@5: Which blog have you been reading? The one I've been writing is totally and absolutely opposed to the Republican party, its agenda and its legacy over the past eight years, a grotesque perversion of constitutional liberties and science. Obama disappointed me by supporting GWB's illegal wiretapping program, but it is GWB and the GOP's wiretapping program, after all. McCain is more of the same, and Palin is a nightmarish totalitarian in half-specs who believes in censorship, opposes medical freedom, and believes in the primacy of greed over science and the environment.

Sorry about that! Fixed now... Accidentally set the image-size to 5420 wide instead of 420! All fixed now.

Anonymous sources do *not* abound at press-conferences! Legitimate organizations and legitimate press conferences do not open with a guy in a ski-mask stepping up to the podium and saying, through a voice-shifter, "Hi there folks. I'm Mr X, here to speak to you tonight on behalf of Procter and Gamble. My identity is secret, but that's OK, you can just attribute this all to P&G."

@5: Why does it matter? Because it is unheard-of. There is no such thing as an unattributed, on-the-record remark to the press. "Unattributed" is the opposite of "on-the-record." "Unattributed, on-the-record" remarks are the kind of thing you'd expect in Pravda's reporting on the Politburo, not in a free press's reporting on a corporate lobby group.

This matters because it leaves holes in the historical record that the press constructs. For example, today the MPAA often complains that it is unfairly damned as a technophobic organization, saying that it has always embraced technology. However, we know this isn't true because we have the attributed, on-the-record remarks of its long-time chief spokesman and president, Jack Valenti (who said things like "the VCR is to the American film industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone.")

But in two or 20 years, when the MPAA says, "We have always supported interoperability in DRM" (perhaps as part of a long-overdue anti-trust investigation into unfair DRM-based tying), we will not be able to say, "Well, MPAA lawyer XXXX said, in 2008, that interoperable DRM products are 'totally illegal.'" The MPAA may say that no lawyer working for them ever said that. They may say it wasn't a lawyer, it was a PR person. Or another reporter. Or that it didn't happen at all.

What's more, because the identities of these lawyers are hidden we won't know if, for example, they are now serving as staffers to the Senators running the investigation, or if they are presently running the MPAA itself, or if they were just arrested for screwing the polar bears at the Brooklyn Zoo.

In short, by failing to answer the first W of the 5 Ws -- "Who" -- the press is failing in one of its most vital tasks: creating a complete record of the parties and their actions in a public policy dispute.

Click through, STWF, goes a lot farther than that. Randall trained to be a physicist IIRC -- so when he says, "Map of the observable universe," he means it.

If you don't like it, go home? What about "First they came for the immigrants, and I said nothing, because I was not an immigrant?"

Clif Marsiglio, it's nice of you to tell me what I should be doing with my time (this year, I moved continents, got married three times on two continents [to the same woman], had a baby, wrote two books, published three books, went on two book tours -- when in that time do you think I should have gone off and gotten an undergrad degree?).

But you should be reading more carefully. This rule change came in on 24 hours' notice. Which degree-granting institution will give a degree on a day's notice?

H4wt.

Yeah -- I dropped a quote, but it's better now!

Neener, you're being very creative in your reading of what I wrote above -- and you've totally failed to characterized Netalel's thesis.

Netanel devotes hundreds of pages to systematically demolishing the idea that " DIY is and always is, better than using someone else's work."

For example, would Shakespeare have written better plays if he couldn't rip off his contemporaries, the Greeks, and anything else he could lay hands on? Would WIND DONE GONE have been better if she hadn't explicitly remixed GONE WITH THE WIND? Would Tolkien have been better if he hadn't had Norse, Finnish, Icelandic, etc mythology to rip off? Would Lotus 1-2-3 have been better if Mitch Kapor hadn't copied the designs of Visicalc? Would Excel have been better if it hadn't copied Lotus 1-2-3? Would Mickey Mouse have been better if Walt hadn't ripped off Buster Keaton?

If you really believe that "original" expression is universally desirable -- or even really possible -- I urge you to read Netanel's book.

What's more, the legitimization of unauthorized distribution is at the center of Netanel's proposals to legalize file-sharing. After all, the legalization of unauthorized (but compensated) use in radio and recording are what broke the previous deadlocks.

The idea that artists should demand technically impossible locks on distribution of their works (as opposed to compensation through blanket licenses) is utterly without historical precedent. It's a dumb, dot-com-era business-model that has proved a total, absolute failure.

Every effort to create an authorization block in online distribution of digital works has not only failed to enrich artists (how much money from RIAA lawsuits has found its way into artists' pockets? Precisely $0.00) it's also materially failed to stop or even slow file-sharing, and shows no sign of ever doing either.

The pre-Internet-era copyright law you celebrate above was FULL of legalization of mass-scale, commercial unauthorized use of copyrighted works for cable operators, radio stations, recording artists and jukebox and live performance.

Mass-scale, commercial unauthorized use is the status quo and has been since 1909, when phonograms were legalized.

The single biggest shift in copyright law since 1976 has been the notion that there's somehow something wrong with mass-scale, commercial unauthorized use.

Walstib@8: Needs citation! What, specifically, are you referring to when you say, "Ray and his clients are aren't quite the innocents they are being made out to be?" Easy to smear peoples' character when you don't bother to specifically note what you object to -- and given that you created this account just to discredit these people, it would be nice to know more about what makes you believe that they aren't credible.

Thanks, Jacobreed!

JT608 -- thanks for the correction!

Poesy gets up plenty early, don't you worry!

Schwal, stop reading the coffee stuff. It's irritating to hear that you are displeased by it. I love coffee and really enjoy writing and reading about it, and knowing that I cause you displeasure breaks my heart. My life would be so much simpler and more pleasant if only you would learn to use your spacebar.

Or to visit another website.

Sheesh.

Yes, Absent, you've astutely discovered that things that are personally important to the authors of weblogs come up often. It's a shocking revelation, I'm sure.

You're right, I misread.

Fee, you're dead wrong. Kids aren't called names because they have funny names: they're called names because they are unpopular. I went to school with a kid whose surname, "Cox," has bottomless potential for comedy. No one made fun of it. He was popular. Another person at school had "Greene" for a surname, and she was viciously teased, called "Greener," (a Canadian slang term for mucousy spittle) and the kids would make horking noises when she walked by. Needless to say, she was also not very popular.

Your name could be "Bumblefuck Shitheel" and if you were confident, smart and good-looking, the kids would call you "Big B!" You could be called "Rob Jones" and if you were weird-looking, socially awkward, or otherwise uncharismatic, the kids would call you "Asshole Rob."

The idea that funny names are the source of real teasing (as opposed to a little wordplay) comes from John Hughes movies, not reality. Real teasing -- the teasing that hurts -- reflects social divisions that are not based on names, but rather on awkwardnesses in personality or appearance.

