I try not to think about the fact that it's been seven years since I got my CS degree and I haven't put it to use professionally.

I entered the field at the wrong time and in the wrong place. It's rough all over, and the housing bubble hit Arizona disproportionately hard. I've spent the past few years working as a temp and building the odd website on the side.

The first temp gig lasted two years — ironically, longer than any other job I've had. But I got laid off about a year ago.

There's this kind of paranoia you get. It could happen again any time. And it has absolutely nothing to do with how hard you work or how good a job you do. You could be out on your ass tomorrow, on the whim of some guy you've never met.

I've heard some of the "get a job" rhetoric lately and it's just baffling. A hell of a lot of people would like very much to get a job. I've been either unemployed or underemployed my whole adult life, and that's with a degree that, fifteen years ago, could have gotten me six figures.

Not that I intend this as a pity party. I've got work now, and it pays well enough to live comfortably while still squirreling away enough each week that I'll be okay for a few months if I find myself unemployed again. There are a lot of guys who have it a lot worse than I do.

And if you take anything away from this comedy of errors, let it be that: this is the story of a guy who's doing okay in this economy.

Job 1: Fortune 500 Company, Real Estate Business

Job: Imaging laptops, working in a warehouse, inventory duty
Distance from Home: 3.5 miles
Best Thing: Laid-back atmosphere most of the time
Worst Thing: Lung fungus
Length of Service: 2 years

This wasn't a bad gig, really. Not intellectually challenging, but I worked with some good people, I got some good exercise in, and most times things were pretty laid-back.

But it wasn't worth giving up my health for, and ultimately that's what I did.

I did a lot of work out in a dusty warehouse, and I managed to contract valley fever. For those of you not from around here, valley fever is a lung fungus, and it lives in dust. The Valley and valley fever are like the Internet and Hitler comparisons — you stay there long enough, it's something you're eventually going to have to deal with.

So I contracted a lung fungus working there, and I've still got asthma. It's manageable now, but I'm not what I was. Before I took that job I was healthy.

The next-worst thing about the job, after the lung fungus, was the meddling from up the chain. People with little-to-no grasp of our actual day-to-day operations had very strong opinions of what those operations should be, and precisely which boxes we should check on which forms each and every single time we did them. Precisely what those opinions were tended to change from week-to-week, producing an ever-changing, increasingly complex system for dealing with very simple tasks.

And as this went on, the environment became less and less laid-back, and more and more stressful.

There was a real disconnect between the building I was in and management out on the west coast. Within my office I was regarded as an essential member of the team, and indeed my bosses not only recognized my value, they realized that I could probably be doing more for the company than just counting how many sticks of RAM were left in inventory, and fought hard to get me not only hired on but promoted.

It's no small comfort to me that every single person who actually worked with me was pulling for me. To the point that when Corporate decreed that all the temps would be let go, my boss's boss's boss got reassigned for telling his boss's boss's boss exactly how he felt about that.

It was nothing personal. And it was nothing to do with my performance. I was just caught up in a bloodbath. I was part of the first wave, but it kept going. Last I heard, they'd laid off another third of my department, every help desk tech in Arizona, nearly everyone in the front office, and most of the people up the chain to VP. And demoted my boss back down to tech.

But before all that, I got a layoff for Christmas. I lost my job two years, to the week, after I'd gotten it.

There's a fatalism that kicks in after awhile. A knowledge that no matter how hard you work and how much you're appreciated, there's some clown in a corner office somewhere who's never met you but has the power to decide whether you're drawing a paycheck next week.

But ultimately there's something liberating about that, too. After awhile you stop trying to impress the clowns in the corner offices who have never met you. You realize the only people worth giving two shits about are the ones you deal with every day — and that trying to impress them isn't about whether you'll have a job next week, it's about doing a good job for its own sake and for the sake of your team.

Those guys had my back. And that means more to me than a paycheck ever did.

Unemployment

Unemployment sucks. But it could be worse.

It's a pretty damn smooth process in this day and age — all online, no driving across town and waiting in line. You fill out an online form, they take a week or two to make sure your story checks out, and then they open up a bank account for you, send you a card, and put money in every week.

Once a week you'll have to resubmit your claim. You tell them you're still looking for work (and keep evidence on file in case they ask for it — I kept rather a long Excel spreadsheet with a list of everybody I'd contacted) and declare any money you've earned.

The whole thing's demoralizing and more than a little Kafkaesque — Ursula K Le Guin recently described it quite wonderfully in a short story called Ninety-Nine Weeks: A Fairy Tale, and it's barely an exaggeration. That spreadsheet I mentioned where I kept track of all the dozens jobs I applied for? Only one of them ever actually got me an offer, and it was out-of-state — more on that below. By the time I did finally get work again, it wasn't from the job search, it was from the same temp agency I'd been working for since '08.

