One of the biggest things I wanted to be certain of is the protection of rights when it comes to the site. I went back and forth (and still am) as to how best to protect those rights. One idea which I have not completely given up on is printing all text in images with watermarks and copyright indicia, etc. This would make it pretty inconvenient for everyone, from me all the way down to the end-user, and I'm not sure how well it would protect anyone's material, anyway. Let's face it: if someone really wants to do something - good, bad, or otherwise - they'll figure out a way to do it. So I'm walking a fine line between making it harder for such people to do this, while still making the material accessible and available to viewers. Further, making the text into images completely destroys the HTML coding, which is antithetical to the form.
At any rate, I knew that I was going to be dealing with various copyright issues and that I, as publisher, needed to Cover My Ass on the front-end before I got too deeply involved. I set about trying to figure out Creative Commons and all of that and I never forgot the Creators' Bill of Rights from Back When because, when this all went down, it was pretty big comics "alterna-news." You have to remember (if you're old enough), that this was not too long after Jim Shooter had gotten the High Hat (they blew up all of Pittsburgh, his hometown, in the New Universe titles, then closed the line) and, to this day, I'm not really sure anyone knows what happened there; Dave Sim was having publishing/distribution problems which had filtered down to the shops as, "They're cancelling Cerebus!" so everyone was buying up back issues of Cerebus, thinking it was going to be the next Tick; there was a lot of talk within the industry about creators' rights and how The Industry liked to kick the little man and a lot of speculation about Big Name Talent Walking (which no one really ever thought would happen, but it was fun to speculate upon - David vs. Goliath, etc.)... and there was this whole group of guys from the biggest independent comics around -- Cerebus, TMNT, etc. - well, really the only independent comics around (published on a regular basis), deciding exactly where and how everyone should draw the line. And if you were in your early 20s and interested in maybe one day pursuing opportunities within the field, this was News - news made more salacious by the all-too-famous closed-mouthed approach of the industry.
So, I figured out that I had to be careful as to which copyrights and links to copyright information I put on which pages. The SAFE RPG is going to be Creative Commons, meaning that it's kind of "open license"; the original supplemental material written for other gaming systems to which we have no rights and assert none have to be handled differently because we have to be able to protect the original content regardless of the fact that it was written for use with material under other copyrights we do not hold (I'm still not 100% on how, but most of the guys I've talked to within the industry that do own these games have been very, very accommodating - they pretty much just want to ensure their copyrights on the material isn't diminished, which is 100% understandable); the interviews and articles have to remain copyright the contributor who worked on them... it's a quagmire of rights and assumptions which really need to be decided upon and worried with before the first real page is published.
Then there's the entire model of compensation which has to be determined, and that largely depends on how you see my role as the publisher (webmaster), how you see the Internet (medium, distribution mode, or both), and a little matter of ethics.
Like Sim, I'm not a "Business Guy," as in, "It's just business." Like I noted on The Oddblog, I could very easily have just set up public forums or a simple button that said, "SUBMIT HERE!" and started collecting free content. I could then leave that content up indefinitely and refer to it as I choose, post my ads and sponsors all over it, and hopefully turn a profit. Of course, most of the submissions would be total crap I would never want to be thought of as having "published," and I'd really be turning control of the site over to the visitors in a way I do not want to do (not just because of these issues but also because that would make The Weirding just another one of Those Sites).
OTOH, I can't afford to pay good money for original content right now and I don't want the site to be nothing but my content because if that's what I'd intended to do, I'd be selling this shit to open market anyway. So it occurred to me that I could enlist some people honestly, by explaining the situation and seeing what we couldn't work out as fair compensation for early content. Thing is, the more I thought about it, the less I felt comfortable with this.
What if, 5 years down the road, I sell the site to Yahoo! for a princely sum? What if authors of popular pieces were approached by other publishers, who demanded I remove the piece and there was no way I could match the other publisher's price? And yes, these seem like, "Pie-in-the-sky, we'll-cross-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it" types of questions - like the mock interviews with Bahbah Wah-wah you sometimes do in your head when you're thinking about how your new book is going to sell (you don't have to admit, you do it, we all do it) - except that, these are very real issues that come up in this business on an everyday basis.