I've got a rubber stamp that a fan made for me that reads, "To ____________, my one, my only, my sole inspiration without whom this could never have been written. Your pal, Cory." It's for signing books -- I don't use it often, but everyone I've used it with has really liked it!

It's a free download -- just follow the link!

Neener@3: I can't disagree more. She tells you why she breast feeds and uses cloth diapers, and so forth -- and then tells you to make up your own mind (indeed, on the subject of cloth diapers, she makes the very compelling quote that of all the things we could green, disposable diapers are something that improves the quality of life for millions of women, and washable ones would undermine that quality of life, and it says something about our social values that the pressure to give up your disposables is so much firmer than the pressure to give up, say, your car).

Zour@4: Did you read the book? Or did you call it "shit" without having read a single solitary word of it? I think I can hear your knee jerking. It's an ugly sound.

Chris S@4 -- the innermost band is static (one dot over/under), the other two spin.

The point about micros isn't the transaction cost, it's the relationship it establishes with the writer. If you give me $5 and thereafter expect to have a say in what I write forever, it's not worth it to me. When you buy stuff from my publisher, if you don't like it, your beef is with them (for not accurately conveying what you're buying), not with me. I wrote the right book -- you bought the wrong book.

When MeFi introduced a $5 signup fee, Matt was bombarded with jackasses who demanded that he settle flamewars, censor stories, etc, on the basis that "I didn't pay $5 to read this crap!"

Here on Boing Boing, there's a bottomless pool of people who think that reading the site for free gives them the right to tell me which subjects I should cover ("Why don't you write more about the RNC?") and which ones I shouldn't ("Enough with the steampunk!"). I can only imagine the sense of totally buzz-killing, life-ruining entitlement that would arrogate to these people if they'd actually spent a dollar or two in addition to clicking on a link to load the page.

The money in creative endeavor stinks. The only reason to do it is because you love it. I'm convinced that taking small sums of money directly from millions of people would establish a miserable, awful career-path.

Read the rest of the paper -- they show progressively increasing levels of selfishness as economists go from undergrads to grads to profs.

I mark deceased on all my credit-card solicitations and put them back inthe mail, too!

Thanks, Kieran!

All the more ambitious extensions to this idea seem like good ideas to me, except that they require a lot of meetings, agreements, and discussions between competitors, likely requiring board-level approval, etc. Likely ETA: 2015.

By contrast, a cabal of three people (webmaster, art director, head of PR) at any given publisher could make this happen tomorrow.

@7: You think that there are publishers who negotiate for art to be used in their covers whose license doesn't include the right to distribute the art for promotional purposes? I find this incredible to the point of not actually believing that it is true.

That would be like commissioning a cereal box and leaving out the right to give it to grocery stores to stick on coupons promoting the cereal.

Do you know of any such books?

I'm not American. I call them Legos because Lego is a neologism and there's no reason in the world not to pluralize it by adding an "s" to the end. Indeed, millions of people do so. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Kiernan@1: the pat-down you experienced is bad enough, true, but it was randomly assigned. It wasn't discriminatory. The woman in this article is being punished for having large breasts. Imagine if the fact that you had brown hair or bushy eyebrows meant that EVERY TIME YOU FLEW you pulled the four SSSS ticket.

Yeah, I had a momentary brainfart there -- it was only up for about 30 secs with the "Stranglers" label before I had my moment of satori and corrected it.

The point being that youth knife crime has no connection to GIGANTIC theatrical Klingon knives. Little asbos aren't sneaking around with 6-foot-long Trekkie LARP props under their hoodies.

That pun stank on ice.

Thanks, Slappy!

Regarding the Ford memoir: fair use is "fact intensive," as you've just demonstrated. The highly specific facts of each case mean that courts have to interpret them all and precedents are hard to apply speculatively to new cases. The Nation's Ford memoir quotation was, the SCOTUS found, substitutive for the original. Do you think the same court would find that quoting a line from a song's lyrics in a novel was substitutive for the recording?

I took a stack -- 20+ -- books to Wales last weekend and read through most of them and queued up reviews going through to mid-Sept, one a day for every weekday.

Thanks, Jelf!

Smallpox vaccination, sanitation and agriculture are trivial?

I'd love to see you get by without 'em.

"Technology doesn't solve problems."

I'm sure there are several hundreds of million people who weren't afflicted with smallpox or polio this century who'd disagree rather vehemently with you.

Also: how do you propose to feed 8 billion people (or even 800 million) without agriculture (itself a technology)?

How's that purified water in your tap working out for you?

Do you just shit in the garden? Sanitation "not fixing your problems?"

I'm incredibly impressed with 5t311a's presentation here. Personalized self-expression is always in order and she makes it look easy and fun. There's nothing more subversive than a young person with something on her mind.

Quoting a song lyric at the head of every chapter is "heavy reliance?" Not in the books I read. It's common as hell.

Funny that a company that took its name from a Vonnegut quote (without permission, I'm sure) would be so stingy in letting a writer use these quotes.

Of course, the quotes are almost certainly fair use (though Harper will still insist on permission in order to satisfy their insurer and corporate counsel)

Simon@4: Medeco tried something like this and were pwned by a paper-clip: "last year at DefCon, Tobias and his colleagues showed how they could simply insert the end of a bent paper clip into a Medeco high-security lock to push back the slider, rendering the slider ineffective as a security layer."

There's a pretty wide gap between continental droit moral and "attribution" as thought of by the CC licenses.

What makes you think it's a trademark violation? Hint: trademark isn't the right to stop others from using your mark in commerce; it is the right to sue people for *deceptively* using your mark in commerce.

Jeff, the largest circ sf magazine I know of right now is Escape Pod, which is 100% CC licensed. They do not lack for submissions.

I have, in fact, written about and reported on the outcomes of the experiment. See my Locus columns and various links here.

Jeff, that post was so packed with straw men, ridiculous assumptions, accusatory implications factual inaccuracies and just random theorizing that it probably constitutes a bigger work of sf than mine.

Tor is a high-paying, high-prestige, high-circulation market that pays more than anyone else in the field, more or less.

Regarding whether others are "expected" to release CC -- I'vewritten a bunch about why this is a good idea, but I've never said writers have a duty to do so, just that they'd be crazy not to.

And the comparison of CC to the dotcom bubble is just bizarre.

And "in perpetuity"? In a pig's eye. Copyright expires. Good thing for writers that it does, or a) most of our work would vanish after a short period because no one could figure out whom to license it from (google "orphan works" -- today more than 98% of works in copyright qualify) and b) because it would prohibit adaptations of public domain works, such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

Honestly, what are you thinking?

Tor.com is one of the best-paying science fiction markets in the field.

