Small things, small minds

I guess it's a sad reflection on my retired, sedate life that I get satisfaction from small achievements.  A tray of cuttings, well-rooted and on the way to summer colour.  A couple of baskets of clean laundry aired and dried in a pleasant breeze.  Another pot-boiling canvas varnished and on its way to be framed. 

And a shelf full of home-made Seville orange and lemon marmalade.  Should keep us going till next year's supply of oranges comes in.  Two friends report separately that the oranges are just being left to rot on the trees in Southern Spain.  Which moved me to enquire what else the bitter orange is used for, and where it comes from.  Turns out that it was the Moors who cultivated it in the Seville region, and that it was introduced to Southern France during the crusades.  Apart from marmalade, it is used in perfumes and flavourings, notably of Triple-sec, Grand Marnier and Cointreau.  It was introduced to Malta before the sweet orange, and is the basis of a national soft drink.  The oil from the (copious) pips is traditionally used in the treatment of excess cholesterol, and extracts from the zest and other parts of the tree have more recently been found, in animals, to reduce anxiety and have a sedative effect.

All of which I learn from Wikipedia.  Or Wikipédia, to be precise, since the English language edition of the same is on strike today in protest against draft Intellectual Property legislation now before the US Congress.  This is an area that I dabbled in back in the 1990s during my first stint in Brussels.  Back then, the rightsholding community was trying to make transporters of copyright infringing material liable for the breach.  Back then, we succeeded, I think, in fixing the focus on the infringing act, and I argued the analogy that if I made an illegal video cassette copy of a film and gave it to you, and you took it home on the tram, the Brussels tram company would be caught as a copyright infringer under the terms of the legislation proposed.  I'm starting to hear comparable (though better argued) analogies from Wikipedia.  The problem is that breach of IP rights in the internet is like the hydra: you cut off one head, and two grow to replace it.  Once again, the rightsholders are looking for easy targets.  Wikipedia argues that it spends vast amounts of time and money removing infringing material already, and that the draft laws are excessively onerous on aggregators of online material.  My allegiance hasn't changed.  The ability to obtain instant answers to questions that come to mind on a whim is one of a limited number of glorious triumphs of the modern age.  Wikipedia is only one example of this powerful new information society, and it is a far from perfect one, but the world would be a poorer place without it.