Category: Media / Sociology

Nintendo to fans: We know you like our game, but…

Nintendo struck a deal with the creators of the full-length Zelda fan film, forcing the movie offline, and one would presume, preventing it from being further distributed.

I find this fascinating on a number of levels.  First, I might have never heard of this movie, had it not been for Nintendo’s legal action (ok, and Slashdot). Bringing in the lawyers frequently creates media attention–and usually not to the benefit of the ones with the legal team.  As the title of the post suggests, I also find it odd that Nintendo would go to such great lengths to “protect its characters and trademarks.” While they are completely within their legal rights here in the states, being a Japanese company one would think they’d appreciate a Dojin work when they saw it. It’s all a matter of perspective.

THE HERO OF TIME UPDATE 01-01-10 | The Hero Of Time.

GPL Enforcement: Don’t Jump to Conclusions

GPL Enforcement: Don’t Jump to Conclusions, But Do Report Violations – Bradley M. Kuhn

Brad Kuhn has an interesting post on the interplay between law, norms, and negotiation in GPL (a particular type of open source license) violations. He suggests that, when a violation is found, start with an assumption that there was no malicious intent and not to publicly “out” the violator.

I think a lot of geeks get religious about freedom in the open source movement.  Usually this is for good reason, but occasionally the mob mentality can turn into something like a witch trial. With so few lawyers, they are a group that’s perhaps not as used to negotiation. It’s good to have even keeled people around to remind us (Slashdotters) to “remember that the primary goal of the GPL is encourage more software freedom in the world.”

Twitter–what’s it good for? Conferences!

When Twitter first came out, I must admit, I was quite skeptical of the technology.  At the time, it seemed like a poor replacement for Facebook statuses–why replicate a technology for communicating with the people you care about?

I’ve since seen the light by getting into following and posting to conferences that I’m either attending, or monitoring from afar. Doing this allows one to:

  • See what’s going on (including snippets of talks by great speakers)
  • Connect with people you might not otherwise talk to

I find these connections most interesting.  First, it seems as though there needs to be some “event” that drives people to seek others out (the jury is out on whether it must be face-to-face). Second, by using a #hashtag, people sharing an experience have a means to immediately converse and share ideas with–not just other people sharing the event, but anyone who might be following them. It really constructs a social network–on the fly.

It’s possible that I dig this because I’m a bit of a geek who isn’t one to strike up a conversation, or because of the network effects with more people on Twitter.  Still, I think there’s an interesting