Excelsior the book

Are you people massively dense or something?

While I'm sorry to see J0hn go, my issue is much less about his departure and much more about the GIGANTIC LEVEL OF STUPIDITY involved in doing something like putting people's copyrighted words into a product and selling it without asking for their consent first.

Not only obvious, but kind of pointless, too, as you say (especially when the only way you can BUY the book is online, but if you have online access in the first place, why do you NEED it? etc etc) -- but is it really a surprise? And why did J0hn seem to take it so personally? I'm extremely upset to see him go, too, FWIW.

I am so fuckin' angry and depressed about this, I love my ilx0r friends and am going to really miss them/y'all a whole lot but being printed without my permission is horseshit

xpost

It is really well known that "lastplanetojakarta.com" is J0hn's, also

Yeah, but there's a ton of M0UNT@!N G0@TS threads and it's naive to think that someone can't work their way back to it. Not that the book is right, but it's not the earth shattering public revelation that you're making it out to be.

Feel whatever you feel regardless, but some of the posts sound like the posters think otherwise.

and if he is ashamed of what he wrote, he shouldnt have written it in the first place/left a long time ago.

xpost i am sure

J0hn, because you (unlike Mark) understand the openendedness of these threads, I can only assume that when you say you're leaving "after this thread," it's a cruelly subtle way of saying you're not leaving at all! Cool!

Jon, people can't see full email addresses unless they're registered.

At least 3 Xs.

http://www.rainbownetrigging.com/rainbow-images/industrial-glove-big.jpg

I'm gonna leave this thread & the forum now for real, as my attemps to clarify my position are just making me angrier & angrier. Bye everybody.

Well, since this isn't inherent to the internet, I guess the responsibility for maintaining this belief falls on the moderators of this board, no?

For the record, I personally don't care that my posts are in this thing. I do not make the mistake of thinking that this means that no one else should care, either.

Because it won't ever be honored. Because it's unrealistic. It's like expecting that you can walk down the street having a conversation with the person next to you, or on the other end of your cell phone, without people listening. It's unrestricted space, and it's explicitly and visibly unrestricted space: it isn't possible to occupy it without being aware of that.

It's like expecting that those eavesdroppers -- whether they mean to be or not -- will never tell other people what they heard you talking about, nor post it to "In Passing," nor in their book about People Saying The Darndest Things, or whatever.

It might be a reasonable requirement of courtesy, but like it or not, courtesy beyond a certain point isn't a reasonable expectation. It just doesn't happen. It isn't something given by default.

It's not like this is new. The profit involved should be irrelevant, and seems to be irrelevant to most peoples' concerns: would they object to someone printing out a thread at Kinko's to read at work? That's all CafePress does: they print it out. They make no claims to copyright or ownership (they do require that their clients possess copyright to the work they're printing; it's never been clear they need to). So the concern is either empty principle or has to do with privacy: not wanting to be read by people you don't know are reading, or aren't answerable to the ILX community, or whatever.

How is it any different from printing out a thread and showing it to a spouse or coworker? Or letting them read your screen? Or the lurkers who read everything anyway?

I'm not saying it isn't okay to be bothered by it, although it's probably clear it doesn't bother me; I'm saying it's not reasonable to expect people to act accordingly, because they haven't been, and they aren't going to start.

(The odds that anyone who's been active in popular online places for a few years hasn't been reprinted somewhere without their consent or knowledge are not great.)