Fanfic Forensics

Going to Console-ing Passions in Boston, looking for US tourism recs

Mon, 21 May 2012 15:24:07 GMT

Forgot to mention this because the acceptance notification came while I was in Deadlineville. I finally get to visit the US! The place is pretty famous, so this is all rather exciting.

The main reason for this trip is Console-ing Passions, a feminist media studies conference that will take place in Boston on 19-21 July. l'll be part of Mel Stanfill's panel 'Media fandom and/as labor'. Rebecca Carlson and Karen Hellekson will be on that panel as well. It looks like I'll get to meet a ton of people I've only ever spoken with over the internet, which is awesome.

My topic will be the flow of money in dojinshi exchange. Abstract:

The market for print dojinshi (Japanese fan comics) is one of the most well-known examples of an established, large-scale system in which fan creators routinely monetize their fanworks. Besides fans, many entities from convention organizers to transport firms and dojinshi resale shops are involved in the creation of a dojinshi and its distribution throughout its commercial 'life'. In this case study, I analyze what all these actors contribute and how they are compensated for their involvement. I keep a particular focus on how and to what degree fans who create dojinshi may or may not profit financially from the sale and resale of their works. It has been pointed out numerous times that in the case of English-language online fandom, any financial value that is created by fannish activities is often reaped exclusively by media companies. By examining how money circulates in one existing and well-developed system for the monetization of fanworks, I raise the question of who might 'deserve' compensation when a fanwork creates financial value in the context of the increasingly intense fan-industry collaborations (intentional or not) around English-language media.

I've been reading through Comiket catalogs and zines to get some numbers, and poking various people involved with dojinshi to ask about their experiences. Mighty interesting. Although everybody sells their works, of course, there still seems to be a similar sort of gendered divide as in many English-speaking fan communities, with the guys being more focused on the financial side of things in several ways. But the people who told me that all emphasized that this is just a general impression they have, so I'll have to dig deeper into this. Drafting Fanlore articles on dojinshi resale shops and dojinshi printing companies as I go along.

But enough research talk. Tourism!

Since it's my first time going to the US, I'll squeeze in some travel time before or after the conference. I definitely want to take a train across the country from Boston; I adore train travel, and the long Amtrak routes look fascinating. I'm thinking of just buying a two-week rail pass and making a big loop, starting with Boston -> Seattle and then going south for a while before returning to the east coast via a different route. If this is a crazy idea and Amtrak trains are actually from hell, please tell me now?

I can get off the train here and there and explore for a few days. Recommendations for such side trips would be very, very welcome. Anyone want to meet up? :)

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/51771.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[watch this video] A corporate-sponsored afterlife

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:11:32 GMT

Welcome to Life is "A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers."

Tom Scott: Welcome to Life (2.5 min)

One thing that jumps out for me is how well this video highlights the massively overblown importance that people attach to copyright today. Never mind the ridiculous licencing fee of $18.000 per month that a "user" would have to pay to keep remembering all the copyrighted works they've consumed in their life; it seems ridiculous that a human being who just died and now has to make decisions about their afterlife is asked to comply with copyright law, of all things.

Or maybe it's not so ridiculous, if you consider how broad an influence copyright already has on people's lives. Large media companies legislate new technologies and innovative companies to death, or try to, not because those new technologies and innovative companies are breaking the law but because they threaten the vested interests of the content industry. These companies push for broad national and international legislation and treaties like SOPA, ACTA, and TPP that will have immense foreseeable and unforseeable effects on civil liberties, for no reason except to "stop the pirates". (Even if "stopping the pirates" will not automatically lead to more sales - offering people affordable and convenient access to copyrighted content leads to more sales.)

Through all this, they also give people the idea that strong copyright protection is both a natural right (it's not) and some sort of life-or-death issue. Anyone who's spent a childhood watching the dire warnings about piracy at the start of every video and DVD has been led to believe that copyright is everything, and there can be no creativity without copyright. People with every conceivable creative hobby or job start to fret about "their" copyright - programmers, quilters, knitters, you name it, even fan artists. I've seen new people on deviantART ask anxious questions about what they need to do to "protect their copyright", as if the single most important thing about drawing fanart is making sure nobody does anything with it. Not to mention that plagiarism of fanart is hardly that common. But that's what you get when you tell people for decades that content thieves are lurking behind every bush: they start to think that it's likely that someone will "steal" their work and make a ton of money with it or something. They internalize the idea that all creativity has to be accompanied by strong copyright protection.

At a certain conference last year, someone talked about how to revive a dying Chinese craft - I don't remember which. The first thing we needed to do, he said, was to grant the few remaining artists strong copyright protection over their designs. But the problem with that craft wasn't that people were making knock-offs of the artworks: it was that no new people were volunteering to learn the techniques. In that situation, why would you make the craft even less accessible by putting the rights to the centuries-old designs in the hands of a few people? That researcher didn't explain why that strong copyright protection was needed; he presented it like it was totally obvious, something he expected everyone in the audience to agree on. To him, that imaginary link between strong copyrights and creativity was so self-evident that he thought strong copyright protection would automatically lead to more creativity. It's a baseless idea, but it's everywhere now, thanks to the content industry pushing it with every video and every DVD - and with all this increasingly far-reaching legislation.

Anyway, this video makes beautifully clear how baffling and insane it is that the copyright of the movies we watch and the music we listen to is becoming a defining aspect of our lives.

Of course it touches upon a bunch of other interesting issues as well. The creator of the video recommends a couple of books that sound pretty interesting: If you liked this, you may also enjoy two novels that provided inspiration for it: Jim Munroe's Everyone in Silico, where I first found the idea of a corporate-sponsored afterlife; Rudy Rucker's trippy Postsingular, which introduced me to the horrifying idea of consciousness slums.

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/51546.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Intro post at Symposium blog

Sat, 12 May 2012 03:10:01 GMT

From now on I'll be doing some occasional posting at Symposium, the blog associated with the OTW's journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Symposium is a great place for meta, and I'm thrilled at this chance to contribute. Here's my introduction post. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/51373.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

E-books, DRM, and restricting access to digital products based on where buyers live

Fri, 04 May 2012 13:42:29 GMT

It's International Day Against DRM. Lovely opportunity to re-read the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers.

No doubt preaching to the converted here, but DRM is pointless consumer harassment that only serves to stifle innovation and consolidate the power of massive distributors like Amazon. I can't believe that any publisher seriously thinks that DRM prevents e-book "piracy". The technology is completely ineffective. I reflexively de-DRM every e-book that I buy, because in most cases, I can't be sure that the books haven't been crippled in a way that will hinder me in doing my job. DRM is very easy to circumvent for anyone who wants to make personal use of an e-book, let alone for people who actually do intend to "pirate" e-books. It just doesn't work.

