Re: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/45640.html

[Mr. Salt had heard about American World History courses.]

I think there  may be a confusion of nomenclature. I don't know if you have  come into contact with ordinary American college students, and we may not all be talking about the same thing. 

To clear up one point of confusion: the word "course" means different things in American and British English. I understand that you British use it to refer to a program of study lasting a year or more, full time. We would call that a "major" or a "field" or a "concentration." When we Americans use the term course, we mean a series of lectures, generally three a week, lasting for a term or a year. There are occasional exceptions, notably in mathematics, hard science, and languages, where a course can be comparable to a British A level subject, but the vast majority of courses are far narrower in scope.  The most elementary and extensive undergraduate course which a graduate student would be eligible to take  might be something  like "Ancient Roman Law," or "Greek/Hellenistic Military History."

Incidentally, we do  not have anything comparable to your "gap year." It is obviously not a good idea to let the students take time off while they are in the  midst of learning languages, lest they backslide. The result is that  different kinds of courses have similar names, and while someone accustomed to the system can recognize the differences instinctively, it is difficult to give formal  rules.

In the United States, World History, like History of Western Civilization, is a freshman/sophomore  level course. In your British terms,  it would correspond approximately to  secondary school O-Levels, or whatever you call them  nowadays. There are a  very large number of American college students who are "not academic," and who, if they were in England, would be apprentices, articled  clerks, etc. In the United States, about the only sizable industry or business with a tradition of apprenticeship is construction ("navvying"). Prospective automobile mechanics are trained in a Community College, earning the degree of Associate of Science, and they are required to take History of Western Civilization, World History, or some comparable course. This is even more strongly the case for white-collar  jobs. A community college will train the more specialized types of typists, up to and including Stenograph (*) court reporters, who can take dictation at a hundred and fifty words per minute.  Or take realtors ("estate agents"). There is a short course, leading to a licensing examination, but, in order to be eligible to take the examination, one must have a Bachelor's degree. Similar arrangements prevail in American civil service systems. Professor Smail is wearing his secondary school headmaster hat  instead of  his university professor hat when he talks about World History. Once you understand that, everything else falls into place.

(*) The Stenograph keyboard uses a kind of English ideogram system, and the typist brings his fingers down simultaneously, as if he were playing a piano, so  that each keystroke is a word or syllable instead of a letter. 


21st century archeology? Hmm... you've been reading William Rathje, haven't you.

[and Mr. Salt knew exactly what I was talking about, specifically Rathje's idea of doing archaeological work on modern American garbage.]
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Scrap:

Well, you understand that  I'm on both sides of the fence-- I used to  be an anthropologist, before switching over into history-- and I've come to the conclusion that the two subjects don't mix very well, save in special conditions.


The  material on prehistoric times [in a World History textbook] will be more or less cribbed from a sophomore archaeology textbook. The way  in which archaeologists know things is appreciably different from the way historians know things, and the sort of person who writes a freshman/sophomore history textbook is very unlikely to have critical expertise in archaeology. I dug out an old textbook, Crane Brinton, _A History of Civilization: Prehistory to 1715_, 5 edition (1976). Brinton  had written the original work in 1955, and had died in  1968. The latter editions were revised by people hired by the publisher, as is usual and customary for freshman textbooks. Now, Brinton's  magnum opus was his _Anatomy of Revolution_ (1938), a comparative study of four revolutions from the seventeenth century to the the twentieth century. By the time he was called  upon to write the  freshman textbook, he was an  "elderly lion," and the publisher felt his name would sell a few more copies. I would not care to  venture about  how  much low-level ghost-writing may have taken  place.  You might think of him approximately as the American equivalent of Christopher Hill or Eric Hobsbawm. At any rate, Brinton's expertise was from a period when all kinds of  little groups  of workingmen were publishing tracts and pamphlets. As you will know, this is a very different kind of work from what early medieval historians do.

If  you haven't paid your dues in a biochemistry lab, and you start talking  about dopamine, you are likely to be talking  nonsense.

I took an introductory prehistory course a long time ago, from an Ohio Valley archaeologist.

