Just how public is Public Domain? and other thoughts about copyright

This piece came about in a roundabout way. I was searching for a conceptual topic for my next major post, as my current topics are mostly transit-oriented, photo-based posts of a historical rather than conceptual nature. I was then recently contacted by a fellow blogger, Tyler of I Ride The T, to write a guest post about my thoughts on public domain images, et voilà a conceptual topic was born.

Due to the differing copyright laws between the United States and other countries, I will focus on the laws of the former, because it is with them that I have familiarity.

Most intellectual property that you come across is copyrighted. The books you read, the television you watch, and the music you listen to are, with few exceptions, copyrighted by their creator. You cannot claim their work as your own, and you cannot make copies for your own profit. The originality of their work - not merely "sweat of the brow", but original intellectual or creative work - allows them to own it just as they can own a house or the deed to a plot of land. (For example, the Supreme Court ruled that a telephone directory, as simple information, could not be copyrighted.¹)

But that is merely the legal situation. There is more to heav'n and earth than is dreamt of in that legal philosophy. Moral and ethical issues must factor into decisions about reuse as well. (I use "reuse" here to indicate "placing the image, in original or modified form, onto a personal site or a public site like Wikipedia").

Even if sweat of the brow is not sufficient to establish legal protection, it still can represent a substantial amount of work on the part of the person who created a work or made it available. Should there not be a "moral copyright" to recognize their work?

To properly address this question requires a more complete understanding of the legal situation in all its complications, including the various grades of copyright and lack thereof.

Limited use of copyrighted material is allowed in "fair use" situations, such as quoting a line or a paragraph from a book, or sampling a song. To qualify for fair use, a reuse must have certain value, use only part of the original, and fit certain criteria (like being for educational or personal entertainment use, and not substantially detracting from the commercial value of the original). For example, a teacher may show a video from Youtube that includes a useful lecture, or you may show a cat video to a few friends. There is no absolute standard on fair use; the United States Code only includes certain guidelines for judges to weigh in court cases.²

Additionally, some people (like myself) choose to release their work under so-called "copyleft" licenses, where a copyright still applies but reuse can be freely made under certain restrictions. A content producer can specify, for example, that they only allow noncommercial reuse; Wikipedia's license requires reusers to attribute content to Wikipedia and to release any derivatives under an identical license.³ Creative Commons, a nonprofit, is perhaps the most popular outlet for creating such free-use licenses.
The GNU Project was the first major online use of free licenses, but Creative Commons has been the most successful in bringing the idea to the public through such outlets as Wikipedia and Flickr.⁴

This brings up an important note: there are two types of freedom. There is gratis, where something is available for no charge. A copyrighted book, for example, can be read freely at your local library. With the exception of newspapers and porn sites (both of which often reside behind paywalls), almost everything on the internet is gratis. Libre is a much stricter meaning usage: available not only for no charge, but with no (or almost no) restriction on its use.

Some content, however, is not eligible for copyright. You can't copyright ordinary words (not that some people haven't tried), nor can you copyright a fundamental physical or mathematical equation, nor something as simple and functional as a fork or wheel. Such common, shared ideas are in the public domain; anyone is free to use them for any purpose. A person can also release their work into the public domain (in most countries), thus giving up all ownership of it forever. But the most interesting controversy is that of old works.

Under United States copyright law, almost anything published before the beginning of 1923 is now in the public domain. Thus, for example, I can take screenshots of photographs from my digital copy of an 1898 Boston Elevated Railway (BERy) publication and freely upload them to Wikimedia Commons.


1898 plan of Scollay Square Station (now the Green Line level of Government Center). Like all images on this page, this is linked from Wikimedia Commons.

That BERy annual report is completely public - it's available on Google Books as well as at the State Transportation Library. The work to make it available was done by a public agency and a corporation for the explicit purpose of making it available to all. Not only am I on solid legal ground in adding the century-old images to Wikimedia Commons, but no one is going to complain when I use the pictures. But what if an image, while in the public domain, was not published for that purpose?