DRM is bad not just for consumers, who get locked into particular vendors because the e-books they bought can't be read on the e-reading devices or apps of other companies. It's also bad for publishers themselves, who also lock themselves into particular distributors by insisting on DRM. They willingly giving those distributors a stick to beat them with. DRM is also crushingly expensive for indie booksellers.

Tech books publisher O'Reilly says they have "a very simple theory: Trust your customers to do the right thing and you'll earn their business". This definitely works on me. Whenever possible, I avoid getting e-books from publishers that I know use some kind of DRM. Even aside from the hassle of having to tinker with an e-book to make sure I can actually use it, it really doesn't make me feel like a valued customer to know that I'm being prevented from engaging in legal uses of material I paid for (uses like quoting or, you know, reading) just because there's a possibility that I might also engage in non-legal uses of said material. All this confidence and dedication towards giving paying customers a fine experience is really heart-warming.

And while I'm standing on this soap box anyway: could we leave the twentieth century and stop restricting access to digital goods based on geographical locations? I've been doing my darnest to avoid Amazon, but I just had to buy Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World through them because literally none of the many other e-book options listed by Yale University Press worked for me. In most cases, the problem wasn't anything technical: it was just the country I'm in. My Japan-registered Android tablet isn't allowed to download the Nook or Sony Reader apps. Google's e-book store is not available in my location. I could get the Kobo app, but it doesn't seem to carry the book. EBSCO and ebrary don't seem to have useful offline options for individual consumers. And while my new favorite store Powells carries the book (with more DRM), it can only be downloaded by consumers in the US. Amazon's Kindle store was the only place where I could legally buy this e-book, at what seems to be a significantly lower price than in most of the other places I checked.

This is beyond pointless. I was actually forced to pay less for this book than I was willing to spend in order to avoid this vendor I don't like. Whatever licensing idiocy stands in the way of people in other countries being allowed to buy these simple digital downloads from all those other vendors, it needs to get resolved.

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/50703.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Drive-by alert: OTW community survey closing today

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:49:04 GMT

The OTW has been doing a survey on people's experiences with the org. It closes today, so best be quick if you were planning to take this excellent opportunity to gush, vent, and tell the org what you want from it.

By the way, the annual membership drive has been accompanied by a couple of really nice introduction posts about various OTW projects, what they're about, what their goals are, and so on. Brief but very informative:

Transformative Works and Cultures journal
Open Doors archiving project
Fanlore wiki (which has recently become my new favourite thing in the world and will be babbled about at length later)
Legal advocacy

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/50369.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Joss Whedon accidentally defines proper relationship between author and work, lit theory done now

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 14:48:01 GMT

kouredios pointed out a Reddit thread in which Joss Whedon answers the question "How do you feel about scholarship about your work and the fact that academics tend to delve quite deeply into it, perhaps to the point of publishing interpretations you did not intend?" with the following:

"All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet -- it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you."

Now, I disagree with the idea that the relationship between an author and their work is anything like that between a parent and a child. While the metaphor in and of itself is rather understandable, that sort of language is all too often abused by fic-averse authors like George R.R. Martin to pretend that their "parent" position gives them the eternal moral right to decide how their creations can be used by other people. I'm also not very impressed with all the Reddit commenters who act like Joss Whedon just invented the idea that works might be open to interpretations not intended by the author.

But his throwaway mention that "art isn't your pet" is really rather interesting. I'd like to propose that in fact, your art is exactly like your pet! More precisely, your art is exactly like your cat. You can raise it from a kitten, feed it, and provide it with a home. You can cuddle it and put its pictures all over the internet. But you can't stop other people from taking the cat pictures you exposed to the world and putting a new spin on them with really weird captions that you may not agree with. And no matter how much you will want your cat to stay in the house with you all day and give cuddles only to you, it will squeeze through the merest hint of an open window to go spread cuddles (and ~~fic~~ kittens) around everywhere it goes. And no matter how profoundly and genuinely attached you might be to your cat, it really doesn't care. It's not equipped for caring about you. It's a ~~nonexistent figment of your imagination~~ cat.

Of course the cat metaphor isn't quite on the mark in a digital age in which copies of a work that are shared around the internet can be pretty much the exact equivalent of the "original" work. A picture of a cat on the internet is does not, in fact, have the same properties as a real-life purring and shedding domestic animal. And unlike copies on the internet, a real-life cat is not a non-rivalrous good. Although cat pictures on the internet are... So in economic terms, the real-life cat might be compared to a private good, while the cat pictures on the internet are non-rivalrous and non-excludable public goods. Or perhaps it's possible to reframe this idea in copyright terms and say that the real-life cat is the idea (not copyrightable) while the cat pictures on the internet are original expressions of the idea (copyrightable)? Or should that be the other way around?

Hmm. It is midnight here, and I should probably confess to not being at full thinking power. The "your work is like your cat" idea is clearly a complex theory in need of careful study and much refining, some other time.

ETA: Apparently someone linked this post on ffa as evidence of acafen being overly analysis-happy and hating on Joss Whedon. I agree with Joss Whedon, I'm just not fond of his metaphor. And I can't believe this needs to be clarified, but the cat theory is a joke.

Now I definitely feel like writing it up into a full paper and see if I can trick anyone into publishing. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/49288.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Please watch this PSA from Microsoft on how to summon men in unitards

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 10:06:08 GMT

Found via Techdirt: a video from Microsoft that "informs" you about the dangers of counterfeit software. The dangers consist of strangely clad men who will invade your office to hide in your copy machines, steal your external hard drives, and abscond with your credit cards and desktops. Conventionally attractive women are particularly at risk of this.

Piracy Lurks Everywhere (2min)

If you're now feeling thoroughly uninformed about counterfeit software, you can go to the official Microsoft site that the video mentions. Techdirt says that it's so poorly designed that it looks like it might be hawking counterfeit software itself. I can't honestly confirm this, since the site refuses to display properly in Chrome, Firefox, and on my Android phone in Dolphin or the native browser. Presumably only those who use IE deserve to be saved from the men in unitards.

One might be tempted to shelve this one with all the other blatantly fear-mongering and uninformative warnings about counterfeit and "pirated" goods that the copyright industry tends to churn out. I'm going for an attempt at self-deprecating comedy myself.

By the way, I really recommend Techdirt as a source for the latest copyright-related good news, bad news, and funny news. There's a lot of copyright-related sources in my RSS reader, and I get the impression that most of the important and interesting happenings around copyright all end up on Techdirt sooner or later. Also at @techdirt. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/48662.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[research] Where the imaginary numbers from the "Copyright Math" video come from

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 03:34:00 GMT

The author of that funny video about how the copyright industries trumpet absurd numbers on piracy-related financial and job losses has written up an informative extended version of his talk in which he explains where he got the numbers for his calculations. It's worth checking out, mainly because it makes clear that there frequently are no reliable sources for the staggering, terrifying, and mostly imaginary numbers on piracy-related economic losses. And consequently, that there is no factual basis for many laws and proposals for laws that include restrictions on online freedoms in the name of enforcing copyright law - SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, the DMCA, and other acronyms.