You're thinking of trademark violations, not copyright violations, and since there's no "naive consumer" who would be "materially misled as to the origin of goods or services" in this case, it isn't one.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/09/alice-in-sunderland-.html

Tarmle -- all good questions that have a wide variety of real-world answers in the US and around the world. I'm not going to answer them (partly because William Fisher of Harvard has written many books and papers that enumerate them in great detail), but rather, I'll note that as a set of questions, these are infinitely easier to answer than "How do we make the Internet worse at copying music?" and "How do we convince people to like DRM?"

#3: They're still one-of-a-kind pieces of folk art.

So you think that when a grad student who is studying terrorism believes he needs the document, and when his advisor concurs, and when the US government's top anti-terror squad makes the document available because it is key to understanding terrorism -- that NONE of this makes a ban on the document seem stupid, misplaced and ridiculous?

I want to move there.

Billybob, here in London where there are about 14 CCTVs per red blood cell per person, Scotland Yard has found that CCTVs were useful in solving crimes where they were present less than *three percent* of the time. San Francisco's exhaustive, longitudinal study of CCTV efficacy concluded that, at best, CCTVs move crime 100m down the pavement.

Meanwhile, every dollar spent on CCTV is a dollar we don't spend on preventative (as opposed to forensic) policing. My friend was murdered on his doorstep in London because the guard that would have normally sat at the tube-exit near his place had been replaced by a CCTV camera, which couldn't call the police when three thugs followed him up the stairs and out the exit.

And every CCTV we place is a CCTV that can be hijacked by bad people to do bad things -- hardly a day goes by without a report of some Peeping Tom using a CCTV to spy on some poor woman in her bathroom, or to follow their neighbors around town.

And CCTV footage is every bit as subject to pressure as human testimony -- so much CCTV footage is "lost" or "unavailable" that people who are pressured to keep damning CCTV evidence out of the public eye could certainly plausibly say that the camera wasn't working that day.

Fynngrrl, I agree -- I cropped the designs where I did because the whole picture was unfortunately "laddish." As the father of an infant daughter whom I hope will grow up with a strong interest in science, I would have really liked some depictions of women in labcoats, not just bikinis.

What's more, you've mistaken dystopias-that-Iain-Banks-depicts for society-Iain-Banks-would-endorse. It's either shocking or risible, but either way, it sure makes you look like a wiener.

Dr Mercury, you've mistaken "Cory" for "Iain Banks." I suppose it's an easy mistake to make, provided you're a straw-man-proffering flame-artist posting in the worst of faith.

Or if you're just an idiot.

Which one is it? It's hard to tell from your posting history, which runs about 50-50.

The problem is that if you follow that logic far enough, we never get rid of ANYTHING on the grounds that it might be a classic someday. Today's giant toxic pile of tires is tomorrow's priceless potsherds.

"Classic" usually denotes something that was produced in great quantity, then had most of the stock disappear. It's not a classic until that second part occurs -- so if everyone mylar-bags their comics and keeps them in an acid-free environment, they'll never be considered classics. For "classicification" to occur, the majority of copies need to be destroyed.

I have indeed bought some jeans there! Two pairs. THe first was fantastic. The second time, though, I wanted to buy something kind of baggy fitting and the guy there talked me into spending a fortune on really tight ones that just got tighter after washing (not looser, as promised) and are now unwearable. It really turned me off the store, since I was wearing a pair of jeans I'd bought in Tokyo at the time and REALLY wanted another pair that fit like them, and the pair he talked me into were totally different.

@11: Cory's assertion, as I understand it, is that fighting bad behavior online (spam, copyright piracy) is essentially doomed, because it just degenerates into an arms race in which progressively-fiercer countermeasures increasingly hurt the innocent while doing little to resolve the problem.

No, that's not the assertion. It's that these particular tactics have been shown ineffective in the field in a battle that's theoretically much easier to win (in the spamwar, practically everyone is on your side, in the copyfight, no one wants their communications "filtered"). Repeating those mistakes is stupid and wasteful and damaging to the body politic.

Just because hitting yourself in the head with a hammer doesn't stop copyright infringement doesn't mean you can't stop copyright infringement.

History is *filled* with exactly this kind of copyfight: the fights over sheet music, phonograms, radios, jukeboxes, cable, and VCRs all recapitulate the present copyfight, and they all had approximately the same solution:

* Don't worry about hand-to-hand, small-scale stuff

* Offer a legit deal at a price that most people opt into

* Take part of the profites from the above and enforce against the most egregious offenders

An enormous number of academics, economists, musicians, music execs, ISP execs, consumer rights advocates and other interested parties have proposed variations on the theme of "Offer people who download with P2P a cheap license that legitimizes the practice. Use 21st century auditing technology to divide up the money in a transparent and fair way. Argue about the details of 'fair' and 'transparent' and 'cheap' but stop arguing about whether you're going to stop copying on the Internet. You're not. You're just going to convince people that there is no peace to be had with the record industry and that will make the job of selling licenses in the future much, much harder."

Substitute "radio" for "P2P" and you have the blanket performance license for broadcasters that is in place in every radio station in the country. Substitute "record" for "P2P" and you have the mechanical compulsory license that legalized every single cover you've ever heard on a CD.

This isn't moon-talk. It isn't even complicated. It's the *industry standard*.

@9: I was told the story of the PII as well, but I asked if that was because the machine was optimized for massively parallel codebreaking while a PII is optimized for procedural linear execution and the guy sheepishly confirmed it. IOW: in every domain EXCEPT massively parallel problem-solving, Colossus is slow as paint, but it is very good at that one domain.

@67: Xeni speaks for me -- and I'm off for the weekend to celebrate my birthday. AFAIC, if one of my co-eds wants to delete some posts they made, it's jake with me.

You guys are the best.

Thanks, Antinous!

@4: Sure -- but he's gone from "best choice" to "least worst choice" with one vote.

Re DHS saying it's only 400K plus aliases: yes, but those aliases are *distinct names*. It doesn't matter how many "real terrorists" the list refers to, it matters how wide a net the list casts, because this is what ends up catching non-terrorists.

IOW: if the list has "Robert Johnson," "Bob Johns," and "John Robertson" as aliases for a single individual, they *should* be counted as three names, because that's three different strings that will trigger false positives against honest people who share these common names.

Re "You can be removed from the list." Mandela isn't off the list, he just has a special permanent dispensation to travel despite being on the list.

Yes indeedy!

I mean, gosh, there's a backlash? You mean, random sourpusses on the Internet have decided that something I like isn't good?

Well, I'll be sure to stop enjoying it now.

Thanks for clueing me in.

Chaircrusher, I promise you that if you slap some brass fittings onto anything, I won't mention it here.

Happy now?

Also: just bought one

Fixed!

I was convinced by an email from William Gibson, "It's an awesome piece of work. Probably the single best Steampunk objet
I've seen.