What it comes down to at the deepest level is a matter of creators' rights: what, exactly, are the electronic printing rights and how should they work? Because, as publisher, I'm pretty much in the shit seat, no matter how things go. If things go exceptionally bad, everyone will say, "Well, my stuff's already been published, so now other outlets won't pay top-dollar for it"; if things go exceptionally well, everyone will say, "I sold him that piece for $x when he couldn't even afford to buy content, and he made $x selling that whole thing off to Yahoo! and I feel he betrayed me!" At the end of the day, The Weirding sucks.
But we're in a very good situation, if we act fast: unlike the comics guys, there are no real institutions that can call the shots online because how the shots are called has yet to be defined (and the longer this remains the case, the happier these institutions are). Of course, there are powerhouses out there, such as AOL - doubly interesting and important, since it's really AOL/Time Warner (parent of DC comics)...
There's no way on God's green earth I want AOL/TW in my anything -- my house, my computer, sure as shit not my intellectual property. AOL is the single largest abuser of individual online rights and privacy that was ever, has ever, and hopefully will ever, exist and they can't wait to get their hands on your free content, baby. Shit, they got Al Bundy doing a commercial where he's literally telling you, "Come to AOL and check out the shit you gave us for free! It's a 'repository' where you can 'share' with our online 'community,' but we're filling up warehouses full of hard drives with your crap and you'll never, ever be able to get back every copy!"
I'm in a very unique position here, since I have the perfect opportunity to throw caution to the wind and act in a manner which I know is unethical. And it's not so much a matter of repercussions for me as a matter of conscience; I'm not as worried that someone is going to corner me ten years from now and demand royalties as I am that I'm going to lie awake nights worrying that they will - no, better, worrying that they should and why they haven't already!
Further, I'm no slouch when it comes to original content. I have so much gaming, comics, art, and writing related stuff around here that were I to spend a week or two doing nothing more than just entering the data and formatting it for publishing, I could single-handedly add new content to the site four times a year for the next several years. I don't have to be concerned with this sort of thing, but it occurs to me that if I'm not, who will be?
Some of the points with which we must concern ourselves:
- Do Electronic Publishing Rights (EPR) include all forms of distribution (i.e., CD/DVD, cellphone, technological distribution methods yet to be developed) or only "online" (i.e., Internet) publishing? How do you control that and who's responsible for it?
- How long do these rights last? Are EPR indefinite and if not, how long can the article remain online - what's the standard? If an article is no longer available online, does it revert to being "unpublished"?
- Do the EPR extend to all electronic forms? Can a publisher "reprint" an online article in a PDF file or read it aloud in MP3 format?
- Where do we draw the line between distribution and format? Am I, the online publisher (or webmaster, as it should be referred to and will be from now on), the distributor, or is the server/host which I use the distributor (assuming I don't own my own server, which I don't)? Which of us is responsible for any rights violations as per distribution? Which of us actually holds the rights to any of the properties? Should the server I use be able to copy my website content and hold onto it indefinitely and if they do, whose rights are being violated: mine, the original contributor's, or both?
- Should there be a royalties system and how does that work? Let's say that, for royalty compensation, I require each contributor to have an open Google AdSense account and put their code as advertisement on their page; what happens if AdSense folds? What if the contributor wants to go with a different program/sponsor?
- What if the facts change and the article needs to be changed to reflect this? Do I have to ask the author for permission to correct/update his work? Does he have an obligation to do so? Do the original rights and contractual obligations then change, become null and void, need to be reworked, or should a clause be made to include these instances and ideas?
13 comments:
What a lot of questions.
I make a living, such as it is, writing articles. I get paid per article, and what they choose to do with it is their business. For most of the sites I write for, when I turn over control over that article, I do so with the understanding that they are paying me to put my article on their site and only their site. I want to know where my work is published, and I want to know what changes have been made to it before it is published. One site that I write for leaves my words as is, but they add photos. Good enough. Another place changed my words, but I always had the ability to tell them I wasn't interested if I didn't like the changes they made.
Once I'm satisfied that they have put my article on only one site, and that it reasonably reflects my thoughts, I don't care what they do with it, as long as that check clears. The stage where I'm at, I don't give a crap about royalties, because I don't really want anything to do with the piece after I write it.
The way it typically works in music licensing is that you have to tell them exactly how you want to use the music. A lot of tv shows ran into problems. That's why we're just now seeing some of the older shows on DVD. A tv show uses a certain piece, and they told them that they want the rights to use it on television and video in perpetuity throughout the Universe. That's great. They can show videos on Mars all day long with the same music. They just can't show it on Earth on DVD. They didn't license the music for that. Electronic rights are difficult because the courts haven't had time to wade through every single issue that will arise. And when they do, I promise you, you will have left something out.