Take, for example, the following picture: a 1916 map of the streetcar loop at Braves Field (now Nickerson Field here at BU):


Because the map was first published in 1916, it is in the public domain in the United States. Even though it was made available through the (presumably copyrighted) Brighton-Allston Historical Society web page, I am by law allowed to do anything I wish with it. In this case, I uploaded the image to Wikimedia Commons and added it to two relevant Wikipedia pages. But was it ethical to do so? Is it fair to take an image, one that somebody had to take the effort to scan and upload, without asking permission? Such ethical issues arise surprisingly often with public domain images.

Certain rights persist to a creator even if they have sold or transferred their copyright (with some exceptions for works released into the public domain). Authors retain such "moral rights", including the right to be attributed (or to use a pseudonym) and the right to control whether or not derivative works may be made. For example, the Monty Python troupe once successfully sued to prevent re-edits of their episodes on the grounds that they misrepresented the group's theatrical philosophy.⁵

In the United States, moral rights are relatively limited. The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 established moral rights, but only artists who create visual artworks like paintings. Its protections also ends after the author's death, unlike copyright which persists for 75 years or longer afterwards.⁶ They are also forfeited if the author releases the work into the public domain, or if they waive their moral rights in a contract.⁶

Thus, for any image in the public domain - whether by age, release, or other reason - I have full legal right to do with it whatever I want. I can make a million copies on my hard drive or my blog. I can photoshop in Jesus, Hitler, or my goldfish. If I understand the relevant legalese correctly, I could even claim it as my own.

Clearly, the last two examples are not ethical behavior. But what if it's a generally ethical activity, like adding the image to Wikipedia? Say I come across this post on Tyler's blog. He has several images scanned in from public domain sources, including that 1898 Transit Commission report. What if I didn't have access to my own copy and wanted to reuse his pictures? By law, they're free for the taking. But he put them up on the internet; do I owe him anything?

As a regular contributor to Wikipedia, I believe that the best possible free information should be available to the most people. If the primary use of an image is for such educational use, than I will upload the image without asking permission from the image hoster. If they didn't understand public domain laws or had a grudge against Wikipedia, they might take their image down, preventing it from being used on Wikipedia. (Knowing Tyler already from a hobbyist forum, I might have asked him personally if he had a higher-resolution version I could upload; however, this is an exception.) Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons require image uploaders to specify both the author and the source, so proper credit would be given to the person who first placed it on the internet.

If the image is for my personal use, like on my blog, then I will sometimes ask permission first. Although my primary purpose is to educate, my blog does also draw attention to myself. If someone took the time to scan an old map or photograph a Da Vinci, then they deserve my respect. I certainly would not host the image myself unless they didn't want me inadvertently using their bandwidth. Instead, I would link the image so that clicking it would bring a visitor to the original host's site, and in the caption I would credit them alongside the original author. I feel that this solution combines a relative lack of difficulty for me with a tip of the hat towards the person who took the time to make the old image available.

I believe this is a moral choice to be made, and as such I am more inclined to ask permission from an individual than a group, than from a government agency. A single person is likely unaware of the concept of public domain, whereas a historical society may or may not be. The federal government, however, is perfectly aware that any document made by a federal employee during their duties is public domain unless a specific justification is given otherwise. A professional document rehoster, like a academic journal provider, will also be acutely aware of copyright law. Hence, I do not attempt to ask for any sort of permission when using a government-produced image, like this one that I took from an EPA document:



My view here is certainly not the only view. In the spectrum between the pro-copyright and anticopyright diehards, I fall in the middle, though towards the latter end. I respect an author's copyright and attempt to avoid violating it during their lifetime; however, I do not hesitate to take public domain images, and I believe that copyright should end at the author's death rather than persisting 75 years to benefit the corporate owners of their work. I strongly agree with the creator of Creative Commons and the Free Culture movement, Laurence Lessig, when he says that "This is a bastardization of the Constitution's requirement that copyright be for 'limited times,'" particularly when one considers that in 1791 the copyright lifespan was just 14 years.⁷

Those on the anticopyright side have a variety of views, but they center around the idea that copyright is designed to benefit publishers rather than creators and thus is fundamentally malevolent. Some, in the copyriot movement, pirate works not to save money but as conscious anticommercialism that they reasonably believe is moral.⁸ Their views are extreme, but certainly not unusual when considered in the context of the internet culture that, in the words of John Gilmore (GNU project co-founder and internet activist), " interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