And it made me notice, suddenly, that Steampunk is more directly
'Gibsonian' to the extent that it consists of *collaged gomi*

This mask is, in itself, a very fine example of collage." (Quoted with permission)

Fixed!

Reed, send me an email -- I'll GPG sign a copy of the collection CBZ and email it back to you!

Srsly, though -- signing thousands of collections nearly killed me. If I'd signed the singles too, I'd be crippled by now.

"The point of Universal v Sony is that the end-user can legally time-shift something for their own use. "

No, the point of Betamax is that judges can create new exceptions to copyright that dramatically fail one or more of the four factors.

The dicta in Betamax show that the judges believed that Betamax doesn't have jurisprudence on its side. They were making up new law because common sense made them believe that this was a fair use.

Regarding retranmission: the majority (the vast majority) of successful fair use defenses have involved public distribution/transmission of copyrighted materials (because private use is invisible to rightsholders). Indeed, most scholars at the time of Betamax believed that Sony would lose because a VHS recording *failed to transform* the copyrighted work -- that is, failed to do the thing that made fair use defenses successful in past.

To be more specific -- Reaper2k implies that failure to qualify for any of the four factors (specifically, factor 1) disqualifies the use from being considered fair.

Betamax (and other cases, including, for example, 2LiveCrew) show that courts must weigh all the factors, and a failure to meet one isn't a failure to qualify as FU. Arguably, Betamax shows that even if NONE of the factors are met, judges can determine that a use is fair.

Mujadaddy: This:

"Such circumstances are LIMITED to criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."

Is absolutely wrong. If it were right, then time-shifting would only be legal for critics, commenters, scholars, researchers, teachers. etc.

Reaper2k, you're just plain wrong.

Please see, for example, the dicta in Universal v Sony (commonly called the Betamax trial), which is arguably the most famous fair use case in the history of US jurisprudence.

Clif, the Canadian DMCA forbids removing DRM from works that are in the public domain, too -- it's the DRM that's protected, not the copyrights.

RTFA, please, especially if you're going to call me an idiot.

You know, every time you send a message to this blog, you consume a discretionary energy resource, generate carbon, etc.

It's the height of hypocrisy to assert YOUR right to expend discretionary energy resources, but to demand that everyone else limit themselves to only the barest survival rations.

Honestly, if you set out to discredit the idea of conservation, you could not do a better job than @13 -- any sane person thinking about trying conservation confronted with this standard would conclude either a) the whole thing was cooked up by extremists who expect you to keep such a close eye on your water use you'll be drinking out of a thimble or b) the situation is so dire that the only way out is to live like a miserable hermit, so might as well live up the planet's last few years while they last.

Zombie: You seem to be suggesting that children should never, ever be given water to play with in quantities of more than 250ml. Do you think children should be allowed to frolic under a sprinkler? How about a kiddee pool? Squirt guns? Water balloons?

What about science projects? I learned about water surface tension from my father by experimenting with different sized vessels and an eyedropper on the kitchen table. Maybe he should have just sat me down in the living room and read aloud to me from the encyclopedia?

And how about all the child development specialists, the Piagists and so on, who tell us that cognitively, water-play is an important part of human (and, indeed, all primate) learning?

Should I stop giving my daughter baths and just wipe her down with a moist towelette? What about those times she fails to finish the contents of her sippee cup (which holds 500 ml, more than double the amount you are comfortable allowing children to use). Should that water be boiled and re-used the next day, or am I allowed to pour it down the sink? Should I install a cistern for unused sippee cup water to use on watering the houseplants? Or maybe I should just get rid of the houseplants (who drink about a litre a day -- quadruple your recommended allowance for children).

Which houseplants are we allowed to have? Which activities are our children allowed to have? Will you be coming by our houses with a green armband to supervise our water use? Am I allowed to dilute the baby's rice cereal 5-1, or should I stick to 3-1 and deal with the constipation and vomiting using dry-wipes?

Also:

Zombie@6: "Delightfully" -- you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

MHY@4: Oh yes, by all means, let's given children untreated water to play in, because the carbon footprint of treating a case of the squirts that has your kid flushing the toilet forty times a day for a week while you try to rehydrate her with electrolyte salts is so much better for the planet than a bucket of clean, treated water to play with on a hot day.

Are you seriously suggesting that we solve the planet's water problems by forcing children to play exclusively in contaminated water?

Jesus Christ, do you live in a cave somewhere? The amount of water used by a kid to paint the house would be a fraction of the water necessary to fill a kiddee pool, run a sprinkler, or have an epic Super Soaker battle. If your version of green involves sitting very still, trying not to consume any resources, you might as well blow up the planet now, because apart from you and a couple of hairshirt-wearing ascetics, no one in the world is going to adopt your program.

Artfreakydude, you've rather missed the point.

Well, Clif, rather than speculating on how poor the audiobooks must be, you could actually just, you know, *download the free samples* (which are excellent, and linked off this post) and discover that you're wrong about this.

JJasper -- no, it's NOT up to the publishers to choose DRM or no DRM, at least not with Audible. Audible's position is that EVEN IF A PUBLISHER REQUESTS NO DRM, they still insist on it. This is about Audible forcing publishers and writers to be locked into their DRM platform, and has nothing to do with publisher choice. My audiobook publisher, Random House (the largest publishing conglomerate in the world), asked Audible to sell my latest book without DRM, and they refused.

I see your problem now. You think that because I link to something on Boing Boing, I agree with every single possible word, and every interpretation of every single possible word, in it.

I don't.

There, that was easy.

I asked Ken, our sysadmin about this, and he told me that doing so would require gigantic amounts of hardware to get this running.

Brit, my banking bits are no easier to DRM than any other bits. That's precisely WHY I won't be sending you my bits. I'll be keeping them a secret, right here.

The thing about DRM is that it presumes that I can send you some bits and then keep you from knowing what they are and copying them. This isn't a very plausible thing to believe.

Icky2000, did you actually read the relevant piece of the MPAA's brief? I quoted the relevant sections above. The reason Wired (and I) characterized the MPAA as saying they don't want to have to prove wrongdoing is because they said, "WE DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO PROVE WRONGDOING." That's not a strawman, it's a quotation.

Here's that quote again:

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

"It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement," van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.

Lulu@3: By this reasoning, anyone who sends mail in an envelope -- rather than by world-readable postcard -- is also a presumptive criminal. Anyone who wears clothes -- rather than walking around naked -- is a presumptive concealed-weapons-carrier. And anyone who shreds their confidential documents -- rather than filing them carefully -- is a presumptive criminal.

I'm sorry, it's just not the case that copy shops in the US take a "how would the photographer or authorities find out about it to stop it, and would they waste manpower on enforcing it" attitude. Since K-Mart paid out a high-six-figure settlement to photographers for reproducing portraits, no major copy shop has been willing to take that risk. It's virtually impossible to get your portrait shots enlarged, retouched or reproduced at a Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Kinko's, etc. What's more, these shops have been known to turn away such requests for photos that are *not* studio portraits because they "look too professional" and *might* be studio portraits.

