Once again, I reiterate my desire for a single way of viewing and participating with posts on X, Threads, Mastodon, and BlueSky -- it's like instant messaging all over again, and there's no ICQ. We need a FriendFeed for the 2000s
I know this is probably an unpopular opinion, especially right now, but I think a lot of accusations of plagiarism are overdone -- including some I have been involved in (Jill Abramson etc.). Remixing media is a fact of life now, and we should get used to it -- anything but wholesale reproduction of massive quantities of a creative work should be ignored
@samueljohnson If it's a creative work, yes — although it's more of a convention rather than a rule. What if the quoted work is simply a statement of fact? Facts can't be copyrighted as a matter of law
Look at it this way: If Google has to pay news companies for the news they summarize or include links to, why doesn't it have to pay anyone else? If it indexes and summarizes my blog post, why don't I get a cheque? Is it because news is a special category of information, and if so, why don't we fund it directly if we think it has social value? https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/google-owes-news-outlets-at-least-10-billion-yearly-study-estimates/
@timbray I totally agree — so why don't we attack the ad monopoly directly, instead of relying on some specious, circular argument about the alleged value news links have for Google?
On getting around media paywalls, archiving content, copyright, and journalistic ethics
My editor's note on yesterday's version of the When The Going Gets Weird newsletter (which is here or at newsletter.mathewingram.com) got so long, and triggered so many conversations on Mastodon and elsewhere that I thought I would create a separate post about
@pluralistic, I apologize if I have missed it, but have you written or spoken about the lawsuits involving AI large language models and copyright? Given your background, I would be very interested in your perspective!
"A catatonic who woke after 20 years could change psychiatry"
Richard Sima writes for the Washington Post: “The young woman was catatonic—unmoving, unblinking and unknowing where or who she was. Her name was April Burrell. Before she became a patient, April had been an outgoing, straight-A student majoring in accounting at the University of Maryland. But after a traumatic event when she was 21, April […]