My recommendation? You keep the rights to display their article on The Weirding, or any sites which evolve from The Weirding, throughout the universe in perpetuity. In other words, when you pay, it's yours, and you can display it no matter who buys the site.
1) EPR does NOT cover all forms of distribution. If I write something, I do not want someone getting around paying me for it by putting it in ebook form for download. If you decide to launch that feature, then you start it fresh. Email the authors if you can, otherwise, leave their works out of it. I say this because if Jennifer Aniston holds a press conference where she reads my article, nobody will ever associate it with me again. Even if she includes my name. See #3.
2) Indefinite. It does not become unpublished thanks to site such as the Wayback Machine.
3) Depends. That's a derivitive work. According to copyright law, the copyright owner must grant permission, however that begs the question whether you are the copyright owner or the original author is. Typically it's the author, but not always.
4) You are the distributor. If the server/host is screwing with any files on your site, you need to seriously consider a new one. They have absolutely nothing to do with the content of your site. That's your job.
5) I vote no royalties. But it's a matter of personal opinion.
6) You need a clause that gives you editorial rights. Then, if there is a problem, you simply add a note that contains the updated facts.
A final note: if a person accepted an offer they weren't comfortable with, and they are bitching about it later, screw 'em. They shoudda known better.
ooooOOOoooo, harsh!
I will say I completely disagree with your last statement. In a perfect world, the majority of business deals should be beneficial to both parties, and while some deals will be more fair than others, both parties should be very well aware of what they're signing over when the signing takes place. And if we don't strive to make it a more perfect world, then we have no room to gripe about it sucking out loud. And that, I think, comes as much from ethics and morals as business sense.
I feel that I am the distributor, as well -- only to the extent that I am the publisher. That's confusing online, because the real distribution method is the Internet itself and the distribution point is SOMEWHERE BETWEEN the ISP you use to access the Internet and the website from which you receive that media. That's my whole point with that issue and why I'm still jabbering about it both here and over to The Oddblog...
Technically, I have no control over distribution except through banning IP addresses which can be illegal in some cases (see the recent case where a whole country was cut off from Wikipedia -- I mean who would really know that all of Qatar ran from one IP address? Who the hell even knows where Qatar is?) and/or seen as a Denial Of Service "attack."
Meaning to say that I have very limited control as to whom accesses the information and what they do with it. If I buy the product outright as a product (whether as work-for-hire, speculatively, or otherwise), it would be my responsibility to protect the theft of that property, but then I would own all rights to that piece and I don't feel that's fair to contributors.
That's where it gets sticky because, what if I hired some guy -- or, much better yet, just agreed to "give" the guy some "space" on my site -- to do a webcomic that suddenly takes off like a rocket?
Now, according to what you have laid out (which is industry standard at this point, I must point-out), I would own all interests to that webcomic and could choose whether or not to cut the actual creator in or leave him completely out. Legal but immoral; it's called theft of property in most countries but here in the good-ol US of A, it's called "the price of Doing Business," and it's complete horseshit, IMO.
Likewise, of the articles and fiction you are shopping, have you considered the legal ramifications that might arise if you expanded any of those works and sold them to other outlets? What if you write a novel based on some characters you once featured in a short you sold to some long-since defunct website? And then it turns out that the guy made his millions in Internet porn or through spam, or even more legitimately -- the point is that he turns out to have the money to sue you so badly that now no one will touch the book! And he has no legal obligation to release those rights to you, the original and sole creator, even though he no longer has any plans to use or distribute the work in any form or nature?
What if then, once you capitulate, the sonofabitch turns around and makes your deal right out from under you -- hiring some ghostwriter to pen it for a fraction of what all other parties (excepting YOU) make? Legal, yes; unethical, shifty, shady -- to the bone. And yet, that's the industry standard in most creative fields, not just comics.
That's why I'm so interested in this. Here's a chance for the talent, the very backbone of all these industries, to stand up and literally lead by example. To say, "This is how we expect to be treated for our online work; how we expect that work to be handled; and what we expect as fair compensation." Especially since the unspoken part of that implicitly reads, "Or we'll just take it to another webmaster who will, OR we'll just make our own damn website. Hookers!"
Eep. Got a little carried away in that last bit, huh? Cut "just."
I wish I'd read this first.
