Right you are, octopussoup!

Gboyer: you don't think that "Your personal music player should take orders from other people at your expense" is an ideology?

Christov, you're glad that Apple is keeping mandatory DRM for audiobooks, even when the publisher and author don't want it? You think that this is a blow for author's rights?

Sean, there's a universe of audiobook rightsholders demanding that Apple allow their products to be sold without DRM and Apple's ignoring them. How does this fit into your theory that Apple only puts on DRM when rightsholders force them to?

Apple dropped DRM because its label-partners wanted a vendor-agnostic format, rather than being locked into Apple's pricing and platform.

Apple's keeping the DRM on the other media because the more media they sell with DRM, the more it costs to switch from Apple's products.

Well, as a muslim, do you feel like western societies have a nuanced, thorough understanding of Islam?

Yes! And not a moment too soon. I need to work!

Scottsigler@8: I buy Samsonite Spinners, the four-wheel cases. We've got three, a soft-side, a semi-rigid, and a carry-on sized mini. They're fabulous -- in a pinch, I can even wheel all three while my wife carries the baby (e.g. while we're waiting for the stroller to be off-loaded).

ACX99: If you think that's true, you need to see one of his stage shows.

Derren's a friend of mine and I don't think that you're correct, Fergus. For one thing, he wrote a book about applied hypnotism.

Regardless of his political views, he's still a lying mass-murderer who led the country into economic disaster and global disrepute, while slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians in the name of "liberating them" or getting rid of fictitious WMDs, all the while traitorously undermining the Bill of Rights and violating his sworn oath to uphold the Constitution.

We shouldn't celebrate the tiny, symbolic victories of the victims of his rapacious regime. Instead, we should treat him as morally equivalent to all the other polticians who might someday hold office.

I don't release for the Kindle because it has mandatory DRM (authors can't opt out of it).

Thanks, Xenu!

Patrick: ahahahaha!

Larry's server's fallen over -- here's the text of the post:

I got off the plane from Boston to find my inbox filled with anger about an article in the Wall Street Journal. To those who were angry, I hope you will direct any anger at the Wall Street Journal after you read what follows.

The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject."

Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me. And of course, because I have "softened" my views about network neutrality, and because I advised the Obama campaign about technology issues during the primary, it follows (and obviously so) that Obama too must be going soft on network neutrality.
I don't know what Google is doing, though if they are trying to negotiate exclusive deals for privileged access, that shows exactly why we need network neutrality regulation. (Though note, the article doesn't say the deal Google was striking was exclusive).

And I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.

But I do know something about my own views, and what the Journal has done here is really extraordinary.

It is true, as the Journal reports, that I have stated that network providers should be free to charge different rates for different service -- "so long," the Journal quotes, "as the faster service at a higher price is available to anyone willing to pay it."

But the whole punch of the story comes from the suggestion that my position is something new. As the Journal states,

Lawrence Lessig, an Internet law professor at Stanford University and an influential proponent of network neutrality, recently shifted gears by saying at a conference that content providers should be able to pay for faster service.

And:

Stanford's Mr. Lessig, for one, has softened his opposition to variable service tiers.

Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a "shift" or "soften[ing]" of earlier views. That's because there isn't any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had -- whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.

For example, in April, 2008, I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee. This is what I said:

As I testified in 2006, in my view that minimal strategy right now marries the basic principles of “Internet Freedom” first outlined by Chairman Michael Powell, and modified more recently by the FCC, to one additional requirement — a ban on discriminatory access tiering. While broadband providers should be free, in my view, to price consumer access to the Internet differently — setting a higher price, for example, for faster or greater access — they should not be free to apply discriminatory surcharges to those who make content or applications available on the Internet. As I testified, in my view, such “access tiering” risks creating a strong incentive among Internet providers to favor some companies over others; that incentive in turn tends to support business models that exploit scarcity rather than abundance. If Google, for example, knew if could buy a kind of access for its video content that iFilm couldn’t, then it could exploit its advantage to create an even greater disadvantage for its competitors; network providers in turn could deliver on that disadvantage only if the non-privileged service was inferior to the privileged service.

That's the same thing I said to the FCC in its hearing at Stanford. You can hear what I said beginning at minute 18:20 here. There I distinguish between "zero price regulations" (such as Markey's bill (which I say I am against)) and what I called "zero discriminatory surcharge rules" (which I say I am for). The zero discriminatory surcharge rules are just that -- rules against discriminatory surcharges -- charging Google something different from what a network charges iFilm. The regulation I call for is a "MFN" requirement -- that everyone has the right to the rates of the most favored nation.
This is precisely the position that the Journal breathlessly attributes to me today. It represents no change -- no "softening" no "shift" in my views.

Now no doubt my position might be wrong. Some friends in the network neutrality movement as well as some scholars believe it is wrong -- that it doesn't go far enough. But the suggestion that the position is "recent" is baseless. If I'm wrong, I've always been wrong.

Big budget films will become like opera: vanity projects created by and for the rich in a form of potlatch, buoyed up by a high-flown rhetoric of cultural preservation.

Mark, that's AMAZING! We just bought a new Miele hoover -- can't wait to see if it carries over onto that range.

No, it's still in warranty -- this was just bad firmware.

Takuan@33: I LOVE that passage!

Enoch Root -- like this, you mean?

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/20/shanghanese-disco-bu.html

To be honest, I don't remember -- I think they're about UKP1.50/each.

It's not Camden -- it's Camden Passage in Islington. Right near Angel tube.

The G1 and the iPhone both have kill-switches, but only the iPhone is designed to refuse code unless it is signed by Apple. You can run any code on the G1.

Capitalism is all about property -- if Apple invades your property to tell you how you may and may not use it, they upset the very foundation of a market economy, the principle that people own things.

There's a difference -- you don't own Boing Boing -- but you do own your iPhone!

This is more analogous to the sole printer with access to a press that can run paperbacks (and with a history of suing people who try to publish their own paperbacks) refusing to print books that contain material they view as objectionable.

But even that analogy breaks down: we're not talking about whether Apple will or won't "carry" the book. We're talking about whether people who *own* iPhones can opt to use this app. Because Apple threatens to sue people who make apps that run on the iPhone without their permission, they establish a long tether between their headquarters and the pockets of every iPhone owner in the world.

Here's a better analogy, perhaps: this is like Borders deciding not to carry a certain book -- and then sending people around to your house to take the book off your shelf if it is on the same shelf as one of the books they've sold you.

When Jobs was questioned about Apple's kill-switch and approvals process, he made it clear that he was worried about malware and bad code -- he conveniently left out the "also, we will be prohibiting anything we decide is bad art." I suspect that the omission was deliberate. You don't think that this represents a step into regulation of speech that's qualitatively different from preventing viruses and buggy apps?

The situations are not analogous: Boing Boing isn't a device that you purchase, it's a publication.

