Education must improve – or else
The Daily Bruin has not moved much further behind the misguided assumption that more money thrown at government schools is a cure-all solution (“Education in California has a long way to go,” Aug. 22).
The Bush administration is seeking to add quasi-market forces to our socialistic schools by encouraging them to improve or else lose funds. This is the same principle that applies to every other economic transaction: If you provide lousy service, your revenue will decline for lack of customers.
In this case, the Bush administration is acting as the customer, saying no thanks to funding failure. Over time, the schools have a huge incentive to improve if they wish to continue to be funded.
Michael Gordon
UCLA alumnus
Copyright laws go beyond what’s right
Even as they complain about students downloading music and movies from the Internet, record companies and film studios are pirating your copyrights – and Uncle Sam is helping them.
The U.S. Constitution says copyrights must expire after a limited time whereupon the work becomes public domain. Then the public is free to copy Sherlock Holmes stories, or perform Shakespeare or Mozart. Public domain is your copyright.
However, copyright’s “limited time” has been repeatedly extended, often due to big media lobbying. The 1790 Copyright Act set copyright protection at 14 years, renewable for another 14. By 1998 copyright was extended to “life of the author plus 70 years.”
Artists should profit from their creations – but not 70 years into the grave. Life plus 25 is more reasonable. Anything longer just benefits distant heirs and big media companies.
The Fair Use doctrine lets the public copy excerpts from protected works for purposes of news, education, research, criticism and commentary as well as parodies . It’s a complex doctrine; you don’t know what’s fair use until you’re in court – so often it’s determined by who can afford a lawsuit.
Pirating movies and music is wrong (though not as harmful to many artists as are industry accounting practices). But it’s hard to sympathize with big media companies who have suffered piracy while they and their lobbyists and lawyers are pirating your rights.
Thomas M. Sipos
UCLA extension instructor