I submitted this to TD as a separate article suggestion, but the restrictions in the "Life in a Day" guidelines against filming trademarked words or logos or copyrighted material fall under a similar theme to this piece.
A project (http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeinaday) that is meant to provide a snapshot of our current culture is being distorted because it would be too difficult for the folks making the film to seek out additional permission to use trademarks and copyrights from all of the snippets they intend to use.
And this comment just indicates you have been paying absolutely *zero* attention to the debate that has been playing out over the last few days.
Blizzard's idea is an interesting one, but it almost certainly won't work and has significant negative side effects on the diversity of their forum population. I can see why it seemed like a good idea when they discussed it internally, but the discussion with the wider audience has made those two points quite clear.
So even people like me that originally saw at least some merit in the idea now think Blizzard would be insane to proceed (since the user community are far more likely to create an "unofficial official forum" somewhere like Wowhead rather than continue to post to the Blizzard forums).
(Like Rose, I'm someone that uses my real name in a lot of "serious" forums, such as here, but keep it away from the WoW-related forums, using the name of my main character instead)
Why would you think that the GPL is legally valid but CC licenses aren't? CC works on the exact same legal mechanism as the GPL.
1. The default position in copyright law is "All Rights Reserved". Your only means for copying a work without permission from the copyright holder is to rely on any fair use defences that are applicable in your jurisdiction (or just hope they never notice and/or never bother to sue you).
2. An open source or CC license grants a publicly available non-discriminatory license to some of those rights, so long as the conditions of the license are met. (This is just like any normal license, except that it happens to be royalty free and you don't have to contact the copyright owner explicitly before relying on it)
3. If you accept and meet the conditions of the license, you can copy the item freely.
4. If you do not accept or do not meet the conditions of the license, it does not apply to you. Refer to point 1 for your legal situation in relation to copying the item.
The one CC license condition I have an issue with is the "non-commercial" one, as it is so poorly defined (e.g. what happens to a blog author who uses noncommercial CC items and then later signs up for the Google AdWords program?), but the rest of the CC system is a pretty straightforward extension of the open source approach to non-code items.
The AC is right. If you *don't* accept the CC license, then you fall back to normal "all rights reserved" copyright law. So the complaint in the lawsuit is wrong - there is no contractual violation here, it's a straight-up copyright case.
Since the CC license in this case includes the "noncommercial" restriction, then the company making the plaques (apparently a commercial endeavour) presumably isn't relying on that license to do what they're doing. If they are, then the CC license terms will need to be detailed in the complaint in order to establish that the defendant is not a valid licensee (as they aren't meeting the terms).
It's similar to the way SCO ran afoul of the GPL when they tried to claim it was invalid in their sundry court cases. If the GPL wasn't a valid license, then all of the GPL-covered code that SCO had distributed for years didn't suddenly become public domain, it reverted to ordinary copyright rules, thus making SCO's own software distribution a huge copyright violation. They lost either way (either the GPL was valid, so code they had distributed under the GPL could be redistributed by others, or it was invalid, in which case they themselves were guilty of extensive copyright infringement).
Re: Isn't "respectable Australian news publication" an oxymoron?
The mainstream newspapers that aren't controlled by News Ltd are controlled by Fairfax instead, so yeah, pretty much anything published via newspaper down here needs to be taken with a fairly large grain of salt.
Whoops, meant to say that even here the 3G providers still use overage charges, so it seems that this belief that "wireless is different" applies over here as well.
It definitely limits how much you want to use your phone's 'net connection when away from a Wifi access point.
Our fixed line providers never got rid of the quotas here in Australia, but most of them have eliminated any overage charges. They throttle the speed of the link instead.
Speed throttling moves the practice of having quotas firmly into legitimate network management territory rather than being thinly veiled profit gouging. Go over quota for the month and you're putting up with a lower quality connection for the rest of the month, but that's a lot better than getting a ridiculous bill in the mail.
I also perceive these download quotas as more honestly accounting for the oversubscription of uplink bandwidth that all ISPs practice rather than spruiking "unlimited" quotas when everyone knows no ISP actually runs their network that way.
The US is actually pretty inconsistent on this issue
You don't seem to have any issues with banks that have been robbed suing the makers of any weapons used, or the makers of the getaway vehicles. You also don't impose any expectations for those manufacturers to do much of anything about the potential for misuse.
Where the US falls down is that the plastic disc industries have had a fair bit of success in claiming that internet services should be held to a higher standard.
For non-functional items (i.e. stories, music, videos) I suspect what we'll see along those lines is for physical releases to focus more on high quality, high margin, comparatively low volume products, with the high volume low-or-no margin products migrating to the digital realm.
Computer games will likely be the longest standing holdouts, due to the structure of the console gaming market, cracked games being such a notorious vector for infection of computers with viruses and the increased linkage of games with online services that provide DRM levels of control without actively pissing off customers.
