Tuesday 05/13/2025
Should have been the writers meeting this morning but something was wrong with the zoom link, nobody could get on. I took advantage to leave early for FOPAL where I did the usual post-sale triage of books that hadn’t sold. There were no donations to process because they hadn’t gotten around to distributing the donations that were held back before the sale weekend. There’s some disarray among the volunteers in that organization; I’m a little concerned. But I only see a corner of it.
Back home I decided to do some thinking and writing. A week ago Bert had stirred a pot with an email in which he suggested that several of the things we do are violations of copyright. He sent this to Sally, who is the current president of the Resident Association. He raised legitimate issues, although they are issues that have existed literally for decades without anybody complaining. Bert had to poke all the sleeping dogs.
Well for one issue: for years there’s been a tradition of showing an opera off DVD on Saturday a month. In the auditorium projected on the big screen. 20 or 30 opera fans show up. Of course technically this is a clear violation of copyright. That’s one of five similar or related issues, or sleeping dogs, that Bert had to poke.
So I wanted Sally to understand the details of this. Sally is a sharp cookie, a highly experienced administrator. (She’s only been president of three different colleges.) I am hoping she will figure out how to handle these issues and how to present them to our staff administrators, who are not aware (or seem not to be aware) of them. So I wrote a backgrounder, a survey of the different things that residents are in the habit of doing for decades that are technically violations of intellectual property law. I found a lot of good info and pulled it all together in a readable fashion, and sent it to her.
There’s a concert tonight, some school choir thing, which I think I will go to. Mind you, if they perform a song that is owned by ASCAP or BMI — and damn few songs are not — they should pay a performance fee. Except that music performed for educational purposes is exempt. Fine, around their school rehearsals. But this performance outside their school? Technically they should pay.
Codgerville 