A better precedent is Mark Russell, who's made a career doing pretty much the same thing the JibJab lads are doing: taking well-known songs and rewriting the lyrics for satirical political commentary. As far as I know (don't quote me) he's never been directly targeted by a copyright suit, but the Supreme Court's ruling in the Orbison v. 2 Liv Crew "Oh, Pretty Woman" case seemed to say that what he does is permissible.
The difference is that parody makes fun of the original work that the work is derived from; satire is a derivative work that makes fun of something else. Parody is protected, satire is not fair use.
Not quite. Satire doesn't have to be derivative of anything. It's an approach to criticism using ridicule, full stop. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Modest Proposal" were both wholly original works... and definitely satire. Same with Voltaire's "Candide" or Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove". Parody is one particular form of satire, using a distorted derivative of the subject as its means of ridiculing it.
Jibjab's little thingy is definitely satire. No question. It's also derivative of "This Land". No doubt. The question is whether its status as satire gives it the "fair use" exemption that other derivative works do not get. For that it would have to be a satire of the original song, i.e. a parody.
(I think it is; you and the courts get to make up your own minds.)
...is JibJab's work a parody of TLIYL, or is it comedy at the expense of Bush and Kerry...?
It's both.
Sure, Kerry and Bush are main targets of parody here, but so is the whole theme of Guthrie's song. They could have used "Yankee Doodle" or "Disco Duck" or "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" as the template, but they chose "This Land Is Your Land" for what it (used to) mean.
Mod parent up. I've been wondering where this watered down "no trespassing" lyric folks are quoting came from, when the version I remember took a wry jibjab at the very notion of private property. (A sentiment I don't fully agree with, but I respect the man for expressing it, and especially his clever way of doing so.)
This is what happens when artists sell the rights to their work for a buck or two. Got a problem with the RIAA, MPAA etc, talk to the stupid artists who are having caviar dreams and champagne wishes.
I never imagined that I would ever hear the words "caviar" and "champagne" used in reference to Woody "This Guitar Kills Fascists" Guthrie. He's a (formerly) walking, talking counterexample to your stereotype.
The point is, artists are in complete control UNTIL the moment they worry about $$ instead of art.
Meanwhile, back in the real world... Artists always have to worry about both money and art. You can't write songs if you can't eat. I'm not disputing the point that too many so-called "artists" are far more interested in the money than the muse, but when the muse isn't feeding you and a cartel is blocking you from access to an audience (as the RIAA has historically done), "selling out" is an option that many take whilst holding their noses.
This comes mere weeks after Slate recommended Firefox over Internet Explorer.
Now, if we can just get the folks in the Office division to start recommending other operating systems over Windows, we could finally get that part of the business sold/spun off to a separate company... just like the judge wanted.
Speaking as a university techie here: Your university really ought to figure out a way to fix their systems to allow you to use their SMTP server from off-campus. What they're doing now was a reasonable, easy-to-implement, fairly-effective policy for spam-reduction at the time they started doing it, but it's not going to work in an SPF-enabled internet. It was never more than a temporary kludge, and if they're honest they'll admit that, roll up their sleeves, and roll out a more correct forward-looking solution.
it will make it more harder for guys like me to run an SMTP server on their own Linux box from a dynamic IP address.
Yeah, but it's not rocket science... more like making paper airplanes. If you can't handle it, I'm not sure you should be allowed to run an SMTP server (dynamically addressed or not). OK, you passed the intelligence test of figuring out how to install Linux and an smtpd, but now there's going to be a test of your ability to deal with this. Just think of how 1337 it'll make you. I just spent 10 minutes publishing SPF records for my domains and the ones I host... something I didn't want to have to figure out, but I can cope with it. That's just an aspect of life: a series of progressive tests.
And it will do pretty much nothing to prevent spam.
This statement is in direct contradiction to your first one. By making it incrementally harder to send spam, that will help to prevent some of it. There will never be a magic bullet that "prevents spam". We can't "prevent death" either. But the incremental steps we can take to reduce the chances of it happening today are Good Things To Do.
It is STRONGLY backlit. That's obvious from the body shadow. So why is the astronaut almost perfectly lit all-around?.... maybe the surface of the moon is providing the frontlight?
You've answered your own question. The dust on the surface of the moon is highly reflective, to the point that it even provides enough illumination to see things here on Earth in the middle of the night. It's more than bright enough to provide an even "fill" light for all those Apollo snapshots, in which the subjects are surrounded by the stuff at close range.
Just tape the worn flag to the exterior of the craft, and it'll burn up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere. But I think it'll be OK for a few millennia, at least; there isn't much in its current environment to wear it out.
My textbook can beat up your textbook, kid. Mine says differently.
Unless your textbook was written by Jehovah Himself, you have to consider the possibility that maybe the author just didn't know what he was talking about.
And you know what? He didn't. A little empirical observation would demonstrate that to you. Did they bother mentioning that in your junior high science class, or was it all just overly-trusting appeals to authority?
