Yawn, yawn. We must still be in the late summer "silly days," when journalist grasp as straws for a story. A decline from 8.5 million sales to 8.1 million is hardly a matter from concern. Anyone who isn't a twit, i.e. doesn't work for the Guardian or as industry analysis, knows Apple will soon upgrade the iPods so production will be ramped up before Christmas. The Nano will probably jump to an impressive 8 Gig and there may just be a genuine video iPod to match selling movies via the iTunes Store.
In that sort of situation, smart people delay purchases, particularly if they already have an iPod.
Both developers do agree about one aspect of their license clause. It is based on the first of science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's Three Law of Robotics, which states, "A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." That, they say, is a good thing, "because the guy was right," Tegel says, "and he showed the paradox that almost any technological development has to solve, whether it is software or an atom bomb. We must discuss now what ethical problems we may raise in the future."
Since it's the military who acts to protect us from the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam and missiles launched by the crazies in North Korea and Iran, their software seems to be in gross violation of the First Law of Robotics. It allows, through mandated inaction, human beings to come to harm. Even worse, the bad sorts will ignore the restriction, making this violation of the law an instance of not just not preventing, but of actually assisting humans to come to harm.
For what it's worth, I'm working on a book, Chesterton on War, that'll be an impressive 500 pages of what G. K. Chesterton (friend and ideological foe of H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw) wrote on war, pacifist and militarism. During WWI, he warned that something had gone terribly wrong with Germany that, if not corrected, would lead within 50 years to a war more horrible than the First World War. And in 1930, he warned that war would break out over a Polish border dispute. Contrast that to H. G. Wells, who claimed that WWI was to be the "war to end all war." That, Chesterton said, was as silly as telling a man bound for work that he was about to engage in the "work to end all work."
Chesterton also pointed out that militarists and pacifists share the same grisly belief--a belief that might ought to triumph over right. One acts on that belief, while the other doesn't act because of that belief. The result in today's world is misery for millions of people who live far from pleasant little enclaves such as Berkeley and Upper Manhattan, enclaves that are only safe because of our military defends these simplistic, moralizing twits.
Seattle, Editor of Dachau LIberated and Eugenics and Other Evils
Re:Wikipedia Entry for Amazon Connect
on
Amazon Connect
·
· Score: 1
As far as I can tell, the page for Amazon Connect just links back to the page for Amazon.com. Try again?
I suspect this is just some weirdness among Wikipedia reviewers. The entry was active for several hours before some twit put in a redirect to the main Amazon.com link. That's dumb because there's not one word about Amazon Connect there. They might as well redirect it to an entry about the Ebola virus. It would have made more sense not to link Amazon Connect to anything.
It may be because I linked to my own Amazon Connect pages to illustrate how it works. But you can't understand Amazon Connect without seeing it in action and those were the only pages I had. (The Amazon Connect team is very busy and has yet to act on my suggestion that they have dummy pages to illustrate how it works.) But again their behavior makes no sense. Amazon.com is commercial and Amazon Connect is commercial. Both exist to sell books. Why pander to a giant corporation and get prissy about my modest sales? It reminds me of the childish "anti-profit" mindset you find in some academic circles.
I'm not sure what to suggest. I forgot to save a copy of the Wikipeda entry I created and don't have the time to rewrite it. I am rather ticked off because I sent quite a few people in the news media to an Amazon Connect entry at Wikipedia that no longer works. That's likely to enforce the idea in the news media that Wikipedia is a bit weird. Maybe it is.
And I'm so ticked off at this unexplained behavior (i.e. no email to me explaining why), I'm less likely to write for them in the future. In this case, I was one of only about a dozen people in on the author's beta. If they squelch that sort of "expertise," what will they do with any other entry I might labor over and post.
Maybe good sense will return and Wikipedia will make my Amazon Connect entry active again. Until then, all I can suggest is that you look on Amazon for my book, Untangling Tolkien. It has the sort of posting you can do and links to my author's profile page.
