Though copyright as it is has issues, this seems very off, as characters are the work, moreso than the settings and even plot - as only one of those three items tends to be unique. I've written books and stories, and the best answer I can give to you is this:
Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.
The problem with that argument is that this statement is simply not true once you tell me about the characters. Now they are in my mind too, and I want control over my own thoughts, just as you do.
I understand that you're saying that the ideas remain yours whether they are in your mind or mine. Either way, accepting your characters into my mind means giving up my control over my mind and thoughts. You are colonizing my mind with your ideas and insisting on limits on my thoughts about them. This would be all right if you paid me rent for storing your creations in my brain, but that would be completely impractical.
> Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
Analogies between humans and divine attributes tend to fall apart when they have to deal with the existence of more than one human. I think this highlights the weakness of the author's moral rights. The author's creation of the character was inspired by many other human creations and real-life characters. The character will go on to be recreated by every person whose unique perspective influences its imagination. Yet the moral rights argument requires picking out one act of creation, conferring divinity upon it, and pretending there are no rival divinities that could possibly conflict with its solitary status.
The idea that a creator has an absolute moral right to control of their characters is a fairly recent one, and it certainly isn't a widely respected one -- imagine how many movies, books, etc. would have never been written if people had considered Dracula, Don Quixote, Frankenstein's Monster, Othello, etc. to be inviolable property of their authors. I don't think it's a particularly strong argument for state protection of copyright.
> because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe.
Nor do you or should you have control over the creations, thoughts of the other billions of people on the planet
> I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper
Why? It certainly isn't natural or basic right. Copyright does not cover or protect things in your head. It covers what you and others fixate into medium. It does(should) not cover ideas, only specific implementations of those ideas. Your imagined god-hood of things in your head matters not.
Creativity is not spontaneous. Despite what you think, your precious characters do not spring original from your mind. They are amalgamations of our shared culture.
You may be lauded for effort of getting them out into a cohesive and entertaining form. But that for fuck sure does not grant you the right to deny the rest of world from doing the same.
I'm not a real fan of chewing food, but having done a similar diet before I prefer it. Turns out that even though me and food don't always get along, after 3 weeks on a liquid diet the cravings for real food for me come back. There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent, this data exists but has been largely ignored since it's from a different kind of community. Anyways - 30 days isn't enough, many items take longer to produce issues. Vitamin C comes to mind, it's destroyed by sunlight, copper (copper is good for destroying a few biological agents it seems, birth-control and Vitamin C, oh it's uses - but we need it as well so it'll be there in soylent in trace amounts), and age, but so little is needed to avoid scurvy, and it takes about 3 months from your last consumption of it to produce adverse results, that it wouldn't be an issue... in the short run.
To address your comment about animals: I saw animals that are littered with disease standing above the product. Standing, breathing without masks, talking without masks(which means trace amounts of spit), in standard clothes that've probably been exposed to much. The rat was far less disturbing than seeing the people who were handling the product.
Contrary to the blood-work, there is a issue that presented itself after 30 days. Not a nutrient deficiency, but a chewing one: he mentioned he started chewing gum due to his jaw aching. As far as I know chewing is supposed to help keep the jaw healthy (an expert/dentist has been sorely lacking from these soylent discussions, I imagine they'd have much to say about chewing, jaw, and tooth issues that crop up), and as someone who hasn't done a great job of that in life... I certainly wouldn't want to mess with jaw health anymore.
Yeah, I was pretty appalled to see one of the founders/employees measuring ingredients out of a box on the floor while wearing dirty espadrilles (canvas shoes). I suspect that if you look at the skepticism/support in this thread you'd see a strong correlation between people who have worked in food service at some time in their lives and those who haven't.
As in people doing these diets years before soylent, not years on said diet. My grammar might not've been clear enough.
EDIT: Specifically I'm thinking of the hundreds (if not thousands by now) of people on T-Nation/Testosterone Nation who've done the 1-month Velocity diet, which is (or was, I haven't been there in years, but that particular diet has been around for at least 5 years+), a protein shake diet with very little solid food. There are years of people doing it for a month and relating their experiences, highlights and downfalls, and I'm sure there are several more experiences in that world that would provide better data points. However, it has the issue of being mostly anecdotal evidence.