I think it was firmly planted on the light side of the moon.
The moon does not have a "light side" and a "dark side". It has a side facing us, and a side away from us, but those sides (as anyone who looks up at the moon from time to time will notice) go through a cylcle of light and dark every month. That flag planted by Apollo 11 spends a couple weeks at a time in near darkness, with only reflected light from Earth to illuminate it.
When I was born my parents spelled my given name "Tod" on my birth certificate. They simply thought that was how to spell it. The joke in the family is that I had a German doctor who thought I was stillborn. {rimshot}
By the time I learned how to spell my name, they'd discovered that "Todd" was the usual spelling, and they/I used it everywhere. When I was 15, I had to have my name legally changed to "Todd" so I could have it spelled that way on my driver license. It was fairly easy and inexpensive because it was just a spelling change and I was still a minor; I understand it gets more complicated and costly for an adult. But it might be worth the trouble, to avoid spending the rest of your life repeatedly having to reconcile the two variants of your name.
You can pick up an early iMac or late beige G3, capable of running OS X nicely, for very little money. It might need a RAM upgrade, but they use the same sticks as old PCs of the same speed, so that's not going to cost you much. With the help of XPostFacto, you can even get some of the "unsupported" pre-G3 models to run OS X well enough for web-site testing purposes. Personally, I'd suggest spending a little more to get a used 12" G3 iBook (going for roughly $1/MHz on eBay), and get a swell little notebook in the process.
I'll let you in on a secret: forest fires (in general) are good for forests. They routinely start naturally (e.g. lightning strikes) and they clear out overgrown areas, leaving good conditions for meadows and eventually forests to regrow. The only reason we need to spend so much stopping these fires is because so many people are putting their homes in the middle of them (a bit like building in a flood plain or on a fault line). Logging to prevent forest fires would just cause that much more environmental damage.
So, exactly how many of those out of work and possibly homeless people do you think own computers and pay monthly service fees for internet access?
I don't know... what percentage of employed people in Illinois have internet access? It's probably about the same. Most people applying for unemployment benefits (or even already collecting) are not homeless. They're people who, until recently, had typical incomes with typical lifestyles, who still hope to return to them soon. They're probably cutting expenses as much as they can, but internet access is something that a savvy unemployed person keeps, to facilitate job hunting. I've been unemployed twice in the past decade, and both times, internet access was (wisely, I think) one of my budget priorities; instead I switched my internet service to the cheapest package and cut elsewhere (e.g. cable TV, cell phone, entertainment, food choices, fuel consumption) rather than cancel it altogether.
Play chicken with the fire alarm. Start small fires and see how long you can let them burn before the alarm goes off. Note: This is not recommended in halon-protected facilities.
Slashdot Mirror
But optical readers are.
A better precedent is Mark Russell, who's made a career doing pretty much the same thing the JibJab lads are doing: taking well-known songs and rewriting the lyrics for satirical political commentary. As far as I know (don't quote me) he's never been directly targeted by a copyright suit, but the Supreme Court's ruling in the Orbison v. 2 Liv Crew "Oh, Pretty Woman" case seemed to say that what he does is permissible.
That's all Bruce Springsteen can do, either... and he wrote the durn song. :)
(Meanwhile, John Mellencamp only gets to sulk about "Pink Houses" being co-opted as a feel-good-about-America song.)
Not quite. Satire doesn't have to be derivative of anything. It's an approach to criticism using ridicule, full stop. Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Modest Proposal" were both wholly original works... and definitely satire. Same with Voltaire's "Candide" or Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove". Parody is one particular form of satire, using a distorted derivative of the subject as its means of ridiculing it.
Jibjab's little thingy is definitely satire. No question. It's also derivative of "This Land". No doubt. The question is whether its status as satire gives it the "fair use" exemption that other derivative works do not get. For that it would have to be a satire of the original song, i.e. a parody.
(I think it is; you and the courts get to make up your own minds.)
It's both.
Sure, Kerry and Bush are main targets of parody here, but so is the whole theme of Guthrie's song. They could have used "Yankee Doodle" or "Disco Duck" or "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" as the template, but they chose "This Land Is Your Land" for what it (used to) mean.
lyrics from Guthrie's original manuscript
Mod parent up. I've been wondering where this watered down "no trespassing" lyric folks are quoting came from, when the version I remember took a wry jibjab at the very notion of private property. (A sentiment I don't fully agree with, but I respect the man for expressing it, and especially his clever way of doing so.)
I never imagined that I would ever hear the words "caviar" and "champagne" used in reference to Woody "This Guitar Kills Fascists" Guthrie. He's a (formerly) walking, talking counterexample to your stereotype.
The point is, artists are in complete control UNTIL the moment they worry about $$ instead of art.
Meanwhile, back in the real world... Artists always have to worry about both money and art. You can't write songs if you can't eat. I'm not disputing the point that too many so-called "artists" are far more interested in the money than the muse, but when the muse isn't feeding you and a cartel is blocking you from access to an audience (as the RIAA has historically done), "selling out" is an option that many take whilst holding their noses.