Apart from the numbers talk, the following excerpts from the write-up are telling (emphasis added):

First, the Motion Picture Association’s claims of $58 billion in actual US economic losses and 373,000 lost jobs came from this press release (which can also be found on Scribd). These numbers originated at a think tank called the “Institute for Policy Innovation” – an organization that Businessweek once profiled in an article called "Op-Eds for Sale." In it, an IPI analyst freely admitted to taking payoffs from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing “op-ed pieces boosting the lobbyist’s clients.” The IPI’s president supported this behavior, saying it was neither wrong nor unethical, and dismissing those who apply “a naïve purity standard” to the business of writing op-eds. This doesn’t necessarily mean that MPAA lobbyists paid the IPI to conjure up these numbers. But whatever their genesis, they’re not easy figures to support.

(...)

To me, the most depressing number in the presentation is the $150,000 maximum fine that Congress designates for “willfully” pirating a single copy of a single song under the Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999. This number is grotesquely divorced from the actual damages and harm caused by a single instance of piracy. As such, it represents a naked perversion of “The Law” — turning it from a source of justice into a bludgeon for a powerful and cynical lobby. The music industry has sued more than 30,000 US citizens under this law. Since the consequences of losing would be bankruptcy in almost all cases, the crushing majority of defendants settled without daring to challenge the industry. As a result, the maximum $150,000 per-song fine has never actually been imposed (although one student is currently fighting a verdict of over $20,000 per song, and a single mom was hit with an $80,000-per-song ruling, which was later reduced, but is still being debated in appeal).

How do organizations arrive at imaginary numbers for the damage caused by copyright infringement? Besides paying lobbyists to "calculate" numbers out of thin air, games of telephone and faulty interpretations of statistics seem popular methods as well. In a 2008 article called "750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy", Ars Technica tried to hunt down the source of the "750,000 lost jobs and $200 to $250 billion cost to the US economy" numbers that used to be (and sometimes still are) tossed about to justify ever-stricter interpretations of, additions to, and enforcement of copyright law. They found that the numbers were completely bogus.

This a very readable and informative article: it's slightly more dated than the "Copyright math" video, but it does an excellent job of clarifying exactly how lobbyists and the lawmakers who listen to them can arrive at mind-bogglingly stupid numbers. Here's a bunch of excerpts (emphasis added):

First, the estimate of 750,000 jobs lost. (Is that supposed to be per year? A cumulative total over some undefined span? Those who cite the figure seldom say.) Customs is most often given as the source for this, and indeed, you can find press releases from as recently as 2002 giving that figure as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol estimate. Eureka! But when we contacted CBP to determine how they had arrived at that imposing figure, we were informed that it was, in essence, a goof. The figure, Customs assured us, came from somewhere else, and was mistakenly described as the agency's own. (...)

With Customs a dead end, we dove into press archives, hoping to find the earliest public mention of the elusive 750,000 jobs number. And we found it in—this is not a typo—1986. Yes, back in the days when "Papa Don't Preach" and "You Give Love a Bad Name" topped the charts, The Christian Science Monitor quoted then-Commerce Secretary Malcom Baldridge, trumpeting Ronald Reagan's own precursor to the recently passed PRO-IP bill. Baldridge estimated the number of jobs lost to the counterfeiting of U.S. goods at "anywhere from 130,000 to 750,000."

Where did that preposterously broad range come from? As with the number of licks needed to denude a Tootsie Pop, the world may never know. Ars submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Commerce this summer, hoping to uncover the basis of Baldridge's claim—or any other Commerce Department estimates of job losses to piracy—but came up empty. So whatever marvelous proof the late secretary discovered was not to be found in the margins of any document in the government's vaults. But no matter: By 1987, that Brobdignagian statistical span had been reduced, as far as the press were concerned, to "as many as 750,000" jobs. Subsequent reportage dropped the qualifier. The 750,000 figure was still being bandied about this summer (note: in 2008) in support of the aforementioned PRO-IP bill.

And:

What, then, of that $200 to $250 billion range? Often, it's attributed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and indeed, the Bureau routinely cites those numbers. According to FBI spokesperson Catherine Milhoan, the figure "was derived through our coordination with industry, trade associations, rights holders, and other law enforcement agencies" at a 2002 anti-piracy confab. But neither the Bureau nor the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which assembled the inter-agency powwow, could find any record of how that number was computed. (...) Several of the witnesses were conspicuously vague about their sources. (...) Finally, Charlotte Simmons-Gill of the International Trademark Association was kind enough to give a precise citation: the October 25, 1993 issue of Forbes.

Ars eagerly hunted down that issue and found a short article on counterfeiting, in which the reader is informed that "counterfeit merchandise" is "a $200 billion enterprise worldwide and growing faster than many of the industries it's preying on." No further source is given. (...) What is very clear, however, is that even assuming the figure is accurate, it is not an estimate of the cost to the U.S. economy of IP piracy. It's an estimate of the size of the entire global market in counterfeit goods.

And finally:

One final, slightly theoretical point deserves emphasis here. All the projections we've discussed, the rigorous and the suspect alike, calculate losses in sales or royalties to U.S. firms. This is often conflated with the net "cost to the U.S. economy." But those numbers—whatever they might be—are almost certainly not the same. When someone torrents a $12 album that they would have otherwise purchased, the record industry loses $12, to be sure. But that doesn't mean that $12 has magically vanished from the economy. On the contrary: someone has gotten the value of the album and still has $12 to spend somewhere else.

(...)

But enough theory and speculation; here is what we can say for certain: the two numbers that are invariably invoked whenever Congress considers the need for more stringent IP enforcement are, at best, highly dubious. They are phantoms. We have no good reason to think that either is remotely reliable.

Perhaps more importantly, both numbers are seemingly decades old, gaining a patina of currency and credibility by virtue of having been laundered through a relay race of respectable sources, even as their origin recedes into the mists. That's especially significant, because these numbers are always invoked as proof that the piracy problem is still dire—that everything we've done to step up international enforcement of intellectual property laws has been in vain. But of course, if you simply recycle the same numbers from 15 and 20 years ago—remember that IACC's 2005 publications still cite that 1995 congressional testimony, from which it seems safe to infer that they have no more recent source—then it will necessarily seem as though no ground has been gained.