And keep in mind that, while Amazon is calling this an author's blog, it isn't. It does things a blog would not do (post your content on your book detail pages) and it doesn't do things a blog allows (i.e. allow reader comments). I've told them they should quit calling it a blog and simply stress that it allows authors to get more active in selling their books through Amazon. For that purpose, it is better than any blog.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Wikipedia Entry for Amazon Connect
on
Amazon Connect
·
· Score: 1
For those who're interested, I've written a detailed description of Amazon Connect and posted it to Wikipedia.
It's marvelous for an author wanting to promote books (existing or planned), answer critics, or write more detail about a book than Amazon usually posts. You can make a posting like that above to any of the Amazon detail pages for which you're the book's author. And you can link to outside sites for more information, including your own website.
If you're an author with a book for sale on Amazon, I'd strongly recommend joining. Just keep in mind that it is for authors only (not publishers), and only allows postings to books you've written or the Amazon home page of those who've bought your books. Also, it's one way, meaning the blog doesn't allow readers to post (probably a good thing). And at present it's only for Amazon U.S. Also, there is a careful vetting process to keep out trolls.
I give the idea Five Stars and a Thumbs Up. Amazon is to be commended for this.
At the risk of stirring up the foil hat and Area 51 crowd, I noted the dangerous First Amendment implications of this bill on my blog about three weeks ago.
Stripped to its essentials, an administration that wanted to squelch any author, musician, periodical, book publisher, or media outlet could go after them for copyright infringement. They would not have to target the speech they dislike. They would not even have to win. The cost of a defense against all the financial resources of the federal government would to crush all but the very deep-pocketed.
Those who're interested in reading about the first bicycles in China might want to read Across Asia on a Bicycle by Thomas Allen and William Sachtleben. They crossed northern China in 1892 on bikes, attracting quite a bit of attention. One Chinese described a bike this way:
It is a little mule that you drive by the ears, and kick in the sides to make him go."
The book, out of print for over a century, was brought back into print last summer by yours truly. Alas, for this struggling writer and editor, someone else is about to bring out a competing edition. But if you check both books on Amazon.com, you'll find they are so clueless about the story that on their cover they date the trip across Asia to 1890. Duh!
After graduating from college, the two left St. Louis by bike for NYC in June of 1890. Crossing the Atlantic by boat and departing from London, they biked across Europe, wintering in Athens. The Asia leg of their around-the-world trip began in April of 1891 and wasn't completed until the fall of 1892. It's the 1891-92 Asia leg that's covered by their book. Unfortunately, they didn't do books on the U.S. or European portions.
These two guys were amazing. Along the way and almost as an aside, they became the first two Americans to summit Mount Ararat. You can find quotes from the book at Across Asia on a Bicycle.
Quite a tale. Two years after their journey, someone tried to repeat their feat and was murdered by Kurdish bandits near the Turkey/Iran border.
I once asked a friend who designed satellite antenna system what it would take to take over a channel and he said it would be fairly easy. The typical uplink is 30 watts into the sort of large dishes you see at TV studios. Because the link is FM (regular TV is reduced carrier SSB), a signal about twice as strong would 'capture' the receiver and the legitimate signal would simply disappear.
What's really intriguing about this story is the Cuba/Iran link. For years we've been told that religious extremism in the Middle East was a close kin of religious conservatives (Jewish and Christian) in the US. Yet when Iraq's brutal dictator recently began to cloak himself in Islamic rhetoric, it was primarily the political left in the US and Europe, who wanted to see him left in power. Their old love affair with Stalin was turned on to the foul Saddam.
Now Iran, an Islamic theocracy, is having trouble with dissidents demanding democracy and who comes to its aid but virtually the only remaining Communist dictatorship in the world.
