11 April 2008 @ 9:16AM >> In an apparent change of corporate policy, Starbucks is being a little more laissez faire about what it allows to be printed on its customizable Starbucks cards.

After the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Monday in which Starbucks was accused of repeatedly rejecting the phrase laissez faire—apparently for violating an unspecified part of company policy—the story was covered widely online.

So, as a public service to you the reader, I decided to place my own order for a laissez faire Starbucks card. Perhaps as a result of the negative publicity, Starbucks is now allowing the phrase. My card, shown here, arrived yesterday.

7 April 2008 @ 8:09AM >> For some reason, the term laissez faire is verboten at Starbucks:

Laissez-faire. It’s a policy that made Starbucks vastly successful. But don’t try to put that phrase on a customized Starbucks Card.

The cards are supposed be personalized to reflect customers’ tastes and uniqueness. They are available in a range of colors, often given as gifts and used by regular customers who prefer to prepay for their java.

But when my friend Roger Ream, president of the Fund for American Studies, received a Starbucks gift card for Christmas, he found there was a limit to how personalized a card could be. His card required him to customize it on the company’s Web site. So he went to the site and requested that the phrase “Laissez Faire” be printed on his card. A few days later he was informed that the company couldn’t issue such a card because the wording violated company policy.

[...]

But why should it be considered inappropriate? The phrase itself is an imperative. It’s French for “leave us alone,” more or less. And it comes to us through history as advice offered to Jean Baptiste Colbert, finance minister under the French King Louis XIV in the 17th century. Colbert is best known for his statement: “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” When Colbert asked a group of merchants, “What do you want from us?,” the answer was, “laisser nous faire.” “Laissez-faire” is, then, an old piece of economic advice with an impeccable French heritage.

Maybe Starbucks considers the phrase inappropriate because it’s “overtly political commentary”? Certainly my friend regards it as a firm statement of political philosophy.

And so, at my suggestion, my friend went back to the Web site and asked that his card be issued with the phrase “People Not Profits.” Bingo! Starbucks had no problem with that phrase, and the card arrived in a few days.

I wondered just what the company’s standards were. If “laissez-faire” is unacceptably political, how could the socialist slogan “people not profits” be acceptable?

My assistant and I tried to get the company to explain its policy. We started by trying to purchase a card with the phrase “Laissez Faire,” and were rejected as my friend had been. We then asked a company spokesperson why. He suggested that it might be because “laissez-faire” is a foreign phrase. That seemed possible and a reasonable precaution.

So we tried another foreign phrase – “Si Se Puede,” or “Yes we can.” It’s the United Farm Workers slogan, now adopted by Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. That sailed right through. The senator’s political campaign slogan was acceptable.

Starbucks has always been something of an alternate universe.

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Update: Yesterday, I placed an order for my own “Laissez Faire” Starbucks card. I guess the publicity led to a change of policy, because today I got an e-mail saying the “order has been completed and will ship within the next business day.” (8 April 2008)

Update 2: My laissez faire Starbucks card has arrived!

4 April 2008 @ 10:20AM >> Apparently, if vodka maker Absolut had its way, Texas, California and much of the southwest United States would be given to Mexico.

At least, that’s the only conclusion one could reach after looking at an ad campaign Absolut is running in Mexico.

The ads, with the bold caption “IN AN ABSOLUT WORLD” show a fictional map of the United States where much of its territory has been taken over by Mexico.

Oddly, Absolut’s distributor, V&S Group, claims in their Corporate Responsibility statement, “We strive to achieve good relations with the world around us.”

Really? In what way does this ad further that goal?

Maybe this is how international borders would be drawn in an Absolut world. But in an Evan world, there will be no more drinking of Absolut vodka.

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit and AbsolutAds.com.)

3 April 2008 @ 8:05AM >> Spam blogs, sometimes called “splogs,” are phony blogs set up to earn money by displaying ads. Splogs steal content from other sites so that they appear to the untrained eye as genuine blogs. When people conduct web searches, that stolen content drives traffic to the site, raising the revenue from advertising.

It’s a sleazy practice, and at times, I’ve seen posts from this site appear on splogs. Recently, I found a splog that copies text from this site, but it also does something new: it changes certain words in the post to modify the content slightly.

This page copied part of a post called Am I a Fair-Weather Friend of Free Speech?

I realize that by linking to the splog, I am helping them achieve their goal of increased traffic. Still, it’s an interesting development in the evolution of spam, and it seems worthy of note.

27 February 2008 @ 8:17PM >> The Economist has a fascinating article on how the Internet is changing Hollywood. Indoctrinate U gets a brief mention.

10 February 2008 @ 2:55AM >> Update: The review program has now ended. The offer below is no longer valid. If you’re interested in seeing the film, you can now download a copy from the Indoctrinate U online store.

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Within a matter of days, we will be ready to launch the Indoctrinate U online store, where we will be offering the film for download as MPEG-4 files and ISO DVD files. MPEG-4 files are playable on Windows, Mac and Linux, and ISO files can also be used to create your own DVD copies of the film playable on virtually all home DVD equipment. All you need is a computer with a DVD burner, software capable of burning ISO files, and a blank DVD.

But before we open the store to the public, we will be offering free downloads of review copies to a limited number of bloggers who plan on publishing reviews of the film. If you’re interested in reviewing Indoctrinate U, please send your name (or online pseudonym), the name of your site, the site’s URL, and the e-mail address where you’d prefer to be contacted to this e-mail address:

reviews (at) indoctrinate-u (dot) com

When our online store launches, this offer will expire, so if you’re interested, e-mail us soon!

Oh yeah, non-blogger media folks are welcome, too.

14 January 2008 @ 8:26AM >> The Economist reports on the music industry’s woes:

In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business. But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI’s focus group showed: that the record industry’s main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before-faster than anyone had expected. For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in Canada. (Sales were flat in Germany.) Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing.

