recursion

So. Yeah. We lost. The Copyright Term Extension Act -- which passed Congress unanimously yet will cost the American public billions of dollars over the next 20 years -- is constitutional. What's next?

It's time to take action.

Siva Vaidhyanathan says after the copyright smackdown, the real fight is yet to come.

Op-eds against the decision are coming out in the New York Times and elsewhere. Reason has an interview with Mickey Mouse from copyright jail. The message is spreading.

Erik Möller has posted his manifesto Renaissance Now: Save the Public Domain! and started the ACTION mailing list to plan what to do next.

Larry Lessig isn't standing still either. Besides his work with the Creative Commons, he's proposed the Eric Eldred Act (see also his New York Times op-ed) to enhance the public domain through a minimal tax to keep copyrights registered after 50 years.

My own contribution is to keep plugging the Lessig Challenge. Stop giving money to the copyright barons! Fight back by funding the public domain and legal and legislative action.

The real fight has just begun.

MoveOn released their "Daisy" anti-war ad this week. It's a remake of an ad from Lyndon Johnson's 1964 campaign which is one of the most famous (and infamous) political ads of all time. From MoveOn's press release:

THE ORIGINAL DAISY AD The original "Daisy" TV ad was produced by Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964. The ad implied that if Goldwater were elected he might take the United States into nuclear war. It ran only once.

The controversial ad began with a little girl in a field picking petals off a daisy, counting. When the count reaches ten, her image is frozen and a male voice begins a militaristic countdown. At zero, we see a nuclear explosion and hear President Johnson's voice: "These are the stakes, to make a world in which all God's children can live, or to go into the darkness. Either we must love each other or we must die." Fade to black. White lettering. "On November 3rd vote for President Johnson."

Wow. The new "Daisy" (5.6 Meg MPEG) ad from MoveOn is pretty intense, so I decided to see if I could find the original.

The Living Room Candidate has all the ads from the 1964 election, including the original Daisy.

Damn, why don't they make ads like that anymore? Johnson's ads are about 50% negative, but even when they are, you believe them, because Goldwater was a fanatic. I really like the closing line of all of Johnson's ads: "Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. The stakes are too high for you to stay home." None of Johnson's ads are defensive, but a number of Goldwater's address misconceptions about him -- that he wants to demolish social security, that he is a warmonger, that he's impulsive. Are you convinced to vote for a man because Ronald Regan says: "Do you honestly believe that Barry wants his sons and daughters in a war?...Of course not....Vote for Bary Goldwater."

Update: Salon has thoughts on the new Daisy ad from 4 media critics. They don't like it very much.

More unnatural quiet at work. I wonder when I'll get used to the number of people we have now? I got vaguely depressed thinking about all the things McClain set up (our wiki and continuous integration tools, for starters).

They kept calling Trevor all day, frantically trying to get some demo working. First he gets laid off, now he's invaluable. I'd be so pissed if that was me. "Give me $150/hour for consulting, or I'm not going to help you any more."

Garrick was still there today, cleaning out his desk and burning CDs of cartoons and MP3s. Did I mention he had a lot of crap? He filled up his minivan with boxes of it all. I'm going to miss him. He's probably going to move to Texas to live with his wife (she works for the oil industry down there).

The morning after. The office feels unnaturally quiet. There's some gallows humor about surviving the layoffs.

Garrick has so much crap that he's back in the office today packing up stuff all day. That's a little strange.

Amazingly, I manage to get some work done.