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Stop Paying Rent on Your Own Words!

Stop paying rent on your own words. For decades, writers were taught that “real” authors have representation, an agent, sometimes even a manager, as if legitimacy were a credential issued by an industry gatekeeper. That belief was formed in an older media economy: fewer publishers, fewer channels, slower production cycles, and a cultural aura around scarcity. In 2026, the belief is not merely old fashioned. It is often financially irrational, and for many authors it is the single most reliable way to give away a permanent slice of income that should remain theirs.

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Who Owns Your Face? DMCA and Reflexive Allegory

You may not like your face, but it belongs to you. You have an inherent, living, right to use your face as your face. You don’t need a Copyright or a Trademark on your face. You only need to wear your face and own it — warts, wrinkles, warps, and all!

This is the story of my face being stolen — for use in a ridiculous Star Trek revenge meme — and the right ending of someone on the internet who stepped forward to not just be a help to me, but to become a new friend as well.

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Predatory Pricing Policies and Owning the Right of First Sale

John Wiley & Sons came up bupkis in the Supreme Court of the Unites States in their Copyright infringement case against a Cornell student who was reselling Wiley textbooks published in Thailand in the USA at a highly discounted rate.  One would think that ruling is terrible for textbooks and for authors — the opposite is true.

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WordPress removes Anil Potti posts from Retraction Watch in error after false DMCA copyright claim

This is alarming! The thief calls the original creator the one in Copyright violation. We’ve celebrated Retraction Watch before in Boles Blogs, and we’re doing it again! Support their site! I’m sure Automattic will get this fixed fast.

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The Best of Urban Semiotic Now Available on Amazon Kindle Direct!

After the glowing success of publishing our Hardcore American Sign Language Learning series via Amazon Kindle Direct, I started thinking about other ways to more permanently preserve the record of the best of what has been written.  Hurricane Sandy, and the death of Howard Stein, have made me consider worst case possible scenarios that led me into thinking about what if WordPress.com went down forever or something happened to me, or my Pair Networking hosting woke up and died.  How would the writing survive?

I decided having access to multiple article resources was becoming paramount in moving forward in a treacherous world, and so I thought to finally do something many readers have been asking me to do for many years:  Create a “Best of” series of writing that they can purchase and read in their own time and on their own devices.

Since the break of the New Year, I have been whittling down this Urban Semiotic Blog into its best, redacted, stories that I alone have written.  It was a long and sweaty job and the results are interesting.  There are no images or hotlinks or reader comments or quotes from outside sources.  It’s just me and my word against your eye.

The results of that effort are twofold:  The Best of Urban Semiotic, Volumes 1 and 2 on sale now on Amazon as Kindle Direct Publishing books!  You can read these books on your smartphone, Kindle, tablet or computer!

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WordPress.com is a DMCA Safe Harbor for Blog Publishers

There are moments when, as the publisher of the 13-blog strong — Boles Blogs Network here on WordPress.com — I find something on the web that instantly sickens my stomach with anger.  Yesterday was an example of that sort of “Immediate Internet Illness.”  I read an alarming article from Wired.com’s Threat Level concerning Righthaven — a “Copyright Troll” — and their purposeful, chilling, delight in making money by filing lawsuits against, what amounts to, fair use and freedom of speech by bloggers and online forums.

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Ten Ninety-Two

A content thief — by any other name — would still stink.

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Tom Jones International Steals from Boles Blues

It sickens me when someone steals our content and blatantly copies and pastes our writing — in total — on their website without our permission.  However, I do love the hunt of catching that red-handed thievery, and today, I introduce you to “Tom Jones International” and that site’s theft of our fresh content.

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Pink Floyd Royalties Fight Reflection

Pink Floyd won a tremendous victory in court this week against EMI, their record company.  The trouble at issue was EMI’s “unbundling” of Pink Floyd albums to sell individual album tracks on services like iTunes instead of requiring consumers to purchase the entire album as required by their contract with the band. 

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Tynt Insight Content Protection

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.

Continue reading → Tynt Insight Content Protection