The copyleft movement and Creative Commons, as I discussed above, have attempted to provide a balance between public domain and full copyright. They allow creators to allow reuse of their works in different forms, thus letting them retain full credit as well as certain optional controls. I personally use a CC-BY-SA license for my blogs and images; this way, anyone can make the best use of my work as long as they properly credit it and allow others to make similar use of their work that uses mine. A major moral victory for the free-use movement occurred a few years ago when Flickr started offering the option for Creative Commons licenses on all uploads. As of right now, 207 million images on Flickr have such licenses, of which 48.6 million have licenses without noncommercial or no-derivatives terms and are thus truly free-use images. Free-use Creative Commons licenses also solve my thorny conceptual problem for images that aren't in the public domain; by using such a license, an author is giving permission to reuse without asking.

Creative Commons has been criticized by the anticopyright movement because it utilizes traditional copyright rather than working against it.⁸ I believe that copyright is not inherently bad, but that in its current state it hinders creativity due to the excessively long posthumous copyright extension.

I also believe that an important step towards a reduction of the ridiculous 75-year after-death period would be the voluntary relaxation of that by creators. For example, a Creative Commons-style license could be made where the piece goes into the public domain after the creator's death. However, true copyright reform is unlikely, as it must come from Congress, which has a habit of pandering to corporate interests on the subject.

Like the rest of this blog, this post is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike-3.0 license.

Cited sources

Feist v. Rural. 499 U.S. 340. Supreme Court of the US. 1901. FindLaw. Accessed 17 November 2011.

"US CODE: Title 17,107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use". Cornell University Law School / Legal Information Institute. Accessed 17 November 2011.

User:Eloquence (Erik Möller) et al (15 May 2011). "Terms of use". Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed 17 November 2011.

MNQ (3 October 2011). "Creative Commons, Lolcats, and the New Copyleft". Yale Law and Technology Blog. Accessed 17 November 2011.

Monty Python, v. American Broadcasting Companies, Inc., 538 F.2d 14 (2d Cir 1976). Harvard University School of Law. Accessed 18 November 2011.

"Waiver of Moral Rights in Visual Artworks". Library of Congress. 10 January 2003. Accessed 17 November 2011.

Lessig, Laurence (December 2001). "May the Source Be With You". Wired Magazine. Accessed 18 November 2011.

Joanne Richardson (Anne.Nimus), 2006. "Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons". Multitudes. Accessed 18 November 2011.

"It tolls for thee"

An early morning experiment in writing bad fiction, complete with the most overused and cliche 6-word opener of all time. Trigger warning for violence and suicide.

"It tolls for thee"


It was a dark and stormy noon as the distant bell tower finished its last stroke. He did not know where it was; it could be as far as Downtown or Needham, or perhaps the Mattapan church belt. It did not seem to matter which church it was anymore; after days of frustrating searching, he found that no bells within two miles could possibly play that pounding low song, haunted parody of a melody.

It was a deep sound channel, man, the hemp-soaked young man at the record store drawled to him. Like in the ocean, you know? Four years of “audio engineering” and he never learned to be professional. But the glorified roadie was all too correct. The tiny house at 38 Thorndike, it seemed, was just in the wrong place. Sound from that distant tower bounced off exactly from the wrong roofs and walls, combining at this improbable node and turning his modestly decorated living room into a hellish echo chamber fourteen times a day. On the hour, every hour, seven in the morning to eight at night, came that unearthly ringing. It stayed in his ears constantly, until he could barely tell whether it was real or imagined. Day or night, sun or rain, it was there.

Any sane man would have moved. Brought buyers in at half-past the hour and bought a house a few streets away. It was not that he was not physically strong enough; he was not yet a very old man. But this house was also the house where his wife had been. He was a practical man and did not believe in such things as ghosts, and yet he knew she was there. She was there in his head, in his memories. On at the threshold could he conjure the feeling of her tender lips; only in the cramped bedroom would her lusty smile surface in his brain. No, to leave this house would be to leave her – for the final time.

