derivative work

The London Guardian published an article on Wikipedia, with ‘experts’ evaluating articles within their expertise. The takehome is that some entries suck, and some entries are pretty good. Well, that’s sort of obvious. I think it’s more interesting that this article, and many others like it, are being published at all. When was the last [...]

Oy. The Google Print discussion just keeps going on, and on … Karl-Friedrich Lenz makes the point that Yahoo!’s opt-in only venture, and older search databases that licensed content, weaken Google’s case. Yep. As a copyfighter, though, I resist the idea that copyright-holders already legally possess that level of control over copyrighted works, and can [...]

I know other folks have observed this, but, really, isn’t it completely clear that Bush has implemented a religious test for office? Isn’t his pattern of practice completely obvious? Not just in his three Supreme Court nominees, but lower court nominees and executive appointments have all been filled with conservative Christians. Seriously, I challenge anyone [...]

… DRAFT: a work in progress; will be updated as I review more cases (or find typos) … Well, according to NPR, Judge Sam Alito from the Third Circuit is nominated. I’m sure that everyone will be all over his record on every conceivable issue in no time at all, but I’m looking at his [...]

Forbes apparently publishes an annual list of the top-earning dead celebrities and creators. They note that Shakespeare would be way up there: [Forbes] calculated what the Bard’s heirs might collect each year if he were still under copyright and estimated it at $15 million with over 5,000 performances of his plays and hundreds of thousands [...]

Yahoo!’s historically less-than-stellar track record of protecting user privacy is made much, much worse by this news: Yahoo! turned over a user’s identity information to the Chinese government, and now journalist Shi Tao has been sentenced to ten years for “e-mailing a government’s plan to restrict media coverage around the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen [...]

Skeptics who use the uncertainties to justify delaying such actions forget that uncertainty cuts both ways, and things could be far worse than forecast. Succinctly put. This in an NYT article about ‘the big thaw’: the shrinking Arctic ice coverage. Andrew C. Revkin, No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum, NYT 2005/10/25

I just got around to reading the weekend’s Washington Post Google Print editorials, pro (Mary Sue Coleman, UMich Pres) & con (Nick Taylor, Authors’ Guild). Short editorials, and I suppose the format limits their ability to go beyond rhetoric (“access to vast libraries of content” … “this is a socialist plot!”) into any actual legal [...]

The Rude Pundit tears it up on comparisons between the Clinton Whitewater-MonicaGate scandal, and the Bush-Cheney Fraudulently-Induced-Then-Bungled-Iraq-War-PlameGate scandal. [link from sideshow] debate over intelligent design: the abstract factory points out that intelligent design advocates, like pretty much every other human being, work within a science-based framework when it really matters to them personally. [link from [...]

I’m pleased to see the Google Print issue spurring discussion of the role of corporations in controlling access to information. See, e.g., today’s post @ Gnuosphere [link from sivacracy] Gnuosphere, Siva, and others point out that Google isn’t doing Google Print out of the goodness of its heart; the company is scanning, indexing, and providing [...]

¡Viva La Huelga! Carlos Cortez 1993 Linocut, 89×58.5 cm “When you do a painting that’s it, it’s one of a kind. But when you do a graphic the amount of prints you can make from it is infinite. I made a provision in my estate, for whoever will take care of my blocks, that if [...]

What the New York Times has not figured out yet is that Judith Miller is an extreme example of the unreliable narrator. She increases our doubt in the story as she tells it. Priceless. [PressThink 10/21, link from sivacracy]

Concerned about massive copyright infringement? The folks at unhappy birthday.com are, too, and have some suggestions for how you can help. [link from sivacracy]

Meghann Marco, a new author, would like to have her book indexed by Google, but her publisher says no, they’d rather sue. [link from kottke.org] As a person who spends a large part of her day trying to get people to read her book, I asked my publisher to include me in Google Print. They [...]

San Francisco’s counterPULSE Theater got a cease-and-desist from Fox TV demanding they cancel their sold-out live action performance of “Once More, With Feeling” (the Buffy musical). According to SFist, Buffy creator Joss Whedon said he had no objection to the staging of the show. [link from whedonesque]

Two great tastes that taste great together. Many “Daily Show” fans (well, okay, me) have been concerned about the future of “This Week in God” now that Stephen Colbert is leaving “The Daily Show” for his own spinoff. Today’s NYT (10/12) explains that the segment is going to stay, but with a new correspondent — [...]