Steve Bissette (who RPG fans might know as the artist on Beyond the Supernatural) discusses some of the very issues I suggest we concern ourselves with as it comes to distribution and control of content online. Especially with continually emerging technology.
I whole-heartedly agree about transferring content to other formats, such as PDF or other e-book formats, MP3, and etc. But that is the way the Internet really stands right now because no one is bothering with this kind of thing. When you sign those rights over, those are total electronic rights, which will be legally argued as "any electronic or digital format." It's implicitly assumed because you are signing off total rights.
I think online rights should be seperated in the same way as foreign rights are to FNASR. And even further, I disagree that if the site which contains your material goes down and that material is "lost" from the Internet, that the piece can still be considered "published" in the true form of the word... but this is one of those nebulous areas which confuse me. We know a lot of documents have been published throughout the ages of which we have no actual record; we know they were published because other documents refer to them. So... logically...
But in this day and age, there has to be further exploration of the concept. I'm not sure that sites like the one you mentioned can actually store everything that's ever been on the Internet, but I don't know how sites like that work nor what they archive and how they choose it, etc...
These aren't the days of South Park, after all. The Internet isn't exactly a "free exchange of ideas"; it's a commercial entity and most people are adapting to that. I don't think enough young people are aware of just what's going on. How many times has someone told me, "That Agree or Disagree thing? I just always click Accept."
...
Ha! I'm not getting roped back into that discussion with you, thank you very much! I agree completely with you in this instance. What I MEAN is that right now, my articles are selling for somewhere less than $50 each. I won't give the specific number, but I will say that I'm happy with it. Now let's say that I get a job writing for Vogue, and I'm making 2k for the EXACT same article. Then, I'm going to be pissed if someone offers me $50, whereas now I'm going to be thrilled. That doesn't mean you should have to cough up extra money because my circumstances changed for the better (or worse). Right now, I'm happy with that level, and it's stupid to try and go back and collect more just because I now have a bloated opinion of myself. ;)
On the internet, you are both the publisher and the distributor. Look at the world of books. You are are the internet equivalent of both the person who is responsible for the book being printed and the person who "sells" the book in the store. Nobody holds the paper company responsible, nor should they. And in theory, you are much more responsible than that for distribution. You decide which search engines to submit to. You ban IP addresses. You moderate the forums. Etc. Someday there will be things you never even thought of that will fall under that umbrella of distribution.
If you don't feel it's fair to the contributors, offer more. But I am telling you that most won't expect anything more, it affects your bottom line, and I don't know that it's going to have the impact you hope for. All of that is irrelevant if it means you can sleep easier at night. Ya know?
One site I'm writing for is not paying me a cent. I'm fine with that because I'm benefitting in other ways. I imagine that one day that will not be true. Now say I hit the bigtime. Good luck to them. They got a bargain. They can continue using it as long as they don't expect any more and as long as they don't write any other articles under my name. Because my name is not for sale at any price.
The same is true of the supposed webcomic. You own the rights to the webcomic. Quite probably, you own all the characters, although that isn't necessarily the case. And you can in theory hire a ghostwriter. But you cannot use the original author's name on new material. How many comics do you know that were left for one reason or another, and then taken over by someone else? Or Tv shows? Or bands? The fans know that it's different, and they will declare loudly how much it sucks. That causes the whole thing to plummet. You treat the writers badly, and soon you won't have any writers. That doesn't necessarily mean that you have to pay them royalties, and at some point you may have to renegotiate if it took off. But you should NEVER have to renegotiate for things you already bought.
The short answer for what if I choose to expand some characters into a novel is that I wouldn't. I know or learn the legalities as I go, and that particular character isn't mine anymore. If he wants to be a real bastard about it, I'll go somewhere else and destroy my own series without EVER breaking copyright law. :D
Believe it or not, as an author, I am standing up and saying what I think. I expect fair pay (in one form or another) for my work. I expect the right to turn any offer down for any reason. I expect to be able to walk away no matter how much I'm being paid. I expect that when I go, my work ceases. If it doesn't, I expect that both parties should make it clear that my involvement has ended. I expect that my work look a lot like what I wrote when it's posted. And most importantly, I expect you are a LOT more like Alan Moore than you may want to admit. :P lol
One final thing- if you are going to debate the meaning of the word "published", for the love of all things holy, hire a lawyer.
Do you need a contract to have helpers for the Wierding now?
This is very very intracate. Some caution is needful but is this going to far?