“In 2007 it became clear that the recorded-music industry is contracting and that it will be a very different beast from what it was in the 20th century,” says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at JupiterResearch. Last year several big-name artists bypassed the record labels altogether. Madonna left Warner Music to strike a deal with Live Nation, a concert promoter, and the Eagles distributed a bestselling album in America without any help from a record label. Radiohead, a British band, deserted EMI to release an album over the internet. These were isolated, unusual deals, by artists whose careers had already brought years of profits to the big music companies. But they made the labels look irrelevant and will no doubt prompt other artists to think about leaving them too.

The prime function of a record label is to scout, identify and promote talent. Distribution is obviously key to the business, but it’s largely a function of logistics and technology, and it’s tangential to the consumer’s interest in the product.

Talent identification and promotion is the real business value as far as consumers are concerned, simply because there are lots of people producing music, most of which probably wouldn’t appeal to any given person. So the role of record labels—first as a filter selecting talent, then as a megaphone promoting it—is a useful function. But this role doesn’t necessarily have to fulfilled by labels. Friends who share your musical tastes might do it, for example. But in order for your friends to turn you on to some good music, they have to be introduced to it somehow.

Social networking sites online amplify the ability of individuals to act as filters and as promoters of what they like. People list their favorite bands on sites like Myspace, and their friends can click over to the band’s profile and often listen to a few tracks for free. More people can be exposed to more music through their friends on Myspace than in real-life casual conversation, so an increasing portion of the role played by record labels is now be handled by individuals, online.

Market changes might force labels to become smaller, but the same technology that’s destroying their current business model will also let labels do more with less. If individuals are taking on more of the role of promoter, any promotion done by record labels will be amplified in a way that didn’t happen in the past. Special-interest niches can be targeted like never before, and the amateur music enthusiasts with influential online presences can be identified and courted by labels seeking to tout the next great act.

Record labels won’t disappear altogether, because there will always be a role for professional filters. Talent needs to be scouted, and promotion will always be helpful in connecting people to new music. But the balance of power in the music industry is shifting, seismically. Labels will be smaller, but they have the potential to be sleeker. And if this gives artists an opportunity to keep more of the revenue their work generates, that won’t be a bad thing.

12 January 2008 @ 12:21PM >> Matt Walliser writes in to say:

In your January 2 article titled “From Rainbows to Downloads” you suggest (emphasis mine)

when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future.

In February 2006 I wrote to you in regards to iTunes reaching 1 Billion downloads, loosely predicting that the music industry’s reluctance to evolve would only serve to strengthen Apple’s dominant position in the marketplace (or something like that). Recent anti-trust lawsuits filed against Apple with respect to monopolization of format simultaneously reinforce both your point (above) and mine. For clarification’s sake: I’m neither condemning nor condoning the actions Apple has taken that have brought about the lawsuit (predatory pricing of their hardware being the most credible, imho), I’m merely calling it like I see it.

Even though the music business has been fighting the trend towards Apple’s online distribution dominance since at least 2005, ironically, one reason Apple has so much power today is because of bad decisions made by the music labels themselves.

For years, labels have demanded that digital music be burdened with copy protection technology. In order to get permission to sell music through the iTunes Music Store, labels required Apple to implement copy protection, which they did. That technology, called FairPlay, is one of the less onerous copy protection schemes out there, but it does mean that music files purchased through the iTunes Music Store can’t be played by non-Apple devices (although they can be burned onto standard CDs, which can then be used in any standard CD player). In other words, the labels’ insistence on copy protection ended up giving Apple the ability to lock customers into its file formats, thereby making it more difficult for those customers to switch to devices sold by Apple’s competitors.

Steve Jobs has called on the recording industry to abandon copy protection, and after one label granted permission, Apple now sells some songs in MP3 format without copy protection. Competitors like Amazon are now selling music in unprotected MP3 format as well. Maybe the recording industry is slowly waking up.

Still, I can’t help thinking that Steve Jobs is secretly smiling to himself, knowing that the long-running short-sightedness of the music business is part of the reason that Apple enjoys such dominance in online music distribution. If music labels had allowed sales of unprotected MP3s right from the start, Apple’s iPod would probably be just as dominant in the market for portable music players, but the iTunes Music Store would likely be a different story.

10 January 2008 @ 6:37PM >> A few years back, I interviewed Michael Moore and asked him if Fahrenheit 9/11 should be considered a political advertisement, and if so, whether campaign finance laws should apply. Moore admitted the film contained his opinions, but that his film should be treated like an op-ed in the paper.

During the 2004 election, neither ads for the Bush-bashing Fahrenheit 9/11, nor the film itself were regulated under campaign finance laws.

But now that there’s a new film about Hillary Clinton, all of a sudden, campaign finance laws do apply to political perspective films:

The early reviews are in, and three federal judges appeared in agreement Wednesday that a movie lambasting Hillary Clinton seemed an awful lot like a 90-minute campaign advertisement.

Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group, is challenging the nation’s campaign finance laws, which require disclaimers on political advertisements and restrict when they can be broadcast. The group argues “Hillary: The Movie” and related television advertisements are not political advertising even though the New York senator is in the presidential race.

Attorney James Bopp argued that they should be considered “issue-oriented” speech because viewers aren’t urged to vote for or against the Democrat.

[...]

The movie is scheduled for two screenings in theaters, once each in California and Washington. It is also being sold on DVD. Neither of those methods are regulated under campaign laws. The advertisements, however, are scheduled to run during the peak presidential primary season and would be regulated.

Bopp, who successfully led a challenge to one aspect of the campaign finance system last year, compared the film to television news programs “Frontline,” “Nova,” and “60 Minutes.” That prompted Lamberth to laugh out loud from the bench.

“You can’t compare this to ‘60 Minutes,’” the judge said. “Did you read this transcript?”

