Viacom Claims Filmmaker Infringed His Own Copyright

This is one of those stories that can only make you scratch your head in wonder. An independent filmmaker in North Carolina blogged about an interesting situation copyright situation:

[M]ultimedia giant Viacom is claiming that I have violated their copyright by posting on YouTube a segment from it's VH1 show Web Junk 2.0... which VH1 produced – without permission – from a video that I had originally created.

Apparently Christopher Knight was running for a local board of education seat and created a commercial in which a Death Star blew up a little red school house. Viacom was amused enough to run it on national television without asking. But the humor quickly ended when Knight, who enjoyed the segment about himself, put it on YouTube. Only in the entertainment industry.

Beauty and the Writer

Sharon Steel apparently has a great eye for the ltitle things that undermine our collective intelligence - like the apparent need of book marketers to play up the sex appeal of authors. Her Boston Phoenix article nails yet another of the nails in the coffin of literature:

But in the post-do-me feminist, post–Harry Potter publishing climate, nobody can predict what the Next Big Thing will be. So it makes sense, if you can’t force a phenomenon, to attract readers to books the same way you’d attract them to another human being. Instead of confining sex to the text, publishers have been quietly whoring out their authors in the best way they know how.

At one time it was enough to be an author with something to say. Then you had to have "platform," because the publishers wanted someone to sell the damned book so no one had to take a risk, even though that's what business really is about.

But now? They want models, actors, pretty boys and girls. How many great authors of the past would make it today? Look at the pseudo biopic, Becoming Jane, about the supposed lost love of Jane Austen. Who did they get to play Austen? The lovely Anne Hathaway, when the author was not a raving beauty. Heaven forbid that Hollywood case someone ... plain in the role.

But perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on the movie. The trend to make writers prettier and the center of romantic intrigue has been around a long time, particularly for female authors. I spoke with Austen scholar Emily Auerbach, a professor of literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and author of Searching for Jane Austen. "Early relatives and editors and critics censored her words, tried to distort her image, actually added ringlets to her portraits to make her look more feminine," she says.

The family, riding the business that Austen become, actually rewrote parts of her letters to make her sound sweeter when, in reality, her sense of observation and descriptive encapsulation could be even sharper than in her books. "For example, she wrote about some neighbors, 'I was a civil to them as their bad breath would allow,'" Auerbach says. The family changed the halitosis reference to something like "as circumstances would allow." Becoming Jane tries to summarize Austen's genius for satire and the comedy of manners with the line, "Their love story was her greatest inspiration." Forget the literate family, early evidence of her gift, her wide reading and critical eye. It all comes down to the romance of the pretty characters. (Heaven help any similar treatment of someone like Nabokov with Lolita hanging in the background.)

Sadly, I don't expect any of this to change, except for the worse. I know writers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s - talented, practiced, with significant life experience - who will never get the break. Not young enough or pretty enough. There are times I begin to understand that J.D. Salinger's hermitage is not simply psychological quirk, but at least in part a clear perception of the essence of commercial publishing. The non-pretty authors may suffer, but I think society loses far more: a chance at some self-knowledge and, perhaps, a touch of soul.

Partisanship, Pay, and Politics

I was listening to an NPR interview of New York City mayor and media mogul Michael Bloomberg. Aside from the interviewer repeatedly trying to bring in the concept of a presidential bid and Bloomberg unequivocally saying that he absolutely would not run, there was an interchange on the nature of politics in areas like education. Bloomberg is an expected fan of capitalism and the power of incentive. Pay to get things done and, if they don't get done, pull back the rewards and try something else. And when asked about the problem in politics, Bloomberg said it was partisanship.

However, I'm not sure that the two are differentiated. There are "partisans" in capitalism, in the sense that different groups will have varying interests and will want to be the ones that get market rewards. Often they will compete for the same rewards. That is what happens in politics, I think. Political parties may think that they know what is best for the country, but more too often they seem to be more focused on what is good for the party. Each is responding to the market forces of incentive, only the incentive is paid for self-interest, and not for solving public problems. The difficulty is that the money and power as forms of payment come from controlling political offices, not from actually getting something done. Instead of working to get rid of that sort of payoff, we should redirect it - get the spoils of political war by actually achieving something positive. But then, we'd all need to agree on a definition of the public good, and that may be the most difficult part of all.

