AutoWeek Runs Over Creative Commons Licensee

In its July 24 issue, AutoWeek magazine published a photo found on Flickr and broke both halves of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license that it used. They didn't credit the photographer or obtain his permission to use the image commercially.

Instead of apologizing and compensating the photog, AutoWeek Art Director Ken Ross made this claim in an e-mail reprinted by Lawrence Lessig:

... this image was obtained through the savethe76ball.com uncredited and in public domain. Our customary payment for this type of shot is $50.

When I wrote Ross this weekend and said they should admit a mistake and pay the guy, he responded that the dispute has been forwarded to their legal department. I hope it reaches the desk of someone with a basic understanding of copyright law.

Nothing created from 1978 onward in the U.S. is in the public domain unless there's an explicit declaration that releases it. Everything's automatically protected by copyright from the moment it is "fixed in a tangible medium of expression," to quote one primer.

Creative Commons · 2006/09/18 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Air America Struggles to Stay Afloat

I'm a day one listener to Air America Radio, yearning to hear liberal talk since Rush Limbaugh first slouched towards a microphone in the '80s. I've never understood how there could be no market for it, especially in places where conservative gasbags saturate the air. In Jacksonville, at least three different stations broadcast Limbaugh's show live, so you can travel the length of the area and keep up with the latest world crisis or societal moral collapse caused by the Clintons.

Air America's in financial trouble, which is no surprise because the network's been horribly mismanaged. An original founder ripped off a charity, misdirecting $875,000 to the fledgling radio network. The money's been repaid to an escrow account, but the scandal and the charity's shoddy financial accounting practices led to its closure.

You can say a lot about Limbaugh, and I have, but the guy never killed a children's charity.

Liberal talk would survive the closure of Air America, because two of the most successful hosts aren't members of the network: Ed Schultz and Alan Colmes. Colmes, who gets unfairly hammered as a liberal milquetoast, runs a funny late-night show after his Hannity & Colmes gig.

If Air America folds, I hope that it doesn't mean the end of Rachel Maddow as a nationally syndicated radio host. No one ever talks about Maddow -- Al Franken, Randi Rhodes and the unlistenable Jerry Springer get all the press -- but she's the best thing about Air America. She has a skewed sense of humor, an optimistic liberal take and likes to obsess over odd stuff, such as the announcer who introduces the presidential radio address each Saturday. Her program moves to 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern beginning on Monday.

One good thing that might come from the network's closure is the end of Springer's radio career. He's terrible, throwing out soggy liberal platitudes, agreeing with each caller and constantly pimping his own projects. If you think his Dancing with the Stars stunt is dull television, imagine hearing him devote an hour a day to it on the radio.

Jacksonville · Politics · Radio · 2006/09/15 · 59 COMMENTS · Link

Five Years On, 2,992 - 19 Lives Remembered

Today's remembrances of 9/11 use an official count of 2,973 people who died at the World Trade Center, Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

Someone at CBS News this morning goofed and used 2,992, a count that includes the 19 hijackers, as this screen grab from Google News shows:

Journalism · Politics · 2006/09/11 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

SMU's Loss to UNT Its Worst Ever?

Covering last night's UNT-SMU game, Dallas Morning News columnist Gerry Fraley writes, "The alumni wanted coach Ray Morrison's head after the Mustangs lost the first game in school history -- at TCU in 1915."

SMU had no alumni in 1915. That's the year the school opened.

Speaking as a UNT homer, the rest of Fraley's commentary is equally sloppy. The North Texas team that beat SMU as a five-point underdog Saturday is one season removed from four consecutive Sun Belt championships. Though the Belt's deservedly the worst-ranked conference in I-A, SMU is nine years removed from its last winning record. The Mean Green have been a better team than SMU for most of the last decade. It's no shock they're the better team this season.

Besides, if North Texas is lowly enough to hang the "worst loss ever" on SMU, a better choice for Fraley would've been 1990. During that season, SMU came to Fouts Field to play UNT when the school was still in Division I-AA and lost 14-7.

As a North Texas alumnus, that's my favorite game to have witnessed in person. The rivalry was so heated between crosstown schools that players and coaches exchanged a few punches at halftime in an incident that came close to being a full team-on-team riot. The incident would have been in heavy rotation on SportsCenter for days if it happened at a bigger school. Because it didn't, the media missed it entirely.

Sports · North Texas · 2006/09/10 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

President Bush is a Gas, Gas, Gas

According to U.S. News and World Report, legislation isn't the only thing that President Bush is interested in passing:

He loves to cuss, gets a jolly when a mountain biker wipes out trying to keep up with him, and now we're learning that the first frat boy loves flatulence jokes. A top insider let that slip when explaining why President Bush is paranoid around women, always worried about his behavior. But he's still a funny, earthy guy who, for example, can't get enough of fart jokes. He's also known to cut a few for laughs, especially when greeting new young aides, but forget about getting people to gas about that.

He wasn't the first president to violate the Clean Air Act, according to Capitol Hill Blue:

Harry Truman belched and farted in front of people, much to the consternation of wife Bess. Dwight Eisenhower may have been in the Army but he cussed like a sailor. John F. Kennedy would leer at young women and make comments about their attributes. He was, according to historians, a breast man.

Lyndon Johnson scratched his crotch at Cabinet meetings and in front of female White House staff members. Richard Nixon, as the Oval Office tapes showed, cussed a blue streak.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, may have been the last President too tight-assed to do anything untoward while in office ...

My guess is that no president could clear a room like William Howard Taft, who grew in office to 340 pounds.

I hope the press will get to the bottom of this.

Politics · 2006/09/09 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Pope Benedict's New Hat

Pope Benedict XVI donned a new hat for his address at St. Peter's Square today:

My mother remembers seeing this hat, which is called a saturno, on pictures of past popes at the Catholic school she attended in her youth.

With the addition of a leopard stripe band, that would be a bitchin' pimp hat.

2006/09/06 · 51 COMMENTS · Link

Aaron Swartz Running for Wikipedia Board

Aaron Swartz is running for a position on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation, an election that began today and ends in three weeks. A contributor to the site since 2003 with around 2,400 edits, Swartz is running in part to help out on the huge engineering requirements of the project:

Since January, Wikipedia's traffic has more than doubled and this group is beginning to strain under the load. At the technical level, the software development and server systems are both managed by just one person, Brion Vibber, who appears to have his hands more-than-full just keeping everything running. The entire system has been cobbled together as the site has grown, a messy mix of different kinds of computers and code, and keeping it all running sounds like a daily nightmare. As a result, actual software development goes rather slowly, which cannot help but affect the development of the larger project.

I can't vote in the election because it requires at least 400 edits, but I thought I'd pass along Swartz's announcement because he'd be an excellent choice for the board. I don't recognize any of the other 16 candidates.

Swartz has been a significant contributor to RSS for six years, which is remarkable considering the fact that he's not yet 20. He coauthored the RSS 1.0 specification and the RSS Content, Dublin Core and Syndication namespaces. He was a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group and is a founder of Reddit.

Wikipedia · Rss · 2006/09/01 · Comment · Link

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