Kim Komando is an idiot
Jan. 26th, 2008 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsOn the way out to the grocery store this afternoon, I stumbled across the Kim Komando show on our local Rush Limbaugh affiliate, KTTH 770, "The Truth!" You can get a feel for KTTH by its lineup: along with Limbaugh, they have Glen Beck, Michael Medved, Michael Savage, and Bill O'Reilly. Not exactly your intellectual powerhouse.
Komando's show ("America's Digital Goddess") is all about technology for the masses. It's a call-in show where people ask "What kind ofdrugs should I take[?] digital camera should I buy?"
Anyway, a caller was on her show and asked a very sensible question: "If I use an on-line distribution service for my photographs, what kind of copyright control to I keep over the pictures?"
Komando said that if you uploaded to Flickr your photos would be "under one of these Creative Commons licenses" and you would lose control over the copyright of your pictures. She sited as an example a young woman whose face wound up on Verizon Wireless billboards because her friend had uploaded a photograph of her to Flickr and had used the Creative Commons license.
Komando is simply wrong about that. There are many different licensing agreements available to Flickr users. My photographs are licensed under the Creative Commons with (a) attributions required, (b) non-commercial use, (c), no derivative works, and (d) persistent licensing. I retain copyright of those photographs. If you want to use them for commercial purposes, come to me and we'll hammer out a fair trade; if you expect to profit from using my photograph, I expect to profit from letting you use it. That's it. That's the whole deal.
Komando left the poor caller with the impression that if she used Flickr, she would lose all control over her pictures, because Flickr encourages the use of CC licensing. I won't argue that there hasn't been special controversy in the photographic community over CC licensing, especially when you do something stupid like forget to mark the photo non-commercial, or fail to enforce the persistent licensing requirement. But Komando's comment is a nasty and ill-informed disservice to her listeners, to Flickr, and most especially the Creative Commons.
(She's an idiot for another reason: her buying guide rarely mentions Macs and never Ubuntu. Her reasoning seems to be that Windows boxes are cheaper, therefore your work or school will use Windows, therefore you want Windows too. The whole world uses Office, which is written by Microsoft. It will therefore run best on an operating system also written by Microsoft. Therefore, you want Windows too. She's like these people, only with a bigger audience who take her seriously.)
Komando's show ("America's Digital Goddess") is all about technology for the masses. It's a call-in show where people ask "What kind of
Anyway, a caller was on her show and asked a very sensible question: "If I use an on-line distribution service for my photographs, what kind of copyright control to I keep over the pictures?"
Komando said that if you uploaded to Flickr your photos would be "under one of these Creative Commons licenses" and you would lose control over the copyright of your pictures. She sited as an example a young woman whose face wound up on Verizon Wireless billboards because her friend had uploaded a photograph of her to Flickr and had used the Creative Commons license.
Komando is simply wrong about that. There are many different licensing agreements available to Flickr users. My photographs are licensed under the Creative Commons with (a) attributions required, (b) non-commercial use, (c), no derivative works, and (d) persistent licensing. I retain copyright of those photographs. If you want to use them for commercial purposes, come to me and we'll hammer out a fair trade; if you expect to profit from using my photograph, I expect to profit from letting you use it. That's it. That's the whole deal.
Komando left the poor caller with the impression that if she used Flickr, she would lose all control over her pictures, because Flickr encourages the use of CC licensing. I won't argue that there hasn't been special controversy in the photographic community over CC licensing, especially when you do something stupid like forget to mark the photo non-commercial, or fail to enforce the persistent licensing requirement. But Komando's comment is a nasty and ill-informed disservice to her listeners, to Flickr, and most especially the Creative Commons.
(She's an idiot for another reason: her buying guide rarely mentions Macs and never Ubuntu. Her reasoning seems to be that Windows boxes are cheaper, therefore your work or school will use Windows, therefore you want Windows too. The whole world uses Office, which is written by Microsoft. It will therefore run best on an operating system also written by Microsoft. Therefore, you want Windows too. She's like these people, only with a bigger audience who take her seriously.)
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Date: 2008-01-27 05:10 pm (UTC)I'm inxlined to think that you'll do more good for your kids by installing OpenOffice, which is free. Ir's not difficult to install, and being able to cope with difference is important.
Five years from now, MS Office will be different. And maybe then Elf will see a need for his kids to know how to use it. But they'll learn more from a change like that than from struggling with what MS does.
And at the moment BECTA, who set the IT standards for British schools, are in a solidly unethusiastic wait-and-see mode on new MS software. O'd want to check which version of Office they recommend, but the core of any advice on this is to find out what the school is doing.
And if data is going to pass back and forth between school and home PC, there's a strong argument for using a different OS, which doesn't use the same web browser, and doesn't succumb to the same computer viruses.