Adobe Doesn't Want Money for Photoshop Express, Just Your Photos
ArsTechnica reports that Adobe's licensing agreement for using the free online version of Photoshop
gives it unlimited rights to make money off photos you upload to the site.
I've seen this sort of problem in the past, and have even reported on it - in Newsweek.com, if I'm remembering correctly (the subject at that time was MSN). The problem is that many companies don't seem to read through their agreements and understand the implications. Some amount of broad wording may be necessary to cover all the things that are effectively done on the web, but, really folks, would a little final read through the copy be that tough?
Supposedly Adobe will modify the agreement, but I'd suggest holding off using Photoshop Express until you see wording you can live with.
Labels: editing, Photoshop, rights
Amazon.com Tries to Bully Publishers
Print-on-demand, or POD, has become an important technology in book publishing and will only become even more so. Instead of having to pay for a run of thousands of books, individuals and companies can have single copies turned out when needed. They are more expensive, but can be the difference between financial feasibility of a new book or non-existence.
But Amazon.com is trying to force publishers that use POD technology to get it from the reseller's own division. Don't buy from them, and they disable the Buy button on a book's listing. Here's a
Publishers Weekly article, and one from
a writers' weekly newsletter called, appropriately, Writers Weekly.
Think I'm going to reconsider from where I buy any of my books. Any reseller with this much of a stranglehold is too big for the good of us all.
Labels: Amazon.com, books, publishing
Clinton Embellishes Bosnian Trip
I came across this in a journalism email list. According to The Feed, a political blog of the St. Petersburg Times, Hillary
Clinton talked about a trip she made to Bosnia when Bill Clinton was president as far more dangerous than others who were there remember. Apparently it took remarks from comedian Sinbad to bring this to light - and two journalists who were there didn't say anything until recently. Maybe it was a case of PTNSS - post traumatic non-stress syndrome.
Labels: Politics
China Unblocks BBC Website
According to the BBC, people in China are finally
able to get full English-language stories on the broadcaster's web site, though not any Chinese-language services or links:
Beijing has never admitted to blocking access to BBC news stories - and there has been no official confirmation that the website has been unblocked.
But Chinese users trying to access pages on the site have almost always been redirected to an error message telling them: "The connection was reset."
It now appears that this is no longer the case, and access to the site is much easier.
The Chinese government censor information and only make it available when it figured that such actions would be obvious during the Olympics? Pshaw. It was probably all a matter of inferior western technology.
Labels: censorship, China, Internet, Politics
Pro-Tibet Organizations Attacked Online
According to a Washington Post story, some number of
groups sympathetic to Tibet have found themselves targeted for cyber attacks that attempt to disrupt operations and steal information:
A handful of recent targeted attacks shared the same Internet resources and tactics in common with those used in a spate of digital assaults against number of major U.S. defense contractors, said Maarten Van Horenbeeck, an incident handler with the SANS Internet Storm Center, Bethesda, Md.-based organization that tracks online security trends.
...
The attacks on pro-Tibet organizations are not the first to be tied to computers in China. The Washington Post reported March 21 that the FBI is investigating whether hackers in China targeted a group working for human rights in Darfur, the war-torn province of Sudan. China has economic and strategic interests in the African nation's oil fields.
Labels: Politics
(Still) Getting the Online WSJ for Free
The Machinist blog has a
great tip on getting the online version of the Wall Street Journal for free. Remember Rupert Murdoch's talk about making the site free, and then saying that they were going to keep the subscriptions and probably increase them? Well, that much was true, but to drive attention - and advertising - to the site, they also need to show up on the search engines. So the engines have to get in, which means that people can, as well. The blog entry gives two different methods of getting to the articles you want without sending a cent to Murdoch.
Labels: newspapers, online
Reporters May Be Getting China-Tibet Story Wrong
It's tough to cover a story of unrest when you can't get into the country in which it's happening. So far as I know, only one western journalist - an Economist correspondent - was officially in Tibet, and, paradoxically, he was pretty much left alone. But everyone seems to be falling into the biggest form of bias that journalists have: the desire for a neat and compelling narrative that simply explains what they are seeing. I think that may be why everything about the protests in Tibet are framed in a little-guy-versus-big-guy politics. But that may be only a small part of the story.
I'm on a mailing list run by a risk management consultancy, and someone well versed in how geopolitics, policy, and economics interact, who just returned from China, had a different view. This person said that the driving cause was inflation in China making it difficult for people to buy food, including monks. Also, the actions are supposedly spreading
from the provinces
to Tibet. Although Tibet gets a lot of attention, there have allegedly been food riots across China, most of which go unreported.