No, I really wouldn't think so, but maybe. That's the whole point: so little is actually decided about the Internet at this point that I want to make sure both myself and everyone else are protected before it becomes a problem.
I'm excessively fair -- to the point that I've basically "screwed" myself out of a lot of rights I might otherwise have held onto over the years -- so I'm not going to go around ripping people off. The problem is that it doesn't really mean much right now and that people don't understand the larger implications of what they agree to online. More, the things they agree to online may or may not even be legally binding contracts.
I especially eschew the fact that a lot -- pretty much ALL -- online sites and services frequently change the agreements you originally Accept without bothering to tell anyone. And, legally, it's OUR responsibility to continually monitor these sites and services for these changes and that's total crap.
But this is a legal system problem all the way across the boards when it comes to American law. It can be argued, legitimately, that one enters an oral contract of NDNC (Non-Disclosure, Non-Compete) the moment one agrees to hear another's proposal. Of course, that's nigh impossible to prove, and is basically left up to the individuals to be ethical and moral about such things. The problem I have with this is that when one of the parties fails to live up to these moral expectations, the law blames the victim ("That's a hard lesson to learn," "Should've known better," "Next time, get it in writing," etc.).
Even worse, these "legal precedents" apply only to contractual law involving the exchange of goods and services, which directly impacts all creative commerce above all else. If you buy something broken at the store and they refuse to refund your money, you have a good chance of getting your money back through arbitration of some kind; this is almost never the case when it comes to creative works, ideas, etc.
If you pay close attention, you'll soon realize that decisions in such cases favor the party with the most money, period. Like 98% of the time.
At any rate, what is there to say that, if you moderate a few forums on the site and then we decide to part ways, you couldn't go before a court and make a case that your contributions helped bring traffic to the site and thus, you deserve a portion of any profits and/or some sort of stake in the ownership?
We all kind of sneer and mock these hypotheticals right now, but it's not just a matter of time before these things happen; these things are happening in various incarnations right now! In particular, all the cases concerning defamation, invasion of privacy, and so on, that are flooding the courts right now are going to be used as precedents in even barely-related cases down the road because the legal system always looks for an easy, streamlined, one-size-fits-all answer, and the lawyers and hucksters who work it are always looking for ways around them.
Further, as these issues are creative in nature, even such seemingly unrelated cases (such as the recent Borat flap) could be used as precedent in online cases. It may sound like I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, but I assure you that I am not. It's just a really young mountain.
"We all kind of sneer and mock these hypotheticals right now, but it's not just a matter of time before these things happen; these things are happening in various incarnations right now!"
I'm not mocking and sneering at anything. I agree with you completely.
Let me boil down my argument to the bare essentials.
A) You're going to need a lawyer, because the issues demand it. Even then, good luck. Like you said, this type of law is in its infancy.
B) My advice (and probably any lawyer's advice) is going to be to promise the least you can get away with. Nobody is going to yell at you for giving them a bonus if their work helped the traffic of the site. Promise little and deliver much, and people will be thrilled. Promise much and deliver little, and they will have your head.
C) You can't do a thing about forcing people to comprehend what they are reading. In fact, you can't do much to force them to read it. On my own site, I have it built into the script that you accept the TOS before you are able to hit submit. Now do you want to guess how many actually read them? Not that many I bet. I've even sent out an email that said that the TOS had changed, and they needed to email me to tell me they accepted, or they would be dropped in 30 days. Only about half responded. There's not a thing I can do to make them pay attention. There's a lot I can do to cover my own butt in case they don't.
Yes, I concur with that and I fully realize that I can't force people to care about things they don't care about. But I have to draw a line somewhere so that I feel justified in being a hardass, when I have to be. I want to foster a community where creators and contributors feel welcome and comfortable, and not just so they'll send me better material, but so that everyone is happy and feels safe and a TRUE exchange of ideas can take place.
And this isn't just from a publishing perspective. What if I want to lift whole paragraphs from blog posts I've made on other sites to include in works on my own site? The search engines will automatically penalize ME for "duplicate content," even though I am the original creator of that content!
And, at the end of the day, all of these much larger entities with many more resources and much more legal power, have the legal precedent to point their finger at ME and say I am the one who should have been more responsible. I am the one who needs to make sure I check their TOS every time I visit their site; I am the one who is responsible for installing their software on my computer if it hoses it; I am the one responsible for the things I say on their site, even if I cannot delete it; it goes on and on.
