Louisiana Voice

Remember Napster?

That was the service where you could download just about any song ever recorded for free.

Until, that is, the peer-to-peer service was sued by the recording industry for copyright infringement and was shut down on July 11, 2001 Lead plaintiffs in the lawsuit were the band Metallica and singer Roy Orbison’s widow, Barbara Orbison.

And why not? After all, it’s only right that artists, like anyone else, be compensated for their works. As essential as food is during the coronavirus quarantine, those truck drivers who deliver our food expect—and deserve—to be paid as do those who stock the shelves and the cashiers who check us out.

Health care is critical but the doctors and nurses still have to get paid.

And while not as crucial to our survival, book authors also deserve to be paid for their labor.

So why is it that the literary equivalent to Napster is allowed to pirate the works of authors so the rest of us can pass the time reading books for free while confined to our homes?

That is precisely what the so-called “NATIONAL EMERGENCY LIBRARY” is doing.

And that’s why the Authors Guild is fighting back—to protect the rights of authors who receive no royalties whenever their books are downloaded from the National Emergency Library, which describes itself as “a temporary collection of books that supports emergency remote teaching, research, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed.”

Let’s be clear: Internet Archive’s so-called “National Emergency Library” is not a real library,” reads a LETTER from the Authors Guild to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive board of directors. “Real libraries license the electronic books they circulate, and authors receive payments from those licenses. Real libraries do not circulate unauthorized copies. Real libraries care about authors as much as they do about promoting knowledge and literacy.

“Let’s be even more clear: Internet Archive’s prior practice of providing access through Open Library to one reader at a time per copy is itself infringing of most in-copyright books—and illegal,” the letter said. “Now, by declaring a spurious ‘copyright emergency’ and making a massive trove of copyrighted books available for free without any restrictions, Internet Archive has demonstrated a shocking disrespect for the rule of law— the cornerstone of our civil, democratic society—at a time when we most need it to prevail. You cloak your illegal scanning and distribution of books behind the pretense of magnanimously giving people access to them. But giving away what is not yours is simply stealing, and there is nothing magnanimous about that. Authors and publishers—the rights owners who legally can give their books away—are already working to provide electronic access to books to libraries and the people who need them. We do not need Internet Archive to give our works away for us.

“Books exist because authors write them, and good books take a good deal of hard work and time. Authors need to earn a living to be able to write, and they deserve to be paid for their work like any other worker. The pandemic is severely impacting authors and booksellers. Bookstores and libraries have closed, and book sales are down. The freelance writing assignments and speaking engagements that many authors rely on to supplement their income are unavailable, and yet authors are not eligible for traditional unemployment. (Indeed, thus far, they have even been excluded from the Pandemic Unemployment Insurance meant to assist freelancers, and the Authors Guild is actively lobbying to correct that.)”

The letter is accompanied by an online PETITION for advocates to sign and send to Kahle and the Internet Archive board.

If Trump had run the Manhattan Project….

“After two months, he would have congratulated himself for a ‘phenomenal job,’ wound down his atomic task force and left the whole nuclear thing to the states.

“Texas would compete with Florida for uranium, while New Jersey and Ohio bid up plutonium prices.

“New York, making bombs, wouldn’t be in touch with Washington state, which would be retrofitting the B-29 without specs.

“Robert Oppenheimer, complaining about the lack of coordination, would be demoted and denied whistleblower protection.

“The bombs wouldn’t work properly in tests, the bombers would take off without enough fuel,  

“Trump would blame the governor of Michigan — and we’d all be speaking Japanese.”

—Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, May 6, 2020.

Editor’s note: The following is an actual release from a creative public information officer (or whomever) in the Walker Police Department, just a few miles down the road from my home in Denham Springs:

The Walker Police Department is asking for the public’s assistance in connection with an incident occurring Friday (May 1) in Walker. At approximately 4 p.m., Walker police were dispatched to a bank on Walker South Road (LA. 447 South) in response to a complaint of an aggressive chicken.

Although police reached the bank with(in) a couple of minutes of the call, the chicken apparently anticipated the imminent arrival of law enforcement and fled on foot from the scene.

According to the complaint, the chicken had been terrorizing bank customers all week, at both the walk-up ATM and the drive-thru. Bank officials told officers that the chicken chased customers, attempted to enter customers’ vehicles and on a number of occasions, failed to engage in proper social distancing.

Despite patrols of the area, including the kitchen of a nearby restaurant, the chicken could not be located.

Police are looking for a reddish-tan chicken, approximately 18 inches tall and 6-8 pounds in weight.

The chicken is wanted on charges of assault, attempted battery, attempted burglary, terrorizing and ignoring and order of the governor.

Given the chicken’s history of aggressive behavior, the public is urged to avoid confronting the fowl and to instead contact Walker police if seen.

And this, dear readers, is our nomination for creative story of the year.

“Live free. By God man … stand up. If you’re frightened, on the other hand, by all means, you should be free to remain frightened. Patriots support your right to hide under a desk. With your mask on. Shivering at the very thought of standing against the oppression coming out of our Governor’s office.”

—Half-wit Clay Higgins, implying on Facebook that anyone with enough concern about the coronavirus to wear a face mask is somehow unpatriotic. [The most charitable thing that be can be said about this failed lawman (resigned once under pressure, fired from another post and just plain lied during the Michael Cohen hearings about the “thousands” of arrests he had made), child-support-avoiding deadbeat dad is that he is several croutons shy of a salad. This court jester actually thinks he can set the parameters that define patriotism in much the same manner as the Alabama preacher who several years ago compiled a list of those in his county who were going to go to heaven and those who were fated for the fires of hell. Folks, that kind of thinking, while somewhat amusing insofar as the minister’s righteous presuppositions, is not only demented, but dangerous when originating in the clearly disturbed mind an elected official. With Higgins, we have time-release stupidity: never in one dramatic dosage but in a steady, uniform flow.]

“There’s not too many states that I know of that are going up. Almost everybody is headed in the right direction.”

—Donald Trump, during a Fox News town hall on Sunday.

“In reality, new coronavirus cases are increasing in about a third of states, compared with just a few where there has been a sustained decline. A plurality of states are hovering around the same level, with neither a significant uptick nor decrease in daily cases.”

—The Washington Post, on Tuesday, May 5.

“I’d point you back to his long-running mantra of ‘leave no vacancy behind.’”

—Mitch McConnell spokesman David Popp, on Monday, May 4, on McConnell’s requesting that Republican-appointed federal judges nearing retirement step down now so that their successors may be nominated by Trump. [Could it be that McConnell sees the handwriting on the wall that tells him Trump’s days as president and the Republicans’ days as the Senate’s majority party are numbered? Otherwise, why the sudden urgency?]

“The American people may well elect a president who decides to nominate Judge Garland for Senate consideration.  The next president may also nominate someone very different. Either way, our view is this: Give the people a voice.”

—Mitch McConnell, on his reasons for blocking Barack Obama’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 on the shaky grounds that he didn’t want to confirm an appointment during an election year. [What was that again about Moscow Mitch’s “long-running mantra”?]

“Oh, we’d fill it.”

—McConnell, in a speech to the Paducah, Kentucky, Chamber of Commerce in May 2019, on what would happen if a Supreme Court seat became open in 2020. [No doubt if the roles were reversed, the Democrats would likely resort to the same tactics, which raises this very serious question: How can we trust anything our elected representatives tell us if they can so expeditiously and effortlessly shed their ethics and change the rules for no reason other than self-preservation and self-enrichment? At what point will we decide we no longer wish to be pawns in a giant chess game played by powerful people who don’t give a damn about us?]