Hilliard's "historical fiction" is inevitably, to some significant degree, an assertion of fact. And in my opinion, the ambiguity about what is "historical" and what is "fiction" makes it worse, not better for Hilliard's case, and for so-called "historical fiction" generally.
He has Tolkien finding actual manuscripts in Elvish. Basically, the story is that Middle-earth was real. No one is going to stand up in court and say that's to ANY degree, "an assertion of fact".
No? What if it was commercials of a computer-simulated Martin Luther King, urging everyone to vote Republican?
What if it was a porno featuring Marilyn Monroe doing a "2 boys 1 cup" with Bobby and JFK? Should none of their families and loved ones have any say in the matter?
Are we ghouls, that we can exhume the bodies of the dead for whatever purpose we choose? Do historical figures have no right to their own legacy at all?
Correct, dead people aren't people, they're dead. They have no rights. That the public might find it offensive would be a deterrent enough without creating rights for the dead in a court of law.
- unless the author of this book uses Tolkien-related imagery or symbols prominently on cover, while advertising the book etc. Tolkien being a character is not a problem, because it cannot be reasonably constituted as an endorsement of the book by any sane person, nor to misrepresent authorship.
Google the title "Mirkwood, A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien," and you'll find its Amazon page and the cover. Interestingly, it's laid out with the author's name at the top, and in the middle:
MIRKWOOD a novel about JRR TOLKIEN
So at first glance, yes it does look like a book by Tolkien. However, at second glance it's clear it isn't, so it's an attention gathering device, not a real deception. No one would buy this book thinking it's actually by Tolkien.
From the Amazon page, and the author's own website, it's also clear that he self-published the book. So it's probably sold a couple of dozen copies up till now, depending on how many relatives he has. And his biography says he's a lawyer. The Tolkien estate did try to C&D him, so they provoked the whole shenanigans, giving him the excuse to promote his book and get lot of publicity, for a book that had been totally ignored up till now.
Also, Google helpfully pointed to several reviews and even warez sites with complete copies of the book in various formats, so you can check it out. Actually, it's in a not-uncommon subgenre, where a famous (dead) author is dragooned into a plot based on his fiction being real, or based on some part of his life. HP Lovecraft has "starred" in several such. As has HG Wells (the movie "Time After Time", e.g.). And Doctor Who has made several, with Shakespeare, Dickens, Agatha Christie. Hillard's book has Tolkien "finding" an ancient manuscript that leads him to some supernatural adventure (I have only glanced at it). The story isn't a LOTR pastiche; there are many, many fantasy novels that "borrow" much more from Tolkien's published work than this.
While he is exploiting JRR Tolkien, I don't think he is infringing on any living person's rights.
It reminds me of Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett where the king hires bards and playrights to tell bad stories about the witches so that people start hating them.
As the sisters were alive they would have the right to sue for libel, slander, defamation, etc.
if someone you didn't know suddenly wrote a novel in which your father was one of the characters and started putting words in their mouths and making them act a certain way. You might dislike that very much.
Of course I would. But I don't have the legal power to stop people doing everything I "really dislike", much as I would enjoy that.
If by "printers and scanners" they meant something else entirely than the words usually mean, maybe they should have said so. And you'd expect high security applications to have customised hardware and software. This is about the bulk of office drones typing out memos in their cubicles
Having made the switch to Linux myself a few years ago, I often face problems with getting peripherals to work well - easily.
We're not talking about you (or me), alone in our basements. A government ministry will have an IT department whose job it is to deal with crap like that.BEFORE they buy, let alone deploy said hardware, thay should make make sure that it works.
And we're talking about bureaucrats, paper-shufflers by trade.What "peripherals" could they use? A printer, a scanner? Plenty of choice of supported hardware.
"Depending on how clear it is that the book in question is fiction, there may be grounds for a libel suit"
None at all, because DEAD PEOPLE can't be libelled. That's why you have all those scurrilous "biographies" about celebs after they die. True or false, doesn't matter. They can't be sued.
Well, I'd almost agree with you... BUT... The Tolkien estate sat on the rights to make a Lord of the Rings movie for decades. They were approached many times and turned it down many times. When they finally got the offer they accepted it really was the best telling of the story they could have gotten
You think The Lord of the Rings (1978) was "the best telling of the story they could have gotten"? Or maybe you were thinking of Jackson's remake?
The notion of "right to publicity" has ample precedent. It's used every day, and it's why you can't use a picture of Steve Jobs in your own advertisement
Fine,. But 1) Jobs is alive (for the moment); JRR is dead, and 2) this isn't an advertisement, it's a work of fiction.