Books as collector's items are scarce in a way that a normal mass market paperback (or even hardcover) book isn't. When the book is a work of art in its own right, it differs from its digital counterpart in much the same way that a sculpture differs from a picture of that sculpture.
That said, even ordinary books can provide decoration and self-expression in a home (the mere fact of *having* a lot of books says something about your interests, and visitors can browse book shelves to get an idea of your tastes or look for recommendations for reading material in a way they won't browse your computer).
I've mentioned a few times in the past that Howard Tayler's collections of Schlock Mercenary stories are like that. The entire comic archive is available online for free, so Tayler makes sure that the books are a pleasure to look at and read, and then releases box set containers every few books as well.
The Maya had wheels. They didn't use them for vehicles because they had no draft animals and wheeled vehicles and the uneven terrain of the Yucatan don't get along very well.
Ideas are, indeed, generally worthless. If something occurs to one person, it is likely to occur to many more. Following through on an idea and turning it into something useful is far more rare.
You get occasional pieces of brilliance (Einstein comes to mind), but even for those, we have no idea how long it would have taken for someone else to come up with it, and without all the work that was done to confirm them, Einstein's ideas wouldn't carry anything like the weight they do now. Even something as significant as calculus was independently invented by two contemporaries (Newton and Leibniz).
Besides, dropping the qualifications to just leave the phrase "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." is a mere rhetorical trick anyway. You aren't meant to take it completely literally - it's exaggeration for effect.
Why the internet usage numbers are almost completely irrelevant
The internet usage figures are basically irrelevant without a breakdown of what they're being used for. If users in other countries are accessing US sites which enjoy Section 230 protections (e.g. Youtube, eBay, plenty of others), then any associated internet usage can't be used as an argument that Section 230 is unnecessary.
Similarly, any usage of government services, private communications services, games, is irrelevant because section 230 won't come into play.
A more relevant figure to look at would be where the large *public* communications sites are hosted (or headquartered), and for the English speaking world I believe those numbers are tilted pretty heavily towards the US. A lot of that would be for reasons unrelated to the legal environment, but the Section 230 laws helping keep those services from drowning in a sea of lawsuits would still be a factor.
"Making enough money to support yourself and your family" is a pretty decent definition, and many successful webcomics by that criterion could never have made it there if they had to go through the traditional gatekeepers of newspaper syndication.
One thing to keep in mind is that the webcomic industry supports a broad range of people:
- hobbyists that do it in addition to a regular day job (e.g. David Morgan-Marr with Irregular Webcomic)
- professionals that started out as hobbyists (e.g. Howard Tayler with Schlock Mercenary)
- professionals that come from a newspaper syndication background, and may even still be syndicated (e.g. Scott Adams with Dilbert)
Some of the hobbyists (such as those like DMM that use pictures of Lego mini-figures for their images) might encounter legal trouble if they tried to directly monetize their work, but that doesn't really matter, since they're doing it because it is fun rather than because it is profitable. The key thing to note is that the presence of the hobbyists doesn't keep the professionals that put the effort in (and have the requisite talent) from earning their keep.
Could you further explain the difference between grant money and advertising money?
They're both forms of sponsorship to perform work that can't be sold directly, but offers value to the sponsor in some way (whether its a hope for future commercialisation, access to an audience, good PR or some other less tangible benefit).
I think you're also getting confused about the difference between "amateur" and "professional". The technical distinction is whether or not you're getting paid to do it (and a lot of online only journalists, such as the staff at Ars Technica, are indeed full-time paid professionals). The incorrect-but-oft-used definition of whether or not you have formal training in the task you're being paid for is pretty irrelevant (in the specific case of journalism, an awful lot of what you need to know to be a good journalist can't be learned in a classroom at all, so that formal training doesn't make as much of a difference as you might first think).
As Mike is fond of saying, it can definitely be viewed as a business model issue. Many existing news organisations aren't set up to benefit from amateur journalism, and hence tend to see it as a threat. In contrast, newer organisations like Ars Technica build audience participation into the model from the start.
That said, even the behemoths like News Limited are starting to figure this out. After major unexpected events, our local newspaper (a News Ltd publication) is pretty quick to put the call out on its website for amateur photos and video footage.
It's especially funny since dilbert.com doesn't have restricted archives any more - it used to be limited to the past 30 days of strips, but now you can get the whole lot going back for years, absolutely free, directly from the author himself.
Of course, as others have pointed out, he still makes a mint selling Dilbert branded real world goods (I still have a Dilbert coffee mug some friends bought me years ago for my 21st birthday).
