So when Napster came along and changed music sharing from a Sharing Goods process to a Sharing Information process we didn’t all suddenly develop criminal tendencies. It’s just that sharing, which we’re inclined to do, suddenly became way more convenient.

Dass mittlerweile auch Andere auf den Geschmack des kosten- und bedingungslosen Teilens gekommen sind ist wiederrum das Problem mit dem sich Danny Sullivan an Hand eines seiner Artikel beschäftigt:

On Friday, I broke a tasty story about a woman suing Google, claiming bad directions caused her to get hit by a vehicle. Today, I discover our story is everywhere, often with no attribution. Come along and watch how the mainstream media, which often claims bloggers rip it off, does a little stealing of its own. [...] No one had written about the case before I put my article up. I know. I checked before publishing. There was nothing out there. So what happened next?

Und Jennifer von thehyperlocalist.com setzt nach und präsentiert Tipps die copycats den Magen verderben (sollen):

That borderline plagiarism sucks to no end, and I don’t like it any more than Sullivan.[...] There’s no foolproof way around it, but the tactics below might force news outlets to acknowledge in some way their original sources.

Bild: (cc) mpujals

What Germans won’t accept is that they wouldn’t have been able to sell all those beautifully designed cars and well-engineered machine tools if Greeks and Spaniards and Americans hadn’t been willing to buy those goods and German banks hadn’t been so willing to lend them the money to do so.

Former marine T.X. Hammes in the Armed Forces Journal put quite some thought and arguments into showing how the unreflected use of Power Point acctually leads to worse descision-making within the US-Army (and everywhere else it is used) by simply replacing arguments with bullet points:

Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them.

And Jonathan Chait explains for the New Republic how modern copyright, “limited quotation rights” and lawyerism threaten documentary film making:

Documentaries in particular are property of a special kind. The copyright and contract claims that burden these compilations of creativity are impossibly complex. The reason is not hard to see. A part of it is the ordinary complexity of copyright in any film. A film is made up of many different creative elements–music, plot, characters, images, and so on. Once the film is made, any effort at remaking it–moving it to DVD, for example–could require clearing permissions for each of these original elements. But documentaries add another layer of complexity to this already healthy thicket, as they typically also include quotations, in the sense of film clips.

Aber es gibt noch andere Gewinner zwischen Rhein und Weser, und deren Ruhm ist entschieden weniger geheuchelt als das in den Düsseldorfer Parteizentralen praktizierte Schönreden des Unvermeidlichen: Es sind – die regionalen Politblogs. Sie haben dokumentiert, wie Rüttgers’ Staatskanzlei und die CDU-Zentrale agiert haben, um die politische Konkurrenz auszuspähen und die eigene Kriegskasse aufzubessern.

Coilhouse berichtet über Kiana Firouz, eine 27 Jahre alte iranische Homosexuelle und Aktivistin, deren Asylantrag von den englischen Behörden abgelehnt wurde obwohl ihr im Iran letztendlich die Todesstrafe droht.

“Yes, they know she’s gay. Yes, they know she could be deported back to Iran at any time, and that if this happens, Firouz will most likely be sentenced to torture and death after being found guilty of the “unspeakable sin of homosexuality” because she has participated in explicit lesbian sex scenes in the movie, and been a fierce proponent for human rights in her country.”

Und die FTD äußert sich erstaunlich deutlich zur neuerlichen dauerhaften causa Ackermann:

“Mit dem Vertrauen an den Finanzmärkten verhält es sich manchmal wie mit alten Bäumen. Zum Wachsen braucht es viel Zeit und Mühe, aber weg ist es ruck, zuck. Anders gesagt: Ein dürrer Satz von Josef Ackermann könnte reichen, um den Effekt eines Rettungspakets von 750 Mrd. Euro zunichtezumachen. Der Deutsche-Bank -Chef muss das wissen – und in bestimmten Momenten einfach mal nichts sagen.”