Apple has a 100 percent monopoly over expression on the iPhone. The prevailing argument for this monopoly has been the prevention of malware and bad code on the phone.

Now Apple is using this power to make artistic judgments and enforce them against *every single iPhone user on the planet*.

Boing Boing's editorial decisions about which links we pick determine what you can see if you only follow Boing Boing links. Apple's decision to block a general-purpose comic-book reader because it comes bundled with a comic they don't like restricts your total, overall capacity to read comics on the iPhone.

Apple doesn't *have* to allow this comic book reading application or this comic on their phones. I don't think the law should compel them to do so.

However, Apple uses a law -- the DMCA -- to legally threaten other developers, artists, and customers who try to install unapproved material on their own bought-and-paid-for phones, and this, combined with Apple's new enforcement regime against comics because they don't like their content is sufficient grounds for me to boycott their products, and to encourage others to do the same.

You may want to put a publicly traded company whose first loyalty is to its shareholders in charge of what you can do with your own property, in your own house. I think that's a bad decision, and I'm saying so, publicly, here, in the hopes that you and others will be convinced of that.

You're describing implementation concerns (important ones) in the as-yet-nonexistent collection scheme. I agree that it should not be tilted to the RIAA (though I note that in radio performance we do have multiple collecting societies, precisely because the mainstream society rejected or gave a bad deal to less-favored [black and hillbilly] artists).

Other definitions:

"This is a nonprofit organization providing a public service as defined by the Internal Revenue Code Section 501(c)(3)."

"A legally incorporated nonprofit organization that operates for the public benefit and has federally registered charitable status Charitable status allows an organization to issue tax receipts for donations, and involves rules and regulations about governance, advocacy and operations that may ..."

"as a noun, refers to a kind of non-profit organization that solicits and is able to accept donations or gifts from individual and corporate donors. A registered charity is a charity which has successfully applied to the federal government under the Income Tax Act for charitable status. ..."

"an activity or gift that benefits the public at large"

First result in Google for "define:charity":

"a foundation created to promote the public good (not for assistance to any particular individuals)"

So a "charitable trust" is always one that helps the needy? There are dozens of the things around here that take on tasks like maintaining old graveyards or cleaning up the parks.

We can argue about this all day, but it won't change the fact that I personally know dozens and dozens of people who use "charity" and "nonprofit" or "public interest group sustained by donations."

Yeah, unlike religious charities like the Salvation Army that deny same-sex spousal benefits to their long-term workers who get sick or die on the job. There's the spirit of Christmas right there for ya.

Any charity that gives you soup and a sermon at the same time is more interested in giving you a sermon than in giving you soup. Real charity doesn't come with strings attached.

Jonathan, that's a far from universal definition. In the US, "charity" typically means "in possession of a 501(c)3 charitable tax-status.

Zikzak, the way that other collecting societies work is that they disburse funds to artists on the basis of actual plays. If you paid for a blanket license and didn't listen to any of the labels' music, your fees would be paid to (or escrowed for) the artists to whom you listened.

In this regard, it creates a level playing field for earning, effectively smashing the labels' monopoly on the retail/distribution channel. The "channel" takes all comers: indies, label artists, small labels, etc, and pays proportional shares based on actual listens as audited by statistically valid, mutually agreeable, transparent methods.

You wouldn't be paying a dime to the RIAA if you didn't listen to their music.

How is the popularity of music to be determined? Terry Fisher and others have written reams on the subject, but it boils down to statistically relevant sampling using a combination of "Nielsen Family" volunteers, network analysis, etc. It's comparable to the systems used to count live performance for disbursing royalties to composers in blanket-license schemes used in live venues.

For some context here -- universities often opt in to database subscriptions that guarantee students access to large archives of scholarly writing. Nothing in those deals prohibits students from sourcing the same material elsewhere, and no one forces universities to opt into the database subscriptions. And if students engaged in mass, unlicensed copying of the journals, they'd probably end up getting sued.

I'm no fan of the record industry, but this is materially similar to one of those database subscriptions, and superior in two important respects:

1. A university that subscribes to the database can't keep copies of the articles in its subscription if it terminates the arrangement (students can keep their music even if the uni opts out, and even once they've graduated)

2. A university that subscribes to a database doesn't automatically get immunity from prosecution for the student body in the event that they engage in unlicensed copying of the articles in the database

These are two pretty big plusses. No one accuses West or LexisNexis of engaging in a protection racket when they offer a subscription to universities. This is a better deal than either of them will give any uni.

This is offering the same deal to colleges that record companies (and collecting societies) offer to radio stations: play (download) any music you like, pay a flat fee, and we'll disburse it proportionally to the artists.

The nonprofit collecting society needs to be arms-length, needs to have fair reporting, and needs to be open to indies, but none of those are insurmountable problems.

The nice thing about this solution is that it pays artists, doesn't criminalize kids, and doesn't involve DRM, software mandates, or banning certain protocols.

Sounds like the right approach to me, *if* we're sure that the collecting society is honest and transparent, *if* the universities get to choose whether they opt in, and *if* the fees are reasonable (say the $5/month Yahoo Music was charging for the whole catalog, or less).

If all those conditions are met, just think of the services that students, universities and entrepreneurs could offer: students might pool their HDDs' worth of music (along with all the archival music in the library and every other university's students' HDDs) into huge cheap servers right there on the campus network (one in every dorm?) that can serve as a backup for getting access to every song, no matter who's online. Keeping all that stuff local will slash network congestion and obviate the program of throttling and spying that prevails on many campuses today.

Give it a couple years for storage prices to keep dropping and students can be issued a USB stick with the DRM-free high-quality library of, say, every song recorded for the past 50 years. Music studies profs can just put up repositories on the class-pages with links to every song under discussion in the class that semester.

Signal processing professors could ask students to try to build better algorithms for cleaning up pools of 30-50,000 vintage tracks.

Pam, I think you missed the authors' point regarding the military: they are arguing that coercive dosing with cognition-altering chemicals is bad and needs to be addressed in any framework that loosens restrictions on them. IOW, they included the military as an example of how things cna go wrong.

"This person is seriously suggesting widely prescribing amphetamines?"

No, this wide panel of distinguished experts is seriously suggesting revamping the system by which cognitive enhancing drugs are regulated to allow for more personal freedom while containing social harm.

Jeez, you not only didn't RTFA, you didn't even read the blog-post, did you?

No2ID coordinator Phil Booth sez, "FYI, unless something technical went wrong - which we'd resolve as soon as
we could after it was reported - NO2ID sends out one e-mail per fortnight
(our newsletter) to people subscribed via the website. And, occasionally -
probably no more than 3 or 4 in any one year - alerts to people who have
provided a postcode if there is something significant happening in their
area. Most people keep informed via their local groups, some of which run
their own mailing lists - from which you are able to unsubscribe yourself.