Thinking About Gresham's Law and Internet Discourse

A few months ago, someone emailed me with a passing reference to Gresham's Law. I had never heard of this before, but apparently it is an economic formulation essentially saying that bad money drives out good. Gresham was an English businessman during the 16th century. In that time, money was metallic coins made out of some rare material - gold or silver. All the money was treated as legitimate currency and citizens were forced to accept it, but many people would shave some metal off the coins they held, keeping the scraps because they had their own value, and then use the coins at face value. Or sometimes governments would mix the rare materials with base ones to stretch them and keep more of the valuable metals themselves.

Eventually people got wise to this scheme and would keep the coins with more metal and spend the devalued currency. Thus, the "bad" money dominates the "good" because it tends to be the one in circulation, as people first spend the ones they know to be of lesser intrinsic value.

On it's own this is an interesting phenomenon. But it applies in other areas. According to the Wikipedia article, for example, lemons can push good vehicles out of the used auto market, because people want to dump the cars with problems, so the lemons recycle more quickly into the used market and, depending on their total number, can come to dominate it. So why not apply it to Internet discourse? I've seen firsthand more than once how unpleasant discourse in specialty online forums, driven by a few people, can cause more thoughtful and knowledgeable folk away. The result is that as new people come in, they see the "victors" as the long-time denizens and associate them with a greater understanding of the topic in question.

In other words, people online are collectively promoting misunderstanding and poor knowledge and effectively rewarding those who actively drive out others because of their own psychological peculiarities. It's another example of collective intellectual and emotional degeneration. What do we expect of younger generations, who spend so much time online, when these are the examples of "success?"

Gonzales Resignation and D.C. Prevarication Quotient

Last Friday I mentioned our unpleasant national tendency in the US to redefine language and history for petty personal reasons - and when done on a national level, I can't think of a single personal reason that doesn't fall into that category.

I just read that Alberto Gonzales is stepping down as Attorney General come mid-September. It shows to what level we've sunk when someone who was so clearly talking out of not only both sides of his mouth, but any other available orafice could withstand the pressure to leave for so long. No explanation - and, of course, that probably means some in power in the Republican Party finally convinced Bush that even avoiding Senate confirmation hearings wasn't worth the political damage the group was taking. Not that it matters, and not that things will get noticeably cleaner in the capital, but it is an amazing site when so many professional politicians across the spectrum effectively say, "Well, I understand spin control, but this is too much even for me."

Bush's statement on the topic was, unfortunately, what one might expect:

"It's sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person like Alberto Gonzales is impeded from doing important work because his good name was dragged through the mud for political reasons," Bush said.

We could get into deconstructing this one sentence, though it would take too long. But let's note at least one partial truth: that his name was dragged through the mud for policital reasons. The question is, whose reasons?

Redefining History

Those with power in the US, over a number of years, have been taken with the idea of using language - even redefining it - to further their own agendas. This has been an unfortunate situation, because when you change the meaning of words, you begin manipulating thought in subtle and permanent ways with often unpredictable results. George Orwell saw the approaching danger when he wrote 1984, and, unfortunately, his view was prescient.

Now we see another form of redefining words - this time in redefining our collective memory of history. It's not the first time, but, again, another disturbing trend. In this case, President Bush tried to argue that the situation in Iraq is like that of Vietnam in the early 1970s, and even referring to al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents in terms of the "war machine of imperial Japan," according to the Wall Street Journal. (Nothing like dredging up World War II imagery when Japan has greatly changed and is now a close ally.) He warns that a quick withdrawal could lead to chaos and another Khmer Rouge. "Then as now, people argued the real problem was America's presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end," he said.

But this is rewriting history, as the 1984 character Winston Smith saw it done. Instead of seeing the past as immutable, it become an assemblage of clay. When you want to support something you do today, you rearrange the parts, eliminating the ones you don't like, and trot out the "proof." But, again according to the Journal, some historians are upset by this comparison.

