7. See Barbara Ringer, "Study Number 31: Renewal of Copyright," reprinted in U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights, Copyright Law Revision, 86th Cong., 1st Sess., Committee Print (1960), 187. See also HR Rep. 94-1476 (1976), 136; William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2003), 210-212.
8. Details of the orphan works problem can be found in the proposals presented to the copyright office by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain; Orphan Works: Analysis and Proposal: Submission to the Copyright Office—March 2005, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdproposal.pdf, and Access to Orphan Films: Submission to the Copyright Office—March 2005, available at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/pdf/cspdorphanfilm.pdf. Two recent bills, in the Senate and House, respectively, attempt to address the orphan works problems. The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008, S 2913, 110th Cong. (2008), would add a new section to the Copyright Act limiting remedies for infringement of orphan works and requiring the establishment of a database of pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works. The House bill, The Orphan Works Act of 2008, HR 5889, 110th Cong. (2008), is similar but not identical. While these bills are a good start, the eventual remedy will need to be more sweeping.
9. Bruce Sterling, Heavy Weather (New York: Bantam, 1994): 73
Notes: Chapter 2
1. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson (August 13, 1813), in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1907), vol. XIII, 326-338 (hereinafter Letter to McPherson), available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1 .html (follow "May 1, 1812" hyperlink, then navigate to image 1057).
2. For example, attempting to procure a former stable master a position (letter from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel H. Smith [August 15, 1813], available at http://memory.loc .gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1.html [follow "May 1, 1812" hyperlink, then navigate to image 1070]), comments on "Rudiments of English Grammar" (letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Waldo [August 16, 1813], in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIII, 338-347), orthography of the plurals of nouns ending in "y" (letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Wilson [August 17, 1813], Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIII, 347-348), accepting the necessary delay in the publication of a study on the anatomy of mammoth bones (letter from Thomas Jefferson to Caspar Wistar [August 17, 1813], available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/jefferson_papers/mtjser1 .html [follow "May 1, 1812" hyperlink, then navigate to image 1095]), and discussing the Lewis biography (excerpt of a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Paul Allen [August 18, 1813], Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783-1854, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 586).
It is easy, in fact, reading this prodigious outpouring of knowledge and enthusiasm, to forget the other side of Jefferson and the social system that gave him the leisure to write these letters. Just a few weeks before he wrote to McPherson, he wrote a letter to Jeremiah Goodman about a slave called Hercules who had been imprisoned as a runaway. "The folly he has committed certainly justifies further punishment, and he goes in expectation of receiving it. . . ." Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah A. Goodman (July 26, 1813), in Thomas Jefferson's Farm Book, ed. Edwin Morris Betts (Charlottesville, Va.: American Philosophical Society, 1999), 36. While leaving the matter up to Goodman, Jefferson argues for leniency and for refraining from further punishment. In that sense, it is a humane letter. But this is one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, full of glorious principles—unalienable rights; life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—enunciated in the context of indignation at relatively mild colonial policies of taxation and legislation. How could a man who thought that taxing tea was tyranny, and that all men had an unalienable right to liberty, believe that it was "folly" justifying "further punishment" for a slave to run away? Reading the letter—a curiously intimate, almost voyeuristic act—one finds oneself saying "What was he thinking?"
3. Letter to McPherson, 333.
4. See Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Baldwin (April 14, 1802), in Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. XIX, 128-129.
5. See Paul Finkelman, Slavery and the Founders: Race and
Liberty in the Age of Jefferson, 2nd ed. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E.
Sharpe, 2001), ix; Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and
Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1997) 1, 40-43, 60-61, 222.