First, Let's Shoot All the Photographers
The Lane Hartwell photo controversy is becoming a Venus morontrap. In the comments on TechCrunch, Robert Scoble flew into its maw and is being broken down into his constituent parts and digested by enzymes:
I think it really is lame to take pictures of people (who don't get a cut of the profits) at parties, without being commissioned, and then send in invoices for that work when it gets used in a parody video.
If photographers are getting paid to take pictures of me, why shouldn't we get a cut too as subjects? I didn't sign a model release for commercial work when Lane and other people take pictures of me at parties like she did of Owen Thomas. Did Owen sign a model release? Did he approve for his photo to be used for commercial purposes?
I think that when I do an event or party I'm going to only let photographers in who freely distribute their work without expectations that they'll get compensated for its use.
Hartwell is a photojournalist who contributes to Wired News, San Francisco Magazine and the San Francisco Bay Guardian. She takes pictures of Silicon Valley notables as a member of the media and was working for Wired News when she took the picture in question. Scoble, who attended journalism school and spent the past 18 months shooting news video for PodTech, doesn't appear to understand the difference between a news photographer and a wedding photographer.
Scoble's comment rated an "extremely well said" from TechCrunch staff writer Duncan Riley and an attaboy from CrunchGear contributor John Biggs, two journalists who should put Scoble's logic into practice and begin sharing a cut of their earnings with the subjects of their reporting.
Credit: The photo of Hartwell was taken by Brian Solis and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Michael Arrington Crunchitizes Shelley Powers
I'd prefer not to rake the same person over the coals twice in one week, but TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington has been engaging in conduct that demands a public rebuttal.
Over the past several days, a bunch of bloggers have been arguing about photographer Lane Hartwell's decision to use a Digital Millenium Copyright Act complaint to get a funny music video yanked from YouTube and other sites. The video, a satire of Web 2.0 by the Richter Scales, included a photo taken by Hartwell without her permission. Her move was either completely justified or ruined everyone's fun, depending on what you think about downloading a bunch of images from Google searches and putting them in a video without asking anyone's permission.
In the midst of this tempest, Arrington launched an extended attack on Shelley Powers, a well-known blogger in the tech community, by accusing her of supporting Hartwell because she's a woman.
He first made this charge Saturday on journalist Mathew Ingram's blog:
Shelley, Lane's attorney is abusing the DMCA for his/her own goals. And copyright has nothing to do with "giving credit." It has to do with being forced to license work unless it falls under fair use, which this clearly does.
Mathew is right, you are wrong. But since Lane is a woman, it really doesn't matter what she did as far as you are concerned. She's a woman, so she's right.
The gender crack was completely out of left field, but when Ingram asked him to chill on his blog, Arrington dug in deeper:
actually, Mathew, I'll do whatever the ---- I feel like, and you can decide to censor comments or not.
Shelley is and always has been a fascist around these issues. If you're on her team (politically) she'll support you to the death. Not on her team and she'll find a way to take you out at the knees. People ignore her rather than call her on it.
On Monday, after Eric Rice strongly condemned Arrington's comments about Powers, Arrington renewed the attack on his personal blog:
I believe Shelley is the kind of person who sees the world through sexist glasses. She is unpleasant. She is a troll on TechCrunch who won't go away. ...
Every interaction I've ever had with Shelley has been unpleasant to the extreme, and I have never initiated any interaction. I believe she is biased, perverse and mean spirited.
As I commented on his blog, this is getting ridiculous. Powers is a well-respected member of the tech community, an author of numerous books and an outspoken advocate for equality in tech.
Anyone who knows her -- and many of us do through her writing -- can cite numerous times when she's criticized prominent women without a hint of favoritism regarding gender. The notion she'd take Hartwell's side because she's a woman is complete and utter BS without a scintilla of evidence to back it up. I suspect on some level that Arrington know this, because on his weblog he doesn't provide her full name or link to her blog, as if he's afraid of what his audience would think if they read her side. (I hate that -- when I slam someone on Workbench I link to them so people can judge whether I've lost my mind.)
At Arrington's instigation I discussed this subject with him privately, but I couldn't make him see that his treatment of Powers is unfair. He's using the huge megaphone of TechCrunch to malign her in a way that's not easy to challenge.
There's no good reason why he keeps attacking her character and making it sound like she harassed him by participating in the open forum he provides on his blogs. The following advice is much less effective without gender bias, but Arrington needs to person up and apologize.
Ron Paul's Raving Republicans
I don't think I've ever seen anything in American politics quite like the "Ron Paul Revolution," the fervent support for the grandfatherly old-school constitutionalist who is pulling liberty-minded voters and money into the Republican primary at astonishing rates. Check out the scene at Paul's New York City headquarters last night when the candidate broke another fundraising goal, raising $6 million in one day to break $12 million for the quarter.
I can't decide whether that rave-like scene is thrilling or terrifying. But Paul supporters should probably rethink holding their palms in the air as they chant "jawohl!", er, "Ron Paul!" and a skinheaded videographer documents the scene.
Paul, a 72-year-old ob/gyn whose 10 terms in Congress earned him the nickname "Dr. No" for his votes on spending bills, sounds a little crazy in the debates, but most of that crazy comes from how foreign his ideas have become in our country. Sixty years ago, his call to knock off government social and tax programs, avoid military adventures, and abolish the Federal Reserve was solidly in the Republican mainstream.
I can't say I'd vote for Paul -- I'm a Democrat who still believes in the necessity of many federal programs he'd destroy -- but I think he brings something important to our politics: a scalpel.
