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The Rental Life: What Happens When You Own Nothing and They Own You

In July 2009, Amazon reached into the Kindle devices of thousands of customers and deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. The company had discovered that the third-party publisher selling those editions lacked the rights to distribute them in the United States. Amazon issued refunds. Then it erased the books. A high school student in Michigan lost his annotated copy mid-assignment. A class-action lawsuit followed. Amazon’s CEO called the decision “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.” The company settled and promised not to do it again, unless a court ordered it, or unless the company determined it was necessary to protect consumers from malicious code, or unless the consumer failed to keep paying.

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Real ID: Federal Mandate, National Card, or Something Worse?

The Real ID is now the law of the land, but it is not the law most Americans think it is, and the story of how it arrived at your local DMV is a twenty-year saga of congressional sleight-of-hand, serial postponement, and a quiet transformation of the American driver’s license into something it was never designed to be. The question everyone should be asking is not whether they need one. The question is what the Real ID actually represents in the architecture of American civic life, and whether the reassurances offered by the Department of Homeland Security hold up under any meaningful scrutiny.

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Return of the United Stage!

It’s been a busy month! We buried 2023 and 2024 is now empirically in play for the rest of us! Janna’s new sites — ASL Opera and Jannauary.com — are both now live, as is the new — Boles.ai — website that not only predicts future history but also lives in the present past; but I am most supremely pleased to announce the dramatic return of: The United Stage!

UnitedStage.com

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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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Will We Ever Own Our iTunes?

I have over 30,000 songs in my iTunes library and many of those songs were directly purchased from iTunes. I’ve scattered that musical library to Amazon and a portion of it to Google. Lately, I’ve been wondering what would happen to all that music if something happened to me. Sure, my wife could grab it, but should I ultimately plan to donate all that music to a school or sell off bits of the collection?

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The Bad Karma of Take Back Yoga

Is it Bad Karma to take back something you freely gave to the world?  The “Take Back Yoga” movement wants their Yoga back.

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Grotesque George Steinbrenner is Bigger than Beautiful Babe Ruth!

Last night, at the new Yankee Stadium, the Steinbrenner family proved — once and for all and for all of eternity — why they are the most obnoxious family ownership in all of sport.  There was a public unveiling of the “George Steinbrenner bronze memorial” in monument park, and Steinbrenner’s plaque was bigger than Babe Ruth’s and Lou Gehrig’s and Joe DiMaggio’s and and Yogi Berra’s and Mickey Mantle’s plaques combined!

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Stealing Student Content

The University of Iowa’s famous Writing Program is under fire from its graduate students — and the creative world at large — for its new “Open Access” philosophy of publishing creative works of its students on the internet to be found and indexed by Google and other search engines.

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Own Your Copyright

In my article — Writing Advice for Authors — I implore all authors to demand, and get, Copyright in their name from their publishers.

Agents and publishers will tell you Copyright in your name doesn’t matter — yet many publishers will fight you to the death to keep the Copyright in their name and not yours.

Why do publishers demand to own your Copyright when you do the writing?

Why do authors allow publishers to own their Copyright?

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Google and Fair Use

If you buy a book, do you own that book or have you only rented the content in that book?  Under the current Copyright law, you may loan that book and share that book, but you may not copy the book and give those copies to your friends or sell those copies to your enemies.

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