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Century-old mummified frozen lobotomized corpses
Okay, so I know I said I'd be posting Part 2 of the How To Homestuck thing, but a) there was some stuff pointed out to me in a discussion in the comments that I'm still thinking really hard about, and I don't want to do any more with that until I've figured out how to make a peace with those things; b) I think most of you are handling it on your own by now anyway :P and c) I have been mostly out-for-the-count with a dread lurgy of doom for much of the past week, so anything requiring serious thinking (or serious physical effort. Or ability to look and/or listen with concentration for more than an hour or so, or at some points be awake, or indeed be asleep, for that long) has been shelved for now.
So, uh, that's indefinitely delayed.
Anyway, with doing anything productive out of the question, and my normal occupy-brain-online sources slowly filling up with tempting, tempting Avengers spoilers, I instead turned to some old standbys of mine: rifling through printed cabinets of curiosities and watching old BBC documentaries, with the result that I made a seriously bad life choice while unable to sleep last night and spent several hours reading up on the search for the remains of Mallory and Irvine atop Mount Everest.
(Bad life choice = images of old, frozen mummified corpses of explorers after midnight are one of the few things that reliably give me nightmares. Childhood trauma.)
Anyway, I was in the middle of reading about this Great Unsolved Mystery of Heroism and Human Endeavour, and what to I run into?
An epic, epic discussion of why copyright law is irretrievably screwed up, of course! So who wants a special Broken Frozen Lobotomized Corpses edition of our occasionally continuing series, Copyright Law Is Irretrievably Screwed Up?
So here's the background, really short version: George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were part of the Third British Mount Everest Expedition in 1924, and they were the last team of that expedition to attempt to be the first humans to reach the summit. A teammate saw them on the ridgeline at around mid-day, "going strongly for the top", then clouds moved in, and that's the last anyone saw of them alive.
The (certified) Great Mystery is: did Mallory and Irvine actually make it to the summit, beating Hillary's official record by decades? There is actually a chance (small, but a chance) that they did: they were the first serious team to use supplemental oxygen, which is the real key; they were disciplined and trained, and Mallory at least was experienced and talented; they had good weather and the best supplies of the period; they took a route that was at least fairly close to one of the two accepted modern routes. A 1924 oxygen bottle found by a later climber shows that they made very close to the world record height (set earlier on the expedition) if they didn't pass it.
At this point, you might have to just say that the answer died with them. Only they carried at least one, and possibly two, pocket cameras, and if they did make the summit, they would definitely have taken photos. And the high slopes of Everest are one of the best preservation environments on Earth, so Kodak says that if someone can bring them the film from that trip, without further exposing it, Kodak can still develop the pictures.
Most of the effort to find Mallory and Irvine has been focused around the idea of finding the film from their last trip. In 1999 Mallory's body was found, but there were no cameras on it. Irvine was the better photographer and more likely to have the camera, though, and a body that would almost have to be Irvine's has been spotted a couple of times in a place that some Mallory & Irvine fanboys are almost certain they could now find again, if they had the time and resources and good weather conditions.
Which is where the copyright question comes in. Because if those pictures exist, and they are developed (almost regardless of what they show), somebody could make a lot of money from them - as the media storm around the discovery of Mallory's resting place demonstrated to anyone who was unsure. And who owns copyright on those photos?
Well, in any well-regulated law, they would be public domain at this point, of course. Even by the U.S.'s current bizarre standards, it's been more than 70 years since Mallory and Irvine died (though of course many of the photos taken by expedition members who survived the trip would still be under copyright to their heirs - which is bizarre in another way.) However! If Mallory and/or Irvine took the photos under contract to the Expedition and its sponsors - as there is an argument they did - then they might fall under the longer, extended corporate copyright limits, at least in some jurisdictions. And then there's the fact that the photos would be unpublished, which means that even if they are public domain, they might fall under newer laws with give "publication rights" which are in practice the same as copyright to the first authorized publisher of a work - and that authorized publisher would be determined by the legal owner of the physical film (*not* necessarily the same person who would own copyright in the images if they had copyright.)
