Eastern.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ August 17, 2009
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No Country for Old Men.

Tentatively scheduled to be on Mike & Mike at 8:42 am EDT on Monday. Latest draft blog entry is posted, with updates on the Cardinals, Blue Jays, and Rangers.

I wanted to read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men before seeing the film and knocked it off in just three days. The book is riveting, a quick-moving hard-boiled mystery along the Texas-Mexico border that starts when Llewelyn Moss comes upon the carnage at the scene of a failed drug shipment, decides to take the money he finds, and ends up hunted by the law and by an amoral hit man named Anton Chigurh. The story is interspersed with first-person passages from Sheriff Bell, who tries to make some sense of the violence and disregard for life he saw while pursuing Chigurh. It is quick and dense with action; McCarthy makes scenes like Chigurh buying medical supplies and treating himself for bullet wounds interesting and fast.

I still haven’t seen the film version, but if the movie was true to the book for the character of Chigurh, I’m surprised to see that any actor could win an Oscar for that role. Chigurh is central, and he is undeniably scary, but he is also completely one-dimensional and boring. He’s an automaton, a remorseless, reasonless killer with no personality and little action in the book beyond (sometimes inventive) murders. The reader sees Chigurh from the omniscient narrator’s perspective, but the narrator’s view is limited to Chigurh’s actions during the events of the novel, and we are left with the same confusion and lack of information as Sheriff Bell, who refers to Chigurh as a “ghost” and whose window into Chigurh is limited to the events laid out in the novel. We know Chigurh by the trail of dead, but we know nothing else of him. (One possible interpretation of Chigurh is that he is Fate or, more likely, Death, which would explain the lack of emotion and inability to change his course of action; I imagine you could write a whole thesis on that topic.) Sheriff Bell is the most interesting and complex character, but he’s not involved in the action – he’s the thoughtful, not-dead narrator who can’t figure out the hows and whys of what he witnessed – almost as if he’s God looking down on a world gone mad.

I also found McCarthy’s prose, a little unclear in the best of circumstances, to be at its most confusing in No Country, not just due to his standard aversion to punctuation but also due to the constant scene-shifting. There are two unnamed characters in offices whose roles were never clear to me, and, when one of them is killed, I wasn’t even sure which one it was.

The problems with thin characters only bothered me upon reflection – the book was a fantastic read because of the pacing and McCarthy’s tremendous and sometimes beautiful prose, and there’s plenty of material to consider after the fact that makes up for the weak characterizations. It’s not as good as Blood Meridian or The Road but still a solid read.

Next up: Back to Blandings Castle for some Heavy Weather.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 15, 2009
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Christ Stopped at Eboli.

I’m starting to fall behind here, so this will be a quick writeup. Carlo Levi was a doctor and political activist in fascist Italy who repeatedly fell afoul of the Mussolini regime, and one of his sentences was to spend a year in exile in the very poor Lucania region of southern Italy. His book about that experience, Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, is a memoir that doubles as a sociological treatise with a subtle air of protest at the existence and treatment of this Italian underclass (although the subtlety disappears in the last five pages, where Levi shifts voice from narrator to activist.) The title refers to the local saying that Christ stopped at the town of Eboli and never made it to the poorest villages of the hinterlands, where the people are more pagan than Christian and are treated as less than human by the various governing authorities of the region and of Italy.

It’s not quite a nonfiction novel because of the lack of any singular plot strand, but instead works as a series of anecdotes and observations of peasant life in grinding poverty and under various forms of oppression, from direct government action to government inaction on issues like the rampant malaria that affects the region. Levi takes the ideal path of the neutral, objective observer, so that the peasants and their stories come through rather than Levi’s judgment on their customs and superstitions. The stories range from heartbreaking (there are a lot of dead children and husbands who left for the New World and never returned) to humorous (the fatuous mayor is almost too absurd to be true), but I did find the absence of some narrative force or unanswered question made the reading slow, especially in the final third or so of the book.

Next up: I’ve already finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 15, 2009
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Stupid Love.

I’ve mentioned this before, but country singer Mindy Smith is actually a former classmate of mine – from second grade on through high school. I’d lost touch with her after we graduated but we reconnected a year or two ago when I found about her music career and contacted her manager, who sent me a copy of her newest album, Stupid Love, which came out earlier this week.

