That’s Farked Up!

April 26th, 2007
Filed Under Thoughts | Leave a Comment

Fark has a new copyright policy: All your photoshops are belong to us.

From TFA:

It’s a big deal, one of FARK’s more popular features is its recurring Photoshop challenge, where users post remixed images to FARK’s forums. FARK already earns ad dollars from the traffic these challenges generate, but according to the new policy, it now also owns the copyright to anything a user posts there in perpetuity. Although it does state that users can re-publish their own works. Which is nice. Sort of. But not really.

How kind of them to ALLOW you to republish your own handiwork. Will Farker’s revolt? Probably not.

UPDATE:(From BoingBoing) Fark’s Drew Curtis has gone on record saying that this agreement isn’t good and will be fixed soonest — great news!

We’re not, we’re asking for a non-exclusive right to republish. Submitters still own their submissions, we’re asking for reprint rights in case we can use it. We have no intention of acquiring ownership of submission.

ANOTHER UPDATE: (from Boing Boing again) Fark’s Drew Curtis adds:

“Something else no one knows, because no one asked, is that since the inception of the website, I have been contacted on multiple occasions by mainstream media people (or otherwise, such as when Thomas Dolby asked permission to blow up submissions to a PS contest with him as the subject to poster size for his own house) about using Fark PS submissions. I have refused to give the permission, and instead have on every occasion contacted the individual who owned the work and told them that the didn’t need to respond to the media inquiry but if they wanted to they could. Because of this, if you ever saw a Fark PS in Mainstream Media that was uncreditted, it was used without permission.”

Last Week, NBC Had Its Worst Ratings In History (Probably)

April 19th, 2007
Filed Under Thoughts | 4 Comments

From digg:

“The network, which dominated television in the late 1990s and earlier this decade, averaged only 6.8 million viewers in prime time last week, according to Nielsen Media Research. That’s believed to be lowest weekly average that NBC has recorded during a TV season since the advent of Nielsen’s ‘people meters’ 20 years ago, and likely ever.”

This comes as little surprise to me. NBC doesn’t seem to get it. They still would rather throw together yet another season of The Apprentice than to come up with something someone might actually watch. ER is still one of my favorite shows, and one of the few NBC shows I will still take the time to watch. 30 Rock comes in second for me. Other than those two shows, I really never watch NBC anymore. There’s nothing that draws me to it. Thanks to CBS I became addicted to Jericho and CSI. Law & Order, while still good, just doesn’t hold the appeal to me it once did. Jerry Orbach passed away, and he was one of the better TV cops on that show. I do have to admit, I like the Law & Order: Criminial Intent shows that feature Vincent D’Onofrio. Why they split the series with him and Chris Noth, I’ll never know.

If NBC ever hopes to attract viewers back, they need to dump the cheap “reality” shows and go back to doing what they’ve always done best: drama.

read more | digg story