RE: http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/45959.html


[A discussion of whether antiquities can be copyrighted]

American Versus English Law

I think you are confusing British copyright law with that in the rest of the world.  American copyright  law is different, and the  difference ultimately goes back to the night in 1773 when we dumped the East India Company's tea into Boston harbor. There are a great many things which the United States Congress may not do.  The Supreme Court  does not operate the same way the Law Lords operate. The United States Constitution contains the limiting language in Article I, Section 8: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their writings and discoveries." There is no license for a perpetual copyright, nor for a copyright for a work of negligible creativity. The action of the American court system in respect of copyright has hitherto been based mostly on something called "judicial deference," which grants the legislature something approximately equivalent to John Locke's definition  of the Royal  Prerogative, not an absolute right, but a freedom in details, provided that the legislature is acting in good  faith. However, there inevitably comes a certain point when the courts become aroused, and begin methodically smashing iniquitous laws. You might look at the leading cases of Betts vs. Brady (1942) and Gideon vs. Wainwright (1963), dealing with the right to legal counsel. The courts tolerated an abuse for a term of years, and then, suddenly,  driven by changes in mental climate, decided it was intolerable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gideon_v._Wainwright

The case of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (1999) essentially settled the issue of copyright in reproductions. The major American museums essentially accepted the position, and the case never went to appeal. It wasn't  even a close call, simply an application of settled principle. The museums were not the authors of the works in question, and could not present any kind of credible evidence of having compensated the authors, and, as you note, ancient or antique works of art are as likely as not to be stolen property at some remove. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_Ltd._v._Corel_Corporation

I don't know if you  have followed the recent developments in American patent law, notably the Supreme Court decision in KSR vs. Teleflex. The court put its foot down, good and hard, abolishing a couple of decades worth of accrued precedents, on the grounds that they represented a perversion of the legitimate purposes of patents.

Representative Mary Bono, the promoter of the most recent copyright extension act, expressed conspicuous and blatant contempt for the constitution in her arguments. She stated that the constitution is something to be evaded by the use of clever tricks ("forever minus a day"). That will come back to haunt her. In American political life, public scorn for the constitution is understood to be a species of blasphemy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act

What will happen in due course will be that the courts will revisit the issue of copyright length. And they will do so in a "puritan" spirit. They will refer to the "intentions of the framers," and revert to the so-called "founders' copyright" (fourteen years, renewable to twenty-eight). The term "Founders' Copyright" is a wonderful invention, simply because it carries the implication that  anyone who objects to it does not believe in democracy, and is merely waiting his chance to betray the country to a foreign power, a la Benedict Arnold.

http://chaucer.umuc.edu/blogcip/collectanea/2008/01/the_wisdom_of_the_14_year_copy_1.html
http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_licenses

The founders' copyright would not present major economic complications, of course.  By the time a book has been published for fourteen years, it is either out of print, or readily available in used bookstores  at a negligible price, sometimes  both at once.

Take another case, Crown Copyright. Most Americans would consider that Crown Copyright is morally offensive. If something is produced with public money, it ought to be public domain, and given that the government has the power to  tax to supply its needs, there is no excuse for needless cupidity.

Now, as to the Egyptian  claim, the instinctive American reaction is that we are already a bit sore about "extraordinary renditions" and that if some Egyptian official insists on trying to claim copyright on the pyramids in America, we'll dump him  in Boston harbor to join the tea. This may just be the straw which breaks the camel's back.

One must remember that a conventional photograph is not a direct reproduction of a three dimensional object. A conventional photograph does involve creative choices about things like camera position and  angle, lighting, objects in the foreground, etc.

These choices do not arise in the narrow specialty of copy photography. For example, if you are photographing a painting, it is axiomatic  that the film plane has to be parallel to the canvas, and that the lighting has to  be arranged in such a way as not to generate surface reflections.  You could write a computer program which would drive servomotors, and cause the light  mounts to travel back and forth until those large white patches vanished.  There are certain types of instruments used in industry for obtaining a direct representation of three-dimensional objects, using scanning lasers, generally with a view to importing pre-existing parts into CAD/CAM systems. I know of at least one project which involves using such an instrument to create a three-dimensional model of  late-nineteenth century phonograph records, which can then be decoded into a sound track. Other people are attempting to use inexpensive consumer-grade equipment, such as cameras and scanners to achieve the same object, via interferometry. The resulting recordings would not be copyrightable.

