Pondering for quite a while about the form and the process of creating blogs, podcasts, wikis, and the like, I’ve finally reached the point where I have finally been drawn into the content. I’ve studied wiki engines, blog engines, podcasting tools, co

Loved the show, I have been listening to the back log of shows (thanks Dave Winer).

I feel it brings the snapshot of life, in an eclectic collection of human thought.

My hope that this will become a monthly feature to Open Source.

Listening via broadband,

Robin G.

I can only reiterate the comparison to print media–if you published a collection of short stories with no authors listed, but put a note at the end of the book stating that acknowledgements could be found on your website, I don’t imagine the authors would find that sufficient, nor would they likely be placated by the argument that prep time or page count was limited, or that crediting them would’ve interrupted the flow of the book.

While the blog medium is new, it’s not that new, and I would suggest that erring on the side of caution might be prudent. (And I assume you’re aware of the Creative Commons license that I and probably others in the list above utilize, which lays out fairly detailed guidelines for pre-approved use.)

Again, I still think it was a good show otherwise, and I’m cognizant that this is a non-profit production and essentially a labor of love for you; I’m just trying to make you aware of issues you’ll no doubt be confronting again.

And incidentally, although Joyce may have been sloppy with his whiskey, I assure you he never was with his writing.

Thanks,

Ian

That said, I will register some of my empathys with Ian. I thought it was a terrific hour of radio, but I was also wondering whether permissions had been obtained, and once it was obvious they had not been, I was wondering when the first objection would come. Fair Use is a very slippery concept.

I found your “qualified un-apology” glib and thoroughly unapologetic.

But apologies.

There was an internal argument about whether or how to credit people during the show, and we had to factor in two things: how difficult it is to read out urls or web-type-names on the air and, more important, whether the interruption of the names would sound jarring as we moved from post to post.

You will be satisfied to know that Chris, the host, was on your side, and wanted to credit everyone on air. We, the producers, overrode him at the last moment, not least because it was a half-hour before we went on air, and we no longer had everyone’s name handy.

I wonder, though, whether we would have been able to put this together at all if we had gotten explicit permission from everyone. Certainly we should have done a better job getting everyone up on the blog sooner for credit, but I don’t really feel like we stole from anyone. From a strictly legal standpoint, what we did falls under fair use, but that’s of course not really the point, we want to do right by the people we work with. Or steal from. You know what I’m saying.

So an apology; it would have made bad radio to list everyone on the air, and the producer-hour drag of sending out emails and collating confirmations before the show would have made likely made the hour itself impossible.

But you’re right; perhaps we didn’t have the right to make good radio without everyone’s permission. On balance, everyone — with the exception of your crazy friend who calls himself Anderson Cooper — was happy to have been included on the show. We did, in any case, owe everyone an immediate link on the blog; we didn’t get to a complete list until today, which is a little inexcusable.

Aggh. I think what I just gave was what my girlfriend refers to as a “qualified un-apology.”

I’m flattered that anyone found my writing worth including in a nationally broadcast program, especially as a longtime fan of James Joyce (and Ulysses in particular). And I understand it was impossible to get permission before the fact due to your timelines and need to go to air.

However, I’m less comfortable with a) your editing of my writing without permission, and b) the anonymous way you presented it–that is, no credit during the show, no credit at the end of the show, and, as of a week later, no credit here on the website. I’m under no illusions that any of that would have made me a literary “star” of the internet, and If you’d asked me, I probably would’ve had no problem with any of this; it’s the fact that you didn’t ask me.

Might I suggest that the next time you do this, you pick an earlier date to glean from, which would allow you time to secure the appropriate permissions from the authors? I have to believe that if you were working in (or from) the print medium that a different set of standards would apply; obviously the speed at which this project was able to be put together speaks to one of the strengths of the internet-based media, but I believe the Great Cataloguer, Joyce himself, might consider your handling of the authors to be–to put it delicately–a little sloppy.

Yours,

Ian

Thanks for choosing mine to read. This show sounds very good and professional and I am proud that I’ve sort of been part of it.