The movie features commentary from conservative pundits, some of whom specifically say Clinton is not fit to be the nation’s commander in chief.

The content of the film is irrelevant; if the film merely expresses opinions, it is protected constitutional speech. And if it is factually inaccurate in a way that is defamatory to Hillary Clinton, she has legal recourse for that.

It shouldn’t matter whether a film is made by a Hollywood insider like Michael Moore or an issue-based outfit like Citizens United. Groups like Citizens United—on the right and the left—are formed by private citizens with a common goal of promoting their shared ideas. The speech of Citizens United should not be more regulated than the speech of any of its individual members—or any other private citizen for that matter.

All filmmakers—in fact, all citizens who value their free speech rights—should be concerned about this decision. Michael Moore should be concerned. Because even though he has the benefit of Hollywood’s infrastructure and support (and therefore has no need to become involved with an organization like Citizens United), his films are financed and distributed by corporations that may one day find themselves subject to the same regulations now being imposed on Citizens United.

Any attempt to regulate political speech is direct assault on the First Amendment.

2 January 2008 @ 8:57AM >> Two of my favorite creative minds in music—Thom Yorke and David Byrne—recently sat down to discuss the future of the music business. Last October, Yorke’s band Radiohead released its latest album, In Rainbows. But rather than releasing it through a traditional music label, Radiohead let fans download the music directly from its website. And rather than charging a fixed amount for the album, users were given the option of naming their own price—down to and including zero.

The sinking fortunes of the music industry establishment may have been instigated by technological change, but they are worsened by the industry’s unwillingness to let consumers buy music that isn’t locked to specific formats or media. It’s like peering into the future of the movie industry.

In both cases, you have industries whose fortunes have been protected for decades by the commingling of content and medium. Record albums weren’t just vinyl, they were vinyl with embedded music: the music couldn’t exist without the physical medium. As tapes replaced records and CDs replaced tapes, higher fidelity and increased convenience of each new format gave consumers a reason to re-purchase content that they already paid for in lesser formats. But when songs are stored as data and can be moved around like any other computer file, consumers will only ever need to buy one copy. As long as open formats are used, people will be able to play their music on any device devised in the future. There goes the upgrade gravy train.

Like the music industry, the film industry is rightfully concerned with piracy, because once music and movies aren’t tied to a physical medium, they can be copied endlessly. But consumers don’t care if this inconveniences the industry; people have shown that they want the convenience of digital content, and they are willing to pay for it. So the more that record companies lock down digital content in order to fight piracy, the less incentive legitimate customers have to buy the product in the first place. What good is the “music as a file” model if it is artificially burdened with the same limitations as physical media?

The movie business hasn’t been hurt by the shift away from physical media yet. But that’s only because technology hasn’t advanced far enough. It takes a lot more data to store a high-definition movie than an album’s worth of high-fidelity music. When a typical consumer’s Internet connection becomes fast enough to download high-definition full-length movies in a matter of minutes, the home market for movies will be subject to same technological dynamics affecting the music business today. And that future is only years away.

But that isn’t the film industry’s biggest problem right now. After all, people won’t pirate content that they don’t want to watch in the first place.

The problem with the film business is that too many insiders forgot that the rest of America doesn’t necessarily share the same view of the world as their friends in Hollywood. Instead, Hollywood has become its own echo chamber, which is why distributors keep pushing out flop after flop of military-bashing films. In Hollywood and at film festivals, such fare is highly praised. But in theaters around the country, the audience for films like Redacted is comprised mostly of empty seats. It’s almost as if Hollywood is producing films only for itself.

My experience in trying to get distribution for Indoctrinate U only confirms this. People in the film business just don’t take seriously the possibility that there’s a market for documentaries outside Hollywood’s typical Michael Moore/Al Gore worldview. I don’t know to what extent that’s out of political bias or the result of a simple Catch-22: they don’t see a market for anything different, but that’s because they’ve never tried distributing anything different.

That leaves us in the position of having to self-distribute Indoctrinate U. And because the Internet will allow us to put the film in people’s hands in the fastest, most cost-effective way possible, we’ll be able to conduct a little experiment of our own. Indoctrinate U will not be available on DVD right away. Instead, we’re going to focus our efforts on seeing whether the Internet can be used to route around the gatekeepers in Hollywood—without the shackles of physical media. (Although unlike Radiohead, I’m afraid, we’re not in a position to give our goods away for free.)

Who knows? Maybe the market can be proven without Hollywood’s help. I think it can. And once the market is proven, we’ll finally know who in the film business wants to serve customer desires instead of the dogma of Hollywood groupthink.

4 December 2007 @ 9:10PM >> There’s a little scandal brewing within Wikipedia.

The free online encyclopedia editable by anyone prides itself on being a meritocracy. The site successfully harnessed the wisdom of crowds to build what’s probably the largest, most quickly-constructed body of knowledge ever assembled in human history. Not bad for something that didn’t even exist when the decade began.

For much of its content, the Wikipedia model seems to work pretty well. Easily-verifiable facts like names, places and dates tend to be rendered accurately. And when they’re not, they’re easy to fix. With millions of eyeballs scanning everything, errors can be caught quickly.

But when the topic is a subject of debate or controversy, the natural human tendency to want to convince others of one’s rightness can lead to some nasty behavior. And when that happens in Wikiland, not only is the quality of the product degraded, so is the trust people place in the collaborative editing process.

A spat between contributors that recently became public demonstrated this weakness in the Wikipedia model, The Register reports (in a somewhat sensationalist tone):

Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia’s core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site’s top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia “ruling clique” grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list’s existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.

Revealed after an uber-admin called “Durova” used it in an attempt to enforce the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to undermine the site’s famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny from the community at large. But clearly, it has also been used to silence the voice of at least one person who was merely trying to improve the encyclopedia’s content.