"The president emphasized the violence in the wake of American withdrawal from Vietnam. But this happened because the United States left too late, not too early," says Steven Simon, a Mideast expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It was the expansion of the war that opened the door to Pol Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge." Ret. Army Brig. Gen. John Johns tells the Journal that what he "learned in Vietnam is that U.S. forces could not conduct a counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay there, the worse it's going to get."

You won't hear too many politicians complain about this, because, at least in my opinion, the majority want access to the same tools to further their ends.

But nothing good can come out of pretending that the past is something other than it was beyond trying to interpret what happened. To remake history is to lie - no other word fits this. But it's not a lie just told to someone else, but to yourself. When you lie to yourself, you destroy your reason. How can you effectively be rational at all if you won't see what is there and insist on making your decisions based on personal fancy? That means we now have a generation of politicians that do their work in a dream world, where the building blocks of experience are set tumbling and the very material of thought - language - is warped and twisted for expediency. Is there any wonder why our country has become so messed up?

Stephen King Makes Australian Book Store Suspicious

If you worked at a book store and saw some stranger writing in books on the shelves, it might make you concerned. So the staff of the Alice Springs book store walked over to the gentleman scribbler. That's when they learned that Stephen King had made an unannounced stop and was adding his signature to his own novels, according to a BBC story. "Well, if we knew you were coming we would have baked you a cake," said the manager to the author. Just don't ask what would have gone into the cake.

Book Author Sues Reviewer

I'm not sure whether this is what the newspaper business calls a man-bites-dog story. Such a tale (or tail) depends on someone doing something you just wouldn't expect. Of course, most book authors probably harbor desires to sue for a bad review - and that's on their good days. (Imagination on the bad days tends toward more graphic and inventive violence.) So I was a bit surprised to read this BoingBoing post about a blogger who saw the subject of a negative review head right to court. As the post quotes the blogger:

He claims to have a revolutionary idea for how evolution works, but his ideas have no connection to reality, and these lovely elaborate drawings he made look nothing at all like actual embryos. The bottom line is that I said his work was more about the evolution of balloon animals than biology.

Obviously this is proof positive that Darwin was nuts and that the fittest aren't necessarily the ones surviving.

Eisenhower on Military Intervention

At a library book sale, I had picked up a copy of the book Confessions of a White House Ghostwriter: Five Presidents and Other Political Adventures by James C. Humes. The author is apparentl7y quite a bright fellow with amazing intellectual retention and a personal history that has intersected the high and mighty.

On page 144, Mr. Humes mentions talking to richard Nixon shortly after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Although the Eisenhower quote is third hand, it's still worth repeating:

He told us that Kennedy seemed shaken by the incident. Nixon then reported former President Eisenhower's reaction. "Dick, for U.S. military intervention, you need four conditions: First, congressional support. Second, the occupation must be limited in time, or you will loose the support of public opinion. Third, there must be a viable leader with a broad popular backing to succeed the ousted dictator. And finally, whatever troops you need, take ten times more."

I suspect he didn't think it necessary to add, "And under no conditions should you destroy the entire infrastructure of the country and not put it back into place rapidly."

Faking Interest Online

The New York Times had an interesting letter to its ethicist. Apparently the writer had interned at a magazine where the editor wanted him or her to post a comment on the publication's blog, but while pretending to have no affiliation. This would be considered a significant ethical lapse in any journalistic circle, as the BBC learned when it had to respond to staff calling in to programs, pretending to be audience members.

I have sympathy for the problem. I remember many years ago hosting a radio call-in show and having absolutely no one telephone. Eventually a friend of mine, the technical director, went to another room and called in to try and spark a conversation. So I understand the difficulty and discomfort of waiting for comments that don't come. However, we were young and foolish. Some might perceive faking an audience as a form of marketing, but it's dishonest.

There are situations and times at which you say, "No, I won't do that." The magazine could have disabled commenting for a while on its blog. Or it could have borne the terrible stigma of not having people care for its opinions - if anyone even noticed or cared. Instead, it choose to manipulate its audience, search engines, and anyone else who might pay attention. To me, that is on the same side of the line as peddling snake oil. I've found in my own blogs that I must insist on moderating comments because I've seen examples of interested people with clear agendas attempting to appear as though they were readers happening onto a topic. Too bad there isn't an equivalent function when you are in the audience and not running the forum.

