S Andrew Swann | July 31, 2009
So the AP still doesn’t “get” fair use. Or they don’t want to get it. According to Tom Curley, AP’s chief executive:
The company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. … He specifically cited references that include a headline and [...]
Category: intellectual property, rants, wtf |
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S Andrew Swann | June 30, 2009
You will love this. And I quote:
Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create [...]
Category: intellectual property, publishing, rants |
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S Andrew Swann | June 29, 2009
A new plagiarism story is afoot on the web seeing light in many places.
Author Chris Anderson writes about the web, and web marketing. He is one who you expect to be savvy about things like social networking, open source, creative commons, and all that other Web 2.0 stuff that’s all the hot shite on [...]
Category: intellectual property, publishing |
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S Andrew Swann | May 28, 2009
Boing-Boing tells us of a lil Canadian think-tank report. The Conference Board of Canada (sounds so official, I trust them already) who’re self-characterized as “the foremost, independent, not-for-profit applied research organization in Canada. Objective and non-partisan. We do not lobby for specific interests” (you know they’re independent, they said so.) had been paid [...]
Category: asshat, intellectual property, internet, politics, rants, wtf |
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S Andrew Swann | February 12, 2009
What is with it with my fellow writers? Every few months I hear about some new neo-Luddite proposal that makes the stuffed suits at the RIAA look like they’re writing Harry Potter slash to bootleg Metallica MP3s. First it was Pixel-Stained Technopeasants, then it was royalties on used books.
Now the Author’s Guild says that [...]
Category: intellectual property, publishing, rants, writing, wtf |
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S Andrew Swann | December 29, 2008
Dear Author again graces us with examples of the paleolithic thinking of the old media.
The upshot is, the NY Times thinks used bookstores are the reason publishing is in a crisis right now.
Yeah, right.
This is the true sign of a crisis, when the old guard suddenly tries desperately to find something, anything, to blame for [...]
Category: intellectual property, publishing, wtf |
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S Andrew Swann | December 26, 2008
From Dear Author we have something that just amazes me in shear economic WTFry.
We all know at the wonderful, and oh so successful, way that major content providers (MPAA, RIAA, Viacom etc.) have tried to impose 19th century “this is my widget” mentality to IP law in the digital age. The stupidity these major [...]
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S Andrew Swann | October 9, 2008
This has been flying under the radar unless you’re like me and you follow uber-geek podcasts like I do. However, the US government has been quietly pressuring our friends and allies to sign on to a lil treaty called ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. This is the wonderful little piece of borderline-fascist policy that allows [...]
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S Andrew Swann | September 20, 2008
More or less randomly I was reading a thread on the Agony Booth and got thinking about fan fiction and how it relates to writing more generally. I generally look at fan fiction as a benign thing, as long as the fan work doesn’t start infringing on the rights of the original, (i.e. isn’t [...]
Category: intellectual property, writing |
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S Andrew Swann | August 20, 2008
To all the aspiring writers out there who want to make a bad impression and leave a permanently sour taste in the mouths of not only your readers but with anyone who’s ever heard of you, Victoria Laurie has some tips for you. (Original post is gone, but once released those electrons don’t go [...]
Category: asshat, intellectual property, internet, publishing, rants, writing |
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