stop. start. stutter.

So I switched projects tonight, hoping that starting in on something else would either a). shake me loose on Sixteen Tons, or b). give me something else I could work on if I can't work on Sixteen Tons.

I have, in 2200 words, developed such a raging crush on Kaden, the main character of Beside Strange Waters, that I just want to pinch his adorable little cheeks.

(And if he puts out better than Joey and Charlie et. al. -- which is looking likely -- he can have just about anything he wants!)

I am still stuck like a really stuck stuck thing. As an attempt at some writerly WD40, let's play a game of Stupid Writer Tricks.

In a comment, give me:
1. A name;
2. A word;
3. Either a first sentence or a random fact (about anything) that you happen to know.

We shall see what (if anything, sigh) comes of it.

(On the agenda for this week: final revisions of the short story I've been distracting myself with, and the last-ditch attempt to actually like the novel I'm writing. I MEAN IT.)

You know how sometimes you get when you feel like there's a thousand spiders under your skin and you kind of want to claw them out? Yeah, that's about how I feel, only with words. There are a whole bunch of things I have to say in the back of my head, and they keep evaporating the minute I try to put them together.

I'm this close to putting the novel on the shelf for a while and starting in on the other one I've got quasi-plotted. The main characters of that one are guaranteed to be more cooperative. However, it's less commercially viable, which kind of sucks. I may take next week and see if it's got more juice anyway. I'm really frustrated and upset with myself for not being able to whip this manuscript into place; it's not the first time I've gotten stuck on something like this, but it's the first time I've had a self-imposed deadline, you know?

(On the other hand, I've been getting some quality knit time. I'm one baby and a wedding behind on the gift knitting, and Christmas is coming up. AUUUUUUGH MUST KNIT FASTER. Yes, my life is a series of deadline failures right now. It's not helping much.)

While I've been sulking around the house, I have hearkened back to my Web 2.0 roots and dinked around a bit with the blog sidebar, which now includes my latest-bookmarked URLs from my del.icio.us -- stuff I come across while researching, stuff I find cool, stuff that I keep using as a reference, etc -- and my "recently played" list from last.fm. I'm also trying to convince myself that I really really I-swear-to-you will start writing up reviews of everything I read on Goodreads, but I know myself well enough to know that I'm just plain old not going to. If you've got a last.fm account, though, feel free to toss me a friend request.

...yeah, I really got nothing this week.

I think sometimes, in writing my characters -- in creating these people who walk around inside my head and on the page -- about kindness.

See, there are three interlocking concepts -- "nice", "kind", and "good" -- that most modern Western society treats as the same concept. I've heard a lot of people use the words synonymously, and I'm just as guilty as anyone else. They're not the same concepts, though. They recognize and inform each other, and they interrelate and pass pieces back and forth, but they're not the same. Treating them like they are does everything a disservice.

(In order to talk about a lot of this, I have to either wave my hands and start using synaesthetic words, or take you through a whirlwind tour of religious and philosophical writing since the Ancient Greeks. I'll go with the hand-waving, since I'm still dealing with the dislocated thumb and probably shouldn't even be typing this much.)

Being "nice" involves being pleasant and agreeable, being courteous, and being nice is important. But sometimes there's an element of falseness in it. There's an implication of vapidity, of shallowness, to the modern definition of "nice". Call it the darker side of nice: the part where the social pressure involves smiling pretty and saying meaningless lies while you ready the dagger to slip between someone's ribs.

But being kind lies in understanding and recognizing that we all hurt each other without wanting to, and seeking to mitigate that damage as much as possible. Kindness has to do with compassion; it has to do with empathy. It has to do with seeking to take a moment and view the world from someone else's viewpoint, and doing things for them that aren't how you personally would do them, aren't what you personally would need at that moment, but are what that person needs.

(It's the Sephirotic concept of chesed, really, which is often rendered in English as "mercy", but which is probably better translated as "lovingkindness" -- and it might take the form of an outstretched hand and it might take the form of complete silence or distance. It is, as one of the wisest men I've ever met says, the importance of recognizing the inherent dignity of every living being.)

