Looks like the folks at Mopornnorthampton are easily flattered. A Mr. “Ulysses Lazarus” from Neurocam is apparently trying to play both sides of the issue today…
To Mopornnorthampton:
Dear Sir/Madam:
As a duly appointed representative of Neurocam International, I am taking the opportunity to voice the support of the entire Neurocam family for your operation. In the contemporary age of sexual repression, NI supports groups like MoPornNorthampton which seek to expose anti-sex reactionaries for the busybodies and blowhards that they are. NI has observed a number of groups internationally in this regard and found you worth of their support.
Sincerely,
Ulysses Lazarus
Operative
Neurocam International
To NoPornNorthampton (received as a comment we chose not to publish):
Author: Ulysses Lazarus…
Home Page: http://www.neurocam.org
—————————————————–
Comment:
I am writing this short note to inform you of the support that Neurocam International gives to your cause. In the contemporary age media omnipresence, NI supports groups like NoPornNorthampton which seek to raise consciousness about the effects of media. NI has observed a number of groups internationally in this regard and found you worthy of their support.
Sincerely,
Ulysses Lazarus
Operative
Neurocam International
See how this sequence played out on the Mopornnorthampton blog:
Neurocam Plays Both Sides (PDF)
[Mr. Lazarus followed up on his (suppressed) comment later to write:
NI finds it unfortunate that you do not wish to accept our praise of your organization. That said, I would like to take the opportunity to correct a mistake in my original post that you have reposted here. Neurocam International no longer maintains the mirror site neurocam.org and can be found exclusively at neurocam.com.]
Would you care to comment on the substantive issues surrounding NeuroCam, or are you going to persist in discussing minor side issues concerning NeuroCam?
Or are you simply suggesting that the fact that you chose not to publish NeuroCam’s comment an MoPorn did is evidence that there will be sever secondary effects if a porn store goes in at 135 King St?
Dear Sir / Ma’am:
NI finds it unfortunate that you do not wish to accept our praise of your organization. That said, I would like to take the opportunity to correct a mistake in my original post that you have reposted here. Neurocam International no longer maintains the mirror site neurocam.org and can be found exclusively at neurocam.com.
Thank you, and it is the sincere wish of Neurocam International that we may be able to work together in the future on mutually beneficial projects.
Sincerely,
Ulysses Lazarus
Operative
Neurocam International
I don’t think you made the PDF right. Nonetheless, see that little copyright symbol down there at the bottom of all our pages? That means you do not have reprint rights to the material on our site. Please feel free to link to the site, and you may quote up to a paragraph, but do not copy and reprint entire pages. Thanks.
Neurocam clearly is playing some sort of mind game, and there is no reason to give Mr. Lazarus’s praise or opinions about porn any weight. Nevertheless, Mopornnorthampton easily fell for empty flattery. This underscores Moporn’s weak powers of discernment, and why people should be skeptical about Moporn’s arguments.
We did the best we could with the PDF, but we were unable to capture some of Mopornnorthampton’s design elements. These were not essential to our point, however.
Our snapshot of this page from the Moporn site is acceptable under the doctrine of “fair use”. It represents a small fraction of the website. We have reproduced it in the service of a political debate. It can help people evaluate the quality of Moporn’s judgment. We were concerned that if we didn’t take this snapshot, Moporn might take the page down.
Big accusations from someone who can’t even make a PDF correctly.
So using your definition of “Fair Use”, I could start a site called “Saloon.com” and I could PDF the pages of Salon.com and offer them on my own site? No, I could not, and neither can you. Fair use covers excerpts of materials, and links to existing materials, not the entire pages full of material you swipe on a daily basis. I would think as a supposed writer, you would have more respect for intellectual property and copyright law.
Not that you’re much of a writer; you’re clearly more of a cut-and-paste plagiarist.
By the way — for the record — the only time we’ve ever edited or censored anything whatsoever on MPN was when we removed *your* home address at *your* request.
If you’d like, we can reverse that decision and put it right back up.
No plagiarism here. We’re happy to give you full credit for your statements. What’s really happening here is you are trying to misuse the law to suppress embarrassing material. How does this reconcile with defending free speech?
It’s your choice to allow people of unknown motivations and credibility to post freely to your website. However, no one compelled Jennifer to write, “We’re pretty sure we’re extremely flattered.”
We’re not embarrassed at all. We thought it was funny. We have a sense of humor, and are able to detect humor when we encounter it. Maybe there’s a book you could read that would explain humor to you.
It was hard to tell from how it appeared on Mopornnorthampton. We wanted to make sure people had a complete picture of Neurocam’s opinions and activities.
Back to the issue of you poaching the content of other websites — the issue is not credit given, or not given — the issue is that you are copying content from other websites and republishing it on your own site without explicit permission. This is considered at best very bad protocol, and at worst, illegal copyright infringement.
If you are worried about a site going away, or changing its content, Google keeps an extensive cache of sites — you could simply link to that. But that’s not what you’re doing; you’re cutting and pasting and PDF-ing other people’s content and offering it on your site.
You do not have republishing rights to the content of our site; clearly you must understand republishing rights, as at the bottom of every page at your other site “WinningWriters.com” is a notification that says “No part of this website may be reproduced without permission.” Why do you have that notice printed on your website, which serves to protect your content, if you don’t respect other people’s websites with regards to their content?
People have reproduced parts of Winning Writers in the past. Sometimes it amounts to fair use, other times it’s too much and we negotiate with them about it.
In the cases you have objected to at NoPornNorthampton, we are clearly within the bounds of fair use.
We have now changed the web page footers at WinningWriters.com to explicitly allow fair use.