Charming. One of the laws created under the shadow of such phantom numbers was the DMCA, which led (among other things) to the sort of automated enforcement that allows private companies to police and punish online creators at random and without having to prove in court that the individuals did anything wrong. There's a new one of those coming to the US in months, this RIAA-backed six-strikes plan, on which there is a truly deafening silence in nearly all mainstream media I've checked out.

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/48093.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[research] Summit Entertainment shoots down art when automated process thinks it's Twilight fan art

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 02:00:43 GMT

Apparently Summit Entertainment had a picture by artist Kelly Howlett yanked from Zazzle because they believed - wrongly - that she was selling Twilight fan art.

Now, I seriously question the wisdom of Summit Entertainment spending time and resources to track down Twilight fan artists who may be trying to make a buck from their work. Except that they don't have to spend time or resources on this sort of thing anymore: the identification of this picture as unauthorized Twilight art being sold in violation of Summit's intellectual property rights happened via an automated process.

Howlett is not actually convinced that anyone at Summit even saw her sketch, that this was done by an automated process that found a (vaguely) familiar tag. But if that is what’s considered the intellectual property of anyone, then is there any stopping big companies like Summit from going after even the most minor of references, let alone the entre fan art community? And how are regular people who make fan art supposed to stand up to high-power corporate lawyers? (Answer: They can’t.)

Using automated processes to identify and "prosecute" (term used loosely here, since these are private companies who've been given the power to police and sentence) infringing art on the internet is a practice that's very error-prone and has considerable collateral damage. People can get their livelihood yanked off the internet or even get kicked offline entirely for no good reason and without due process. And when individual creators want to protest bogus infringement claims, they don't have an automated process to do the work for them or the confidence of having lawyers in their pockets that they can shake at big companies: it takes a great deal of time and effort before they get permission to upload a work again. Some people say that such "annoyances" for individual creators are unfortunate but necessary, because rightsholders need automated systems to track infringement of their works on the whole wide internet, and they just can't afford to actually look at every single online work that gets flagged. I think that claim shows a complete failure to understand what makes works valuable on the internet, for their creators and in the eyes of others.

When a work is taken down after a bogus infringement claim, it can often be uploaded again, but that new copy will have been stripped of its the work's whole history. A "work" isn't just the text or the picture that you can make a backup copy of; it's the work, and the comments, and the views, and the kudos/favs/stars/bookmarks/ other thingies by which sites let people show appreciation and communicate. You could even argue that the "work" also includes bookmarks outside of the posting location - bookmarks that get broken if the work has to be reposted to a different URL. A bogus takedown notice can destroy all of that in a second.

I recently deleted one of my fics from the AO3 by accident, and losing that one easily replaceable online copy of that work was nothing compared to losing the whole history of comments etc. associated with that particular copy. If this snafu had happened because of some random claim by an automated process rather than through my own inattention, I'd have expired from sheer fury on the spot, because someone would have taken three quarters of what made that fic valuable for me simply because their algorithm had a hiccup. Whoops.

There's lots of reasons to dislike automated processes, but deep down, what offends me the most is that a bunch of media companies apparently feel totally okay with imposing their view of where the value of "culture" lies on everybody else. In their framework, the financial value of any given movie or other commercial property they own trumps the different value of works created outside of their circuit, in any and all circumstances. In the minds of these companies (because companies are apparently persons), if it's to protect the need of a handful of people to make all financial value derived from a movie flow into their pockets and nobody else's, it's completely acceptable to use automated processes to randomly shoot down online art and potentially destroy the value it holds for its creators. Not just "acceptable": it's the natural order of things.

It's unbelievable that the new RIAA policing scheme actually has some people going "Bwahaha, that will teach those pirates". Media companies who only want to protect their current business model get the power to decide what "legitimate" culture is for everybody else? Via use of automated processes? What could go wrong. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/47845.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Watch Amazon pivot: Digital Manga is no longer suspended from the Kindle Store

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 04:44:59 GMT

The suspension of Digital Manga from the Kindle Store over unspecified "content violations" has been reversed, which Digital Manga attributes to the outpouring of support from fans who took action. That was fast!

While I'm glad Digital Manga can continue to sell via Amazon, I'm profoundly unimpressed with the robustness of Amazon's judgment here. If they can be swayed by one group of people yelling loudly about their interpretation of the vague content guidelines, they can be swayed by other groups, including those whose interpretations are not so benign and who may want to stop others' voices from being heard on Amazon's massive platform. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/46868.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[watch this video] Be amazed by the new field of Copyright Math

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:42:13 GMT

It's pretty sobering to read that the sky-high figures for financial damage and job losses caused by "piracy" that the media industry routinely presents as true, and on which so many draconian "anti-piracy" laws are based, are completely false. But you can also just watch this funny video, it's probably more memorable anyway ;)

Rob Reid: The $8 billion iPod (5 min)

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/46684.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Digital Manga suspended from Kindle Store entirely over yaoi titles; how to contact Amazon

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 02:58:28 GMT

It seems Amazon just suspended Digital Manga Inc. from publishing on Kindle entirely. Reportedly, this was done over an ill-defined "content violation" related to Digital Manga's yaoi titles. It's not the first time that yaoi titles are the subject of censorship kerfuffles, but apparently Amazon is still not planning to clarify its famously vague guidelines about "pornography" versus "erotica".

(Apple is engaging in disturbingly similar practices, apparently keeping out yaoi titles and other LGBTQ content from its iBooks store. Digital Manga was told to remove its yaoi titles from its iPad app on February 2. It's a bad, bad thing when distributors get to control what appears on people's reading devices and can use drm to lock people even further into their walled gardens.)

Amazon can be contacted at ecr@amazon.com (Digital Manga's recommendation) or via the online Kindle customer service (a rather well-hidden page, I must say). I've contacted Amazon to ask why I'm no longer allowed to put Digital Manga's titles on my Kindle; feel free to use the text below in full or in part. Here's another letter.

Dear Amazon,

On March 15, 2012, Amazon suspended publisher Digital Manga Inc.’s account from distributing its books on the Kindle platform because of "content violation" (1). The grounds on which Digital Manga Inc.'s account was suspended seem extremely questionable to me, not just because Amazon's content guidelines appear to be very vague and difficult to comply with, but also because this suspension comes after previous incidents in which Amazon was taken to task for removing manga with even fairly tame same-sex content while leaving manga with more explicit heterosexual content untouched.

As Kindle owner and paying Amazon customer, I'm dismayed to hear that Amazon may be trying to keep perfectly legal content off my device. Because I don't want to take any action without having all the facts, I would like to request some information from you.

