Deep Thoughts and Readings

The most read article is ... anything written by yours truly, and some minor pieces by some others like from The New Yorkers.

The Most Read Article of The New Yorker goes to A Critic At Large: Candid Camera, The Cult of Leica, by Anthony Lane, published September 24, 2007. The more things change, the more they stay the same. At least that's some of those Leica die-hards want or until Leica pulled off with a digital themselves, the M8.

Another shorter but no less interesting piece entitled The Privacy Paradox by James Suroweicki which makes the case that copycat of the fashion industry is actually good for the industry and any counter measure in terms of legislation may actually do more harm than good, in short, the cure is badder than the disease. The latest fashion war against copycat is waging all the way to the highest temple of legislation, that is the Congress. On the street level, Anna Sui is handing out Wanted T-shirt of caricatures of Forever 21 founders who allegedly are guilty of ripping off runway pieces by boldface designers like Ms. Sui herself and selling them at a fraction of the original's price to people who want high fashion but not the high price.

That makes me think of all the copyright and intellectual property rights on the Web. My brain is not big enough to address let alone solve this problem but then it doesn't stop me from blogging about it. I think it's really low to steal someone's post and treat it as one's original, it's like counterfeits that pretend to be the real ones, it's just wrong and illegal. What irks and fascinates me the most is that some of the posts that got pilfered aren't even great or anything. And even some paper, allegedly steals from bloggers, you know or I know it's bad when the paper, of all the bloggers they can choose to steal from in the whole wide web, is stealing from some blogger who can't even blog. That's just very disturbing. The day that my post is stolen will be the end of civilization as we know it, not because the act of stealing per se but because of the bad choice.

Then there is this whole fair use gray area. I personally always use other's jpegs and I normally give attribution if I don't forget or too tired or confused to put it. But does it make it OKAY though? Or if your site has all those crazy Google ads, does it make your site commercial (even we know the only persons clicking those ad links are you and your dog, I personally tried it but got busted by Google for suspicious clicks), can you still claim non commercial use of some images you get from the web? Or like embedding songs on the web? I don't really know. My web doctrine is to give attribution whenever you can.

More on knockoffs.