The expert then went on to say that food inflation had sparked not only the actions in Tibet and, apparently, people killed in Chinese grocery stores as they tried to buy cooking oil, but there have been food riots in "West Africa, Mexico, Morocco, Yemen, Guinea, Uzbekistan, Senegal, India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Burma." Good lord, that is a scary thought. There have been crop problems in a number of important food producing countries, and the economics of oil and the financial markets is driving up inflation and diverting crops to create ethanol.
If inflation, and the skyrocketing food prices that results, are becoming such a problem, you'd hope that journalists would start to cover the issue. So long as we're hearing only the tidy "political unrest" story, we don't learn what might actually suggest a solution, or at least a real explanation.
Labels: international, journalism, news
Fake News on Local Television
Farhad Manjoo is promoting a new book:
"True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society." Aside from being a witty and intriguing title, the topic of how companies and special interests feed stories that news outlets use verbatim is an important tone.
It's not that being a channel for commercial interests is usual. Many people who have written press releases have the experience of seeing them turned directly into stories without a single change in wording. But corporations are becoming ever more clever in this undertaking:
Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she'd once written a magazine column called "Internet Mom"). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.
...
Nine stations aired Raskin's warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11.
But Raskin went on further, suggesting "safe" products as gifts - from companies that hired her as a shill. This is also done on a national level. When you see someone touting round-ups of products, often - although not always - that person is paid by the manufacturers to include their products.
But the use of spoon-fed news feeds, whether print, audio, or video, has become a real problem. News outlets use them because it's "free" content, and the audience never knows that it's just been sold down the river.
Labels: news, PR, television
UK Statistics Watchdog Goes Out Fighting
The
UK government is disbanding its Statistics Commission, which is a shame because the group apparently fought against political use of statistics, according to an FT story:
Allegations about the politicisation of data have intensified throughout the years of New Labour rule – most recently with last week’s issue of national figures showing thousands of children had not won entry into their first-choice state school.
Critics of Ed Balls, schools secretary, accused him of trying to deflect attention from the statistics by simultaneously reporting that “a significant minority” of schools were breaking new admissions rules.
The commission has written to Mr Balls’ department and stressed the release of official figures should be “seen to be independent from policy comment”.
The government set up the commission in 2000 "to improve trust in government figures." The question is whether it didn't do its job well enough or entirely too well. A new UK Statistics Authority replaces it next month.
A group devoted to making politicians come clean on their use of statistics. More than a full-time job, I'd bet.
Labels: Politics, statistics, U.K.
Snap That Spud: UN Potato Photography Contest
The United Nations is hosting a photography contest "to highlight the role of the potato, the planet’s fourth largest food source, in the fight against hunger and poverty,"
according to the organization. Nikon is sponsoring the contest, and there will be cash prizes. If you want
details on the context, check here.
Labels: contest, theme
Spitzer's "Kristen" and Copyright
As heat swirled around former New York governor Elliot Spitzer's dalliance with call girls, one's image was grabbed by media from her Myspace page and freely used. But it's a question whether that use was legal or an infringement of copyright.
Photo District News has an interesting article on the topic. A number of lawyers they contacted said that the media's rights to do so are questionable:
"Whoever took that picture owns that picture," says New York attorney Nancy Wolff. "It's either an infringement or they [the news outlets] have to make a fair use argument."
Wolff says the news organizations probably decided the risk of a lawsuit was low. They also probably considered competitive pressure as other sources published the same photos. "It's a fast business decision," Wolff says.
As I understand it, one of the aspects of fair use is education - but that means that the contents itself of the copyrighted piece must be what is at issue. But the stories are not about the photos; they're about the alleged business arrangements between Spitzer and Ashley Dupre/Youmans (the latter being her actual name). So the photos of her are not the subject of discussion and education, and could well be seen as something whose commercial value has now been reduced, which means that "fair use," which could be an argument against infringement, is now a more remote possibility.
But there's one other question I don't see being addressed. Youmans's lawyer has been talking about copyright infringemnt, but who took the pictures? As Youmans was the subject, they wouldn't be her property, but that of the person who pressed the shutter button, and no one has been talking about that person or people, who would have had had to register copyright of the images and who would have standing for taking legal action.
Labels: copyright, infringement, news, Politics
How Presidential Candidates Answer the 3AM Call
The Clinton and Obama campaigns had traded those "How would he/she/it answer that call in the middle of the night?" ads. But I realized that no one actually mentioned what the answer would be. So I put the vast resources of the En Words crack investigative team to work and came up with answers. Here is how each of the three major presidential candidates would answer a crisis call at 3 in the morning:
- John McCain Nuke 'em.
- Barack Obama Maybe if we wait until breakfast, things will change.
- Hillary Clinton Bill, it's for you. (Pause.) Bill? Are you there, Bill?