As far as I can determine, Digital Manga Inc.’s books may have been objectionable to you because of the either of the following clauses in Amazon's content guidelines for sellers (2):

Pornography. Pornography; X-rated movies; home porn; hard-core material, including magazines, that depict graphic sexual acts, amateur porn and soiled undergarments. Unrated erotic videos and DVDs and properly censored erotic artwork and magazines of the type you'd find at a typical bookstore are permitted. Nudity, graphic titles, and descriptions must be sufficiently concealed with censor strips on all items containing such content.

Offensive material. What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect. This includes items such as crime-scene photos or human organs and body parts. Amazon.com reserves the right to determine the appropriateness of items sold on our site. Also, be aware of cultural differences and sensitivities. Some items may be acceptable in one country, but unacceptable in another. Please keep in mind our global community of customers.

Could you please inform me as soon as possible, and in detail, which of the abovementioned guidelines were violated by Digital Manga Inc., so I can determine for myself whether Amazon is keeping their content from me for a good reason? If there were any other reasons behind the suspension, such as complaints from other customers, please let me know about these as well so I can make an informed decision.

Also, allow me to say that I profoundly object to turns of phrase such as "What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect". This sort of language gives Amazon carte blanche to act in a completely arbitrary fashion when determining which content is "appropriate" for sale on its site.

Please be assured that I will be buying all my digital and print books via other sellers until you provide me with a satisfactory answer to my questions. Censorship is abhorrent, and as the largest distributor of e-books on the market, Amazon has a responsibility to ensure that its store welcomes all legal content.

Sincerely,

(name)

References:
(1) http://www.digitalmanga.com/blog/2356/important-announcement-dmps-kindle-publishing-suspended
(2) http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_rel_topic?ie=UTF8&nodeId=15015801

ETA: The text above contained a reference to taking my business to the The Book Depository, but eggsbenedict points out that The Book Depository was bought by Amazon last year. I don't know exactly how this is impacting the running of the company, but removed the reference just to make sure. Apparently Amazon also owns Abebooks and a bunch of other book-related companies, including some I use and give money to, such as LibraryThing.

Again, I don't know what being owned by Amazon means for these companies and if it has any influence on, for instance, their content policies. Maybe there's no influence. However, it does seem clear that I'm absolutely unable to buy legal copies of some of the e-books I want or need for work without financially benefiting Amazon. It's not a sign of a healthy system if it's completely impossible anywhere in the world to buy a legal copy of a certain book without somehow going through this one single distributor.
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[research] Copyright reflects "the degree of cultural development" of a country?

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 03:41:17 GMT

The protection and people's awareness of copyright are said to reflect the degree of cultural development of the country, and therefore, copyright systems should be understood by a wide range of people.

That's how the Copyright Research Information Center, a Japanese government-authorized "public service corporation", starts out its introduction to copyright for beginners. The Japanese version of that sentence is:

著作権に対する理解と保護の度合いは、その国の文化のバロメーターといわれています。それだけに、著作権とは何か、なぜ大切なのかをもっと知ることが必要です。

...Which literally translates as:

The degree of understanding and protection of copyright is said to be a barometer for a country's culture. For that reason, it is necessary to know more about what copyright is and why it is important.

It's a statement that still makes me boggle every time I need to visit CRIC's site to check something about Japanese copyright law. Of course, one could argue that it would indeed be a sign of "development" (whatever that means) for a country to have proportional, reality-based, and effective copyright legislation that verifiably does what copyright was intended to do, namely to promote the creation of culture. However, given how much the rest of CRIC's site goes on about how people should respect copyright more, I think they mean that "cultural development" (or in the Japanese version, simply "culture") should be measured by the degree to which people obey current copyright legislation. The way CRIC is trying to shape discourse around copyright here is pretty amazing. Copyright is not just a law, or a "moral right", but an indicator of the worth of a whole country's culture? Whoa, there.

I was reminded of CRIC's wording again after starting on William Patry's Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, which deals with how participants in copyright-related battles use language to shape people's perception of the issues at hand and of the "other side": pirates, parasites, enemies, dinosaurs, and so on. "Pirates" is universally used, for instance, but it's an incredibly loaded word that does much to shape discourses around any sort of copying or sharing of media.

Judging by how fic is often described in the media, I get the feeling we have a bit of a discourse problem too :/ Hmmm, I wonder if we'd get any interesting results if we took a bunch of those "as others see us" news articles and ran them through a word cloud generator. *note to self*

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[watch this video] Kara

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:27:47 GMT

Social experiment: please watch the video before reading any of the text that follows it? There seems to be wide agreement that this is a moving and poignant short, but I'm curious to know exactly why different people find it poignant, so I don't want to impose my framing of what happens beforehand.

Kara (7min)

"Kara" is intended to show off the motion capture technology that will be used for some future games on the PS3. Reading the full article only after I'd watched the video, it struck me how my reaction to it was different from that of Cory Doctorow, whose introduction to the vid on Boing Boing was the only text I read before moving on to the video. He writes that "the unsettling poignancy of this clip arises from the gender and form of the robot". In the comments to that article (which are somewhat iffy in places), lots of people pipe up with where they think the poignancy came from, citing everything from the robot's appearance to her human-like reactions to the music. There's more interpretations in the comments on YouTube (which are iffier).

I found this moving as well, but I'm fairly sure that the "gender and form of the robot" had very little to do with my reaction. For me, this video was all about the story of Kara and the assembly worker, their interactions, and their relationship. Kara is certainly impressively human-like, the acting is good, the music helps, and so on, but all that just works to support what is essentially - for me - a character piece. Some Boing Boing commenters felt the story would have been stronger if the whole thing had been deliberate, a test to see if the robot was self-aware enough. While that might have been interesting, it's not my preferred interpretation, because it would interfere with my reading of this as two characters interacting. If it was all a set-up and the assembly worker's reactions were routine and fake, something he does twenty times a day with every robot he tests, that would mean these two characters didn't really connect. I want there to be shippiness everywhere, darn it.

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[research] Fellow academics, you can cite tweets now! Badly, but you can.

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 03:32:18 GMT

The MLA (Modern Language Association), has updated its widely-used citation guidelines for academic papers with a citation style for tweets:

Begin the entry in the works-cited list with the author’s real name and, in parentheses, user name, if both are known and they differ. If only the user name is known, give it alone.

Next provide the entire text of the tweet in quotation marks, without changing the capitalization. Conclude the entry with the date and time of the message and the medium of publication (Tweet). For example:

Athar, Sohaib (ReallyVirtual). “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event).” 1 May 2011, 3:58 p.m. Tweet.

It's kind of baffling that the URL for a tweet isn't supposed to be included. The point of references in a paper is to enable the reader to locate and verify the sources used, and to locate a tweet, a URL seems almost indispensable. URLs are required for citing websites, why not for tweets? Since the MLA guidelines are used as rules rather than guidelines by many academic publishers, an individual researcher who tries to "fix" this by including a tweet URL may encounter quite a bit of hassle trying to get the references published the way they want.

And I must admit to experiencing a small fit of giggles as the Atlantic article where I first read the news used the phrase "The Modern Language Association likes to keep up with the times" in a totally non-ironic fashion. It is now March 2012. Twitter was launched in July 2006. The page about tweet citation on the MLA's site isn't dated, so I briefly hoped that it was actually published earlier and the Atlantic only noticed it just now. But no, the MLA announced the new guidelines on its own twitter account a couple of days ago.

It took the MLA until March 2012 to a) conclude that academics might need to cite tweets, and b) come up with a broken format? Of course the MLA is not a representative of academia or academics, but sometimes I wonder if those kids on their intertubes might be on to something when they whine that the gears of our academic machine turn a tad slowly.

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[watch this video] Michael Geist explains why ACTA is harmful

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 03:19:20 GMT

A testimony at a European Parliament workshop on ACTA on March 1. I think this one is a must-see, especially because Geist doesn't just touch upon the problems inherent in ACTA, but also clearly and concisely lists a lot of issues that keep on coming back in similar treaties: the use of unclear language, the exclusion of developing countries from negotiations, the lack of transparency that comes with negotiating treaties out of the public eye and behind the back of established international venues that are designed to host these kinds of negotiations, and so on. A full transcript of the talk is available here.

Michael Geist at the European Parliament INTA Workshop on ACTA 01.03.2012 (10 minutes)

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Outer limits of shipping imagination reached, everybody go home

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:17:09 GMT

Home from Tokyo, will get cracking on a bunch of replies now. In the meantime: I looked at the list of pairings on the cover of this dojinshi and felt like a really, really undeveloped fannish person because I only know how to ship mere humans. I should get more practice at looking at the world around me and finding the shipping angle in everything.

(Mukibutsu Anthology 7, multiple authors)

And this is just one book in a series of large thick anthologies about objects getting it on. Anthropomorphic (gijinka) manga have been all the rage for several years now, ever since Hetalia: I don't remember if Hetalia started it or if it was simply the most succesful representative of the trend. I bought a bunch in the beginning - the ones with the antropomorphic trains and the antropomorphic Japanese prefectures and the antropomorphic condiments and the antropomorphic fast food restaurants - because the idea seemed novel and possibly interesting, but most of them were pretty boring comedy stuff with some nudge-nudge-wink-wink hints at shipping. The stories in this dojinshi are not boring. Clearly, all that was necessary to get me extremely interested in shoeshine/shoes was the addition of explicit and, um, fully realized shipping. This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/45105.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[research] Going to ICOMAG. Also, 'genre' is an interesting word

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:55:56 GMT

The second International Convention on Manga, Animation, Game and Media Art (ICOMAG) will be held in Tokyo this weekend. This year's title is 'Commons of Imagination: What Today’s Society Can Share through Manga and Animation'. The conference aims are described as follows:

Japanese Manga and animation are currently enjoying huge popularity all over the world. Manga and animation obviously have a major impact on society, although it has generally been regarded in terms of recreation up to this point. In reality, however, both the content and form of manga and animation touch upon the most profound aspects of how we see life and the world around us. But the mechanisms of such effects remain largely unconscious and are seldom the main focus of discussion. Manga and animation also fulfill a function that has conventionally been played by the arts, namely, serving to build connections among societies and communities with differing historical and linguistic backgrounds. Viewing manga and animation as a kind of cultural commons, this roundtable will aim to discuss what we can share through these genres and will focus on the possibility of sharing cultural imagination through manga and animation.

I decided to go because the person who told me about the conference said that it probably wouldn't be very interesting for me "because it's not about fan studies". This confused me, especially after I'd read more about the conference's themes. What this gathering is trying to do - like "focus on the possibility of sharing cultural imagination through manga and animation" and "discuss whether manga and animation have the potential to develop as a common language in the global culture of the future" sounds like it has a very, very great deal to do with how audiences for manga and anime decide to deal with those media. And with what millions of manga and anime fans around the world are already doing.

Judging from the texts on the site, the conference could turn out either very interesting or overly focused on what the industry and professional creators "can" or "should" do. I'm not quite sure where they'll try to go with all this, but I'm curious, and some of the speakers sound pretty interesting. Fingers crossed.

In any case, it's a great excuse to go to Tokyo. I've freed up two days to go bury myself in Comiket Service's new second-hand dojinshi shop and in the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library. Yonezawa was one of the great driving forces behind Comiket, and after he passed away a couple of years ago, his massive collection of dojinshi and rare manga-related materials was turned into the cornerstone of a to-be-completed manga library at Meiji University. It doesn't look like I'll be able to access a lot as a one-day member in the library, but the new shop sounds like it couldn't possibly disappoint. The old second-hand dojinshi shop was crammed so full of books when I went there last December that I could literally not even turn around in some places; it had its own kind of charm, for sure, but it was hell to find anything - although I did buy a dojinshi with a very lovey-dovey drawing of Eomer and a horse on the cover that I still haven't dared to read. The new shop sounds most excellent: it focuses on gen and joseimuke ('for girls', which in practice means mostly boys' love) and promises a wide selection from old as well as new genres.

By the way, I love that the Japanese term 'ジャンル' or 'genre' is used to denote a fanwork's source work by dojinshi fans, in the way 'fandom' is used a lot by English-language fans. Wouldn't it be fascinating to consider how fanworks could also be thought of as belonging to 'genres' in the English-language sense of the word? What could be the implications of thinking of 'Harry Potter' or 'Avatar' in the same way we think of more well-known genres like 'horror' or 'action'? Think of the theoretical wrangling. What would be the properties of the genre 'Harry Potter' - those characteristics that make you recognize a work as 'Harry Potter' the second you catch a glimpse of it, the way you can often tell the traditional 'genre' of a movie with one glance at the poster? What would be... No? *cough* Okay.

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[random] Anti-science claptrap debunking for the non-scientist

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 06:19:54 GMT

Nobody needs to be a card-carrying biologist or climate scientist to recognize that things like belief in intelligent design or climate change denial are based on some deeply flawed thinking. Not that science is all-knowing or always right per definition. But there's a big difference between, say, criticizing the flaws inherent in hallowed concepts like academic objectivity, and rejecting a widely-supported scientific fact because you don't believe in science.

Still, it's not always self-evident to argue back at "non-believers" if you're not an expert in the relevant field yourself. People can read "ten myths used by climate change deniers/intelligent design proponents/whatnot" lists and explanatory websites and Bad Science posts as much as they like, that still won't give most of them a truly profound understanding of the arguments. Personally, I really prefer to feel like I know what I'm talking about before I enter into a complex discussion. Perhaps a lot of "non-believers" have no scruples whatsoever about denying things they have no solid grasp of, but sinking to that level and waving around scientific information without truly understanding it can easily result in simply more confusion. (Compare with, say, the often very unhelpful internet lawyering that takes place in discussions about the legal status of fic.)

Which is why this graph is a really welcome reminder that to start debunking anti-science nonsense, you often don't need more than really, really basic logic:

(From here, found via approximately half of Twitter)

"Which makes more sense?" is not a solid argument, of course. Things that seem to make no sense can still be true. But stopping for two minutes to consider exactly who is involved in a debate and what their motives might be is still pretty helpful in a lot of these discussions. Regardless of complex scientific facts, theories, and models that you and I may or may not understand profoundly enough to wield them well: exactly how likely is it that vast numbers of scientists argue against intelligent design/climate change denial/a link between abortion and breast cancer/a link between vaccination and autism/et cetera because they like to troll/want to earn tons of grant money/are all part of a grand anti-corporation liberal socialist communist environmentalist conspiracy/hate religion/hate freedom? This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/44616.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[watch this video] The periodic table table (and fic libraries and carved books)

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:04:39 GMT

Theo Gray, element collector and many other things, constructed a table with a hand-carved wooden tile for every element in Mendeleev's periodic table. Each tile hides a sample of the element inside the table. It's a beautiful piece of work, and I love how it shows that there are real, physical, interesting things behind that perfectly boring grid full of letters I was presented with in high school and forgot as quickly as I could possibly manage. Maybe I'd have tried harder to take an interest in chemistry if the periodic table had been presented as this intricate ordering of actual materials that look and feel absolutely fascinating. Most of the video is Gray showing off his collection of element samples, and oh, I wish I was in that room right now and could touch all that stuff. (New thing learned today: tungsten is an incredibly heavy element, and one actual use of tungsten powder is sprinkling it on wax in dog's ears so the ears will lie flat.)

Theo Gray: the periodic table table (via Open Culture)

And of course a "periodic table table" is just a really cute idea. It makes me think of grabbing some old cabinets from the library and making a "fic archive archive" of printed and bound editions of all the fic in my bookmarks. There would be typewritten cross-referenced index cards in catalog cabinets, and there would be Dewey decimal, and the classification numbers would be stuck to the jackets with tape that's peeling off after many loving readings. Everything would smell of paper, and I would stroll through the stacks and caress the spines of my old favorite Snarry epics and be the the most well-content woman in the world. (I thought for a minute about what a collaborative print archive/library of all the fic ever written might be like, but it would never get past the planning stage. We'd never agree on whether mpreg belongs under 305-Social groups, 618-Gynaecology, or 299-Other religions.)

Speaking of books and gorgeous things: these books carved with surgical tools are ingenious and stunning. (via cofax7)

This entry was originally posted at http://fanficforensics.dreamwidth.org/44430.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

[random] Friending spree and life philosophy

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:29:41 GMT

Added a bunch of people whose journals I like and/or whom I've talked with. Hello!

In random news, this is the most motivational image I know. It will be on my coat of arms when I get one, and my motto will be "Exactly how bad do you want it?", but in faux French.

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Tech news sites "stunned" by women using Pinterest, decide it's about "social shopping experiences"

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:30:24 GMT

About a week ago, The Mary Sue reported that some major tech news sites are apparently using the fact that Pinterest has a majority of female users as an excuse to write sexist copy:

However, another topic started to emerge that should be far more troubling to social media users. Tech journalists covering the site started using phrases like “female-centric” and “catnip for women,” in their articles.

(...)

And yet, when tech blog Gizmodo put together its write-up on the site, the lead read, “Quick! Name the most perplexing social site you can think of. If you are a dude, it is probably Pinterest.”

Even MSN Money framed the conversation in terms of male v. female users: “Even though the site may be dominated by women’s interests, think of it this way: It’s essentially a guide telling men everywhere exactly what women want.”

Neither of these statements is a problem on its face. It’s true that women use the site in large numbers. In fact, Forbes is reporting that 70 percent of the user base is women. However, it should be no shock to seasoned tech reporters and talking heads that women use the Internet.

In fact, the core problem is the idea that somehow the site has less value or is inherently confusing because women are using it. Ask yourself these questions:
Was Reddit’s rise covered by tech bloggers and journalists with aside paragraphs like: “If you want to know what men like, go check out Reddit!”?
Did snarky bloggers make pie-charts like this one when Tumblr was growing that pointed to gender stereotypes about men?
Did tech analysts write blog posts about the “manliness” of any given tech startup?
Did tech experts ever go out of their way to explain the appeal of a new social media site to women by stressing that it really wasn’t overtly manly?
If you answered “no” to all these questions, I’m not surprised.

I took a closer look at the Pinterest-related reporting from the tech news sites in my RSS reader. About half were either not reporting on Pinterest or reported about it without saying anything strange about its user base. The other half unfortunately confirmed what The Mary Sue claims. Examples:

TechCrunch: Where The Ladies At? Pinterest. 2 Million Daily Facebook Users, 97% Of Fans Are Women

The article starts with an "OMG". It states that "Pinterest is becoming an obsession for flocks of women" with its "gorgeous photography, and links to shopping sites". Presumably it's also becoming an "obsession for flocks of women" because it's useful, but carrying on.

"The stunningly feminine fan base" could grow because "even though it was co-founded by three men, the site’s not shy about courting women". Women liking a service made by men, and men feeling totally okay with marketing their service to women? Remarkable!

TechCrunch clarifies that there is a significant majority of male users, but these are "probably not addicted to pinning tuxedos and power tools like women pin brides dresses and bundt cakes". The article is accompanied by a few graphics of hearts and squealing women that are probably intended to be amusing.

The Next Web: Here's why Pinterest is growing so fast

"At the risk of sounding sexist, we have to examine the traditional habits of females versus males. To that end, women tend to like to shop more than men do. You could easily define Pinterest as a way for people to “window shop” for anything that interests them, whether that’s a physical object or something as intangible as quotes. They can then show off their “purchases” (pins) to their friends, and even re-pin and create discussions around what they've found. It’s a social shopping experience, disguised as a website full of interests."

So, you can define anything women collect (pictures, text, whatnot) as "purchases". Women like collecting things because they like to show off their "purchases" in "social shopping experiences". If I ever feel like it's time for social and career suicide, I'll do it by writing an article about how deviantArt favorites galleries and rec/fic bookmark collections can be explained by framing these fannish activities as "social shopping experiences" that are a traditional habit of ~~women~~ females.

ReadWriteWeb: Who's Using Pinterest? Yup, It's Mostly Ladies

"Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right." Dude-terest. Females.

"Here at ReadWriteWeb, the guys are a little more receptive (than Gizmodo) to the Pinterest and its potential use cases." Really? Thank you, ReadWriteWeb guys, that's big of you. "In "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest", Dave Copeland outlined why the site isn't exclusive to women and detailed his own experience getting started with it."

Well then, on to ReadWriteWeb: A Guy's Guide to Pinterest

"One of the first things I noticed when I signed up for Pinterest earlier this week is that several of my female friends and acquaintances were already on the site. It was as if they had been holding out on what many are promising will be 2012's hot ticket in the social networking space." Perhaps he simply wasn't noticing what his female friends and acquaintances were doing because the interests and concerns of other groups often don't register on people's radar, but all right. Perhaps the women really were conspiring to hide things from him. "I suddenly felt like I had ventured behind some secret curtain."

The rest of the "guy's guide" is actually a... well, a how-to guide for using the main features of a website. I have no idea why this article is not called "A Guide to Pinterest", there's nothing gender-specific about it.

ReadWriteWeb again: "Pinning" has to become bigger than "liking"

"With all these eager-to-shop female audience members who are most likely interested in fashion designers, style, collections and craft, it's rather surprising that Pinterest hasn't really figured out how to cash in." Most likely, yes.

" "I bet you in a few months, the usage will change," says Visua.ly Editorial Director Aleksandra Todorova. "It will be just like Twitter and Facebook. Companies are going to start using it, professionals...it's not going to just be women planning their wedding or scrapbooking or sewing quilts and all that." " Soon, there will be professionals on Pinterest. Not just women.

I'm not on Pinterest myself yet, although several people have recommended it and it looks quite shiny. But I already feel so terribly behind for not having a tumblr. People on tumblr, why is Gizmodo saying that Pinterest is Tumblr for Ladiez, aside from that they're dumb? Is tumblr that dominated by male users? Just from browsing around on it, I never got the impression that tumblr is heavily skewed towards one topic or another. There are lots of porn tumblrs, apparently, but there are lots of porn everythings. I was half considering making a porn tumblr myself for the more mature A:tLA art that I'm too embarrassed to post under any of my existing handles.

ETA: More links and analysis at How to stop being a Pinterest sexist．

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Today in quality ACTA reporting from Real Newspapers: the true meaning of those Guy Fawkes masks

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:50:13 GMT

Things may be going in a hopeful direction regarding the EU ratification of ACTA. Bulgaria is the latest individual country to halt ratification procedures, and after the Greens and the Socialists, the Liberal political block in the European Parliament finally seems to be getting worried as well (though it remains to be seen what they will actually do when it comes to a vote - they are associated with this individual). By contrast, the extremely large and therefore important Christian Democratic block is clearly not listening.* Stop ACTA now has a very handy letter-sending form right at the top of its homepage.

In other good news, the self-styled Flemish 'quality' newspapers, which I've largely been boycotting since their disgraceful reporting about the 3-11 disasters in Tohoku last year, have finally begun informing the populace about ACTA after ~~weeks~~ ~~months~~ years of saying basically nothing at all about it. They put out some very interesting articles that are masterpieces of contradictions, misinformation, and hilariously incoherent nonsense. The articles are also nearly identical and clearly copy-pasted from a press agency text, but I suppose that's the least of their imperfections.

My absolute favorite bit: anti-ACTA demonstrators "wear masks out of fear of reprisals".

That is seriously in there (Google translate). Every time I hear somebody bemoan the evils of unreliable citizen journalism and blow trumpets about how "professional" reporting needs to be protected and respected, I laugh and laugh.

*In a lovely example of them not listening: one of their members, Ivo Belet, just replied to a mail I sent him containing a link to a debunking of much of the contents of a document called "Ten myths about ACTA" that the European Commission has been sending around. Mr. Belet tried to assuage my fears by sending me a link to the "Ten myths about ACTA" document. I realize that it's absolutely impossible for EP members to follow links in and give personalized responses to all the mails they get, but this sort of thing doesn't make them look concerned with citizen's opinions. Or very bright.
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By the way, ACTA's not just a European issue, it's everywhere

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:59:32 GMT

There seems to be some confusion around here and elsewhere on the interwebs that ACTA is something local, like the EU equivalent of SOPA/PIPA. Unfortunately, ACTA is a treaty that was secretly negotiated and quietly pushed through by many governments from around the globe. It's already been signed by the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea. Many EU countries also signed, although some of the national representatives who did so immediately regretted it and confessed that they had no idea what they'd put their signature under.

But ACTA can't become law in any EU country unless all individual countries also ratify the treaty and the overarching EU parliament also approves it. That's what the big push right now is all about: the EU countries, even those whose representatives already signed, will all dodge ACTA if the parliament decides to shoot it down, which it actually might. There is also still a chance that individual countries might still backtrack, and Poland already halted the ratification process. This is a nice example of the EU's "nothing happens unless every country agrees" ethic actually working for good instead of just stalling things: if one national government wakes up and gets ornery about something quiet and nasty like ACTA, they can actually save the citizens of all other EU countries, because some kinds of big treaties and proposed laws cannot be turned into actual law in any EU country unless everyone agrees they're a good idea.

I'm not certain what people from the US, Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea can still do to prevent ACTA from becoming law in their countries, or even if it already is law in some of them. That all depends on the political process in those countries; like with the EU, a signature may not mean automatic ratification. There must be activist websites about ACTA for all of those places that inform citizens if there's still something they can actually do. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a US perspective on ACTA here.

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A few quick things you can do against ACTA

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:44:11 GMT

We know the story by now, I suppose? ACTA is bad, but the European Parliament still needs to approve it, and there is a real chance they can be convinced not to do so if the people they represent make enough noise. Stop ACTA has summaries of and links to everything that's relevant. Here are some of the actions they recommend, in order of how much time they take to complete:

Signing these petitions:

Avaaz.org
AccessNow.org

Sending a message to all your country's representatives in one go using this form.

Checking the stance of your country's individual representatives on ACTA on this handy site and then using the contact info provided to call or mail the ones who still need to be convinced to vote against.

Taking part in one of the many local actions against ACTA that will take place on February 11 and the surrounding days.

Please consider doing one or more of these, I've been following this ACTA nonsense for a couple of years and it's only barely less noxious now than it was in the beginning. Those who claim that all the bad things in the treaty have been ironed out by now are either uninformed or lying. The European Parliament is hardly perfect, but they actually have managed to vote against similar anti-internet and anti-consumer nonsense in the past, and there's good hope that they can do so again.

I sent a personal mail to all the Belgian MPs (including the far right ones *grimace*) and a thank-you note to the two who had already come out against ACTA. Fingers crossed.

ETA: Three! Got a reply from an MP listed as 'stance unknown' that he won't support the treaty as it is. Come on, come on...

ETA 2: Four!
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