Finding the UK Close to Home

I just got back from St. John's, Newfoundland, and was intrigued by the accents. Some sounded as though they had been transported wholesale from the north of England. That reminded me how often US regional accents, at least in the eastern part of the country. If you can hear some of the undiluted ones - easier in the case of someplace like Newfoundland and more difficult when areas become homogenized through urban concentration - there are traces of Irish, Scot, English, and Welsh. Although a bit technical in the linguistic sense, here's an article from Wikipedia about this. Now I just need to find a layman's book on the subject.

New Zealand Newspaper Publisher Outsources Editing, Production

I was sorely tempted to call this, "And Now A Word From Out Outsourcer." According to an AP report, New Zealand newspaper publisher APN News & Media is outsourcing editing and layout of the country's biggest daily. By the end of 2007, the contracting firm, Pagemasters New Zealand, will be editing APN's seven papers using 45 editors, nearly 30 fewer than the papers themselves used. The company's owner also has other media properties, including some newspapers in Ireland that will be following a similar course. The APN executive who has led the New Zealand project said, "I'm confident readers won't notice the difference."

That may be, at least if all goes well, but are editors mere functionaries that improve copy and lay it out? Or are they generally an intrinsic part of filtering through and choosing news direction? I've never worked on staff at a newspaper, but it seems to me that there is the potential for some conflict of interest. The outsourcing firm - which is owned by New Zealand Associated Press, and so certainly having access to expertise - is, nevertheless, going to be primarily concerned with efficiency, not necessarily the underlying mission of the papers.

Mission may sound quaint to some who would argue that these newspapers are business concerns and must be treated as such. Yet that's what I'm doing. When the primary interest of a business is making money, they it ceases to care about what else it does and customers cease to care about doing business with it. No one owes a company attention or sales; that comes as a consequence of providing something to customers. I understand the need to constrain costs, but no company has ever trimmed its way into greatness. I'm sure lowering overhead is what APN is gaining. I wonder if anyone has tallied what it might be losing.

Gioogle Gives Sources Talk-Back Ability

Google is letting sources quoted in stories that appear on Google News Service the ability to comment on the coverage. My, what a thorny issue this has opened. As the Wall Street Journal reported:

In an experimental project, Google this week began soliciting comments from individuals and groups cited in stories it carries, working to verify the identities of those commenting and displaying the comments alongside links to the original stories.

One big question is how does Google know whether those commenting are actually who they claim to be. This is going to be far more time consuming and expensive than I think they realize.

Some in the news industry are concerned about the chance that Google could become ombudsman to the world. But one good thing - not only will the sources be allowed to respond, but so will the reporters and editors. Also, I don't see why it's necessarily bad for sources and journalists to mix it up. Mistakes are more rampant in the news than I think many insiders realize - or want to know. Some months back I interviewed someone from an educational institution and, in the process, asked out of curiosity how often reporters got things wrong. What I heard back was, in major stories, only one out of five don't have significant mistakes. Granted, her view of mistakes included mischaracterizing the institution, which would seem a PR matter, but, really, if you can't correctly identify what an entity does, what else in the story is questionable?

The other possibilty here is that this could become a way of annotating stories to give fuller context. Here's the last paragraph from the Wall Street Journal story:

Vic Strasburger, a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico, said Google asked him by email to comment on an Associated Press article about a fast-food study in which he'd been quoted. Dr. Strasburger submitted a comment expanding on what he was cited as saying in the article. "I'll do a 15- to 20-minute interview, and two sentences will appear about what I've said," he said in an interview. "So the Google feature is really a chance to flesh out those two sentences and to include some more of what I ordinarily talk about in a 15- to 20-minute interview."

Coudl it be that this is a key ingredient news outlets have been missing in attracting younger readers, who are used to the back and forth debate that happens on the web?

On Crossword Cruelty

A book of crossword puzzles some friends had given me last Christmas, Will Shortz's Greatest Hits, recently turned up after I had originally misplaced it. So I've been trying to work my way through some at the beginning. "Trying" is particularly apt, as that is how I find many of the puzzles to be. For years I've made the foolish assumption that there were certain unstated rules to crossword puzzles, such as each block gets only one letter, or the number of blocks indicates the number of letters. Oh, how mistaken I have been! One puzzle required the solver to put the word "house" into various spots. Another had several two-letter combinations and one of three letters. In other words, you can spin around and around without realizing that it's impossible to find a four letter synonym for "whim" that will fit into the puzzle because you actually want the six-letter "notion."