Got all that? Good. Here, as best I can follow, is the list of possible claimants to ownership of these hypothetical images:
1. The Mallory and Irvine estates: arguing, I believe, that as owners of the cameras and film, the publication rights would devolve on their heirs. This, of course, would still require arguing the question of whose camera it was and which of them took the photos.
2. The Somervell Estate: Edward Somervell was another climber on the expedition (who took what was, until the Mallory/Irvine Mystery really took off, the most famous photo from the expedition, of climbing partner Norton at that record height). He apparently used to tell a story that he met Mallory and Irvine on their way up as he was on his way down, and loaned Mallory his camera, because Mallory had forgotten his. So the Somervell estate claims that the film/camera, and therefore the publication rights, go to his heirs. Incidentally, (one of?) Somervell's heir is also a climber, and one of the people actively looking for the camera - and one of the main witnesses to the camera-loaning story. (He claims his great-uncle used to say he wanted his camera back, so he's going to find it. He's also one of my favorites of the bunch - he summited Everest in a historically accurate reproduction of the 1924 expedition gear, just to prove it could theoretically be done, which is reasonably awesome.)
3. The British Everest Expedition and Assigns Thereof - Which appears at the moment to be the Royal Geographic Society, who are administering most of the existing intellectual (and physical) property from those expeditions. Their argument is that a) Mallory and Irvine were working for them, so they get corporate copyright, and b) anyway the cameras and film belonged to the expedition, so they have legal ownership of the film too. This is arguable - there was a contract whereby the expedition members signed away certain of their IP rights in photographs and other records of their expedition - but it didn't have any standard work-for-hire language and it also seriously limited the Society's rights, to an almost creative-commons-esque extent. Also, some of the people involved have claimed that the RGS has been blatantly ignoring that agreement as regards other photographs, treated them like simple intellectual property of the RGS rather than abiding by the contract's original terms.
There do not appear to have been clear records as to which, if any, of the cameras and film on the expedition were expedition property rather than personal property; it seems clear that at least some of them were personal property, but they were all the same model Kodak and goodness knows exactly whose roll of film they happened to use - if it comes down to that question it will come down to a lot of serious archival and historical work, possibly with no answer at the end.
4. The Nepalese government and/or the finders - Especially if the cameras aren't actually found on a body (but possibly even if they are) it might be arguable that the physical property, and thus publication rights, falls under finders-keepers salvage law (in that its owners just left it sitting on top of a mountain for ninety years.) After Mallory was found and it suddenly became clear that this stuff could be valuable, the government of Nepal passed a law giving itself first salvage rights to anything on Everest. However, nobody involved in this, apparently, thinks the government of Nepal can be trusted to get the film safely developed, so the only result of that is that all later expeditions looking for it have operated in secrecy hoping to smuggle the film out of the country, get it developed at Kodak labs, and then deal with the legal question when it's a fait accompli. (Which led to one comical incident where two people planned secret search expeditions for the same week, they ran into each other while searching, looked at each other sheepishly and agreed to pool forces.)
5. If there is no corporate copyright in the photos and nobody can provably claim ownership of the film, they might be in the public domain, at least in some jurisdictions. Or you know, they might end up in legal limbo for decades on end.
The most likely outcome, if the photos exist, is probably that some media conglomerate with deep pockets will pay off all the claimants (except of course the public good) to agree that they get publication rights. That does not by any stretch, however, seem like the most justly, morally, ethically, economically, scientifically, or pragmatically sound answer to the problem. Not to mention that there is something incredibly sordid about the fact that our system requires people (really whether they want to or not) to scrabble around grotesquely under the bodies of the heroic dead to grab what we can. :/ I am pretty damn sure that is not why those mountaineers went up there in the first place.
Okay, once you've solved that one, we can move on to "Who theoretically holds copyright to the original footage, direction and cinematography in works of art like Octopus Steals My Video Camera And Swims Off With It While It's Recording?"(a question of more hypothetical importance than you might think to some in the cryptozoology community...)