The federal government expanded at a rapacious rate under borrow-and-spend Republicans, and I don't see a Democrat who's strongly motivated to reverse that trend. In the last four debates I didn't hear one Democratic candidate talk about failed and expensive domestic programs that ought to be dropped. Democrats need to learn that the growth of the federal government's role in our lives isn't just about civil liberties. The more we spend on new do-goodery, the less that's available for the important do-goodery like Social Security, disease control, emergency assistance and renewable energy.
Credit: The photo was taken by Madwurm and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Michael Arrington, Amateur Cardiologist
Two founders of blogging networks, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Sam Sethi of the recently folded BlogNation, have been taking shots at each other ever since Sethi either quit TechCrunch a year ago or was fired. You can read the full story on WebProNews, but it's old news to anyone who's ever been pulled under with a sinking business. Employees went unpaid, bosses broke promises, investors never showed, mean people suck.
On Friday, Arrington publicly accused Sethi of causing his worker's fatal heart attack:
... Marc Orchant had a massive heart attack. And the reason he had a heart attack may have been because he was working for Sam, not being paid, and massively stressed out about supporting his family.
Orchant, a tech journalist in Albuquerque, N.M., who wrote for BlogNation, died earlier this month at age 50.
I've lost a coworker in his twenties and an uncle at age 50 to catastrophic, unexpected heart troubles. We struggled to find medical reasons why their ailments weren't caught in time to save them. The answers were skimpy and provided no comfort.
How stupid with anger must you be to diagnose somebody's heart attack from afar and use it to score points in a business feud? Arrington should muster up some decency, for the sake of Orchant's family and friends if not his own reputation, and keep him out of a stupid slapfight between two people who should celebrate the fact they no longer work together.
Hugh MacLeod Ages Like Fine South African Wine
It's funny what people reveal about themselves online. Read my blog for any length of time and you can probably figure out my uneasy Michael Corleone-like relationship with journalism, the field I majored in and subsequently escaped. I can't decide what to think about my long absence from the profession or the fact that I don't seem to be missed.
Read online marketing guru Hugh MacLeod, the guy who plies bloggers with a South African wine in the expectation they'll sing its praises, and you discover he's got a gigantic mean streak about middle age.
This morning on Twitter, MacLeod posted this tweet to blogger Frank Paynter: "Mssg to Frank Paynter re. your attempts to 'friend' me on Facebook. Go. ----. Yourself. -------. http://listics.com/."
He then followed with another message: "Seriously. Frank Paynter. Go ---- yourself. And your Mean Kids friends. Stupid, middle-aged Losers. Enjoy."
This was at least the third time I've read MacLeod point out somebody's age in the course of insulting them, so I did a little checking on the Google. Contempt for middle age is one of his regular themes.
An art director I know was laid off from Ogilvy's in New York about 2 years ago. He's had a very hard time. His current situation is a total disaster. He's 40 years old. Before the layoff his career had been less than spectacular.
Forget to upstream and you end up like him: middle aged and crashing on a friend's couch in The Bronx.
Apparently these MeanKids folk were taking the occasional pop at me as well. Mommy! Mommy! Come quick! A posse of middle aged, self-loathing underachievers is being mean to me Boo hoo hoo hoo...
Watching the big Madison Avenue agencies trying to get with the program is a bit like watching a middle-aged married man hitting on a co-ed in a bar.
I had it in my head that MacLeod was young, but I think this impression was based solely on snarky comments like these. As someone who turned 40 this year and gray 10 years earlier, I've cultivated an appreciation for young people who sneer at quadragenarians in their dotage. Unlike racists and sexists, agists always get what's coming to them in due time.
But as it turns out, MacLeod's no spring chicken. He noted his 40th birthday in 2005 with this gloomy cartoon:
That snide young whippersnapper is one of my elders.
But Never Sip From That Cup Again
Today's healthy living tip from Primate Brow Flash:
Matt turned me on to a use for old sippy-cups.
They work perfectly as Neti Pots!
Fill with warm salt water (1/4 teaspoon salt to 1 cup warm water), lean over a sink, tip your head sideways and jam the nozzle of the sippy cup into the higher nostril and pour. You will feel the salt water fill your nasal passages and then it will fall out of your other nostril. It left me with feeling of cleanliness in an entirely new place. ...
Note. If water steadily rises across your vision in one or both eyeballs while doing this, or if more than two cups of water disappears into your nose without any exiting, cease immediately.
Happy 100th Birthday, L. Sprague de Camp
Last Tuesday, the Yahoo Groups mailing list devoted to the late fantasy novelist L. Sprague de Camp failed to note the 100th anniversary of his birth. This unconscionable slight has inspired Leo Grin, editor of the Robert E. Howard literary journal The Cimmerian, to take up his metaphorical two-handed battle axe and go medieval on their asses:
... not since I quit the board of The Dark Man in December of 2003 have I been so disgusted at the hapless, witless performance of a group of colleagues. I'm so thoroughly revolted, in fact, that I've come to an ad hoc decision, one that feels not only appropriate but strangely purifying, like a good flea bath or delousing: I'm going to remove the D for de Camp group from my list of links on TC's blogroll. I originally put it up as a tangential link to REH, mostly out of a sense of charity towards my good buddy and frequent Cimmerian contributor Gary Romeo. But damn -- friendships aside, I see no reason to funnel Cimmerian readers towards a congregation that reeks of such bovine stupidity that it misses the most important de Camp milestone of this century. If they can't even work up the energy to mention his centennial, what good is the forum at all? Maybe D is for dumbasses? For shame, halfwits, for shame.
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