The other book by Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit (again in that order) is Graphic Design, Referenced. I don’t have a clue who it’s meant for, unless it’s meant for functionally illiterate graphic-design students who need everything explained to them in pictures.

The book isn’t so terrible for such a designer. Nor is an illustrated guide a bad idea for a design book; it sure beats turgid, self-important, completely unillustrated art-history monographs masquerading as graphic-design “criticism.”

But really: Who is this book for? And will they be able to use it? It’s supposed to be practical – the subtitle is “A Visual Guide to the Language, Applications, and History of Graphic Design” (Oxford comma in original). But as someone who has read a hundred graphic-design books over 30 years and every English-language history of graphic design, this book is so disorganized as to be incomprehensible. The confounding fact is that it is teeming with “organization,” with sections and chapters straplined thus: [continue with “Graphic design, mishmashed” →]

Today I’m putting out one more, ideally one last, call for contributions to The Cranky Copyright Book. I have to survive day to day between now and the receipt of tens of thousands of dollars in a copyright settlement. This settlement has cast a shadow over my life for the last 16 years.

I wrote hundreds of freelance articles for Canadian newspapers in the 1990s. (Among other work, I was a columnist for the Star and also for the Globe and Mail.) Starting in the ’90s, Canadian newspapers illegally reproduced freelance writers’ articles on electronic databases, to which they charged access. We took them to court and won at the Supremes. Hence what they did was indisputably wrong. This is one of those rare copyright issues that are open and shut. There’s no room for debate.

Publishers and database owners settled the lawsuit – but rich, detached lawyers are now dragging out the payment process. This is merely the latest indignity I have had to suffer in a decade-and-a-half-long process.

• Newspapers’ duplication of our articles was illegal because it was unauthorized. So newspapers attempted to extort post-facto and perpetual authorization from freelancers. I was the first person to get the Globe and Mail’s freelancer contract in the mail.

• Years ago, I attended exactly one information meeting about the court case, chaired by representative plaintiff Heather Robertson and her lawyer. She wrote her address (in King City) and phone number on the blackboard, but has never actually returned a phone call or E-mail from me. I find this bothersome because I am one of the larger claimants, she seems not to actually need the money, and she gets an extra payment as the representative plaintiff.

• The settlement had to be approved by a judge. For weeks last summer I planned to attend the approval hearing and report on it. An old lady and I showed up at the courthouse to watch the proceedings, but the courtroom location was unlisted everywhere we looked. (We looked everywhere. We also asked everyone, and had them check their databases, and did all the same things at neighbouring courthouses. We left no stone unturned.)

  Whaddya know: The details had been hidden on the lawyers’ Web site the whole time, which I couldn’t load on my iTouch in the courtroom or anywhere nearby.

• There have been quite a few postings of late by freelance writers incensed at another publisher’s contract. All those postings tend to take the form “Why I won’t sign the Transcontinental contract.” Their cause is just, but their tone is a bit precious, for this is the same cause for which I’ve been suffering for these last 16 years. (I’m not the only one. And how many of those new writers have spouses or other sources of income?)

• Adding insult to injury, well-heeled lawyers (abetted by a fellow lawyer, Howard Knopf) have talked the judge into extending the filing deadline. All this does is string us along and keep us poor longer.

So: I’ve got to keep my head above water between now and receipt of my long-delayed settlement funds. That’s why I’m asking for contributions again.

But there’s going to be a payoff. Even though the settlement money is mine and barely compensates me for the harm caused, I am going to turn right around and use part of that money to write, edit, and publish The Cranky Copyright Book, in print and electronically. I am transforming the ill-gotten gains of notorious copyright assholes into an original work of literature defending the rights of creators in a time of copyright reform. Do you see anybody else doing anything like that?

But I’ve got to get there from here first.

Gary Indiana, Three-Month Fever: The Andrew Cunan Story, p. 98:

It’s plausible that Andrew did a lot of detective work on the rich, to move among them easily and comfortably identify, as if born to it, the luxurious junk with which their lives and their homes are so often stuffed. The rich are different from us, different anyway from him, as a magic charm against death the rich fill their houses and private airplanes and seasonal hideaways with incredibly precious and intimidating versions of the everyday objects ordinary people have, plates and flatware and furniture and flush toilets, in addition they fill all available space with every imaginable and unimaginable æsthetic object, creating an aura of awe and grandeur around the invisible Freudian fecal pile that makes it all possible. The horror vacui sensibility of the rich is a form of voodoo against the inevitable neoplasm, coronary episode, renal failure, diabetic amputation, prostate malignancy, cerebral incident, or mentally-disturbed drifter that arrives, voodoo or no voodoo, exactly on time in every life but Leni Riefenstahl’s.