Also, as a result of trying to come up with anything else to think about last night, I decided there needs to be a modern-day Holmes AU set on top of Mt. Everest entitled "The Adventure of the Yellow Band". The 'yellow band' is apparently a geographic/geologic fature near the top of Everest, but clearly it needs to be a "Speckled Band" AU. The Stoner sisters would make excellent high-adventure mountaineers, and modern!Holmes would totally love wandering around being forensic on the highest point on Earth, which is at this point basically an amusement park for privileged danger junkies. (There are something like 120 well-preserved traumatically dead bodies up there, of course he'd love it.) ...okay this is mostly due to me wincing like crazy every time somebody on one of the search-for-Mallory-and-Irvine expeditions went stomping carelessly through irreplaceable, until-then-untouched historical sites, but Holmes AU makes everything better.
Okay not BBC!Sherlock, he lacks certain of the Victorian virtues of his predecessor (and not my fuermosi!AU Holmes, who has slighty more self-preservation instinct) but another random modern AU holmes? Well the ACD one spent two years wandering around the Himalayas just because he didn't have anything better to do, it wouldn't be out of character.
(I'm not writing this, obviously. It would require me to figure out how long an unprotected Livestrong bracelet would survive above 30,000 feet. And I tried (and failed) to research that re: Wriststrong and low Earth orbit for another bunny years ago, I doubt ultra-high-altitude would be easier to find out.
...why do I do these things?)
Anyway I originally planned to end this entry by promising to try very hard to get to some of my several outstanding online obligations in the near future, but I keeled over in the middle of writing it and slept for six hours of very strange dreams, and I am probably going to keel over again shortly, so perhaps this is not the time to commit to getting things done. :/
So, uh, that's indefinitely delayed.
Anyway, with doing anything productive out of the question, and my normal occupy-brain-online sources slowly filling up with tempting, tempting Avengers spoilers, I instead turned to some old standbys of mine: rifling through printed cabinets of curiosities and watching old BBC documentaries, with the result that I made a seriously bad life choice while unable to sleep last night and spent several hours reading up on the search for the remains of Mallory and Irvine atop Mount Everest.
(Bad life choice = images of old, frozen mummified corpses of explorers after midnight are one of the few things that reliably give me nightmares. Childhood trauma.)
Anyway, I was in the middle of reading about this Great Unsolved Mystery of Heroism and Human Endeavour, and what to I run into?
An epic, epic discussion of why copyright law is irretrievably screwed up, of course! So who wants a special Broken Frozen Lobotomized Corpses edition of our occasionally continuing series, Copyright Law Is Irretrievably Screwed Up?
So here's the background, really short version: George Mallory and Sandy Irvine were part of the Third British Mount Everest Expedition in 1924, and they were the last team of that expedition to attempt to be the first humans to reach the summit. A teammate saw them on the ridgeline at around mid-day, "going strongly for the top", then clouds moved in, and that's the last anyone saw of them alive.
The (certified) Great Mystery is: did Mallory and Irvine actually make it to the summit, beating Hillary's official record by decades? There is actually a chance (small, but a chance) that they did: they were the first serious team to use supplemental oxygen, which is the real key; they were disciplined and trained, and Mallory at least was experienced and talented; they had good weather and the best supplies of the period; they took a route that was at least fairly close to one of the two accepted modern routes. A 1924 oxygen bottle found by a later climber shows that they made very close to the world record height (set earlier on the expedition) if they didn't pass it.
At this point, you might have to just say that the answer died with them. Only they carried at least one, and possibly two, pocket cameras, and if they did make the summit, they would definitely have taken photos. And the high slopes of Everest are one of the best preservation environments on Earth, so Kodak says that if someone can bring them the film from that trip, without further exposing it, Kodak can still develop the pictures.
Most of the effort to find Mallory and Irvine has been focused around the idea of finding the film from their last trip. In 1999 Mallory's body was found, but there were no cameras on it. Irvine was the better photographer and more likely to have the camera, though, and a body that would almost have to be Irvine's has been spotted a couple of times in a place that some Mallory & Irvine fanboys are almost certain they could now find again, if they had the time and resources and good weather conditions.
Which is where the copyright question comes in. Because if those pictures exist, and they are developed (almost regardless of what they show), somebody could make a lot of money from them - as the media storm around the discovery of Mallory's resting place demonstrated to anyone who was unsure. And who owns copyright on those photos?