Well, here's a real, and frequent example from the US, where the copyright vests with portrait photographers, not commissioners:

Your old aunt dies. You got to Kinko's to have her wedding photo enlarged to sit next to the casket. Kinko's says, "I'm sorry, but absent any hard proof that the photographer vested copyright in your aunt, I need to assume that this copyright belongs to him, so you can't have this photo (or any other portrait photos) for the funeral." The only way to get around it is to track down the descendants of a photographer who took your aunt's wedding photos fifty years ago and ask them for a license (and pay whatever they charge).

There's nothing about the existing system that precludes commissioners and photographers negotiating for different rights -- the only thing Canadian law says today is that, absent any other agreement, the photographer is assumed to have assigned copyright in photos to his clients.

Skep@5: 10,000 pounds is pretty close to 1,000,000 US dollars these days.

mgabrysSF@4: "I didn't see mr sun mentioned or the ice receding on mars."

That's because you didn't look.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/222712/69

Church: yes, I read it. I don't recall that the book computed a single thing (except for the position of its atoms in space -- something that this jewelry is also doing). Are you suggesting that the novel was a Von Neumann machine?

Moon: No, steampunk doesn't have steam in it. Steampunk is stuff that looks like it comes from the sort of alternate reality described in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, in which computation (and a host of modern technologies engendered by it) arrive a century earlier. It has nothing to do with steam per se (nor with "punk" -- the word is a play on "cyberpunk," which DID have something to do with punk, to whit its nihilist bent, and the "punk" in "steampunk" is there because the first steampunk novel was written by two prominent cyberpunks.)

@2: And the function performed by THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (the book for which the term "steampunk" was coined) was what, exactly?

What a great note, Jordan!

You think that Man with the Hex sounds like "Someone Done Hoodoed the Hoodoo Man?" Apart from having similar titles, what do they have in common?

Holy fuck is this AWESOME.

So, Polomoche, which Louis Jordan song do you think sounds like "Man with the Hex" or "Caviar and Chitlins?"

Louis Jordan's delivery, composition and arrangement style is pretty much totally, absolutely different from the Atomic Fireballs'. Even songs like "Cheese and Cornbread" and other uptempo numbers feature much more choral vocals, a smoother delivery, a generally slower-paced arrangement, and a lot more comedy that the Fireballs.

Indeed, there's practically *no* comedy in the Fireballs' songs, which makes any comparison to either Calloway (who had a similar energy but again, an utterly different delivery from the Fireballs) or Jordan thin indeed.

Just because they're in the same genre and Jordan got there first doesn't make him "the real thing" -- with the implication that this is the false or denatured thing.

Have you heard any of the Atomic Fireballs' catalog?

Lo@14 -- look forward to seeing the files! No, there aren't any with the CC baked in, though you're welcome to make one!

Polomoche@8: I can sing about 200 Louis Jordan songs from memory and there's not a one of them particularly like the Atomic Fireballs. There's no universe in which Jordan is remotely close to "jump blues."

Jed@10: "It might be nice if this thing were broken up into several, rather than one CBR."

Luckily it's CC licensed -- send me the URL once you've uploaded it and I'll add it to the post!

Ifireball -- correct, sir. The filesize really ratcheted up when I ripped the PDF into PNGs. I imagine that a lot of that was rasterizing the type-pages, the rest just inefficiencies in the process. I'd love for someone to produce a smaller k-size version that retained the resolution and quality.

Hey, Daveybot! I've done talks in Edinburgh and Glasgow since I moved to the UK, and I'm sure I'll do more before long!

Absent@2: You should compile a list of the metatags!

Eustace@8: Seen 'em? I OWN ONE!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2556601928/

Well spotted, Shard -- image replaced!

You guys have an extremely exotic definition of fashion that somehow excludes "Clothing you wear to look distinctive, establish group identity, and please your aesthetic sense."

26,27: The file is ripping now and doing VERY well! Thanks everyone!

Cory

Kiergsmith@14: this seems super-promising, but the output is all v. low-rez -- only 477px wide! I'm shooting for 4,000!

Takuan, if you build that, I will not only buy one, I'll blog it!

David@7: indeed it did take two of us! Tanya was F/T, we were both P/T to start!

Cory

Sam, have a look at the forth amendment and tell me how this could possibly be constitutional -- for bonus points, read p on "general warrants" and "writs of assistance" and how they led to the forth amendment.

Click through -- the main mechanism sits under the desk.

Clif Marsiglio, I've never once argued for the abolition of copyright.

I haven't "copied and pasted" anything about the my critique of the US copyright regime into the debate about the Harper bill.

You really don't know much about Canadian copyright -- on that score, we agree. There's no such thing as "fair use" in Canada (the thing you're thinking of is "fair dealing" and it's a radically different, though related, concept).

What's more, "private copying right" is not "fair use" or "fair dealing."

Look, you're just making stuff up here. You don't know anything about Canadian copyright law -- and you haven't paid close enough attention to the earlier posts on this to have an intelligent opinion on it.

You just showed up to grind some kind of axe about "rule of law," and when you discovered that this had nothing to do with "rule of law" you made up some more stuff.

There's lots of online resources through which you could educate yourself about:

* Commonwealth copyright

* Trade agreements and copyright

* The WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996

* Fair dealing

* Private copying rights

What's more, it's pretty easy to find out what I favor for copyright reform (there's a very long list of dozens of essays I've written on the subject here: http://craphound.com/articles.php -- though you won't any in which I advocate for the abolition of copyright -- that also comes under the heading of "you're making stuff up").

It's also pretty easy to discover what the words "public domain" mean in this context, and how that differs from the various CC licenses I've used on my work (CC itself has lots of material on this subject).

The world's copyright systems are different. Knowing a little about US copyright law doesn't mean you know much about Canadian copyright law.

Copyright reformers have many nuances in their beliefs. Arguing (as I have) for limits on term and scope of copyright doesn't make me a copyright abolitionist.

Copyright itself is not an immutable "social contract" handed down on stone tablets by Victor Hugo in 1886. It is a dynamic system whose reforms have *always* come about because an older law made a new commonplace activity illegal (for example, the following practices and technologies were all illegal for years before copyright law was changed to accommodate them): making records, broadcasting records, cable TV, jukeboxes and VCRs).

Hand-wringing moralizing about how kids are "violating the social contract" totally misses the fact that the social contract was written just last week by a bunch of giant entertainment companies who want to extract rent from said kids.

What's that, Xyzzy? You want MORE STEAMPUNK? Well, if you insist! I'll be sure to post LOTS OF STEAMPUNK EVERY SINGLE DAY JUST FOR YOU!

