Down the Rabbit Hole, and other exercises in divergence .

This Time - John Legend
This time I want it all.
This time I want it all.

Following a late-night music binge, today has been one of those [down the rabbit hole] days where I procrastinate on one imperative project by working on another that is necessary but not as important and/or as time-sensitive. This behavior is successful given that it's design is to alleviate the guilt of not working on the imperative project.

Today's imperative project is to outline for my Patent Law class, which has been a struggle, to say the least. I'm pretty sure the class reiterates the same policy everyday and just adds new jargon in an effort to preserve or increase it's self-importance. I blame it all on the author of the book, who likes to repeat himself over and over, and a little bit on Thomas Jefferson, who is largely to blame for the existence of US Intellectual Property laws. I will, of course, stop begrudging TJ the existence of IP law as soon as this final is over... To his credit, he has a nice quote that Justice Scalia probably wishes had not survived the test of time:
I am certainly not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy ... .
Inscription on the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., taken from a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval (July 12, 1816).

In any case, my procrastination-project, which is searching for a note topic, is proving fruitful and is at least within the same topic as the class I should be outlining. I started with the Google Book Search Project, which I understood to be a project with the goal of digitizing all books. (I also thought it was a completely original project but apparently it is inspired by other digitization projects already underway such as the Library of Congress's American Memory project, Project Gutenberg, the Million Book Project and the Universal Library.)

I had heard of the Google Book project, and always believed it to be an incredible and noble project both preserving and spreading knowledge worldwide through increased ease of access. Still, I never looked into the project because I don't really want to read an entire book on a computer. (If I could read German, I might make an exception for Grimm's 20 Stories.) Then I stumbled upon it when fact-checking for my journal. I couldn't find a hard copy of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. I typed a quote from the journal paper into Google and up popped the digitized book - not only are the books scanned and readable, they are search-able, just like web pages! Google's first "crucial question" was apparently "how long would it take to digitally scan every book in the world?"; attending college during the Napster litigation, my first question was, what are the copyright ramifications of this project?! Of course, I am behind, and there is not only litigation - which has just been settled out of court this week - but also a small amount of scholarly discussion (see, e.g., Proskine, Emily Anne, Intellectual Property: Copyright: Note: Google's Technicolor Dreamcoat: A Copyright Analysis of the Google Book, 21 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 213.)

I am not close to finishing my research on this topic, but I suspect that with this recent settlement, and changes in the way music has been digitized and subsequently marketed in the last few years, there is there is a paper in here somewhere.

Another related subject that serves for interesting fodder is Internet Archive, is nonprofit organization dedicated to building and maintaining a free and openly accessible online digital library, including an archive of Web." IA's web archive project, The Wayback Machine, is a digital time capsule. It's archived web pages bring up issues when used as evidence in court. So far the patent office has accepted it's archived pages as prior art, but courts have come to different opinions. See Wikipedia Internet Archive. Where do archived web pages fall under the 6th amendment's right to confront one's accuser? Would the courts feel more comfortable if IA were regulated by statutes or monitored by some organization? How would such measures confer reliability on an organization, especially given that it doesn't seem to have an agenda other than the classic librarian goal to preserve and provide access to information?

Maybe I'll have some answers in a few months.