Hi everyone!

I’m reaching out because I have a big family, and as the last born, they’re all really excited to see me graduate. If anyone has any extra tickets for the graduation ceremony on DEC 19th that you’re not using, I’d be incredibly grateful. 

Please contact me at mdiallo6@umbc.edu

Please let me know—thank you so much in advance!

Hi everyone!

I’m reaching out because I have a big family, and as the last born, they’re all really excited to see me graduate. If anyone has any extra tickets for the graduation ceremony on DEC 19th that you’re not using, I’d be incredibly grateful. 

Please contact me at mdiallo6@umbc.edu

Please let me know—thank you so much in advance!

Hi everyone!

I’m reaching out because I have a big family, and as the last born, they’re all really excited to see me graduate. If anyone has any extra tickets for the graduation ceremony on DEC 19th that you’re not using, I’d be incredibly grateful. 

Please contact me at mdiallo6@umbc.edu

Please let me know—thank you so much in advance!

Hi everyone!

I’m reaching out because I have a big family, and as the last born, they’re all really excited to see me graduate. If anyone has any extra tickets for the graduation ceremony on DEC 19th that you’re not using, I’d be incredibly grateful. 

Please contact me at mdiallo6@umbc.edu

Please let me know—thank you so much in advance!

Want to bring some disability-friendly ideas into kitchens this season?  Look over some cooking hacks for chefs with disabilities and check out Fall recipes from The Accessible Chef.

For those heading into shopping for the holidays, Yelp is providing crowd-sourced information about business accessibility - which can be an asset to dining out as well.  It's also helpful to call ahead with any public business for specific details from dietary restrictions and allergies to stair-free navigation to sensory-compatible environments. 

Travel is also a highlight of this season - given the diversity of disability, here is a more inclusive list of tips to ease travel hassles.

November is also about:

It’s the most wonderful night of the year! Join EESA for Karaoke Night on Monday, December 2nd, at 7 PM in the Commons Sport Zone. We will have hot chocolate and many winter treats! Let’s hit all the right notes this winter! 

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! Below are some important reminders!

If you are interested in running for Vice President, please fill out the following form: https://forms.gle/xe5bWSqf5xV1rhYB6 

The election will occur during the Club Meeting this Monday, December 2nd!

Effective immediately, any student may join the team by completing a Team Entry Form. Both undergraduate and graduate students can join the team.

There will still be tryouts on December 6 and December 7th. However, the results from tryouts will now be used to determine placement on competition teams. Both undergraduate and graduate students can try out. Tryouts are a great opportunity to learn and test skills, so give it a shot; even if you feel you might not get placed, you don’t know unless you try!

Team Entry Form: https://forms.gle/c4hZ2LJyAAz2HzLs6 

Fall 2024 Tryout Application: https://forms.gle/EFTAFdA88YuwcsYu9 

Friday, December 6th | 12:30pm to 3:30pm (NEW TIME) [ITE 231]

Saturday, December 7th | 12pm to 3pm [ITE 231]

William Brooks

At issue in many people's minds is the very real problem that works disappear.  Hundreds of games were Wiiware-only; they don't exist anymore except on illegal Web sites that distribute copies of these games without permission from the creators.  Someone recently found a copy of software from almost 50 years ago that they thought no longer existed.  This is a real thing, and it's comparable to loss of art—imagine all copies of a book being destroyed because for a while nobody cared and libraries were illegal because people might read books for leisure.  That scenario also has its own fun real-world analogy:  for almost a century, rich people got bored of glass baubles, and then when people started wanting glass again nobody knew how to make it because the last people who ever did it died out two generations prior.  The fact is things get lost—art, knowledge, everything—unless preserved.

My take has always been one of human rights.

Think about what kind of music you listen to, and what kind of music you don't.  What kind of movies do you like?  Do you collect comic books?  Video games?  Do you draw your own comics, make your own music, write your own games?  All of that builds on prior art.

More fundamentally, the fact that you listen to rock and hate rap, or that you're a rap artist and can't stand heavy metal, or whatever else, is part of your identity.  It's part of the culture you grew up in.  Koreans and Japanese in their native countries have K-Pop and J-Pop and it's big in their culture, and it's not big in American culture.  Some people are really into comics and action figures and can tell you everything about every super hero ever.  People who make video games that are like older video games grew up playing those older games and want to reintroduce some of that experience, often with a more modern take, but with a classic experience.

That's identity.  It's who you are.

We call this the right to participate in culture[2][3][4].

Disney wrote a play for Beauty and the Beast several decades ago, and if you want to perform it you need to pay Disney half a million dollars.  Never mind that Beauty and the Beast is old, and that bringing it up in Africa might get you confused looks but mentioning it anywhere in the United States will get you a very normal and not strange at all conversation because literally everyone knows what Beauty and the Beast is.  It's old, it's part of our culture.

Most bands start out as cover bands.  Frequently they're covering music that's 20, 30 years old.  It's stuff they grew up listening to, often stuff their parents grew up listening to.  If you, right now, go outside with a guitar and start playing decades-old Aerosmith or ZZ Top songs in public, technically you can be issued a cease-and-desist notice and made to pay hundreds of dollars in damages for each time you played the song and for each person who heard it.

