A few interesting items I spotted today
Ann Althouse has this interesting this post about the article "Our Godless Constitution," in The Nation. She shows how the article incorporates shoddy scholarship and, more importantly, explains how the article's inflammatory approach will utterly fail to explain the importance of separation of church and state to religious people. There are many arguments, including those adopted by the founders of the United States, that would demonstrate the social and religious importance of the separation of church and state.
Andrew Raff's IPTAblog has an article following up on the controversy that blew up last month when Martin Schwimmer asked Bloglines to remove his Trademark Blog from the Bloglines service. He frames and summarizes the issues well, I think.
My jaw dropped a bit, though, at the Sieblogs site that Andrew linked to. Sieblogs aggregates content from what must be a collection of hundreds of weblogs and mass media sources. It then displays that content by category. There's nothing on the main page or entry page that indicates the original content author. That's a violation all of the Creative Commons attribution licenses, and the sheer copying and re-display of the content is a violation of general copyright law, although it is something many weblog authors would permit if asked. Even though there are no advertisements yet, the utter failure to credit the author and source weblog really surprised me. They at least link to the original article.
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This kind of stuff is only just starting, I bet. I wouldn't be the first to speculate that now that AskJeeves has purchased Bloglines, it's only a matter of time before Bloglines is choked with ads and the lawsuits about copyright infringement start flying. Or maybe not. It would be nice to be proven wrong.
ai-
Most of those who might take offense won't have to jump all the way to copyright lawsuits. But some probably will request to be removed from the collections. I personally hope that they'll begin with cordial letters and receive cooperative responses. If they don't, they can escalate to formal take-down requests under the DMCA. That usually takes care of it.
On the other hand, people who'd hoped to make a living off other folks' content might decide to fight it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those who thinks all the fruits of creativity ought to be locked down. I think the Creative Commons licenses are great, for example, and I'm thinking of applying a Creative Commons license here (not that anyone else cares all that much). But that doesn't mean the material is up for grabs, and I think it's offensive when content repackagers ignore share-alike, no-derivatives, non-commercial, or attribution license terms and step all over the good-will of people who have gone to the trouble to make sharing and redistribution of work they have authored.
I think the question whether "non-commercial" means "don't advertise around this content" is interesting. My hunch is that it does, but I'm not going to go into that here. Yet.