In a lot of ways, kindness isn't a Western concept. Which is not to say that Westerners can't be kind. But inherent to the concept of kindness, or at least kindness as I'm sort of fumbling around with it, is the notion of non-self-centrism, and that's something that's very unfamiliar to the modern American mind. "Nice" is a model of the world where the individual performing the action is the center of that action. When you're thinking about being nice, a lot of times you're thinking about I, I, me -- what I need to do right here to be perceived as a "nice person". "Kind" is a model of the world where you have to actively engage with the other people around you -- to place your situational partner's needs and wants and reactions ahead of your own, and do things that will minimize their hurt and maximize their healing.

Kindness isn't easy. It's scary and it's frightening and it means that you have to stomp down your initial impulses half the time, because no two people have the same needs and wants and reactions at any given time. It involves a lot of listening, and a lot of giving, and a lot of struggle.

The world needs more kindness in it. (And sometimes less nice. Because often, being nice and being kind are actively in opposition.)

I'm not nice, and I'm not interested in being nice; I never have been, I never will be. And sometimes I'm good, and sometimes I'm not. But I always, always try to be kind, even when I'm doing something that isn't nice or isn't good. I don't always succeed, but it's important to me to try.

As a writer, I often have to write people who aren't nice or good or kind. It's important, though, for any writer to remember that nobody's a villain in the story of his own life, and nobody wakes up in the morning and looks herself in the mirror and says "yeah, I'm so evil". Every single human being I've ever met has been capable of moments of incredible kindness back-to-back with moments of incredible cruelty and moments of incredible carelessness, and fictional people who don't have the same depths to them ring flat and one-dimensional.

More than that, though, it's important for me to treat my characters with kindness -- even if they're not kind people. Even when they're doing awful things, I need to treat them sympathetically, even if they're not sympathetic characters; I need to respect their dignity. If I don't, it creeps into the text, and a reader winds up looking at the result and feeling like something's horribly wrong.

It's a hard problem to struggle with, and like so many of these meandering little essays, it's one I don't have a nice neat solution for. (I'm actually wondering if one of the problems I'm having with the main project right now is that I'm not being kind enough to one of the protagonists. Yes, Joey, I'm looking at you.) It's just something I've been thinking about lately as I try to explain my life philosophy to a few friends...

Ha! I have finally fixed the commenting problem! Permanently, I hope. So y'all can comment on the site instead of on the LJ feed (where entries and comments go away after two weeks).

*makes \o/ arms of glee*

Dislocating the thumb you use to hit the space bar with. That's what sucks.

(I have never been able to train myself to use my right hand for the space bar or my left hand for the shift key. I am therefore reduced to typing one-handed. Okay, sure, I can type about 40wpm one-handed, but I can touch-type about 120wpm, and this is therefore annoying.)

Fortunately, I'm a freak of medical science, and therefore it will probably only be about two or three days before I can type properly again. But. SUCK.

So about two weeks ago I was bemoaning the state of my wardrobe -- it is impossible for me to find jeans that fit me this season, and my last pair of remaining jeans was starting to give out at the seams -- and Best Beloved and I went to go do some Google research. I stumbled across makeyourownjeans.com and decided I'd give 'em a try.

Got the result today, and not only do they fit perfectly, they're sturdy and well-crafted. If you're like me and a tough fit, grab your tape measure and head on over.

A-Space: Social Network for Spies

"A-Space" (A is for analyst), modeled after MySpace and Facebook, will open in December for U.S. spies and covert operatives across 16 some intelligence agencies to share information with each other.

The effort is spearheaded by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or DNI, a post created in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, to coordinate foreign and domestic security and promote collaboration among those 16 intelligence groups. To respect the concerns of operatives undercover and other security-leery analysts, A-Space will be voluntary.

The only way this could be more funny would be if it also included "What terrorist operative are you?" quizzes. With sparkly pink text.

I think I can say for all of my fellow sufferers-in-IT, past and present, that we all understand: sometimes, you just have to sacrifice a goat to get it working again.

So apparently we're having some problems with commenting here, which I am working on. (It's tough being your own IT department.) In the meantime, if it doesn't work here (though I think I might have fixed it) you can comment on the LJ feed, although entries there disappear after two weeks; I do read comments over there, too.

