b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Abominable TV Dialogue
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Folk Music Goes Indoors
Experts Not Always Right
Wednesday, February 5, 2003
Why Jack Can't Read
Jack Valenti fails to read the US Code for the single law that lies at the heart of his political maneuverings, yielding another fine tidbit for the Citizens Copyright Information Kit. It really is important to document these kinds of incidents, and to ensure they are as widely disseminated as possible. Public displays of ignorance are a powerful disincentive for people to take you seriously. And to have Mr. Valenti volunteer such an act is more effective than any ad hominem attack. A comprehensive collection of documented quotes from the venerable Mr. Valenti might be fun, and an excellent resource. Is anyone keeping such a thing?Thanks to Ernie for the helpful link to the Fair Use clause in the US Code. As someone once told me, "Lawyers aren't inherently bad, it's just the other guy's lawyer that's bad."
Fair Use is not the Law - noted legal scholar, and MPAA President, Jack Valenti, is now on the record stating that there is no such thing as fair use. Here's an excerpt from the Q&A interview with the Harvard Political Review, as reported by Jenny:
HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's 'fair use' rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
Now I see why he has taken such preposterous positions (i.e. VCRs will destroy the Entertainment Industry and should be declared illegal). Jack has somehow not been alerted to the presence of 17 U.S.C. 107. Could someone see that he reads it before his next trip to Washington?
[Ernie the Attorney]
Tuesday, February 4, 2003
Abominable TV Dialogue
I've seen my share of B movies, dreadful SciFi, and late-night television, but I've never seen anything as bad as the cliche-ridden, over-hyped, ping-pong dialogue on the WB's Gilmore Girls. Yech. It's a "favorite" at my house and I just have to leave the room after about the third witty exchange between a group of brainless adolescents. If you took Moon Unit Zappa, transplanted her to Boston for a decade, and then gave a 20-minute recording of her voice to Sir Mix-a-Lot you couldn't get any worse than the over-rehearsed, concatenated, dialogue on this show. That my 12-year-old daughter thinks this is good is a really frightening thing.Legal Services Anywhere Anytime
I just completed my first online legal transaction: met the attorney via his weblog, discussed my needs and ordered the work via e-mail, paid for the service via PayPal on my credit card -- Damn! This is really cool.Martin Schwimmer of Schwimmer Legal and The Trademark Blog is the most aggressively e-commerce ready attorney I know. He just completed the trademark search and opinion for my new business, and we conducted the entire thing without a phone call. We had a couple of brief IM sessions. When divorces get this easy things are really gonna change!
One tip for Marty -- don't leave that money in your PayPal account too long. They've been known to do stupid things with it.
How Much RSS?
Jim McGee likes full posts in his aggregator -- but I don't; Forcing what I want on (potential) readers of this weblog cramps their ability to use info in the way that's best for them -- which is bad; I want multiple RSS feeds:- one with headlines only
- one with some arbitrary character limit -- e.g. 500 chars
- one full feed
Why can't I get that in Radio without having to be a programmer?
Confessions of an RSS bigot.Yes, I'm an RSS bigot as well. And yes, I know that I could create my own feed using something like RSS Distiller as John Robb points out. But as my own support staff, I scarcely have time to stay current with the material that already comes into my news aggregator. the time to figure out how to parse a site's html and generate a reasonable feed generally isn't worth it. [...]
Agreed. It's still too damned hard to create useful RSS feeds with scrapers. Unless you know regex it's a really frustrating, hunt-and-peck experience.
[...] It's about managing my poor, limited, attention which needs all the help it can get. For my selfish purposes, the more material that flows into my news aggregator the better. And better still if I can get full posts instead of teasers. I've yet to find a blog post that read better in context than it did in my plain aggregator. [...] [McGee's Musings]
Weblogs and IM
Paolo makes a few points about the limits of IM, and a salient point about how IM can extend traditional voice contact and internal weblogs.
IM and BlogsDave started this very interesting thread on weblogs and IM.
I use both technologies a lot. I use IM to interact with most of the people I work with, to the point that even when I talk to them on the phone we usually keep an IM window open to exchange links or images while we talk. I also use weblogs both for public and internal publishing. [...]
What I would like to have is a tool to attach IM conversations to weblog posts, just like there are comments linked to each post today.
[...]
This would probably not be applicable to public weblogs, also if it happens all the times that people ping me because they find a link to my IM address on this page and it's usually quite interesting, but it would definitely be very useful to manage internal communications on our k-logs. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Folk Music Goes Indoors
Home concert givers better be wary -- the copyright police may be showing up at your door.I guess folk music is having some sort of resurgence -- I don't know much about it -- but there is a little coffee house in my exurban neighborhood that's been hosting live folk music for a few years. I've been told it's pretty good, if you like that sort of thing.
One thing I do know is that the little coffee house has been in a protracted legal battle with ASCAP -- the The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers -- over royalty fees. ASCAP and BMI run what can charitably be called legalized extortion rackets which operate on the same "voluntary" principles as the Teamsters Union.
Artists appearing at the coffee house play original folk music -- their own compositions -- and the coffee house plays only CDs it gets from the artists themselves. So there are no royalties owed to any Music industry extortion service. But that doesn't matter to ASCAP. As far as they're concerned, if you play music you must be infringing someone's copyright and for a flat fee they'll license you against all "piracy", passing the money along to an artist of their choice (after extracting their hard-earned service fee, of course.)
Just one more symptom of a terminally ill industry.
Private homes are nano-venues for e-folkies. Folk-music has found a renaissance is the most nano of micro-venues: people's living rooms, promoted by listservs.
Concert-goers bring the chips, dip and beer. A basket is set out for the suggested $10 to $12 donation for the musicians, and the living room, dining room and family room are filled with people wanting to hear folk music.With few venues willing to hire folk acts and few middle-class suburbanites willing to make the schlep downtown, search out parking and elbow other patrons to get the bartender's attention, folk house concerts are quietly spreading like wildfire with the help of e-mail and Internet advertising.
Monday, February 3, 2003
Experts Not Always Right
Today's Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) on the future of manned space flight quotes a number of "experts" -- not all of whom are right.
[...] "Any specific mission you can identify to do in space, you can design and build an unmanned space craft to do it more effectively, more economically and more safely," said Alex Roland, a professor of history at Duke University and for eight years a historian at NASA. Manned space flights are more about capturing the public's imagination than science, he said. "It's circus, it's just pure circus." [...] [WSJ Online]
By this philosophy we don't actually need doctors, history professors, or even steering wheels in cars. Let's just have machines do it all. It was a dumb thing to say.
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