derivative work

Pharyngula tears up a Christian apologetic, which was fine and entertaining, but it was the commenter Oneiros Dreaming who made me laugh out loud: pharyngula: Personally, I’m a little bit miffed about this frequent assertion that atheists are just that way because they want free sex. I’m an atheist, and I never got to take [...]

ordinarily i’m interested in quotes from artists & creators that evidence awareness of or interest in non-copyright maximalism. but in today’s NYT article (“King Kong vs. Pirates of the Multiplex”) there was a quote from Peter Jackson: “Piracy has the very real potential of tipping movies into becoming an unprofitable industry, especially big-event films. If [...]

I’m almost always infuriated when I hear about publicly licensed networks and stations refusing to air political ads. The latest: A media critique ad that aims to bring attention to the Darfur genocide. Be A Witness. Link from Ann Bartow @ sivacracy 8/25

Okay, I’m sneaking a little break away from visiting family in Virginia to breathe the fresh air of the Internet. I wouldn’t exactly call Virginia a hellhole (at least not in front of the family who lives here), but the Internet cafe (Panera Bakery) I’m surfing at blocks arthur silber’s the light of reason and [...]

some links, some quotes, some comments, all in one … I pulled various of these articles up several hours ago from various blogs, which I would like to link back to, but windows got closed, systems got rebooted, and to make a long story short I no longer know which link came from where. Molly [...]

the ministry of reshelving: subversive operations in cataloging. One major project: to move copies of 1984 to ‘current events’, ‘politics’, ‘true crime’, etc. description @ avant game; documentation @ flickr. linked from bitch phd.

I just re-set the blogroll to show everything, sorted alphabetically; reverse-alphabetically in a few categories. This is a shift from the past several months, when I had limits on total # of blogs in a category, and showed them by ostensible date-of-most-recent-updates. That didn’t work. The date-of-most-recent-updates was determined some means incomprehensible (well, uncomprehended, anyway) [...]

Indeed, the Medium Lobster could not agree more: while some in the petty name of “truth,” “accountability” and “basic humanity” might want to open this material to the world, outrage over yet another American atrocity would just fuel more violence. Oh, ACLU, don’t you have enough blood on your hands? Which is why the Medium [...]

A Chelsea art dealer got a C&D from DC for exhibiting “gay Batman” art by Mark Chamberlain. More detail at artnet 8/18. … also more detail at StayFree, which has posted one of the watercolors … and i now see that boingboing has posted a different watercolor.

The widely quoted, hilarious response by Terry Pratchett to the Canadian court order [more from Michael Geist] applied to early purchasers of Harry Potter 6: Terry Pratchett, by a strange coincidence, chose the H*rry P*tter launch day to issue a stern warning about his next Discworld novel: ‘Now that the bound proof copies of _Thud!_ [...]

The BBC recently aired a second Victorian lesbian drama based on a novel by one of my favorite writers, Sarah Waters. The BBC made one of the best lesbian movies, ever, in its adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”. The BBC is opening its archives to the world. England is a [...]

Garrison Keilor imagines library pork like the Alaskan bridge-laden Republican Transportation bill. First, the model: For Alaska, the Republicans earmarked $223 million for a bridge almost as long as the Golden Gate to link the town of Ketchikan (pop. 8,000) — which is a town that exists to sell T-shirts and postcards to cruise passengers [...]

I like the flow of the google / library discussion: what’s the essence of library? and suspect I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time to come. (It sounds like a delightful perfume: a bit musty with an sweet undernote of decaying paper and an overnote of astringent preservative, maybe.) Just picking out [...]

In The New Yorker, The Talk of the Town, posted 2005/8/15, Hendrik Hertzberg had this to say about Bush & his recent comments on intelligent design: If the President’s musings on [intelligent design] were an isolated crotchet, they would hardly be worth noting, let alone getting exercised about. But they’re not. They reflect an attitude [...]

Okay, I’m on some kind of a roll with fictional discussions of IP etc. Here’s another: Lois McMaster Bujold, in Barrayar, chronicled a cross-cultural exchange about the value of information access. Cordelia, from the planet Beta, is shocked that poor people don’t have access to information; Vorkosigan, from the planet Barrayar, is shocked at her [...]

John Varley has made more than a few comments about IP and information politics in his various stories. The Golden Globe (recommended) was centrally concerned with an actor named Sparky Valentine, and Sparky had a few observations about IP: In the early days, when they were considering various ideas for a corporate logo, Valentine had [...]

Great. US officials are admitting what was obvious to many even before the invasion: The US invasion of Iraq will lead to another theocracy. [Wash Post 8/14] [linked from david 8/14 at sivacracy] “We set out to establish a democracy, but we’re slowly realizing we will have some form of Islamic republic,” said another U.S. [...]

More on Google and Siva’s response (and my responses to Siva): Recap: In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is implementing an opt-out provision in its scan-copyrighted-library-books program, and delaying scans of copyrighted books until November. [google blog] This has been widely reported as Google backing down. See, e.g., “Chilled by [...]

Some more thoughts on the recent NLRB decision restricting employees’ off-duty fraternization. Guardsmark, LLC, 334 NLRB No. 97 (2005) (decision in pdf): The Board majority found the rule at issue here (in Guardsmark): “While on duty you must NOT … fraternize on duty or off duty, date or become overly friendly with the client’s employees [...]

Up early for my spouse who caught a red-eye. Now she’s resting peacefully and I of course can’t get back to sleep. But that’s okay, because there’s the Internet! Positive outcomes of BlogHer: Mary Hodder at Napsterization is establishing a Speakers’ Wiki. In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is implementing [...]