On the subject of Jaron Lanier on ‘Persistent Somnolence’ there is an article in the NYT – Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name):
“If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.
This habit of mind is already pervasive in the culture and will be difficult to roll back. But parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally.”
One has to understand that the Jews or any doctrinal culture that relies on the tradition of mental molestation of helpless young minds have been doing this “sampling” for a few thousand years now. A page of Talmud is the perfect example of a mashup or to be more accurate a “collage”. A typical Rabbi is a rapper mouthing off a quote after quote to a well rehearsed beat. Just now the internet brought that “light” to the world and the general culture is finally catching up to the derivative Jewish hell.
Via exclusiverights:
“American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. v. Google, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2010) (complaint)
On Wednesday, a group of photographers, illustrators and graphic artists filed a class action lawsuit against Google. The class action plaintiffs allege that Google had, in effecting its Google Books program, committed copyright infringement by (i) scanning and creating digital copies of images without permission; (ii) storing digital copies of the images; and (iii), distributing and publicly displaying the images. According to the plaintiffs, the suit was “designed to redress the most widespread, well-publicized, and uncompensated infringement of exclusive rights in images in the history of book and periodical publishing.”
On the subject of Musicblogocide or Beware of Putting all your Eggs in Google Basket. The Swedish founder of the notorious copyright breaker The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde is launching a new micropayments system Flattr. The idea is rather elegant. You pay to Flattr a predetermined fee, say $10 per month or whatever you decide, this fee is divided each time you click a Flattr button on the participating content providers sites. In my opinion this solves only part of the problem. The only way to fix the morass of the current poisonous Internet culture is to have a mandatory micropayments on all creative content embeds. The payment has to be essential not a a volunteer, complimentary charity. A micropayment has to follow usage, i.e. quoting, embeds, sharing instead of being a charity on a pay-wall-less site. But here is the explanation video from Peter Sunde: ►►►read more
Two events last week should put all users of Google services on notice. First was the so called “Musicblogocide” as described in the Guardian – Google shuts down music blogs without warning, as years of archives are wiped off the internet. We have seen before similar actions from Google and this one seem to fit the pattern. Google denies service in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, there is usually no warning and most importantly there is virtually no recourse, no innocent until proven guilty, no reasonable possibility to appeal or appease the lawyered up machine.
Similarly on the same week Google announced that they are discontinuing FTP service to the Blogger blogs, a serious disruption to thousands of users. Google’s excuse is that they are spending too much on the resources for the FTP based blogs is laughable. But back to the Musicblogocide.
There is a vast problem on the Internet with the copyright, especially as it relates to music but not only music. Google itself contributes to the ambiguity on this issue if not pushes people away from the admittedly digitally outdated copyright interpretations. The Google Internet as it exist today leads people in a certain direction. Specifically the Internet is viewed as an advertising page inventory with the following dire consequences:
- Quantity trumps quality, keywords trump coherent sentences. This leads to millions of Splogs and the entire Affiliate Marketing industry.
- Original authorship is diluted, share alike and mashups culture is encouraged. This leads to the proliferation of the aggregators (borderline Splogs really).
- The common “share alike” practices encourage republishing or even outright stealing of content (the borders are blurred again).
- There is still no micro payment system to deliver any value to the content originators, the so called “creative class”. You don’t have to look far to see the result of this, even in the current great recession.
Google is in the unique position to change this poisonous climate. But there is an impression that all they care about in the end is the display ads inventory. Today Google presides over the Internet that is anti authorship and anti intellectual property. But instead of tackling the root causes of this decrepit culture Google prefers to pick on the bloggers who only blindly follow where the system created and blessed by Google leads them. One way to solve this is to create a micro payment app to drive the value to the writers and the artists. You want to embed anything, pay the micro price. Shift the value proposition on the Internet from the DJs to the creators and composers. And don’t blame the DJs for the direction you Google yourself googled for them.
Techdirt – Poet’s Son Says No One Can Quote Father Without Paying Up… Even Academic Dissertations:
“All Louis and Celia Zukofsky is still copyright, and will remain so for many many years. I own all of these copyrights, and they are my property, and I insist upon deriving income from that property. For those of you convinced that LZ would find my stance abhorrent, the truth is that he kept all copyrights (initially in his name) as he had the rather absurd idea that said copyrights would be sufficient to allow for the economic survival of my mother, and their son. My stance is congruent with that hope.
Despite what you may have been told, you may not use LZ’s words as you see fit, as if you owned them, while you hide behind the rubric of “fair use”. “Fair use” is a very-broadly defined doctrine, of which I take a very narrow interpretation, and I expect my views to be respected. We can therefore either more or less amicably work out the fees that I demand; you can remove all quotation; or we can turn the matter over to lawyers, this last solution being the worst of the three, but one which I will use if I need to enforce my rights.”
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 )
Nieman Journalism Lab has been posting about the AP plan to stop the theft of the original content online and now they published the original memo, it starts:
“There evidence is everywhere: original news content is being scraped, syndicated and monetized without fair compensation to those who produce, report and verify it. AP’s legal division continues to document rampant unauthorized use of AP content on literally tens of thousands of Web sites…”
Washington Post – The Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition):
“David Marburger is a First Amendment lawyer who, along with his economist brother Daniel, is stirring a minor controversy in the blogosphere with a proposal that might empower newspapers, or any news organization that spends the bulk of its budget on original reporting. They want to amend the copyright law so that it restores “unfair competition rights” — which once gave us the power to sue rivals if our stories were being pirated. That change would give news organizations rights that they could enforce in court if “parasitic” free-rider Web sites (the heavy excerpters) refused to bargain with them for a fee or a contract. Marburger said media outlets could seek an order requiring the free-rider to postpone its commercial use or even hand over some advertising revenue linked to the free-riding.”
Also via Bnet: Could Copyright Change Fix Old Media? David Marburger Q&A.