The ringing in his ears subsides for a moment, and he contemplates going outside for the first time in a week. If he could put her aside for an hour, then perhaps he could clear his head and-

And that that exact moment, the hedonistic thug on the other side of the thin clapboard wall chooses to power on his heavily distorted amplifier. His reaction is measured yet automatic, as if he has been mentally preparing for years. He reaches into an empty drawer and retrieves an ancient revolver. It is surprisingly heavy in his hands. He is unfamiliar with the heft; he has not touched except twice a year to blue the steel. From a yellowed cardboard box in the back of another drawer, he pulls out six small bullets a places them one at a time into their chambers. Click. Spin. Click. Spin. He knows exactly what will happen. In a few minutes, the hooligan will get bored of creating obnoxious screeches, and he will go to the corner store. He will walk down the sidewalk, directly in front of the man’s house. The man practices aiming, firing, turning the gun upwards. He spins the cylinder and stifles a laugh: he’s playing Russian Roulette with bullets in every chamber.

The low tones begin. It is one o’clock.

Gender and Language

Three posts ago, remember how I wrote about feminism, from the perspective of me as a man? Okay, good. Now, two posts ago was about hyperfocus.

That essay about feminism was written in one of my hyperfocus ("Spark") moments. After sitting a few moments awake in bed, I climbed down the latter, booted up my laptop, and typed for twenty solid minutes without stopping for more than a few moments. It was as close to taking material directly from my brain and placing it onto a page as is possible, and the result was quite nice. It's rough and unpolished, but it's a direct statement of what I believe.

I didn't do a lot of editing. That's not necessarily out of pride, though I do have some in the finished work, but mainly because it didn't need very much. True grammatical polishing, in fact, would take away some of the impact. Last post, about precision, applies exactly here. Even when repetitive and sometimes in odd uses and forms, the words in the piece were exactly how I wanted them. I digest, over and over again, media where turns of phrase are perfected to the point of beauty. Firefly, where every line is a quotable sound bite, and Snow Crash, where every sentence is carefully constructed to make the characters a little more awesome, and two personal favorites. That shows in my best writing, where some of my best lines could stand alone.

I made almost no grammatical edits to the piece. I added a short paragraph to the middle, which I mostly composed during the rough draft but didn't type out then. But there was one part I edited over and over, and I am still unsatisfied with. It was the first paragraph, especially the fourth sentence. The final incarnation is "I am a man because that is who I am; I did not choose to be a man." It makes my point: being male, unlike being a feminist, was not a conscious choice I made.

But it's problematic, because so many people do not fit into the gender binary of {{male and masculine}} versus {{female and feminine}}. It fact, even ridding ourselves of the stereotypes of masculine and feminine, the divide between {{male}} and {{female}} is not absolute. I first became aware of this on a prominent internet forum known for its inclusiveness. There are about a dozen openly transgender and genderqueer people on the forum, and I read what they have to say. There are people who start their lives as "normal" males and discover later in life that they feel that they are female, and vice versa. It is customary to refer to such transgender people by the pronouns they prefer, regardless of their appearance or genitalia. Other people are even further from this gender binary. There are people who feel they belong in neither male or female, or in both. Cultures from Native Americans to the Thai recognize the idea of a third sex. And there are countless situations where birth defects and genital anomalies cause a person to be improperly sorted by sex at birth, or make such sorting impossible. There are at least eleven different ways that a person with no conscious feelings outside the gender they grew up as, can in fact be sorted into a different gender, because no marker like external genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, or appearance can sort genders with 100% accuracy. (This also happens to be an argument against heterosexual-only marriage, because when defined by these tests a person's legal gender can differ from the gender they were raised as, and identified with, since birth).

So it's very difficult to pin down wording for that sentence that identifies me as immutably male without unreasonably marginalizing all of these people - which make up perhaps 1% of the population, and a highly invisible percent at that. I am not a male because I was born with a penis rather than a vagina. I am not male because it was on my birth certificate, or because my genotype is XY. I am not male specifically by birth. I am male because that is how I personally identify (and, lucky me, those physical characteristics happen to agree). But English, with its roots as a heavily gendered language, make it hard to express this. Like highways and suburbs designed before walking came back as a form of transportation, the language simply did not evolve with any real capacity for describing gender and sex other than {{male}} and {{female}}. I found it difficult to convey the idea that I am mentally male while avoiding implying that my physical characteristics differ. Precision suffers.