And so I have decided, at least in theory, to plot my revenge by releasing what I think would be an incredibly cruel crossword. There would be only one word clues, and each clue would have at least one synonym with the same number of letters. But the answer to each clue would be the clue word itself. People would at least spend five minutes tearing at their hair, wondering why things wouldn't fit together. Of course, one would have to publish this anonymously.

French Teen Arrested for Posting Potter Translation

French police arrested a 16-year old from Aix-en-Provence for posting his own translation of the final Harry Potter novel before the release of the official version, scheduled for October. According to the Reuters story, here's what a representative of Gallimard, publisher of the sanctioned French version of the novels, said:

"It is not a young person or a fan we are talking about here -- these are organized networks that use young people," she told Reuters by telephone.

Networks using young people? Oh, right, there are criminal networks recruiting young people to surrepticiously translate large novels from one langauge to another and then to post their work on the web, removing any chance of making money off their effort. The criminal networks, concerned that they seem to be making nothing from their enterprises, are said to be planning to retain consultants to help analyze their business models.

New Republic Gets Another Black Eye?

According to an article in the Weekly Standard, Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp, the New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist," signed a sworn statement "admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods." Apparently the WS is going on the word of a single source on this part of the story, though it says it received a statement from the military stating, "An investigation has been completed and the allegations made by PVT Beauchamp were found to be false. His platoon and company were interviewed and no one could substantiate the claims."

This has got to be bad news for the New Republic, which had a public fiasco with the articles - fictions would be a closer term - that Stephen Glass wrote for the publication. Beauchamp is married to a TNR staffer, according to a statement from the magazine. It appareantly did some extensive fact checking and thought that the majority of the reports were accurate. It will be interesting to see if a copy of the statement comes out soon to confirm the WS report.

Celebrity Interviews Don't Catch a Cold

An article in the Washington Post has been making the rounds among some journalists I know. It looks at the celebrity interview and how it's become a formulaic exercise in fake intimacy. To know that, all you'd have to do is critically view or read, oh, maybe ... one celeb interview. The author, Ann Homaday, even does a short historic rundown of the origins of this most odd journalistic exercise. Here's the basics of the approach, as explained by a vet of the women's magazines:

If structured spontaneity is the coin of the realm of TV, then ersatz rapport is the folding money of print. "I write for a lot of women's magazines, and I'm always encouraged to make my subjects 'relate-able,' " says Jancee Dunn, whose memoir "But Enough About Me" chronicles her career writing celebrity profiles for such publications as Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and GQ. "It's a word I hear over and over. That and 'likable.' And apparently that's due to reader demand. It's all very structured. They want to relate, they want to think of the celebrity as their best friend, or at least someone they could be friends with."

The sad thing is that it is possible to do something more interesting.

Immodestly speaking, I still like the interview I did with actor Tony Shalhoub for AARP the Magazine (at least the first version that got changed significantly in the editing process). It was about making decisions (an interesting angle given that the character he plays on his show Monk couldn't pick right from left on a good day). I took his quotes and put them together for an as-told-to, though the original version before editing was better, I thought. Of course the magazine pushed for some intimate personal detail or other that would bring in the crowds, but it was still acceptable after the fact. And the real fascinating part for me was the actual discussion with Mr. Shalhoub, an actor whose talent and work I greatly admire. I will see if at some point I can post the original version, but the link above to the published one will have to do for now.

Stalking the Wild Hacker

According to a story in The Enquirer (a UK tech site), Michelle Madigan, an associate producer from Dateline NBC decided to go undercover at Defcon, the annual global hackers convention held in Las Vegas. (I'm waiting until hackers create their own trade union.) The people running Defcon spoke to her multiple times, offering press credentials. She wanted to do things the hard way - and so, she did:

Too bad. They knew when her plane took off. They knew when her plane landed. They knew when she picked up her non-press attendee pass (human in the vernacular). They followed her around. They knew when she walked into the ladies room to wire up, camera and sound. She knew that the camera was not allowed but did it anyway, and told a goon that she was doing so.