Speaking of comments on the LJ feed, infaile asked a question in the comments this morning, following up on the DMCA entry. Cutting it down to the barest essentials:

I am curious as to whether or not the DMCA applies to multiple countries, or just the States. Living in Australia, and having been quite active on deviantART for a few years now, I was always under the (admittedly, un-researched) impression that copyright in one country would be recognised by law courts in another. Recently, I had a chance to read [a friend's] dA journal about how one of her pieces was used without her permission in an advertising campaign. To my knowledge, she lives in Hong Kong (or somewhere else in Asia) and the offending party is based in the States. When pursuing legal action, she was told that she couldn't sue because the work in question wasn't copyrighted in the United States, and despite the picture being exactly the same as the one she'd posted in her dA gallery, she apparently couldn't "prove conclusively" that it was the exact same image.

Okay, as usual, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice; if you need legal advice, consult a lawyer who is licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.

That having been said, I'm afraid that your friend's getting a total runaround. International copyright is a tangled mess, but it's governed by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which states that copyright is applied to a work at the moment of its creation, and that you don't have to apply for a formal copyright in order to be protected by copyright laws and treaties. The Berne Convention also includes reciprocity of copyright: a copyright from any one signatory nation is honored in any other signatory nation. I know that Hong Kong's a signatory to the Berne Convention, even after reversion to China. I'm not sure which other Asian countries are, not without looking them up. International copyright law is overseen by the World Intellectual Property Organization these days, which specifically upholds Berne.

In other words, your friend's run into a bunch of assholes who think that the chances of some chick from Hong Kong bringing legal action against them are so small as to be an acceptable risk, and the legal advice she got is either from someone who doesn't know the law, or who wants to blow her off so she stops making trouble for them.

And, so that this entry isn't entirely composed of boring stuff, have a list of seven musicians or groups you might not know about, courtesy of the Internet Live Music Archive:

1. A Silver Mt. Zion: Side project of Godspeed You! Black Emperor; they're both haunting and spiritual and beautifully political at the same time. Good background writing music; I usually prefer background-writing music to be instrumental or in languages other than English, just so it doesn't interfere with my verbal centers, but for some reason, this doesn't trip me.

2. Cowboy Junkies: I like their earlier stuff better than what they're doing now, but they're still pretty fabulous. A little bit jazzy, a little bit bluegrassy, a little bit pop. I want to lick their lead singer's voice. (And possibly their lead singer, but I try not to say things like that in public too often.)

3. David Rovics: Just your good old-fashioned lefty political hippie guy-with-a-guitar folk protest music. Gotta love it!

4. Mike Doughty: Former frontman of Soul Coughing (see below!) who's reinvented both his life and his music when neither one was satisfying him anymore. Brilliant lyrics, amazing guitar work, and when he added in keyboard and drums, it didn't distract from the music or feel grafted on the way it so often does; it enhanced it. One of my favorite artists, ever, period-and-of-sentence.

5. Moxy Fruvous: Pretty much anything I could say about Fruvous would be inadequate, so I'll keep it to the bare minimum: four of the most musically-talented guys you could ever imagine, producing a sort of political street-theatre folk rock indie vibe that somehow manages to be outrageously funny and outrageously serious at the same time. Not to mention that their covers of various stuff will ruin you for ever hearing the original again. (I cannot hear "Dancing Queen" without singing "Angel of Harlem" along with it.) The day they stopped touring and recording together was a sad day indeed.

6. Rusted Root: ...Okay, about the only way I can describe them is sort of a fusion of bluegrass, zydeco, and tribal percussion. With a very high chair-wiggle factor.

7. Soul Coughing: Pretty much the quintessential late-90s New York cult band: a gleeful mixture of jazz groove, electronica, hip-hop, and slam poetry, with songs that make absolutely no sense when you see the lyrics written out, and cause you to go "Oh! I get it now!" when you hear Doughty singing (or speaking) them. Is Chicago! Is not Chicago! ...Yeah, the songs make more sense when you know that the band was usually drugged out of their minds when they were writing or performing them.

Watching the current SFWA debacle has been painful -- on every side. I've said for years that copyright is the most misunderstood concept on the internet; the sheer amount of misinformation is stunning.