My Mother has SAD, suffered for years with it in various parts of CA (too much gloom during winter, even though the days were long and sunny spring-autumns), but now lives in a northern mid-west state. We discovered that SAD doesn't affect her as much there for a couple reasons we can only guess at. The sun was out more often even on bone-chilling days, and the snow on the ground reflecting the light was far, far better for her than the gloomy rainy winter days of CA.
It was a nice surprise that a colder/Winter state was better for her particular SAD. Seems very counter-intuitive at first, but sometimes an individual's needs aren't so clear. And I just gotta reiterate... the snow reflecting more light into a home, combined with it adding the whole ambiance of a Winter look (rather than the sight of gloom or leafless plants in a more temperate state during winter) seems to have a real beneficial effect. Of course, individual results will vary, this only works for one particular case, but it's still of interest how SAD works and affects each person.
I once worked for a company that did pre-employment background checks. Before I left the CEO was talking about the next big thing in weeding out undesirables from the workforce: a system that would keep track of every time someone was placed behind bars/arrested, adding that to a database, and notifying potential/present employers that person A either working for them or applying to work for them had been arrested, either at one time or now.
Not charged with a crime, not falsely arrested, just simply placed behind bars. I left before really delving into the legality of it, but it apparently was.
Remember, the bill of rights only applies to the government. A private company doesn't have to care about WHY you were placed in a jail cell or whether you actually are a criminal, just that you were detained by the police at one time.
If every protester who'd been arrested (I'm thinking Occupy from a while ago) was now in a database that prevented them from ever getting a job again even though they've never committed a "real" crime, then being legal sure doesn't seem fine at all.
I should also mention that I've worked for a few companies handling private information about people. The lack of security in the private area is astounding. I'm honestly surprised that massive SSN and other personal info don't leak out of private companies more often, most of the time it's not difficult to walk out with a million DOB/Name/Current Address/SSN/Duplicatable Signature on thumb drive, there's no internal tracking and no encryption most of the time. The private sector is the last place surveillance should be happening, it's really frightening to think what could happen should they mess up.
Most police forces are institutionally right wing, and so are quite happy to help corporations build blacklists to keep people involved in unions or who brought up health and safety issues out of work. I'm sure police forces hate left wing occupy protesters and will be quite happy to supply detailed information about who they have arrested or information gained from undercover operations to help build blacklists.
Police officers across the country supplied information on workers to a blacklist operation run by Britain's biggest construction companies, the police watchdog has told lawyers representing victims.
The Independent Police Complaints Commission has informed those affected that a Scotland Yard inquiry into police collusion has identified that it is "likely that all special branches were involved in providing information" that kept certain individuals out of work.
I used to work for a pre-employment background screening agencies. It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background. Unfortunately, it's not illegal (federally, with the EEOC, each state may have their own differences) to discriminate by personality test.
This is definitely something I saw prevalent in the hiring world: if it isn't outright illegal, use it to prevent someone from being hired. In many cases we had clients that'd tiptoe the line and ask if certain reasons would be valid for rejecting a person, and some HR managers were upset when they learned it was against the law to disallow someone who had admitted their criminal history from being hired. So they found another reason.
There is still a massive amount of hiring discrimination. It's just not the "official" reason anymore since that'd be illegal. That job was soulbreaking.
It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background.
I'm not sure if you are in the US, but that's not true here. As a specific example: if the crime involved money and the position is with a financial institution. We have a big problem in the US where felons can't get jobs which can obviously lead to a lot of recidivism.
> It's illegal to reject someone based on any criminal history as long as the person has not lied about their background.
Source? As far as I know, it's legal, but you have to show a good reason to do so, and finely tailored policies, that aren't simply a broad "we don't hire anyone with a criminal record."
There are plenty of cases in which you may, or even may be required by law, not hire someone based on particular crimes on their criminal background check, such as sex offenders for jobs involving children or felonies for people who need to get a security clearance.
I was overly broad with that, excuse me. It's much more complicated, but generally you can't exclude someone based on a criminal record alone as you rightly point out, and that's not accounting for other circumstances. So yes, financial will matter (of course, any financial crime means that license will be revoked and that record will be accessible as well), but unrelated crimes are different.