Scott Schuman writes the Sartorialist. He had previously bragged to the Globe, perhaps while drunk, that he’s good in bed with the ladies.

For some unaccountable reason, a blog consisting of pictures with a few snippets of text has been turned into an overly thick book full of pictures with a few snippets of (ill-proofed) text. For example:

Typical teens, Stockholm

I saw these two exiting a subway station in Stockholm’s Södermalm neighbourhood…. They looked so exotic to me and yet somehow familiar. They spoke mainly Swedish with just a touch of English[;] however[,] their predominant language was the language spoken only by a tiny, very special group – TEENAGER! It quickly became clear to me that what was exotic about them was not their traditional dress [continues for some time – Ed.]

Sure, they’re “typical teens” for the Sweden of 2030, when, as the T-shirt says, they take over. At that point Schuman might want to stay out of the country lest he be beheaded in the public square as a louche idolator, pornographer, and apostate. That would surely set Schuman’s sex life back to about the year 630.

Newsflash: Man bites Mediabistro.

The Galleycat column reported the exact way “Forbes reporter David K. Randall scored a book deal”: By querying an agent.

For authors who don’t already have agents and connections, this is how it’s usually done. It is a symbol of the ongoing dysfunction of the publishing business that business as usual is considered news.

I asked Randall for comment on that topic, but heard nothing back. Interestingly, the writer of the piece, Jason Boog, is listed as an instructor at NYU Journalism. And so is Randall. It looks like one academic told another academic he’d sold a book the standard way books are sold, and the latter academic wrote a news article about it. But Boog tells me he quit NYU after he got hired on at Mediabistro and merely consideres Randall “a professional contact.” Still, the whole thing is a bit insider, and the news value is precisely nil – unless, like the writer, you’re a friend of the subject.

The shocking thing is that somebody this well connected had to resort to a cold call. I’m one of those people who would like publishing to have a future. I want to meet somebody within that industry who might actually make it happen.

John Hilton III has written an article for for First Monday with the deceptive title “From PDF to MP3.” It has nothing to do with PDFs or MP3s. The article attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of Creative Commons licensing in the creation of alternate formats – and fails.

Hilton studied eight printed books by five Internet academics and copyright reformers (which alters the experiment right there) – Benkler, Boyle, Doctorow and Lessig (inevitably), and Zittrain. Hilton tracked down some creators of derivative works made from these books.

“The most common reason for derivatives was to increase the ability for others to access a given work,” he writes. Yet Creative Commons licensing had no bearing on the creation of any of the derivative works. Nothing was specially enabled by Creative Commons. While there were no barriers or illegalities resolved by Creative Commons, such licensing may have put authors in breach of contract.

• Hilton mentions how a contributor “converted Boyle’s The Public Domain into a DAISY digital talking book for the blind,” and later mentions a separate Braille conversion. In the U.S. and many other places, alternate formats for print-disabled readers can be converted as of right without asking permission, assuming the copyright holder hasn’t beaten you to it. Alternate formats rely on a specific exemption built into copyright law and are not something special you need a licence for. Alternate formats are already permitted up front.

• Hilton discusses foreign-language translations. You always need advance authorization for those (save for sign-language translations as an alternate format in Canada, but this is U.S. law Hilton is addressing). The problem is most authors assign the right to authorize translations to their publishers. There are good reasons for that: Publishers have all the contacts and all the files necessary. (Generally, one publisher license a foreign-language version to another publisher, who hires a translator.) Not atypically, publisher and author split the proceeds, which may not be a lot of money.

  Nonetheless, the authors involved may not have had the right to assign translations. That means they could be in breach of contract. Creative Commons licensing does not override the terms of an author’s contract with a publisher. When I twice asked him about this, Hilton refused to even confirm he verified that authors had the rights they assigned. (So much for First Monday’s peer review, one might say.)

