This is an amusing copyright case. A court reporter in the City of Albuquerque insisted on getting paid for the use of his court transcript by a lawyer. This was upheld by a district court who ordered the lawyer to pay $4K to the reporter. The lawyer appealed and the lower court decision was overturned:
“In broad terms, [the court reporter's] fee claim rests on the tacit premise that court reporters in some legal sense own the content of the transcripts they prepare, such that they are entitled to remuneration whenever a copy of a transcript is made (even if they played no role in making the copy). To accept this premise would effectively give court reporters a “copyright” in a mere transcription of others’ statements, contrary to black letter copyright law. See 2 William F. Patry, Patry on Copyright, Ch. 4 Noncopyrightable Material, § 4.88 (Updated Sept. 2008) (court reporters are not “authors of what they transcribe and therefore cannot be copyright owners of the transcript of court proceedings”).”
Interesting, the court reporter had to write this down, most bloggers can just do “cut & paste” and they still think it’s sort of authored and certainly could be monetized. Even Moses knew better, he said “Erase me from Your Book” – I am just a transcriber. (via Ex©lusive Rights )
There is an interesting review of the new book about Alisa Rosenbaum AKA Ayn Rand by Timothy Sandefur – Anne C. Heller’s Ayn Rand And The World She Made.
“What Anne Heller recognizes, that few others have, is that Rand was a nineteenth century romantic novelist living in a twentieth century, post-war world; a world fixated on existentialism, abstract expressionism, anti-heroes, atonal music, psychoanalysis, relativism, pragmatism, protest and dogma. Rand provided compelling explanations for all of these phenomena, which stood opposite the world she spoke for and that originated the language in which she spoke. Rand’s idols were Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo. One need merely read The Idiot to see what Rand was doing in The Fountainhead ; one need merely read Hugo to see what she was doing in Atlas Shrugged. Indeed, compared to the often tedious and preachy Hugo, Ayn Rand was a master of self-restraint and subtlety.”
I have been asking myself if people were always that stubborn. Of course people refuse to learn from their parents. But recently I was trying to help a friend in selection of a major purchase. I was able to only tweak the decision. I am certain I could have saved this person hours, if not weeks of due diligence, but the person insisted on going through the motions and making an independent decision, that I am still convinced, was the wrong choice.
But there are influencers who have the spell on others. Often people have such a high esteem for these mentors that they accept every advice, especially the detrimental guidance. My question if this is a permanent condition or perhaps subject to the historical change and evolution. Mainly perhaps because we are exposed to so many pitches, the carpet bombing by commercials, so we become immunized and people refuse to believe of accept anything. Perhaps this is also the origin of uniquely American cult described by David Brooks in his last book, the obsession with knowing everything and reading everything about a particular narrow area of interest, learning to be an expert in pez dispensers, scotch, fly fishing, etc. Say reading every blog on earth about the Apple computer for example. So back to my question, is this stubbornness a new evolutionally cultural reaction or the result of having the information to feed the inner geek? I am not certain, but I am rather sure that the inoculation against listening to any advice is wasting years of human lives.
Globes quotes Leviev:
“I like to concentrate on the future. What has happened has happened. But our main mistake was the investments in the US.”
My take on Leviev’s American mistake:
- Invested with a splash at the top of the bubble purchasing height profile = most overpriced properties.
- Instead of partnering with professional developers, partnered with a hustler like himself Boymelgreen, partnership went sour almost immediately.
- People who operate in Israel, Eastern Europe and Russia, where projects are built by greasing the approval process, often can’t operate in USA, lacking municipal and political connections.
- Design and approval process in America is much more expensive and much more protracted compared to the European construction. Design and approval in America can approach 15% of development costs (my guess only), a shock to the European developers.