I don't think that it's much of a surprise to anyone that I come down pretty firmly in the "pixel-stained technopeasant wretch" camp. (Since, you know, you're reading this right now, and if I were one bit less besieged by problems with the primary manuscript, you'd have more regular fiction to read here.) I know that there's a pretty sharp schism in the SFWA about electronic distribution channels -- even as an outsider, the fight's vicious enough to be visible from the ramparts, as it were, and I know enough people who are on the inside to know that it's even more vicious than it appears.

It's also, I know, not as simple as a case of "us" vs. "them", no matter what side you fall down on -- and I know enough to know that I do not want to get involved in the fight, no way no how. I have very, very firm opinions on copyright, digital rights management, and intellectual property laws -- in the way that only someone who's been enforcing those laws for the past five years, even (especially!) when I don't agree with them, can have. Whether we like it or not, though, the laws are the laws. And even the alternative-copyright "copyleft" movements, like the Creative Commons license and the GPL, take their legal protections and basis from existing copyright law; without the framework of existing IP law, you don't get copyleft any more than you can have copyright.

I'm making this post not to come down on any side or get my opinion out there, but to explain a little bit about the DMCA process that any online service provider will follow. (For those of us who are just tuning in, I spent five years on the abuse desk of a major blog service. I've seen a lot of DMCA notices.)

The thing that kicked off this whole brouhaha was a (badly-formatted) DMCA takedown notice. I've seen a lot of people in comments to Patrick Nielsen Hayden's post or Cory Doctorow's post, saying that it's ridiculous for Scribd to require takedowns to name each individual infringing work, and that a blanket notification should suffice. That is, unfortunately, not what 17 USC 512(c)(3)(A)(iii) says:

Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.

As someone who's seen one (1) metric fuckton of DMCA takedown notices, trust me: a direct link to the URL of the allegedly-infringing material is pretty much the only way to be sure that you've gotten absolute identification. Every online service provider on the internet is going to require that. (The lawyers in my audience may be tempted at this point to point out ALS Scan, Inc. v. Remarq Communities, Inc. We argue about that one a lot. Nobody's got a clear consensus yet.)

I've seen a lot of DMCA takedown notices from everyone from the RIAA to major publishing houses to individuals. I've also seen people flip out when you tell them that their takedown notice doesn't conform to the standards set forth by law, and I've seen a lot of people say that they don't want to go through all the legal mess, so why can't you just take it down without having to do that? (I've seen a lot of people in the comments to various places championing this option; sort of a "gentleman's agreement" sort of thing, as it were.)

The law doesn't work like that, either. The DMCA requires that an online service provider must have "actual knowledge" of infringing activity before action must be taken (and the OSP's immunity from liability kicks in). And the filing of a properly-formatted (ie, conforming to all six points of the law) DMCA takedown notice is what constitutes "actual knowledge".

The good news is, it's really easy to write a DMCA takedown notice if your copyright is being infringed. (The other good news is that it's awfully easy to write a DMCA counter-notification if you're falsely accused of copyright infringement.) You don't need to pay a lawyer to draft it for you, although as always, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice; if you have legal questions, contact a lawyer who's licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.

If your work is being infringed upon by someone on a commercial website, first go to the US Copyright Directory of Service Provider Agents. If you don't find the service listed there, check the site for a copyright statement. If that doesn't pan out, see if you can find out who hosts the site in question. (If I've lost you at this point, find a sympathetic geek and say the words "upstream provider". Your geek will nod knowingly and take care of it for you.)

Here's a sample DMCA takedown notice, which can be adapted by anyone who needs it:

========== BEGIN SAMPLE DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE ==========

Dear [name of copyright agent],

Pursuant to 17 USC 512(c)(3)(A), this communication serves as a statement that:

(1). I am [the exclusive rights holder | the duly authorized representative of the exclusive rights holder] for [title of copyrighted material being infringed upon, along with any identifying material such as ISBNs, publication dates, etc -- or, if the material is a web page, the URL];

(2). These exclusive rights are being violated by material available upon your site at the following URL(s): [URLs of infringing material];

(3) I have a good faith belief that the use of this material in such a fashion is not authorized by the copyright holder, the copyright holder's agent, or the law;

(4) Under penalty of perjury in a United States court of law, I state that the information contained in this notification is accurate, and that I am authorized to act on the behalf of the exclusive rights holder for the material in question;

(5) I may be contacted by the following methods: [physical address, telephone number, and email address];

I hereby request that you remove or disable access to this material as it appears on your service in as expedient a fashion as possible. Thank you for your kind cooperation.