You've got to figure that people who like taking the road less travelled, that as often use a practical understanding of human psychology as technical skills, might not be easy marks. If you researched for 15 minutes, you'd probably also gather that such people are unlikely to take things sitting down. (Well, technically most were sitting when they busted her cover during a large gathering.) So much for the enterprising reporter.

The New York Times Makes a Questionable Editorial Choice

On July 22, 2007, Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman and contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine published an article concerning the difficulties in reconciling an Orthodox Jewish way of life and the rest of the world. The opening of the essay is an experience from Feldman's past, when he bought his Korean-American fiancée to his tenth reunion of his yeshiva and then was surprised and, presumably, hurt because the two of them were cropped out of the reunion picture in the newsletter.

Unfortunately, there seems to have been more of a story. According to The Jewish Week, there is considerable evidence (the word of the photographer and an admission by Feldman) that the cropping was not a deliberate slight, but that a number of people were inadvertently left out of the picture because there were simply too many there for a single frame of film.

I used the word unfortunately for good reason. The faulty reporting, and the apparent unwillingness of Times editors to have Feldman correct his essay's opening, has brought the accuracy of the entire piece - and the intentions of all involved - into doubt. That is a shame, because there is value within the piece as it addresses the difficulty of trying to be Orthodox in this world as well as the tensions on the Jewish part between these two worlds:

One time at Maimonides a local physician -- a well-known figure in the community who later died tragically young -- addressed a school assembly on the topic of the challenges that a modern Orthodox professional may face. The doctor addressed the Talmudic dictum that the saving of a life trumps the Sabbath. He explained that in its purest form, this principle applies only to the life of a Jew. The rabbis of the Talmud, however, were unprepared to allow the life of a non-Jew to be extinguished because of the no-work commandment, and so they ruled that the Sabbath could be violated to save the life of a non-Jew out of concern for maintaining peaceful relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish communities.

Depending on how you look at it, this ruling is either an example of outrageously particularist religious thinking, because in principle it values Jewish life more than non-Jewish life, or an instance of laudable universalism, because in practice it treats all lives equally. The physician quite reasonably opted for the latter explanation. And he added that he himself would never distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish patients: a human being was a human being.

And then there was the teacher who stood and said that view put the doctor in the danger of violating Torah. The teacher later apologized to the class - not because he felt he was wrong, but because there were non-Jews in the audience when he spoke. "The double standard of Jews and non-Jews, in other words, was for him truly irreducible: it was not just about noting that only Jewish lives merited violation of the Sabbath, but also about keeping the secret of why non-Jewish lives might be saved," as Feldman writes.

Of course, this ultimately isn't about a tribal attitude belonging to Orthodox Jews. You can find the same attitude among Muslims (look at the Shiite/Sunni divisions), among Christians, among virtually any nationality. You can find it in school rivalries, for heaven's sake. We are People and you are not. This is the heritage of mankind and, perhaps, one of the real meanings of the Tower of Babel story. We as a global people have long ceased speaking the same language, and we don't recognize each other's humanity. If we did, war, economic oppression, and many other features of modern life would become impossible to undertake. Oh, for some real translation in today's world.

Used Booksellers Skew Older

If you're curious as to who is selling used books online, AbeBooks.com, which operates a network of such dealers, has some answers. The company surveyed 1,949 online sellers that do business with it and found that 79% are over 45, most were in white collar jobs, and 20% work 51 or more hours a week. Many are on the road buying books, 60% operate strictly online, and a third read between five and 10 books a month. So much for graceful early retirement.

Don't Poke Fun at New Zealand's Parliament

If New Zealand's parliament doesn't want to be satired and ridiculed by people in the country, it doesn't have to be. According to a Press Gazette story:

The new standing orders, voted in last month, concern the use of images of Parliamentary debates, and make it a contempt of Parliament for broadcasters or anyone else to use footage of the chamber for "satire, ridicule or denigration".

This is potentially punishable by some time in jail. Obviously Sauron didn't quite disappear from the land when