Jon Renaut 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (196) comment rss

  • On the post: Judge Dumps Yet Another Mass Infringement Suit In Response To Single, Pro Se Motion To Quash

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 01 Mar, 2011 @ 06:06am

    Confusion

    When a man named John Steele is somehow involved with porn, it is NOT as a lawyer.

  • On the post: Walmart Employees Fired For Disarming Gun-Toting Robber

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 18 Feb, 2011 @ 05:53am

    Re: Policy

    I think WalMart has a very strict "You don't make judgment calls, you follow the rules" policy. They probably feel they have to in order to maintain order in such a large organization.

    I worked at a Ritz Camera in college (before everyone went digital). Our biggest local competitor was the WalMart photo lab, and we often got customers coming in with pictures that WalMart refused to print. WalMart had a strict no-nudity policy, which extended all the way to infants waist-up in the bath. While I can't imagine a reasonable person in our society finding that obscene or inappropriate, it violated policy, so they wouldn't print it.

    I don't mean to support or condemn WalMart here - I'm not really sure what side I come down on - but I think that, based on corporate policy that the fired employees certainly should have known, this was the correct call by WalMart.

  • On the post: Firm Involved In Planning Attack On Journalist Glenn Greenwald To Hurt Wikileaks Apologizes; Cuts Ties With HBGary Federal

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 11 Feb, 2011 @ 06:15am

    That's not an apology

    . . . any involvement that we may have had. . .

    If you don't admit wrongdoing, you haven't apologized. Good for them for cutting ties with the other firm, but that doesn't count as an apology.

  • On the post: Netflix Shows Which ISPs Actually Perform Well… And Which Don't

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2011 @ 06:43am

    Who cares? There's no competition

    At my house, I can get Comcast cable or Verizon DSL. None of the others on the chart are an option. And I live in Washington DC, hardly an underserved backwater.

    I like to see this data come out, but I think it's pretty unlikely that it leads to anything but a couple of blog posts.

  • On the post: Still Trying To Track Down Who Controls Patent Used Against Reddit, Digg, Fark, Slashdot & TechCrunch

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 18 Jan, 2011 @ 08:06am

    Is that you, Hobbes?

    Transmogrification Security AG LLC? That is a F'ING RAD name for an LLC.

  • On the post: Deep Linking Could Be Infringement In Germany If Website Puts Even Ridiculous Weak Attempts To Block It

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 14 Jan, 2011 @ 07:47am

    Re: Re: Re:

    You're right, I hadn't thought of that. I think I was blinded by how ridiculous this whole thing is. A redirect to the front page could just have been bad coding.

    If it had, instead, redirected to a nasty "you can't link to that page" message, then what I said above would still apply.

  • On the post: Deep Linking Could Be Infringement In Germany If Website Puts Even Ridiculous Weak Attempts To Block It

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 14 Jan, 2011 @ 07:08am

    Re:

    Agreed. Anti-circumvention laws are dumb, but given that they ARE law in Germany, I don't think the effectiveness of the preventive measures being circumvented is relevant.

  • On the post: Is There Anything Lamer Than Facebook Threatening Lamebook With Trademark Infringement?

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 05 Nov, 2010 @ 02:29pm

    i like this

    Love to see the Facebook "like" button on anti-Faceboook posts.

  • On the post: Debunking The Claim That Giving Away Music 'Devalues' It

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2010 @ 07:50am

    "Devalue"

    I hate the word "devalue". There are really only two situations when it's used: by someone who is pretending a psychological or moral argument is a logical one, or by someone who is lying.

    Or, I guess, three, by someone who is debunking one of the above usages.

  • On the post: The Boy Who Mistook An iPhone For His Mother

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 08 Oct, 2010 @ 06:58pm

    Broke my heart

    My daughter wasn't even two when she said, "Put phone away, Dada" for the first time. It was a bit of a shock. And there's a good chance I was reading Techdirt when she said it.

    But it has changed my behavior. I make sure I let her know when I'm checking email and will be with her in just a minute. I'm home with her from 3-530 every day (luxury of being a government contractor), and I do like to keep up on the important emails that come in while the rest of the world is working. But I work much harder now on balancing my attention between her and my internet connection.