Regards,
[your full legal name]
(Digitally signed)

========== END SAMPLE DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE ==========

It's not the best sample letter in the universe, and I'm sure your lawyer could draft a better one, but it's substantially compliant with 17 USC 512(c)(3)(A), and an online service provider can't ignore it.

Now, if you get a notice from your online service provider that you're violating someone's copyright, and you don't think you are (or if you are using someone else's material, but think that your use of the material is fair use), you might want to contact a lawyer, because by filing a counternotification, you're opening yourself up for civil and possibly criminal penalties if the person who filed the notification wants to sue you. (However, I can tell you that in five years of handling notification and counter-notification, we never once got notice that a use went to court.)

Filing counter-notification basically says "hey yo, I'm not infringing on this person's copyright; bring it on." The OSP is required by law to forward your counter-notification to the original notifier, and also required to remove the contested material for "not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days". (Most places, in my experience, just go with a straight 14 days.) Once counter-notification is filed, an OSP is out of the picture; it's between the notifier and the notifyee.

Chilling Effects has provided a Counter-Notification Generator, to save me the trouble of having to write one.

A lot of the shitstorm surrounding the current SFWA argument stems around the notion that filing a DMCA notification is a huge and arcane task. It's really not. Most OSPs will receive dozens, if not hundreds, of DMCA notifications in a week. It's all very simple and straightforward, and the reason for that is that most OSPs really don't give a shit who's "right" and who's "wrong" in any particular conflict. They just want to do what the law requires; most OSPs recognize and sympathize with the line between protecting rights-holders and encouraging free expression. And if you speak to them in the right language, they'll basically get the hell out of your way -- but if you speak to them in the wrong language, you waste everyone's time and frustration, including your own.

I hope the SFWA's lawyers are sitting down with Andrew Burt and explaining how the DMCA actually works, so that actual, legitimate violations of copyright (on Scribd and on other sites) can get dealt with swiftly and promptly and the people who have asked SFWA to be their copyright representative can get infringing uses of their material removed. I'm also glad to see that the SFWA ePiracy Committee has suspended operations until they can investigate further -- and, hopefully, come up with an effective process and procedure that benefits both fair and/or transformative use while also protecting the rights of copyright holders to have control over where and how their material is posted -- whether that control is a more traditional "nobody gets to use this, period" or a Creative Commons-style authorization of transformative work.

What saddens me are all the people who are speaking out against Scribd for not being more proactive in this case, including many of the commenters in Scribd's blog response. An online service provider can't be more proactive in matters regarding copyright violation; if they are, they lose some of the protections written into the DMCA for immunity from liability.

Yes, they're going to require that you file a DMCA notice of infringement for every instance of copyright violation on their service -- because by doing so, you initiate the process that's laid out in the law, and everyone involved, including you, have a number of protections as set forth in that law. (And everyone I know right now is terrified of the implications of Fair Housing Council v. Roommates.com, which sets a fucking awful precedent about CDA Section 230 immunity for OSPs -- and which came out of the 9th circuit court. When the 9th goddamn circuit court makes a decision like that, everyone gets nervous.)

I hate the DMCA. I hate it a lot. Most people I know who work for online service providers hate the DMCA too, with a passion that's usually reserved for Teletubbies and Fox News. However, despite how much I hate it, despite how fucking annoying it really is, there are certain narrow subsets of instances where even the second-worst copyright law ever passed can be useful -- and one of those useful cases is the immunity it affords OSPs, because without it, we probably wouldn't have an internet anymore.

So, basically, when you get a response from an online service provider that says, hey, we can't help you unless you jump through these hoops, please don't get upset or angry. The person on the other end of the screen probably agrees with you that the hoop-jumping sucks. But really, it's for everyone's benefit -- including the benefit of the rights-holder.