The  kind of photograph you would probably make of a Greek pot would be rather a gray area. It would not tend to involve any very inventive composition, you would probably photograph it against a sheet of gray or brown paper (a neutral background). Someone could probably  show that the "set up" is substantially the same as  that in hundreds of other published pictures of pots of about the same size and shape. More to the  point, however,  the  museum  shop could almost certainly make  much more money selling replica pots, advertised to be exact copies, costing perhaps a couple of hundred dollars each, and in fact, most museums have been doing this on a considerable scale for years. These replicas are  not  quite exact copies-- in some invisible location, they are stamped with the museum's name, etc.,  so as not play a trick on Sotheby's. The idea is that the buyer does not pretend the  pot is the original article, but he might claim that it is a souvenir of a visit to a museum, or give it as a certain kind of conventional gift.  Such replicas, sooner or later, make their way into thrift shops at  extremely low prices. Nowadays, the museum shops seem to  be deemphasizing this kind of thing. Instead of unabashedly selling a mechanically produced exact copy of a particular named museum piece, they want to sell stuff produced by an authentic craft tradition of barefoot and illiterate potters in, say, Egypt. To find  the mechanical copies, one has to look on the internet.

http://www.museumstorecompany.com/index.php
http://www.talariaenterprises.com/product_lists/vase_pg1.html

Supposing you translate a bit of Moliere. Translation is a work of substantial creativity. You have a copyright in the translation, but  not in the underlying Moliere play.  Since the Moliere play (written circa 1660) is in the public domain, you can publish your translation. Now, if you translate something a contemporary French author wrote last year, you have a copyright on the translation,  but he has a copyright on the original. You need both copyrights to publish, so you can't  do so without the French author's permission. On the other hand, he cannot just  take your translation and put out an English edition without  your permission. He can, however, commission someone else to create a new translation, and he does not need your permission for this. You can see an extreme case of this kind of thing in certain large open source computer programs, where hundreds or thousands of people may have contributed, the contributions are finely intermingled, and it is practically impossible to change the terms of contract under which they provided their contributions-- that is, a particular  open-source license, such as the General Public License. A  photograph of the pyramids in the open desert would fall into the same category as a translation of Moliere-- that is, a creative  derivative of a public-domain work.

Many of the movable antiquities (say, up to ten tons or so) have long since been carried off to London, Paris,  Berlin, or New York. One does not have to go to Egypt to look at  the movables.  For the price of a trip to  Egypt, one could make a systematic tour of all the museums within, say, a thousand miles of one's home. Interestingly, looking at an introductory art history textbook, published in  1976, I found that the editors had gone to two photo-archives in Germany to get  pictures of the objects in  the Cairo museum. Presumably some industrious German had gone through the Cairo museum, and methodically photographed everything, years before. We may take it as read that nearly every tourist who ever visited Egypt since the invention of the camera took photographs of the pyramids, and there is, in practice, a hyperabundance of photographs available outside of Egypt, taken  by people who do not intend to go back, or  who are no longer living. In many cases, the photographs never had copyright documents filed in respect of them. Perhaps the photographer failed to renew the copyright-- circa 1950, only about 9.5% of American copyright  holders exercised  their right of renewal (5.5% exclusive of movies and music, Kaplan and Brown, _Cases on Copyright_, 1978, p. 302). There are various intricacies. Before 1964, and to a lesser extent, before 1989, an author who wanted to maintain his copyrights had to take certain positive actions, and many authors, photographers, etc., being realists, did not trouble to do so. Here is a page discussing the issue in some detail, with respect to American copyright law.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html

I'm pretty sure that you could find enough pictures taken after the invention of Kodachrome, and yet, free from legal entanglements. If you wanted to use  photographs, not as works of art, but as documentary evidence to recover the exact  dimensions of the pyramids, with a view to building  three-dimensional models, copyright  would not operate, because you would merely  be extracting factual information, which is not itself copyrightable. The leading cases for this involve attempts to copyright telephone directories and secure a monopoly on the associated advertising revenue. Obviously, the Egyptians can do things in their own country. They can decide that the Great Pyramid is un-Islamic, and blow it up the way the Taliban did with that Buddha statue. However, their reach is much more restricted in dealing with things which are no longer in Egypt. It would seem that whatever claims  the Egyptians might  make about photographs are simply too late.

