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On this day in 1973, the Kohoutek Comet was first sighted by Czech astronomer, Luboš Kohoutek. The comet’s pending arrival was highly anticipated. The media even deemed Kohoutek the “comet of the century” because scientists suspected that it came from a theoretical collection of comets about a light year away, called the Oort Cloud, and so would be highly gaseous which would create a spectacular display in the night sky.
But Kahoutek was a let down. When it arrived in December, it turned out to be too rocky to have been from the Oort Cloud. And even though it was brighter than most comets, it was nicknamed ‘Comet Watergate’ because of the scandal caused by its failure to meet the press’s expectations.
Kahoutek won’t be seen again from Earth for another 75,000 years.
On this day in 1994, the Supreme Court issued its ruling in the landmark copyright case of Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. The case began when controversial rap act 2 Live Crew released a parody of Roy Orbison’s 1964 hit “Oh, Pretty Woman” that included a sample of the original song without permission. The record sold 250,000 copies and Orbison’s label, Acuff-Rose, took them to court.
The case went all the way to the Supreme court which ruled in favor of 2 Live Crew establishing the precedent that commercial parody can count as fair use and is protected under the Constitution. And the decision went further, arguing that mechanical sampling can also be protected when used as part of a parody. On behalf of the unanimous court, Justice David Souter wrote,
“Parody’s humor, or in any event its comment, necessarily springs from recognizable allusion to its object through distorted imitation. Its art lies in the tension between a known original and its parodic twin. When parody takes aim at a particular original work, the parody must be able to ‘conjure up’ at least enough of that original to make the object of its critical wit recognizable. What makes for this recognition is quotation of the original’s most distinctive or memorable features, which the parodist can be sure the audience will know.”
In the last few years, the Acuff-Rose decision has been cited by critics of contemporary copyright law who argue that digital copy protection technologies restrain free speech by preventing artists from using fragments of original works in their parodies.
It’s the birthday of biologist David Baltimore, born in New York City in 1938. Balitmore first discovered his love of biology in high school when he spent a summer in Bar Harbor, Maine working on the seaside at Jackson Memorial Laboratory. He studied at Swarthmore and Rockefeller University and eventually got a job at MIT.
In the 1970s, Baltimore discovered an enzyme called “reverse transcriptase” that transcribes RNA into DNA, which was previously thought impossible. The enzyme plays an important role in the reproduction of HIV and the growth of cancer and Baltimore won the Nobel Prize for the discovery.
His later career has been hounded by scandal. In 1986, Baltimore published a paper on immunology in the journal Cell and one of his co-authors, Thereza Imanishi-Kari, was accused of fabricating the underlying data. Baltimore stood by his colleague while being investigated by the National Institutes of Health, the Congress, and even the Secret Service. Eventually, the NIH ruled against them and Baltimore was forced to resign from Rockefeller University where he was President. In 1998, he signed a letter retracting the paper. The case was widely discussed throughout the scientific community and has been the subject of at least three books.
Baltimore is now Robert A. Millikan Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology where he was president from 1997 to 2006. In 2002 a main belt asteroid discovered at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego was named after him: 73079 Davidbaltimore.
All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.
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