Quotes for the week ending 23 Jan, 2010

“We’ve got the Internet here at Signal, and it’s been a miracle that we’ve been able to stay on air … “Don’t ask me how we’ve managed to do that.”

Mario Viau, station director at SignalFM, in Port-au-Prince, which has been on the air and online since the earthquake struck..

“Because this is just a dirge. I’m ready to shut it off. And I’m sure there’s plenty other about to do the same.

Anonymous commenter on the Rolling Stone blog that live blogged the Hope For Haiti Now telethon. He went on to say that Live Aid “existed to raise money for a terrible epidemic. But the performances were more like a giant party. People were interested, and it was a huge success. This sad telethon will be immediately forgotten. And that’s a shame. Wasted opportunity.”

“Good attitude Mr. Anonymous. With a mindset like that nothing will ever happen.”

Someone going by the name of Jeff, responding to the above poster.

“We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales.”

Message on the Twitter web site, supposedly after Haiti suffered aftershocks on Wednesday.

“It puts into the public domain every bit of information collected by public bodies that is not personal or sensitive, from alcohol-attributable mortality to years of life lost through TB. Happily, not all the data sets deal with death.”

Editorial in the Guardian, on the launch of new website, data.gov.uk, which Tim Berners Lee ( and professor Nigel Shadbolt) served as advisors, on the request of Prime Minister, Gordon Brown.

“News Corp. needs Google more than Google needs News Corp.”

Greg Patterson, attorney at Espresso Pundit, in Mike Sunnucks’s story on the battle eating up over the Fair Use Doctrine

“Yet, honest Abe and HAL9000, both had one thing in common. They conveniently applied a Heuristic theory as they were, in fact, the only one calling the shots.”

Steven Lowell, PR Manager, Voice 123, on why failure, and the ‘Heuristic Algorithm’ is a bad long-term solution.

Copyright discussion through blatant copying

This video about ‘fair use’ using the most copyrighted characters in the world, is remarkable.

There are visible traces of Lawrence Lessig (who appears in the credits.)

The whole fair use debate is something that needs to be kept alive. Based on the original Fair Use Doctrine, various interpretations have been made on the four pillars of that doctrine: the intent, nature, ‘substantiality‘ (a terrible word that describes how much of content is used) and  the commercial impact of copying/use.

Not too long ago the Associated Press roiled up a lot of people when it declared fair use meant  the right to use just four words, beyond which they had to pay them! After much criticism, AP came to a setlement with the Drudge Report, and bloggers in general.

But as Clarlotte-Anne Lucas, a former journalist, noted, (See no AP, speak no AP, link no AP) there is a double standard, in that the AP can quote a blogger without making a payment for content pulled off a blog, but it wants bloggers to pay them for using AP content.

These issues will keep coming back, whether it is the intellectual property grandstanding of music companies, media companies, or … who knows, blog aggregator companies who could soon realize that there is gold in them posts. That’s why ongoing discourses like the video above matter.