Category: Rants

Dear People

I have been given the task of getting links for our websites that have good page rank on the links directories.
In addition we have many categories so your site will be place on an appropriate page.

If you would like to trade links please send me your website details.
If you are not the right person please pass this on to your webmaster.

Best Regards,
Helen Williams

Dear Robotic Spammer (Ms. Williams),

Sites with good page ranks have them, in part, because they do not participate in shady deals like you are talking about. Additionally, on the completely unlikely chance that this was supposed to be a legitimate offer; spamming my email via my contact form and queuing up a a torrent of comment spam in my blogs moderation queue is NOT the way to get me to cooperate with you. In fact, all it will do is get you added to my email’s spam filters and added to my blog’s comment blacklist.

Best Regards,
Mark

In a recent opinion piece on PCMag.com, Mr. Dvorak shows off his stunning lack of comprehension of the benefits to Creative Commons Licensing.

Will someone explain to me the benefits of a trendy system developed by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford?

CCL is a simple way for content creators to let everybody know what they’ll allow others to do with their work. There’s no lag time in tracking down the content creator/copyright holder/legal department and then phoning/emailing/snail-mailing them to find out if it would be okay to take their work and do X with it (whatever X might be). This simplifcation of the process allowing others to remix existing content is a wonderful benefit to the public and content creators alike. Content creators can take any CC licensed material they like, mix it up into something new and put it back out much more quickly without worrying that they’re going to be sued for breaking somebody’s copyright. The public benefits because this allows a lot more content to be created much more quickly.

A bit later in the article, Mr. Dvorak starts complaining about the optional commercial provisions in the CCL scheme.

This means that others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes? What difference does it make, if everyone is free and easy about this? In other words, a noncommercial site could distribute a million copies of something and that’s okay, but a small commercial site cannot deliver two copies if it’s for commercial purposes. What is this telling me?

Provided that the content creator tagged the content as having the Non-Commercial provision in a CC license; then it’s telling you that creator does not want to use their work in a commercial fasion. How hard is that to comprehend? The sad part is you almost picked up on a key reason people use CC licenses but you had to go at it backwards. Yes, a noncommercial site could distribute a million copies (of an appropriately licensed work) for free and that’s a great thing; articularly for the non-mainstream, unknown content creator who just wants to get their work out in the public eye.

Then Mr. Dvorak comes up with this bit of nonsense:

This is nonsense. Before Creative Commons I could always ask to reuse or mirror something. And that has not changed. And I could always use excerpts for commercial or noncommercial purposes. It’s called fair use. I can still do that, but Creative Commons seems to hint that with its license means that I cannot. At least not if I’m a commercial site and the noncommercial proviso is in effect. This is a bogus suggestion, because Creative Commons does not supersede the copyright laws.

If he had done even a modicum of research on the Creative Commons website; he would have found their page detailing the Baseline Rights included in ALL CC licenses. The only thing “bogus” about this suggestion is Mr. Dvorak’s claim that it’s the Creative Commons folk who are making it. A Creative Commons license doesn’t say you cannot have any fair use rights; it simply says “Hey friend, here’s some stuff for you to play with, so long as you’re willing to play by the rules.” And then it gives you a convenient link to check out what those rules are. Along those lines, Mr. Dvorak complained that the Creative Commons folk could sue somebody and ruin what little fair use rights remain to the public and again a quick look through the Creative Commons website puts paid to that bit of nonsense.

For his next delusion, Mr. Dvorak decides the Creative Commons folks are somehow corrupting Public Domain. I would have thought having a clear & concise document specifying that a work has been dedicated to the public domain is a good thing. *shrug* Maybe that’s why I’m a no-name blogger and not an editor at PC Magazine.

There are several more examples peppered throughout the remainder of Mr. Dvorak’s article. All of these examples could have been cleared up if he’d bothered to do a bit of looking around the Creative Commons website, but probably the most basic bit of guff that he writes is in the last paragraph of the article.