Well, in any well-regulated law, they would be public domain at this point, of course. Even by the U.S.'s current bizarre standards, it's been more than 70 years since Mallory and Irvine died (though of course many of the photos taken by expedition members who survived the trip would still be under copyright to their heirs - which is bizarre in another way.) However! If Mallory and/or Irvine took the photos under contract to the Expedition and its sponsors - as there is an argument they did - then they might fall under the longer, extended corporate copyright limits, at least in some jurisdictions. And then there's the fact that the photos would be unpublished, which means that even if they are public domain, they might fall under newer laws with give "publication rights" which are in practice the same as copyright to the first authorized publisher of a work - and that authorized publisher would be determined by the legal owner of the physical film (*not* necessarily the same person who would own copyright in the images if they had copyright.)
Got all that? Good. Here, as best I can follow, is the list of possible claimants to ownership of these hypothetical images:
1. The Mallory and Irvine estates: arguing, I believe, that as owners of the cameras and film, the publication rights would devolve on their heirs. This, of course, would still require arguing the question of whose camera it was and which of them took the photos.
2. The Somervell Estate: Edward Somervell was another climber on the expedition (who took what was, until the Mallory/Irvine Mystery really took off, the most famous photo from the expedition, of climbing partner Norton at that record height). He apparently used to tell a story that he met Mallory and Irvine on their way up as he was on his way down, and loaned Mallory his camera, because Mallory had forgotten his. So the Somervell estate claims that the film/camera, and therefore the publication rights, go to his heirs. Incidentally, (one of?) Somervell's heir is also a climber, and one of the people actively looking for the camera - and one of the main witnesses to the camera-loaning story. (He claims his great-uncle used to say he wanted his camera back, so he's going to find it. He's also one of my favorites of the bunch - he summited Everest in a historically accurate reproduction of the 1924 expedition gear, just to prove it could theoretically be done, which is reasonably awesome.)
3. The British Everest Expedition and Assigns Thereof - Which appears at the moment to be the Royal Geographic Society, who are administering most of the existing intellectual (and physical) property from those expeditions. Their argument is that a) Mallory and Irvine were working for them, so they get corporate copyright, and b) anyway the cameras and film belonged to the expedition, so they have legal ownership of the film too. This is arguable - there was a contract whereby the expedition members signed away certain of their IP rights in photographs and other records of their expedition - but it didn't have any standard work-for-hire language and it also seriously limited the Society's rights, to an almost creative-commons-esque extent. Also, some of the people involved have claimed that the RGS has been blatantly ignoring that agreement as regards other photographs, treated them like simple intellectual property of the RGS rather than abiding by the contract's original terms.
There do not appear to have been clear records as to which, if any, of the cameras and film on the expedition were expedition property rather than personal property; it seems clear that at least some of them were personal property, but they were all the same model Kodak and goodness knows exactly whose roll of film they happened to use - if it comes down to that question it will come down to a lot of serious archival and historical work, possibly with no answer at the end.
4. The Nepalese government and/or the finders - Especially if the cameras aren't actually found on a body (but possibly even if they are) it might be arguable that the physical property, and thus publication rights, falls under finders-keepers salvage law (in that its owners just left it sitting on top of a mountain for ninety years.) After Mallory was found and it suddenly became clear that this stuff could be valuable, the government of Nepal passed a law giving itself first salvage rights to anything on Everest. However, nobody involved in this, apparently, thinks the government of Nepal can be trusted to get the film safely developed, so the only result of that is that all later expeditions looking for it have operated in secrecy hoping to smuggle the film out of the country, get it developed at Kodak labs, and then deal with the legal question when it's a fait accompli. (Which led to one comical incident where two people planned secret search expeditions for the same week, they ran into each other while searching, looked at each other sheepishly and agreed to pool forces.)
5. If there is no corporate copyright in the photos and nobody can provably claim ownership of the film, they might be in the public domain, at least in some jurisdictions. Or you know, they might end up in legal limbo for decades on end.
The most likely outcome, if the photos exist, is probably that some media conglomerate with deep pockets will pay off all the claimants (except of course the public good) to agree that they get publication rights. That does not by any stretch, however, seem like the most justly, morally, ethically, economically, scientifically, or pragmatically sound answer to the problem. Not to mention that there is something incredibly sordid about the fact that our system requires people (really whether they want to or not) to scrabble around grotesquely under the bodies of the heroic dead to grab what we can. :/ I am pretty damn sure that is not why those mountaineers went up there in the first place.