Job 2: Local Non-Profit, Medical Industry

Job: Imaging laptops
Distance from Home: 13 miles
Best Thing: A job!
Worst Thing: Poor pay, sporadic availability
Length of Service: 3 months, off and on

This one wasn't too bad either. Neat office, nice people, and a certain degree of autonomy. The cramped little room I worked in got pretty crowded and hot as time went on, and there was a whole lot of downtime as I waited for laptops to finish imaging, but hey, I got time to catch up on my reading.

I also learned some interesting things about security policy. I've never had to lock things down so tightly from the BIOS — a unique strong boot password on every machine, USB boot disabled, Bluetooth disabled, and on and on.

The toughest thing was that this wasn't a 40-hour-a-week job. It was "We just got these laptops in; image them and when you're done we'll send you home and call you back in when we get more."

And, without getting into the specifics of my pay, here's where that got frustrating: often I didn't make significantly more money than if I'd just stayed at home and collected unemployment.

Unemployment in Arizona works like this: you get a weekly stipend of up to $240. I was eligible for that maximum amount.

Every week, you report how much you've earned. You can earn up to $30 before they start subtracting your earnings from your unemployment check.

So there's this sort of dead zone between $30 and $270 where you are making the same amount of money whether you work or not.

And at this job, I frequently worked a weird part-time schedule and fell into that zone. Once I got past that first $30, I wasn't actually making any money; I was just getting a paycheck from the temp agency instead of the state.

Obviously there are still reasons to work. For its own sake, first of all. And second, to stay eligible for my healthcare, which was set to expire after three months without work. (I got back into the market just in time, but not fast enough to keep someone from fucking up my paperwork and taking me off their books even though I was still paying in every week. I had to call three different departments to get it corrected and my last prescription covered.) But there's still a definite sense of frustration in knowing that you're effectively working for free.

More than one other tech actually told me I should slow down and deliberately take longer to do the work so that I wouldn't get sent home in the middle of the week to await the next shipment. What a position to be in — effectively being punished for being efficient, and incentivized to slow down and waste time.

This, as you will see, was to become a recurring theme.

Job 3: Company You've Probably Heard Of If You Live in North America, Retail Business

Job: Phone support
Distance from Current Home: 30 miles
Distance from Apartment Where I Lived 4 Years Ago: Directly across the street
Best Thing: Coworkers seem like all right guys
Worst Thing: The single worst job I have ever had. Fuck these people.
Length of Service: About a month

On some level, this fucking fiasco was my own doing.

I'd been poking through listings on some job site or other (probably not CareerBuilder; I quit using it after I discovered it was the thing that kept locking up my browser and hanging my entire system) and I noticed an IT job being offered through my temp agency which my rep hadn't brought to my attention. So I E-Mailed him and asked about it. In hindsight, I should have assumed there was a good reason he hadn't approached me about it.

It was phone support. Not phone support like I'd done before, but in a phone bank — I had a few feet of shelf that I wouldn't really refer to as a desk, partitioned off from the guys next to me by small dividers that I wouldn't really refer to as a cubicle. Every morning at 6 AM I pulled up whatever broken chair nobody was sitting in, put on a headset if it was still where I'd left it the day before, and started working my way through a list of branches to call to walk their managers through installing new kiosks that didn't work very well in buildings that, half the time, weren't cabled correctly. (Ever walk a retail manager through recabling a patch panel? I've done it six times before breakfast.) It was dimly lit and it was dehumanizing — I'd compare it to an assembly line, but the assembly lines I've seen are a whole lot livelier and more fun.

(I will grant one thing to the "cog in a corporate machine" setup: this is a company with hundreds of stores, all organized exactly the same. Each store has the same patch panel with the same numbered ports that go to the same rooms and assign IP's based on the same scheme. There was this in-house .NET program we had that would let you plug in a store number, automatically populate the IP address for every port in the place, and give you a one-click ping for each one. That's the advantage of a company that treats its stores as unifom, cookie-cutter widgets. The disadvantage is that it treats people exactly the same way.)

I spent most of each day on hold listening to the same fucking 16 bars of piano music over and over again. Periodically interrupted by a recorded voice telling me I was on hold, of course — and if I ever meet the son of a bitch who decided to stick voice recordings in the middle of hold music, I am going to gouge his eyes out with my thumbs. I know I'm on hold, asshole; that's why there is music playing. About the only thing that could trick me into thinking that I wasn't on hold would be if the music abruptly stopped and I heard a human voice instead.