Practically speaking, it  is more or  less impossible to attach a legitimate contract to the sale of an inexpensive object, such as a book or a magazine or a newspaper. This would fall broadly under the concepts of "Doctrine of First  Sale," and "Contracts of Adhesion." What it comes down to is that the buyer would have to read the contract, and make some positive demonstration of agreement, and when one is attempting to sell the buyer something he really doesn't need anyway, pressing a contract upon him is a formula for commercial ruin. One might add that  the most avid consumers are children, who lack the legal capacity to enter into contracts, save in very narrowly defined circumstances.  This means that even if the Egyptians were able to attach terms and conditions to a photograph, the effect would be to  render the  photograph unpublishable, not to propagate these terms and conditions.

An object as big as the pyramids, practically speaking, can be photographed from space.  About twenty years ago, there was an incident when an American intelligences analyst, a relative of the noted naval historian Samuel Elliot Morrison,  sold a picture from an American spy satellite to Jane's Defense Weekly. It was a detailed picture of a Soviet warship under construction.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB13/
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB13/4.jpg

 What got the Egyptians all worked up, if you recall, was that Las Vegas promoters proposed to build full-scale replicas of the big and dramatic monuments so that tourists would not  have to go to Egypt to experience the gigantic monuments. Tourist sites in Egypt are of dubious safety, nowadays, with all the Islamic fundamentalists running around.

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[AlunSalt wondered if it might be possible tuse nineteenth century imporessionist palntings as a source of information about contemporary atmospheric conditions. ]

HNN post, Alun Salt, Monet the Astronomer?

10/12/2006 01:27 PM

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HNN post, Alun Salt, The Needham Question

11/06/2006 07:13 PM

RE: http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/31292.html#comment

Was European Superiority Confined to Military Technology?

Well, for practical purposes, western science was not available at the time that the west expanded. Chemistry cannot really be said to be on a scientific basis before Mendeleev, in, what, the 1880's or thereabouts. The first body of really scientific chemistry would have been in the 1920's or thereabouts, for example, Charles Kettering and Tetraethyl Lead at GM. As for Newton and Calculus, in the real world of engineering, most rate problems are actually differential equations, usually nonlinear, and those were basically unsolvable until computers became available, from about 1940 onwards.

The alleged superiority of western technology was in fact mostly a matter of military technology. And here, I think there is a case to be made that China was simply the kind of country where small differentials of military ability did not translate into political power. From the military historian's standpoint, the extraordinary thing about Chinese walls was that they were twenty to fifty feet thick. The Chinese used rammed earth, or what we would call adobe, which was shatterproof, and simply absorbed cannonballs. Outside the adobe, they put a stone facing.  With a crude cannon you could knock down a European castle, and put a rebel duke out of business. The walls might  only be a couple of feet thick. Most of the castles in England were "slighted" by Oliver Cromwell's siege train, circa 1651, in the course of mopping up after the  English Civil War. Italy was one of the most notorious loci of military innovation in the sixteenth century, largely because it was fought over by the French and Spanish, and Italian princes were constantly changing sides between the two. What drove military innovation in Europe was the extent to which the surrounding community was prepared to acknowledge the victor of a small battle as a legitimate ruler  of a small territory, and proceed on that basis. The Pope did not, and could not, issue orders for Polish troops to go and serve as peacekeepers in, say, Ulster or Estremadura.  I am not an orientalist, and perhaps Jonathan Dresner could comment if he is around.

(12/02/2006 10:28 AM)

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