“I’ve never seen the Wikipedia community as angry as they are with this one,” says Charles Ainsworth, a Japan-based editor who’s contributed more feature articles to the site than all but six other writers. “I think there was more hidden anger and frustration with the ‘ruling clique’ than I thought and Durova’s heavy-handed action and arrogant refusal to take sufficient accountability for it has released all of it into the open.”

Kelly Martin, a former member of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, leaves no doubt that this sort of surreptitious communication has gone on for ages. “This particular list is new, but the strategy is old,” Martin told us via phone, from outside Chicago. “It’s certainly not consistent with the public principles of the site. But in reality, it’s standard practice.”

[...]

If you take Wikipedia as seriously as it takes itself, this is a huge problem. The site is ostensibly devoted to democratic consensus and the free exchange of ideas. But whether or not you believe in the holy law of Web 2.0, Wikipedia is tearing at the seams. Many of its core contributors are extremely unhappy about Durova’s ill-advised ban and the exposure of the secret mailing list, and some feel that the site’s well-being is seriously threatened.

In a post to Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales says that this whole incident was blown out of proportion. “I advise the world to relax a notch or two. A bad block was made for 75 minutes,” he says. “It was reversed and an apology given. There are things to be studied here about what went wrong and what could be done in the future, but wow, could we please do so with a lot less drama? A 75 minute block, even if made badly, is hardly worth all this drama. Let’s please love each other, love the project, and remember what we are here for.”

But he’s not admitting how deep this controversy goes. Wales and the Wikimedia Foundation came down hard on the editor who leaked Durova’s email. After it was posted to the public forum, the email was promptly “oversighted” - i.e. permanently removed. Then this rogue editor posted it to his personal talk page, and a Wikimedia Foundation member not only oversighted the email again, but temporarily banned the editor.

Then Jimbo swooped in with a personal rebuke. “You have caused too much harm to justify us putting up with this kind of behavior much longer,” he told the editor.

If there’s a flaw in the Wikipedia model, it isn’t that the site relies on the wisdom of crowds too much, it’s that the site’s highest-volume contributors and editors—the people who effectively run the place—could succumb to the gravitational pull of groupthink.

The problem is that it’s difficult to engineer a way to allow for group-driven creation of content while dispersing certain responsibilities and decision-making tasks among the masses. It’s impossible to create a system that’s completely open to everyone without getting overrun by malicious vandals, so it’s hard to see how the site could avoid issuing bans or using some other form of group-imposed censorship.

But, to whatever extent is possible, Wikipedia would be wise to avoid greater centralization of power. Otherwise, it could lead to problems that could cause Wikipedia’s well-earned goodwill is going to melt away just as quickly as it was built.

30 October 2007 @ 10:00PM >> Today’s Quote of the Day:

[I]t’s kind of depressing if mobility and the human excretory process are the best arguments to be made for why the print medium won’t go way of the dodo, don’t you think?
—Paul La Monica, in response to comment from venture capitalist Roger McNamee.

8 October 2007 @ 10:42PM >> BBC News reports of a company getting sued for copyright infringement because their employees are listening to the radio and—gasp!—the radio “could be heard by colleagues and customers.”

7 October 2007 @ 11:32AM >> The old saying goes, when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade.

Well, sometimes, life hands you a bushel of lemons, a block of ice, a bag of sugar, a nice big pitcher, and a whole bunch of cups.

This happened to me recently, when I became the target of a lawsuit that goes to the heart of what it means to have the right to share your opinions with your fellow citizens.

For the past four years, in putting together the film Indoctrinate U, I investigated administrative abuses against free speech and free thought rights on college campuses. To me, the topic is of vital importance to our nation’s health.

If a generation of students graduates into a society riven by a worsening political divide, what would the effect on that society be if those students were never afforded the opportunity to engage in real, down-and-dirty debate in the one venue where people can pursue a life of the mind? Eventually, you end up with a society that fears free speech, because its citizens have gotten used to being protected from the uncomfortable aspects of hearing things that they vehemently oppose. By coddling students and attempting to shield them from reality by stifling certain speech, academia is directly contributing to a diminishing respect for free speech in the larger society.

On campus, administrators and student mobs do the dirty work of shutting down speech that falls outside what academics consider to be the realm of acceptability. Around the world, we see instances where governments, police and military forces put people to death for having the wrong thinking. These sorts of transgressions happen relatively infrequently in Western society, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a clear and present threat to free speech.

In hyper-litigious Western nations, courts are often the weapon used to shut people up. But instead of this weapon being wielded by the state, courts are used by corporations, non-profits, accused terrorists financers and even newly-invented religions to tamp down criticism of various kinds.

Out of necessity, while putting together Indoctrinate U, I immersed myself in trying to understand the legal ramifications of speech. I knew that the film would anger a lot of folks at institutions that have lawyers on retainer. I knew we could be targeted legally whether justified or not.

But it turns out, it wasn’t Indoctrinate U that got me dragged into court. It was a dispute with a dry cleaner, of all things.

Today’s New York Post, which heard about the case after the plaintiffs filed to have the case moved to New York Supreme Court, contains a short piece on the story.

I was originally sued for $20,000 for the words, “Todd Layne Cleaners sucks and is overpriced.” Admittedly, my words were juvenile and, to some, offensive. But as a statement of opinion—an opinion formed after a long string of negative experiences with this cleaner—it is quite clearly constitutionally protected speech.

But Todd Ofsink, the owner of the cleaners, sued me for expressing my well-grounded displeasure with his business. Fortunately for Ofsink, his brother Darren is an partner in the law firm of Guzov Ofsink. So he is getting an endless supply of legal work from his brother’s firm, presumably for free. Ofsink knows that I would have to pay to defend my right to criticize his business, so he figured I’d be an easy target. His attorney brother told me that if I signed a non-disparagement agreement—in effect, giving up the right to criticize his business—he would drop the lawsuit.