There were a couple of guys there who I'd gone to high school with. One of them I recognized but hadn't really known very well; the other used to pick on me but claimed not to remember me (he blamed it on the drugs he'd been doing back then and I am inclined to believe him). Now, remember how earlier I expressed frustration that my career hasn't really gone anywhere? Well, if you want a symbol that will hammer that little insecurity home, suddenly finding yourself sitting next to a couple of guys from high school is a pretty good one. But probably not as good as being directly across the street from the apartment where you lived back when you worked a previous dead-end job. Man, that would have been a sweet commute in 2007!

So no, let's say that this job wasn't the best fit for me. But dammit, I got up every morning at 4:30, put on a smile, went in, did my job and did it well. I blew through every task they gave me and asked for more.

This, as it turned out, was a problem. But nobody ever actually bothered to tell me that.

One morning I walked in and found that my login wasn't working. I asked the guy who'd been training me; he hemmed and hawed and wandered off for awhile, then came back and told me to turn in my badge.

It bears repeating, at this point, that I had just driven 30 miles to show up to work at 6 AM.

My rep told me that they'd called his office the previous evening to tell him to call me and tell me not to come in to work in the morning — after he'd already gone home for the day.

He added that I'd been sacked because they thought I didn't schmooze enough with the end users over the phone — something that nobody had ever actually complained to me about. I wasn't rude, or even brusque; I was just, in my rep's words, "too focused on getting the job done". I'm used to support jobs emphasizing getting the task done quickly, because the user doesn't want to be on the phone and wants to get back to what she was doing. But apparently that's not how it worked at this company; they wanted me to slow down and shoot the breeze — except nobody ever bothered to tell me that. Come on, guys, if you want me to talk about the weather, just say so — I have quite a lot to say about the weather in Phoenix in June, even when half the state isn't on fire.

Anyhow, it's the only job I've ever been fired from. And nobody even bothered to tell me there was a problem, let alone that I'd been fired.

The guy who walked me to the door was apologetic and told me not to worry about it, that people get fired from that place all the time through no fault of their own; maybe just for looking at somebody the wrong way. And it occurred to me that I'd passed my boss early one morning in the hall and, when she asked how I was doing, cracked a grin and responded "Hanging in there" — and she apparently took offense that I hadn't said something more enthusiastic.

On the whole, pretty demoralizing and upsetting, and far and away the worst professional experience I have ever had.

Of course, I use the term "professional" in its loosest possible sense.

Job Interviews

Through it all, of course, I was interviewing wherever I could.

There are lots of stories I could tell. The temp agency I spent half an hour trying to find. The interview where I referred to a former coworker as "A temp like me, but kind of a slacker" but the interviewer just caught the "like me, kind of a slacker" part and that pretty well torpedoed me. The interviewer who asked me about a comment I'd posted about Spore's DRM on the FTC website back in '09 and then followed up by asking my opinion about SB1070. But the best story is the hosting company I saw advertised on a billboard.

"Do you know Linux? We're hiring!" said the billboard, with a colorful mascot next to the words. I would see it on the freeway on my way to work. Or maybe it was on my way home from work. Maybe it was both; I think they had more than one billboard.

Well, hell yeah I know Linux. I pulled up the website and submitted a resume. Turned out it was a hosting company — even better. I spent most of '07 running the backend of a local ISP singlehandedly; I know my way around Apache httpd and MS IIS pretty well.

So they called me back, and the most immediately odd thing was that they told me the job was in Austin. Why would a company in Austin advertise in Phoenix?

Well, of course the answer is that they couldn't find anybody in Austin willing to accept the shitty salary they want to pay for Linux administration, so they're advertising in depressed markets that are full of desperate, unemployed Linux admins. But as you might expect, they didn't come right out and say that.

No, they gave me some talk about how they're expanding into new markets, and how they'd pay for my relocation, and they didn't balk when I gave them a deliberately high figure for my expected salary. They made the whole process seem very exclusive, putting me through three different interviews — a general one, a second one with a series of technical questions, and a third where they had me SSH into one of their servers and demonstrate that I know my way around bash.

And then they offered me an hourly rate that was maybe fifty cents better than what I was currently getting in the phone bank. And a relocation fee that might have covered a U-Haul rental, deposit, and first month's rent on an apartment.

I hear Austin is a neat place, but no thank you.

It was about this point that I decided to read some employee testimonials on the place, and it sounded suspiciously like the terrible job I was already working at.

The billboards are down now. I wonder if they ever found anybody desperate or gullible enough to take their offer.

Job 4: Contractor for a Contractor for a Contractor, Insurance Industry

Job: Imaging laptops
Distance from Home: 32 miles
Best Thing: Getting work immediately after the previous fiasco; autonomy and people who were happy to see me
Worst Thing: Night crew fired after their first day
Length of Service: 6 weeks

Actually, before this job my rep sprang into action and got me a half-day gig fixing a company's QuickBooks setup, a mere 5 days after the debacle at my previous job. But I'm not counting that as its own section. My rep's cool, though.

