Category: Media

While I Take a Utilitarian View on IP Law…..

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I tend to see it as a public interest law (i.e to promote the progress of science and useful arts) at its core, and not property law, there are still people who should be busted for violating the exclusive licensing agreements associated with this.

Case in point, the Hartford Courant, which has taken to using articles from the smaller local papers without attribution:

Newspaper editors and reporters across the state are noticing a new trend: their local coverage is being copied daily by the Hartford Courant.

In most cases The Courant has been attributing the reporting to the newspapers being copied, which include the Journal Inquirer, The Bristol Press, The Herald of New Britain, the Register-Citizen of Torrington, and the Waterbury Republican-American.

In some cases The Courant appears to have lifted information from the other papers in its entirety without any attribution. But either way, editors say, the Courant is using for free and making money from a product other papers pay to produce, and they want it to stop.

It appears that someone at the Courant has taken it to a high enough level that the Journal Inquirer has sued them for plagiarism, which means that the Courant is not taking stories and writing them up, but taking stories and pasting them up.

If they had been accused of just taking the stories, it would be under a separate bit of case law, it involved Hearst and wire service stories during WWI, but I could not Google it, so this is unbelievably lame.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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Lou Dobbs is looking to run for office, and he’s selling himself as a friend of illegal aliens:

Lou Dobbs is looking at any number of possibilities for a political career, such as running for Senator from New Jersey, or even the presidency. And he would of course be running on a signature issue of…his great friendship with the Latino community, and support for amnesty for illegal immigrants, and a path to citizenship???

Signs of the Apocalypse, Media Conspiracy Edition

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The apocalypse part is that Matt Taibbi is agreeing with Sarah Palin on whether or not the media is out to get her.

He goes meta, of course, because, he is both a good writer and a smart one, and notes that the media always has its chosen targets, and that this wankitude (Gore, Dean, etc.) is thoroughly bipartisan.:

I would, however, like to point out a few things, none of which really involve taking sides in this particular cat-fight. In no particular order:

1) The political media has always taken it upon itself to make decisions about who is and who is not qualified to be taken seriously as candidates for higher office. Without even talking about whether they do this more or less to Republicans or Democrats, I can testify that I witnessed this phenomenon over and over again in the primary battles within the Democratic Party. It has always been true that the press corps has drawn upon internalized professional biases, high-school-style groupthink and the urging of insider wonks to separate candidates into “serious” and “unserious” groups before the shots even start to be fired.

….

2) When that does happen, when the press corps decides to abandon all restraint and go for the head shot, it usually tells us a lot more about the reporters’ bosses and what they’re thinking than it does about the reporters themselves. Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors.

…

3) So Sarah Palin is now in that category of politician whom reporters feel safe in attacking.

It’s a good read, and highly accurate.

Out of the Mouth of Babes

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Richard is a friend of my son, and he was playing with Charlie today, and they wanted to play on the computer.

I was in the middle of doing my Sarah Palin book ad on my blog post, and they were asking why I was doing a screen shot of the image, and I explained how the ads paid me a few bucks, but they did weird stuff like this all the time.

Well, Charlie has been thoroughly indoctrinated by me and Uncle Keith (Olbermann), so he started ragging on Palin and the book, and Richard, who has similarly proper parenting joined in, and then he let fly the best review ever on Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue

The book will probably fall apart, just like the Captain Underpants ones do.

–Richard S. Age 9

While I have no knowledge of the quality of the printing and binding, this is almost certainly accurate about the book so many levels.

I think that I hurt myself laughing.

The kid has a future in stand-up comedy.

Why Sarah Palin’s Book is a “Best Seller”, or More Stupid Google™ Adsense™ Tricks

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Yes, once again, the good folks at Google™ Adsense™ are serving up an advertisement for Sarah Palin in response to something that I posted (just the image, no link, not ever).

My disclaimers are below, but in this case, I clicked through, something that Google™ Adsense™ frowns upon if you do it routinely, to see what exactly this offer was.

Well, here is a screen-shot of the page from Newsmax:

(click for full size)

There, is, of course, a pattern here. You have people who are rich because of dumb luck in the genetic lottery, people with names like Scaife Olin, Bradley, Coors, and Koch, who are spending huge amounts of money that they inherited from daddy, or grand daddy, or great-grand daddy on the right wing machine.

They subsidize the publisher that prints the Palin book. They subsidize the propaganda sheet that offers the book free with a 1 year subscription, or for $4.95 (plus $5.95 shipping and handling, which means that they must use a unicorn to get the book to you) with a 4 months of Newsmax free.

What does this get?

  • Inflates Newsmax circulation numbers artificially.
  • Increases Newsmax ad revenue.
  • Inflates the sales of Going Rouge artificially.
  • Generates buzz for Going Rouge because its sales numbers looks high.

All of which adds credibility to both the book, and to the magazine, because, much like the late, unlamented New York Sun, their claim to credibility is based on circulation, and their circulation is based on paying people to take their parakeet cage liner.

In any case, back to the ads.

Please note, once again: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers who purchase those ads through Google™ Adsense™.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™, even though it would make me money, and cost them (Palin’s Publishers and Newsmax) money.

This Has Epic Fail Written All Over It

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It looks like Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp are working together to attempt to create a walled garden around his so-called news:

Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company’s being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.