• Audiobook versions are mentioned, but rights to those may also be assigned to publishers by contract. (That is almost always the case because a different set of rights – confusingly named publishing rights, denoted by ℗ – come into existence with a recording. Plus they are a lot of work to create. It’s a hassle that publishers are better equipped to handle.)

• Hilton writes: “A[nother] theme emphasized was the importance of authors giving credit to the individuals creating derivative [works].” No clause in copyright law requires any such acknowledgement, and neither does Creative Commons licensing. It’s extraneous at best and shows how Creative Commons proponents have a hard time staying on topic.

  Also extraneous is a discussion of the importance of publishing digital versions rather than paper books only. Copyright law doesn’t force or prevent any such action and neither does Creative Commons licensing.

The real problem with Hilton’s thesis

Hilton misstates copyright “regulations” when he claims they “often prevent derivatives from being created.” Copyright law prevents unauthorized derivatives from being created, and allows certain others as of right. Copyright law does nothing to impede authors from authorizing derivative works. The only thing impeded is illegal creation of derivative works. Copyright law, like surprisingly many laws, makes some things illegal, but there’s an easy escape clause here.

At root, Hilton argues that ante-facto Creative Commons licensing makes more works possible. But authors didn’t even necessarily have the legal right to authorize many of these works under any guise. Others could be made right away. For still others, authors could be easily contacted and asked for permission directly. Had that happened, authors could have checked their contracts and refrained from granting subrights they didn’t have in the first place.

Hilton consistently implies that Creative Commons is the only practicable way for authors to let others create derivative works (“As more authors license their works in such a way as to permit derivatives, and as more individuals learn that they are legally permitted to create derivatives”). If you want to create a derivative work, you can just ask the author for permission. Other times you can forge right ahead.

Hilton discusses the importance of crediting creators of derivative works, but, when I asked, dismissed the practicality of having those creators contact the original authors. This is ridiculous, since all parties are online and that isn’t going to change until they drop dead. Hilton says authors should go out of their way to thank creators of derivative works, but suggests it’s too much trouble for such would-be creators to actually contact the authors.

Hilton contacted 28 creators of derivative works, but didn’t bother telling us how many actual works were created. Even so, five authors could handle 28 requests among them pretty handily. This is not a lot of E-mail to sort through.

The advantage of appealing directly to authors is, first of all, they can actually say yes or no (Creative Commons creates a permanent yes) and they at least know who they’re working with. Knowing exactly what somebody plans to do in advance is perfectly reasonable and causes no harm to anything, let alone the commonweal.

As another Internet academic, Douglas Rushkoff, put it, “Where’s the Creative Commons licence that I could say ‘OK, you can have it for free, but at least you have to ask me for it’? ‘Free if you send me an E-mail’? I just want to give it to you rather than to it.”

The worst copyright paper of the year?

Well, the year is still young, but for now, yes. John Hilton III didn’t prove Creative Commons solves any problem he raised. Everything creators of derivative versions did they could have done without Creative Commons licensing just by asking for permission.

You can’t really be serious if you think asking for permission would have been a barrier in any of the cases Hilton describes.

Additional annoyance

As with apparently all First Monday articles, some twit has gone out of his way to convert every hyphen to an en dash. They’ve known this is a mistake for ten years, because that’s when I first reported it to them.

1. 2006 June 2: Toronto 18 suspects arrested. This alleged Muslim terrorist cell contained one member whose lawyer claimed the group planned an assault on the CBC’s Canadian Broadcasting Centre (“storm the CBC, take over the CBC”)

2. 2007 January 9: CBC débuts Little Mosque on the Prairie, a situation comedy in which multiracial Muslims populate a small Prairie town, living with fellow Canadians in wacky peace and harmony

3. 2009 May 4: One Toronto 18 suspect pleads guilty to terrorism charges; found guilty 4 September

4. 2009 May 28: Supreme Court agrees to hear appeal, filed by CBC and other press outlets, concerning a Toronto 18 press ban

5. 2009 September 21: A second suspect pleads guilty to terrorism charges

6. 2009 September 25: Young offender convicted (under appeal)

7. 2009 September 28: A third suspect pleads guilty to terrorism charges. Little Mosque on the Prairie returns for a fourth season

8. 2010 January 16: Two members of Toronto 18 sentenced to 12 years and life imprisonment, respectively

9. 2010 March 9: CBC Toronto runs advertisement in Toronto Star (for upcoming news segment) explaining where “you” can buy halal meat for “your family”