Labels: Politics, satire
Laughs and Death
I started watching the DVD of Death at a Funeral, and, literally, had to stop it on the the fourth line to save the movie for other members of my family as well. A hearse pulls up to an estate in England. Four formally-dressed men come out and bring a casket from the back as someone, obviously a relative has been standing. They all go in. One of the men asks, "Would you..." He addresses the gentleman who had been waiting for them, and means would you like to view the body. The man nods. The first one opens the casket and the other looks down for a few seconds. I'm thinking, "If this were me, I'd have it be the wrong body." But it's taking a long time, and then he looks up and says, "That's not my father." The head of the group from the funeral hall mutters, "Shit, I took the wrong one." The four race back out to the hearse, return the casket to the back, and tear off. It's hard to come up with a comic line that is something you cannot anticipate, particularly when the viewer knows the movie is a comedy and what weirder thing to have in British humor than the wrong body. But to pull that off in such a disarming way that you figure the screenwriter and director are going to play things straight, at least that far, is impressive.
Labels: comedy, movies, writing
Happy Belated Birthday, Douglas Adams
I meant to post this yesterday, but, ironically, was tied up with deadlines. How can you not celebrate the birth of a man who said, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."
Check Wikipedia for a
short biography of the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the name of which he apparently came up with while flat on his back, drunk in an Austrian field. Although many people are familiar with the book and movie, I think the ultimate form of the piece was the original BBC radio series, which was funny as all get out, although here's a tip of the hat to
Alan Rickman's portrayal of Marvin, the miserable robot with a brain the size of a planet.
Labels: author, books, humor, science fiction
Hillary Clinton Develops Drawl
This morning, while with my daughter on her newspaper rounds, we had the radio on and heard a clip of Hillary Clinton addressing an audience down south. As I listened, I realized that she had added more than a hint of a drawl to her voice. Although she obviously lived in Arkansas, she was born in Chicago, went to college in Massachusetts, and represents New York in the US Senate. Just where the hell did the accent come from, when she normally doesn't have it? This seems like one of the most condescending and cynical political acts I've noticed in a long time. Why isn't anyone in the conventional media noting this? Are they all scared because the Clinton campaign accused them of bias?
Labels: accents, media, Politics
A Real Business Course
InsideHigherEd.com (via Slashdot.org) is reporting a brewing controversy at Hunter College in New York City:
corporate sponsored courses. According to the report, the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition (IAAC) - an organization of large corporations looking to reduce copyright infringement in the form of knock-off vendors pretending that their wares are major brand names - actually sponsored a course at the school last year, and that's resulted in the Faculty Senate getting involved:
According to the complaints filed with the Faculty Senate, Hunter agreed to let the IACC sponsor a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods. One goal of the effort was to mislead students not in the course into thinking that they were reading about someone real. So-called “guerrilla marketing” — in which consumers are unaware that they are being marketed — is the subject of some controversy in the marketing and public relations world. But even among advocates for the tactic, there are some who are disturbed about what happened at Hunter.
Students in the for-credit class did such things as paper campus with fake fliers from an imaginary student looking for a lost Coach bag and a blog supposedly about her realizations that the bag was a counterfeit. Although being called guerilla marketing, I don't think the term applies. Guerilla marketing generally means using low-cost methods for getting interest in a business, with a premium on unusual methods - but you generally know that you're looking at something sponsored by a company.
The irony here is that this version of deceit and propoganda is trying to trick people to take specific actions much the same way as producers of counterfeit products try to trick consumers. They play on people's associations, deliberately misleading them, to gain their own ends. It's a bad situation when your own words and actions end up supporting that which you claim to oppose.
Labels: education, marketing, propoganda
Memoirs and Faulty Memory
The New York Times has an article about
yet another imaginary memoir. In this case, a woman writing under a pseudonym (Wouldn't that seem to be a giveaway in a
memoir?) claimed to be a "half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods."
Apparently not. She was all white, grew up in a posh part of LA, never lived with a foster family, never did drugs, and never ran with gangs. The 33-year-old Margaret Seltzer admitted all when her sister, who saw a piece in the Times, dropped a dime:
“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”
No, the details were taken from people she had met while supposedly working to reduce gang violence in LA. Yup, putting a voice to people is important, particularly when you're getting a significant advance to do so and, presumably, not sharing it.
Aren't there giveaways, other than wanting to use a pseudonym and then be willing to have your photograph taken? The writing seemed to telegraph to some critics that something was going on:
Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”
I know that book publishers are short-staffed - got to wring out every last penny for the corporate owners, after all - but, really, couldn't they invest in a fact checker to make even a cursory inquiry? Let's see: $30,000 to save many times that number and enough embarrassment to fill a small stadium. Seems like a smart investment to me.