Basically, what I am saying is that there need to be more concrete definitions (across the board) as to what constitutes distribution and delivery, what constitutes form and format -- even what constitutes content (as in the forums moderator example, above). And we need to determine these things before lawyers get involved (though that's not a dig at you, mind you -- that's just my whole point: if we get lawyers involved NOW, THEY will be the ones who TELL US what the terms are, what we should expect, and so on); we have to set our own standards so that the lawyers need only look it over and tell us where the precedents have already been set, whether or not what we want is even feasible, and so on.
And then put it all into terminology no one can understand.
Agreed. The whole mess needs clarified.
I do disagree on the lawyers thing though. As an example, I've got my real estate. I can go to a lawyer and tell them that I want to have a contract drawn up that only allows people to rent if they stipulate that they will display a live horse in the store window every second Thursday of the month. And they are going to look at me funny, take my money, and write the contract like I want it. One of the first steps with a GOOD lawyer is to ask your goals. If they can understand your goals and what you hope to avoid, they can come up with a nice document that will suit your needs.
The list of what you actually CANNOT do is a lot smaller than people think. Whether it's moral and you can live with it or not is another matter.
I do think what you are trying to do is noble and needs to be done. Don't get me wrong. Where my hesitation comes in is because do you really want to be THAT person that winds up in court to set the precedent?? I don't! lol
Absolutely not! I do not want to be the guy to have to stand up in court and set this, or any other, precedent.
But I think the more precise point to that would be that if there was already an industry standard in place -- a kind-of template by which we could say, "This is how the Internet works, in this regard..." -- the precedent will have already been set and the courts have no real place to "decide" anything, simply to set the precedent according to the standard.
Of course, that's more common sense than The Law will allow, I'm sure.
I wanted to directly address your point #3) in your first post above:
That's the real crux of the matter from a legal standpoint, in some regards: what the hell does Electronic refer to as it refers our rights? That's not a very questionable term and the reason it's there is to protect the buyer's right to reprint the content in yet to be developed technologies -- tech which doesn't exist yet, but may one day, no matter what form it takes, so long as it is somehow "electronic" in nature. What is, to us, a "gray area" has long since been thought of and put to bed by the roomsful of legal consultants the larger sites and online conglomerates have; they chose that word, "electronic," it wasn't an arbitrary adjective, nor quite as alliterative as this sentence -- or is that onomotopeiac? Ahem.
And this all goes hand-in-hand (along the same principles, though shifting to a new subject) with what you mention re: moving to Vogue for a pay raise. What if I had a site on which I paid you to blog about the issues all Intricate Girls face and I pay you and we are both pleased and the blog becomes a hit and Vogue offers you a job...
Now, if I hired you to write a blog for me about the things I defined -- if I developed the idea of the blog, but you actually developed the blog itself -- who really owns the rights to such an idea? I could likely take you and Vogue to court and say that you can't run off with my idea -- I might not win the case, but you'd be so tied-up in legalities that neither you nor the magazine would be making money off of it and someone would have to pile all the "pro" beans and measure how high that hill was in relation to the "cons." And both you and Vogue might find yourselves without that column they were going to pay you to write.
Conversely, if Vogue called and said they'd retained your services and wanted to buy all the content of yours I had published or the entire blog and concept, etc., I could hold out for an unprecedented price and they might decide not to hire you because they were banking on getting that online content. Things like this have rarely happened yet, but they have happened (South Park) and they are absolutely going to happen again.
And it makes perfect business sense for me to hold onto that property for as long as I want, because it's is my property and I can ask whatever I want for it and that's how the whole game is played... but we're some very little fish in an ever expanding pool. None of these people are going to take us seriously, even as some sort of union or coalition, if for no other reason than that the only people who stand to gain from such an industry standard are we creators: we're talking about setting limits as to what rights we grant very big companies who pay a lot more tax dollars than any of us ever will.
I've written like 10 long posts in regards to this and forgotten everytime to tell you that I did consult my legal counsel.
:CD
Remember your branches of government though. If there is anything more terrifying than the thought of being dragged to court, it's the thought of getting lawmakers to spell out internet law. Through past situations, I've actually known a LOT of congressmen, lawyers, and judges. I'll take the judges any day. They are infinitely more interested in trying to determine a "fair" situation for everyone. The lawyers are utter bastards and the congressmen are completely self-absorbed.
I am well aquainted with your lawfirm. I've used them on occasion. :D
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