A Note on the Rewrite Squad


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A Note on the Rewrite Squad

I have temporarily blocked public access to Robert Campbell's thread, The Rewrite Squad.

Kat and I received a "Demand for Immediate Take Down - Notice of Infringing Activity" from Mr. James Young on behalf of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. regarding the material in that thread that quotes Mayhew's Q&A book. Mr. Young calls himself an "Internet Investigator." I don't know if that is a lawyer or not, but no matter.

This document he sent us is the channel you go through when using the DMCA law. It is only the initial notification and I could easily file a Counter-Notice at this point, but that's a lot of blah blah blah. I decided to comply with the Take Down Notice to show good faith. I've got no beef with Penguin. Besides, there is a way to satisfy the law without losing all of Robert's work.

Since the thread was not a direct straight-through publication of the book, like is done whenever outright piracy occurs, but a comparison and discussion question by question--with all kinds of material between the sections quoted from the book (which are also not in the sequence given in the book), I discussed an idea or two with Robert and we will make the thread into a form that falls clearly within the Fair Use provision of the USA copyright statute.

That way we will keep the spirit of holding the feet of ARI scholars to the fire and meet the concerns of the publisher. But until it is in that form, we will keep it offline.

Stay tuned.

Michael

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Michael:

This turn of events - Mr. Young's request for "immediate takedown," sounds like a none-too-veiled threat and an attempt at censorship through intimidation. Perhaps you could quote exactly what he said in his communication to you? It would be interesting to see in what way it is claimed that the quotes used from Mayhew's book constitute a copyright infringement. If he has a valid case, I would like to see the evidence. If he does not solidly have the law behind his claims, then this should be viewed as an attempt to intimidate and suppress free expression.

This "takedown request" sounds similar to the tactics that the Church of Scientology's lawyers have attempted to use to silence any criticism of the Church and its practices from its former members.

If they succeed in this action, expect it to be followed by further requests to remove other material that they do not approve of.

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Jerry,

The language is standard DMCA form language, even the intimidating-sounding title.

The problem isn't so much the content on the site. It is the content on the server where it can be downloaded by the public.

Here is a layman's article if you are interested in some of the legal mechanics:

DMCA Takedown 101

I have many more references since this is a topic I enjoy.

Note that the complaint is not against the thread per se, nor against Robert's work. It is against portions of the book published by Penguin that Penguin feels were published on that thread in violation of its copyright. (Obviously, Mayhew must have complained to them, though.)

I could do a lot of speculating or bearing my chest and thumping on it, or even cowering.

There's no need. Robert's work will not be lost and the law has been and will be complied with.

The only inconvenience here on the forum will be some down time while we prepare the thread for legal compliance.

As I said earlier, stay tuned.

Michael

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I've linked to the Rewrite Squad from other threads, hopefully when you put it back the links won't be broken.

Dennis,

The links will not be broken (although they will be for a while), so there is no need to go around fixing them.

Depending on the down-time, Google--when the spider crawls--might deindex something that was indexed so that the post will no longer appear in its the search results. (Ditto for Yahoo, Being, etc.) But it will reindex it later when the thread goes back up, so that stuff will appear once again.

Michael

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Whoever is behind this has, in effect, conceded Campbell's point. If a listing of the discrepancies goes beyond fair-use limits, the discrepancies must be quite extensive. QED.

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A couple of updates:

(1) I've started editing all of my posts on The Rewrite Squad that quoted from the Mayhew book, in order to cut down substantially on the amount of direct quotation from that source. I expect this will take another two weeks to finish, as there are upwards of 150 posts to edit (of course, I don't have to do anything about the posts about Rand's answers that Mayhew chose not to use).

(2) I'll be speaking about Mayhew's rewriting at FreeMinds 2010 tomorrow afternoon (July 1).

Robert Campbell

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A couple of updates:

(1) I've started editing all of my posts on The Rewrite Squad that quoted from the Mayhew book, in order to cut down substantially on the amount of direct quotation from that source. I expect this will take another two weeks to finish, as there are upwards of 150 posts to edit (of course, I don't have to do anything about the posts about Rand's answers that Mayhew chose not to use).

(2) I'll be speaking about Mayhew's rewriting at FreeMinds 2010 tomorrow afternoon (July 1).

Robert Campbell

Robert,

Go get 'em!