The only NO2ID lists that get traffic of that level - 7 per day - are our
internal or local group *coordinator* (i.e. committed activisits) lists."

You know what I dream of? A Nixie watch. That displays the time in number of seconds since Epoch. In hexidecimal. With the A-F characters replaced by their Cyrillic equivalents.

That's the watch I want. If I had one of those, I might stop buying watches.

I might!

Can you cite an "evil" thing that SEIU has done?

Can you suggest a way that workers' interests can be represented when the banks and the bailers sit down to negotiate that *doesn't* involve a union?

I don't think that these posts are really responsive to the points that Richard raises, namely:

1. If "it's just a game" then why not add rape quests and child mutilation quests too?

2. Not having a "torturer" class in the game means that it's possible to play for years without encountering it or deciding whether it's the kind of thing you want in your play. Adding torture to a game that never had it is noteworthy and, for some players, shocking

Thanks, Jenjen! Fixing now.

No one is advocating free access to child porn.

However, Cleanfeeds doesn't prevent people who are looking for child porn to gain access to it (the cops who specialise in child porn will tell you that trading takes place on private, closed P2P networks, often hardened with crypto -- Cleanfeeds doesn't and can't prevent this).

So that leaves the use-case for Cleanfeeds being "preventing people from accidentally seeing child porn." I believe that this is generally a non-problem. I'm a pretty wide-ranging web-user and I've *never* accidentally had child porn come up in a web-browser (the same is not true of email -- I've gotten many graphic child-porn images in spam, but Cleanfeeds does nothing about spam).

But even stipulating that this *is* a problem for some people, Cleanfeeds won't be effective at combatting it because the blacklist will necessarily omit some child porn (no one is pretending that Cleanfeeds can evaluate every page on the net), and will necessarily include some material that *isn't* child porn (like Wikipedia pages) because the people who run the list are not accountable and will have definitions of "child porn" that don't jibe with the law or with individual judgments.

What I believe is that Cleanfeeds should operate like HM Customs. If you try to import something questionable into the UK (say, a copy of Alan Moore's brilliant LOST GIRLS, which explores the subject of pubescent sexuality with art and sensitivity), then HM Customs may try to stop the book from entering the country.

When they do, they will notify both the importer and the exporter of their decision. It will be made public. If anyone objects, they can appeal the decision, also in public.

This is the rule of law. This is transparency. This is due process. This works.

This is not how Cleanfeeds works.

Cleanfeeds uses secret criteria to assemble secret blacklists of pages that it wishes to block. If you try to "import" a blocked page, you aren't told that it's blocked; you're returned a cryptic HTTP error-code. There's no notice to the "exporter" or the "importer" that the page is on the list. The list is not disclosed to the public.

The failure of security through obscurity is axiomatic to every field of information security -- except Cleanfeeds, which relies on secrecy and obscurity to prevent the importation of child porn.

Letting a secret group of people decide what you can and can't read according to secret criteria is not a good basis for creating a free society. And it doesn't stop child porn, either.

Ah yes, the shocking ignorance of the experts at "www.periodpiano.com" who catalogue and classify antique pianos. Clearly, they need Flashdavy on staff.

Calling someone a pedagogue (sic) is not a rebuttal.

I've been ordered to start carrying a mandatory RFID-based biometric card because I'm an immigrant. They've suspended habeas corpus. They've given police power to stop law-abiding citizens from taking photos in public. They've banned public protest at Westminster. They're attempting to create a law that forces all of us to show papers. They've allowed local authorities to use anti-terrorism powers to hunt people who put out their bins at the wrong time. Tell me again why Labour is a party that's anything less than "deplorable"?

Thanks for all the conversions -- but we really need to preserve the italics!

That was SO AWESOME. I want Jack Black to play me in the movie of my life. Or Doogie Howser.

That's exactly it, Zippy! A kind of exuberant, extravagant crazy that's totally lovable.

Ralsina! That's fantastic, but it's stripped out all the italics!

MrJosh: "Take a sewing machine and make it run on steam"

You're talking out of your ass. Steampunk != runs on steam. Steampunk = evocative of the kind of alternate history featured in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, the book for which the term "steampunk" was coined.

D'oh! So I did! Fixing now -- thanks, Daemon!

They're fantastic.

No, it's about how to help your child acquire the learned skill of sleeping through the night, so that she (and we) are more awake, happy and alert during the day as we play together.

Click on the BB post link, Jason! There's a whole article about it!

Soundchaser, I've lived in London since 2003 (except for academic 2006/7, which I spent in LA on a Fulbright at USC). Before that, San Francisco, Toronto, Costa Rica, Toronto.

I agree about the Spadina tunnel! You know, I think that technically that should really be classed as two separate stations joined by an underground slidewalk. It's kind of a cheat that the TTC pretends it's all one.

Yup, my office -- where I go every morning, sit down, and write! Some pics here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/tags/office

I used to work out of the spare bedroom at the flat, but now that's the baby's room. It's nice to have a place to meet people that isn't home, too -- plus, I got to turn it into a total lair that has all my favorite junk in it, as well as a reading chair and a napping sofa (which, sadly, I almost never get to use).

It's a good 20 minutes from home, 30 minutes most mornings as I usually drop off the baby at day-care on the way.

I won't be in Montreal this year, but I'm definitely planning on attending the WorldCon next summer, so I'll see you there I hope!

HOLY FUCKING FUCK -- those are so totally absolutely STONKINGLY brilliant! ZOMG.

Well, the *entire paper* is about why this isn't the hard question that Keeper makes it out to be -- you make not agree with them, but to say, "Wow what an idiot. Attaching a fiber to your house doesn't do a hell of a lot" is to clearly indicate that you didn't read the paper, particularly the section labelled "Interconnection, and Who Provides Services?"

Keeper, RTFA. I mean, seriously, RTFA. What a stupid thing to write.

Witczak: Tim Wu is one of the most respected telecoms scholars in America. I suspect that again, if you RTFA, you'll find that this has not escaped his attention.

Crimeshark: google "olpc mesh zeroconf"

Some people see a depression leading inevitably to Weimar Germany, the burning of the Riechstag, and the slide into barbarism. Some people see it leading to a New Deal, solidarity, and a generous and giving spirit that fills up the nation.

Woah, I never made the connection! He's THAT Charlie Shopsin? So cool!

Hmm -- works for me! Try again?

I'm pretty sure they aren't bootlegs, as I bought them inside a Disney themepark (and for a lot less than $50! They were about $12 each).

Sorry about that -- I've nuked the video.

For the record, Poesy not only thrived on four feeds a day after four months, but she's the biggest, roundest baby at the nursery -- a chubby, bright-eyed cutesicle who weighs in at a good 12kg at the 8 month mark.

This book is absolutely aimed at breastfed babies -- Poesy is breastfed.