They were hoping that I would do what most people would do: sign the agreement, end the case, put it out of my misery, and not waste tens of thousands of dollars defending a right that’s guaranteed to me as a U.S. citizen.

I decided to try to fight the case myself, without an attorney representing me in court. I didn’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars to defend a right that I already had, but I also thought it would be an interesting test. After all, I knew I wasn’t the only person who’s been sued for expressing displeasure with a business.

What would other people do in such a case? Would they fight it themselves? Or would they buckle under and sign away their rights to a bully? And if they decided to fight, is the legal system today even accessible to the individual, or has the law in our society become so professionalized and abstracted from daily life that individuals have no way to defend themselves?

This brings me back to the lemonade. Although this nuisance lawsuit has brought me much personal agitation, it also perfectly illustrates the troubles faced by many others. I could be a guinea pig going through this aggravating process to demonstrate whether or not the average citizen can navigate the legal process to defend the rights enumerated in constitutional law.

Morgan Spurlock subjected himself to a month of McDonald’s for Super Size Me. If I was going to be subjected months and months of a convoluted legal process, maybe some good could come out of it by incorporating the story into a film.

One of the things that inspired me when making Indoctrinate U was all the students whose academic careers were in jeopardy—simply for having the wrong views—who fought back and won. Most people end up backing down when confronted with a system aligned against them. Those were the stories we never heard, because the people involved went away quietly and defeated. But by putting some of the people who stood up and prevailed on screen, I hoped to encourage others to fight for their right to think freely. Little did I know that those same students would inspire me to defend my own rights of free speech.

Perhaps my story could serve as a lesson for others. Unfortunately, I don’t know what that lesson is, because the story isn’t over. I’m still fighting it in court, and Todd Ofsink, his attorney brother Darren, and their courtroom litigant Damien Matthew Bosco, keep trying to ratchet up the pressure.

After filing the original lawsuit against me, Ofsink found out through my court filings that I was a documentary filmmaker. He also discovered that I’m not exactly politically in tune with most of my fellow New Yorkers.

Suddenly, Ofsink filed a new motion with additional accusations that were not included in the original complaint. He claims, for example, that I “simulated masturbation in front of female employees.” But Ofsink also made the mistake of claiming to have security cameras covering the store, which allows me to make this challenge: put the security tape online. What the world will see is an angry former customer making a dismissive hand gesture after Todd Ofsink makes his initial threat to sue me.

Once he leaned about my filmmaking career, Ofsink also jacked up the amount of money he’s trying to take from me: now it’s $300,000!

I hate to tell them, but in all these years of service, I have still not received my first check from the Vast Conspiracy. Being a documentary filmmaker is not lucrative unless you can get Hollywood to distribute your films. And as I can tell you, that’s not easy for someone of my pursuasion. So if jacking up the cost of his attempt to use the legal system to extract more money from me, he won’t be too happy to hear about the state of my finances.

But I’m not convinced that their motivation is money. It seems clear to me that their maneuverings are calculated to pressure me into signing the non-disparagement agreement that they have now offered me twice. They are just trying to use the legal system to shut down legitimate criticism of their business.

Sorry, gentlemen, it’s not going to happen. I will not sign away my rights. If you insist on fighting this ludicrous case, then I will keep fighting it until I win. Your lawyers will lose to a guy representing himself with no legal degree, but who has the law on his side. In this country, I am still allowed to criticize businesses that provide lousy and rude service. I am still allowed to tell my neighbors all about it. So, you can either drop the case and save yourselves further embarrassment, or you can continue trying to put the screws to me and in the process give me a great story to tell the world.

Where will this end up? Who knows! All I know is that I wish it weren’t happening. But because it is, then maybe some other folks might benefit from watching my experience—whatever my experience ends up being.

25 September 2007 @ 9:28AM >> After days of denials, The New York Times has finally admitted that a controversial MoveOn.org ad referring to General Petreus as “General Betray Us” was not handled according to the paper’s usual advertising guidelines. Public Editor Clark Hoyt writes:

For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq.

But I think the ad violated The Times’s own written standards, and the paper now says that the advertiser got a price break it was not entitled to.

On Monday, Sept. 10, the day that Gen. David H. Petraeus came before Congress to warn against a rapid withdrawal of troops, The Times carried a full-page ad attacking his truthfulness.

Under the provocative headline “General Petraeus or General Betray Us?” the ad, purchased by the liberal activist group MoveOn.org, charged that the highly decorated Petraeus was “constantly at war with the facts” in giving upbeat assessments of progress and refusing to acknowledge that Iraq is “mired in an unwinnable religious civil war.”

“Today, before Congress and before the American people, General Petraeus is likely to become General Betray Us,” MoveOn.org declared.

The ad infuriated conservatives, dismayed many Democrats and ignited charges that the liberal Times aided its friends at MoveOn.org with a steep discount in the price paid to publish its message, which might amount to an illegal contribution to a political action committee. In more than 4,000 e-mail messages, people around the country raged at The Times with words like “despicable,” “disgrace” and “treason.”

[...]

Did MoveOn.org get favored treatment from The Times? And was the ad outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse?

The answer to the first question is that MoveOn.org paid what is known in the newspaper industry as a standby rate of $64,575 that it should not have received under Times policies. The group should have paid $142,083. The Times had maintained for a week that the standby rate was appropriate, but a company spokeswoman told me late Thursday afternoon that an advertising sales representative made a mistake.

The answer to the second question is that the ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, “We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature.” Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad, said that, while it was “rough,” he regarded it as a comment on a public official’s management of his office and therefore acceptable speech for The Times to print.

By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq — and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the “liberal media.”

For its part, MoveOn has decided to pay the Times an additional $77,083 for the ad, to make up the difference between what they paid and what they should have paid. This move shields the Times against accusations that it made an in-kind contribution to MoveOn, something that could be legally perilous for the paper.

