“I can watch American Idol and child porn at the same time while giving the dog a reach-around”

http://www.popehat.com/2011/03/21/so-apparently-theft-snivelling-and-nutjobbery-are-patriotic-now

Not me! Not me!  No, the title of this post is not mine and not about me, but it made me laugh too damn much not to use it.  The full story’s at the link above, but the gist is this:

One of the blogs I read had a post about what to do if you’re awakened in the night by the Feds asking questions – essentially, shut the fuck up so you don’t accidently say something incorrect (because no one can avoid that at three AM) and get tagged for misleading law enforcement.  With the number of incidents where someone is never charged for a crime other than misleading law enforcement, it’s good advice – or not, if you’re able to perfectly recall every meeting and conversation you’ve had for the last ten years.

So PopeHat makes this excellent post and bullshit, aggregator-boy copies it whole-cloth onto his site.  PopeHat makes a polite comment about fair-use and copyright violations, to which dumbass-who-can’t-format-a-decent-post-twice-in-a-row responds with a bullshit rant.  The quote above is from PopeHat’s response post, which is well worth a read and addition to your RSS feeds.

And there’s a certain temptation to add canine-reach-arounds to my tag cloud, but I’ll resist.

In any case, the reason I was bringing this up was to start a post on copyright and fair-use for blog content, but as I type this, I realize that it’s pointless.  It’s really, really useless to even make the argument …

Because either you get that it’s not okay to copy someone else’s work in its entirety to your blog, even if you “give attribution” – or you don’t.

Either you get that even something as simple as a blog post was created by someone and they have the right to determine its use – or you don’t.

There’s no real way to change the “content should be free”-mentality, because people that think that way simply cannot understand ownership of an intangible.

People who create content deserve to control that content’s distribution.  Period.  They’ve traded a portion of their lives to create something that, hopefully, others find useful or entertaining.

Even this simple post, short as it is, represents a portion of my life that I traded to create it.  It represents time I could have spent doing other things …. like playing Halo: Reach with my girlfriend and listening to her yell “eat it old man!” after shooting me in the back of the head …

Okay … yeah … it’s a fair trade …