It has been a while since I’ve done a rant about plagiarism. It’s one of the more corrosive bits of self-destruction writers engage in. It might be envy, or laziness or something deep-seated and broken in the writer’s psyche, but in most cases I’ve heard of, the plagiarist is compulsive Read more…
There is not much more I can say about the Cook’s Source Magazine scandal that hasn’t been already said. If you don’t know what I’m talking about (and if so, what Internet have you been surfing?) we have the author of an article about medieval tarts (SCAdians take note) who Read more…
(NOTE: I’m going to start posting (some) political stuff on my blog again, the experiment with two blogs didn’t really work, and no one needs another political blog anyway.) Again with the asshats I say. And we have some wonderful hats of assness this time in the person(s) of a Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…
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.) Read more…
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 Read more…
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 Read more…