But it strikes me that MoveOn giving more money to the Times after the paper gets caught doesn’t change the equation much. One high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement gives some cash to another high-profile wing of the Surrender Now movement. Big deal.

17 July 2007 @ 8:46AM >> BusinessWeek asks, “Which major American newspaper should be the first to throw up its hands and stop publishing a print product?”

This could be the worst year for newspapers since the Great Depression. The double-digit revenue declines long forecast by doomsters have arrived. While nearly all the major papers still post profits, albeit smaller than before, a few prominent ones are losing boatloads. At Hearst Newspapers’ San Francisco Chronicle, according to a deposition given by James M. Asher, the company’s chief legal and business development officer, losses of $330 million piled up between mid-2000 and September, 2006, better—or should I say worse?—than $1 million a week. During negotiations with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s unions, the owning Block family disclosed that the paper lost $20 million in 2006. Late last year, The Boston Globe was headed for unprofitability as well, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And 2007 does not look materially kinder than 2006 for any of these papers. One senior executive describes the climate like this: “If you told me 24 months ago that revenues would be declining as much as they are today, I’d say you were smoking dope.”

So, which paper should be the first to abandon print? Read the piece for the author’s opinion, which differs from mine.

10 July 2007 @ 8:48AM >> A film industry insider discusses what’s wrong with Hollywood today and relays a telling anecdote:

Not long ago I developed the story of a West Point cadet whose fireman father had been killed on 9-11. This was the same family President Bush praised in his 2006 West Point graduation speech. It was a service family -– a fire officer father who’d given his life, a soldier son, the soldier’s brother, himself an aspiring fireman, and a mother who’d been teaching school the day her husband was killed.

I called a well-placed Hollywood power broker to get the project launched. I told him the story, and pictured the family, rightly, as the best America has. There was a long pause. Then he blurted out, “Wait a minute! Those are the people who elected BUSH!”

Maybe if the powers in Hollywood remembered that not everyone votes or thinks like they do, they’ll be able to find an audience beyond what they’re reaching now.

20 February 2007 @ 8:52AM >> I don’t often find myself agreeing with the political sensibilities of Steve Jobs, but if there’s one thing the man knows, it’s how to build a successful organization. So when the founder both Apple and Pixar started talking about teachers’ unions, I was pleasantly surprised:

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

“What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn’t get rid of people that they thought weren’t any good?” he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

“Not really great ones because if you’re really smart you go, ‘I can’t win.’”

[...]

“I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way,” Jobs said.

“This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy.”

Public education is effectively a monopoly for the portion of the country that can’t afford private schools. And the problem with public education is the same as any other monopoly: the organization functions as though its customers are merely an annoyance only tangentially related to the organization’s survival.

That’s why you hear teachers’ unions oppose school choice on the grounds that it would hurt failing schools. But the point of public education is not to ensure the survival of schools, it’s to ensure the education of students. So what if failing schools are closed? They should close. And the only way that’ll ever happen is if less-advantaged families have an opportunity to vote with their feet and abandon the schools that are failing their children.

14 February 2007 @ 7:59AM >> The federal budget surplus increased by 82% in January.

(Surplus? There’s a budget surplus? Who knew? Certainly not the media.)

---

Update: A criticism of the post is that by focusing on one month, I painted an inaccurate picture. The statistics were for the month of January. I generally assume people will follow the links for the full story. But just in case, the first link from MarketWatch indicates that tax receipts are generally higher in January due to individuals (like me) making estimated tax payments.

But MarketWatch also states: “For the first four months of the 2007 fiscal year, the deficit was $42.2 billion, about 57.2% lower than the $98.4 billion deficit in the same period in the previous fiscal year.” The trajectory of the falling deficit is impressive, potentially leading to a balanced budget by mid-2008.

My distrust of the establishment media’s reporting of the economy still stands. I would hope the media would be equally vigorous in reporting good economic news regardless of which party occupies the White House. And by many measures, the economy over the last few years has outperformed the economy of the mid-to-late 1990s. Unlike then, today’s boom is not based on the irrational exuberance of an Internet-driven stock market bubble. And unlike today, the 1990s economy was not saddled with the massive economic damage caused by the September 11th attacks.

Nevertheless, a surplus in a single month is not the same as a surplus for the fiscal year, and we’re not there yet. The fact that, in my view, the media represents the economy inaccurately is no excuse for my doing the same.

22 January 2007 @ 7:02AM >> From Briefing.com:

On Friday, it was reported that the December US federal budget showed a surplus of $44.5 billion. This was well above the expected $24 billion.

The twelve month trailing deficit is now down to $208 billion.

This is amazing. The US federal deficit is now down to just 1.5% of GDP (through fourth quarter estimates).

At the end of 2003 the deficit was running at over 3.8% of GDP and was in excess of $420 billion. The forecasts were for “$400 to $500 billion yearly deficits as far as the eye can see.”

That conventional wisdom has been proved COMPLETELY WRONG. Yet, the belief seems to linger on. There are continued constant references to the “huge budget deficits” in the press on nearly a non-stop basis.

The fact is, the accumulated deficit as a percentage of GDP has fallen from 75% in 1994 to about 61% today. The deficit is shrinking not just on a current year basis, but also as a burden to future generations.

This improvement is even more remarkable considering that the Iraq war is costing approximately $100 billion per year, and that reconstruction costs for Katrina are also in the past twelve months’ data.

If not for these factors, the deficit would be nearly in balance and certainly less than 1% of GDP.

Furthermore, when state budget surpluses are taken into account, the current US government deficit is closer to just 1% of GDP. This consolidate figure including state budgets is actually a better measure of the fiscal health of US government overall and is more accurate in terms of comparing to other countries.

