Makes a lot of sense to me.

im curious… pls reblog and tell me in the tags what you think is the closest bird to you right now. for me it’s a wood pigeon 🕊️🕊️🐦

A spotted dove (Australia)

Gen Z and Millennials are putting their own spin on book clubs

From Dua Lipa to “silent” book clubs, Millennials and Gen Z are joining book clubs as a way to socialize.

Book club event listings grew 24% in the United States in 2023 from the previous year, according to ticketing platform Eventbrite. Meetup saw a 10% increase in book club listings.

Many of these book clubs are not the stodgy ones of old, however, featuring wine and crackers in a host’s living room. Book club organizers and members are creating new gatherings to talk about books at dating events, breweries and on group runs. Social media is also helping lead younger readers to new genres and in-person communities built around reading. #BookTok was TikTok’s most popular community, outpacing #CarTalk and #MovieTalk.

The growing popularity of book clubs reflects a renewed interest in events and experiences in-person following the isolation of the pandemic, as well as growing fatigue with endless time on screens.

“Book clubs are moving away from someone’s house to meet at different restaurants or as a way to try new places in a city and connect over a book,” said Teri Coan, brand manager at Once Upon a Book Club, a monthly book-subscription box with gifts designed around things mentioned in the book of choice.

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Copy Right and Public Domain in 2024

Happy 2024 all! its also Public Domain Day! a magical holiday here in America where things enter the public domain. Works published in the year 1928 (or 95 years ago!) have entered the public domain, which means they belong to us, all of us, the public!

Mickey's Back!

Yes! I'm sure you've heard, but Mickey Mouse (and Minnie Mouse too) is entering the Public Domain today. This has been news for a few years and indeed Disney's lobbying in the late 1990s is why our copy right term is SO long. So what exactly is now public domain?

Most people know about Mickey's first appearance Steamboat Willie, but a second short film, Plane Crazy was also released in 1928 so will also be public domain. So what's public? well these two films first of all, you're allowed to play them, upload them to YouTube or whatever without paying Disney. In theory you'll be allowed to cut and sample them, have them playing in the background of your movie etc. Likewise in theory the image of Mickey and Minnie as they appear (thats important) in these films will be free to use as well as Mickey's character as he appears in these works will be free to use. Now Mickey's later and more famous appearance

will still be protected. Famously the Conan Doyle Estate claimed that Sherlock Holmes couldn't be nice, smile, or not hate women in works because they still held the copyright on the short stories where he first did those things even though 90% of Sherlock Holmes stories were public domain. It's very likely Disney will assert similar claims over Mickey, claiming much of his personality first appeared in works still copyrighted.

Finally there's copyright vs trademark. Copyright is total ownership of a piece of media and all the ideas that appear in it, copyright has a limited set term and expires. Trademark is more limited and only applies to things used to market and sell a product. You can have a Coke branded vending machine in your movie if you want, but it couldn't appear anywhere in the trailer for your movie as thats you marketing your movie.

Where trademark ends and copyright begins and how trademarked something in the public domain is allowed to be are all unsettled areas of law and clearly Disney in the last few years as been aggressively pushing its trademark not just to Mickey in general but Steamboat Willie Mickey in particular

Ultimately the legal rights and wrongs of this might not matter so much since few people have the money and legal resources of the Walt Disney corporation so they might manage to maintain a de facto copyright on Mickey through legal intimidation, but maybe not?

And Tigger Too!

All the talk about Mickey Mouse and Steamboat Willie has sadly overshadowed other MAJOR things entering the public domain today. Most people are aware Winnie the Pooh entered the public domain in 2022, but they might not realize his beloved friend Tigger didn't. Thats because Tigger didn't appear till A. A. Milne's second (and last) book of Pooh short stories, The House at Pooh Corner in 1928.

Much like Mickey Mouse only what appears in The House at Pooh Corner is public domain so the orange bouncy boy from the 1960s Disney cartoon is still on lock down. But the A. A. Milne original as illustrated by E. H. Shepard is free for you to use in fiction or art. His friend Winnie the Pooh has made a number of appearances since being freed, most notably in a horror movie, but also a Mint Mobile commercial so maybe Tigger too will have a lot of luck in the public domain.