"Cost of printer and scanner drivers" -- Bullshit.
Just buy printers and scanners that are supported and the cost is zero.
Basically any business class networked printer supports Postscript and/or PCL, which have standard drivers anyway.
The real reason is no doubt some bureaucrat who just wants his Outlook and Excel. Or one who has links with some large software vendor. Impossible to prove though, they'll produce whatever reports they need to to justify what they want to do.
It's about Right of Publicity. If you're not bored reading my comment yet, it says that no one can commercialize your persona without your permission. This is a good thing
In the world of advertising, where it prevents claims that so and so endorses your product whthout his permission, it's a good thing. If it prevents you writing fiction involving real people, especially real, DEAD people, it's not "good" at all.
Actually then the only fiction that would be allowable to write would be fantasy, like Lord of the Rings.
I do think that the author has the absolute right to publish this book, if it's as described. You can't let dead people's estates have vetoes over what is written about them. However, the title of the book is "Mirkwood, A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien." The word "Mirkwood" was invented by Tolkien, as a place in Middleearth. And of course "Tolkien" was his name. So it seems the author, or more likely his publisher, were trying to ride on the coattails of the Tolkien's work. Anyone searching for these terns will come up with this book now. That still should be allowed, but it's a bit sleazy. I think that there would have been no issue at all if he hadn't put "Tolkien" in the title. Maybe he; was baiting the Tolkien estate in the hope of getting some publicity when they attempted to shut him down.
Anyway, free speech applies to exploitative assholes as well as nice people.
It's a "teach a man to fish" situation - you say yourself that school books are important, and if it's cheaper/easier to provide hardware to read those books digitally than it is to provide physical books then the tech is not just a gimmick.
Cost of Kindle: about US$100. Cost of printing a book: about US$1.
You could give every primary school kid 20 books, and their school a decent library of several hundred, for the cost of supplying them all with Kindles. Devices which would be gimmicks, get broken, require electricity, whose batteries die and don't get replaced. Also, the Kindle is burdened with DRM. I was amazed to find that you can't even copy a paragraph of text from the fucking things. It's all locked down, designed to protect the publishers' rights -- in other words, to RESTRICT the readers' rights, and torpedoes all the advantages of having digitised text.
I'm pretty tired of Slashdot allowing any twat to plagiarise a story, (in this case from CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20033940-64.html )and screw up a few facts (eg, they confuse Gigabits with Gigabytes; only out by a factor of 8), submit it "anonymously" and then drive traffic to their crummy site.
, this is potentially another way of tracking that few people would have thought about.
If you didn't think about the fact that the name you use on several sites identifies you, you aren't thinking much. That's why I use this inane name here and others on different sites; on friendly local sites I use a variation of my real name, but not here.
Summary says ""The prospect of long-term space travel has led scientists to consider, increasingly seriously, the following conundrum: if travelling to a new home might take thousands of years, would humans be able to successfully procreate along the way". But TFA is taking about trips to Mars, not "thousands of years".
Also most of the radiation that is the problem is from the sun. Once a starship is underway, that will be pretty low. And it will have lots of shielding, probably megatonnes of water will be needed for the biosphere anyway.
The usual provocative headline with no relation to the actual facts of the story, which was just a flimsy excuse to print a photo of a naked Jane Fonda.
"Revisiting some of the most violent video games made over the last couple of decades shows exactly why this is such a huge concern."
No it doesn't. Maybe the writer should have SAID why it was a "huge concern", then we might have a discussion. Is he suggesting that players emulate the gameplay? If so, instead of a few screencaps, some real world evidence might have been helpful.
Or, how many can actually get another job?
Two things you never want to be associated with:
1. Thief.
2. Whistleblower.
I haven't read TFA but I wouldn't be surprised if you could rat out your (former) employer while keeping your name out of it: the BSA or whatever is going to do a raid to collect the evidence.
Personally I was quite surprised when I realised that my former employer had pirated virtually all their business software. At least that explained the crappy quality of the manuals. If I'd ratted them out after I quit (there were plenty of reasons, but not as a protest against software piracy) they probably would have tried to blame me for it anyway.
Just in case the above loses some people, here's an analogy:
Points for not using a car analogy, but still, analogies prove nothing, and usually just illustrate the prejudices of the speaker (comparing drug dealing with file sharing, as in this case, is pretty prejudicial).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Mixing fact and fiction is quaintly known in civilized societies as lying.