@5: Which blog have you been reading? The one I've been writing is totally and absolutely opposed to the Republican party, its agenda and its legacy over the past eight years, a grotesque perversion of constitutional liberties and science. Obama disappointed me by supporting GWB's illegal wiretapping program, but it is GWB and the GOP's wiretapping program, after all. McCain is more of the same, and Palin is a nightmarish totalitarian in half-specs who believes in censorship, opposes medical freedom, and believes in the primacy of greed over science and the environment.

Sorry about that! Fixed now... Accidentally set the image-size to 5420 wide instead of 420! All fixed now.

Anonymous sources do *not* abound at press-conferences! Legitimate organizations and legitimate press conferences do not open with a guy in a ski-mask stepping up to the podium and saying, through a voice-shifter, "Hi there folks. I'm Mr X, here to speak to you tonight on behalf of Procter and Gamble. My identity is secret, but that's OK, you can just attribute this all to P&G."

@5: Why does it matter? Because it is unheard-of. There is no such thing as an unattributed, on-the-record remark to the press. "Unattributed" is the opposite of "on-the-record." "Unattributed, on-the-record" remarks are the kind of thing you'd expect in Pravda's reporting on the Politburo, not in a free press's reporting on a corporate lobby group.

This matters because it leaves holes in the historical record that the press constructs. For example, today the MPAA often complains that it is unfairly damned as a technophobic organization, saying that it has always embraced technology. However, we know this isn't true because we have the attributed, on-the-record remarks of its long-time chief spokesman and president, Jack Valenti (who said things like "the VCR is to the American film industry as the Boston Strangler is to a woman home alone.")

But in two or 20 years, when the MPAA says, "We have always supported interoperability in DRM" (perhaps as part of a long-overdue anti-trust investigation into unfair DRM-based tying), we will not be able to say, "Well, MPAA lawyer XXXX said, in 2008, that interoperable DRM products are 'totally illegal.'" The MPAA may say that no lawyer working for them ever said that. They may say it wasn't a lawyer, it was a PR person. Or another reporter. Or that it didn't happen at all.

What's more, because the identities of these lawyers are hidden we won't know if, for example, they are now serving as staffers to the Senators running the investigation, or if they are presently running the MPAA itself, or if they were just arrested for screwing the polar bears at the Brooklyn Zoo.

In short, by failing to answer the first W of the 5 Ws -- "Who" -- the press is failing in one of its most vital tasks: creating a complete record of the parties and their actions in a public policy dispute.

Click through, STWF, goes a lot farther than that. Randall trained to be a physicist IIRC -- so when he says, "Map of the observable universe," he means it.

If you don't like it, go home? What about "First they came for the immigrants, and I said nothing, because I was not an immigrant?"

Clif Marsiglio, it's nice of you to tell me what I should be doing with my time (this year, I moved continents, got married three times on two continents [to the same woman], had a baby, wrote two books, published three books, went on two book tours -- when in that time do you think I should have gone off and gotten an undergrad degree?).

But you should be reading more carefully. This rule change came in on 24 hours' notice. Which degree-granting institution will give a degree on a day's notice?

H4wt.

Yeah -- I dropped a quote, but it's better now!

Neener, you're being very creative in your reading of what I wrote above -- and you've totally failed to characterized Netalel's thesis.

Netanel devotes hundreds of pages to systematically demolishing the idea that " DIY is and always is, better than using someone else's work."

For example, would Shakespeare have written better plays if he couldn't rip off his contemporaries, the Greeks, and anything else he could lay hands on? Would WIND DONE GONE have been better if she hadn't explicitly remixed GONE WITH THE WIND? Would Tolkien have been better if he hadn't had Norse, Finnish, Icelandic, etc mythology to rip off? Would Lotus 1-2-3 have been better if Mitch Kapor hadn't copied the designs of Visicalc? Would Excel have been better if it hadn't copied Lotus 1-2-3? Would Mickey Mouse have been better if Walt hadn't ripped off Buster Keaton?

If you really believe that "original" expression is universally desirable -- or even really possible -- I urge you to read Netanel's book.

What's more, the legitimization of unauthorized distribution is at the center of Netanel's proposals to legalize file-sharing. After all, the legalization of unauthorized (but compensated) use in radio and recording are what broke the previous deadlocks.

The idea that artists should demand technically impossible locks on distribution of their works (as opposed to compensation through blanket licenses) is utterly without historical precedent. It's a dumb, dot-com-era business-model that has proved a total, absolute failure.

Every effort to create an authorization block in online distribution of digital works has not only failed to enrich artists (how much money from RIAA lawsuits has found its way into artists' pockets? Precisely $0.00) it's also materially failed to stop or even slow file-sharing, and shows no sign of ever doing either.

The pre-Internet-era copyright law you celebrate above was FULL of legalization of mass-scale, commercial unauthorized use of copyrighted works for cable operators, radio stations, recording artists and jukebox and live performance.

Mass-scale, commercial unauthorized use is the status quo and has been since 1909, when phonograms were legalized.

The single biggest shift in copyright law since 1976 has been the notion that there's somehow something wrong with mass-scale, commercial unauthorized use.

Walstib@8: Needs citation! What, specifically, are you referring to when you say, "Ray and his clients are aren't quite the innocents they are being made out to be?" Easy to smear peoples' character when you don't bother to specifically note what you object to -- and given that you created this account just to discredit these people, it would be nice to know more about what makes you believe that they aren't credible.

Thanks, Jacobreed!

JT608 -- thanks for the correction!

Poesy gets up plenty early, don't you worry!

Schwal, stop reading the coffee stuff. It's irritating to hear that you are displeased by it. I love coffee and really enjoy writing and reading about it, and knowing that I cause you displeasure breaks my heart. My life would be so much simpler and more pleasant if only you would learn to use your spacebar.

Or to visit another website.

Sheesh.

Yes, Absent, you've astutely discovered that things that are personally important to the authors of weblogs come up often. It's a shocking revelation, I'm sure.

You're right, I misread.

Fee, you're dead wrong. Kids aren't called names because they have funny names: they're called names because they are unpopular. I went to school with a kid whose surname, "Cox," has bottomless potential for comedy. No one made fun of it. He was popular. Another person at school had "Greene" for a surname, and she was viciously teased, called "Greener," (a Canadian slang term for mucousy spittle) and the kids would make horking noises when she walked by. Needless to say, she was also not very popular.

Your name could be "Bumblefuck Shitheel" and if you were confident, smart and good-looking, the kids would call you "Big B!" You could be called "Rob Jones" and if you were weird-looking, socially awkward, or otherwise uncharismatic, the kids would call you "Asshole Rob."

The idea that funny names are the source of real teasing (as opposed to a little wordplay) comes from John Hughes movies, not reality. Real teasing -- the teasing that hurts -- reflects social divisions that are not based on names, but rather on awkwardnesses in personality or appearance.