Anyhow, shortly after the half-day QB fixer-upper, he found me something else and, at last, I got to be part of a Windows 7 refresh — the precise thing that my boss, the previous December, had assured me would ensure my job security for another year, the week before announcing that the Windows 7 rollout had been canceled and so had my employment.

Anyhow, this one was interesting. The idea was to provide a minimum of disruption for the employees, while upgrading most of the office to Win7 in a matter of weeks.

So we had a night crew. They came in, ran a script to back up the user's files, either reimaged the user's existing computer or grabbed a new, freshly-imaged one that I'd already put together, restored from backup, and left it to me to walk the user through initial configuration the next morning.

At least, that's how we eventually got it working. The first night, things failed rather spectacularly.

I got in the next morning to find the night crew still there, a small handful of computers actually in working condition, and the rest in various states of completion.

The way I heard the story went something like this: one tech on the crew had asked the guy in charge what the plan was — how they were going to split up the workload, what the schedule was, etc. He had made some vague "Just get started" noises. She asked him a few more times; he responded similarly. Finally she just went to work; she was responsible for the handful of machines that had actually been finished, while the other techs hadn't really worked out a plan for how to get their work done.

So the company fired everyone else and put her in charge of the new team.

After that it went really smoothly most nights. There were a couple exceptions — one weekend when the generator had to be turned off for maintenance and so they couldn't come in to get computers ready for Monday, and one night when the AC was out and it was too hot to work. But no more problems from the techs themselves; the second crew did a really great job and made my life much easier.

Job 5: Company You've Probably Heard Of If You Live in the Southwestern US, Real Estate Business

Job: Imaging laptops
Distance from Home: 22.5 miles
Best Thing: Autonomy
Worst Thing: Still a bit of a drive.
Length of Service: 4 months so far, out of a one-year contract.

And from there I moved on to my fifth job of the year, not including freelance Web design or that one-day gig fixing QuickBooks.

This one comes with a one-year contract, so hopefully that'll hold and I'll still be there through next August. But I'm not going to take that for granted; one of the many lessons I learned in the Dank Pit of Phone Support last summer is that a six-month contract can turn into a one-month contract with absolutely no warning. Course, I've been working this one long enough that I am confident in saying that this time I am working for decent human beings, but again, it's not the people I've actually met I'm worried about. And every time I hear the Windows 7 rollout's been delayed, I get a little nervous.

---

I guess it's worth asking, what motivates me to come to work every day and do a good job? Here's what I can come up with:

• Need for money
• Need for health insurance
• Pride
• Loyalty to my coworkers

It's instructive to note the things that aren't on the list. "Hope for promotion" and "fear of losing my job" are conspicuously absent — yes, I do feel both of those things, but as I've mentioned several times, I have absolutely no sense that my employment or advancement is tied to my performance in any way. They're motivating factors just as much as the potential for finding a $100 bill on the ground or tripping and cracking my skull — they're both things that have some potential for happening, and my job performance has about as much to do with the likelihood of either one.

Also missing: "company loyalty". And unlike those other two things, this isn't something I have in the slightest. I am, as I said, loyal to my coworkers, and I appreciate my rep at the temp agency, but that's not the same thing as being loyal to either the company I'm working for or the company that placed me there. If I get a better offer I'll take it — and those last two bullet points are the only reasons I'll give two weeks' notice.

On the whole I'm not entirely sure this is a bad thing from my perspective — hell, the ideal list would probably have two bullet points instead of four. Company loyalty, the stick of firing and the carrot of advancement — I don't need those things to do a good job. But from the company's perspective, it's probably a bad thing.

And if I may be so bold, I think I'm probably representative of a good solid chunk of my generation. Educated, underemployed, unable to hold down a job for more than two years through no fault of my own — what happens when that's your workforce? In the coming decades we're going to find out.

So today is Read Comics in Public Day, or, as it's called in my house, a day I walked out the front door. I got to read a bit of Paul Cornell's Action Comics while waiting for a haircut. Nice to see the local barbershop doing good business: the one-two punch of road construction and SB1070 has made it tough for businesses in that area.

So if you happen to be in the neighborhood, Chavez Barbershop is recommended — you can't beat their prices, they're open long hours, and I didn't have to wait long enough to finish my comic. The haircut's pretty good too.

Dear President Obama,

It has recently come to my attention that White House policy is now decided based on things people post on blogs.

Sir, I won't brag about my credentials, but suffice it to say that I know how to operate WordPress and I spend upwards of ten dollars per year to maintain a domain name.

To that end, I must share with you a shocking photo I have unearthed, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack recently made some highly inappropriate and racially-charged remarks:

Please remove this individual, who has clearly proven himself to be a complete fucking idiot who is not competent to make cabinet-level decisions, from his post and replace him with someone who is not a complete fucking idiot.

