Thursday, February 10, 2011

SHUT . . . DOWN . . . EVERYTHING

General Madagascar, we may be in serious trouble.

Yeah, it’s been kind of a panicky week here at Mister Fweem’s Blog Inc., what with two of my blogs going private and all out of fear of losing forever the first use rights to the novels I’m writing (and posting first drafts of here). So reading this story about a Las Vegas-based law firm (and you KNEW that sleazy city was going to come into the story quickly) snapping up copyrights to viral material and then going on to sue anyone and everyone who even thinks about posting their stuff online.

This kind of stuff is why I’ve been more circumspect, as of late, in trolling the Internet for images to use on my blogs. I’ve cut down a lot, and have included many, many links to the source material and noting when things are out of copyright or under creative commons licensing and such.

And I’m still nervous about it.

I’m not the only one.

There are many people out there on the net tracking what Righthaven is going, including this site.

There are many people out there offing false hope of legal remedies to protect oneself against the kinds of thing Righthave is doing, including this misleading advice from wired.com. (Misleading because the safe harbor protection offered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 offers protection for web hosts, ISPs, and other such big boys against copyright infringement lawsuits, not the individuals that Wired insinuates can get protection by filing a $105 form with the federales.

So the reactions are to re-do the DMCA, learn about it (using such sites as this) read it in its entirety (and fall asleep, drooling on the keyboard, thanks to sites like this) or, in the case of Good ol’ General Madagascar:

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