Very interesting. It seems that some groups simply want to see the great mass of people regimented and are indifferent to the ideology used to justify the regimentation. Religious or secular, Marxist or Facist, it is all the same to them. Mussolini was, after all, a communist before he was a facist and Nazism had people who were called "beefsteak Nazis"--brown on the outside and red inside. Then there is the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Hitler may have intended to break it at the earliest opportunity, but Stalin seems to have been sincerely surprised when Hitler broke it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I just completed a copyright dispute with the JRR Tolkien estate that lasted for over a year and Kelly v. Aribba Soft was a major part of my defense and perhaps one reason why the Tolkien estate was willing to settle out of court and not contest the publication of my soon-out chronology of The Lord of the Rings, presently entitled Untangling Tolkien. It may also be why the judge in the case dismissed their lawsuit "with prejudice" back in January of this year. "With prejudice" is a judge's way of saying, "don't ever bother me with this case again."
First, the July 7, 2003 decision IS precedent and can be cited. What is no longer precedent is their Feb. 6, 2002 decision. A lawyer in the know would have to tell you why, but my guess is that some technical glitch allowed Kelly, the plaintiff in the case, to ask for a "rehearing en banc." By withdrawing and refiling what seems to be the same decision, the appeals court created their own technicality that allowed them to rule Kelly's petition moot. Law is full of those sorts of games.
The decision mattered in my case because I'm in Seattle, which in 9th Circuit and a 9th Circuit Appeals decision like this one has the force of law at the district court level where I was fighting. If I could show a great deal of relevance between "fair use" in that case and my appeal to fair use, my defense would be on very solid ground.
That mattered because the Tolkien estate's case was built on a series of 1998 decisions in the 2nd Circuit (New York), the most important of those cases being Castle Rock, a decision that found a book of Seinfeld trivia called the Seinfeld Aptitude Text as an infringing derivative.
The court's rationale was that a fictional author creates an entire world and any use of that, whether in a trivia book or some sort of viewer's guide was infringement. The decision was much criticized in legal journals, no other circuit has followed it, and, to my knowledge, tthe 2nd Circuit hasn't repeated it. You can go to:
http://chillingeffects.org/
for a discussion of the effect that has had on Internet fan fiction. It has also made if VERY RISKY to do guide books to popular movies, TV shows or, by extension, popular works of fiction like Lord of the Rings. Books that help readers understand fictional works, rather than make academic literary comments on them, are at risk until the Castle Rock decision is buried.
My defense was that online art (as in Kelly v. Arriba) is a form of fiction and my bullet-list summaries of what happened each day the equivalent of thumbnails. Settling out of court, we will never know if the judge would have bought that argument. But I did have a lawyer tell me that if I'd won on it at the district and appeals level, the case would have headed for the Supreme Court, since the 2nd and 9th circuits would have been in conflict. Since that would have taken years, I was better off settling out of court.
This decision applies to music in a roughly similar fashion. The Castle Rock decision virtually eliminated a whole spectrum of what would otherwise be fair use categories simply because the work was art/fiction rather than fact/biography/history. It would be very easy to slip music into art, making even brief excerpts, perhaps in an Internet radio show, illegal.
The Kelly v. Arriba decision has two key factors. First, when the reduction is great enough (i.e. a picture is reduced to a thumbnail) the original purpose of the art is no longer being served, so the thumbnail is not infringing.
The second factor is that the thumbnail is part of something (i.e. an image database) that is serving a different purpose, in this case, indexing internet images. If that purpose has public value, then it is fair use and protected from charges of infringement. Think, for example, of a book that gives the basic plot of movies or an audio database that has short (stressing short) samples of music, indexed perhaps by artist, gendre, theme, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
In that sort of situation, smart people delay purchases, particularly if they already have an iPod.
--Mike
For what it's worth, I'm working on a book, Chesterton on War, that'll be an impressive 500 pages of what G. K. Chesterton (friend and ideological foe of H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw) wrote on war, pacifist and militarism. During WWI, he warned that something had gone terribly wrong with Germany that, if not corrected, would lead within 50 years to a war more horrible than the First World War. And in 1930, he warned that war would break out over a Polish border dispute. Contrast that to H. G. Wells, who claimed that WWI was to be the "war to end all war." That, Chesterton said, was as silly as telling a man bound for work that he was about to engage in the "work to end all work."