If I am not available, I hear Shirley Sherrod is looking for work.

Love,



Thaddeus R R Boyd, Blogger

PS: If my blogger credentials are insufficent for the White House to do what I say, I am willing to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress.

So, another month, another piece of news on Jack Kirby's heirs seeking termination of copyright transfer from Marvel. And another thread made up of the exact same absurd comments.

For the sake of my time and blood pressure, I've decided to just copy down all the very very stupid comments people keep making, followed by explanations of why they are very very stupid, and just preemptively copy-paste it into the comments thread of every article I see on the subject from now on.

I'll probably come back and revise this post here and there, so if it pops up new in your RSS feed every now and again, well, consider it a Living Document.

(Thanks to Nat Gertler for feedback and corrections.)

---

Thad Boyd's Preemptive Response to Comments We Are Definitely Going to See in This Thread

1. "Kirby's heirs didn't do the work, Kirby himself did! Therefore, they don't deserve any money for it!"

   Yes, that money should go to the people who actually did the work. Like Disney. Who could forget Bob Iger's classic run on Fantastic Four?

   Snark aside, there's a valid point to the argument that Kirby's heirs shouldn't get the rights. I personally believe that copyright law lasts far too long and these characters shouldn't belong to Kirby's heirs OR Disney/Marvel at this point, and should be in the public domain. But until that day comes, can we at least acknowledge that Bob Iger didn't contribute any more to the development of these characters than Kirby's heirs did? And that, if Kirby had made more money in his lifetime, he would have left it to his children?

2. "Isn't it convenient how Kirby's heirs waited until there were successful film franchises based on his work before they asked for the rights back? If it's so important to them, why didn't they do this years ago?"

   Because they couldn't. Copyright transfers can't be terminated until 56 years after the property's creation.

3. "The Kirby kids should just get jobs!"

   The youngest of the Kirby "kids" was born in 1960. Do you really think they've all just been sitting around, unemployed, for the past several decades, waiting for the moment when they could try and get Dad's copyrights back?

4. "It was work for hire, so Kirby never had any claim to the rights."

   No, it wasn't. There was no work-for-hire contract. Jack Kirby was a freelancer, and therefore entitled to his share in his creations.

   EDIT 2011-08-02: As of July 28, a federal judge has ruled that Kirby's work WAS in fact for-hire. This is because the Kirbys were the parties filing for termination and therefore had the burden of proof — unfortunately putting them in the situation of having to prove that Kirby's work was NOT for-hire. They failed to prove a negative, and the judge had no choice but to side with Marvel. While I must concede the legal burden of proof was on the Kirbys, I still maintain that the LOGICAL burden of proof is on Marvel, so my point stands, even if it's unfortunately proven to be insufficient in court.

5. "Kirby was an employee of Marvel, so he never had any claim to the rights."

   No, he wasn't. There was no employment contract. Jack Kirby was a freelancer, and therefore entitled to his share in his creations.

6. "But he KNEW it was work for hire, because that's just how things were DONE in those days."

   The law does not recognize "just how things were done", it recognizes contracts. If Kirby did not sign a work-for-hire contract, BEFORE the work was produced, then it was not work-for-hire.

   EDIT 2011-08-02: Marvel's key documents in its defense were agreements Kirby signed in 1972 and 1986 claiming his previous work had been done on a for-hire basis. Kirby's agreement, in writing, that this was the case is legally damning, but still not hard evidence that the works actually WERE for-hire; Kirby signed these documents under duress, and the 1986 one was famously a condition for Marvel returning his original art.

   It bears noting that work-for-hire agreements cannot be made retroactively; if Kirby's 1963 work was not for-hire, he couldn't MAKE it for-hire in 1972. Furthermore, the 1972 document itself is contradictory — it asks Kirby to assign all his copyrights to Marvel, and then suggests he never had any.

7. "This will destroy Marvel Comics and all my beloved characters!"

   Yes, just like ten years ago when Jerry Siegel's heirs got their half of the Superman rights back, and now there are no Superman comics anymore. Wait, what?

   Most of Kirby's characters were co-created with Stan Lee. Stan has already agreed not to seek termination of copyright transfer (presumably because Marvel gave him a much, much better deal than Kirby), so that means Marvel will keep a 50% stake in them no matter what. The Kirbys will not be given editorial control and will not have veto power over Marvel's decisions; all they get is royalty payments — which, incidentally, Jack never got from Marvel.

   And that's relevant here: stuff like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. It's too late for Jack or Jerry to get their due, but these legal battles have an impact on still-living creators — chiefly, publishers will give better deals to their talent in order to keep them happy and avoid future lawsuits. Every time a writer or artist gets a royalty check from Marvel or DC, he has guys like Siegel and Kirby — and their heirs — to thank for fighting that fight.