The main reason someone gets rejected from criminal reasons, in my experience, is having an old record that's been cleared or expunged, and then answering "No" when the employment application asks a specific wording of "Have you ever been convicted of a crime?" - The answer would be yes, and a criminal check would reflect something had happened, but that the record has been expunged due to enough time passing for that particular crime. It sounds convoluted, and it is. Not sure it really should, but I only worked in the industry. Whether or not the industry followed the letter of the law is much, much different.
Its ironic that in an America that lets legal shenanigans turn all kinds into criminals, that the same legal weaselling lets people get away with what is completely illegal, just because they say they didn't do it for the illegal reason, just some other reason they choose at the time.
What this reiterated was mostly what I've been telling other self-publishers: marketing marketing marketing. Here's a book that gets good reviews and is supposedly (since I haven't read it) written well, yet only sells 1500 copies. Of course, 1500 copies in a very very short while is triple what most books sell in their lifetime, but it's still a very small number when it's by an author whose sold millions and has at times been credited with getting America's youth reading again - even if it was only for a while.
If J.K. Rowling can't sell more than a couple thousand copies of a new book based on it's quality alone, what makes you think you're going to sell any more by going the traditional publisher route under an also-unknown name.
It all comes down to marketing your book. You'll have to do your own marketing with traditional publishing as well, except now you also are in a contract. If your book does badly, your advance will make up for it. If it does well, then you're limited by paying back the advance prior to royalties, and you lose a touch of control.
Anyways, it gives me faith in our self-publishing business and our answers to clients who wonder why they haven't sold 3,000 copies yet. Although our last one is over 10k sales, mostly because they had been marketing the book months in advance of even writing it, and it was the written form of the advice they had been giving for years and building a platform with.
That's what we can learn from this. Build a platform based on you, market the book before it's even been written, build anticipation, and then market even more. I've really enjoyed this "revelation" about J.K., even if I'm not a reader. True, it does have a slightly sour taste due to it being a somewhat PR move, but then again... even Issac Asimov was Paul French when he wanted to write something my 8-year old sister would (and has!) read.
I think this rhymes with the article. Basically you're trying to jumpstart as many self-enforcing (positive, or runaway) feedback loops as you can, taking a shotgun approach, and hoping that one of them would catch.
Exactly, pros do it all the time. Eventually it becomes cool. I never buy into the hype about it looking bad for a few reasons:
I wear glasses. Years ago people thought all glasses looked silly. And they were, with giant thick lenses. Now people buy non-RX glasses to look cool, even.
I saw an animated sci-fi show from around 10 years ago (Denno Coil, Japanese anime) where in order to see the AR/VR world, you wore glasses. Every single kid wore glasses. You had to in order to see the VR/AR. Once something is common, the look factor doesn't matter.
I think we're just seeing people being disappointed that Reality is still decades/centuries/possibly impossible behind Fiction, and Fiction is only pulling further away as Reality gets better computers to render Fiction with.
It's quite logical to practice one of the most important human communication skills at every opportunity possible. Practice makes perfect, and will hone the skill for use in situations where it will lead to direct benefits. If something isn't practiced, it can backfire when employed incorrectly.
It also very much feels like it'd go against the point of being empathetic if the only time it's employed is in beneficial situations.
It's also in very bad taste. Even if things were being brought on purposefully... it just feels wrong to have authorities sort-of bragging about catching law violators.
It feels immature. Law enforcement is supposed to be serious. This kind of thing should only really be a number in a report, not a picture with a comment trying to be funny. It should be objective, neither heavy-handed or lackadaisical.
Those characters do not live in your head. They live in mine. I have full control in expressing who and what they are on paper for others to learn more about them. No one else does, no one else can say they did this or that because they don't have any control over my creations, my thoughts, my personal universe. To say someone else can just write with my characters is tantamount to violating an innermost personal space - indeed, it's intruding on one of the most personal forms of control and self-expression possible. You can't just create situations and settings for things that only exist in my mind. I want others to know, so I'll put out a public work. That doesn't mean someone can put something in my world, my character's lives, without my approval. Copyright is just a legal extension of that God-hood I exert over things in my head.
It is just too bad that the current form of copyright is far from ideal, as we've seen. I'm not against fan fic or other expression of still-in-copyright works either, I tend to like them and tend to agree that they do more good than harm, just pointing out that it does matter in some cases, discretion of the author should always be allowed, and just being well-known and popular doesn't magically make that control disappear. Being dead does though, so much of this doesn't really apply to the original topic, but felt I had to make a response to this.