Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design seems like a swell chap, but his recent post on applying the GPL to premium Wordpress themes exemplifies the kind of erroneous thinking I frequently find in the creative community. In trying to apply scarcity rules to infinite goods, he misses out on an opportunity to utilize, rather than [...]
Even as content industries, patent trolls, and cretins shamelessly abuse their monopoly privileges, some of their behavior filters down to creators with even less to gain from such behavior. The false concepts of idea “ownership” and permission culture are a flesh-melting venom chewing away at our creative body.
Despite the attempts to elevate it to something tantamount to actual items, so-called “intellectual property” occupies the Land of Make-Believe along with unicorns and elves. Yet the very suggestion that the monopoly privileges associated with IP are invalid raises hackles and provokes fervent responses from the faithful.
IP apologists like to say that people such as myself who don’t like seeing ads, installing malware on our computers, or paying for copies of an infinite good have a “sense of entitlement” to content. As you might have guessed, I think this is hogwash. Corporations and content creators have gotten used to controlling [...]
Yesterday people both on- and offline were crowing about how Pink Floyd “won” a legal battle with their record label, EMI. At last, the band can force their fans to buy digital versions of their songs as full albums, rather than individual tracks. Wait, what? This was worth fighting over?
Remember Ubisoft’s amazing new DRM scheme? The one that would stop all those nefarious “pirates” by forcing legitimate purchasers of Ubisoft games to be constantly online? Yeah, well, it got cracked. Mere hours after the release, at that.
It looks like a few suits over at Penguin publishing decided to “connect with this whole internet thingy” by turning their eBooks into applications. Because what’s missing when you read a book is a little self-contained social network / entertainment platform. This is the kind of mistake that stems directly from the mistaken idea that [...]
Ever since Ubisoft decided that forcing users to constantly “phone home” over the internet was a great way to stop unauthorized sharing of their games, the tired old DRM debate has been experiencing yet another flareup. I was rather disappointed with the treatment the issue got by a few of the webcomics I follow: While [...]
I finished watching Dollhouse this weekend, further convincing me that somebody like Joss Whedon is perfectly positioned to lead his contemporaries into the wonderful world of 21st century business models, a la Trent Reznor in music. Careful, spoilers inside.
The Bennet Lincoff proposal has been getting a decent bit of play from the “copyright compromise” crowd, and advocates replacing copyright with a renamed “digital transmission right” that covers how digital files are used online. It’s voluntary, but the unspoken part is of course that if you don’t pay for a license, you’re operating illegally [...]
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- Lame: People who study in chapel. Text, play games on your phone, talk, but don't try to read your notes in the dark. #fb #school 2010-11-10
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Interesting Links
- Half-Life: Origins (Live Action)
- One Year in Washington
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- Dear tea party, we are not your enemy
- The Price of Plutocracy
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Listening To...
- Danny Byrd - Feet Won't Touch the Ground
- Adele - Rolling In The Deep
- Nancy Elizabeth - Hey Son
- Another Electronic Musician - Walking at Noon
- Simon & Garfunkel - El Condor Pasa (If I Could)
- Within Temptation - Where Is The Edge
- Dream Theater - Panic Attack
- Access To Arasaka - Aftermath
- Danny Byrd - Feet Won't Touch the Ground
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Bookshelf
Malcolm Gladwell - Blink
Patrick Rothfuss - The Wise Man's Fear (Kingkiller Chronicle, #2)
Jodi Picoult - My Sister's Keeper
Rudy Rucker - Postsingular
J.D. Robb - J.D. Robb In Death: The First Cases (In Death #1 & 2)
mistypedURL by Michael Castello is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.