Speaking of which, Italy, Germany, Japan, and France continue to run deficits in excess of 3% of GDP. That is far higher than the US percentage of 1.5%, or 1% for all government. Italy’s accumulated deficit is 100%, Japan’s is 100%, and the EU as a whole is close to 65%.

It can easily be argued that there is in fact no current budget crisis in the US.

This is not to say that curtailing the deficit further would not make sense. Nor is it to ignore the long-term problems posed by the need to fund social security or Medicare. Those are budget issues that need to be addressed.

Nevertheless, the clamor over the current deficit is blown way out of proportion. It may simply be lingering pessimism in the press, or it may be supported by those advocating tax hikes.

Or, it may be that the people advocating tax hikes have a lot of allies in the press, and that both camps have an ideological vested interest in convincing people that the economy is in the tank and the federal government needs to grow even further.

I suspect the economic gloom and doom in the press will continue...at least until the next time a Democrat occupies the White House, when the same economic situation that prevails today will suddenly be reported as positive news.

9 January 2007 @ 7:49AM >> The Blue Fund is an investment portfolio that—among other criteria—only holds stock in companies whose political contributions favor Democrats. Not surprisingly, the fund invests in the New York Times and CBS.

8 January 2007 @ 9:41PM >> Mine Your Own Business is a soon-to-be-released film documenting the detrimental effects that trendy environmentalists can have on underprivileged communities throughout the world. Not every society has yet been fortunate enough to reap the economic benefits of the industrial revolution, and some activists want to keep it that way, preferring to impose impoverishment on other cultures in the name of quaintness.

You can view the trailer for Mine Your Own Business on YouTube or read more about the film here.

The film debuts in New York on Friday, January 19th and in Washington, D.C. on January 24th. Both screenings start at 7PM. If you wish to attend either screening, you can sign up here.

Disclosure: Mine Your Own Business was created with the assistance of the Moving Picture Institute, which was also instrumental in enabling the completion of another soon-to-be-released film, Indoctrinate U.

8 January 2007 @ 1:05PM >> A while back, I wrote about the Microsoft tax, the fee included in the price of nearly every personal computer that covers the cost of Microsoft Windows. The thing is, not everyone uses Windows. Some people (like me) use Macs, and therefore avoid the Microsoft tax altogether. But others use alternative operating systems like Linux.

Most people who use Linux manually install it on machines that came with Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. If they remove Windows altogether, then they’ve ended up paying for a product that they’re not using. One intrepid Linux user tried to get a refund from Dell after removing Windows from his computer. Believe it or not, he was successful, and he outlines the steps that others can follow to avoid paying the Microsoft tax.

27 December 2006 @ 10:49PM >> A newspaper purchased in 1998 for $1.2 billion has just been sold for $530 million. Noting that the paper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, lost over half its value in less than a decade, a Goldman Sachs analyst commented that the “valuation is a bearish signal for the newspaper industry.” No kidding.

Perhaps one of the problems with the Star-Tribune is the caliber of the columnists in the paper’s employ...and the quality of the writers who come to their defense.

13 December 2006 @ 7:18PM >> Some thoughts on the future of newspapers from The Atlantic Monthly:

[T]op reporters and columnists at major newspapers are realizing (or will realize soon) that their fates are not necessarily tied to those of their employers. As portals and search engines and blogs increasingly allow readers to consume media without context or much branding, writers like Thomas Friedman will increasingly wonder what is the benefit of working for a newspaper—especially when the newspaper is burying his article behind a subscriber wall. It will require only a slight shift in the economic model for the Friedmans of the world to realize that they don’t need the newspapers they work for; that they can go off and blog on their own, or form United Artists-like cooperatives to financially support their independent efforts.

So what should newspapers do? They could stop printing. It may happen eventually, or perhaps newsprint will find a financially sustainable market among the elite and elderly (or perhaps it will have a nostalgic vogue not unlike that of, say, heirloom tomatoes), but that’s not what I’m getting at. The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

That, I’d venture, is how you start rethinking the newspaper business. Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for The New York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes. Or The Washington Post’s Dana Priest creates an interactive online universe around her intelligence reportage. With editorial oversight only for libel and factual accuracy, Sanneh or Priest are allowed to do whatever they want on their sites (while their mother ships pour their resources into marketing them). In Sanneh’s case, allow other people to write music reviews under the Times/Sanneh “brand.” In Priest’s case, turn the site into a clearinghouse for global intelligence information, rumors, conspiracy theories, and so forth (obligatory disclaimer: “The views of posters do not necessarily represent those of the Washington Post Company”). Go even further: incentivize the critics and reporters by allowing them to profit based on the popularity of their sites; make it worth their while to stick around.

[...]

Playing this logic out, the next task would be uniting the Sanneh or Priest site to the Times or Post whole. You could essentially self-syndicate, sending your regular Times or Post headlines to Sanneh’s and Priest’s sites, luring readers back to the mother ship while increasing the number of times each story is read. Indeed, the logic could be (and in some circles already is being) played out even further. What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.

30 November 2006 @ 8:52AM >> The CEO of the world’s largest music publisher is attempting to extract money from everyone who buys a digital music player.

Universal Music Group’s Chairman and CEO Doug Morris said of iPods and similar players, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it’s time to get paid for it.”

By accusing everyone who bought a digital music player of piracy, Universal hopes to coerce manufacturers of these devices to pay a per-unit fee, a surcharge that is then passed on to the consumer. (Universal apparently figured out that running a profitable business is much easier without the burden of convincing customers that your product is worth buying.) That’s exactly what the music giant did with Microsoft, which now pays Universal for every Zune music player sold.

Now, Universal is targeting the iPod. And with 25% of the market, Universal has quite a bit of leverage against Apple. The company can threaten to pull all of its music from the iTunes Music Store unless Apple complies with a demand to impose a per-unit fee on all iPods. If successful, anyone who buys an iPod will be considered an assumed pirate, and Universal will receive money, regardless of whether any music from that label ever ends up on one of those iPods.