The impetus for the discussions came from News Corp, owner of newspapers ranging from the Wall Street Journal of the US to The Sun of the UK, said a person familiar with the situation, who warned that talks were at an early stage.

However, the Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine.

There are a number of assumptions here, on both sides, which I think will kill the deal:

  • That NewsCorp®, and its shareholders will tolerate the implosion, at least in the short term, of online ad revenues, particularly given the current moribund revenues for print advertisement.
  • That even if Microsoft® is successful, its unlikely to bring in much in the way of other search business their way.
  • That if Microsoft® succeeds in dethroning Google® that they won’t be an aggressive monopolist and short change those content providers.
  • That Craigslist® won’t continue to eat their lunches in the lucrative local classified markets.
  • That the New York Times will team with the publisher of the Wall Street Journal and New York Post on this.
  • That any of the foreign media will go in on this.
  • That the EU antitrust authorities won’t be on their ass like white on rice.

This is one of those things that will get a lot of ink, because, of course, the newspapers want it to work, but it won’t get much beyond that.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room is, and continues to be, that the major news outlets are driven by the demands from Wall Street to hit their numbers, which, when juxtaposed with stupid debt deals on shiny new headquarters, they have consistently made their products less attractive.

The problem is that when you cut journalism out of newspapers, all you have left is advertisements, and like I said, Craigslist® is better as a pure advertising play.

H/t Atrios.

Harry Reid Disses David Broder

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So it appears that Harry Reid is telling the “Dean of the Washington Press Corps” to go Cheney Himself:

“In tomorrow’s Washington Post, David Broder, their distinguished senior columnist, certainly not a political conservative, expresses his reservation as a citizen about the steps that we could be about to take,” McConnell said.

Reid couldn’t have been less impressed. “To focus on a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while is not where we should be.”

(emphasis mine)

David Broder has been highly respected for his writing columns calling liberals DFHs* and giving a tongue bath to the conservative establishment since the 1960s.

Actually, it’s been the same article, written over and over again.

Nice to see that Harry Reid is calling him irrelevant. One wishes that this statement had been made decades ago by hundreds of more people.

Of course Broder is a conservative. He has been a spokesman for the status quo for over 40 years, though his real constituency is the Washington, DC cocktail party circuit.

*Dirty F$#@ing Hippies.

Complaints About Google Ads…..AGAIN

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Once again, the geniuses at Google™ Adsense™ have served up an ad which appears diametrically opposed to what I write about.

I saw this on Monday, but I’ve set it to post on Tuesday at 10:00am, because driving watchers to the interview might lead other news folks to interview her in search of ratings.

Please note: once again, that I do not vet, nor do I endorse any ad that appears on my site, and I reserve the right to mock both the ads that appear on my site, as well as the advertisers.

Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.

I Think that It’s A Joke

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Atrios calls Mark Shields his Wanker of the Day for the following (video after break):

SHIELDS: We have a president of real intellectual horse power who is cool, detached and analytical and if anything you can watch the emotional side of him emerge in this whole process.

I mean…We saw it at Arlington, we saw it at Fort Hood, we saw it at Dover Air Force Base

There’s an emotional aspect, the comforter in chief as well as the commander in chief. Both roles. And I think it makes me nostalgic for those days when we had a manly man in the White House who could say, “Let’s kick some tail and ask questions afterwards” you know? That’s what we really need instead of any reflection.

(emphasis mine)

If I thought that Shields were seruious, I’d be dismissing him as a wanker too, but I think that the, “Manly man in the White House,” is the tell here. It’s a joke, and the the target here, I think is actually David Broder, who that morning wrote the following on Afghanistan (no direct link to the Kaplan Test Prep Company), “The urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it is right.”

Mark Shields was calling David Broder out, in the smarmy, inside-the-Beltway subtle way….You see, if he had said it with a jacking off motion with his hand, it would have been clear, but instead, he just used an arch voice.

Video follows:

When Conservatives Have Lost Cokie Roberts

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They have jumped the shark, and when Cokie Roberts, whose shtick over the last 30 years has been to criticize Democrats for being….Democrats…says that Jon Voight’s ramblings suggesting that Obama has been “programmed” are, “cringe-worthy,” it means something.

Lou Dobbs broke the conservative barrier on TV, by getting thrown off the air for being too wingnutty, a first time I think that this has happened to a major media figure.

I think that the Republicans are crossing lines that are beginning to freak out the “very serious people” inside the beltway.

H/t The Washington Monthly

Why Does No One Ever Quote Bob Herbert?

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Lord knows, I rarely, if ever, quote him, and his mist recent column in the New York Times deserves notice.

His basic point is that there is no recovery for most of the country, even as “Wall Street can boast about recovery all it wants, much of America remains trapped in economic hell.”

Herbert writes about this stuff a lot, and he’s treated like a red-haired stepchild, he rarely gets quoted in the blogosphere, either pro or con.

I’m not sure why this is.

Did Dobbs Walk Away, or Was He Pushed

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The real problem here for CNN was that Lou Dobbs has gone completely around the bend, but crazy motherf$#@ers bring in ratings, (see O’Reilly, Bill), but it also means a hit to his credibility.

His exit was certainly abrupt, he announced today that this was his last show, and the reason that he gave, “some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day,” implies to me that he was pushed.

It sounds a lot like, “Spending more time with his family.”

He’ll probably end up on Fox.