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Nonbookish Linkage
Bookish Linkage
If I had found the words I was looking for, I would not have read so much.
Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Eighth Selection (1991)
Copyright lawsuits can be difficult and take time. Just ask George Harrison. The lawsuit against him for “subconsciously” plagiarizing the song “He’s So Fine” in writing “My Sweet Lord” dragged on from 1971 to 1998. Some copyright lawsuits don’t take quite so long – and can produce even sadder results.
In 1997, Bob Craft, who lived in rural Montana, legally changed his name to “Jack Ass.” He said he did so because of a campaign against drunk driving he began after his brother was killed in a car accident. He also created a cartoon character called Andi Ass to help promote responsible drinking and designated drivers with the slogan, “Be a smart ass, not a dumb ass.” According to Ass, “The ‘SMART ASS’ chooses a designated driver, rather than being a ‘DUMB Ass’ and drink while driving.”
In October 2000, the MTV series Jackass premiered. Shortly after the release of Jackass: The Movie in late October 2002, Ass filed a pro se complaint against sued Viacom, MTV’s parent company, in state court. Ass claimed Viacom defamed both him and Andi Ass. He also alleged it was guilty of plagiarism and trademark and copyright infringement of his legal name, as well as that of Andi Ass. Given the movie grossed more than $42 million in its first ten days, Ass sought damages of $10 million.
Ass said he represented himself because “I couldn’t find an attorney” to represent him. That’s likely why Ass was unaware that federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over copyright, trademark, and patent cases. As a result, Viacom moved the lawsuit to the federal district court in Montana in January 2003.
Almost immediately after removing the lawsuit from state court, Viacom filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. After the parties briefed their legal positions, the federal judge dismissed the case in early July 2003. It evidently was too great a loss for Ass. He committed suicide on July 21.
Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn’t any. But this wrongs the jackass.
Mark Twain, Notebook
To Scots, bagpipes aren’t just a musical instrument. They also have political symbolism. So political, in fact, they’ve been considered a war weapon.
Treating bagpipes as weaponry stems back to the last and most famous of the Jacobite Risings, which sought to restore the House of Stuart to the throne of England. In 1745, Charles Edward Stuart (known to history as “Bonnie Prince Charlie) launched a rebellion in the Scottish Highlands to regain the British throne for his father, James Francis Edward Stuart. Despite initial successes, the English crushed Charles’ forces at the Battle of Culloden on April 16, 1746, although Charles managed to escape.
Bagpiper James Reid belonged to the Highland forces. Most sources say he was among the Jacobites taken prisoner at Culloden Marsh. Others say he was captured in December 1745, when English troops recaptured Carlisle, England, from the Jacobites. In either event, Reid went on trial for treason. Reid claimed he wasn’t a combatant because he didn’t have a gun or sword. Instead, he only played the bagpipes on the battlefield.
On October 7, 1746, a jury found him guilty but recommended mercy because it appeared Reid never carried arms. However, a commission appointed to hear the treason cases rejected the recommendation. The commission, headed by the chief baron of the Court of Exchequer, reasoned that Highland regiments “never marched without a piper; and therefor his bagpipe, in the eye of the law, was an instrument of war. Reid died by hanging on November 15, 1746, in York, England.
Many sources erroneously say Britain’s 1746 Act of Proscription classified bagpipes as war weapons. However, the law, passed in response to the 1745 uprising, doesn’t mention bagpipes. Rather, the commission’s decision is considered the first recorded ruling declaring a musical instrument a weapon of war. Some report that the precedent led to counting bagpipes captured in combat with weapons, such as sabers, guns, and munitions. Even in World War I, the British Army had some 2,500 bagpipers who went “over the top” with only their pipes.
Reid’s conviction returned to court 250 years later. In June 1996, authorities arrested David Brooks after residents complained of him playing bagpipes on Hampstead Heath. They charged him with violating an 1890 London bylaw prohibiting playing musical instruments without permission. He pleaded not guilty, saying his pipes were an instrument of war, not a musical instrument.
