The Cushing Academy near Boston removed all the books from their library last year in an intentional purge against intellectualism designed to streamline campus thinking. Cushing replace paper with electronic books and online resources and we cannot but help but wonder what was lost in the pulp dust.
Intellectual theft has come far in the last century. I can imagine that the idea of taking an article from a newspaper and passing it off as ones own must have been daunting in the late nineteenth century — and surely something that people would not have been so eager to do given the lack of incentive. Now, however, it is too easy to select an entire article with your mouse, copy it, and paste it into your blog — and throw your name on top of it.
Tynt helps you control the copy thieves.
Plagium is a new web service that tracks “Plagiarisms” using the Yahoo! Search API. I tried Plagium this morning and I was disappointed in its lack of helpful returns and I was disappointed because I always love catching content thieves.
I spent my Memorial Day tracking down the jerk who took my hardcopy book — Picture Yourself Learning Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard — and scanned it into a .PDF file for easy downloading on his website. There are few people who believe this sort of behavior is content theft — but let me assure you what was done to my book is a violation of International Copyright Law, it is pirating — and in giving away something for free that my publisher paid me to write and paid to have distributed as a hardcopy book — only ruins the book publishing economy in its core. That means fewer books will be published and fewer authors will want to write books that can so easily be stolen. Here’s a screenshot of the page for my book from the pirate site. The .PDF file size description was the dead giveaway that this site was not selling my hardcopy book.
Yesterday’s rather boring Macworld Expo did have one good glimmer of freedom: iTunes will no longer protect its music with the awful DRM that I hate. Digital Rights Management was a golden goose egg that arrived too late and under-cooked. I was pleased with the announcement that iTunes music would finally belong to those that bought it because that’s the way it was always supposed to be: Only the container changed. When I jumped into the iTunes store to upgrade my 4,000 song strong iTunes-purchased library, I was met with this offer to upgrade: $270.84USD for 1,304 total songs. I clicked that “BUY” button and the download parade began. Almost.
As the world of publishing changes, so too, does the way we create containers for content. It used to be enough to have paper and ink. Now we have a virtual world where mere replication is the business recipe of the day, but the real, inherent, power of original content is that it cannot really be contained because it is always transmogrifying into multiple, redistributable forms depending upon end user need and desire. Content isn’t king. How the end user changes the content container is king.
In my article — Blogging the Bodily Fluids Stream — I argued action streams like Twitter had no place on a blog because content, not diary mapping, should be the business and purpose of the human condition. I mentioned a few Six Apart employees — the makers of Movable Type — as examples of the decay of blogging for content. Anil Dash, one of those I mentioned, wrote a fine response on his blog to my article — Actions are the Body Language — where he argues what you do on the web is important and should rightly be published for public consumption.
Continue reading → Why the Wet Why Resonates the Human Condition More than the Dry What
You must be logged in to post a comment.