I'm glad to say that last week's rant has translated into action. Customized profile pages - a major spammer vulnerability in Wikidot.com - now don't appear except for Pro users. There is another new pro-only (not pro-lite) feature too, which is the ability to create per-site profiles for users. When you enable this, your site members get a page in the profiles: category, which they can edit.
My rant today is about something I've discussed before on the blog: copyrights, licensing, and copying. I'm also going to go off-topic and get political. This is my personal opinion, not Wikidot official policy.
There is an… interesting thread on the community site about a site dedicated to "Stopping music theft". My personal view is that we are all richer when we share culture, and that the words "theft" and "intellectual property" are propaganda, abused in order to try to give ideas, knowledge, and culture the same property status as wheat, cattle, or money.
This site does not violate the Wikidot Terms of Service, but personally, (and this is not official Wikidot policy, just my personal view) I find it distasteful. Who monitors the blacklists? What stops a list of banned sites becoming a list of "dangerous" sites, "offensive" sites, or "politically incorrect" sites?
Deeper, all property is a political construction with economic goals. The state creates property by law, in order to maximize economic benefits. Roads are common property, houses private, because this works better than private roads and public housing. There have been massive experiments, and failures. The USSR failed largely because it used a failed property model based on collective ownership of the means of production. There is nothing sacred with "property", it is simply a political tool that creates (or fails to create) economic value. Over time, failed property models die, and better ones survive.
Property laws that fail to create economic value (for society at large, not the owners!) should not exist, no matter how powerful or vocal their proponents. If all property was by definition good, we would still own other people as chattel. Women would still be property of their fathers or husbands. Children would work.
The music industry is particularly insidious in actively lobbying for laws that benefit it, at the cost of society at large, while claiming a moral high ground based on nothing more than words like "intellectual property"1. I am not particularly happy with copying of music, lyrics, or movies, but the music industry (leading the movie and TV industries now) forces extortionate prices on the market. It costs almost zero to distribute a digital product. If people go to such lengths to copy, it's because the official price is fraudulent and kept high by manipulating the market, and legal system.
Perhaps part of my ire at this site comes from that sentence, "many tech-savvy people philosophically favor open source everything including music and thus may take umbrage with the very thing I am trying to accomplish which is to stop the theft of intellectual property." As if open source is not 100% based on strong copyright, and enforcement of that!
Back to Wikidot, to make my rant semi-relevant. We're going to be making two changes. First of all, all new free sites will be licensed under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Existing alternative licenses will remain. Second, Pro site owners will have the option of blocking cloning, and cross-site includes, of their content.
It isn't an on topic rant, but it is a rant all-the-same.
I think the "wiki of the week", needs to be renamed "wiki of the month" or "wiki of the season" or depending on how long the current one ends up staying "wiki of the year".
Wayne Eddy
Melbourne, Australia
LGAM Knowledge Base
Contact via Google+
Blocking cloning/CSIs ? Thanks!!!
Oh wait… I'm meant to be complaining aren't I? Why didn't you do this sooner? D= … ;-)
~ Leiger - Wikidot Community Admin - Volunteer
Wikidot: Official Documentation | Wikidot Discord server | NEW: Wikiroo, backup tool (in development)
There are a lot of nice sites here, already suggested:
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/c-87108/suggest-a-wikidot-site-to-be-featured
They only need to be put as featured sites, i.e. featured sites need someone to take care of them…
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegan. - Paul McCartney
This looks like a promising topic for rants.
It's too high for me to pay, certainly. Live music or songs on Lala.com (which is legal, in case the original poster is watching) are more appropriate for my budget. On that point, the OP could be a bit more constructive by identifying these alternatives on his site (instead of just emphasizing what not to do).
Anyway, I wouldn't call the price fraudulent; the publisher is legally a monopoly, and there's no reason that it should price only where it recoups its costs. If musicians want to price people like me out of the market by giving their IP to music labels, that's their call.
I don't find the site distasteful. But I think ISPs can do their own dirty work. The site's tagline is "IP owners unite." Anyone whose day job is writing songs for Lynyrd Skynyrd has better things to do than scour the internet for these sites. Seeing as how I'm not an "IP owner" and don't plan to become one any time soon, I guess the site just isn't for me.
I, myself, find it amusing that the term illegal is held in high regard only when to your advantage or beliefs. In America, we are having problems with illegal immigrants (despite the fact that we take in the most legal immigrants) and with illegal pirating of "intellectual property" (I'm sure it's true with most of the developed world); with the term illegal being largely disregarded by our government in both cases due to its lack of solving either problem.
I believe that illegal immigrants are exactly so; however, intellectual property is gray area that is monopolizied upon with the farce of it being "legal". Reforms are needed in both areas, however, it seems that neither is being changed.
On his site, he says: "This site's creator watched his song "God & Guns," the title track of the Lynyrd Skynyrd album released in 2009 start to show up all over the internet at free download sites A MONTH BEFORE THE ALBUM WAS EVEN RELEASED!!!". A "do-not-surf-list" he's hosting, doesn't prevent dishonest employees (at the studio, cd press, or even the label) from leaking these records.
I think the correct way for record companies is to wake up and adapt to this day. There are some signs of it, like Last.fm and Spotify (personally I use Spotify — the repertory is unbelievable (it is surprising how many of these backwards record labels have signed) and the response time (or whatever is the correct expression) is great - just choose a song and it starts playing instantly. Unfortunately, what I have heard, the payments for artists are ridiculous). I think he's wasting his time here. As Franknarf said, a different approach would be more efficient. But I also understand the frustration seeing his bread being spreaded all over the world for free.
Record labels are ripping the artists (labels get about 80% if I remember it correctly, altough they'll handle the marketing etc) while consumers are copying their records because of high prices. Labels are hunting down people for downloading music which is understandable but the major group downloading are children. They are an easy target since they can be still frightened with law cases. And remember the Sony rootkit virus? Why on earth did they do that for paying customers? The person who copied the same cd from the internet got a better working product. The "top" -lists are also largely manipulated by record labels. Which one is the bigger crook, a kid who downloads music or a record label?
___TTT___/ http://www.trumpetexercises.net
(_|||_) \ - Janne
What is all the hubub about? The only positive and absolute way of protecting "intellectual property" is to keep it in your head! Now, jelly donuts, that is a completely different thing. Why? Try this, put a box of donuts on your desk. Write on the box, "save one for me". Come back in an hour and how many donuts are in the box? What box? The box had to go because it had the conditional written on it. Donuts are really intellectual property in this example. They are eaten (listened to) and the protein (intellectual content) is digested by the body (mind) and then the donuts are gone (all except for evacuation but we won't go there). Is it the taking or the use of this intellectual property that is a violation? In our glorious past possession was 9/10s of the law. With that archaic axiom as our guide then the taking is the crime. But this is a thought or idea we are talking about not a thing that can actually be held or touched. The sharing of our thoughts and ideas with other humans makes us different from any other animal on this planet. There are those among us that believe this openness is a threat and must not be tolerated. I can only hope that our future has more sane and rational leaders that will want to separate monetary gain from the debate on intellectual property usage. Until then, I'm keeping my jelly donuts close and my enemies, not so much. -magik
I think that [[gallery]] is closer to a module than a syntax element.
I suggest that [[gallery]] be kept for backward compatibility but deprecated and changed to [[module Gallery]].
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