More A Way Of Life… Look, this is just between you and me

Catching up on stuff:

Thank goodness it's cooled down a bit....

I've posted reviews of Minority Report and Open Secret in Opinion, and I should have at least one comic and two more book reviews up in the next day or so. How good am I?

Returning to the topic of the comics message boards I occasionally check out, I spotted a thread a little earlier of the "What's your favourite [fill in the blank] ever?" school. In this case it was comic cover. Vaguely wondering what sort of stuff would be favoured, I checked it out, only to find that each page was huge because posters were calling in (often quite large) images of the covers they like, and almost all from other people's sites. Now, I've always had a big problem with this kind of thing, so I posted a fairly innocuous comment to the effect that I didn't want to spoil the party, but isn't what you're doing basically bandwidth theft?

The reply I got was very enlightening: "I'm getting them from Mile High Comics and no. It's not". In other words, "yes I'm taking them from someone else's site but no, somehow this isn't theft." Fortunately, someone else stepped in to point out that therefore this is exactly what it is, quoting a copyright notice on the Mile High site in support. Which led to some contrition from the "I'm not stealing" man.

The reason I find this whole exchange enlightening is that it made me realise that there probably is an entire generation of web users who don't think there's anything wrong with pulling in content from another site, mindless of issues of either intellectual ownership or straightforward resource theft. Rather than growing up (in web user terms) accepting the conventions and standards that have been established, they succumb to the simple convenience of what they can achieve. I've actually mailed the owners of the boards to ask whether they think they ought to be educating their users in the rights and wrongs.

And finally for this evening - JakeTM.org - Ivan Massow's latest venture, launched late last year and boasting 7438 members. I think it's suffering a slight identity crisis, as I'm not sure whether it's a social group, a business networking system or a way for Massow to sell more of their financial products, or indeed a combination of the three. I'm sort of intrigued though. I may sign-up and let you know.