I've got a rubber stamp that a fan made for me that reads, "To ____________, my one, my only, my sole inspiration without whom this could never have been written. Your pal, Cory." It's for signing books -- I don't use it often, but everyone I've used it with has really liked it!

It's a free download -- just follow the link!

Neener@3: I can't disagree more. She tells you why she breast feeds and uses cloth diapers, and so forth -- and then tells you to make up your own mind (indeed, on the subject of cloth diapers, she makes the very compelling quote that of all the things we could green, disposable diapers are something that improves the quality of life for millions of women, and washable ones would undermine that quality of life, and it says something about our social values that the pressure to give up your disposables is so much firmer than the pressure to give up, say, your car).

Zour@4: Did you read the book? Or did you call it "shit" without having read a single solitary word of it? I think I can hear your knee jerking. It's an ugly sound.

Chris S@4 -- the innermost band is static (one dot over/under), the other two spin.

The point about micros isn't the transaction cost, it's the relationship it establishes with the writer. If you give me $5 and thereafter expect to have a say in what I write forever, it's not worth it to me. When you buy stuff from my publisher, if you don't like it, your beef is with them (for not accurately conveying what you're buying), not with me. I wrote the right book -- you bought the wrong book.

When MeFi introduced a $5 signup fee, Matt was bombarded with jackasses who demanded that he settle flamewars, censor stories, etc, on the basis that "I didn't pay $5 to read this crap!"

Here on Boing Boing, there's a bottomless pool of people who think that reading the site for free gives them the right to tell me which subjects I should cover ("Why don't you write more about the RNC?") and which ones I shouldn't ("Enough with the steampunk!"). I can only imagine the sense of totally buzz-killing, life-ruining entitlement that would arrogate to these people if they'd actually spent a dollar or two in addition to clicking on a link to load the page.

The money in creative endeavor stinks. The only reason to do it is because you love it. I'm convinced that taking small sums of money directly from millions of people would establish a miserable, awful career-path.

Read the rest of the paper -- they show progressively increasing levels of selfishness as economists go from undergrads to grads to profs.

I mark deceased on all my credit-card solicitations and put them back inthe mail, too!

Thanks, Kieran!

All the more ambitious extensions to this idea seem like good ideas to me, except that they require a lot of meetings, agreements, and discussions between competitors, likely requiring board-level approval, etc. Likely ETA: 2015.

By contrast, a cabal of three people (webmaster, art director, head of PR) at any given publisher could make this happen tomorrow.

@7: You think that there are publishers who negotiate for art to be used in their covers whose license doesn't include the right to distribute the art for promotional purposes? I find this incredible to the point of not actually believing that it is true.

That would be like commissioning a cereal box and leaving out the right to give it to grocery stores to stick on coupons promoting the cereal.

Do you know of any such books?

I'm not American. I call them Legos because Lego is a neologism and there's no reason in the world not to pluralize it by adding an "s" to the end. Indeed, millions of people do so. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Kiernan@1: the pat-down you experienced is bad enough, true, but it was randomly assigned. It wasn't discriminatory. The woman in this article is being punished for having large breasts. Imagine if the fact that you had brown hair or bushy eyebrows meant that EVERY TIME YOU FLEW you pulled the four SSSS ticket.

Yeah, I had a momentary brainfart there -- it was only up for about 30 secs with the "Stranglers" label before I had my moment of satori and corrected it.

The point being that youth knife crime has no connection to GIGANTIC theatrical Klingon knives. Little asbos aren't sneaking around with 6-foot-long Trekkie LARP props under their hoodies.

That pun stank on ice.

Thanks, Slappy!

Regarding the Ford memoir: fair use is "fact intensive," as you've just demonstrated. The highly specific facts of each case mean that courts have to interpret them all and precedents are hard to apply speculatively to new cases. The Nation's Ford memoir quotation was, the SCOTUS found, substitutive for the original. Do you think the same court would find that quoting a line from a song's lyrics in a novel was substitutive for the recording?

I took a stack -- 20+ -- books to Wales last weekend and read through most of them and queued up reviews going through to mid-Sept, one a day for every weekday.

Thanks, Jelf!

Smallpox vaccination, sanitation and agriculture are trivial?

I'd love to see you get by without 'em.

"Technology doesn't solve problems."

I'm sure there are several hundreds of million people who weren't afflicted with smallpox or polio this century who'd disagree rather vehemently with you.

Also: how do you propose to feed 8 billion people (or even 800 million) without agriculture (itself a technology)?

How's that purified water in your tap working out for you?

Do you just shit in the garden? Sanitation "not fixing your problems?"

I'm incredibly impressed with 5t311a's presentation here. Personalized self-expression is always in order and she makes it look easy and fun. There's nothing more subversive than a young person with something on her mind.

Quoting a song lyric at the head of every chapter is "heavy reliance?" Not in the books I read. It's common as hell.

Funny that a company that took its name from a Vonnegut quote (without permission, I'm sure) would be so stingy in letting a writer use these quotes.

Of course, the quotes are almost certainly fair use (though Harper will still insist on permission in order to satisfy their insurer and corporate counsel)

Simon@4: Medeco tried something like this and were pwned by a paper-clip: "last year at DefCon, Tobias and his colleagues showed how they could simply insert the end of a bent paper clip into a Medeco high-security lock to push back the slider, rendering the slider ineffective as a security layer."

There's a pretty wide gap between continental droit moral and "attribution" as thought of by the CC licenses.

What makes you think it's a trademark violation? Hint: trademark isn't the right to stop others from using your mark in commerce; it is the right to sue people for *deceptively* using your mark in commerce.

Jeff, the largest circ sf magazine I know of right now is Escape Pod, which is 100% CC licensed. They do not lack for submissions.

I have, in fact, written about and reported on the outcomes of the experiment. See my Locus columns and various links here.

Jeff, that post was so packed with straw men, ridiculous assumptions, accusatory implications factual inaccuracies and just random theorizing that it probably constitutes a bigger work of sf than mine.

Tor is a high-paying, high-prestige, high-circulation market that pays more than anyone else in the field, more or less.

Regarding whether others are "expected" to release CC -- I'vewritten a bunch about why this is a good idea, but I've never said writers have a duty to do so, just that they'd be crazy not to.

And the comparison of CC to the dotcom bubble is just bizarre.

And "in perpetuity"? In a pig's eye. Copyright expires. Good thing for writers that it does, or a) most of our work would vanish after a short period because no one could figure out whom to license it from (google "orphan works" -- today more than 98% of works in copyright qualify) and b) because it would prohibit adaptations of public domain works, such as Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan.

Honestly, what are you thinking?

Tor.com is one of the best-paying science fiction markets in the field.