At Brooks’ October 1996 trial, his barrister argued the decision in Reid’s case was binding legal precedent as it was never overturned, according to Glasgow’s The Herald. Magistrate Michael Johnstone questioned the wisdom of the defense. If correct, he said, Brooks could have been charged with carrying a dangerous weapon and faced a prison sentence.
Johnstone called Reid’s case a miscarriage of justice but said that in times of war, bagpipes are instruments of war, and in peacetime, they’re musical instruments. Because Brooks used his as a musical instrument, Johnstone fined him 15 pounds (about $24.45) on each count of playing without permission and ordered him to pay 50 pounds in court costs, The Herald reported.
Some sources claim the Brooks case means Reid’s execution was illegal and, thus, abrogated treating bagpipes as weapons of war. However, Johnstone’s analysis belies that. So, the question remains: are bagpipes instruments of war? And, if so, how many bagpipers are needed to render the instrument a weapon of mass destruction?
Bagpipes are the missing link between music and noise.
E.K. Kruger, quoted in Wit
(This post originally appeared at Exploring History.)
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubez
- America is ending (“The fights over masks and vaccinations for Covid-19 is an overwhelming measure of intellectual and moral deterioration of the country.”)
Nonbookish Linkage
Bookish Linkage
[A] successful printed book is a stone dropped in water, its message rippling outwards to hundreds, thousands, millions.
John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution
Find a list of the best 20th-century novels, and you’re likely to find both George Orwell’s 1984 and his Animal Farm. The former, published in 1949, is such a classic of dystopian literature that it’s hit the top of Amazon’s bestseller lists twice in the last four years. Yet his first tale of dictatorships, Animal Farm, struggled to find a publisher due to World War II politics.
For those unfamiliar with it, Animal Farm is a tale of a group of farm animals overthrowing the farmer to create a society where they are all equal and share the fruits of their labor. Ultimately, though, the farm ends up under a dictatorship whose motto is “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
 First edition of Animal Farm Orwell said the idea for Animal Farm came to him in 1937, but he didn’t begin writing it until the end of 1943, finishing it early the following year. He freely admitted that his goal was for readers to see the Soviet Union “ for what it really was.” He felt Joseph Stalin betrayed the purposes of the 1917 Russian Revolution, turning the country into a totalitarian society “in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.”
As Britain was still at war with Germany, the British government and public opinion supported the Soviet war effort. And the fear of upsetting the Anglo-Soviet alliance led to Orwell having difficulty getting Animal Farm published. He said four publishers rejected it. One, Jonathan Cape, actually accepted the book but, after consulting with the British Ministry of Information, believed it “highly ill-advised to publish at the present time.” The founder wrote Orwell:
If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators [Lenin and Stalin], that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.
Ironically, the ministry official with whom Cape consulted was later revealed to be a Soviet spy, according to D.J. Taylor’s 2003 book, Orwell: The Life.
In mid-July 1943, T.S. Eliot, on the board of another publishing firm, wrote Orwell of that firm’s rejection of the book. “[W]e have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time,” Eliot wrote. He also told Orwell the book’s viewpoint, “which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing.”
Secker & Warburg, considered to be anti-fascist and anti-Soviet, eventually published Animal Farm – on August 17, 1946, more than three months after the war in Europe ended. Orwell wrote a proposed preface called “The Freedom of the Press,” telling of the difficulty publishing anything considered anti-Soviet, a situation, he said, in which “the principle of free speech lapses.” Even though the book’s proofs left space for it, the preface wasn’t published. Discovered in 1972, The Times Literary Supplement published it in September that year.
Animal Farm’s publications in Britain didn’t mean clear sailing. At least three American publishers turned it down. Harcourt Brace finally published it in 1946. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and hasn’t been out of print since. Someone published some 5,000 copies of a Ukrainian translation in Germany in March 1947. The American military confiscated 3,000 copies and gave them to Soviet authorities, who destroyed them.
Sadly, Orwell’s struggle to publish Animal Farm supports what he wrote in his preface, “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.”
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell, Animal Farm
(This post originally appeared at Exploring History.)
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