There's workarounds, and I try to use them. For the sentence in my essay, some ambiguity with "because that is who I am" works as a kludge, though not as an elegant solution. But one of the simplest situations is also the most frustrating and complex. If I have a person, who I am referring to in the third person singular, what can I use if "he" or "she" would be incorrect because I do not know their gender, or wish to hide it, or it doesn't fit simply into the binary?

Conventional formal English dictates that I default to "he", a sexist protocol that I find distasteful. Equally ugly is "it", which is at least neutral, but totally dehumanizes the person. "One" only works in rare situations. (S)he is so inelegant and so worthless for fiction that I refuse to consider it as a serious use. Certain workaround pronouns have been proposed, and I've even been known to use "hir" and "xe" at times. They're not pretty, but they're the least evil in a field that includes "thon", "per", "yt", "co", "en", "mer", "hy", "hu", and "e".

But the solution is obvious. "They". It works for multiple third persons of indiscriminate sex; why not for a single? The singular they has a controversial history. Shakespeare made frequent use, and it was more or less standard until grammatical standardization and reforms in the nineteenth century, when the stereotypical British prescriptivists outlawed it, along with other glories like the split infinitive and the ending of sentences with prepositions. With modern equality movements and linguistic changes it is beginning to make a comeback, but it is still considered inappropriate for any serious writing.

I consider this unacceptable. It is a long-used and elegant solution for a thorny problem that only will get more prominent as strict societal enforcement of the gender binary loosens. The singular they, I say, is here to stay!

Metawriting

Metaposting is either the lowest depths of writer's block, or a legitimate way to improve my writing, by thinking about how I write. In either case I'm not too shameless to do so, not even two posts in a row. I personally think that analyzing my writing, and the language that underlies it, I can improve how I write. A style requires a highly subjective mastery of tone, vocabulary, and how to manipulate words to create emotion, and I don't think that can be picked apart with any real positive result.

But good writing also requires precision. Exactness of grammar, wording, and pattern creates the most meaning when it is followed exactly - except when imprecision is necessary to create a style. With this I cannot help but to quote Raymond Chandler, the master of noir. His ability to mix perfect prose with idiosyncratic cant was necessary to his gritty style: "By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have." Even in that meta-sentence, he juxtaposes turns of phrase like "convey my compliments" with "God damn it."

My writing is precise to the point where I cannot normally write fiction because I am too exact about it. My style is half the formalized prose of American secondary education and half the mixed-dialect measured neutral tone of the longtime Wikipedia editor - with word pairs and tidbits from all sorts of my readings thrown in. I have a tendency to sound like who I read. When I read Douglas Adams, I find triple-digit-word-count, half-paragraph run-on sentences to be the funniest thing since the banana peel. When I read William Gibson, my prose tightens. I read enough that my voice becomes an amalgam and mostly my own rather than near-plagiarism, but on occasion I find myself with a finely-crafted sentence, only to depressingly realize that I read the sentence last year in Richard Feynman's autobiography. Perhaps reading Ayn Rand (more on that later) is causing me to write 600 and thousand-word posts out of nothing.

This post started as a discussion of transgender issues in language. I began with few words on how my feminism post started as a single flowing document. That became 1100 words about hyperfocusing and the nature of genius. Then this post began as that same post... and with this doubly-meta, self-aware sentence it's pushing 500 words about precision in language. Thinking about the way I write causes me to write. I can only hope next post actually goes where I intend it to go.

Sparks Fly

That last post was created by my creative spark. I get it occasionally; the short (10 minutes to a few hours) burst of extreme focus and higher thinking. It's quite powerful; I've written entire thesis papers in a matter of hours when it gets turned on. My rhetoric develops a maturity that I can't normally conjure up, my prose gets tighter, and I frequently get my very best writing from this spark. Sometimes it's a nonfiction essay, like last post. On a few occasions, I've even written short fiction - and that's the only time I can write decent fiction.

I occasionally get it with other things besides writing. A few times, I have had an insight with a problem in a program I was creating, which led to a fury of work that solved the problem, often in elegant fashion. Similar things occasionally happen with problems or problems with designing a rocket.