You're thinking of trademark violations, not copyright violations, and since there's no "naive consumer" who would be "materially misled as to the origin of goods or services" in this case, it isn't one.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/09/alice-in-sunderland-.html

Tarmle -- all good questions that have a wide variety of real-world answers in the US and around the world. I'm not going to answer them (partly because William Fisher of Harvard has written many books and papers that enumerate them in great detail), but rather, I'll note that as a set of questions, these are infinitely easier to answer than "How do we make the Internet worse at copying music?" and "How do we convince people to like DRM?"

#3: They're still one-of-a-kind pieces of folk art.

So you think that when a grad student who is studying terrorism believes he needs the document, and when his advisor concurs, and when the US government's top anti-terror squad makes the document available because it is key to understanding terrorism -- that NONE of this makes a ban on the document seem stupid, misplaced and ridiculous?

I want to move there.

Billybob, here in London where there are about 14 CCTVs per red blood cell per person, Scotland Yard has found that CCTVs were useful in solving crimes where they were present less than *three percent* of the time. San Francisco's exhaustive, longitudinal study of CCTV efficacy concluded that, at best, CCTVs move crime 100m down the pavement.

Meanwhile, every dollar spent on CCTV is a dollar we don't spend on preventative (as opposed to forensic) policing. My friend was murdered on his doorstep in London because the guard that would have normally sat at the tube-exit near his place had been replaced by a CCTV camera, which couldn't call the police when three thugs followed him up the stairs and out the exit.

And every CCTV we place is a CCTV that can be hijacked by bad people to do bad things -- hardly a day goes by without a report of some Peeping Tom using a CCTV to spy on some poor woman in her bathroom, or to follow their neighbors around town.

And CCTV footage is every bit as subject to pressure as human testimony -- so much CCTV footage is "lost" or "unavailable" that people who are pressured to keep damning CCTV evidence out of the public eye could certainly plausibly say that the camera wasn't working that day.

Fynngrrl, I agree -- I cropped the designs where I did because the whole picture was unfortunately "laddish." As the father of an infant daughter whom I hope will grow up with a strong interest in science, I would have really liked some depictions of women in labcoats, not just bikinis.

What's more, you've mistaken dystopias-that-Iain-Banks-depicts for society-Iain-Banks-would-endorse. It's either shocking or risible, but either way, it sure makes you look like a wiener.

Dr Mercury, you've mistaken "Cory" for "Iain Banks." I suppose it's an easy mistake to make, provided you're a straw-man-proffering flame-artist posting in the worst of faith.

Or if you're just an idiot.

Which one is it? It's hard to tell from your posting history, which runs about 50-50.

The problem is that if you follow that logic far enough, we never get rid of ANYTHING on the grounds that it might be a classic someday. Today's giant toxic pile of tires is tomorrow's priceless potsherds.

"Classic" usually denotes something that was produced in great quantity, then had most of the stock disappear. It's not a classic until that second part occurs -- so if everyone mylar-bags their comics and keeps them in an acid-free environment, they'll never be considered classics. For "classicification" to occur, the majority of copies need to be destroyed.

I have indeed bought some jeans there! Two pairs. THe first was fantastic. The second time, though, I wanted to buy something kind of baggy fitting and the guy there talked me into spending a fortune on really tight ones that just got tighter after washing (not looser, as promised) and are now unwearable. It really turned me off the store, since I was wearing a pair of jeans I'd bought in Tokyo at the time and REALLY wanted another pair that fit like them, and the pair he talked me into were totally different.

@11: Cory's assertion, as I understand it, is that fighting bad behavior online (spam, copyright piracy) is essentially doomed, because it just degenerates into an arms race in which progressively-fiercer countermeasures increasingly hurt the innocent while doing little to resolve the problem.

No, that's not the assertion. It's that these particular tactics have been shown ineffective in the field in a battle that's theoretically much easier to win (in the spamwar, practically everyone is on your side, in the copyfight, no one wants their communications "filtered"). Repeating those mistakes is stupid and wasteful and damaging to the body politic.

Just because hitting yourself in the head with a hammer doesn't stop copyright infringement doesn't mean you can't stop copyright infringement.

History is *filled* with exactly this kind of copyfight: the fights over sheet music, phonograms, radios, jukeboxes, cable, and VCRs all recapitulate the present copyfight, and they all had approximately the same solution:

* Don't worry about hand-to-hand, small-scale stuff

* Offer a legit deal at a price that most people opt into

* Take part of the profites from the above and enforce against the most egregious offenders

An enormous number of academics, economists, musicians, music execs, ISP execs, consumer rights advocates and other interested parties have proposed variations on the theme of "Offer people who download with P2P a cheap license that legitimizes the practice. Use 21st century auditing technology to divide up the money in a transparent and fair way. Argue about the details of 'fair' and 'transparent' and 'cheap' but stop arguing about whether you're going to stop copying on the Internet. You're not. You're just going to convince people that there is no peace to be had with the record industry and that will make the job of selling licenses in the future much, much harder."

Substitute "radio" for "P2P" and you have the blanket performance license for broadcasters that is in place in every radio station in the country. Substitute "record" for "P2P" and you have the mechanical compulsory license that legalized every single cover you've ever heard on a CD.

This isn't moon-talk. It isn't even complicated. It's the *industry standard*.

@9: I was told the story of the PII as well, but I asked if that was because the machine was optimized for massively parallel codebreaking while a PII is optimized for procedural linear execution and the guy sheepishly confirmed it. IOW: in every domain EXCEPT massively parallel problem-solving, Colossus is slow as paint, but it is very good at that one domain.

@67: Xeni speaks for me -- and I'm off for the weekend to celebrate my birthday. AFAIC, if one of my co-eds wants to delete some posts they made, it's jake with me.

You guys are the best.

Thanks, Antinous!

@4: Sure -- but he's gone from "best choice" to "least worst choice" with one vote.

Re DHS saying it's only 400K plus aliases: yes, but those aliases are *distinct names*. It doesn't matter how many "real terrorists" the list refers to, it matters how wide a net the list casts, because this is what ends up catching non-terrorists.

IOW: if the list has "Robert Johnson," "Bob Johns," and "John Robertson" as aliases for a single individual, they *should* be counted as three names, because that's three different strings that will trigger false positives against honest people who share these common names.

Re "You can be removed from the list." Mandela isn't off the list, he just has a special permanent dispensation to travel despite being on the list.

Yes indeedy!

I mean, gosh, there's a backlash? You mean, random sourpusses on the Internet have decided that something I like isn't good?

Well, I'll be sure to stop enjoying it now.

Thanks for clueing me in.

Chaircrusher, I promise you that if you slap some brass fittings onto anything, I won't mention it here.

Happy now?

Also: just bought one

Fixed!

I was convinced by an email from William Gibson, "It's an awesome piece of work. Probably the single best Steampunk objet
I've seen.

