RasterWeb!

I know that 2006 is the year of “User-Contributed Content” but it has come to my attention that we all need to hire our own personal laywers before we submit anything to any website. Ok, if not lawyers, we at least need a watchdog group… failing that, a bunch of know-it-all bloggers should suffice.

When someone announces a new video hosting service in the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, the first thing someone does is checks the Term of Service to see if it looks good, and by ‘good’ we’re referring to maintaining the rights of the creator. You may be surprised by how many sites that accept user contributions have these little bits about how they own the content you’ve submitted and all rights to sell it to others throughout the galaxy until the end of eternity. Ok, it’s not quite that bad, but it can get a little weird.

The sad thing is, most of these are either written by lawyers who have no idea how the web works, or were just copied from another site, and only the names have been changed. 98% of the users never read these things, it’s the 2% that do and make a fuss about it that you have to thank. And the thing is, if you alert the folks in charge of the weirdness, they’ll often try to accomodate you in some way. Well, that’s what I’ve seen happen so far…

JD Lasica has a nice post about this, with my favorite part being where he cites Ourmedia’s Terms of Service:

You own your own material. Ourmedia claims no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to our service.

Now, Ourmedia is pretty enlightened, and they let you choose the license you want to release your work under (though the seem to favor Creative Commons, as that jives with the whole idea behind Ourmedia) but the blip.tv Terms of Service are also pretty good with words like “…you own or otherwise control all of the rights to your content…” That, coupled with the fact that they’ve had open dialog with the community about the “who owns what rights” issues makes me feel pretty good about them.

So folks, before you sign up with any site that will be using content you provide, check the terms. There are ways around some of the terms as well, which we’ll get into next time. I’m pretty sure we won’t even need to break the law to do so.

I started to browse through the podsafe music network site recently (even though I am not a fan of their licensing terms) because, well, because it had some music I wanted to hear. I was getting bothered by their interface that presented these little play buttons for each audio file, and since I couldn’t just run it through Webjay’s Play This Page feature, I hacked up some code to do a little transformation to expose cleaner URL‘s for the MP3‘s first.

So this means what? It means I can browse to a page like this one for Scaterd Few , then click on a bookmarklet to run it through my hack, and get a simple page with links to the MP3’s.

But wait, there’s more! I can then click on the Webjay Play This Page bookmarklet to send it to Webjay and, you know, Play The Page!

And last but not least, as I said to Lucas “I will now patiently await cease and desist letters from all of the parties involved…”

I was always bothered by the scene in Return of the Jedi that shows Boba Fett falling into the Sarlacc pit. I mentioned this back in 2001:

I watched part of Return of the Jedi yesterday as well. I’m still waiting for the director’s cut where they show the scene where Boba Fett flies out of the Sarlac pit and kills Luke Skywalker…

Well… While browsing the Star Wars Databank, we came across this bit about ol’ Boba Fett:

The airborne Fett slammed into the side of Jabba’s sail barge before tumbling into the Sarlacc’s mouth. With a sickly belch from the desert creature, it seemed as if Fett’s career as the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunter was brought to an end.

Emphasis on seemed is mine. I knew “the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunter” could not be so easily eliminated.

(Oh yeah, Jane Wiedlin loves Star wars.)

Supposedly all of the stormtroopers are clones of Jango Fett, so do they share the same birthday?

If they do, that must be one helluva party on the Death Star!

Lord Vader’s gift is probably “I won’t crush your trachea with my mind since it’s your birthday” or maybe shooting lessons at the target range…

Happy Birthday Stormtroopers!

In Calendar Woes (Part 1) we got some useful feedback, most of all from Steve Ivy who let us know that “iCal will not give you write access to calendars that you are subscribed to” – gee, thanks Apple!

So with a happy Mozilla Sunbird solution just like Jon Udell has (except I’m using Mac OS X, not Windows) what’s the deal with iCal? Well, there’s a few deals with iCal… And a few problems. Keep reading…

The main one is that iSync is now a part of my life. I use it to sync my calendar with my Nokia phone. With iCal seeing just one calendar, I could not add it to iSync. I had to create a dummy calendar just to allow iSync to use my real calendar. But wait, there’s more… It’s not enough to just set up it and leave it. I also have to actually launch iCal so it will pull down the latest version of my calendar via it’s subscription before it will be updated properly for iSync to send it to my phone. So the process of syncing my calendar is to launch iCal so it can download my subscribed calendar, and then run iSync. Two steps. I guess I should start writing AppleScript again…

It seems as thoough the same problem exists with syncing my calendar with the iPod. Launch iCal first to get the latest calendar changes, then sync. I tend to use my phone calendar rather than iPod calendar, so it’s not a big deal if the iPod is out of sync, though it would be nice for it to be in sync, right?

Don’t worry folks, I’m sure I’ll have more Calendar Woes to discuss in the future…