Slashdot Mirror

Shit like this is basically thinly veiled bigotry. It usually starts with this, but then they come for gay romance, trying to get rid of every type of romance they don't like. Y'know, because anything that isn't heterosexual intercourse between cisgender white people is icky.

Their methodology was atrocious, their so-called university affiliation was denied by the college, and they used unethical research practices. this is NOT science; it is GARBAGE.

Check these out, yo:
A thorough summary of the fail
Another roundup

As an academic who's written critical works on contemporary media, I'm all for fair use and the freedom for fans or opponents to employ some material in their own work. But that isn't what this proposed Lexicon is, in truth.

This isn't fair use (news reporting, educational or criticism, although the publisher tries to pretend the latter) or transformative in any way: van der Ark's Lexicon is a summary of elements in the work. That means that, as a secondary work about Harry Potter, this is much more akin to the Castle Rock case: copying fragments of the work.

More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications (like some of the other guidebooks she's produced), while this work is taking the unpaid labour of countless fans who contributed to the Lexicon website and turning it to the personal profit of the site's disgruntled owner (who's cranky because his good buddy "Jo" wouldn't give him a paying job in the UK to edit her own encyclopedia).

The whole imbroglio has been amply covered by the helpful souls at Fandom Wank if you want to get a feel for what others besides OSC have said. (Anne Rice has even weighed in!)

It exists. It's called Blackjack's Law.

People don't have a choice about their race, they do about the software they use.

Or since this is the Internet, look at this page and see why the analogy is silly -

Video and WMV - OTP. pwnt

I like the "The REAL cause of the civil war icon".

Well, ask and ye shall recieve. I'm setting up a delivery site where you can grab an Ubuntu Breezy .deb right now. And here it is.

Done, and attributed to you.

FYI, that's the repository for such laws, covering all sorts of online discussion. It's also the corpus of law from which we Internet Lawyers prosecute.

You are receiving this message as you have been identified as possibly engaging in the act of unfairly criticising an author and are thus banned from reading stories on this site. This ban will remain for a period of seven days - repeat offenders will be banned permanently.

To see it in action, go here and click the "Ban Me Harder" link. Of course everyone figured out that just typing the url in bypassed this.