November 2009
28 posts
Evan Ratliff decided to spend a month trying not to be found, despite an ever-growing group of online sleuths devoted to catching him. And he would have succeeded, if he hadn’t gotten sloppy.
The judge in the copyright infringement case pitting the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against Google and its book search program has set a date for the final hearing on the parties’ controversial settlement proposal.
Judge Denny Chin from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has scheduled the “final fairness hearing” for Feb. 18, 2010 at 10 a.m. U.S. Eastern Time. As expected, the judge also granted preliminary approval to the proposed class-action settlement, according to an order he issued on Thursday.
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The litigation between the parties began in 2005, when the Authors Guild and the AAP filed separate lawsuits against Google that charged the search company with engaging in massive copyright infringement through its program to digitize millions of library books without always obtaining permission from copyright owners.
For those who are interested in the blow-by-blow, my old roommate James Grimmelmann’s coverage at The Laboratorium is consistently good.
The Mary HK Choi / NatashaVC collaboration is even more awesome than I had hoped.
My parents moved last spring. I had set aside a single box of junk from my room that I wanted; by the time it arrived, my mother had turned it into six. This is how we operate. Among the treasures:
- A Bloom County cartoon I cut out of the newspaper in January, 1986, that I have never seen reprinted.
- A postcard of Fenway Park
- An “Ecology Now” decal that I acquired somewhere. Copyright 1970.
- Other people’s submissions to the literary magazine I worked on in high school.
- A newspaper article about Aldrich Ames.
- A list of BBSs that I used to dial into in Minneapolis, circa 1992.
- Notes on a D&D campaign I ran for my little brother.
- A sew-on patch from the soccer league in Hartford I played in when I was in fourth and fifth grade.
I’m most disappointed when people I know who use the word could find something more concise, or shocking, or linguistically artful to go with. It’s sold at the Wal-Mart of pejoratives. It’s cheap, it’s made en masse, and there’s nothing but bad preservatives in the ingredients. Let’s all—The New York Times, Bloggers, TV Writers, Those Who Use The Word “Douchebag,” Those Who You Would Call A “Douche,” Bar Patrons, Sports Fans, English Professors, Joe Dolce—become better communicators, and find something better than the word “douche” and it’s mediocre suffix “bag” to go with.
Or, you know, we could just judge each other a little less.
” —Foster Kramer has had enoughI know that none of you care, but this is one of the best technical presentations I’ve ever seen.
Flicked Off: ‘2012′ is Awesome and Haters Can Suck It | The Awl
One of these days, Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Mary HK Choi are going to fight, and it is going to be awesome.
Literary Vices, with Rudolph Delson: Richard Nixon’s ‘Six Crises’
I love this series.