Many people roll their eyes at that—which is the biggest evidence of the right to participate in culture:  not only does it seem absurd, but it's something that happens rarely and, despite the fact that it does happen, people ignore it because it's too absurd to contemplate.  Of course you can play songs in public with your band.  Why wouldn't you be able to?  They're just part of your life.

(Funny:  for a short while, the music industry had people going around busting small restaurants and shops because the employees had a small CD player or iPod behind the counter playing music for them to listen to and…well, customers could sort of hear it, so it was a performance, and they wanted $30,000 per song per time it was played, meaning millions and millions of dollars.)

The other part of that is that people inherently seem to recognize copyright.  A new movie or game comes out, new music comes out, and people automatically respect that you shouldn't be copying it around because people worked to make this thing and they deserve to get paid.  Give it a few years and people care less and less about that and start recognizing that work as belonging to them, as part of their culture.  It's difficult for most people to process the concept of long copyright terms:  they can recite the law and then immediately start violating copyright and making up all kinds of reasons why it's legal—right after quoting the parts of the law that says it isn't—because it's too bizarre for them to keep it in their head that it isn't just their right.  Anything that hasn't been sold in 20 years? "It's no longer copyrighted" it absolutely is and you can be sued into oblivion for distributing it.  People will forget they can't go on Youtube and play songs that they didn't write, then when reminded will go "oh yeah…" and then do it again because they immediately forget because it makes no goddamned sense that you can't play a song from the 1980s on guitar and publish a video of it.

There's a strange conflict here:

1. People recognize, immediately, that new works represent work, and that it's wrong to undermine the creator's ability to monetize their work, thus respect copyright as a necessary and proper right.
2. People recognize, after a short while, that everything that's happened around them is part of their culture—all music, stories, games, movies, everything—and has slowly become a part of their identity, thus recognize those same works as belonging to them and to all of us.
3. When pressed, a lot of people—despite 1 and 2 both being in effect—will think for a few seconds and quickly reason that because someone created a work of art, it must belong to them until they die, and they must have ultimate control over it.

The copyright term we have isn't 7 years.

It isn't 14 years.

It isn't 20 years.

It's whenever the original author dies, plus 99 more years.

There is literally no way you haven't violated all kinds of laws related to copyright just by existing.  Did you sing Happy Birthday?  It's now out of copyright, finally; back when COVID-19 started, you could still technically be sued for singing it at a birthday party, but I'm pretty sure in practice nobody ever got sued.  You could have, though.  For thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.  Especially if you did it in a McDonalds with a whole bunch of people around.

Twitch and Youtube are loaded with things that could get you sued into the ground.  Do you realize that streaming a video game means broadcasting copyrighted music and copyrighted images to hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of people?  Nintendo has taken to suing people and even sent someone to prison for 2 years; much of the time this is tied to them actually offering services involving distribution of copyrighted materials (i.e. Nintendo games installed on your jailbroken Switch), but in several cases they have literally identified streamers who use emulators and gotten judgments against them in the tens of millions of dollars for showing copyrighted material (i.e. video game footage).  Nintendo likes to push that emulators are illegal, but…they're…not.  The only control you could have over emulation would be a patent, and those last 20 years, and Nintendo has never made such a patent claim.

The biggest problem may be that participation in culture is such a fundamental right that nobody cares.  Nobody cares about copyright terms because it's hard to process.  They just ignore it and go on violating copyright law because obviously you aren't owned by other people—individuals or big corporations—and as history becomes a part of you, you come to own your own history.  All of these laws can kind of float around in your head for a little while, but they're kind of hard to not just ignore because the concept is just bizarre.

Seven years.  I say seven years.  Microsoft Windows 10 comes out, 7 years later every patch that was released since Windows 10 came out is still under copyright, but the original release with all its security vulnerabilities and bugs and old stuff that got fixed in the past 7 years is free.  Disney released The Little Mermaid years ago in 380i, then 1080p; they have the original film, they're releasing a new box set in 4k, that 4k release is a new copyrighted work, being able to freely copy the old 1080p version doesn't mean you're allowed to copy the new 4k bluray release.  You can wait seven years for that.

Maybe you think that's too short.  14 years, 20 years, whatever.  Pick a number.  If you say more than 20 I'mma fight you—at 20 years old your entire childhood is less than 20 years old and defines you.  I can't grind away the right to control your work for a reasonable period, I can't give you what someone published 6 months ago even if it's really really really made a huge impact on your life.  I also can't accept the existence of any justification for an adult still owning NOTHING of their own childhood, of everything that was created since they were born still belonging to someone else.

This cuts in every direction.  All those movies and music and all that software is fair game because it's 7 years old.  All that open source software that has licensing to prevent you from running off and closing up the source for something you built from it ALSO no longer can claim any right to enforce such licensing because it's 7 years old.  You have to go back 7 years in the Github repo to get the version that you're allowed to have, you can't use newly contributed code, but this sword cuts both ways.  I've dealt with RMS, he hated the idea of short copyrights because of exactly that, people want something that's good for them and only good for them; too bad, that's not how the world works, having rights is a trade-off.

The important point is it needs to cut in every direction.  If it doesn't, then how can it be giving people the right to participate in their own culture?

At least think about it.  Nobody does.