I’m a bad blogger for not updating more frequently, so here’s a linkpalooza of cool things to read.
Boy do I need to clean out my bookmarks.
At the New York Times, “Begging for Your Pay”.
He waited on $31,000 through November 2009; by February, the company still owed him $20,000. Wisdom, who said he had had a perfect credit score until then, racked up over $20,000 in credit card debt, and his bank raised his interest rates to 30 percent. He was paying more than $500 a month in credit card interest, and withdrew from his retirement accounts to make ends meet.
I feel your pain, dude. It’s been over a year, and a producer still hasn’t forked over the dough.
China and Intellectual Property.
Bootleg copies of the “Dark Knight” and Shenzen sweatshops churning out fake Louis Vuitton bags are only part of the problem. Last March, the United States International Trade Commission banned imports of cast steel railway wheels made by the Chinese group Tianrui. Tianrui had hired nine employees from the Chinese licensee of Amsted Industries of Chicago, a maker of railway parts. They came with an armful of trade secrets that allowed Tianrui to muscle into the business.
What really happened to htmlcomics. You may recall I had a run-in with this scary dude, a convicted felon pirating comics, some time ago. He followed up my post several times with some vaguely threatening emails, odd complaints I had lied about his kindly cooperation with my request he stop pirating my work (read the link and decide for yourself,) and demands to remove anything I had ever said about him online, all of which I ignored. I did not publish any of his later emails, especially after learning what he did to this cop who pissed him off. That’s so not normal. I just handed the letters to my attorney.
He also made the odd claim that he had been released from “all charges”. Whatever charges he thinks they were, the real story is that he was sued by the federal government and had his servers and websites permanently shut down and forfeited. You can read all about it at Copyhype.
Copyhype’s article also lays to rest some of the online cheering from people who claim they had the dude shut down via their blog posts or something. The investigation began in 2009.
The case of htmlComics.com is, as far as I know, the first time a domain name has been forfeited under 18 USC § 2323(a) as property “used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of” criminal copyright infringement.
And while my bottom line has gone up considerably since I first wrote about the perils of digital book filching, I’m chalking that up to the many thousands I spent on advertising, having the website redone, and other rather expensive incentives, not to mention my ubiquitous web presence.
I’m also working with Image Comics to create A Distant Soil digital books. The first 14 issues of A Distant Soil were not published by Image, and they are undergoing a major cleanup operation. They also require new covers and will have some new content. They should be available soon, but this art is more than 20 years old, and digital files did not exist back in the day. We’re doing major restoration here.
I also hope you enjoy the online comic experience at my official website. It’s been fun bringing it to you.
Jaron Lanier declares “Web 2.0 is utterly pathetic.”
“Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine,” says Lanier, “but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.”
At Plagiarism Today: “Why I don’t Fear Chilling Effects.” Chilling Effects sometimes posts the personal information of people who file takedown notices for copyright infringement online. I think that’s kind of creepy. Here’s another take on the matter.
First, the name Chilling Effects, to many copyright holders, sounds very accusatory. Though Chilling Effects “aims to support lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats” it does so by being an impartial database of notices. Not every notice in Chilling Effects is “chilling” free speech in any way, in fact, the vast majority are not.
