The discussion of copyright is blurred by conflating law and creativity as impulses. Law is a socially accepted response mechanism; it gives offended parties recourse after something has happened. It is not designed to curb impulses, to stifle creativity or to inhibit ideas. Law cannot do anything like that. Law does not, for example, stop crime, but it does provide a framework for coping with crime.

The concept behind copyright is that the products of someone's work should be recognized as entities, as the end result of labor, of time spent creating this thing, this book, this song, this phonograph. Those rights signify that this thing exists, so-and-so made it, and therefore has standing in a court of law, in the community, in whatever creative realm the work lives in.

Copyright is what is providing Mr. Lethem with his income. He can choose to allow people to use, reframe or pirate his work if he wishes, but he can also stop say, Mel Gibson from making a movie based on Motherless Brooklyn by denying permission to use it or suing him if he does it anyway. There's a difference between allowing someone into your kitchen for a snack and hiring someone to remodel it. If your hungry guest takes to swiping the silverware or tearing off cupboard doors, you can, by force of law, get your forks or cabinets replaced.

Certainly copyright law has been abused by those like the Joyce and Becket estates that sue over what courts have deemed fair use. It's also been abused by Monsanto and phamrecutical companies who claim to have invented tree sap and wheat. But those claims have been shot down in court and the offenders made to pay for their abuse. The process is exhauting and expensive, to be sure, but it's the method available until someone invents a better one.

More interesting and more pertinent to art, is the current debate over copyrighted coding. Since computer codes are often building blocks, we have to create a novel way of addressing the rights of the base work while compensating those whose additional work creates another, separate work which then becomes fodder for yet more work. Lawmakers often do not consider the implications of their laws and make matters worse by selectivly addressing things they don't understand.

It's not the airlines I loathe, it's the lack of professional attitude and service airlines personnel display. It's not only airlines workers, of course; many places have dismissed customer service as part of their product or put their workers in impossible public relations positions. However, when I'm in an airport or on a plane , I'm stuck having to tolerate whatever conditions exist not just because I want to get somewhere, but because I could be arrested for demanding to be treated well.

The pressure inherent in working with the public combined with ridiculous so-called "security measures" is wearing a thin veneer of civility threadbare. Airport and airline workers not only have to deal with the same job pressures the rest of us cope with, but we passengers have to go through hell to get the product we purchased. Complaints after the fact get a nice note from customer service saying, "Sorry, but there's nothing we can do."

I arrive two hours before my five hour flight, drop off unlocked bags that will probably have something stolen from them, watch a TSA agent pour my prescription medicine on a table that had shoes on it seconds before then take away a curling iron because "it look dangerous to have." (sic)I get past security, purchase overpriced food inside the airport, before boarding a dirty aircraft. The tired flight attendant who has no resources, not even free playing cards, to placate frustrated passengers makes it clear that the entire system is way out of whack and there's nothing s/he can do because there's no more bottled water, juice or soda but I could spend $8 for some cookies and a 1/2 cup of warm milk to get a beverage.

Airlines could get a PR campaign started that points out how useless some safety measures are and demands that they get what they and we have to pay for - a system as safe as is reasonably possible and provides some tangible measures of private response to what is essentially large scale public transportation. I understand the complexities of travel, but I don't understand why airlines and the public keep playing the sap for politicians who use them as excuses to make useless laws. It's not about how long it takes to take off after a snowstorm, it's about how much elasticity is in the fabric of daily functioning so it can stretch to cope with a crisis.