Doctorow and Le Guin in Spat Over Fair Use

Sam Harrelson on October 14, 2007

Two of my favorite writers, Cory Doctorow and Ursula K Le Guin, are in a bit of a spat over the perception of fair use and creative commons in relation to a short Le Guin piece that Doctorow published on the uber popular boingboing.net blog:

In a nutshell: I quoted, in its entirety, a one-paragraph story that Ms Le Guin sent to the fanzine Ansible, in which she made fun of a book review in Slate that said that Michael Chabon “has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.” Le Guin’s paragraph was a long one, about 500 words, and I pasted the whole thing in, because I thought it was delightful.

In my own non-important view, I have to side with Doctorow here… he seemed to have nothing but the best of intentions and wanted to introduce a new crowd of readers from boingboing to Le Guin’s excellent work. Additionally, his explanation of Fair Use seems to be right on… but I’m not a copyright lawyer (thank the gods), so what do I know?

Yet again, here’s an instance of the offline and online publishing worlds having a difficult time grok-ing the intricacies of each others’ systems, customs and practices.

You say tomato, I say tomato… let’s call the whole thing off.

An apology to Ursula K Le Guin – Boing Boing

Colbert Opinion Piece in the NY Times

Sam Harrelson on October 14, 2007

Stephen Colbert assumes the role of Maureen Dowd in today’s NY Times. Very very funny:

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(I’d like to thank Maureen Dowd for permitting/begging me to write her column today. As I type this, she’s watching from an overstuffed divan, petting her prize Abyssinian and sipping a Dirty Cosmotinijito. Which reminds me: Before I get started, I have to take care of one other bit of business:

Bad things are happening in countries you shouldn’t have to think about. It’s all George Bush’s fault, the vice president is Satan, and God is gay.

There. Now I’ve written Frank Rich’s column too.

Great stuff… go read the whole thing.

Pictures and Videos

Sam Harrelson on October 14, 2007

I’ve had a couple of people email me to find out where the videos and pics of Mary Hudson, etc are located on the web.

Pictures: http://photos.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my Flickr site which is the same thing).

Videos: http://tv.samharrelson.com (or you can just go straight to my YouTube site which is the same thing).

There’s a constant stream of pics and videos flowing these days since Mary Hudson is having a lot of “firsts!” so be sure to check in or subscribe to those places if you’re into feed reading.

BTW, I’m also a heavy Twitter user. If you’re a user add me (http://www.twitter.com/samharrelson) or sign up and give it a go. It’s good for your constitution.

Mediocre Marketing

Sam Harrelson on October 13, 2007

Seth Godin lays down a beautiful analogy for those who watch the innovators and then attempt to follow their success in light of the Radiohead album release of In Rainbows.

This is exceptionally true in the case of online marketers who are frequently beyond watchful in their appraisal of new marketing approaches and hence beyond mediocre (video, social media, etc):

So, in every industry, the middle waits. And watches. And then, once they realize they can survive the switch (or once they’re persuaded that their current model is truly fading away), they jump in.

Seth’s Blog: Radiohead and the mediocre middle