STEAMPUNK!

STEAMPUNK!

STEAMPUNK!

Clif Marsiglio: first of all, please don't characterize my work as being "in the public domain." That's a legal term and it's wholly incorrect.

Second of all, under current Canadian law, the private copying right arguably (and per some caselaw) makes private downloading lawful. This isn't about kids breaking the law: this is about Canadian lawmakers *changing the law* to criminalize kids. And doing so at the behest of a foreign power, against the wishes of the Canadian rightsholders, performers, record labels, writers, librarians, citizen's rights groups, etc.

Yup -- I have a little upload script that resizes and sends any jpgs on my desktop to my server for easy embedding, and it prompts for the size info before uploading. I accidentally hit the 5 twice, trying to make it 500 px wide.

Preserverence is basically the art of self-deception -- you just keep telling yourself that you're certain to attain victory ANY SECOND NOW, even if you have no basis to assert this.

Thanks, everyone! This has been the tour of a lifetime and it was all SO WORTH IT. I've got two more stops -- private industry things -- before I go back to London, but everywhere I've gone, people have been so kind and effusive and generous -- that's worth any amount of sleep.

I haven't been silent at all. I will be posting at least one, often two or more posts about Little Brother, every single day, for at least two months, and if you don't like it read something else. I've said it before and I'm happy to say it as often as you'd like (time permitting, given the book tour schedule).

If you don't like reading websites in which the editors talk about their projects and appearances, then you don't like reading Boing Boing. I'd hate to see you reading a site you don't like -- what a waste of your time -- so you should probably take yourself elsewhere.

Can't get more straightforward than that, can I?

Ahaley, Tivo doesn't honor the broadcast flag -- which effects broadcast programming. They respond to a few other flags as part of their cable agreements.

The big deal about *broadcast* is that the spectrum (which belongs to the American public) is loaned for free to broadcasters, who, in return, are NOT ALLOWED to restrict the recording in this way.

The tour stops were picked out with some science by Tor Teens, based on the places where bestselling YA fiction becomes a hit first -- IOW, the places that seem to be centers for diffusing enthusiasm about kids' books. If it were up to me, there'd be twenty more cities on this tour (though it'd probably kill me!), but this is all about spending Tor's money as intelligently as possible.

Falk, you need to look up the difference between embedding and copying. But of course, that would mean you'd have to discuss the facts, rather than grinding your personal vendetta axe.

Those are great -- too bad the pix are all stuck in linkable flashblobs. Why do designers love Flash so much? It must be a gigantic pain to update those sites, and no one can link directly to one of your pieces... It's like the artist is saying, "Hey, all my pieces are equivalent, so one really needs to show a friend any one specific piece."

Spoon, are you making a funny or something?

Little Brother is already available as free download, just like all my books, and as has been noted, is a NYT bestseller.

Thanks everyone!

AriB@2: Anything you can come up with from the book, I'm game to see!

No, it's not necessary for the hash to be reversible in order for it to violate privacy -- for example, the hash may be stored with other identifiers (e.g. names gleaned from debit cards) or may be mined after the fact -- e.g., someone wants to figure out if you were in a certain place at a certain time, so they take the hash of your face and run it against the database.

Indeed, the storing of hashes without other identifiers creates new privacy risks, inasmuch as such hashes will necessarily contain many collisions, so that false circumstantial evidence of your presence at a given till could be generated, without any way for you to refute it.

Other lovely facts about the British approach to privacy:

If you're arrested (or even brought in for interrogation but not charged), your DNA is sampled and held on file, indefinitely, whether or not you are convicted of any crime.

Immigrants -- even those who've lived in the country for years, as I have, and are only renewing their visas -- are now required to give a full suite of biometrics to the Home Office.

HMRC maintains a semi-secret taxation records-keeping system for the wealthy and titled, because they don't believe that the existing system used by "normal" people is secure.

British passports have biometric identifiers and RFID chips.

Scotland Yard has announced its intention to begin to mine Oyster Card data to automatically identify "criminals."

The head of Scotland Yard advocated DNA sampling for children as young as 5 who exhibit "antisocial" tendencies, so as to make it easier to arrest them later in life.

God, the British smugness about civil liberties is insufferable.

The UK suspended habeas corpus first, and more enthusiastically.

The UK is closer to a national ID infrastructure than the US.

The UK allowed (and finally rescinded) a regulation that would fingerprint all passengers in T5 in London.

The UK passed RIPA, then sat quietly back as the Met and local councils used the extraordinary, invasive anti-terrorism powers to spot people whose dogs muck the pavement.

The UK collects enormous amounts of financial data on its citizens, then lets the bloody HMRC repeatedly lose 25,000,000 households' worth of that information. Repeatedly. Over a period of years.

The US is not a model nation by any means, but whatever privacy-discarding madness it is gripped by, the UK is likewise in the grasp of.

Hey, Spooke -- get stuffed.

I'm a Canadian.

I live in Britain.

This isn't "American" perspective on anything.

I get the impression they'd be really happy to have someone volunteer to set up tech stuff for them.

Um, Coresoup, Derren Brown is a renowned skeptic who has devoted his career to debunking psychic phenomena, and makes no claim to doing anything supernatural. He, like James Randi, Penn and Teller, etc, is a conjurer who openly derides those who seek to deceive the public.

You, sir, are talking out of your ass.

Simon, "Walkman" was lost because Sony had the stupid temerity to sue a DICTIONARY for describing the term (accurately) as generic. IOW, they forced a judge to decide between giving them exclusive rights, or censoring whether lexicographers could legitimately publish their observations about the way people spoke.

Eai@4: No, that's just a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their clients to justify their billings. In practice, it's unheard of for courts to allow truly deceptive uses of marks, even if this kind of use has been allowed. For example, we all use "to google" as a generic way to describe searching, but there's zero chance that Microsoft could launch a campaign called "Google it with MSN Search" without losing the ensuing courtroom battle.

Copyrightme@29: "Of course, as a nationally recognized copyfighter you'll be making the entire book available as a free download, yes?"

Why yes: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

@17Mousewrites: Nope, never been to that one!

@4, 7: Indeed, I will be posting about Little Brother daily for a couple of months at least. I'll be mentioning each day's tour stops, all the new Instructables, any really cool remixes, any awards it wins, etc. At least once, often twice a day. Sometimes more, as events warrant.

@5: Almost all - I'm covering half the overseas flight from London so I can go Premium Economy, which is a lot easier on my back (and my sciatica).

@6: Not this time! I do get to Portland every couple years, though.

I already have a DSL line from BT, which I'll be keeping.

Is "internet users have short attention spans" not rather patronising?

No, I don't think --

Wait, what?

Hellhead, you're just the sort of person I was hoping would sign up -- by all means, send in a request!

Regarding other authors -- no not that I know of. Someone should set up a service, though.

