Posted by Matou on Wed 7 Jan 04, 11:02 PM to Matou's blog.
First off, a message from cerrynn to those who have memoed and emailed her recently – she is currently effectively silenced by the esoteric mysteries of communications and computers - or, to put it another way, her 'puter is bust! Hopefully, this will be fixed very shortly and she will be able to reply to you.
For any that may be interested, we heard from the webmaster of the website who published an extract from her weblog and linked directly into it. He has complied with her (our) request and removed the text – but with the statement that publishing extracts is not an infringement of US copyright law. In this I believe him to be completely wrong. It is true that US law has what is known as a “Fair Use” doctrine but not in his wildest dreams could it be applied to his purposes. The doctrine covers such things as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. I have advised him of this, very politely IMO, but the reality is that law has little to do with it. The reality is that he can do much as he likes since even if he hadn't removed the offending item it would be unrealistic for us to do much about it. (I do actually know a *very* good hacker, a poacher turned gamekeeper but we, at least, have ethics.)
Despite our wishes, he insists on keeping the links in place. He denies it is discourteous and is keeping them anyway, so there! He defends his actions with the statement that in the US people do this all the time and cannot understand why we might be upset to see her wonderfully emotive and literate writing (or links thereto) placed next to adverts for free porn and pictures of pussies. Anyone who knows us will be aware that we are far from being prudes and we don't have any problems with erotica, porn and explicit photos – in appropriate places. I am also sure that other loggers will understand where we are coming from. He generously pointed out that we could always take our writing off the Net (so he couldn't get at it). How gracious. What would it have cost him to take the links off?
We perceive a completely unwitting arrogance on his part that puts us in mind of another rather well-known American who stomps all over other nations' wishes and does what he is totally convinced is God's will (you did know that the Almighty is a relation and listens to him regularly?) – and is then surprised when those other nations aren't keen to help him out when his abilities don't match his expectations. Ah well.
As cerrynn said, we are not going to stop writing. We will, however, bear in mind this man's cruising search bots when we think of titles for our weblogs. I must add that neither of us is an Americophobe (is that a word?) but there are aspects of the American culture and philosophy that we can detest with a passion.
Matou
Edited Wed 7 Jan 04, 11:17 PM by Matou