- Any activity in America, especially urban development, is a subject to litigation. European developers never fully account for this risk, and litigation is inevitable for a large project, especially when the investment turns red and market collapses.
by Ben Atlas on 08.30.2009.10:01am · 1 comment
First there was a dramatic but not unexpected announcement by Africa-Israel this morning that they lost NIS 1.52 billion in just the second quarter. More importantly Africa-Israel’s financial release is bracing the creditors for possible eventuality when Africa-Israel will not be able to meet its debt obligation. Globes – Asset sales may not be enough to pay debts. Africa-Israel points to five problems:
- “The sale of income-producing properties has reduced its cash flow and hurt its core business.
- Current market conditions have made it difficult to obtain financing to develop and redevelop properties, as well as to recycle financial debt needed for current operations. The credit crunch has affected the obtaining of financing by potential buyers of properties that Africa-Israel has put up for sale, and made it harder to get a closed deals at a good price.
- It is not possible at this time to rely on an improvement in the company’s main markets, such as the US, Eastern Europe, and Russia.
- The greater uncertainty reduces the company’s bargaining power with potential buyers of its properties, while it also tightening the deadlines for the repayment of debts, which makes it harder to complete negotiations for the sale of properties.
- These negotiations reduce management’s time to deal with the development and redevelopment of the company’s properties, execute the company’s long-term strategy, improve its current and future cash flow from projects, achieve profits, and create value for the company’s properties for the benefit of its shareholders and bondholders.”
What is the remarkable is the fear in the Israeli banking system is the insolvency of the individual oligarchs not the corporate bankruptcies. Globes reports:
“The main fear in Israel since the start of the crisis has been the collapse of one of the country’s biggest tycoons such as Africa-Israel controlling shareholder Lev Leviev. Israel’s two largest banks Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi are expected to be the worst hurt by Leviev’s woes. The estimate is that Leviev owes Hapoalim more than NIS 1.5 billion through his privately held Memorand Ltd. and an additional NIS 500 million to Leumi through companies he controls.”
Much has been written about the unholy symbiosis between the Israeli oligarchy and the financial and political systems. But what emerges is that the banks financed the oligarchs at an astonishing rate, this in turn fueled oligarchic expansion into the Russia, Europe and USA and now the chickens are coming home to roost. Let me just paraphrase this, at the time when Israeli banks had an opportunity for extending capital to local innovation, they extended billions in concentrated and centralized capital to the oligarchs to finance the international speculations.
Publishing:
- Find yesterday’s trend or yesteryear idea
- Ghost write a book
- Spam the world pimping it
- Try to sell the book to max people who don’t know who you are (since people who know you either already read this crap on your blog or know better)
- Tell your girlfriend your book is better that the last one from Donald Trump
- Spend at least 8 hours a day monitoring Amazon ranking
- Introduce yourself as an “author”
- Put the book at top of your online bio
- Make people feel cheated again and even more turned off from reading
Faris Yakob writes in Brands as Modern Myths about the quote:
“…he is conflating myths here with lies, and he knows it – because later on in the article he says: ‘this isn’t to say stories aren’t important’ and ‘it’s still storytelling – just done differently’.”
Faris piles on:
Duckworth points out, “brands enable us to make sense and create meanings for ourselves in the socia world of consumption in which we participate.”
Right… and what is the definition myth? …My point exactly. Speaking of ads and myths, what happened to the good old ads like this 1968 one from the American Airlines? ►click to continue
This was obvious for while, sadly. There was a point when I was exited about the potential but it all became pretty ridiculous and Elizabeth Bernstein makes the case in the WSJ – How Facebook Ruins Friendships:
“Like many people, I’m experiencing Facebook Fatigue. I’m tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites, uploading photos of their children or parties, forwarding inane quizzes, posting quirky, sometimes nonsensical one-liners or tweeting their latest whereabouts. (“Anyone know a good restaurant in Berlin?”)”
UPDATE: NYT – Facebook Exodus.