This isn’t ordinarily my style of music, but I did really enjoy the album beyond just being supportive of an old friend. The album runs about half-and-half between upbeat, folky-alternative songs and mournful ballads, with the former making more of an impression after my first listen than the latter, which required a few more spins for me. The first single, “Highs and Lows,” and the opening track, “What Went Wrong,” both would fit on an alternative rock station’s playlist; “Highs and Lows” sounds a bit like a lost David Gray track, while “What Went Wrong” is more power-pop along the lines of Jellyfish or the Primitives with a folk influence. The album’s closer, “Take a Holiday,” will probably pop up on half a dozen soundtracks over the next few years – it’s a closing-credits kind of song with a shuffling beat and a repeated lyrical gimmick of rhetorical questions asked by someone who’s hit a rut and can’t quite get out. The ballads are more of a mixed bag; the duet “True Love of Mine” has (non-cheesy) wedding song written all over it (and lo and behold, her duet partner Daniel Tashian sounds a lot like … David Gray!), and “Love Lost” does a great job of showcasing Smith’s sharp, smoky voice, but “Disappointed” feels underproduced and harsh and the ship metaphor in “Telescope” seemed a bit hackneyed to me.

The best part about this album, at least at the moment, is that you can download the whole thing for $3.99 at amazon.com. I doubt that’s the permanent price, but the discount has Stupid Love #2 on amazon’s mp3 album charts. I’m not sure how much of my audience is into this kind of music – anything from straight country to Sarah McLachlan – but I’ll offer a cheerfully biased recommendation that you give Stupid Love a shot.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , ,
→ August 12, 2009
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Links/radio.

I’ll be on the Herd today at 12:25 pm EDT, and on the FAN 590 in Toronto at around 5:40 pm.

I was at the Tigers/Red Sox game last night and had some things to say about the brawl and about Junichi Tazawa.

Also, this week’s chat is on Friday at 2 pm EDT, because I’ll be at Fenway tomorrow during my normal chat time.

Filed Under: Appearances, Chat
→ August 10, 2009
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The Death of the Heart.

TV today – ESPNEWS at 2:40 and Outside the Lines in the 3 pm half-hour, both EDT.

Articles: Preview of the signing deadline. First report from the Under Armour Game. Second report should be up this afternoon.

Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart appears on both the TIME and Bloomsbury lists and ranked 84th on the Modern Library 100; TIME‘s Richard Lacayo praised the way Bowen used the main character, 16-year-old ingenue/orphan Portia, to reveal the cruelty of the characters around her: “In the mirror of her innocent eyes, experience will catch a glimpse of its own reflection. It’s not a pretty picture.”

This theme was unmistakeable, as Portia is particularly useful to Bowen in laying bare the selfish, jealous, spiteful nature of Anna, wife of Portia’s half-brother Thomas; after Portia’s parents die, she goes to stay with Anna and Thomas in London, only to find herself tied up in the quiet, seething resentment and anger between them, Anna’s paramours (whether consummated or not isn’t quite clear, although I don’t think it needs to be), and that most essential element in any English novel, the servants. Bowen does infuse some comic elements, but the novel’s greatest strength is in her descriptive prose:

Portia had learnt one dare never look for long. She had those eyes that seem to be welcome nowhere, that learn shyness from the alarm they precipitate. Such eyes are always turning away or being humbly lowered – they dare come to rest nowhere but on a point in space; their homeless intentness makes them appear fanatical. They may move, they may affront, but they cannot communicate. You most often meet or, rather, avoid meeting such eyes in a child’s face – what becomes of the child later you do not know.

Bowen also has a little fun with caricatures, not of whole characters but of little traits, some humorous, some shocking:

She walked about with the rather fate expression you see in photographs of girls who have subsequently been murdered, but nothing had so far happened to her…

But ultimately, The Death of the Heart is dull. Very little happens; Portia falls for one of Anna’s beaux, the shiftless, irresponsible Eddie, earning the scorn of just about everyone around her and heading for an inevitable heartbreak at Eddie’s hands. Bowen focuses so heavily on emotions and settings that the plot, while not truly thin, is short, and the novel’s end brought release from the oppressive air of the time period.

Next up: Non-fiction with Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, the story of his year in exile in a tiny mountain village in southern Italy.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 9, 2009
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Charlotte’s Web.

TV on Monday: 2:40 pm EDT on ESPNEWS and 3 pm on Outside the Lines.

Between Then We Came to the End and The Magicians, I read the #13 book on the Radcliffe 100, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, which also appears at #63 on the Guardian 100. I’ve seen both the 1973 animated adaptation and the the 2006 live-action version – we own the latter on DVD and I’ve probably seen it in whole or in parts 50 times, as my daughter went through a phase where she wanted to “watch the pig” over and over again – but I don’t think I had ever read the book; if I did, it was when I was much, much younger.