Chesterton also pointed out that militarists and pacifists share the same grisly belief--a belief that might ought to triumph over right. One acts on that belief, while the other doesn't act because of that belief. The result in today's world is misery for millions of people who live far from pleasant little enclaves such as Berkeley and Upper Manhattan, enclaves that are only safe because of our military defends these simplistic, moralizing twits.
--Michael W. Perry, Inkling Books
Seattle, Editor of Dachau LIberated and Eugenics and Other Evils
It may be because I linked to my own Amazon Connect pages to illustrate how it works. But you can't understand Amazon Connect without seeing it in action and those were the only pages I had. (The Amazon Connect team is very busy and has yet to act on my suggestion that they have dummy pages to illustrate how it works.) But again their behavior makes no sense. Amazon.com is commercial and Amazon Connect is commercial. Both exist to sell books. Why pander to a giant corporation and get prissy about my modest sales? It reminds me of the childish "anti-profit" mindset you find in some academic circles.
I'm not sure what to suggest. I forgot to save a copy of the Wikipeda entry I created and don't have the time to rewrite it. I am rather ticked off because I sent quite a few people in the news media to an Amazon Connect entry at Wikipedia that no longer works. That's likely to enforce the idea in the news media that Wikipedia is a bit weird. Maybe it is.
And I'm so ticked off at this unexplained behavior (i.e. no email to me explaining why), I'm less likely to write for them in the future. In this case, I was one of only about a dozen people in on the author's beta. If they squelch that sort of "expertise," what will they do with any other entry I might labor over and post.
Maybe good sense will return and Wikipedia will make my Amazon Connect entry active again. Until then, all I can suggest is that you look on Amazon for my book, Untangling Tolkien. It has the sort of posting you can do and links to my author's profile page.
And keep in mind that, while Amazon is calling this an author's blog, it isn't. It does things a blog would not do (post your content on your book detail pages) and it doesn't do things a blog allows (i.e. allow reader comments). I've told them they should quit calling it a blog and simply stress that it allows authors to get more active in selling their books through Amazon. For that purpose, it is better than any blog.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Wikipedia-Amazon Connect
Feel free to link to it from your blogs. The idea is a great one, but it's a little confusing until you see actual examples.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Amazon Author's Profile
I was initially a skeptic, but having used it, I'm 100% behind the idea. You can see what an author's posting looks like here:
Untangling Tolkien
It's marvelous for an author wanting to promote books (existing or planned), answer critics, or write more detail about a book than Amazon usually posts. You can make a posting like that above to any of the Amazon detail pages for which you're the book's author. And you can link to outside sites for more information, including your own website.
If you're an author with a book for sale on Amazon, I'd strongly recommend joining. Just keep in mind that it is for authors only (not publishers), and only allows postings to books you've written or the Amazon home page of those who've bought your books. Also, it's one way, meaning the blog doesn't allow readers to post (probably a good thing). And at present it's only for Amazon U.S. Also, there is a careful vetting process to keep out trolls.
I give the idea Five Stars and a Thumbs Up. Amazon is to be commended for this.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Stripped to its essentials, an administration that wanted to squelch any author, musician, periodical, book publisher, or media outlet could go after them for copyright infringement. They would not have to target the speech they dislike. They would not even have to win. The cost of a defense against all the financial resources of the federal government would to crush all but the very deep-pocketed.
You can read the entire argument at:
Free Speech
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
After graduating from college, the two left St. Louis by bike for NYC in June of 1890. Crossing the Atlantic by boat and departing from London, they biked across Europe, wintering in Athens. The Asia leg of their around-the-world trip began in April of 1891 and wasn't completed until the fall of 1892. It's the 1891-92 Asia leg that's covered by their book. Unfortunately, they didn't do books on the U.S. or European portions.
These two guys were amazing. Along the way and almost as an aside, they became the first two Americans to summit Mount Ararat. You can find quotes from the book at Across Asia on a Bicycle.