Tuktuk! Hilarious -- what a family tree!

The PDF's fixed now -- thanks!

Charleswi: that only works if you know where in the card the chip lives.

Bwahahahahaha!

Sheer hilarity!

@2: That's pretty silly.

So, when a headline reads, "US asks Canada for better terms in trade agreement," you think it should read, "Elected representatives of the US ask elected representatives of Canada for better terms in trade agreement?"

Or, "Hollywood numbers slump" should read, "Numbers for Hollywood film industry slump"?

You must live somewhere with REALLY wide newspapers.

Mwiik -- it wont be sooner than Monday!

Torrance, it was a repost, so I nuked it.

Hey, Destructor! Yes, there's a UK edition coming on Nov 17 that will also be sold throughout the commonwealth, including .au, .nz and .za

I just use Thunderbird, but I've used Mail.app and even Entourage with these tips in past.

Xodarap, I think you're wrong, sorry! Take "Scalzi" out of the sentence and see how it reads.

Torrance -- yeah, I keep podcasts on the iPod and pop the bead in whenever I've got a few seconds; it's the only way I can keep up.

Jeff, see: http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html

Fixed!

Airpillow, I take your point. I think there's a time for funny, ranty stuff and a time for serious, "neutral" tone. Blogs are great for the former, position papers, journalistic editorials, etc are generally where I do the latter.

I've looked at the comments from the WotC guys, and while there's a little word-mincing, there's a pretty clear indication that the intent is to poison the previous edition and the open license that went with it.

Jared@11 not yet! I'll have everything up shortly, though, around the time the book launches.

Kerry@10 Thanks for the review!

Clockwork@9 So, you think it infringes on your liberties to be told that it's rude to come here and dictate what should and shouldn't be on the blog?

I'm going to be posting about Little Brother on a very regular basis for the next year or so. I will be posting more links to the related instructables, there will be videos and audio material, keysigning parties, and reminders of each stop on the book tour.

If that bothers you, you're probably in the wrong place (or you can figure out how to skip the stuff, as, I assume, you skip everything else that we post that you're not interested in).

Boing Boing is the place where the four editors post about the stuff we find interesting, and about the stuff we do with the stuff we find interesting (e.g. books, videos, etc). If that's not what you want to read, you've come to the wrong place.

Registrado, it'll go up once the book's out.

Thanks, MKUltra!

Rob O -- I have 10,000 books in storage in Toronto, another several thousand in a storage in LA, and still more in storage in London. That's the tip of the tip of the iceberg. You try moving continents ever 2-3 years for a decade and see where your books end up.

Automatt, the book'll be up for download the same week as it comes out in stores -- more specifically, it'll be available for download as soon as I get home to London and get the last few files I need to upload online.

There is a bigger tour, including some NYC dates -- but not BookExpo Canada.

May 1 it is. Durrrr.

The UK cover is completely lovely -- the US cover (shown here) not as good.

Lava, this was *originally* posted on complett.nl, where Materialicious found it. But they're not Magellan -- they didn't "discover" something previously unknown. Many people have gone to the site in times gone by. Many people have appreciated this work in person, too. Materialicious and lots of other people posted about it, and other people saw it, and other people saw what they posted, and so on.

"Via" means, "this is where I saw it." It does not mean, "This is the first person in the world who ever wrote a blog post about it."

Life is too short -- and provenance is too difficult to determine -- to track down "via"s unto the first hit a website ever received.

Takuan, I bow before you.

Linea, my grandfather was a watchmaker who had literally 10,000 partial movements in his apartment when he died.

Thanks, Andrew!

Magician, you're missing the point. Say I want to run a video service. I can buy all the bandwidth in the universe, a bundle of fiber as thick as a baby's arm going straight into my server, and it won't make any difference to Virgin's customers. Virgin is saying that it doesn't matter how fast they get the data from me -- all that matters is how much I've paid them to reach Virgin customers.

So, realistically, how will this work? Will every person who wants to serve files to the Internet have to buy a data connection and then bribe *every ISP in the world* to deliver the packets faithfully to their customers?

Shouldn't Virgin's first service priority be giving me the packets I asked for at the fastest possible speed?

Annoyedcapitalist: the empirical evidence from Internet2 researchers who've used the best-available QoS mechanisms is that the management costs of these systems are ALWAYS higher than adding the capacity necessary to obviate them:

http://commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Statement&Statement_ID=40

Network operators want to charge us *three times* for our connections:

1. I pay for my broadband

2. Google pays for its broadband

3. My ISP charges Google to connect to my broadband

This is just rent-seeking, exploiting a regulatory monopoly -- the public's largesse -- to pick the public's pocket.

Imagine that you ran a successful independent pizzeria, Annoyedcapitalist's American Style. When I call you up, BT says, "You're ringing a basic-tier pizzeria. Please hold for 2 minutes, the time we delay calls to Annoyedcapitalist's American Style because they haven't paid us a 'premium tier' fee. Their line isn't engaged -- we just don't route calls to them as efficiently as we might in order to maximize our revenue. In the meantime, if you're hungry for pizza *now*, why not try Domino's, who have paid for premium-rate call-routing."

That's a pretty sweet racket for BT -- whose lines and right of ways have been paid for by the public, directly (through subsidy when they were a public entity) and indirectly (though free and low-cost rights-of-way) -- but how is this good for the public, pizza, or capitalism?

If BT or Virgin want to run a purely capitalist enterprise, let them negotiate for every foot of sewer and every pole they string their wires through, and pay market rates for them. But if they're going to get this stuff at public subsidy, they need to act in the public's interest -- or someone else should be given their wires and the mandate to run them.

Well, that's a watch *movement* in a nicely chased silver ring.

@14, sorry, I couldn't disagree more.

In Eldred v Ashcroft, the supremes held that *ninety eight percent* of the works in copyright are orphaned. Not only can their authors not get paid for their use, but in many cases, all known copies of these works will disappear before their copyrights expire, which will effectively remove these artists from the historical record -- forever. This is already happening to a lot of early, post-1928 (Steamboat Willie) film stock, which is disintegrating in archives because it can't be used because no one knows whom it belongs to.

The orphan works proposals that have reached anything like maturity say that:

1. Various entities -- including nonprofits, including artists' groups, including others -- can use registries to help with orphan works. These registries will be optional, and the LoC will work to keep them honest. The LoC has maintained its own registry since Ben Franklin.

2. Anyone who finds a work that is not in the registry is required to conduct a good-faith search for the author. If that search comes up null, the LoC or a collecting society will collect a set royalty for use of the work and escrow it for the author.

3. If the good-faith search turns out to have been merely pro-forma, conducted *without* good faith, the author will be entitled to massive statutory damages.

None of this is coherent with the bizarre rant that this guy published. He's basically made up a bunch of stuff, backed it up with selective and misleading quotations, and then declared the sky is falling.

