Regnery Publishing, the slimy house that produced "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" and other works of popular demagoguery, is being sued by its writers for ripping them off on royalty payments. Regnery sells books to its own sister companies (conservative discount clubs, newsletters, and "other organizations") at a huge discount, then pays the authors a minuscule royalty based on the discounted price -- meaning that the authors get a $0.10 royalty (or less) instead of $4.50 per copy.

The authors also say in the lawsuit that Regnery donates books to nonprofit groups affiliated with Eagle Publishing and gives the books as incentives to subscribers to newsletters published by Eagle. The authors say they do not receive royalties for these books.

“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.

The authors argue that because at least a quarter and as much as half of their book sales are diverted to nonretail channels, sales figures of their books on Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales but does not reflect sales through book clubs and other outlets used by Eagle, are artificially low. Publishers use these figures when determining future book deals, and the authors argue that actions by Eagle and Regnery have long-term effects on their careers.

Link (via Making Light)

By Doc Searls.

Panaqqa writes "On Monday, the US government appealed a September ruling striking down a controversial section of the Patriot Act as unconstitutional. The section permits the FBI to send secret demands to ISPs (called 'National Security Letters') for logs and email without first obtaining a judge's approval. The ACLU has quoted the president of the small Plaintiff ISP, identified only as John Doe because of a gag order under the law, saying that the gag provisions make it 'impossible for people... to discuss their specific concerns with the public, the press and Congress.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The concept of "fan fiction" represents an interesting challenge for copyright law. Most copyright laws don't take into account the idea of fans creating new works involving characters or worlds that they like -- as such a thing just wasn't practical until recently. However, thanks to the rise of tools that make the creation of creative works easier than ever before, it's become a bigger and bigger question. In Germany, the problem has been highlighted by fans of the board game Warhammer 40,000 who spent time and money to create a fan film based on the game. Unfortunately, thanks to German copyright law, the film can not be shown. Apparently, they can't just say it's okay without losing all rights to the Warhammer brand. Basically, according to the article the company can assign the copyright to another party, but it's a complete assignment, meaning that the game maker no longer has those rights any more. This sounds quite strange, as it's hard to see how any copyright law (or trademark law) would function properly if you can't license things selectively for specific purposes. The gamemaker apparently feels bad about the result, and doesn't seem to mind the idea of the fan film, but claims that under the law, it can't allow the film to proceed. This seems to clearly go against the very point of copyright law, which shouldn't require the holder of a copyright to ban its use in other cases. If there's someone out there who can explain the specifics of German copyright law, that would be great -- as the story doesn't make much sense. Can there really be no licensing of content without assigning the entire copyright? If that's truly the case, then hopefully people will realize it's time to update copyright law to take into account our more modern communications infrastructure.

An anonymous reader writes "Ten kids in a pilot program in the Hungerhill School in Edenthorpe, England will participate in a program that puts RFID chips in students' uniforms to keep track of their whereabouts. A group called 'Leave Them Kids Alone' is opposing the program. Bruce Schneier blogs: '...Now it's easy to cut class; just ask someone to carry your shirt around the building while you're elsewhere.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First a caveat. You don't have to agree with me, this is my opinion, and my blog, and that's what blogs are for, they're places where, if you happen to have an opinion, you can put it.

This is the mode of a blogger with comments. Defensive. Yuck!!

If you say in your comment that I'm dishonest, I will delete your comment. That's the only tool I have to work with until my new friends at Disqus give me the feature Wordpress has that allows you to queue up every post in moderation when blog comments get flamey. This technique tells the honesty-attackers in no uncertain terms that they should take their attacks somewhere else.

So if your comment got deleted it's because something in your comment required a response from me (or someone else) that says basically "I am honest." I just save us all the trouble. No need to defend myself if the attack is gone.

You may think I am dishonest, you can even say so (but be careful to be sure you're right, and have the courage to put your name on it, only cowards make personal attacks anonymously) and do it in your space not mine. Here, I want comments with ideas and information. It's okay to disagree with me, the people who say that all they did was disagree are wrong. I never delete a comment just for being disagreeable. I delete them if they challenge my honesty. I really don't like that, I think the people who do it are creepy.

Okay, good. Glad to get that out of the way.

