Slipr

Question:
If someone posts a home video to YouTube, and I want to use a snippet of it in a commercial video, would doing so constitute a copyright violation even if they haven’t in any way claimed their rights to it? (i.e. a © or some creative commons thing)

Answer:
It would be a copyright violation. Because according to Congress, everything produced after 1985 is automatically copyrighted to its creator whether or not they stick the little © on it or make any other explicit claim to it. How do I know? Because Ze Frank Told me So.

Amazing, really.

Some people hate the redesigned WIRED.com. (For reference, here’s the old design. I liked its no-nonsense stream-of-news format, but there’s no way it could accommodate the volume of content the current site accommodates — much of it from their network of blogs.)

But I love it, probably because, way back when I was building seedmagazine.com and scienceblogs was just a notion, my first impulse was to integrate the two, much as WIRED has on its current homepage. Acquired bloggers and mainstream journalists, happily co-existing on the same site.

That idea got vetoed, which is just as well — ScienceBlogs has a character all its own that wouldn’t have been captured in that vision.

But WIRED implemented my original vision pretty successfully. (It’s amazing how often things are simply in the air.) I’m sure it’s done wonders for their traffic. Part of the reason WIRED’s effort is genius is that it recognizes that on the internet, there is no content hierarchy: any chunk of information, be it a news report, an opinion piece, a blog entry, a single image, five seconds of video, can be the next megahit, can go viral, can climb the charts at Digg, Reddit, Slashdot or Stumbleupon, can make it to the top 10 results for some fairly well trafficked search terms.

So on the homepage of WIRED, magazine content, web-only news, wire stories, hijacked Wikipedia content, “Geekipedia” entries and blog entries happily coexist. And it’s pretty much all good stuff.

But today I noticed something new — maybe it’s been up a while, since I mostly find my way to WIRED stories through their RSS feed.

Hottest Web Links…?

Turns out it’s Reddit, but pasted into the WIRED homepage.

There’s only one problem with this seemingly natural effort at corporate synergy (Conde Nast owns Reddit), which is that Reddit is full of kooks. Check out what’s on the homepage of WIRED at the moment I’m posting this thanks to the ‘magic’ of mob rule:

Now don’t get me wrong, the science links on Reddit are about ten times better than the ones on Digg — more thoughtful, more relevant, and less likely to be an urban legend. But the homepage of Reddit? It’s been completely hijacked by folks with a very particular political bent.

This is the sometimes unfortunate consequence of vote-driven user-generated news aggregators like Reddit and Digg being powered by their most rabid users. It’s tyranny of the majority. Or not even the majority, but whatever is the most active special interest group on the site.

All those checks and balances the founding fathers realized were necessary to keep the government from being a too-efficient expression of the nation’s passionate mood swings have yet to be implemented in these sites. They’re like those third world democracies that demonstrate that democracy does not always equal peace and prosperity.

There’s only one logical explanation for why WIRED, which is a great site, would sport an unfiltered version of Reddit on the homepage. (And not even a version you can interact with directly on the WIRED homepage, save as a passive observer!)

It’s obvious that Conde Nast looks with envy at the superior traffic of Digg. So how better to drive traffic to Reddit than to turn a tab on WIRED.com into a giant house ad for it?

I call bullshit. Shame on you, corporate overlords.

I’m the blue smiley-face. The little AOL man is a coworker.

I’m kind of disappointed he didn’t walk around today in the shirt, proudly displaying his excellent taste.

Dear consumer electronics industry,

I am disappointed in your recent offerings. None of them feel like they might actually improve, rather than needlessly complicate, my life.

The cell phone was a nice touch. And the ipod — whoa! The Nintendo DS was OK too, but as an entertainment device it’s got stiff competition in the form of a centuries-old technology known as books.

But smartphones? Are you aware that I’m away from a computer only about 2 waking hours a day as it is? And what is this bullshit tablet PC? And bluetooth headsets? Please.

Here’s what I want to know: where is my monitorless computer? Why can’t I subvocalize my e-mails rather than typing them? How come telepresence, augmented reality, and true always-on connectivity have yet to come to fruition?

Second Life is nice if you’re not doing so well in your First one, but technologies that help the handicapped — whether it’s a motorized wheelchair for the immobilized or virtual worlds for the socially awkward — have only limited utility for us everyday Joes.

Please start building things that actually make my life different, or help me be more productive or less likely to experience any idle moments in which I might contemplate my various existential crises.

Or at least, like social networks, become necessary once everyone else is on them. Is that too much to ask?

The Times is killing me, they really are. Maybe it’s because they’re the only paper I read with any frequency (besides Der Spiegel, which is mostly good for keeping up with baby polar bears), or maybe it’s because they’re one of the few who act like they’re actually trying where the web is concerned.

This is just classic:

(It’s a screengrab from a Times article on the use of computers in the kitchen.)

So, let’s see, we have the times linking to their topic page on Hewlett-Packard (do I care?) and their Marketwatch page on Circuit City (ditto).