On the post: David Lynch Tries Crowdfunding His Next Movie
Actually 3 tiers (kind of)
On the post: WSJ Opinion Highlights The Problems Of 'Permission Culture'
"Life in a Day" guidelines
A project (http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeinaday) that is meant to provide a snapshot of our current culture is being distorted because it would be too difficult for the folks making the film to seek out additional permission to use trademarks and copyrights from all of the snippets they intend to use.
On the post: Users Revolt Over Blizzard's Requirement Of 'Real Names' In Forum Comments
Re:
Blizzard's idea is an interesting one, but it almost certainly won't work and has significant negative side effects on the diversity of their forum population. I can see why it seemed like a good idea when they discussed it internally, but the discussion with the wider audience has made those two points quite clear.
Fortunately, as the AC above posted, Blizzard were convinced to change their minds by those discussions and have now dropped the idea of requiring the use of real names on the updated forums (one of the forums announcements from Blizzard: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25968987278&sid=1&pageNo=1.
On the post: Users Revolt Over Blizzard's Requirement Of 'Real Names' In Forum Comments
Re:
However, there are quite a few people with the same real name and decent Google footprints.
On the post: Users Revolt Over Blizzard's Requirement Of 'Real Names' In Forum Comments
Re:
1. This is clearly upsetting a significant percentage (possibly even a majority) of their current forum posters and most loyal players (e.g. see https://greyshades.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/an-open-letter-to-blizzard/)
2. It almost certainly won't achieve their stated goal (e.g. see http://habitatchronicles.com/2010/07/realid-and-wow-forums-classic-identity-design-mistake/ and, more amusingly, http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100707).
So even people like me that originally saw at least some merit in the idea now think Blizzard would be insane to proceed (since the user community are far more likely to create an "unofficial official forum" somewhere like Wowhead rather than continue to post to the Blizzard forums).
(Like Rose, I'm someone that uses my real name in a lot of "serious" forums, such as here, but keep it away from the WoW-related forums, using the name of my main character instead)
On the post: Lawsuit Over Use Of Creative Commons Content Raises Contract vs. Copyright Issue
Re: Copyright vs intellectual property
On the post: Lawsuit Over Use Of Creative Commons Content Raises Contract vs. Copyright Issue
Re: Re: This is quite baffling.
1. The default position in copyright law is "All Rights Reserved". Your only means for copying a work without permission from the copyright holder is to rely on any fair use defences that are applicable in your jurisdiction (or just hope they never notice and/or never bother to sue you).
2. An open source or CC license grants a publicly available non-discriminatory license to some of those rights, so long as the conditions of the license are met. (This is just like any normal license, except that it happens to be royalty free and you don't have to contact the copyright owner explicitly before relying on it)
3. If you accept and meet the conditions of the license, you can copy the item freely.
4. If you do not accept or do not meet the conditions of the license, it does not apply to you. Refer to point 1 for your legal situation in relation to copying the item.
The one CC license condition I have an issue with is the "non-commercial" one, as it is so poorly defined (e.g. what happens to a blog author who uses noncommercial CC items and then later signs up for the Google AdWords program?), but the rest of the CC system is a pretty straightforward extension of the open source approach to non-code items.
On the post: Lawsuit Over Use Of Creative Commons Content Raises Contract vs. Copyright Issue
Re:
Since the CC license in this case includes the "noncommercial" restriction, then the company making the plaques (apparently a commercial endeavour) presumably isn't relying on that license to do what they're doing. If they are, then the CC license terms will need to be detailed in the complaint in order to establish that the defendant is not a valid licensee (as they aren't meeting the terms).
It's similar to the way SCO ran afoul of the GPL when they tried to claim it was invalid in their sundry court cases. If the GPL wasn't a valid license, then all of the GPL-covered code that SCO had distributed for years didn't suddenly become public domain, it reverted to ordinary copyright rules, thus making SCO's own software distribution a huge copyright violation. They lost either way (either the GPL was valid, so code they had distributed under the GPL could be redistributed by others, or it was invalid, in which case they themselves were guilty of extensive copyright infringement).
On the post: Newspaper Publishes Totally Made Up List Of 'Disorders' Associated With Text Messaging
Re: Isn't "respectable Australian news publication" an oxymoron?
On the post: Why iPhone Broadband Caps Aren't Actually A 'Good Deal'
Re: Overage charges vs speed throttling
It definitely limits how much you want to use your phone's 'net connection when away from a Wifi access point.
On the post: Why iPhone Broadband Caps Aren't Actually A 'Good Deal'
Overage charges vs speed throttling
Speed throttling moves the practice of having quotas firmly into legitimate network management territory rather than being thinly veiled profit gouging. Go over quota for the month and you're putting up with a lower quality connection for the rest of the month, but that's a lot better than getting a ridiculous bill in the mail.
I also perceive these download quotas as more honestly accounting for the oversubscription of uplink bandwidth that all ISPs practice rather than spruiking "unlimited" quotas when everyone knows no ISP actually runs their network that way.
