Mudita Journal

On Copyrights (and Taking Shit from Joeshit)

December 3, 2005 · Filed under: Atlasphere, Personal
Share

I’ve taken a bit of a beating over at LiveJournal lately, for attempting to enforce the Atlasphere’s rights to its articles. A user named “Joeshit the Ragman” (nice, eh?) originally copied the entire text of one of our recent articles.

When I asked to have the copyrighted material removed, I was greeted with hilarity and insults (such as “Holy crap you’re ugly. No wonder you’re such an asshole”). Lovely.

Eventually the LiveJournal staff stepped in and required him/her to shorten it to an excerpt, but not until I’d been beaten around the ears by some folks who seem very foreign to the concept of respecting intellectual property.

Along the way, Grossman’s original column took a pretty harsh beating too (e.g., “god, that’s awful, it’s like a middle school student wrote it! I wrote better than that at 16″), albeit from people who write things like this on their blog:

Am I scared of success? My life will be totally different if I ever get wealthy, or even get above the poverty line. Sometimes I think the reason it’s taken me so long to finish my book is that I’m scared of that happening. I love my life already–it’s strange to think of having an all-new one, even though I’ve been dreaming about being wealthy my whole life. Just a thought. [And:] If there’s one thing I’m even better at than writing books, it’s repulsing women. I’m the master at not having a girlfriend. Nobody can beat me. I’m proud of that fact! I’m proud of being such an extraordinary person that everyone’s afraid to date me.

I mostly found the situation funny, but it’s a little disturbing seeing how mean and disrespectful people can be to those who try and enforce their copyrights.

Posted by Joshua Zader · Trackback URL · Link
blog comments powered by Disqus