  • On the post: Washington DC Pulls Down Internet Voting Trial After Hackers Program It To Play UMich Fight Song

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2010 @ 06:55am

    Re: Re: out of context

    And a blog post on it from Halderman - http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/hacking-dc-internet-voting-pilot

  • On the post: Our Own Dark Helmet Shares Lessons From Crowdfunding Experiment

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 28 Sep, 2010 @ 07:25pm

    Kickstarter is great, but maybe too generic?

    In the interest of full disclosure - I have a website I've launched and am working to get going that could be described as Kickstarter for authors, minus the publicity and venture capital. So feel free to ignore me if you think I've crossed the line between "engaging in discussion" and "pimping my site".

    I think the thing that Kickstarter really lacks that authors really need is the features tailored to selling and publicizing books, and specifically books. There's not really a community of authors working together to benefit all of the community. There aren't the features like you see on Amazon, the related books and "people who bought this also bought . . .". Kickstarter is a really cool site, it's well done, and they've probably done more to get crowdfunding into the mainstream than anyone, but I think too much of the responsibility is still on the author, and the author is still too much alone.

    I don't think too many people browse Kickstarter for authors to support. If you want a book to read, you go to a bookstore or Amazon where there are plenty of books, and plenty of ways for potential readers to be introduced to your stuff because it's similar to something they knew they were looking for.

    All that said, DH, I think it's great what you're doing, and appreciate the feedback you're sharing on how it's going. You're on the front end of this kind of model for making a living as a writer, and you not only have to overcome being relatively unknown, but also have to overcome the huge percentage of your potential fans who just don't understand what you're doing. Take my mother, for example. She is a voracious reader, but not what you'd call a computer expert. She just bought a Kindle and absolutely loves it. But there is absolutely zero chance that she'd be able to get your book onto her Kindle without me or some other tech support.

    Anyway, congratulations on the success. Even if you don't get funded on Kickstarter, it sounds like you've made some good contacts, and you've advanced the cause of all your fellow authors.

  • On the post: Canadian Recording Industry Demands 45% Of Revenue; Then Blames 'Pirates' For No Streaming Music Services

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2010 @ 09:21am

    He's telling the truth

    "Why would you spend a lot of money trying to build a service in Canada when Canadians take so much without paying for it?" said Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which represents major record labels.

    He's not talking about pirates - he's talking about the Canadian recording industry, taking 45% of gross revenue without doing anything to deserve it. The Canadian recording industry is made up of Canadians, right?

  • On the post: Scribd Puts User Docs Behind A Paywall Without Them Realizing It

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2010 @ 07:10pm

    A lot of room in that space

    I'm not sure why the Wordpress model isn't more widely used. You essentially have three options - free and limited hosted at wordpress.com, paid and supported hosted at wordpress.com, or free and whatever you want hosted yourself.

    Document hosting or nearly any sort of web application could function the same way. With the cost of cloud storage dropping daily, it seems like someone should be able to make this model work for tons of useful things, like embeddable PDF hosting.

    I'm currently accepting venture capital to get right on this.

  • On the post: Yahoo Happily Admits It Manipulates Ad Auctions To Get Advertisers To Bid More

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2010 @ 07:48pm

    Yahoo?

    People buy ads on Yahoo? This is news to me.

  • On the post: Intel Confirms HDCP Master Key Is Out

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2010 @ 06:26am

    Re: Re: What was the key?

    You think that's bad, I just got served a subpoena for violating the DMCA with that above comment.

  • On the post: Intel Confirms HDCP Master Key Is Out

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2010 @ 05:48am

    What was the key?

    Anyone know what the key was? My money is on 1234.

  • On the post: Microsoft Exec Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent'

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2010 @ 11:44am

    Incompetence experts

    If anyone knows a little something about incompetence, it's an executive from the company that produced Windows Vista (and 95, and 98, and ME, and . . .).

  • On the post: Big Brother In Your Garbage Cans

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 08 Sep, 2010 @ 05:52am

    Re: Re: Disable the chip

    I see a new business model for enterprising teenagers - removing the RFID and attaching it to a neighborhood stray cat.

  • On the post: Lessons In Smart Trademark Management: Free Licensing Of The Mark From Twitter

    Jon Renaut ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2010 @ 04:52am

    How unfortunate

    It's a sad commentary on the state of IP law when a company behaving reasonably is newsworthy.

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