Labels: books, publishing, scams
Newsweek's Evan Thomas on Press Objectivity
I find it a partial relief when a major journalistic figure like
Evan Thomas of Newsweek decides to say that the press has biases. It's like hearing a small town politician admit that the water seeping up from the ground really
is a broken water main, and not excess condensation. Unfortunately, Thomas takes some what might seem the most palatable and understandable prejudices as the only ones. He rattles off what the mainstream media's
realprejudices are:
The mainstream media (the "MSM" the bloggers love to rail against) are prejudiced, but not ideologically. The press's real bias is for conflict. Editors, even ones who marched in antiwar demonstrations during the Vietnam era, have a weakness for war, the ultimate conflict. Inveterate gossips and snoops, journalists also share a yen for scandal, preferably sexual. But mostly they are looking for narratives that reveal something of character. It is the human drama that most compels our attention.
I won't argue that the media does have these biases. They're part of story structure, and so the stock in trade of the working reporter. Do you think a gardener would be disinterested in an interesting plant?
But to claim these as the
only prejudices is laughable. Look at the following passage from his own article:
Politicians have long known how to go over the heads of the press to the public. Had the voting franchise been restricted to reporters, neither Richard Nixon nor Ronald Reagan would have been elected president. Much of the Fourth Estate regarded Nixon as a thinly packaged autocrat, Reagan as a dumb nuclear cowboy. Both presidents were re-elected in landslides.
Thinly packaged autocrat and dumb nuclear cowboy? That's not weakness for war, gossip, or character-revealing narrative. That's unbiased prejudice toward people with a political or intellectual bent for which you don't care. I remember one editor at a major publication turning down a story idea that involved people who went target shooting in costume because "I don't really like guns."
How about the support of JFK in the 60s? He was glamorous, witty, attractive, charismatic - and he liked the press. There's another form of press bias: they want to be around the people who seem to reflect the impression they want to exude. In other words, these are people who often are suckers for flattery and blandishments. He addresses this slightly, but unsatisfactorily at the end of the article:
It is true that reporters are susceptible to flash and charm; like most cynics, they are romantics in disguise. JFK and the early Bill Clinton were bound to get better press than insecure Richard Nixon or earnest Al Gore (who for some reason hides a raucous sense of humor). Right now, Obama and John McCain are popular with reporters. But if the usual laws of press physics apply, the media will turn on both men before Election Day. The blogs and the talk-show hosts will rant. The voters will take it all in (or not). And then make up their own minds.
Yup, I'm sure the press will turn just like it did with JFK ... oh, wait, it didn't, really.
Another form of bias is when the journalistic community largely becomes slaves to social fashion. Thomas essentially notes this, without calling it a form of bias, when he recounts some of the ping-pong back and forth between toady and antagonist, the reporting about WMDs and Iraq being a collective nadir.
In other words, there is tremendous bias in the media, because the media is made up of fallible people. To address the issue is important for journalists, but to try to package it in a form that doesn't taste bad is to continue the worst bias of all: that of a warped self-image.
Labels: ethics, journalism
Bush Aide Resigns After Admitting Plagiarism
An aide to President George W. Bush,
"responsible for outreach to conservative and Christian groups," as the Washington Post noted, resigned after admitting that he had plagiarized the work of others in a newspaper column he wrote on a regular basis for his hometown newspaper, the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel. According to the story:
On its Web site Friday, the newspaper said 20 of 38 Goeglein columns between 2000 and 2008 contained "portions copied from other sources without attribution." News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt said Goeglein had written 80 or 90 columns for the newspaper in a relationship that began more than 20 years ago.
On its Web site Friday, the newspaper said 20 of 38 Goeglein columns between 2000 and 2008 contained "portions copied from other sources without attribution." News-Sentinel Editor Kerry Hubartt said Goeglein had written 80 or 90 columns for the newspaper in a relationship that began more than 20 years ago.
What was finally noticed by blogger
Nancy Nall was material he had lifted from former Dartmouth professor Jeffrey L. Hart. What gave him away to Nall was mentioning a Dartmouth professor, Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey, in a column about education:
Now, I’m sure Tim’s spare brain space isn’t cluttered, as mine is, with “American Idol,” the internet and what’s-for-dinner concerns. Certainly string quartets waft through his paneled study, where he reads and thinks under the mounted ibex head, far from the vulgar buzz of pop culture. Surely he can acquaint himself with notable professors of philosophy at Dartmouth while I watch the Oscars. But this name was so goofy, just for the hell of it, I Googled it. And look what I found.
She shows the evidence. According to the Post story:
Peter Wehner, a former Bush aide, said Goeglein was regarded as "a person of sterling character" who was Bush's "eyes and ears" in the conservative world. "It is an important job, and he really developed a bond of trust with the conservative world," Wehner said.
Ah, there's the problem - he focused on family values, not professional ethics.
Labels: ethics, newspapers, plagiarism, Politics