8. "I work hard at my job, and I don't expect an ownership stake in my work."

   Unless you were doing freelance work in the comics industry prior to 1978, your job is not analogous to Jack Kirby's job, your agreement with the company you work for is not the same as Jack's agreement with the company he worked for, and your heirs' claim to the work you do is not equivalent to Jack's heirs' claim to the work he did.

9. "So if I built a house –"

   Copyrights are not houses.

10. "So if I bought a house –"

    Copyrights are not houses.

11. "So if I sold my house –"

    Copyrights are not houses.

12. "So if I filed for a patent –"

    Getting closer, but copyrights are not patents, either.

13. "Marvel lived up to its end of the bargain and doesn't owe Jack anything."

    Even assuming this is true (and I think the King would have something to say about that if he were still with us), you could just as easily frame this as "Kirby lived up to his end of the bargain and his heirs don't owe Marvel anything." Marvel got sole ownership of the copyrights for 56 years, which is exactly what Jack agreed to. That agreement is about to expire. What you're suggesting is that Marvel should automatically get to keep the copyrights for 29 more years than Kirby ever agreed to, in exchange for nothing.

14. "This is an insult to Jack's memory! He would have wanted all the money to go to Marvel, not his family!"

    Have you ever noticed how most people on the Internet would rather crank out an ill-informed, knee-jerk response than spend the same amount of time using Google to find out whether they're actually right or not?

    Leaving aside the question of how many people would REALLY rather see the profits from their work go to the company they work for than their children, Kirby's relationship with Marvel is a matter of public record, and it wasn't a positive one. He did not feel that he received either the compensation or the credit that he deserved.

15. "If it was so bad, why did he keep working there?"

    He actually quit, on several occasions, due to disputes with the company: once in the 1940's, again in the 1960's, and finally for good in the 1970's.

16. "If it was so bad, why did he keep coming back?"

    He came back in the 1950's because the market was crashing and many of the other publishers were going out of business. He came back in the 1970's because he had been offered a better deal than he'd had before — that was the point at which he sold his rights, though it bears repeating that this was prior to 1978 and the sale would have expired at 56 years from the date of each character's creation.

17. "Jack Kirby didn't create anything; all he did was design costumes for characters Stan Lee came up with."

    Have you ever noticed how most people on the Internet would rather crank out an ill-informed, knee-jerk response than spend the same amount of time using Google to find out whether they're actually right or not?

    Even if all Kirby had ever done was design the look of characters, that would be sufficient for an ownership stake. But he did considerably more than that.

    Writing at Marvel was a collaborative process. The "Marvel Method" was that Stan would float a plot outline, the artist would draw the pages, and then Stan would fill in the dialogue. Sometimes Stan's outline was detailed, sometimes it was rough, and sometimes there was no outline at all and he wouldn't know what was in the comic until he saw the art. In those cases he'd just write the dialogue — and even then, he would often use the artist's dialogue suggestions.

    Artists at Marvel had an active role in developing characters and stories. Kirby, Ditko, and others felt that they were not given the credit they were due, and their contributions were underplayed. The fact that you didn't know how much Kirby did and believed all the heavy lifting was done by Lee would seem to prove that point.

18. "What about Spider-Man? Kirby didn't create him!"

    Kirby worked on an early version of Spider-Man that bore little resemblance to Ditko's final version. I would tend to agree that his claim to Spider-Man is tenuous, but the court may decide that his heirs are entitled to some share in the copyright — probably not the 50% they'd expect for the Fantastic Four, but some smaller portion.

    I've seen some commenters speculate that the Kirbys don't expect to win the Spider-Man rights but are asking for them as a tactical maneuver — in a legal dispute, it's good practice to ask for more than you want, wait for a counter-offer, and negotiate from there. This seems plausible, but Kirby DID claim that he had co-created Spider-Man.

19. "This is unethical!"

    Ethics are personal and subjective. I think it's unethical for a company to pocket billions of dollars on the back of a man it never paid more than a modest page rate, 15 years after his death. You, presumably, believe it's unethical for a dead artist's next-of-kin to try to turn a profit from characters he willingly sold off 40 years ago. We can agree to disagree on the ethics of the situation.

    The law, on the other hand, is much less ambiguous. When Jack Kirby sold his rights in 1972, he did so under a copyright law that stated they would go into the public domain starting in 2014. When Congress changed that law in 1976 (effective in 1978), it changed the terms of the agreements Jack and others had signed. As such, the new law included an escape clause for anyone who had sold his copyright under the old law: he — or, in the very likely event that he didn't live long enough, his statutory heirs — could terminate the transfer when the original expiration date came up.

    Whether you think the law is ethical or not, it's the law, and it's not being disputed in this case. If Kirby's work was not for-hire, and he didn't sign any contracts giving his characters away BEFORE he actually created them, then he owned a portion of their copyrights, and his heirs are legally entitled to reclaim that portion.

