is a blog by Brendan
Well, presumably until the relevant copyright cartel fights it for a decade, screaming that it will be the death of them, then eventually gets beaten into submission and makes twice as much money from the new model. As usual.
Charity ad seen on the back of a bus:
Donate Your Car To Us
& End Homelessness
“The Hausenbildenmächina works at last, Greta! It could be change the future of the world! But the reaction only occurs at exactly 88 miles per hour.” Hans shakes his head in despair. “I can’t go that fast! Not even on my European racing-style bicycle!”
“Ach, Hans!” Greta takes his hands in her own. Her eyes are full and bright. “I always believed in you, always knew–if only we had some way to obtain one car! Any car! But our German-or-possibly-Austrian credit doesn’t carry over to these United States.”
“Greta,” says Hans, face suddenly alight, “I may just have a plan!”
I signed up for Netflix, in spite of their popup ad policies and my own better judgment. Why? Not because I watch lots of movies–although SAHMD might change that–but because for me, it has the potential to be the poor man’s TiVo. Only the TV I want! Whenever I want! With no commercials! The eventual investment will be significantly higher than just buying a real TiVo, of course, but I get like twelve channels, so a real TiVo wouldn’t be that great anyway.
My queue so far further evidences my dorkhood by being full of CSI: Season Two and Nova mini-documentaries, which is what brought to my attention the fact that only on PBS does Hitler get to be the star.
Argh. Unbelievable.
KENTUCKY.
I finally did what I’ve been threatening to do for over two years: there is now a navigable archive of every single IdiotCam©. I did some horrible things to NewsBruiser’s theme system to make it an image gallery, but it works. You can view things by their post dates or their categories (including the entire Plastic Mullet Series), and you can search for the title text and some other keywords. There’s even an RSS feed, so I don’t have to worry that humans who only subscribe to this site are being deprived of me putting stuff in my nose!
So I lied. I still don’t trust that my funny-filter is better than yours, but I do think it’s better than Dog Bites Dog’s funny-filter (if not, alas, its funny-generator). It also occurred to me that a DBD weblog has a function other than filtering: I think it’s a good thing to archive and save the best bits for future humans, who won’t understand their context, because the links have rotted. But still.
Relatedly, like most postadolescent males, I have harbored in my gut the desire to start a satirical news publication. Since by far the best part of any such rag is the headlines, though, that’s all I ever bothered to produce. For the last few months, whenever I’ve felt particularly savage about something in popular culture, I’d come up with a headline and archive it. That wasn’t often enough to be a viable source of content on its own. Combined with somebody else’s generated headlines, though, it might be!
It is for these combined purposes that I’ve set up Dog Bites, a weblog in the vein of Spam As Folk Art. It should have new content every day or two, or more often if DBD is on a hot streak and I’m feeling hateful. I hope you like it! (And hey, my SAFA co-maintainers, let me know if you want in on some of this action.)
I always assume that most of my readership won’t like or care about this stuff, which is why I try to put warnings up front. But really, as far as I know, there are people who enjoy me talking about IP and DRM and CC and copyright reform. Who can tell! Whatever you do, don’t write me about it.
My own contribution: Today’s Penny Arcade newspost points out some absurdities we’ve started taking for granted, as brought glaringly to light after some idiots–actually a lot of idiots–took Wednesday’s strip and its newspost seriously. Leaving aside the fact that this is a comic in which the two protagonists regularly kill each other, Tycho latches onto the key point here: we are rapidly accepting a society in which people with lots of money can secure and bind ideas, with little or no benefit to the people who came up with them, and take away all your money and property if you attempt to break those bindings.
He also mentions a lot of legal stuff in which he and the rest of the humans at Penny Arcade are involved, about which he’s not allowed to talk. This is not uncommon news, but it’s not terribly common either, so I’ll fill in further: a while back, PA produced a book called “Penny Arcade: Year One,” which was pretty much what it sounded like–digitally magnified prints of 72-dpi copies of their very first comics, with some commentary. Everybody bought it, including me; it looked like a great step for webcomics; then they never brought out another book, despite thunderous demand. If you read Penny Arcade, you probably already know this.
What you may not know is that KiwE Publishing, the print-on-demand company through which they produced the books, had a better idea of what they were getting than the PA guys did. This was before PA had any legal or business counsel–they were still selling a full site-month of ads for a tenth of what that was worth, shit like that, and so they tried to understand the contract themselves and then signed it. In return, they received metaphorical splintered broomsticks in their metaphorical you-know-wheres.
