Michael Ward 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Publish The Thought

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 01 Jul, 2003 @ 09:56am

    This isn't Publishing; it's Printing

    There's nothing wrong with using a service to print copies of your book for you.

    That's all they're doing for you, though. The truly hard part is getting reviews, publicity, visibility.

    Michael Ward
    Hidden Knowledge

  • On the post: Cajun King Of Spam Stirs Pot Of Controversy

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2003 @ 10:05am

    Spammers-Be-Gone

    The current issue of TECHNOLOGY REVIEW has a good article on spam and the (probably doomed) technological efforts to minimize its bad effects on us.

    Spamming isn't a technical problem; it's a social problem. As long as there are no social controls on spamming behavior, some individuals will spam. They make money by stealing a little bit from each of us, in our time, our taxes, our telecom charges.

    The answer is to establish penalties for spamming that can be enforced on individuals. The interesting thing about spam is that it always includes a trail back to the guilty parties; or else there is no benefit to the spammer or the merchant who uses him. The TR article quotes a spam-fighter to the effect that 200 individuals are responsible for nine-tenths of all spam in the world.

    Publish that list. Establish social controls over those 200 scumbags by the use of moral suasion.

    Ever read Eric Frank Russell's SF novel "Wasp"? The list is long. Dirac Angestun Gesept.

  • On the post: eBay Plans Keyword Bid-for-Click Ad Program

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2003 @ 09:54am

    eBay Sells Ads

    A truly brain-dead idea.

    I spend a lot of time on eBay and their search engine already needs work: you simply cannot use enough qualifying terms to winnow out irrelevant items.

    This is just going to clutter the search result pages with even more things you don't want to see.

    eBay will make a small bit of money on ad sales, and lose a lot from irritated customers who find something better to do than spending their time and money on eBay.

  • On the post: Is Acrobat Adobe's Greatest Act?

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2003 @ 09:36am

    Adobe's Acrobat Marketing Strategy

    Given that Adobe has just separated the Acrobat creation software line into (1) high-volume and (2) small-operator versions, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see them lower the price of the lower-end version to $99 retail / "$0" bundled with a new PC. They make a lot of money off these bundled packages, just because the PC makers sell so many systems.
    But, first: They sell it for all the traffic will bear. Later, then, they lower the price and go for volume.
    That's what I'd do, and Bruce Chizen is even smarter than I am.


    Michael Ward
    Hidden Knowledge

  • On the post: Anatomy Of A Penis Pill Swindle

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 06 Jun, 2003 @ 10:36am

    Spam and Pills

    This morning's spammail brought four ads for penis pills. They're so obviously fraudulent that it makes you lose any faith in the FTC that you might have had. Has the FTC ever explained why they haven't gone after these people?

    Michael Ward
    http://www.hidden-knowledge.com

  • On the post: Public Domain Works Can Be Used Without Credit

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2003 @ 10:22am

    DASTAR Copyright case

    In spite of the fact that much of our e-book business involves new publication of older material that has fallen out of copyright, there are some aspects of this decision that I find troubling.

    The UPI story that Mike linked to covers the copyright issue pretty well. Fox should have renewed the copyrights, but they didn't. They lost their control of the films when they screwed up. (The "automatic" extensions from the mid-70's actually left quite a number of things still requiring explicit renewals.)

    The truth is that lots of things -- that should have been copyrighted or renewed -- never were. You can visit the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress and go through the ledgers yourself; you'll be surprised at what you find.

    But it bothers me that Dastar gave the original creators no credit. That shows greed and a lack of class.

    The legal case was about Fox's attempt to regain financial control of the work. Since they had already lost their control via copyright, they were trying to use Trademark law as another way to regain ownership. The court found that that was not what the Trademark law was all about.

    Probably it wouldn't have hurt Dastar to include some references to the original publication of the films. They could have put one credit line on the box.

    Of course, the law being what it is, Fox might then have sued Dastar for using "Fox" on the packaging to imply that it had been licensed from them.

