Pensatorium

Women in red. I like particularly this one.

Ajude a sustentar a Wikipédia e outros projetos, sem colocar a mão no bolso, e concorra a um Eee PC!

…e também a pen drives, card drives, camisetas geeks, livros e mais! O BR-Linux e o Efetividade lançaram uma campanha para ajudar a Wikimedia Foundation e outros mantenedores de projetos que usamos no dia-a-dia on-line. Se você puder doar diretamente, ou contribuir de outra forma, são sempre melhores opções. Mas se não puder, veja as regras da promoção e participe - quanto mais divulgação, maior será a doação do BR-Linux e do Efetividade, e você ainda concorre a diversos brindes!

Thomas Hardy

quoting Benjamin Mako Hill from “Why Give to Wikimedia?“

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

Fiquei ligeiramente surpreso por a apresentação deles (largamente improvisada, aliás) ter-se focado em dois aspectos principais: os prazos curtíssimos que têm para entregar os trabalhos, e as dificuldades em arranjar conteúdo para os produzir, devido ao licenciamento do conteúdo existente (copyright).

If we know little about the utility of longer copyright terms, there is abundant evidence regarding the vital importance to the progress of our culture of a robust stock of public domain works.

Most artists, if pressed, will admit that the true mother of invention in the arts is not necessity, but theft. And this is true even for our greatest artists. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1591) was taken from Arthur Brooke’s poem Romeus and Juliet (1562), and most of Shakespeare’s historical plays would have infringed Holingshead’s Chronicles of England (1573). For the third movement of the overture to Theodora, Handel drew on a harpsichord piece by Gottlieb Muffat (1690-1770). Passages of both works are compared at this very interesting web site.

Cultural giants borrow, and so do corporate giants. Ironically, many of Disney’s animated films are based on Nineteenth Century public domain works, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Pinocchio, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Alice in Wonderland, and The Jungle Book (released exactly one year after Kipling’s copyrights expired).

Borrowing is ubiquitous, inevitable, and, most importantly, good. Contrary to the romantic notion that true genius inheres in creating something completely new, genius is often better described as opening up new meanings on well-trodden themes. Leonard Bernstein’s reworking in West Side Story of Romeo and Juliet is a good example.