Not if it's clearly labelled fiction.
And if any of the made-up events are in any way insulting, it's slander.
If Tolkien were alive, it MIGHT be libel, not slander. But seeing as he's dead and buried for 40 years, it's neither. YOU CAN'T LIBEL THE DEAD.
Hilliard's "historical fiction" is inevitably, to some significant degree, an assertion of fact. And in my opinion, the ambiguity about what is "historical" and what is "fiction" makes it worse, not better for Hilliard's case, and for so-called "historical fiction" generally.
He has Tolkien finding actual manuscripts in Elvish. Basically, the story is that Middle-earth was real. No one is going to stand up in court and say that's to ANY degree, "an assertion of fact".
No? What if it was commercials of a computer-simulated Martin Luther King, urging everyone to vote Republican? What if it was a porno featuring Marilyn Monroe doing a "2 boys 1 cup" with Bobby and JFK? Should none of their families and loved ones have any say in the matter? Are we ghouls, that we can exhume the bodies of the dead for whatever purpose we choose? Do historical figures have no right to their own legacy at all?
Correct, dead people aren't people, they're dead. They have no rights. That the public might find it offensive would be a deterrent enough without creating rights for the dead in a court of law.
- unless the author of this book uses Tolkien-related imagery or symbols prominently on cover, while advertising the book etc. Tolkien being a character is not a problem, because it cannot be reasonably constituted as an endorsement of the book by any sane person, nor to misrepresent authorship.
Google the title "Mirkwood, A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien," and you'll find its Amazon page and the cover. Interestingly, it's laid out with the author's name at the top, and in the middle:
So at first glance, yes it does look like a book by Tolkien. However, at second glance it's clear it isn't, so it's an attention gathering device, not a real deception. No one would buy this book thinking it's actually by Tolkien.
From the Amazon page, and the author's own website, it's also clear that he self-published the book. So it's probably sold a couple of dozen copies up till now, depending on how many relatives he has. And his biography says he's a lawyer. The Tolkien estate did try to C&D him, so they provoked the whole shenanigans, giving him the excuse to promote his book and get lot of publicity, for a book that had been totally ignored up till now.
Also, Google helpfully pointed to several reviews and even warez sites with complete copies of the book in various formats, so you can check it out. Actually, it's in a not-uncommon subgenre, where a famous (dead) author is dragooned into a plot based on his fiction being real, or based on some part of his life. HP Lovecraft has "starred" in several such. As has HG Wells (the movie "Time After Time", e.g.). And Doctor Who has made several, with Shakespeare, Dickens, Agatha Christie. Hillard's book has Tolkien "finding" an ancient manuscript that leads him to some supernatural adventure (I have only glanced at it). The story isn't a LOTR pastiche; there are many, many fantasy novels that "borrow" much more from Tolkien's published work than this.
While he is exploiting JRR Tolkien, I don't think he is infringing on any living person's rights.
It reminds me of Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett where the king hires bards and playrights to tell bad stories about the witches so that people start hating them.
As the sisters were alive they would have the right to sue for libel, slander, defamation, etc.
if someone you didn't know suddenly wrote a novel in which your father was one of the characters and started putting words in their mouths and making them act a certain way. You might dislike that very much.
Of course I would. But I don't have the legal power to stop people doing everything I "really dislike", much as I would enjoy that.
If by "printers and scanners" they meant something else entirely than the words usually mean, maybe they should have said so. And you'd expect high security applications to have customised hardware and software. This is about the bulk of office drones typing out memos in their cubicles
Having made the switch to Linux myself a few years ago, I often face problems with getting peripherals to work well - easily.
We're not talking about you (or me), alone in our basements. A government ministry will have an IT department whose job it is to deal with crap like that.BEFORE they buy, let alone deploy said hardware, thay should make make sure that it works.
And we're talking about bureaucrats, paper-shufflers by trade.What "peripherals" could they use? A printer, a scanner? Plenty of choice of supported hardware.
None at all, because DEAD PEOPLE can't be libelled. That's why you have all those scurrilous "biographies" about celebs after they die. True or false, doesn't matter. They can't be sued.
Well, I'd almost agree with you... BUT... The Tolkien estate sat on the rights to make a Lord of the Rings movie for decades. They were approached many times and turned it down many times. When they finally got the offer they accepted it really was the best telling of the story they could have gotten
You think The Lord of the Rings (1978) was "the best telling of the story they could have gotten"? Or maybe you were thinking of Jackson's remake?