Orphan works legislation is desperately needed, so that we can:

* Make new works from old

* Rescue old works from history's scrapheap

* Pay the 98% of artists whose works are presently orphaned

You're right. The Berne convention prohibits mandatory registration. That's why we can be absolutely certain that the US will not pass an orphan works rule on the lines that this guy is worried about, nor will any other WTO signatory.

So, the question is whether more artists have been put out of business by the net than have been put into business by it. The net positively overflows with musicians, fine artists, visual artists, filmmakers, etc who are making art and reaching an audience (and, presumably, making money at it).

MarkFrei: Well, if you want to do something entrepreneurial (sell art on the market) and you don't want to have to figure out what's commercially viable before you try it, I guess you're pretty much out of luck. Entrepreneurs who don't care about selling stuff people want to buy at a price and in a form they want to buy it in generally don't do very well.

Maybe you could apply for grants?

@3: Someone posts a ridiculous loaded hypothetical that's totally unrelated to the post: what do you do? Dismiss the hypothetical and ignore the straw-man

Um, the magnet person was a sarcastic hypothetical person, made up in response to the council's assertion that they need to protect their street-signs. Yeesh.

I think would be good for kids -- I think they're better at loving stuff without having to understand it (viz Alice in Wonderland) than big people.

Dustin -- the reason her sex is relevant is that she's lipsynching MEN who speak, and the incongruity of this is part of its artistic impact.

If the artwork in question was, for example, wearing a fake maternity pad 24/7 and recording public reaction, and the artist was a man, I would probably headline it, "Man artist wears pregnancy belly."

Art, right freakin' on.

This isn't art criticism, it's crummy attitudinizing and straw-man crap. This guy has invented a group of poseurs (the mythical "people in top hats" who don't know what to make), who are not anywhere in evidence, are entirely irrelevant to this post, and used them to damn Jake (with faint praise and an arch sneer), and anyone else who happens to enjoy something without (apparently) designing circuit boards.

It's a literal non sequitur, an attempt to hijack a thread in order to rubbish the legitimate passions of others.

It's inexcusable.

If the only excuse you can offer for your sneering is that the people you're sneering at are "thumbless," then you're a bigger troll than I took you for. Apparently learning to design circuit boards doesn't turn you into someone who's also learned to value human endeavor for its own sake.

You have fun there up on your exalted perch, but please forgive us mere thumblesses for our "histrionics" when you tell us that we are insufficiently subculturally pure for this movement that you have appointed yourself arbiter and executioner for.

Honestly, what a shitty, petty little stream of piss you've left in your short career as a Boing Boing message-board poster. It's people like you who stop others from ever doing creative things, insecure snipers who sit on the sidelines and tell everyone else how lame their clothes, loves, and enthusiasms are.

Who the fuck asked you?

Evilrooster and Agent 86, you cats are tops in my books.

"Emulating?" Oh, the arrogance!

How about "celebrating?" How about "enjoying?"

Yes, you sit there on the sidelines, sneering at the people who are having a good time, telling them that they're not *really* enjoying themselves. Give the old spleen a good workout. I'm sure that when you lie on your deathbed, you'll smile grimly at the productive hours you spent spoiling other peoples' fun.

You know, "making things," doesn't technically including "making people miserable."

Oh for god's sake -- what is it about someone *liking* something and *being excited by it* that causes sourpuss grumpuses to crawl out of their holes to piss all over them?

Who *cares* if "subculture" or "movement" or "esthetic" is the right word for it?

Didn't you get enough of arguing about whether so-and-so is a *real* goth/punk/whatever when you were 16?

If Jake wants to call himself a steampunk, more power to him! If someone else who likes top-hats wants to say the same, yee-haw, follow your weird, buddy, and more power to you!

Christ, anything you can do to have a good time, feel good, and make the world and more interesting place, allez!

And anyone who says you're using the wrong word to describe what you do, or that it's lame because it is the wrong color or not interesting to them, they can pound sand. Griping about other peoples' passions most assuredly does NOT make the world a more interesting place.

Creating an account for the sole purpose of posting a message that tells people who are having a fun time playing around with culture, fabrication, and identity that they are insufficiently edgy because they don't make their own top-hats is really dysfunctional.

Cuvtixo, dismissing an entire realm of activity as "harmless" -- especially a traditionally feminine one -- in the same breath that you dismiss an entire field of scientific endeavor does not do you proud.

The guy from Warner used to be a free agent. He's a radical copyfighter named Jim Griffin, and he's a hell of a dude. I trust him to the ends of the earth.

Skep, you're misunderstanding me -- yes, a DJ could be busted for *downloading* a song, but the act of *playing* the downloaded song over the air is legal. The license covers playing music, period, regardless of source.

As to royalties, there are plenty of double dips -- indeed, they're the norm in blanket licenses. For example, a DJ buys a CD at a record store -- that's one royalty to the composer and artist. Then she plays it on the air -- that's another royalty. The broadcast is piped through a department store that pays for the performance right -- that's a THIRD royalty.

It's useful to compare this to other blanket licenses, for example, the license offered to radio stations.

When a DJ drops the needle on his record, he is legit, no matter where the recording came from (an iPod, a bootleg, a download), and no matter what happens to the transmission after it is received (shared, retransmitted, recorded, webcast). The radio station has paid for the right to play all the music, over its equipment, regardless of origin or eventual disposition.

In this system, an ISP's customer is like the DJ: it doesn't matter where she gets the music, nor what the people who receive it from her do with it. *Her* use is legit. Solving the global issues is a matter of proving the model works and going to other countries and looking to get their ISPs to offer comparable licenses.

Or compare this with the US compulsory license on compositions: if you want to sell a recording of you performing *any song ever written*, you just need to pay a small fee to a collecting society, which will pass the money on to the composer.

You sell the record to me, and I take it to a country that doesn't have the deal and sell it on as a wholesaler: you're still legit. The composer still got paid in the USA. It may be that the recording found its way to China and got duplicated 10,000,000 times. You're still legit. The composers need to get a better deal out of China, but abandoning their US revenue until that happens is suicide.

Keneke, I just hate it. Artistically, I think it fails -- it's meanspirited, opportunistic (trying to jump on a pop culture bandwagon that had already left the scene like an old white guy in a bad suit and comb-over doing a Flava Flav impression) and incoherent (what does Gloria Estefan have to do with Polynesia?). The brilliant twoaxis symmetry that guaranteed that every seat in the house was a great one is gone, so half the theater misses half the show now.

The old show's jokes were corny and sweet, the new show's jokes are lame and dismissive.

Every time I hear Iago tell us that the tiki birds are stupid, I remember how much pleasure my grandfather got from them, and I think, "What a prick the guy who did this must have been."

Photocopy them and send Scribd the copies.