KiwE got, with that contract, the exclusive commercial-printing rights for the first five years of Penny Arcade comics. Once Tycho and Gabe understood what the demand for their books was like, and that KiwE was a shitty way to print them, they wanted those rights back. Ha ha! KiwE wasn’t about to give up that gold mine. In fact, I’m willing to bet they tried to get a percentage of PA’s ad sales, since one could interpret web-publishing them and selling ads as a commercial printing. Thus legal wrangling, et cetera, and here we are five years later with no more PA books.
(I should add that I know all this only fifth-hand, through interweb osmosis; feel free to correct me if you have better intel.)
Anyway, the situation’s not that different from what happens between musicians and RIAA member labels every day. Tycho and Gabe should be proud. They’re practically rock stars.
What’s most interesting to me about the situation is that such ripoffs can exist only under the behemoth that is today’s full copyright. Had the PA guys originally chosen to release their works under, say, a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license, any exclusivity clauses KiwE had tried to sneak in would have been invalid to begin with. Of course, this wouldn’t have been possible five years ago, since CC wasn’t founded yet, but I think it’s a point that needs making.
(One strong indication that they might have chosen a CC license: if you’ve been reading PA for a long time, you may remember The Bench, a PA-sponsored site which let anybody download Photoshop files with images of the characters and make their own “open-source” Penny Arcade comics–or, actually, any comics at all. The Bench even hosted them for free.)
The situation also could have been avoided with better legal counsel, but then putting some text on your web page is considerably easier and cheaper than hiring a lawyer.
And yes, under that license, some other company could conceivably have downloaded a bunch of PA comics, printed them up, bootlegged them and kept all the profit, legally. So what? Anybody who wants can already read any PA comic they want for free, and it’s unlikely there would have been much of an audience for a PA book produced by anyone other than PA. (How would they market it, anyway? Buy ads on PA’s own site?) This is the genius of loose licensing and web publishing: there’s no incentive to rip off work that’s already free, and yet, if people like it, they will still buy hard copies from its creators.
I want to open a game-comic-bookstore with two attachments: a set of rooms with gridded tables and whiteboards, reservable cheaply for gaming or brainstorming meetings, and a coffee and sandwich shop. The place would be called The Purple Hippo, possibly.
Problems with this pipe dream:
Shockingly enough, #2 is the sticking point for a lot of my pipe dreams. (I also have no capital, but I assume that’s implicit.)
In an oddly appropriate segue, I should probably talk about The Louisville Game Shop now. I was lucky enough to find out about TLGS before it opened, back in December, and I even managed (through dint of extreme endurance and sharp eyes) to show up at its grand opening. It’s got a great inventory, and its owner (Colin) is friendly and helpful. Almost painfully so.
I really, desperately want TLGS to succeed. I want it to draw in thousands of customers and ignite a latent gaming esprit de corps in the Highlands. I want Colin and his business partners (if any) to be rolling in filthy lucre. I want them to experience so much demand that they have to buy adjacent buildings. I want there to be a real game store in Louisville.
I’m aware that no link on the interweb is really one-way, so I assume that Colin will eventually read this, and I wanted to make sure I said that stuff first. Consider it a preface.
Because it really doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. The place has “Nice Guy Tries To Start A Business, Goes Bankrupt In Under A Year” written all over it. I try to patronize it whenever I can, and most of the time I’m the only customer there. When I came to the grand opening, they didn’t take credit cards yet; I hesitate to think how much that cost them. Like I said, there’s some excellent inventory–I bought my copy of Nobilis there–but it doesn’t look like any of it is moving. (This is also the situation at Great Escape, but that’s because their game inventory is crap and they make their money on comics and DVDs.)
I don’t have the money to even be a good regular customer at TLGS, much less support it entirely myself, as I’d like to. I find myself thinking of ways to give in-kind, as if it were a charity project–I can host your website! I’ll print flyers! The advertising for the store is pitiful, by the way. I found one flyer in an engineering buildings at U of L, and I think there was a half-page ad on the back of LEO once. There appears to be a little interweb buzz, but in Louisville that’s really not worth much.
Anyway. I’m going to be crushed when TLGS fails, as I’m pretty sure it will. And even though I can think of things they could be doing better (1: don’t put your shop on the first floor of a musty double-zoned house), I know that the same or worse would happen to me if I tried to start a business now.
But now is when I want to start a business, because I have only myself to risk. When I’m thirty-five and understand business better and have capital, I’ll probably also have a family of some kind to worry about; I won’t have the option of living on ramen noodles for a year, or whatever, if I fail.
PS As if I needed another reason to be bitter, Fourth Street Live is doing great!