    When we reissue things like uncollected Rafael Sabatini stories, Sherman's Memoirs, etc. we try to give original publication data. This is useful to historians, critics, and just plain readers.

    I'm sure some of the people who bought the Dastar collection wondered why some of the material seemed a little bit familiar. Maybe not many; television was still not in everybody's home in 1949 (!)

    Michael Ward
    http://www.Hidden-Knowledge.com

  • On the post: BYU Student Group Returns Web Awards For Copying

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2003 @ 09:56am

    site design; stylistic models

    To my eye the BYU folks picked up the layout concepts from the Builder site and re-thought them through; their result is less cluttered and more unified.

    The use of "multiple rectangular blocks" is not copyrightable.

    The key points are:
    a. is the source code the same
    b. is the layout (on the page) of the internal links the same

    Michael Ward
    http://www.Hidden-Knowledge.com
    http://www.MagazineArt.org

  • On the post: Robotic Speed Reading

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 20 May, 2003 @ 10:14am

    scanning machines / Rocky Mountain News

    The page comes up blank for me, too, and with a couple of minutes poking around I still couldn't find a link elsewhere on their site.
    This -may- be the newspaper's take on the story of a few days ago about the scanner installed at Stanford, currently converting the CSLI archives into digital form. Other interesting projects include Benetech.org in Palo Alto, scanning books for the blind and limited-vision, and the venture MIT and HP put together to digitize the MIT Press backlist, using auto scanners and digital character recognition with a high claimed accuracy.
    Our experience at Hidden Knowledge, in digitizing public-domain books for publication as e-books, has been that commercial OCR software is still inadequate and not getting better very fast. OTOH, as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper it becomes more reasonable to store digital images of the pages, say monochrome at 600 dpi.
    Mike

  • On the post: Six Technologies That Will Change The World

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2003 @ 08:53am

    Six to watch

    Ned Lud says "We don't need supersonic SARS distribution."

    The others are -extremely- likely to arrive in the next decade or two.

    Myself, I'm looking forward particularly to the ink-jet marzipan duplicator.

    [memo to self: different UI than other comment boxes; blank messages non-optimal.]

  • On the post: Book Pirates And The People Who've Never Heard Of Them

    Michael Ward ( profile ), 01 Apr, 2003 @ 02:18pm

    Book Pirates and the moral high ground

    It's a lot of work to create and publish an e-book. We have a small e-book publishing company, and do it for fun, for glory, and for some hope of money. We pay authors, grind through endless HTML on the websites, struggle to get reviews, negotiate with Amazon, and generally indulge in self-mortification in the name of literature. We also give books away.

    There are plenty of shades of morality involved in making e-books available at no charge. They range from the small crimes of stealing someone's work (and posting it and bragging about it on alt.binaries.e-book), to the glorious things that you can find at Project Gutenberg, the Online Books page, &etc. where pieces of our cultural heritage are preserved and made available to us again.

    Jeff Kirvin could have made a photocopy of his book, and no one would have complained; but now the concern is whether his giving approval to the person who made the "pirate" scans (by accepting the pirated e-book) makes him part of the act of theft. I don't fault Jeff (a great contributor to the field) but I would think twice about what it means.

    That said, what I do tell Quinn Yarbro when her novel about the first female Pope gets put onto somebody's website in Estonia or dumped into the alt hierarchy? We busted our butts on this book; how about some credit? How about helping us pay for the webhosting?

    What's true for us is true for Tor and Rosetta and Harper. Lots of these questions have straightforward answers. In this case there are some shades of rightness and wrongness; but just because some of your goals are good that doesn't mean you should run off and do something that will have a bad effect on other people.

    If you want to see more books converted and made available as e-books, you need to ask for them, push for them, pressure publishers to do them and to make them available -- available as widely as possible, as easy to use as possible (with as few DRM restrictions as feasible) and in as many formats and fields as possible -- and then you need to buy them.

    If you don't buy them then they won't be published. If you don't buy then the publishers will spend their efforts on things that you -do- buy.

    Mike