Dan and Angi have something to say

Welcome to our site! This is the Lovejoy family blog where we talk about all kinds of stuff. Mostly we talk about minutia and our beautiful son Elijah.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

Dan says:

Lt. Uhura, open a channel

The Batesline kerfuffle is getting a little more attention from the dinomedia, including dinomedia in Tulsa proper. KTUL interviewed Robert E. Lorton III, President of the Whirled. Michael says his blog quotes are fair use. What do you say, Mr. Lorton?

But, Robert E. Lorton III, President of the Tulsa World, disagrees. Lorton says Bates is opening a channel to PDF, or Portable Data Files,

First - he’s not using opening hailing frequencies. It’s a hyperlink, for crying out loud. Second, it’s Portable Document Format, as any brain damaged monkey with a dial-up and Google can find out in 10 seconds.

hosted on the Tulsa World website. Lorton says those files are owned by the Tulsa World and should not be free, but that they cannot lock the files.

Wow, he just called his entire IT staff a bunch of idiots. And Ashlee Simpson’s lip-syncing issue was a problem with the band.

“One way to stop it is to pull the PDF files, and I don’t want to do that,” Lorton said.

Well, Mr. Lorton - you’ve got lots of choices. You can make the files public, or you can make them not public. You can invite the whole world to look at them, or not invite the whole world to look at them. I don’t really care. But you can’t make the files public, then start suing people for picking them up.

Of course, the Captain Obvious answer is naturally:

“I am linking to files or pages that are freely available on the Internet,” Bates replied.

I think a little Analog-io ad absurdam would do us some good at this point:

*Insert Shimmery Motion Graphics and dream sequence audio fx here*

Imagine, if you will, that the Tulsa Whirled left a side door open, then put a sign on that side door that read, “Hey! free copies of our paper! Come get ‘em!” Imaginet that there was an unimaginable surplus of papers - so anyone could come in a grab a copy, and it wouldn’t cost the Whirled anything at all. Now imagine that all kinds of people see that sign and come take copies of the paper. Some of them take just what they need. Some take everything.

Some of them cut out specific paragraphs, highlight them, add their own commentary, and post them in a public place for everyone to read. Now the World threatens to SUE the folks who were invited through the open door, first for going through it, then for telling people something anyone walking by on the street can see - that the door exists.  Of course, they’re only suing the folks they disagree with.

The President of the paper says, “I can’t lock that door, and I don’t want to take the papers out of there.”

Can there truly be two sides to a story if one side doesn’t make any sense at all?