Other works:

Peter Pan; or the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up

Peter Pan is a strange case, even though the play was first mounted in 1904, and the novelization (Peter and Wendy) was published in 1911, The script for the play was not published till 1928 (confusing!) meaning while the novel as been public domain for years the play (which came first) hasn't been, but now it is and people are welcome to mount productions of it.

Millions of Cats

The oldest picture book still in print, did you own a copy growing up? (I did)

Lady Chatterley's Lover

The iconic porn novel that was at the center of a number of groundbreaking obscenity cases in the 1960s and helped establish your right to free speech.

All Quiet on the Western Front and The Threepenny Opera in their original German (but you can translate them if you want), The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie, and Orlando by Virginia Woolf will also be joining us in the public domain along with any and all plays, novels, and books published in 1928

for Films we have The Man Who Laughs who's iconic image inspired the Joker

Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, Buster Keaton's The Cameraman, Should Married Men Go Home? the first Laurel and Hardy movie, Lights of New York the first "all talking" movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Wind, as well as The Last Command and Street Angel the first films to win Oscars for Best Actor and Best Actress respectively will all be entering public domain

For Musical Compositions (more on that in a moment) we've got

Mack the Knife by Bertolt Brecht, Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love) by Cole Porter, Sonny Boy by George Gard DeSylva, Lew Brown & Ray Henderson, Empty Bed Blues by J. C. Johnson, and Makin’ Whoopee! by Gus Khan are some of the notables but any piece of music published in 1928 is covered

Any art work published in 1928, which might include works by Frida Kahlo, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alexej von Jawlensky, Edward Hopper, and André Kertész will enter the public domain, we are sure those that M. C. Escher's Tower of Babel will be in the public domain

Swan Song, Public Domain and recorded music

While most things are covered by the Copyright Act of 1976 as amended by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, none of the copyright acts covered recordings you see when American copyright law was first written recordings did not exist and so through its many amendings no one fixed this problem, movies were treated like plays and artwork, but recorded sound wasn't covered by any federal law. So all sound recordings from before 1972 were governed by a confusing mess of state level laws making it basically impossible to say what was public and what was under copyright. In 2017 Congress managed to do something right and passed the Music Modernization Act. Under the act all recordings from 1922 and before would enter the public domain in 2022. After taking a break for 2023, all sound recordings made in 1923 have entered the public domain today on January 1st 2024, these include.

Enjoy your public domain works!

It all started with a mouse

For the public domain, time stopped in 1998, when the Sonny Bono Copyright Act froze copyright expirations for 20 years. In 2019, time started again, with a massive crop of works from 1923 returning to the public domain, free for all to use and adapt:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2019/

No one is better at conveying the power of the public domain than Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, who run the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain. For years leading up to 2019, the pair published an annual roundup of what we would have gotten from the public domain in a universe where the 1998 Act never passed. Since 2019, they've switched to celebrating what we're actually getting each year. Last year's was a banger:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/20/free-for-2023/#oy-canada

But while there's been moderate excitement at the publicdomainification of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," AA Milne's "Now We Are Six," and Sherlock Holmes, the main event that everyone's anticipated arrives on January 1, 2024, when Mickey Mouse enters the public domain.

The first appearance of Mickey Mouse was in 1928's Steamboat Willie. Disney was critical to the lobbying efforts that extended copyright in 1976 and again in 1998, so much so that the 1998 Act is sometimes called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Disney and its allies were so effective at securing these regulatory gifts that many people doubted that this day would ever come. Surely Disney would secure another retrospective copyright term extension before Jan 1, 2024. I had long arguments with comrades about this – people like Project Gutenberg founder Michael S Hart (RIP) were fatalistically certain the public domain would never come back.