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I gave my talk on Mayhew's editing this afternoon.

It was during "breakout" sessions, not a plenary, but well attended and, as far as I can tell, well received.

PowerPoints can be seen here:

http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/whosanswering070110.pptx

Robert Campbell

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Unfortunately, I don't have Microsoft Office and thus not Power Point, so I can't open this.

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Phil,

Download and install Open Office. It's free (open source), published by Oracle, and it opens (and edits and even creates) all MS Office documents.

I had MS Office and migrated. The reason is the sneaky ads and computer hijack policies of Microsoft, and the fact that you have to pay for upgrades to MS Office. Everything in Open Office is free, including the upgrades.

The only inconvenience is that some of the things that you can do are not in the same place as MS Office. So you learn something new.

But you get the whole shebang, word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, etc.

Do that and you will be able to see Powerpoint slides with no problem.

Michael

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Daymmm! I forgot all about that! I need this! I am getting this! Crap, I remember when they started that project; they were a client where I worked back then and were urging us to use it.

rde

Gonna git me one.

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OpenOffice is a pretty good. I've used it occasionally.

On the other hand, I'm a Mac user whenever I can be, so some of the vulnerabilities of Microsoft products don't affect me.

I've put a PDF of the same slides here:

http://hubcap.clemso...ering070110.pdf

Much bigger file, less platform-dependent.

Robert Campbell

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OpenOffice is a pretty good. I've used it occasionally.

On the other hand, I'm a Mac user whenever I can be, so some of the vulnerabilities of Microsoft products don't affect me.

I've put a PDF of the same slides here:

http://hubcap.clemso...ering070110.pdf

Much bigger file, less platform-dependent.

Robert Campbell

I "graduated" to MAC about 2 yrs. ago, after being married to PC since Windows 3.0.

I'll never go back.

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OpenOffice.org Impress will open "whosanswering070110.pptx" for me under WinXP SP3, but the slides are either entirely blank or are only showing partial text.

It could be that PowerPoint documents created with a Mac simply aren't compatible with those created in Windows.

The PDF file opened perfectly. That, though, is about nine times the size of the PPTX file. Yet hard disk space is rarely a critical consideration these days ... and, for that matter, single MP3 songs are routinely twice the size of that PDF.

Edited by Greybird
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Thanks Robert, for the PDF and thanks Michael for the tip about "Open Office". I had forgotten about that.

I just bought a beautifully light (2.6 lbs) long battery life (11 hours) carry-it-everywhere Toshiba netbook to complement my Windoze XP desktop.

So maybe I'll install OO on that.

Edited by Philip Coates
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I use open office to and love it (and the price!) but you should be forewarned that there are issues with listening to audio with a .ppt. The experts can fix the problem but you have to compile and download this and that and fix this and that (the usual open source stuff).

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It could be that PowerPoint documents created with a Mac simply aren't compatible with those created in Windows.

Steve,

This is not what Microsoft claims about PowerPoint files. They are supposed to be the same in the Mac OS and in Windows.

In practice, I've found some problems with foreign language characters and logical symbols. But there aren't any of either in the PowerPoints from my talk.

Robert Campbell

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<br />
<br />It could be that PowerPoint documents created with a Mac simply aren't compatible with those created in Windows.<br />
<br /><br />Steve,<br /><br />This is not what Microsoft claims about PowerPoint files. They are supposed to be the same in the Mac OS and in Windows.<br /><br />In practice, I've found some problems with foreign language characters and logical symbols. But there aren't any of either in the PowerPoints from my talk.<br /><br />Robert Campbell<br />
<br /><br /><br />

I pass PowerPoints from Office 2008 for Mac to and from Windows Office 2007 and Windows Office 2003 several times per week - - as a Mac user who has about 200 students of whom 90% are using Windows. Two types of problem can occur:

1) Minor formatting differences (items moving slightly on the slide - - if you have created a slide where exact placement of items on the slide is vital, better check it!)

2) If items are not saved in proper format (PowerPoint X - 2004, NOT 2007) then those who use Office 2003 and have not downloaded and installed the free viewer can't open the presentation.

That's about it for problems - and I receive presentations from students several times per week and send them presentations at least once per week. No problems, given that I always "save down" into the 2004 version of PPT as noted above.

Bill P

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