I wonder if I may be a bit too vocal about my opinions on the state of copyright; I had two different people tell me about the article on Slate yesterday (and it’s almost the day before yesterday - I’m staying up too late!). One was my boss, who told me about it at work. I checked it out and sent myself a link so I could refer back to it when I got home. When I checked my email, I had two messages with the same link - the one I sent myself, and one from my mom.

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A few days ago, there was an exchange on one of my YahooGroups (that was actually meant to be offlist, but whatever) and one member was expressing frustration because her attempts to pay for a seminar or class of some sort weren’t working. I mostly skimmed the post, assuming that it was a typo when she said she signed up for PayPay. Further messages in the thread indicated that, while she hadn’t typoed, perhaps the original poster had, because there really is a PayPay.com.
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Dear Old Bill,

The tracking changes feature in MSWord STINKS! If the purpose is to track changes, then the tracking and display options should be set at file creation and then LOCKED - the file should look the same on every machine! That’s the whole POINT! ARGH!!!!

Also, if you’re going to allow Roman Numerals in the footer’s page numbering, then you’ve got to support them in the printer dialog box for page ranges. Otherwise you have a certain section of pages that cannot be printed in ranges, because if the document thinks pages i - xviii are pages 1 - 18, then when you try to print the actual pages 1 - 18, you’re going to get i - xviii. Then too, if you’re going to have it go by the absolute numbering, stick with that instead of switching back and forth. If I want to print pages 22 - 28, and the document thinks they’re pages 42 - 48, then it should follow the same logic as the Roman Numeral pages. Instead, it switches to the page numbers and ignores the document’s numbering, which means that the first twenty pages after the twenty Roman Numeral pages can only be printed if you a) print the entire document at once, or b) print each page one at a time with the Current Page print option. That stinks.

No love,
Me

After I came back from DragonCon and started corresponding with the lawyer I met there, I realized I didn’t understand enough about copyright to properly discuss some of the things I wanted to discuss, so I decided I should fully read the book I got at SIGGRAPH back in 2003 – Digital Copyright by Jessica Litman. I’d only skimmed it before. I didn’t expect to really get into it, but she writes in a very conversational style, and the issue is one that interests me very much. Before I knew it, I had half the book marked with random slips of paper and old mailing envelopes – whatever was close to hand. I have written before about what I think should be done to solve the “fanfic violates copyright, and if we try to make money on it TPTB will come down on us” problem. I seem to recall that during that incident, someone posted a comment that “George Lucas is going to eat your face,” which was so amusing that someone on F_W immortalized it in icon form. But that’s neither here nor there.

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Dragoncon was fun and interesting. Part of my motivation for going was to market my Tshirts, because the kind of people who go to Dragoncon are the kind of people who would enjoy my sense of humor. So, I ordered four of my favorite designs to wear while I was there.

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