— YouTube vs. Viacom
Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube in its litigation with Viacom:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. […]
Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.
“ You may learn information about yourself that you do not anticipate. This information may evoke strong emotions and has the potential to alter your life and worldview. You may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change. ”
— 23andMe, warning me of a risk of using their genetic testing services, in their “Consent and Legal Agreement” (via jakelodwick)
“ Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening — really listening — to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and — if you can manage to get anybody’s attention — get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you’re asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. ”
Alvar Aalto - Auditorium of the Viipuri Municipal Library, now the Vyborg Library in Russia.
61 notes
Eames, Aalto — her most significant relationships were with dead designers.
(Dwell magazine, December 2004)
16 notes
I look at this graphic every day. It represents all the weeks of this decade. If you look at the present week, the light-gray square in the upper-left, you can visualize a day as one-fifth of it … and the waking day as 1/16 of that rectangle. Seven of these graphics and you’ve got something like a lifetime. Kind of weird to see it all at once.
“ Another purveyor of fine content is Maria Popova, who calls this curating “controlled serendipity,” explaining that she filters interesting links to thousands of strangers out of her thirst for curiosity. Mrs. Popova uses a meticulously curated feed of Web sites and Twitter followers to find each day’s pot of gold. She said, “I scour it all, hence the serendipity. It’s essentially ‘metacuration’ — curating the backbone, but letting its tentacles move freely. That’s the best formula for content discovery, I find. ”
“ Some believe that embarrassing things will become less embarrassing once everyone can see everyone else’s faults – the internet as community of the flawed. David Weinberger is quoted: “An age of transparency must be an age of forgiveness.” Or, as Marc van der Chijs puts it in Googlespeak: Life is beta. ”
“ I worry about the echo chamber of tumblrs and their ilk and the meaningless repetition and amplification of digital objects. I’m obsessed with the way that people collect, hoard, and re-broadcast photos and music and words without also creating their own. I’m not saying every tumblr reblogging pictures of hot girls in kitten earmuffs or grainy photos of Parisian cafes is as intentional and special as Orozco’s working tables, but the impulse, I think, is similar. We are overwhelmed, and if we can pick and chose a few objects that we like, put them in a place where we can keep them, it helps us to exercise some kind of control over the flood, even if it leads to visual/aural/literary ADD and a tawdry kind of exhibitionism: look at all these things I found. But while I’d rather not bother with some peoples’ online collections, I think some are interesting as works in progress, and some seem like ready-made archives, perfect and complete. ”
“ I want everything we do to be beautiful. I don’t give a damn whether the client understands that that’s worth anything, or that the client thinks it’s worth anything, or whether it is worth anything. It’s worth it to me. It’s the way I want to live my life. I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares. ”