But they were wrong. The public outrage over copyright term extensions came too late to stave off the slow-motion arson of the 1976 and 1998 Acts, but it was sufficient to keep a third extension away from the USA. Canada wasn't so lucky: Justin Trudeau let Trump bully him into taking 20 years' worth of works out of Canada's public domain in the revised NAFTA agreement, making swathes of works by living Canadian authors illegal at the stroke of a pen, in a gift to the distant descendants of long-dead foreign authors.

Now, with Mickey's liberation bare days away, there's a mounting sense of excitement and unease. Will Mickey actually be free? The answer is a resounding YES! (albeit with a few caveats). In a prelude to this year's public domain roundup, Jennifer Jenkins has published a full and delightful guide to The Mouse and IP from Jan 1 on:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

Years and years ago I worked for a small software company that made niche products for a tiny, vertical market. My boss started doing the enshittification tango (though I didn't know that's what it was at the time) and I was so angry and confused. Why would he be intentionally making our products worse?

Now I know. And it's incredibly validating to have smart people saying that I wasn't wrong, actually, to be uncomfortable with the way the company was going.

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

Years and years ago I worked for a small software company that made niche products for a tiny, vertical market. My boss started doing the enshittification tango (though I didn't know that's what it was at the time) and I was so angry and confused. Why would he be intentionally making our products worse?

Now I know. And it's incredibly validating to have smart people saying that I wasn't wrong, actually, to be uncomfortable with the way the company was going.

Mr Grinch!

You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch You really are a heel You're as cuddly as a cactus, you're as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch You're a bad banana with a greasy black peel!

Tu es un méchant, M. Grinch, Tu es vraiment une crapule Tu es aussi câlin qu’un cactus, tu es aussi charmant qu’une anguille, M. Grinch Tu es une brebis galeuse avec un pelage gras et noir!

You're a monster, Mr. Grinch Your heart's an empty hole Your brain is full of spiders, you've got garlic in your soul, Mr. Grinch I wouldn't touch you with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole!

Tu es un monstre, M. Grinch, Ton coeur est un trou vide Ton cerveau est plein d’araignées Tu as de l’ail dans l’âme, M. Grinch Je ne te toucherais pas avec un poteau de trente-neuf pieds et demi de long

You're a vile one, Mr. Grinch You have termites in your smile You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile, Mr. Grinch Given a choice between the two of you, I'd take the seasick crocodile!

Tu es un vilain, M Grinch Il y a des termites dans ton sourire Tu as tout le douceur tendre d’un crocodile qui a le mal de mer, M Grinch Si je devais choisir entre vous deux Je prendrais le crocodile qui a le mal de mer!

You're a foul one, Mr. Grinch You're a nasty-wasty skunk Your heart is full of unwashed socks, your soul is full of gunk, Mr. Grinch

Tu es un odieux personnage, M Grinch Tu es une mouffette qui pue Ton coeur est plein de chaussettes sales Ton âme est pleine de saletés, M. Grinch

AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling that Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause

A federal judge on Friday upheld a finding from the U.S. Copyright Office that a piece of "art" "created by" AI is not open to protection. The ruling was delivered in an order turning down a tech bro’s bid to challenge the government’s position refusing to register works made by AI.

The opinion stressed, “Human authorship is a bedrock requirement.”

Copyrights and patents, the judge said, were conceived as “forms of property that the government was established to protect, and it is understood that recognizing exclusive rights in that property would further the public good by incentivizing individuals to create and invent.”

The ruling continued, “The act of human creation — and how to best encourage human individuals to engage in that creation, and thereby promote science and the useful arts — is thus central to American copyright from its very inception.”

Copyright law wasn’t designed to protect non-human actors.

The order was delivered during the writers and actors strike seeking protection from AI infringement (among other corporate abuses), and as courts also weigh the legality of AI companies training their systems on copyrighted works. Those lawsuits, filed by artists and artists in California federal court, allege copyright infringement and could result in the firms having to destroy their large language models.

full story: X

Here's how humans can retain creative control despite tech bros trying to remove artists from the creative process: Make it so they can't profit from human creativity, and only give human creators legal protection for their work. When someone driven by profit can't profit from something, they'll move on to something else.