Quite a tale. Two years after their journey, someone tried to repeat their feat and was murdered by Kurdish bandits near the Turkey/Iran border.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
What's really intriguing about this story is the Cuba/Iran link. For years we've been told that religious extremism in the Middle East was a close kin of religious conservatives (Jewish and Christian) in the US. Yet when Iraq's brutal dictator recently began to cloak himself in Islamic rhetoric, it was primarily the political left in the US and Europe, who wanted to see him left in power. Their old love affair with Stalin was turned on to the foul Saddam.
Now Iran, an Islamic theocracy, is having trouble with dissidents demanding democracy and who comes to its aid but virtually the only remaining Communist dictatorship in the world.
Very interesting. It seems that some groups simply want to see the great mass of people regimented and are indifferent to the ideology used to justify the regimentation. Religious or secular, Marxist or Facist, it is all the same to them. Mussolini was, after all, a communist before he was a facist and Nazism had people who were called "beefsteak Nazis"--brown on the outside and red inside. Then there is the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. Hitler may have intended to break it at the earliest opportunity, but Stalin seems to have been sincerely surprised when Hitler broke it.
First, the July 7, 2003 decision IS precedent and can be cited. What is no longer precedent is their Feb. 6, 2002 decision. A lawyer in the know would have to tell you why, but my guess is that some technical glitch allowed Kelly, the plaintiff in the case, to ask for a "rehearing en banc." By withdrawing and refiling what seems to be the same decision, the appeals court created their own technicality that allowed them to rule Kelly's petition moot. Law is full of those sorts of games.
The decision mattered in my case because I'm in Seattle, which in 9th Circuit and a 9th Circuit Appeals decision like this one has the force of law at the district court level where I was fighting. If I could show a great deal of relevance between "fair use" in that case and my appeal to fair use, my defense would be on very solid ground.
That mattered because the Tolkien estate's case was built on a series of 1998 decisions in the 2nd Circuit (New York), the most important of those cases being Castle Rock, a decision that found a book of Seinfeld trivia called the Seinfeld Aptitude Text as an infringing derivative.
The court's rationale was that a fictional author creates an entire world and any use of that, whether in a trivia book or some sort of viewer's guide was infringement. The decision was much criticized in legal journals, no other circuit has followed it, and, to my knowledge, tthe 2nd Circuit hasn't repeated it. You can go to:
http://chillingeffects.org/
for a discussion of the effect that has had on Internet fan fiction. It has also made if VERY RISKY to do guide books to popular movies, TV shows or, by extension, popular works of fiction like Lord of the Rings. Books that help readers understand fictional works, rather than make academic literary comments on them, are at risk until the Castle Rock decision is buried.
My defense was that online art (as in Kelly v. Arriba) is a form of fiction and my bullet-list summaries of what happened each day the equivalent of thumbnails. Settling out of court, we will never know if the judge would have bought that argument. But I did have a lawyer tell me that if I'd won on it at the district and appeals level, the case would have headed for the Supreme Court, since the 2nd and 9th circuits would have been in conflict. Since that would have taken years, I was better off settling out of court.
This decision applies to music in a roughly similar fashion. The Castle Rock decision virtually eliminated a whole spectrum of what would otherwise be fair use categories simply because the work was art/fiction rather than fact/biography/history. It would be very easy to slip music into art, making even brief excerpts, perhaps in an Internet radio show, illegal.
The Kelly v. Arriba decision has two key factors. First, when the reduction is great enough (i.e. a picture is reduced to a thumbnail) the original purpose of the art is no longer being served, so the thumbnail is not infringing.
The second factor is that the thumbnail is part of something (i.e. an image database) that is serving a different purpose, in this case, indexing internet images. If that purpose has public value, then it is fair use and protected from charges of infringement. Think, for example, of a book that gives the basic plot of movies or an audio database that has short (stressing short) samples of music, indexed perhaps by artist, gendre, theme, etc.
That's w