    The size of the portion, and that "if", are the only legal points in question here. Did Kirby sign any work-for-hire contracts? His heirs contend that he didn't, and will attempt to make that case in court. And if Marvel fails to produce any contracts, and simply makes the argument that that's the way things were in those days, that's going to make for a pretty weak case.

    EDIT 2011-08-02: As noted above, Marvel's case was strong enough to win. I must stress that they never produced any original contracts or hard evidence of any kind, and I believe this ruling to be a case where legal burden-of-proof is at odds with logical burden-of-proof. Marvel has still not actually proven that Jack's work was for-hire — his heirs have just FAILED to prove that it WASN'T.

I grant permission for anybody to reuse this post, in whole or in part, so long as they grant attribution. And don't go nuts with that "or in part" part; no selectively excerpting partial sentences to make it seem like I meant the opposite of what I did.

And, for further reading, check out the following links, which have much more thorough rundowns of what copyright law says, why it says it, and how it specifically applies in the Kirby case:

• http://archives.tcj.com/aa02ss/n_marvel.html — The Comics Journal reviews Kirby's 1980's battle with Marvel to get his original art back
• http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2009/09/21/kirby-family-files-for-copyright-reassignment/ — a Publishers Weekly article on the subject from September, with some very good posts by Kurt Busiek and Nat Gertler in the comments section
• http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/01/kirby-family-attorneys-respond-to-marvel-lawsuit/ — a Kevin Melrose article on the subject from January, with some very good posts by himself and Kurt Busiek in the comments section
• EDIT 2011-08-02: http://adistantsoil.com/2011/07/28/marvel-comics-vs-jack-kirby-decision-marvel-wins/ — Colleen Doran's summary of the decision, including a link to the complete document.

As Tom Tomorrow notes, there seems little left to say about the first black President's inauguration the day after Martin Luther King Day, but it seems like a moment that requires some comment.

So, my two cents: an expression I've heard from many of my elders following Obama's election is "I never thought I'd see the day." Me, I'm twenty-six years old. I always thought I'd see the day.

In closing, a video of Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen singing This Land on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial (HT: Some Guy with a Website).

I like to think this is one of those moments people talk about — one of those times you tell your grandchildren about, and say, "I was there. I was there when everything changed. I was part of that."

Ball's in your court, President-Elect Obama. (President Obama…I like the sound of that.) You have the potential for greatness…or you can be merely adequate, another Clinton. The choice is yours. But regardless, you've accomplished something extraordinary here. Regardless of what happens over the next four years, tonight I am proud to stand with my country in welcoming you as our next President.

…All right, one more:

By the way, I'm aware of the irony of using musicians from the 1960's as my symbol for change, so don't bother pointing that out.

…By the way, I'm also aware of the irony of using a Sideshow Bob quote in a post about Obama's victory, so don't bother pointing that out either.

The news media have been misusing the term "hacker" for at least the past two and a half decades — to the point that their definition has become the accepted one, and a formerly positive term has developed a terrible stigma. But apparently the past 25 years of shoddy "journalism" on the subject were just not sloppy enough, because now they can't even adhere to their own stupid and wrong definition of the word — as evidenced by a million articles currently claiming that Sarah Palin's E-Mail was hacked.

By all accounts, a scammer gained access to Sarah Palin's account by using the "reset password" feature — and, allegedly, the secret question she had used as the key to resetting her password was her zip code.

Let me be absolutely clear on this: Knowing how to use a phone book does not make you a hacker. If you think it does, shut up, because you are stupid.

"Hacker" used to be a positive term. And then, it became a negative term that at least implied some level of skill. Now, it apparently means anyone unscrupulous who has at some point been in the same room as a computer.

Hell, when our Internet connection goes out, I call the cable company and tell them I'm my roommate, because his name's on the cable bill and they won't talk to me if I tell them the truth. Apparently that qualifies as "hacking" now.

So it seems that today's top election news is that a recent Barack Obama speech lifted lines from a 2006 speech by Massachusetts Governor Devall Patrick. Judge for yourself:

Obama:

Don't tell me words don't matter. "I have a dream" — just words? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" — just words? "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" — just words? Just speeches?

Patrick:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" — just words? Just words? "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" — just words? "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." Just words? "I have a dream" — just words?

Truly the most shocking thing any Presidential candidate has done in the past week. (Well, if you don't count, say, McCain deciding he's pretty okay with the whole torture thing after all. Did I mention how proud I am to have voted for him in '04?)

But my friends, I have unearthed something strikingly similar that predates both quotes. Again, judge for yourself:

Just a statue? Is the Statue of Liberty just a statue? Is the Leaning Tower of Pizza just a statue?

