Exclusive to PB News: In a remarkable series of events, an outbreak of general copyright stupidity has swept national legislators on a worldwide basis, reports PB News’ copyright correspondent …… ….. was the first one to connect the rampant stupidity infection with the spread of senseless copyright extensions. Along with this symptom, other frightening side effects have appeared, such as an irresistible urge to filter internet content. (In a sad note I must report to our readers that …..’s name will never again be used by this journal. Having recently published a book entitled The Solomon Scandals, ….. inadvertently copyrighted his own name and so is not allowed to use it without his permission – which he has been unable to obtain.)
First appearing in the United States, the virus lowered the IQ of American legislators enough so that they passed something called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which makes pretty much everything illegal. Further information about the Act is not available, because the Act is copyrighted and telling our readers anything about it would be a felony. In an action that should have alerted health officials to the oncoming viral surge, the same legislators passed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act which granted Walt Disney Studios extended copyrights on its properties. These copyrights will run until everyone who could possibly see or read any of the copyrighted properties has been dead for over 70 years.
As reported earlier in this journal, the Australian legislature has had a severe attack of the filtering version of the virus. Australian pols have decided to filter out “stuff” from the Internet. “The internet is full of Stuff”, said one Australian pol interviewed by ……., “and we have to keep that Stuff out of the innards of these computer things. If the computer things can’t think for themselves, we will have to think for them.” As a result, from now on the only thing that will be allowed through the giant Australian government filtering complex in Melbourne (where hundreds of tarsiers read each and every page of the Internet twice a day) will be stories on how to polish automobile hubcaps.
In an even more frightening outbreak of stupidity, the British government announced that it would push to extend its current 50 year copyright on musical works to 70 years, despite the recommendation of a high-level commission that this was unnecessary. When asked about this, the head of the British Labour Party said: “Well, if we pass this legislation it means that we can copyright Scotland. We’ve always wanted to copyright Scotland, but have never been able to. Now we can, right?” When your correspondent pointed out that this made no sense the legislator replied: “It’s copyright, why should it make sense.”
Contributors to this report were Paul Biba and ……
Humor alert, of course! And not just on the stuff Paul brought up. Jon Stone and I are having a little dispute over the copyright of The Solomon Scandals. What do you do when your protagonist insists on ownership of what I maintain are merely FAUX memoirs?
Meanwhile, except for a section on a federal landlord whose real-life connection with Sen. Abraham Ribicoff helped inspire Scandals, I’m more or less done with v. 1 of the site. I’ve focused on creating as much content as possible on topics ranging from the origins of the book to Obama vis-a-vis my fictitious president, Eddy Bullard.
Afer that, I’ll be doing refinements such as further proofing and a change in the site template or maybe a special notice instead. I want to recognize the distinction between the copyrighted book excerpts and the site-specific material that will be Creative Commons-licensed.
I’ll also be adding more credits for photos from Wikipedia contributors. Hint, hint to WordPress. It really needs a plug-in to make the process less labor-intensive. I could even envision attribution happening automatically as soon as you inserted a CC-licensed photo from Flickr, Wikipedia or a similar source—a capability that ideally would also exist within WordPress-capable editors such as Live Writer, not just WordPress itself.
The Scandals site itself makes liberal use of CC content, and I’m pleased to give back even though the book itself is a commercial work from Twilight Times Books (hey, I can’t afford to do everything pro bono, alas).
David
I just wish you were joking. 😉