And it made me notice, suddenly, that Steampunk is more directly
'Gibsonian' to the extent that it consists of *collaged gomi*

This mask is, in itself, a very fine example of collage." (Quoted with permission)

Fixed!

Reed, send me an email -- I'll GPG sign a copy of the collection CBZ and email it back to you!

Srsly, though -- signing thousands of collections nearly killed me. If I'd signed the singles too, I'd be crippled by now.

"The point of Universal v Sony is that the end-user can legally time-shift something for their own use. "

No, the point of Betamax is that judges can create new exceptions to copyright that dramatically fail one or more of the four factors.

The dicta in Betamax show that the judges believed that Betamax doesn't have jurisprudence on its side. They were making up new law because common sense made them believe that this was a fair use.

Regarding retranmission: the majority (the vast majority) of successful fair use defenses have involved public distribution/transmission of copyrighted materials (because private use is invisible to rightsholders). Indeed, most scholars at the time of Betamax believed that Sony would lose because a VHS recording *failed to transform* the copyrighted work -- that is, failed to do the thing that made fair use defenses successful in past.

To be more specific -- Reaper2k implies that failure to qualify for any of the four factors (specifically, factor 1) disqualifies the use from being considered fair.

Betamax (and other cases, including, for example, 2LiveCrew) show that courts must weigh all the factors, and a failure to meet one isn't a failure to qualify as FU. Arguably, Betamax shows that even if NONE of the factors are met, judges can determine that a use is fair.

Mujadaddy: This:

"Such circumstances are LIMITED to criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research."

Is absolutely wrong. If it were right, then time-shifting would only be legal for critics, commenters, scholars, researchers, teachers. etc.

Reaper2k, you're just plain wrong.

Please see, for example, the dicta in Universal v Sony (commonly called the Betamax trial), which is arguably the most famous fair use case in the history of US jurisprudence.

Clif, the Canadian DMCA forbids removing DRM from works that are in the public domain, too -- it's the DRM that's protected, not the copyrights.

RTFA, please, especially if you're going to call me an idiot.

You know, every time you send a message to this blog, you consume a discretionary energy resource, generate carbon, etc.

It's the height of hypocrisy to assert YOUR right to expend discretionary energy resources, but to demand that everyone else limit themselves to only the barest survival rations.

Honestly, if you set out to discredit the idea of conservation, you could not do a better job than @13 -- any sane person thinking about trying conservation confronted with this standard would conclude either a) the whole thing was cooked up by extremists who expect you to keep such a close eye on your water use you'll be drinking out of a thimble or b) the situation is so dire that the only way out is to live like a miserable hermit, so might as well live up the planet's last few years while they last.

Zombie: You seem to be suggesting that children should never, ever be given water to play with in quantities of more than 250ml. Do you think children should be allowed to frolic under a sprinkler? How about a kiddee pool? Squirt guns? Water balloons?

What about science projects? I learned about water surface tension from my father by experimenting with different sized vessels and an eyedropper on the kitchen table. Maybe he should have just sat me down in the living room and read aloud to me from the encyclopedia?

And how about all the child development specialists, the Piagists and so on, who tell us that cognitively, water-play is an important part of human (and, indeed, all primate) learning?

Should I stop giving my daughter baths and just wipe her down with a moist towelette? What about those times she fails to finish the contents of her sippee cup (which holds 500 ml, more than double the amount you are comfortable allowing children to use). Should that water be boiled and re-used the next day, or am I allowed to pour it down the sink? Should I install a cistern for unused sippee cup water to use on watering the houseplants? Or maybe I should just get rid of the houseplants (who drink about a litre a day -- quadruple your recommended allowance for children).

Which houseplants are we allowed to have? Which activities are our children allowed to have? Will you be coming by our houses with a green armband to supervise our water use? Am I allowed to dilute the baby's rice cereal 5-1, or should I stick to 3-1 and deal with the constipation and vomiting using dry-wipes?

Also:

Zombie@6: "Delightfully" -- you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

MHY@4: Oh yes, by all means, let's given children untreated water to play in, because the carbon footprint of treating a case of the squirts that has your kid flushing the toilet forty times a day for a week while you try to rehydrate her with electrolyte salts is so much better for the planet than a bucket of clean, treated water to play with on a hot day.

Are you seriously suggesting that we solve the planet's water problems by forcing children to play exclusively in contaminated water?

Jesus Christ, do you live in a cave somewhere? The amount of water used by a kid to paint the house would be a fraction of the water necessary to fill a kiddee pool, run a sprinkler, or have an epic Super Soaker battle. If your version of green involves sitting very still, trying not to consume any resources, you might as well blow up the planet now, because apart from you and a couple of hairshirt-wearing ascetics, no one in the world is going to adopt your program.

Artfreakydude, you've rather missed the point.

Well, Clif, rather than speculating on how poor the audiobooks must be, you could actually just, you know, *download the free samples* (which are excellent, and linked off this post) and discover that you're wrong about this.

JJasper -- no, it's NOT up to the publishers to choose DRM or no DRM, at least not with Audible. Audible's position is that EVEN IF A PUBLISHER REQUESTS NO DRM, they still insist on it. This is about Audible forcing publishers and writers to be locked into their DRM platform, and has nothing to do with publisher choice. My audiobook publisher, Random House (the largest publishing conglomerate in the world), asked Audible to sell my latest book without DRM, and they refused.

I see your problem now. You think that because I link to something on Boing Boing, I agree with every single possible word, and every interpretation of every single possible word, in it.

I don't.

There, that was easy.

I asked Ken, our sysadmin about this, and he told me that doing so would require gigantic amounts of hardware to get this running.

Brit, my banking bits are no easier to DRM than any other bits. That's precisely WHY I won't be sending you my bits. I'll be keeping them a secret, right here.

The thing about DRM is that it presumes that I can send you some bits and then keep you from knowing what they are and copying them. This isn't a very plausible thing to believe.

Icky2000, did you actually read the relevant piece of the MPAA's brief? I quoted the relevant sections above. The reason Wired (and I) characterized the MPAA as saying they don't want to have to prove wrongdoing is because they said, "WE DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO PROVE WRONGDOING." That's not a strawman, it's a quotation.

Here's that quote again:

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

"It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement," van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.

Lulu@3: By this reasoning, anyone who sends mail in an envelope -- rather than by world-readable postcard -- is also a presumptive criminal. Anyone who wears clothes -- rather than walking around naked -- is a presumptive concealed-weapons-carrier. And anyone who shreds their confidential documents -- rather than filing them carefully -- is a presumptive criminal.

I'm sorry, it's just not the case that copy shops in the US take a "how would the photographer or authorities find out about it to stop it, and would they waste manpower on enforcing it" attitude. Since K-Mart paid out a high-six-figure settlement to photographers for reproducing portraits, no major copy shop has been willing to take that risk. It's virtually impossible to get your portrait shots enlarged, retouched or reproduced at a Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Kinko's, etc. What's more, these shops have been known to turn away such requests for photos that are *not* studio portraits because they "look too professional" and *might* be studio portraits.

