scot hacker's foobar blog

Since posting a couple of days ago about how Byte has erected toll gates around a decade’s worth of historical computing content (including two years worth of my own), some very interesting threads have been exchanged between Byte authors in private mail.

Everyone understands the advertising crunch, everyone knows that salaries have to come from somewhere, but no one likes the remedy, or is even sure that it is one. No matter how you slice it, Byte has broken probably tens of thousands of incoming links to piles of historical technical content. For virtually every person following one of these links, the “Please register!” page they meet will simply be a dead end.

The author’s rights are just what our original contracts say they were. As it turns out, we have the right to repost content as submitted on our own sites three months after it appeared on Byte. Of course, that would still leave the content hovering in mid-air, unconnected to the rest of the Byte and CMP empires, and without their masthead, without the Byte imprimatur. The meat without the dish.
Continue reading “Disappeared Content”

Byte.com just announced that they could no longer cut it on the advertising model alone, and moved to a subscription model. $12/year gets you into all of the CMP web properties. That’s all well and good, except for the fact that most of the best technical content I’ve written is now stuck behind the CMP tollgate, inaccessible to all but the most committed readers. This effectively punches a big hole in my resume, and I’m already getting mail from people wanting to know how they can read a copy of “Who Controls the Bootloader” and other pieces. There’s got to be a better way. And if I knew what it was I’d be rich.

Have been grappling with the question of whether it should be okay to inline an artist’s image in my weblog, when relevant to a post.

Whether I inline an image from someone else’s web site or host a copy of the image on my server, I am helping myself to your “stuff” – either your bandwidth or your intellectual property. Are you concerned about bandwidth? If you’re like most webmasters, you like traffic. Presumably, you put that content online because you wanted it to be viewed by as many people as possible. You (or your work) craves attention. If you didn’t want it widely viewed, you wouldn’t have put it online to begin with. I think that’s fair to say. So if your goal is to have your content seen, why should you care whether it gets seen via my server or yours, my bandwidth or yours? The important thing is that it’s credited to the appropriate author/artist, right?

This is tricky stuff, because the whole notion of copyright is predicated on the right to copy – to keep a modicum of control in the hands of the artist. How can the artist maintain control of something that is not hosted on his/her own server?

On the other hand, can one hope to maintain control of something on the internet at all? I think the answer is probably… no. And yet I am not yet willing to let go of the notion that the artist is entitled to control his/her own work, even after s/he’s put it out there for public consumption. In the end, I think it’s ultimately harmless if I copy your image, host it on my site, and serve it up in my own pages, as long as I give you appropriate credit. The trouble with that is that you are depending on me to give you credit – the artist is at the mercy of other webmasters. And what if I don’t give you credit? Can you control that? Nope. But you can hope for a world where respect counts for something. On that note, I have decided it’s probably okay to repost copyrighted works in my weblog without seeking permission, but with credit. I know that’s not what copyright law says. It’s what I think is morally acceptable.

Mike read a catalog of electronics testing gizmos on the way down to SLO as if it were a magazine. When I got to my brother’s house, dad and brother were reading a catalog of Dremel and other wooodworking tools as if it were a magazine. Why don’t I “read” any catalogs? What catalogs would I read if I did?

More and more web sites and devices are using associative database programming to try and determine what you will like based on what you’ve expressed an interest in in the past. And what if the algorithms read you wrong? Article at WSJ about such snafus – you watch a movie about a guy whose wife becomes bisexual, and your TiVo immediately assumes you want a steady diet of gay programming. You try to psyche it out by counter-programming a ton of “super straight” content, end up overcompensating… is this the first example of artificial intelligence going wonderfully, terribly wrong in the home? We don’t have a TiVo, but if we did, I’m sure it would think Amy and I just l-o-o-o-o-o-v-e birthing babies.