The story is probably familiar to most of you – a spider and a pig form an unlikely friendship where the spider, Charlotte, comes up with an amazing plan to save the pig, Wilbur, from ending up the entree at Christmas dinner. Charlotte’s actions attract plenty of human interest, but it isn’t until her final web that she knows she’s saved Wilbur’s live, after which he has an opportunity to return the favor in some way by saving her egg sac.

What disturbed me most about the book was the discovery that the screenwriters behind the live-action movie had changed so much of the dialogue and story. In the book, the animals play a much smaller role, and there’s no horse or crows. Fern’s younger brother has more dialogue and is less of a brat, while Fern herself actually turns away from Wilbur when she develops a crush on a boy in her class – a fickle friendship that serves as a counterpoint to the friendship between Wilbur and Charlotte. When it’s clear that Charlotte’s plan has succeeded, Fern is more interested in getting more money to go on another ride with her new boy-toy. Templeton, the rat, isn’t quite so Steve Buscemi-like, with a little more personality and a little more interest in helping Charlotte. (A little, but not much.) And Wilbur is a lot less childlike in the book, with even a touch of sarcasm was wiped out in the film version.

But most of all, I was shocked by the book’s ending – Charlotte lives! How the hell could they change that?

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ August 7, 2009
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The Magicians.

First blog post from the Area Code games is up on the Draft Blog. Second one is filed and should appear on Friday morning. I’ll also be on the telecast of the Under Armour Game on ESPNU on Saturday, making a few short appearances from the stands or the dugout if we can work out the logistics.

Friend of the dish Lev Grossman came to my attention because of his work (with Richard Lacayo) on the TIME 100, and when I asked them to do a Q&A for the dish about that ranking, Lev asked if I’d be interested in reading his upcoming book, The Magicians, which comes out in hardcover on Tuesday. I knocked off the book on my flight to California on Tuesday – all but 20 pages, to be exact, although I finished the book before I got to my rental car – and absolutely recommend it. (And no, I wouldn’t recommend it solely because Lev’s a Friend of the dish. It’s legitimately awesome.)

The Magicians will inevitably be called a grown-up rejoinder to Harry Potter, and Grossman does borrow from Rowling’s works while alluding to other giants of the fantasy genre, from Narnia to Middle Earth to Faerûn. The central character, Quentin, is a young, very bright, heartsick loner in present-day Brooklyn who dreams of a world like that in his favorite series of books, about a magical world called Fillory which is accessed through a grandfather clock in the house of a British family. Quentin is a skilled magician in the real-world sense of card tricks and disappearing nickels, but eventually discovers that the magic of spells and incantations is real and enrolls at a college for magicians that bears a few resemblances to Hogwarts. Unlike the innocent teenagers of Harry Potter’s world, however, Quentin and his classmates drink, smoke, swear, and screw, although I think they do more drinking than the other three things combined, and eventually embark on a sort of kill-the-big-foozle quest that defies their (and the reader’s) expectations.

Grossman manages to straddle the line between straight storycraft and outright parody brilliantly. One can read The Magicians as a retelling of the Potter myth with older kids, greater tragedies, and more complex interactions between characters, as well as several cliche-mocking twists in the final hundred-odd pages that skewer not just Rowling’s work but the standard plot devices of fantasy and science fiction. (There’s also a great shot across Rowling’s bow in defense of American magic.) Yet never does the book descend to the superficial, sneering tone that pure parody often has, as The Magicians‘ story stands strongly on its own, built around a complex, brooding central character, and an accelerating plot that grows from school-aged dramas involving crushes and difficult exams to life-and-death struggles in another world. He adds depth to two of the main characters with glimpses into their dysfunctional family lives, and ties up just about every loose plot strand or seemingly incongruous event as the novel speeds to a too-early finish – and the final two pages seemed word-perfect to me both as I read them and as I replayed them for hours after reading.

I do have minor quibbles with the book – there’s a “why do bad things happen to good people” discussion that seemed cursory and labored, and the way Quentin discovers a friend of his is gay was a little out of place and didn’t end up tying into anything else in the book. There is also one major event near the novel’s end that was like a slug to the chest to read, although I could see it as a counterpoint to Rowling, who largely skipped that sort of tragedy in Deathly Hallows (justifiably, given her audience). Grossman is also a big fan of the sentence fragment – “But still.” appeared at least twice – although I think that will only annoy the sliver of you who are as hardcore about grammar as I am.

Where The Magicians succeeds most is in Grossman’s creation of an immersive world within his book, and then a world within that world for his characters. Fforde, Rowling, and Murakami all have that ability to draw me into the pages of a book so that finishing the work is akin to waking from a pleasant dream. Grossman has achieved that same feat here.

Next up: Why not follow this with another book from the TIME 100? Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,