The dot-ai bubble

Countless people have benefitted from the AI boom, whether that’s been students struggling to hit the word count on a recent essay, tech journalists trying to fill out column inches, or chief executives attempting to impress investors on earnings calls.

However, perhaps one of the more unexpected beneficiaries of the artificial intelligence hype is Anguilla, a small British territory in the Caribbean. The island, which has an estimated population of ~16,000 people, now makes around $3 millionper month from .ai — its unique internet domain suffix.

Domain demand

Companies paying to register their websites with domain suffixes that are, in theory, linked with nations where they don’t operate is hardly a new phenomenon. In 2011, for example, Colombia was already receiving 25% of the revenue from sales of the .co suffix: a cheaper (and shorter) alternative to the more common .com address that we ourselves at Chartr.co eschewed for aesthetic, and maybe some financial, reasons 4 years ago.

Indeed, as is to be expected with anything vaguely linked to artificial intelligence, registrations for .ai names have accelerated at an almost unparalleled rate — up 156% in May 2023 from a year earlier, compared to a paltry 27% increase for boring old .com domains. Searches on Google, which conveniently celebrates its 25th birthday today, also show .ai racing ahead of the competition, with more and more people looking to get those 2 headline-snatching vowels at the end of their website address.

— Nested into Kevin Kelly’s excellent Wired essay on creativity in the age of AI image generators is this excellent summation of the paradox of influence, which applies to every realm of creativity far beyond AI.  

When you read Gabriel García Márquez or Miguel Cervantes you are really reading Edith Grossman reading Gabriel García Márquez and Miguel Cervantes. There are many great writers but precious few great translators. Edith Gossman was a towering figure in a secret art. She will be missed.

A translator recognised! Wonderful to see.

“Plenty of tricky pairs of English terms can be used interchangeably, even if there are certain subtle differences between them—distrust vs. mistrust, for example. Unfortunately, the triple homophonic whammy of palate, palette, and pallet doesn’t fall into this category.”

Triple homophonic whammy is a great expression. Whammy is a great word itself. Like rummy, used by Chris Brookmyre in his sentence alakazammy stairheid rammy; a fight at the top of the stairs. But not quite the same meaning.

When a publisher might not do as good a job as a self-publishing author

By Mike Shatzkin

We’ve previously explored what I called “the end of the trade publishing concept”, which stems from the now wide-open opportunity to publish available to anybody with a computer and something to deliver as a book. It feels like we may have reached a new benchmark: admittedly a very fuzzy one. But it looks like it has become very difficult, bordering on impossible, for a commercial entity to make money consistently publishing new titles. Let’s summarize the facts that have changed on the ground that make that the case.

**Thirty years ago, each new book coming into the world in English was competing with 500,000 incumbents that were (at least theoretically) available for purchase. That was the total number of books “in print” in English in the world. Today that number, with a big boost from Ingram’s Lightning print-on-demand capability, has grown to more than nineteen million titles.

**Up until twenty years ago, bookstores sold the lion’s share of the books. Only serious publishers with sales forces, warehouses, inventory, and relationships with retailers could compete for sales. Now bookstores account for as little as 20 percent of the sales. Most sales are made through online promotion and availability that give incumbent publishers no particular edge. So increased title competition has come along with the vanishing of the unique publisher sales and distribution advantage.

**In the pre-Lightning era, publishers had to maintain inventory in a warehouse for any title expected to compete in the marketplace. That requirement cost publishers money, but also served to eliminate competition. No inventory holding is required today to have a title listed as available being able to ship within days, if not hours. That saves incumbent publishers some cash investment, but unleashes a slew of new competition.

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Mike Shatzkin is one of the smartest people writing about the publishing biz. This is an excellent piece on what is involved in publising today and how much access to readers has changed the game. ~ eP

Fascinating.

So it is better to sleep and leave the bottle unopened; Tomorrow in the offices the year on the stamps will be altered; Tomorrow new diaries consulted, new calendars stand; With such small adjustments life will again move forward Implicating us all

Philip Larkin