Copyfighting since 1967

I know it looks bad to say I’m going to start posting regularly again, then not post for a week. I have a legitimate excuse this time. The internet at our apartment is down, and has been for several days, and we don’t have internet hooked up at our house. So I’m at the library right now.

I was at the library last night, as well, going through the basement stacks of bound periodicals, looking for some old literary journals for a paper I’m writing. While I was wandering through the nondescript binders of journals, magazines, and abstracts, I noticed a title I recognized from my youth: PC World. To its left sat PC Magazine. I read those in junior high and high school. I loved them. I filled out the response cards so that vendors would send me mountains of junk mail filled with pictures of the toys I so desperately wanted. One of the computer mags I used to read had a column by Penn Jillette. I thought it was hilarious when I was 14, but haven’t seen it since then. I couldn’t find it in any of the issues in the basement, (I think they have them all,) but I didn’t look very long since I was researching a paper. I’m wondering now, though, if Penn’s column was in a different publication, or was just very short lived and I looked in the wrong ones. Or maybe it wasn’t on the last page of every issue like I think I remember it being.

When I came up to the first floor of the library to find microfiche of another journal, I discovered reels of Computerworld, one I hadn’t read. They had it dating back to 1967. I couldn’t resist coming back today to look through some issues. Turns out it was a bi-fold newsweekly that read remarkably like the Slashdot of today. For example, the front page of Vol. 1, No. 2 (July 26, 1967) has such stories as “Brooks Bill Results Reviewed…By Brooks,” describing the situation in which Congressman Jack Brooks, in charge of some type of computer legislation, was allowed to determine his own effectiveness without outside review, and “Copyrights—Disappointing Position,” describing the struggle between the right to store data and the perceived right to control what data you made, or paid to have made, even after you’ve sold it. “The problem of copyrighting came up in two cases—and in neither case was there any comfort for the computer people concerned,” the story begins. “Information retrieval people, interested in building up their on-line libraries, heard the Deputy Register of Copyrights insist that the creation of input data which included copies of whole documents was a “clear violation of the copyright owner’s basic right to ‘print, reprint, publish, copy, and vend’ his work.”” Sounds like half of the /. discussions each and every day.

One of the longest pieces was called “Are Women A Problem?” “Single women have a social life; married women have families. A manager, though he may not readily admit it, is hard put to assign one of his female staff to overtime, shift-work, or assignments of short notice. Almost every manager feels more comfortable asking a family man to assist in extracurricular projects than he does a woman, single or married.” Apparently, it’s just too hard to ask a woman to do her work, so you should only hire men. What can you say, it was 1967. Still, no wonder geeks don’t have social skills, the women were intentionally kept away from them by their employers. Incidentally, while typing this, I found Computerworld.com. I searched the site for the article title and came up with with “Mammography repository offers private access to health data”