On the post: Down Goes Another One: Spanish Appeals Court Rules Against Movie Studio Lawsuit Against File Sharing Site
The US is actually pretty inconsistent on this issue
Where the US falls down is that the plastic disc industries have had a fair bit of success in claiming that internet services should be held to a higher standard.
On the post: Significant Objects Becomes A Book... More Infinite Goods Creating New Scarcities
Re: Re: Re:
Computer games will likely be the longest standing holdouts, due to the structure of the console gaming market, cracked games being such a notorious vector for infection of computers with viruses and the increased linkage of games with online services that provide DRM levels of control without actively pissing off customers.
On the post: Significant Objects Becomes A Book... More Infinite Goods Creating New Scarcities
Re:
That said, even ordinary books can provide decoration and self-expression in a home (the mere fact of *having* a lot of books says something about your interests, and visitors can browse book shelves to get an idea of your tastes or look for recommendations for reading material in a way they won't browse your computer).
I've mentioned a few times in the past that Howard Tayler's collections of Schlock Mercenary stories are like that. The entire comic archive is available online for free, so Tayler makes sure that the books are a pleasure to look at and read, and then releases box set containers every few books as well.
On the post: Scott Adams: Ideas vs. Execution
Re: Ideas and Execution
Ideas are, indeed, generally worthless. If something occurs to one person, it is likely to occur to many more. Following through on an idea and turning it into something useful is far more rare.
You get occasional pieces of brilliance (Einstein comes to mind), but even for those, we have no idea how long it would have taken for someone else to come up with it, and without all the work that was done to confirm them, Einstein's ideas wouldn't carry anything like the weight they do now. Even something as significant as calculus was independently invented by two contemporaries (Newton and Leibniz).
Besides, dropping the qualifications to just leave the phrase "Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything." is a mere rhetorical trick anyway. You aren't meant to take it completely literally - it's exaggeration for effect.
On the post: Does Section 230 Need Fixing?
Why the internet usage numbers are almost completely irrelevant
Similarly, any usage of government services, private communications services, games, is irrelevant because section 230 won't come into play.
A more relevant figure to look at would be where the large *public* communications sites are hosted (or headquartered), and for the English speaking world I believe those numbers are tilted pretty heavily towards the US. A lot of that would be for reasons unrelated to the legal environment, but the Section 230 laws helping keep those services from drowning in a sea of lawsuits would still be a factor.
On the post: Scott Adams: Ideas vs. Execution
Defining "success"
One thing to keep in mind is that the webcomic industry supports a broad range of people:
- hobbyists that do it in addition to a regular day job (e.g. David Morgan-Marr with Irregular Webcomic)
- professionals that started out as hobbyists (e.g. Howard Tayler with Schlock Mercenary)
- professionals that come from a newspaper syndication background, and may even still be syndicated (e.g. Scott Adams with Dilbert)
Some of the hobbyists (such as those like DMM that use pictures of Lego mini-figures for their images) might encounter legal trouble if they tried to directly monetize their work, but that doesn't really matter, since they're doing it because it is fun rather than because it is profitable. The key thing to note is that the presence of the hobbyists doesn't keep the professionals that put the effort in (and have the requisite talent) from earning their keep.
On the post: If Astronomers Can Happily Share The Business With Amateurs, Why Do Some Journalists Get So Upset?
Re: Re: Re:
They're both forms of sponsorship to perform work that can't be sold directly, but offers value to the sponsor in some way (whether its a hope for future commercialisation, access to an audience, good PR or some other less tangible benefit).
I think you're also getting confused about the difference between "amateur" and "professional". The technical distinction is whether or not you're getting paid to do it (and a lot of online only journalists, such as the staff at Ars Technica, are indeed full-time paid professionals). The incorrect-but-oft-used definition of whether or not you have formal training in the task you're being paid for is pretty irrelevant (in the specific case of journalism, an awful lot of what you need to know to be a good journalist can't be learned in a classroom at all, so that formal training doesn't make as much of a difference as you might first think).
As Mike is fond of saying, it can definitely be viewed as a business model issue. Many existing news organisations aren't set up to benefit from amateur journalism, and hence tend to see it as a threat. In contrast, newer organisations like Ars Technica build audience participation into the model from the start.
That said, even the behemoths like News Limited are starting to figure this out. After major unexpected events, our local newspaper (a News Ltd publication) is pretty quick to put the call out on its website for amateur photos and video footage.
On the post: Scott Adams: The Economic Value Of Content Is Going To Zero, But Maybe It's Okay
Re: Re: Re:
Of course, as others have pointed out, he still makes a mint selling Dilbert branded real world goods (I still have a Dilbert coffee mug some friends bought me years ago for my 21st birthday).
On the post: Scott Adams: The Economic Value Of Content Is Going To Zero, But Maybe It's Okay
Re: Re:
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