And it seems to actually weaken the copyrights you have coming to you without Creative Commons.

With this one sentence, we can see Mr. Dvorak appears to actually understand what a Creative Commons license does1. I would suppose since he has the basic idea that he does not agree with the concept behind Creative Commons and so wrote this rather inflamatory article. It seems to me Mr. Dvorak is suffering from RIAA syndrome. That is to say, he’s an established content creator who just does not understand –and doesn’t want to understand– the evolving landscape of the business environment.

1 A CC license removes the specific restrictions on the use of your content that you decide do not need to be on the content. One could consider this an intentional weakening of the copyright.

After doing a bit of house-cleaning1 and trying to fix a problem with Ariesna‘s computer2 when I decided to take a break and read some blogs off my portal page. At AWelkin‘s page, I ran across this link: 2005 Inaugural Celebration.

Estimated cost of the 2005 Presidential Inauguration celebration: $40 million
Amount currently pledged by the United States to aid victims of Sunday’s tsunami: $35 million
….
I read that the cost of your upcoming inauguration has surpassed $40 million. I also read this morning that the tsunami death toll has reached 114,000, and that more than 1,300 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since our 2003 invasion. I know too that many Iraqi civilians have suffered this past year.

I think it would be a magnanimous and inspiring act of Christian goodwill and worldwide solidarity if you were to forgo the planned inaugural celebrations this year and instead pledge those funds to worldwide disaster relief and the rebuilding of civilian infrastructure in Iraq. I think it would be a gesture that Americans, and indeed, the world, would never forget.
….

I thought that was rather inspired and stopped a moment to do the same. I post about it here to try spreading the word to encourage others to do the same.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I hope you all have a happy, safe & properous new year!

1 Stop that sniggering! Everybody has to clean their place some time and while I dislike doing it; sometimes the mood hits me. Today it hit me because I was drying a rug on the shower curtain bar and the water that came out of it was funny colored. It rather resembled the cat vomit that hit the rug last night; hence my desire to clean the tub before using it today.
2 Sorry dear, it’s still not working. I’ve got an alternative plan in mind now but it’s ugly. Tell you about it later.

Well, I gotta put this here too. I am trying to keep my political stuff mostly in the political groups, but you guys should probably know that there’s a strong possibility that the elections were hacked, and that as a result we have Bush. I don’t see this as a conservative or liberal issue. I see this as an integrity issue that ALL Americans should be concerned about. Our first clue should have been that the exit polls indicated almost the opposite of what happened.

For more of the above posting go give this a read.

If a post of a LiveJournal user isn’t good enough for you, try these sites on for size:

For exta fun, we have a report coming out of Cincinnati of how the election officials locked out the media “citing concerns about potential terrorism.”

County officials say they took the action Tuesday night for homeland security, although state elections officials said they didn’t know of any other Ohio county that closed off its elections board. Media organizations protested, saying it violated the law and the public’s rights. The Warren results, delayed for hours because of long lines that extended voting past the scheduled close of polls, were part of the last tallies that helped clinch President Bush’s re-election.

Call me a crackpot if you will, but I’m siding with the media on this one. There was no transparency in that count and the public’s right to know was violated by the Warren county election officials. Now let’s take a look at a couple of other snippets from the article:

A representative of The Associated Press, which had stringers at every Ohio board of elections site, said no such election-night access problems were reported outside of Warren County.
…
County Prosecutor Rachel Hutzel said commissioners “were within their rights” to restrict building access.
Having reporters and photographers around could have interfered with the count, she said.

Does it strike anybody else as odd that no other county in Ohio made any sort of notice about similar concerns? Or that not one other county had a problem with letting the media observe the count? According to Ms. Hutzel’s biography, posted on Warren County’s official website, she has been both the President and Treasurer of the Republican Women’s Club. Ms. Hutzel, if you don’t mind; please explain exactly how the media could have interfered?

Still not convinced that this election stinks? Go to Black Box Voting and see what they have to say about the security and tamperability of America’s electronic voting machines.