The version of this announcement that ran on the Shapeways blog is below.  I just want to preface it with a huge thanks to my wife Jessica for doing all the real editing of this paper (as she does for all of the papers I write), Sherwin Siy for looking over this for me, Sophie Khan and Geoffrey Mann for letting me use their images to illustrate “non-representational” scans, Henrik Rydberg for designing the layout, Parker Higgins for inspiring footnote 11, and Shapeways (especially Marty Meyer) for letting me keep doing these papers.  I also suggest quite strongly checking out Professor Margoni’s paper linked to below for an EU perspective and Paul and Laura’s forthcoming paper for a real law review article treatment of this stuff.  I’ll add a link to it here once I have one that is not behind a paywall (if such a link exists).  Also, Justin Hughes’ paper on photography and copyright is really great.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

Occasionally I find myself in the highly fortunate position to be asked to contribute to a scholarly journal without having any professional incentive to do so.  This is exciting because I’m as flattered as anyone when someone else is interested enough in my writing to want to republish it.  It also gives me a chance to come into contact with the kinds of contracts that academic publishers offer their contributors.  To put it mildly, these contracts are insane.  In exchange for an unpaid contribution, the contracts expect the authors to give the publishers all sorts of exclusive rights and to indemnify the authors against any sort of infringement lawsuit.

After waddling my way through some python learning courses, I finally stumbled into an excellent “next step” programming challenge.  It had the ideal combination of a connection to my real life, super straightforward goals, and a handful of moving parts that I was pretty sure I could figure out (but that I would, in fact, have to figure out).  The project was to download an image of the front page of every People’s Daily back to 1993.  This post is going to walk through the process of how to build the python script in a way that I wish someone had done when I was trying to figure this out.  That means instead of code snippets inside of a longer unified program (or just snippets) it will have a series of discrete programs that build upon themselves.  For me, that makes it easier to figure out how each part works.