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January 18, 2003

Mine, I tell you, mine... all mine!
: I've put up a new copyright notice, just to irritate the copyright mob.

: Just for the record, since I am baiting these folks, I'll repeat here what I said in a comment below: I don't defend Disney (having covered entertainment and come up against them at their control-freak worst). I also don't necessarily defend the exact number of years now given to copyright.
But I do defend copyright holders against the arch language I'm reading everywhere: That by holding onto their creations, they are thieves. Bullshit. Creation itself is generous. Creation deserves compensation. Creation has value. Authors are copyright holders, too. They are not thieves.

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Blog heresy
: I'm sorry, but I just have to ask:
Is Lawrence Lessig overrated?
Well, the truth is, he has to be. Like Mother Theresa, he has been put up on a pedestal at nosebleed altitude. The blog admiration is blushworthy. No one is that brilliant. But Lessig doesn't blush. He has someone maintain a third-person blog (in addition to his first-personal version) covering of all his personal happenings, like a year-round Christmas letter.
Of course, he's a smart man and earnest.
But he lost the Eldred case, big time.
He was kept away from the Microsoft case for good reason; Microsoft was perfectly justified objecting to him advising the judge (and we now know what a bozo that judge was).
Now here's Lessig proposing a ludicrious and unworkable copyright tax that would unfairly burden copyright holders and their heirs and create a gargantuan federal bureacracy and, by the way, offend American First Amendment sensibilities (let's bring back the stamp tax!).
I've admired the guy but I fear that others admire him too much and I'm overdosed on the Lessig-worship. He's mortal.

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Bar none
: Great poster-art with sly bar-code jokes from a Russian agency.

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And keep it holy
: I hope (and pray) that we are beyond the day in America when being Jewish could hinder an American from running for the White House.
If Joe Lieberman has religious problems in his race, they may not be with his faith but with his orthodoxy. We are not an orthodox nation; we don't understand orthodxy; we don't trust it.
So it's helpful to read a definition of Lieberman's own "Modern Orthodoxy" at the always-enlightening Jewsweek.com:

Modern Orthodoxy aspires to strict adherence to traditional Jewish law (keeping the Sabbath and kosher) while fully engaging in secular society...
Rabbi Barry Freundel, the spiritual leader of Georgetown's Kesher Israel and Lieberman's rabbi, believes that his congregant is fully ensconced in both worlds. "He has a willingness to fully engage modernity," says Freundel. "I don't think you could have a president from the more right-wing Orthodox camp because they don't fully embrace modernity."
The fact that he doesn't stick out may not only place him in a position to teach America what it means to be a Jew, but will teach Jews what it means to be Jewish in America. "So on Shabbat he'll walk to synagogue, there'll be kosher food in the White House," says political analyst Norman Green. "He'll be forcing a lot of conservative and reform Jews to reconsider their Jewish practices."

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George's game
: I was giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt, thinking that he and his team were strategists. But look where we are now:
We're in a political and diplomatic (remember this word, bloggers) quagmire in Iraq. Now we have to wait -- how long? a year? -- until a gun is found with sufficient smoke to choke the objections of the world and meanwhile, the economy and the Bush presidency slide and slide more.
In North Korea, Bush has ignored the most basic lesson of parenthood that anyone learns when managing a 3-year-old: Be consistent and do what you say you're going to do. Or else you lose all your authority.
He's no strategist, I fear.
Chess is not his game.
Checkers is.

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Always On
The Portland Business Journal [via I Want Media] reports on the start of a tech biz gang weblog under Red Herrings' Tony Perkins called Always On. It wants to be a Gawker of technology and it may grow into that but thus far, it's a bit awkward.

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A pissing contest
: If I'm translating this correctly (and there's always a good chance I'm not) there has been a rousing media feud going on in Germany:
A writer for the "taz" newspaper reports in May that Kai Diekmann, editor of the very-tabloid Bild, had an operation to lengthen his penis (it's more poetic auf Deutsch: he had einer Operation zur Penisverlängerung") -- but that it failed.
Then Diekmann sued, seeking 30,000 Euros. I'm not sure whether he was suing because they said (a) he had the operation, (b) he needed the operation, (c) it failed. I'd love to read that brief.
Next, a judge ruled that the penis reportage was satire.
But it's not over. Now Diekmann is going to appeal and the headline writers are having fun with the words "penis" and "extension." [via Monoklon]

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