But not the one thing I, the user, would actually care to click on — a link to outside info on the product they are discussing. So basically you’re telling me, in all the research your reporter did on this story, he or she didn’t find one particularly insightful outside article / blog post on the subject? Or you just don’t want to direct me off your site? I do use tabbed browsing, you know.

So why would they do such a thing?

Easy: SEO dogma says internal linking is key to promoting the search engine prominence of all the topic pages the Times has generated in hopes of getting more of that sweet, sweet search engine traffic. With respect to the user, their attitude appears to be “meh.”

So, I’ll continue counting on Engadget, Gizmodo and Google to get me a survey of the lay of the land on a given product. Thanks for totally not fulfilling that other most important role that all online news organizations must fulfill: to be a curator of others’ content and not just a producer of original content. (More on that at a later date.)

It’s really too bad Seed had me sign a contract that prevents me from talking about anything they do that could vaguely be construed as a trade secret, because the ScienceBlogs model is worth talking about from both a business and a media perspective.

Regardless, there is plenty about ScienceBlogs that is not the least bit secret and is obvious even to an outsider, which I am rapidly becoming having left Seed almost two years ago after starting ScienceBlogs. For instance their latest move: partnering with German publishing company Hubert Burda Media to do a European edition of ScienceBlogs. (press release here)

(Aside: What is it with all these privately-held Western European publishing companies getting into science publishing? Holtzbrinck (German) owns Scientific American and Nature, while Bonnier (Swedish) bought Popular Science and is about to launch a new title called Science Illustrated. I suppose it’s obvious: they don’t answer to shareholders, so they’re free to get into solid, slow-growth niches, and they’re from science-savvy countries.)

Another aside, this one on significance: some people think ScienceBlogs is niche… but it’s only as niche as science itself is. On the web, it’s a monster. Just check out this Alexa graph, in which I compare it to a known quantity, namely the traffic of Sciam.com.

I’m guessing, based on that graph, that ScienceBlogs is doing at least 4 million pageviews per month, and as many as 5-6 million, and scoring at least a million and a half uniques. (Update: Paid Content reports that Seed claims 1.7 mm uniques / month.)

On top of that, everyone knows that, as hobbyists with day jobs who really just want a platform from which to speak, bloggers work for peanuts. (Just ask Jason Calcanis, who built Weblogs, Inc. on the backs of bloggers making $4 a post. Bloggers are making more now — I heard treehugger pays $10 a post and SuicideGirls, which, believe it or not, has a ‘news’ service, pays closer to 12 or 13, but it’s still nothing compared to what journalists get paid for their time… or is it… I’ll have to post on the economics of being an actual blogger another day.)

Update: Paid Content also reports that Seed is now offering revenue share to bloggers, or at least to the ones they’ll launch with in Europe. I sure hope the bloggers in the U.S. are getting the same deal.

The point I’m getting to in a roundabout way is that going overseas is a completely logical move for Seed. That’s because the entire ScienceBlogs model is built around acquiring, acquiring, acquiring. If you’re making money on every single blog, why not just keep adding them to your network, up to the limit of quality blogs that are out there? It’s what Clive Thompson called the Record Label model of the blog business (whose adherents include Weblogs Inc., B5Media, PopSugar and its companions, etc.), and frankly, it’s the future of online media. That, too, I will have to save for another post.

So having hoovered up all the good U.S. science bloggers (believe me, I know… every time I look around for good blogs that aren’t on SB, I realize just how many of them they’ve already got) why not expand into other languages? Frankly the only thing limiting the ultimate growth of SB is the amount of resources Seed wants to throw at it, and possibly also the potential for the overall quality of the site to go downhill if too many voices dilute its lovably idiosyncratic personality.

I’m glad that ScienceBlogs seems to be doing so well. (Seed, the magazine… not so much… but maybe that’s just because I’ve seen the sausage being made.) Mostly because when I was building ScienceBlogs, I was scared out of my mind that, as with all startups, things wouldn’t work out, the company would go under, and ScienceBlogs would be shortly disbanded. But it didn’t, and Michael Behe will forever rue the day.

When your efforts to convince people that downloading content are mocked this mercilessly, it’s probably time to give up.

produced by The IT Crowd

Same theme, different comedy team:

Awkward Pictures on Illegal Downloading

Spotted on GigaOm…

The Last Night of Misshapes: Hip, Post-New-Wave and Through
NY Times

The episode with losing my twitter name had a happy resolution, as I received the following today:

Hi Christopher,

Just wanted to confirm: your user name is yours again. We have a list of requested names from MTV who potentially belong to other people, but if they don’t want to give them up, they don’t have to. Most times people don’t mind, but sometimes they do; we apologize for the trouble. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Aha! So it was MTV that tried to steal my username. Somehow I’m not surprised. If they weren’t already loathing themselves for creating some of the lowest brow entertainment on Earth I’d take this opportunity to heap even more scorn on them.

Three cheers to Twitter for doing the right thing.