Okay, once you've solved that one, we can move on to "Who theoretically holds copyright to the original footage, direction and cinematography in works of art like Octopus Steals My Video Camera And Swims Off With It While It's Recording?"(a question of more hypothetical importance than you might think to some in the cryptozoology community...)
Also, as a result of trying to come up with anything else to think about last night, I decided there needs to be a modern-day Holmes AU set on top of Mt. Everest entitled "The Adventure of the Yellow Band". The 'yellow band' is apparently a geographic/geologic fature near the top of Everest, but clearly it needs to be a "Speckled Band" AU. The Stoner sisters would make excellent high-adventure mountaineers, and modern!Holmes would totally love wandering around being forensic on the highest point on Earth, which is at this point basically an amusement park for privileged danger junkies. (There are something like 120 well-preserved traumatically dead bodies up there, of course he'd love it.) ...okay this is mostly due to me wincing like crazy every time somebody on one of the search-for-Mallory-and-Irvine expeditions went stomping carelessly through irreplaceable, until-then-untouched historical sites, but Holmes AU makes everything better.
Okay not BBC!Sherlock, he lacks certain of the Victorian virtues of his predecessor (and not my fuermosi!AU Holmes, who has slighty more self-preservation instinct) but another random modern AU holmes? Well the ACD one spent two years wandering around the Himalayas just because he didn't have anything better to do, it wouldn't be out of character.
(I'm not writing this, obviously. It would require me to figure out how long an unprotected Livestrong bracelet would survive above 30,000 feet. And I tried (and failed) to research that re: Wriststrong and low Earth orbit for another bunny years ago, I doubt ultra-high-altitude would be easier to find out.
...why do I do these things?)
Anyway I originally planned to end this entry by promising to try very hard to get to some of my several outstanding online obligations in the near future, but I keeled over in the middle of writing it and slept for six hours of very strange dreams, and I am probably going to keel over again shortly, so perhaps this is not the time to commit to getting things done. :/
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But then, I still think Act 1 is objectively inferior, and we know that's not a popular opinion. ;>
(I did get C. to read it...he, like you, has the gaming background to find it funnier than I did...but he also lost interest in reading it before he got to the end. I get what it does for the narrative, and it has got its own rewards in the long run, but it is essentially acting as a gatekeeper for the rest of the story. Whether or not you value that depends on a range of factors, including whether you think the story has to be protected from infidels. Anyhow, I would think it was an interesting theoretical choice on Hussie's part if I didn't think it were basically unintentional. *GRIN*)
*There is nothing wrong with that. Once upon a time I wasn't a freakishly overread comics fangirl, either. And I quite firmly believe that now is the best time in the history of the world to be reading -- and making -- comics, even though I don't do the latter. SO MUCH BRILLIANT WORK right now, there's no way I can even keep up! Also, talk about gatekeeping, comics shops remain a massively un-woman-friendly environment. I think Teenaged Me (hee hee, Past Sara, who has a LOT to answer for, talk about your useful heuristics) mostly dealt with that by being deliberately oblivious. At least on the internet you don't need to wear bulky clothing and not make eye contact so as to prevent sexual harassment on your way to your reading material.
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...but I like putting things in categories! And there's some things it's just really hard to talk about without using categories.
(Heh heh heh. Old webcomics cred! Did you know that you are the second person I've met in RL who gets a namecheck in that era of the Narbonic archives? ...muttermutter kids these days probably don't even know what Narbonic is.
Homestuck has actually got me poking back at my old webcomics obsessions more - I caught up on the last two years of S*P the other day, and kind of scared myself by the fact that I still remembered all the important backstory.
But it's interesting that Homestuck fandom doesn't really act like a 'webcomic' fandom, except in the ways that it does -- oh crap there I go trying to make categories again.)
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And hah, I really don't feel like 2004 was all that long ago. I'm curious about what you're reading nowadays, too.
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Sherlock story sounds interesting.
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Have you ever read Lady Franklin's Revenge?
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