Jim Wright is a former US Navy Chief Warrant Officer with a really smart and insightful blog called Stonekettle Station; you are all encouraged to visit it and delve among the various posts. One post you'll no longer find there is this one. You'll notice he's taken it down from his blog and his Facebook page though he's allowed other sites that asked reprint permission to keep it online.
A lot of people agree with Jim on that post, and unfortunately from Jim's POV, a lot of them liked it enough to copy & paste it without asking his permission first.
It would be safe to say that on the matter of copyright, fair usage, the practicalities of the Internet, etc., Jim and I have differing philosophies. However, while I might see the matter from a different angle, I do not for one nanosecond say Jim isn't 100% right in his desire to protect the dissemination of his own material and to expect compensation for same.
And absolutely the testicle head who read his essay on the air then pissed him off by refusing to either apologize or pay for it deserves all the shame and approbation Jim has unleashed on him.
Sitting in my files is the first rough draft of a post on creativity, copyright, fair use, plagiarism, swipes, and public domain. As much as I'm annoyed by the greed of certain corporations that lobby to extend copyright to ridiculous lengths in order to keep properties they acquired but never created from reaching the public domain, Jim's case is neither defensible as fair usage nor a matter of a non-copyrightable public utterance. There are a lot of conflicting rights playing off one another in the issue of copyright / fair usage / public domain, but hosing over a creator and then being an anusoid about it is never right.
Two guys recently confirmed as being public domain. Original art by Sidney Paget.