For many years, we've been hearing all sorts of bizarre and crazy ideas for different methods of offering broadband. A popular one tends to be with flying devices of some sort. For a while we heard all sorts of stories about hideous-looking floating blimps called stratellites that would get press every six months or so, but which never actually launched anywhere. That's been going on for about five years. Another company tried something similar, but called its offering aerostats. Then there was the company that tried to use an acronym instead, referring to "HAPs" or "high altitude platforms." No matter what you call them, though, they haven't actually done much. However, that won't stop some people from trying. The latest such case isn't even a blimp. The idea is to take Russian unmanned spyplanes and turn them into flying broadband providers. Perhaps they'll double as spyplanes as well, though that's not clear. What is clear is that the economics of such an offering, combined with the likelihood of it being reliable (i.e., almost no chance), means that this is another plan not destined to be competing with your DSL connection any time soon.

Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising.

Here's what Facebook can do.

Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.

Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.

Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!

circletimessquare writes "Using ingredients usually relegated to the lower half of the list of ingredients on a Twinkies wrapper, some professional chefs are turning themselves into magicians with food. Ferran Adrià in Spain and Heston Blumenthal in England have been doing this for years, but the New York Times updates us on the ongoing experiments at WD-50 in New York City. Xanthan Gum, agar-agar, and other hydrocolloids are being used to bring strange effects to your food. Think butter that doesn't melt in the oven, foie gras you can tie into knots, and fried mayonnaise."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Todd says:

This is Victorion, a new mural by Sirron Norris that he recently completed on Balmy Alley in San Francisco's Mission District. (Balmy is a small alley that's lined with colorful murals, many of which have political themes.)

I love it -- it's sort of a Mission District version of Transformers crossed with Howl's Moving Castle, done in the style of a twisted kiddie cartoon.

The theme, of course, is preserving the character of the neighborhood from the relentless onslaught of condos and redevelopment -- Victorion is subtitled "El Defensor de la Mission." But independent of that, the mural itself is pure genius, with incredible details that only get better and better the closer you look.

Link

Wired has a roundup of two Wikipedia spinoffs that have been in the news recently. Both sites, Citizendium and Veropedia, were launched because their founders felt that Wikipedia had reliability problems that could only be addressed by an independent project. But their approaches are very different. Citizendium is what the open source software world would call a fork. They launched the site with some Wikipedia articles as the baseline, but they're not contributing their changes back to the Wikipedia project. That means that the two projects are diverging over time, and in a few years the content on the two sites will be quite different. It also means that there's going to be a lot of duplication of effort: the content in Citizendium and Wikipedia will largely be redundant. In contrast, Wikipedia is, in open source terms, "upstream" from Veropedia. Just as distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat take Linux code, improve it, and then package it for public consumption, making a profit in the process, so Veropedia is going to take a subset of Wikipedia, do some additional work to ensure it's reliable, and then publish it on an ad-supported site. Unlike Citizendium, Veropedia is planning to contribute its changes back to Wikipedia. Personally, I'm not convinced that there's a pressing need for either effort, and I'm particularly skeptical of Citizendium. I think Clay Shirky is right to question the underlying rationale for Citizendium, and while founder Larry Sanger has touted some modest successes over the last year, they're going to need some massive growth to catch up to Wikipedia.

Tim Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Tim Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

A number of readers sent word of the hearing by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in which committee members raked two Yahoo execs over the coals. "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies," the committee chairman Tom Lantos, D-Calif., said angrily after hearing from Jerry Yang and Michael Callahan about Yahoo's actions that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a Chinese dissident. In 2004 Yahoo turned over information about journalist Shi Tao's online activities requested by Chinese authorities. In Feb. 2006, Yahoo's General Counsel Callahan testified that he had not known the nature of the investigation the authorities were conducting. He later learned that several employees of Yahoo China were aware at the time that the investigation involved "state secrets," but Callahan did not go back to Congress to amend his testimony. Committee members were withering in their disdain for Yahoo's refusal to help Shi Tao's family after his arrest.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Congratulations to our friends at VEER for being acquired by Corbis.

"An anthropological study of African skinhead fashion from the early seventies." Images by photographer Clayton James Cubitt. Link to gallery.

Related: Photographer Pieter Hugo has updated his "Nigerian badasses series" -- Cubitt's term of endearment for Hugo's work. Link to Hugo's updated series. Cubitt gave Hugo credit in the magazine spread where "Lagos Calling" appeared, along with Nick Knight (who has done some amazing portraits of skinheads) and Malick Sidibe (Malian photographer, amazing portraits in general).

Last week on Boing Boing tv, we showed "the making of" -- now, here's the real thing. Jason Wishnow's book trailer for the new book, "The Zen of Zombie : Better Living Through the Undead".

Link to ZEN OF ZOMBIE video, and here's the backstory.

Previously: Zombie Yoga: 100 undead, doing poses in the park

OH HAI HAPPY THANSGIBBEN! Link (Thanks R Stevens).