Nicolas Holzapfel wrote a guest post on TechCruch about comments, a subject I have obsessed about since the Internet. Ostensibly the post talks about the introduction of Echo functionally by J-KIT commenting platform but it really touches on the fundamental dilemmas of the internet old online conversation culture. Nicholas slices through – Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead:
“Lots of comments amounts to an enormous long list of entirely unstructured text. There are no dividers or subheadings, no logical progression of arguments or groupings of opinion and no distinction between unique, intelligent insights and throwaway expressions of approval and opposition. Because nobody can be bothered to read through such a mess before they add their own comment, there isn’t even the structure of a coherent conversation. Instead, there is endless, pointless repetition; conversations emerge, peter out and then re-emerge 50 comments later with new participants who haven’t noticed that the same issues were discussed 50 comments ago….
…I’m disappointed with how comments are handled. To my mind, the Internet should be the world’s parliament. It should be a massive conversation, a democratizing collective debate which abolishes the distinction between authors and readers – the active opinion-producer and the passive opinion-consumer. Unfortunately that’s not going to happen if all that the readers author is a garbled, unstructured mess that nobody reads.
Some people believe that comments on popular articles will always be like this because many-to-many conversations are impossible. They believe that if we want coherence we must content ourselves with either conversations in small groups (few-to-few) or one-way conversations whereby a throng of admirers hang on the words of an admired expert (one-to-many).”
I will add couple of points:
- One should add to the conversation Disqus commenting system arguably more influential platform compared to J-KIT that just introduced “echo: functionality this week, many say in a competitive response to J-KIT. The race between commenting platforms is about the geekiest of functions not about the “parliamentary culture”. Human conversation craves simplicity of a dialog, not the hotness of the next gadget.
- And speaking of “a throwaway expressions of approval and opposition” one should mention Twitter as one of the culprits and it’s detrimental influence on traditional comments.
- The idiotic likes and dislikes. They all point to the style that departs from a coherent conversation towards the supremacy of emotional reactions. The importance of how I feel as opposed of what I think. For an author the thinking part is so much more valuable yet the morons still persist with “LOL, Amazing!!!!!”
- Anonymity is at the root of the eroding conversation. You can’t have a dialog with handle, especially a deceptive handle. This is huge problem; people need to be taught away from the retched anonymous culture.
- As long as the meta-blogs don’t lead in this, little will change and the comments will continue to erode. Alas the big blogs don’t care about conversation. They hideous “likes”, the “echo” and the rest of the visual garbage are the vanity mentions that translate into clicks.
Speaking of goddesses, the mother of modern Anarchism, Kovno born Emma Goldman. Couple of weeks ago I took a photo of midnight communist demo on Union Square and above Emma Goldman speaking on Union Square in 1916, a century before Hillary (sorry for the comparison). Emma Goldman was truly a heroic, advanced woman.
WOW! Plaza Penthouse LLLP v CPS 1 Realty LP: “Plaintiff Plaza Penthouse LLLP signed a purchase agreement for $5.25 million, for what it thought was a two bedroom, park view apartment at the legendary restored Plaza Hotel, without ever laying eyes on the intended penthouse apartment. Upon finding out the apartment had only one bedroom and no park view, plaintiff commenced this action seeking, among other things, the return of its $1.05 million down payment.”
This is Yitzhak Tshuva’s building. There is no name of the actual depositor who plunked $1.05 mil deposit without ever seeing the property, just the front. I couldn’t find there the size of the property but it lists two bathrooms and one 1,393sf bedroom. The entire apartment must be just around 2,000 sf. That’s $2,626 per sf, holy cow! (via city life)
Dave Pyle lives in Moscow and takes interesting photos of my old hometown. These are actually not from his photo blog but from his flickr.
Interesting sun reflection in the Kremlin tower clock and the moon crumb in the sky and Lena of course. How are those Red Square cobblestons doing, do they still remember me?
Comments – a Throwaway Expression of Approval and Opposition
by Ben Atlas on 08.27.2009.6:27am · 0 comments
Nicolas Holzapfel wrote a guest post on TechCruch about comments, a subject I have obsessed about since the Internet. Ostensibly the post talks about the introduction of Echo functionally by J-KIT commenting platform but it really touches on the fundamental dilemmas of the internet old online conversation culture. Nicholas slices through – Echo won’t kill comments — they’re already dead:
I will add couple of points: