Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Copyright
May 16, 2012 | Wednesday | 24 Comments
As the Washington Post reported, romance author Adele Dubois received a "notice of copyright infringement" from Google, which then removed a post from the Romance Books R Us blog based on the entry "ADELE + EXITOS." The e-mail from Google stated, “Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others.” The e-mail lists the copyright owner as Sony, the copyright work description as “Adele + Exitos” and the “location of the infringing material” as the post by Dubois, which…
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November 10, 2010 | Wednesday | 30 Comments
ETA: Note: Apparently, *I* have not learned the lesson that the plural of “lesson” is “lessons” - and there was an apostrophe up in that title. All fixed! Color me embarrassed - which if memory serves is a rather sickly shade of puce. Here’s a not-in-any-particular-order list of lessons learned from the Cook’s Source copyright idiot-a-thon of last week. 1. Do not piss off the internet, especially when now, unlike a few years ago, mainstream news media will have no problems with citing Live Journal as a source. 2. Don’t steal. I mean, is that really a hard one? It’s…
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November 04, 2010 | Thursday | 58 Comments
I have this short write-up of links that are all feel-good and awesome with coulis, but first, let’s have some hot smoking asshattery. From many people comes this amazing series of links wherein Monica Gaudio, a writer and something of an expert on historical cookery, was plagiarized by a magazine, Cook’s Source, whose editor, Judith Griggs, believes the internet is public domain. So you don’t have to pay people whose words you steal, and moreover (wait for it… wait for it…) Monica should be grateful that Cook’s Source reprinted her article without permission or payment. No, really. Cook’s Source lifted…
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April 22, 2010 | Thursday | 74 Comments
Digital book pricing is all over the place, and different vendors have some books while others don’t, and sometimes when you find them, they’re so expensive you just give up and turn on the tv. Or maybe that’s just me. But Marilyn wrote to me with a bigger problem: what happens when the ebook you buy is so horrible in its quality, so poorly completed that if it were paper, you’d return it? She writes: Would it help to write to certain publishers about excetionally poor proofreading in e-books? I recently purchased a 2-in-1 book and was stunned to see…
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April 19, 2010 | Monday | 51 Comments
Every now and again in our long and storied history of being cable subscribers, Hubby and I have subscribed to HBO and other cable network packages. Every time we did, it was ridiculously expensive given how much time we actually watch tv, let alone HBO, and even more preposterous was HOW MANY HBO CHANNELS we received. Honestly, I think at one time we had 12! Once we had a TiVO digital recorder, we didn’t want HBO so much any more, because by then there were some series out on DVD that we could rent, and we had the ability to…
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August 21, 2009 | Friday | 36 Comments
There’s a great deal of “If you liked…” recommendations for romance readers. And most of the time those recommendations are much appreciated - especially when they come from the online community, which is hellaciously well-read. But thanks to Amazon, we have a new category: If You Didn’t Like This, How About Plagiarism Instead? Leslie Kelly noticed that because her book Slow Hands is one of the free Harlequins being offered as part of their 60th Anniversary, it is frequently in the top ten downloads for Kindle. Nice, right? Well, not entirely. There’s one review that lists an alternate title that’s…
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March 12, 2009 | Thursday | 52 Comments
I hate DRM. And since it’s Read an eBook Week, I figure it would serve well to discuss one of the facets of digital publishing that stops people from trying out ebooks, after, of course, the high cost of the ebook readers: DRM. DRM is Digital Rights Management, or, more appropriately, Driving Readers Mad. The security wrapped around ebooks that allegedly prevents me from sharing them really just prevents me from owning the actual book itself. Given the various types of formats and the varying degrees of security embedded within them, DRM means I’m being sold a format and not…
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February 03, 2009 | Tuesday | 44 Comments
Last week, which is about two years ago in blog-time, I asked what y’all thought the appropriate cost for an ebook would be, based on my noobish calculations of whether there were actual savings in e-format vs. paper, what with the cost of paper, glue, transport and shelfspace. One person contacted me personally and asked if I’d be interested in her story of self-publishing her book in both print and e-formats, and the cost vs. savings of each in her experience. She asked that she remain anonymous, so I’m not posting this so people will try to guess who it…
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January 13, 2009 | Tuesday | 266 Comments
Isn’t it enough that you people set out to destroy her career and almost caused her death? In case you don’t know, which I know for a fact you have been told, Cassie Edwards suffered a massive stroke due to the stress you idiots put on her. I hope you can live with yourselves knowing what you did almost cost this woman her life. You have deprived her grandchildren of their grandmother. You have caused a lot of innocent people much heartache by your actions. Everyone is blaming you and your cronies for what happened. Not just her fans, fan…
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January 09, 2009 | Friday | 37 Comments
So here’s a question for you. Without getting too specific, there’s something really freaking awesome on the internet (ha - how’s that for a tease?) and I’d love to link to it, but my understanding is that the copyright is still in place, and therefore the amount of data available on Ye Olde Internet is copyright infringement. And unless you’re a secretary who works at midnight, I try to avoid sending the Bitchery eyes toward things that cut off someone’s copyright at the knees. The item in question was published in 1965, and appears to be out of print. One…
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September 25, 2008 | Thursday | 102 Comments
First, I am just astonished that among the top stories on CNN are Ahmadinejad’s comments at the UN (which are so bugfuck scary shitass motherfucker holy shit that I splutter), and news about Clay Aiken coming out of the closet and Nicole Kidman drinking water to become pregnant. Jesus fucknuts. Juxtaposition of WTF, much? Second: a rather curious but happy byproduct of the Twilight empire: the actual town of Forks, WA, is receiving a huge tourism boom - which their economy is most happy about. I love that the town is totally into it, from organizing a blood drive from…
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