Well, here's a real, and frequent example from the US, where the copyright vests with portrait photographers, not commissioners:

Your old aunt dies. You got to Kinko's to have her wedding photo enlarged to sit next to the casket. Kinko's says, "I'm sorry, but absent any hard proof that the photographer vested copyright in your aunt, I need to assume that this copyright belongs to him, so you can't have this photo (or any other portrait photos) for the funeral." The only way to get around it is to track down the descendants of a photographer who took your aunt's wedding photos fifty years ago and ask them for a license (and pay whatever they charge).

There's nothing about the existing system that precludes commissioners and photographers negotiating for different rights -- the only thing Canadian law says today is that, absent any other agreement, the photographer is assumed to have assigned copyright in photos to his clients.

Skep@5: 10,000 pounds is pretty close to 1,000,000 US dollars these days.

mgabrysSF@4: "I didn't see mr sun mentioned or the ice receding on mars."

That's because you didn't look.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/222712/69

Church: yes, I read it. I don't recall that the book computed a single thing (except for the position of its atoms in space -- something that this jewelry is also doing). Are you suggesting that the novel was a Von Neumann machine?

Moon: No, steampunk doesn't have steam in it. Steampunk is stuff that looks like it comes from the sort of alternate reality described in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, in which computation (and a host of modern technologies engendered by it) arrive a century earlier. It has nothing to do with steam per se (nor with "punk" -- the word is a play on "cyberpunk," which DID have something to do with punk, to whit its nihilist bent, and the "punk" in "steampunk" is there because the first steampunk novel was written by two prominent cyberpunks.)

@2: And the function performed by THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (the book for which the term "steampunk" was coined) was what, exactly?

What a great note, Jordan!

You think that Man with the Hex sounds like "Someone Done Hoodoed the Hoodoo Man?" Apart from having similar titles, what do they have in common?

Holy fuck is this AWESOME.

So, Polomoche, which Louis Jordan song do you think sounds like "Man with the Hex" or "Caviar and Chitlins?"

Louis Jordan's delivery, composition and arrangement style is pretty much totally, absolutely different from the Atomic Fireballs'. Even songs like "Cheese and Cornbread" and other uptempo numbers feature much more choral vocals, a smoother delivery, a generally slower-paced arrangement, and a lot more comedy that the Fireballs.

Indeed, there's practically *no* comedy in the Fireballs' songs, which makes any comparison to either Calloway (who had a similar energy but again, an utterly different delivery from the Fireballs) or Jordan thin indeed.

Just because they're in the same genre and Jordan got there first doesn't make him "the real thing" -- with the implication that this is the false or denatured thing.

Have you heard any of the Atomic Fireballs' catalog?

Lo@14 -- look forward to seeing the files! No, there aren't any with the CC baked in, though you're welcome to make one!

Polomoche@8: I can sing about 200 Louis Jordan songs from memory and there's not a one of them particularly like the Atomic Fireballs. There's no universe in which Jordan is remotely close to "jump blues."

Jed@10: "It might be nice if this thing were broken up into several, rather than one CBR."

Luckily it's CC licensed -- send me the URL once you've uploaded it and I'll add it to the post!

Ifireball -- correct, sir. The filesize really ratcheted up when I ripped the PDF into PNGs. I imagine that a lot of that was rasterizing the type-pages, the rest just inefficiencies in the process. I'd love for someone to produce a smaller k-size version that retained the resolution and quality.

Hey, Daveybot! I've done talks in Edinburgh and Glasgow since I moved to the UK, and I'm sure I'll do more before long!

Absent@2: You should compile a list of the metatags!

Eustace@8: Seen 'em? I OWN ONE!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2556601928/

Well spotted, Shard -- image replaced!

You guys have an extremely exotic definition of fashion that somehow excludes "Clothing you wear to look distinctive, establish group identity, and please your aesthetic sense."

26,27: The file is ripping now and doing VERY well! Thanks everyone!

Cory

Kiergsmith@14: this seems super-promising, but the output is all v. low-rez -- only 477px wide! I'm shooting for 4,000!

Takuan, if you build that, I will not only buy one, I'll blog it!

David@7: indeed it did take two of us! Tanya was F/T, we were both P/T to start!

Cory

Sam, have a look at the forth amendment and tell me how this could possibly be constitutional -- for bonus points, read p on "general warrants" and "writs of assistance" and how they led to the forth amendment.

Click through -- the main mechanism sits under the desk.

Clif Marsiglio, I've never once argued for the abolition of copyright.

I haven't "copied and pasted" anything about the my critique of the US copyright regime into the debate about the Harper bill.

You really don't know much about Canadian copyright -- on that score, we agree. There's no such thing as "fair use" in Canada (the thing you're thinking of is "fair dealing" and it's a radically different, though related, concept).

What's more, "private copying right" is not "fair use" or "fair dealing."

Look, you're just making stuff up here. You don't know anything about Canadian copyright law -- and you haven't paid close enough attention to the earlier posts on this to have an intelligent opinion on it.

You just showed up to grind some kind of axe about "rule of law," and when you discovered that this had nothing to do with "rule of law" you made up some more stuff.

There's lots of online resources through which you could educate yourself about:

* Commonwealth copyright

* Trade agreements and copyright

* The WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996

* Fair dealing

* Private copying rights

What's more, it's pretty easy to find out what I favor for copyright reform (there's a very long list of dozens of essays I've written on the subject here: http://craphound.com/articles.php -- though you won't any in which I advocate for the abolition of copyright -- that also comes under the heading of "you're making stuff up").

It's also pretty easy to discover what the words "public domain" mean in this context, and how that differs from the various CC licenses I've used on my work (CC itself has lots of material on this subject).

The world's copyright systems are different. Knowing a little about US copyright law doesn't mean you know much about Canadian copyright law.

Copyright reformers have many nuances in their beliefs. Arguing (as I have) for limits on term and scope of copyright doesn't make me a copyright abolitionist.

Copyright itself is not an immutable "social contract" handed down on stone tablets by Victor Hugo in 1886. It is a dynamic system whose reforms have *always* come about because an older law made a new commonplace activity illegal (for example, the following practices and technologies were all illegal for years before copyright law was changed to accommodate them): making records, broadcasting records, cable TV, jukeboxes and VCRs).

Hand-wringing moralizing about how kids are "violating the social contract" totally misses the fact that the social contract was written just last week by a bunch of giant entertainment companies who want to extract rent from said kids.

What's that, Xyzzy? You want MORE STEAMPUNK? Well, if you insist! I'll be sure to post LOTS OF STEAMPUNK EVERY SINGLE DAY JUST FOR YOU!

STEAMPUNK!

STEAMPUNK!

STEAMPUNK!