I checked /. briefly on a cruise from Seattle to ports in Alaska.
They could be using a satellite in polar orbit (at whatever speed/distance) which could give them connectivity roughly half of the time.
Now, if we can just get the folks in the Office division to start recommending other operating systems over Windows, we could finally get that part of the business sold/spun off to a separate company... just like the judge wanted.
Speaking as a university techie here: Your university really ought to figure out a way to fix their systems to allow you to use their SMTP server from off-campus. What they're doing now was a reasonable, easy-to-implement, fairly-effective policy for spam-reduction at the time they started doing it, but it's not going to work in an SPF-enabled internet. It was never more than a temporary kludge, and if they're honest they'll admit that, roll up their sleeves, and roll out a more correct forward-looking solution.
Yeah, but it's not rocket science... more like making paper airplanes. If you can't handle it, I'm not sure you should be allowed to run an SMTP server (dynamically addressed or not). OK, you passed the intelligence test of figuring out how to install Linux and an smtpd, but now there's going to be a test of your ability to deal with this. Just think of how 1337 it'll make you. I just spent 10 minutes publishing SPF records for my domains and the ones I host... something I didn't want to have to figure out, but I can cope with it. That's just an aspect of life: a series of progressive tests.
And it will do pretty much nothing to prevent spam.
This statement is in direct contradiction to your first one. By making it incrementally harder to send spam, that will help to prevent some of it. There will never be a magic bullet that "prevents spam". We can't "prevent death" either. But the incremental steps we can take to reduce the chances of it happening today are Good Things To Do.
You've answered your own question. The dust on the surface of the moon is highly reflective, to the point that it even provides enough illumination to see things here on Earth in the middle of the night. It's more than bright enough to provide an even "fill" light for all those Apollo snapshots, in which the subjects are surrounded by the stuff at close range.
Just tape the worn flag to the exterior of the craft, and it'll burn up on re-entry to Earth's atmosphere. But I think it'll be OK for a few millennia, at least; there isn't much in its current environment to wear it out.
Unless your textbook was written by Jehovah Himself, you have to consider the possibility that maybe the author just didn't know what he was talking about.
And you know what? He didn't. A little empirical observation would demonstrate that to you. Did they bother mentioning that in your junior high science class, or was it all just overly-trusting appeals to authority?
Your science textbook was written by an idiot with no knowledge of basic astronomy. Sorry.
The moon does not have a "light side" and a "dark side". It has a side facing us, and a side away from us, but those sides (as anyone who looks up at the moon from time to time will notice) go through a cylcle of light and dark every month. That flag planted by Apollo 11 spends a couple weeks at a time in near darkness, with only reflected light from Earth to illuminate it.
By the time I learned how to spell my name, they'd discovered that "Todd" was the usual spelling, and they/I used it everywhere. When I was 15, I had to have my name legally changed to "Todd" so I could have it spelled that way on my driver license. It was fairly easy and inexpensive because it was just a spelling change and I was still a minor; I understand it gets more complicated and costly for an adult. But it might be worth the trouble, to avoid spending the rest of your life repeatedly having to reconcile the two variants of your name.
You can pick up an early iMac or late beige G3, capable of running OS X nicely, for very little money. It might need a RAM upgrade, but they use the same sticks as old PCs of the same speed, so that's not going to cost you much. With the help of XPostFacto, you can even get some of the "unsupported" pre-G3 models to run OS X well enough for web-site testing purposes. Personally, I'd suggest spending a little more to get a used 12" G3 iBook (going for roughly $1/MHz on eBay), and get a swell little notebook in the process.
(And rather large, I might add.)
That's because the kernel is widely and freely available under the GPL.
I'll let you in on a secret: forest fires (in general) are good for forests. They routinely start naturally (e.g. lightning strikes) and they clear out overgrown areas, leaving good conditions for meadows and eventually forests to regrow. The only reason we need to spend so much stopping these fires is because so many people are putting their homes in the middle of them (a bit like building in a flood plain or on a fault line). Logging to prevent forest fires would just cause that much more environmental damage.
I don't know... what percentage of employed people in Illinois have internet access? It's probably about the same. Most people applying for unemployment benefits (or even already collecting) are not homeless. They're people who, until recently, had typical incomes with typical lifestyles, who still hope to return to them soon. They're probably cutting expenses as much as they can, but internet access is something that a savvy unemployed person keeps, to facilitate job hunting. I've been unemployed twice in the past decade, and both times, internet access was (wisely, I think) one of my budget priorities; instead I switched my internet service to the cheapest package and cut elsewhere (e.g. cable TV, cell phone, entertainment, food choices, fuel consumption) rather than cancel it altogether.
Play chicken with the fire alarm. Start small fires and see how long you can let them burn before the alarm goes off. Note: This is not recommended in halon-protected facilities.