The notion of "right to publicity" has ample precedent. It's used every day, and it's why you can't use a picture of Steve Jobs in your own advertisement
Fine,. But 1) Jobs is alive (for the moment); JRR is dead, and 2) this isn't an advertisement, it's a work of fiction.
Just buy printers and scanners that are supported and the cost is zero.
Basically any business class networked printer supports Postscript and/or PCL, which have standard drivers anyway.
The real reason is no doubt some bureaucrat who just wants his Outlook and Excel. Or one who has links with some large software vendor. Impossible to prove though, they'll produce whatever reports they need to to justify what they want to do.
It's about Right of Publicity. If you're not bored reading my comment yet, it says that no one can commercialize your persona without your permission. This is a good thing
In the world of advertising, where it prevents claims that so and so endorses your product whthout his permission, it's a good thing. If it prevents you writing fiction involving real people, especially real, DEAD people, it's not "good" at all.
Actually then the only fiction that would be allowable to write would be fantasy, like Lord of the Rings.
Anyway, free speech applies to exploitative assholes as well as nice people.
It's a "teach a man to fish" situation - you say yourself that school books are important, and if it's cheaper/easier to provide hardware to read those books digitally than it is to provide physical books then the tech is not just a gimmick.
Cost of Kindle: about US$100. Cost of printing a book: about US$1.
You could give every primary school kid 20 books, and their school a decent library of several hundred, for the cost of supplying them all with Kindles. Devices which would be gimmicks, get broken, require electricity, whose batteries die and don't get replaced. Also, the Kindle is burdened with DRM. I was amazed to find that you can't even copy a paragraph of text from the fucking things. It's all locked down, designed to protect the publishers' rights -- in other words, to RESTRICT the readers' rights, and torpedoes all the advantages of having digitised text.
but in this case it's not clear that you've traced the story back to it's origination.
It's is clear though that the blog cited by the submitter and endorsed by Slashdot isn't it.
I'm pretty tired of Slashdot allowing any twat to plagiarise a story, (in this case from CNET at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20033940-64.html )and screw up a few facts (eg, they confuse Gigabits with Gigabytes; only out by a factor of 8), submit it "anonymously" and then drive traffic to their crummy site.
That's about the size of it. It's amazing how threatened so many governments feel by the unrestricted free flow of information.
Well, sure, But what has that to do with gaming?
, this is potentially another way of tracking that few people would have thought about.
If you didn't think about the fact that the name you use on several sites identifies you, you aren't thinking much. That's why I use this inane name here and others on different sites; on friendly local sites I use a variation of my real name, but not here.
Also most of the radiation that is the problem is from the sun. Once a starship is underway, that will be pretty low. And it will have lots of shielding, probably megatonnes of water will be needed for the biosphere anyway.
The usual provocative headline with no relation to the actual facts of the story, which was just a flimsy excuse to print a photo of a naked Jane Fonda.
What are the risks, death and suffering of innocent victims.
Exactly. WHAT IS IT? You seem to have just assumed the answer and gone from there to calling gamers baby killers.
how many parents must lose their children
Well, in the 20 or 30 years these games have been around, how many have?
Lots of people spend lots of time playing video games. Personally, I think they're all a waste of time. But that's about it.
proofread the title and not only the summery itself.
You must be in the southern hemisphere; it's wintery here.
No it doesn't. Maybe the writer should have SAID why it was a "huge concern", then we might have a discussion. Is he suggesting that players emulate the gameplay? If so, instead of a few screencaps, some real world evidence might have been helpful.
Or, how many can actually get another job? Two things you never want to be associated with: 1. Thief. 2. Whistleblower.
I haven't read TFA but I wouldn't be surprised if you could rat out your (former) employer while keeping your name out of it: the BSA or whatever is going to do a raid to collect the evidence.
Personally I was quite surprised when I realised that my former employer had pirated virtually all their business software. At least that explained the crappy quality of the manuals. If I'd ratted them out after I quit (there were plenty of reasons, but not as a protest against software piracy) they probably would have tried to blame me for it anyway.
You stopped reading at that point, didn't you? Please read the whole post and determine my prejudice again.
You equated Hotfile with a drug dealer. Yes, at that point people really should stop reading, though I soldiered on to the end.
Just in case the above loses some people, here's an analogy:
Points for not using a car analogy, but still, analogies prove nothing, and usually just illustrate the prejudices of the speaker (comparing drug dealing with file sharing, as in this case, is pretty prejudicial).