The IP thieves and copyright infringers are out in force, multiplying like rabbits. And, like all good zombies, they want to eat you — with a special hankering for your brains. I’d advise that educators should exercise wariness in using their sites as teaching resources; the enabling of serial infringers isn’t much different from doing the infringing yourself, and most schools have stringent prohibitions against the use of pirated materials in the classroom. […]
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These images became public-domain material the moment the macaque generated them. Caters licensed the rights to exclusive use of them from Slater, but then faced a conundrum: How could they exercise those rights? Only by maintaining strict control over their availability. (For example, if they’d licensed reproduction rights to a T-shirt manufacturer.) As soon as the agency released digital files of the images for distribution via an online publication, the Daily Mail, their public-domain status became activated, so to speak. […] As one unintended, unexpected consequence of attending the tech expos, I’ve achieved a definite level of geekiness — which makes me, given my chronological age, a geezer geek. I don’t feel especially geezerish, nor for that matter particularly geeky. But I can converse with segments of the tech crowd and understand much of what they say; and I find myself explaining technical issues to people less versed in these matters than I, who seem to find those distillations useful. Who’d have thunk it? […] Photography itself was of course a fad, until it wasn’t. Same goes for stereo sound, blue jeans and T-shirts as casual wear, and rock & roll. One function of cultural journalism (and I have that hat, among others, in my wardrobe) involves looking at fads in order to gauge the likelihood of their turning into trends, and from trends evolving into relatively permanent aspects of the cultural landscape. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Dog Days (1): News & Notes
I’m envisioning a performance piece for TverCA, the “new contemporary art centre” in Russia, to commemorate that phase of the infamous Katyn Massacre perpetrated therein April 1940. For ten hours at a stretch, with the occasional break, the performer places a cantaloupe on a shelf attached to the log wall, puts the barrel of the pistol against it, and fires a single shot — maintaining NKVD executioner Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin’s implacable pace of one every 3 minutes. Bottles of vodka are passed around at the end of each session, as was Blokhin’s custom. […]