snowdeal.org - conflux

conflux

Suck Pirate Flags
"Intellectual property rights seem a quaint notion these days � the antiquated, Elizabethan remains of the Old Economy with all the here-and-now applicability of lace collars. Intellectual property is a fairy tale, told by dot-commers to make their interns laugh, like stories of stockholders who expect a profit and journalists who check their sources. The idea of owning what you create has become a sad little joke."

"The near-universal disregard with which intellectual property is treated leaves anyone with even the slightest interest in their own rights thinking that the population of the Internet consists almost entirely of beady-eyed, slack-jawed warezd00dz. But moralizing never got anybody anywhere, save nailed to a tree. And since piracy is going to continue no matter what the courts or copyright-holders do, Metallica and the AP and anybody else with complaints about the state of intellectual property rights on the Web is going to have to do some hard thinking fast.

"First one with a business plan wins."

redux [02.05.00]
Reason Magazine Copy Catfight
"There is an inherent conflict between intellectual property rights and freedom of speech, a tension between your right to control a story you've written and my right to use it as raw material for my own work. Thanks to two trends, that tension is turning rapidly into a collision... On one hand, as information has grown more valuable, copyright and trademark law has become increasingly restrictive. At the same time, there has been, in the words of MIT media studies professor Henry Jenkins, an "explosion of grassroots, participatory culture," a new high-tech folkway that not only draws on pop culture but appropriates from it more easily than ever before, and disseminates itself on a wider scale."
Feed Daily
"PUT YOURSELF in Microsoft's place. After battling the DOJ lawsuit and the ILOVEYOU virus, and beating down sixteen-year-olds for setting up Web sites with names like www.windowslover.com, the company's public image has deteriorated to the point that even a TV ad blitz featuring a sweater-clad Bill Gates can't overcome rising distrust. What would you do? Sic lawyers on a popular, grass-roots Web site? Probably not, but that's the latest gambit from Redmond. The conflict that is brewing between Microsoft and the "News for Nerds" site Slashdot is more than just another David-and-Goliath story -- the resolution could altogether delete the idea of on-line anonymity."
"Last week, administrators at AndoverNet, the owners of Slashdot, received a lawyerly letter from a J. K. Weston of Microsoft, demanding that Slashdot remove or censor some of the thousands of daily, anonymous posts to the site, posts that contained "unauthorized reproductions of Microsoft's copyrighted work." The letter invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DCMA) and stated that as an ISP, Slashdot was responsible for the content on their servers and potentially liable for damages, even if the text was placed there by shadowy Mister Nobodies."

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[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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