That was Homer Simpson in The Telltale Head, which first aired February 25, 1990, significantly predating both speeches.

So there you have it — both men plagiarized their speeches, from an 18-year-old episode of The Simpsons.

Stunning, I know. I expect a book deal out of this. We may even be talking Pulitzer material.

This evening, as I was driving home from Phoenix, NPR was playing Dr. King's Why I Oppose the War In Vietnam speech. I got distracted and missed my exit. That may not have been causal — I don't usually come that way and have missed that exit before — but it was the first time I'd heard the audio and it certainly had my attention.

Kudos to NPR for acknowledging King's more controversial later years — every year at this time, we see the usual round of King retrospectives, and too often they skip from I Have a Dream to the assassination, glossing over his outspoken opposition to the war and his focus on economic inequality.

I also just read Barack Obama's speech from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and it reminded me why he struck such a chord in '04. The man gives a damn fine speech, and today he delivered one worthy of being spoken from Dr. King's own pulpit.

But I am a cynic.

Obama says, "The Scripture tells us that we are judged not just by word, but by deed." Very well. "We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them" are some very pretty words. But touring with the vehemently anti-gay Donnie McClurkin was a not-so-pretty deed. And his backpedaling explanation that McClurkin isn't anti-gay but only wants to cure "unhappy gays" is not only political weaselry, it's also the plot of X-Men 3.

"It is not enough to decry the disparities of health care and yet allow the insurance companies and the drug companies to block much-needed reforms" — those are pretty words too. Words which lead me to wonder why Obama wants the insurance companies and the drug companies to help him write his healthcare plan.

Obama says a lot of pretty — hell, downright inspiring — things. But in 2006 he voted for a non-binding withdrawal plan for the Iraq War over Kerry and Feingold's bill to set a date. In 2005 he voted to renew the PATRIOT Act. Judged not just by word but by deed indeed, Senator.

Two years ago The Boondocks produced one of the finest half-hours of television I have ever seen, an episode titled "Return of the King" which explored the premise of Dr. King waking up from a 30-year coma in the modern era. At one point, King asks, "What happened, Huey? What happened to our people?" Huey responds, hesitantly, "I think…everyone was waiting for Martin Luther King to come back."

And that's the tragedy of the modern civil rights movement: for forty years, America has been waiting for Martin Luther King to come back. (It's also the tragedy of the current season of Boondocks, which has descended from this Peabody-winning meditation on our culture to jokes about movie ticket prices, and whose Katrina episode centered around Granddad trying to get rid of his mooching relatives, but that's a tangent.)

And for a nation and a movement so desperate to see Martin Luther King come back, it can be very tempting to mistake Barack Obama for him. He is an inspiring orator, and if he becomes President it will be the most significant step for racial equality since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But Obama is not Martin Luther King. I seldom find myself in the position of defending Hillary Clinton, but she was right when she said, "Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led a movement. He was gassed. He was beaten. He was jailed. And he gave a speech that was one of the most beautifully, profoundly important speeches ever written in America, the I Have a Dream speech." Obama, meanwhile, has sat quietly on the Senate floor and taken safe positions on controversial issues rather than risk his reputation for what he believes is right. (Clinton has too, of course — even moreso, I would argue — but that doesn't make the King/Obama contrast false.)

I also think Clinton has been attacked unfairly for her remark that it took LBJ to sign the Civil Rights Act. She wasn't impugning Dr. King's legacy, she was merely recognizing President Johnson's role — and I don't think any rational person could argue that, had Richard Nixon been President in 1964, the act still would have passed.

All this to say…I hate politics. There are moments when Barack Obama's words inspire me, when I think of how he could be a great leader, how he could restore America's position in the world and, more, how he could bring us closer than ever to recognizing those self-evident truths that Jefferson mentioned back in 1776. I hear him speak of the continuing struggles for equality, not just racial but also sexual and economic, and I want to see a leader who can speak to the nation's conscience and make those dreams a reality.

But in the end, all available data show that he is just another politician. I may well mark his name on my ballot two weeks from now, but I fear that too will be an exercise in cynicism — if I vote for him, it will not be because I trust him, but because I mistrust him less than I do Clinton.

I think it's hard to be an optimist in America in this day and age. Perhaps incremental improvement is all we can hope for. I can't say I think that's enough…but I guess I'll take it.

If the President be connected, in any suspicious manner, with any person, and there be grounds to believe he will shelter him, the House of Representatives can impeach him; they can remove him if found guilty.

- James Madison, Father of the Constitution

Happy Independence Day. Remember the Enlightenment thinkers who cast off the sovereignty of a man named George who believed himself a supreme power unbeholden to his citizens and the rule of law.

(See also: last year's 4th of July post, which includes the complete text of the Declaration of Independence and a link to Brent's modern version.)