Is this really a road that music publishers want to go down? Aside from the obvious ill will it engenders from honest customers, such a move runs the risk of changing the purchasing calculations of people who own these devices. In effect, it legitimizes piracy in the minds of consumers.

If you’re an honest customer who purchases music today, your decision making may change if you know that record labels charge you simply for buying a music player. You’re already paying once up front—before you’ve even spent a dime to fill the device with music—so why pay again for the same thing when you want to download music? People will feel entitled to download whatever music they want, because they will know that they’ve already been billed for it.

Treating your customers like crooks is never a good way to encourage repeat business. And imposing a blanket music surcharge simply for buying a player is a surefire way to get people thinking that they’ve got a right to download music that they’ve already paid for.

If record labels wanted to ensure that paying customers today become pirates tomorrow, they couldn’t have designed a better way.

25 October 2006 @ 9:13AM >> David Zucker, the writer and director of Airplane! and a number of other comedies, has recently been releasing humorous political ads online. Political involvement among Hollywood insiders is nothing new, but what makes Zucker’s recent work a man-bites-dog story is that he’s been doing ads for those evil Republicans, something which is sure to make him an anathema in his industry.

One of his recent ads, a send-up of the Clinton Administration’s foreign policy—complete with a Madeleine Albright stand-in who looks a little too accurate to be flattering—was deemed too hot for establishment Republicans, who declined to air it. No matter; these days, you can reach audiences online without expensive media buys.

Zucker’s latest piece looks at what life might be like if Democrats captured Congress and dictated the nation’s tax policy.

Has David Zucker stumbled onto a new model in political advertising? I think so.

19 October 2006 @ 5:25PM >> Even fictional currencies in virtual words are within the reach of the taxman:

Users of online worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft transact millions of dollars worth of virtual goods and services every day, and these virtual economies are beginning to draw the attention of real-world authorities.

“Right now we’re at the preliminary stages of looking at the issue and what kind of public policy questions virtual economies raise — taxes, barter exchanges, property and wealth,” said Dan Miller, senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.

“You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there’s no mechanism by which you’re taxed on this stuff,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The increasing size and public profile of virtual economies, the largest of which have millions of users and gross domestic products that rival those of small countries, have made them increasingly difficult for lawmakers and regulators to ignore.

...in much the same way that a weekend invitation to the Kennedy compound is hard for alcoholic philanderers to ignore.

16 October 2006 @ 12:13PM >> When readers of this site hear that an old media company is embracing virtual reality, it might conjure up memories of Dan Rather and some not-quite-real documents. But in this case, one of the oldest media companies in the world is breaking new ground by dedicating a full-time reporter to covering the economic happenings within a virtual universe called Second Life:

In preparing to open a Reuters bureau on a bustling island, Adam Pasick has been introducing himself to residents and interviewing entrepreneurs. After finishing such interviews, Mr. Pasick often levitates for a moment, then flies over buildings.

Mr. Pasick, a Reuters technology reporter who was formerly earthbound with the news agency, is heading up Reuters’ first virtual news bureau inside the online role-playing game Second Life. While many independent journalists and bloggers have published inside such virtual worlds, Reuters is the first established news agency to dispatch a full-time reporter to do so.

[...]

“The fact that it’s in a virtual world doesn’t change things as much as you’d think,” said Mr. Pasick, 30, a Michigan native based in London. “It’s not any different than when Reuters opens up a bureau in a part of the world that has a fast-growing economy that we weren’t in before. The laws of supply and demand hold true, it has a currency exchange, people open businesses and get paid for goods and services.”

Scientific American has more:

Created by Linden Lab in San Francisco, Second Life is the closest thing to a parallel universe existing on the Internet. Akin to the original city-building game SimCity, Second Life is a virtual, three-dimensional world where users create and dress up characters, buy property and interact with other players.

More than 900,000 users have signed up to build homes, form neighborhoods and live out alternative versions of their lives in the 3D, computer-generated world. Players spend around US$350,000 a day on average, or a rate of $13 million a year. Usage is growing in rapid double-digit terms each month.

Players buy and sell goods and services using a virtual currency, known as Linden Dollars. An online marketplace allows users to convert the currency into real U.S. dollars, enabling users to earn real money from their activities.

Adam Pasick, a Reuters’ media correspondent based in London, will serve as the news organization’s first virtual bureau chief, using a personal avatar, or animated character, called “Adam Reuters,” in keeping with the game’s naming system.

“As strange as it might seem, it’s not that different from being a reporter in the real world,” Pasick said. “Once you get used to it — it becomes very much like the job I have been doing for years.”

Over the last month, I’ve been helping Reuters launch their presence in Second Life; I was brought in as an outside consultant and was responsible for much of the programming work. It’s been a fun gig, and has helped me fill the downtime while we work out distribution kinks with the upcoming film Indoctrinate U.

But what I found most intriguing is that an old-school company like Reuters would even consider embracing virtual reality, much less with this level of commitment. Ten years ago, such a move would likely have been met with derision by other establishment media companies. But covering online communities like Second Life makes sense: there’s real economic activity, and there are important issues to cover—such as how real-world laws will be applied to environments like Second Life.

It’s a sign of a changing world...both real and virtual.

16 September 2006 @ 9:31PM >> Glenn Reynolds has some advice for vendors of electronic media:

Get this straight content providers: Our computers belong to us. If we’re in the mood, we might let you sell us some stuff to run on them. But they don’t belong to you, and we’re not likely to surrender control over our own bought-and-paid-for hardware, which we often rely on to do our jobs and run our lives, simply in exchange for letting you sell us something. (Honestly, most of what you’re selling isn’t all that good anyway, and you’re lucky that people buy it at all. So don’t get greedy. And while click-through license agreements may make it legal, they won’t make you any more popular.)