(I use the term "spark" here in allusion to Girl Genius, a webcomic I'm very fond of, where The Spark is a state of hyperfocus that certain characters make use of. I'm not as skilled as they, but I recognize the description of the feeling.)

It's almost impossible to control. Thinking about a problem or essay for a length of time can sometimes trigger it; when I need it to make a thesis paper perfect, it may take a week or longer before I get to it. Sometimes it appears when I think on a problem for an hour or so with nothing else to entertain me; it was such boredom that produced my rant on feminism. Sometimes, it's triggered by a single idea: a thought in Marine Science last year about self-replicating nanobots quickly warped into a humorous monologue.

About llamas.

I've made it a point to analyze it when it does appear, which, fortunately, is more often than it used to. Being able to harness it, to call it at will, would be an extraordinarily powerful ability. I could write at my best any time I wanted to. That means thinking as fast as I can type (20-30wpm*) with almost no need to revise**. At my best, I come within spitting distance of 1000 words per hour.

I know that it comes most often at night. I am a loner by nature, and though I have an impressive ability to focus with distractions around, late night when everyone else is sleeping is still my best hour. Even though I am frequently extremely tired, the hyperfocus causes me to ignore sleepiness and hunger as well as less base things like other things that normally crowd my mind. The late-night nature is both a blessing and a curse; while it's saved a number of assignments (and at least one semester paper) at the eleventh hour, it also effectively prevents sleep for as long as it lasts, and more than once I've hit save with the first hints of dawn beginning to grace the eastern sky.

Besides the witching hours, the other contributing factor seems to be stress. As I've noted, on a number of occasions it's appeared when I have an essay due the next day (a habit I'm attempting to get out of for college). Even when it blesses me with a non-academic gift - like the aforementioned monologue, and last night's essay - it's a product of having too much on my mind. Which is not good when, say, I really ought to be working on differential equations instead.

So I'm trying to figure out how to trigger it in ways other than staying up late and procrastinating on my homework. Thinking a lot in the absence of other distractions (like books and the internet) may help, and it's why walking at night is something I'll be doing more. Certain music has an effect; it can't be catchy, but it has to be powerful. Ozzy's raw power distracts; Dio's melodic songs are better for trying to focus. Symphonic death metal - particularly with Norwegian lyrics that I don't listen to because they're not in English - and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's masterful guitar work seems to be best.

One thing that definitely helps is simply being good. I got this spark only a handful of times before 11th grade, when I had Ms. Park. We had our differences at times, but I respect her perhaps more than any other teacher I've had, because she made me develop my style. She gave assignments that didn't require trying to shoehorn myself into a literary style; they required creating arguments and backing them up with evidence. She allowed me my idiosyncrasies within the bounds of reason and focused on shoring up the weak parts of my writing. Very quickly, I was writing much further above my age than I usually had. Now that I can write at a level equal to my ability to think, it is much easier to produce when I do get the spark.

I don't know how it works for other people. Perhaps everyone gets hyperfocussed on occasion, and I'm simply overanalyzing a normal phenomenon. Perhaps I'm just lucky. My suspicion is that it is often correlated with high intelligence plus what are sometimes termed mild autism-spectrum disorders. Anecdotal evidence from a few other people seems to support this idea. I certainly fit the psychological and behavioral patterns for high-functioning Asberger's. Regardsless of the source, though, it is my opinion that true genius requires not only a high degree of skill, but also an ability to summon that hyperfocus almost at will. I can only wish I had that ability.

* I was taught to type in the standard style, but I never took to it. I'm possessed of a pair of abnormally large hands, which make it difficult to fit ten fingers in position on a standard keyboard. I also didn't have the patience to go through the absolutely demeaning exercises required to learn such a method. So, instead, I simply typed with what felt naturally - hunt-and-peck with just my index fingers - whenever my teacher wasn't looking. Since then, I've spent so much time typing that I can type 20 to 30 words per minute - and as high as 45 wpm on typing tests - with just two fingers. My only problem is a tendency to transpose certain two-letter patterns, particularly ng to gn.

** In tenth grade, I turned in a thesis paper that I didn't edit after the first draft. It was half act of juvenile defiance, half refusal to spend time editing something that was already just as perfect as I felt it should be.