Quick story. It's not heartwarming but it's certainly warm.
Friend of mine really liked Dragonriders of Pern, which is the science fiction series where people train and ride dragons. She was also an artist. People would roleplay Pern online, naming themselves, describing and naming dragons, you know, nerd stuff.
My friend (a real person, I assure you) started drawing friends riding on their dragons, and drawing them based on requests. Got pretty good at it. Did commissions. Drawing people on dragons.
One day, she gets a very stern letter. The letter is from Todd MacCaffrey, son of Anne MacCaffrey, creator of the Dragonriders of Pern series. In it, he says that drawing people on dragons is copyright of the MacCaffrey organization, that my friend is liable for penalties.
He demands she stop drawing people on dragons, and in doing so indicates that she had already made her liable for many thousands of dollars of damage. She has kids and a family. She was not doing this for a living.
So, she burns everything.
Just makes a pile and burns all her art, past and present, out of fear this could turn them out of their home and that something she was drawing was some sort of felony that would me thousands to defend, thousands if she lost, and maybe jail time.
Burned all of it.
Never drew again.
Now, lawyers will arrive and go "you should have hired lawyers" and that's nice and all, and I'm sure some people would have, blasting all potential return for their works into the sea to pay a legal bill. I talk to people shaken to the core with these letters.
People really on the edge, barely getting by.
So if you're new to The Jason Scott Experience and wonder why I get a little intense about people being threatened legally and new laws implying massive drain and weight, the fire in my eyes is reflected from my friend's bonfire.
As this goes viral, let me mention this is late 1990s.
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HAVE YOU CONSIDERED GIVING THE GIFT OF SKEUOMORPHISM
Well, there's an new service over at Internet Archive that just popped up and the gift never stops giving. It involves an awful lot of human knowledge, a strong dash of serendipity, and BOOKS GALORE
It's called OPEN LIBRARY EXPLORER and it's essentially an experimental approach to bringing some online version of the experience of browsing and moving among classifications. It's fun for the whole family, and at the end of it you get to read!
OK, so. Nobody, almost nobody, has time for the wonky tracking of all the laws that screw with their lives and keeping tracks of the up and downs of things like copyright maximalist bombage and the day to day energy of that. So, I'm giving you a very quick "What can I do" list.
So, first, really, sign up for, donate, and become a member of the EFF, Electronic Freedom Foundation. They've been around a long time and they're all up in everything. You'll be hard pressed to find someone who does the high-profile internet bazoola who HASN'T worked with them.
And yes, that includes me, a half dozen times since 2000. 20 years of me working with these folks on stuff you didn't have to hear about because they helped me or organizations I was working with first. They're at EFF.ORG and the year-end challenge is afoot.
So my pal (anonymous so his family doesn't find out) decided to play Call of Duty Warzone with me and his two sons and our 4-player team got to the last rounds, 3 of us were killed, and the 8 YEAR OLD WON THE GAME FOR US.
I am humbled
It probably helped that the two kids (8 and 11) kept calling me "The Pro", as in "The Pro will protect us".
brb adopting two children 8 and 11
Somewhere, the guy who was #2 in this warzone round will go to bed annoyed he wasn't able to win the game, but by the mercy of an otherwise cold universe he does so unaware he was smoked by Gorgu
If this was a small set, like a half-dozen or so, it'd be short work to get them though the digitization process and shove them up. But this is about 130 tapes, so you run into a problem - it's a very boring process. This means, unless you're compensated, you might fall off.
So instead, I try to come up with a process that is 1. Simple, 2. Not destructive to the original material, 3. Easily done in the time gaps of my life.
Combining these attributes means it can "just happen" over time, and the choices I make are not final.
Side note: Are YOU prepared for the for-cost Google future? You better be!
Within 10 years, beset upon in every way by governments, agencies and laws, companies like Google, who have wormed their way into every crevice of public and private service by literally dropping the perceived cost of world-changing tech to zero money, will be forced to stop.
There's a rich, deep undercurrent on all of these companies making a very good illusion that you just "get" search or file storage or information retrieval and it just happens. They do this because they sell everything about you to others. One day they will not easily be able.