Excelsior the book

(MOD NOTE: You are such a fucking asshole.)

OH NO I DIDN'T

Momus still I'd like you to explain why some laws are meant to be flounced (copyright, speed limits, etc.) why some aren't (Geneva conventions, assault statutes, etc.).

yeah but we dumped your shitty tea in the Boston Harbor instead of stealing it, see?

also, this was exactly my point. If the laws no longer apply, then change them.

xpost - my hatred of iced tea is one of my few non-Southern attributes. I can't explain it.

I think a plausible explanation for J0hn's fear and loathing here is that it took the idea of this book to make him realise the self-betrayal implicit in his every post. In something akin to Heidegger's account of 'the Uncanny', he was jolted out of 'posting-as-habit' and suddenly saw posting as vulnerability, self-betrayal, even a kind of unwelcome self-recognition.

That was my take on it, too.

you have a point, but I was really responding to Momus's implied "all property laws are bad" position more than anything.

(a) There are conceivably instances in which something somebody posts here could wind up somewhere that he or she would seriously, for any number of reasons, prefer it not to wind up.

(b) On the off chance that such a thing were to happen, it'd be totally cool and convenient if that person could do something about it. Not even because of ownership or fairness or anything like that, but because, duh, they'd like it not to be there.

(c) The best way to provide people with that chance is to say -- just to say, for the record! -- that everything on this server is copyright-the-poster, and to just stick with that idea rather than bending and equivocating and talking about Kanye West and fair use and telling people not to be upset. It doesn't even need to be a legal issue. It can be a simple social issue: a lot of people would prefer ILX to be the kind of place where it was clear that disseminating people's posts in all sorts of directions is, I dunno, frowned upon. Like Tuomas said: the same way it's understood, in daily interaction, that recording your friends and playing the tapes willy-nilly is just generally not cool.

(d) And chances are, that in 99.9% of the cases that something gets reprinted outside of ILX -- quotes, posts, paraphrases, whole threads, little "hey look at this" cut-n-pastes like we ourselves do all the time -- nobody will be upset. Nobody will care. We all understand that information works that way, and we all understand that our posts are public and will likely flow here and there. But on that slim .1% chance that something winds up in a place that someone has good reason to really, honestly not want it, he or she will at least be able to respond by asserting some clearly backed-up rights.

If people are shocked because they think this book of Mark's was clearly one of those 99.9% who-cares instances, then sure: it is. My guess is that people reacted strongly because this instance seemed to serve no clear purpose whatsoever except to bring up the whole copyright issue. Turns out in the end that he had a perfectly good reason -- testing the printing service -- but as it stood it looked like a simple test of principle.

momus isnt saying the laws are bad. he's saying that with the way things are now, they are meaningless. so we might as well face the reality of everything being up for grabs.

i have more respect for the "noise idiots" than some other members on the board. go figure.

As a complete outsider here with nothing to lose or gain, I can definitely say that there's been a slight but obvious "going downhill" since I've been here (which is, like, a minute).

But, ILX, you still feel special to me.

*solitary tear

I was puzzled too, Kevin, so I did an image search and this is what came up:

http://www.dertonline.com/ramones.jpg

http://www.dangerousbrothers.co.uk/images/pjh_cap.jpg