Forum UK - feature story on BI

klae's looking at it the way I'm looking at it, but it all depends on the acceptance of "posting copyrighted material is theft." If you don't see it that way, then you certainly can't have a discussion about the finer ethical points beyond. Scanning "just the good parts" of a magazine has become common to the point of social acceptance -- technology trumps ethics -- but it's still not actually allowed. I think that's the disconnect here.

We're only interested in the eight pages, fair enough. But they don't come sold separately. The retort is that if you steal $100 or $100,000, that's still stealing. Or if you want Bambi's videos, you can't buy one at a time; you have to buy a subscription or you don't get to see any of them. Not choosing to subscribe doesn't mean it's okay to just steal the two or three clips that most interest you, because it's just a few out of the large collection that comes with a subscription. So that's where my head is at on this topic.

When someone scans in articles from my day-job magazine, they're doing it so they don't "have" to buy it. Online, it's trendy to say "yeah, print magazines are dead and worthless, they suck" and then see people get excited about scanning in a review and posting it, and have a big discussion about it. Well, it's of value then, right? The content doesn't suck; the price does. Or rather, it's easier and preferable to read a scan than to pay for it.

I'm sometimes the person who sends an email to the site owner or poster, asking for it to be removed politely so I don't have to call the lawyers. So I cannot, in good conscience, say "don't scan my magazine, but let's scan theirs."

Other times, when we've done an article on a company and they want to post the thing on their site, we sometimes grant limited permission. Like I said...I'll ask.

Good news -- they said yes! Better than that, they're saying they will send me the files themselves, which is better than scans. Apparently they figured, what the hell, and it's a good promotional tool. I hope the UK fetishists who do have the ability to pick it up still do -- they are doing us an exceptionally nice favor.

This is very unusual because mags make the bulk of their money on ads. That's one of the reasons people get upset about just the content pages getting scanned; at least if you borrow a friend's mag, you're getting ad exposure to what they call "pass along readership." There is an upside, money wise. But pages scanned at home with no ads don't have any ads on them -- and if you post the content on a website, it's usually a website that the publisher themselves is also selling ads on. So I really didn't expect them to say yes. I do not think my job would have!

In any case, glad I asked. I think we did the "right thing" and we'll be rewarded. Sounds like the files will arrive later this week.

I kind of figured they wouldn't. Does your magazine give away content with no ads attached to it? Mine don't! :)

Stockings? CVS? Boss's Day? So that's how things drift off-topic!

I got the files from the UK, got a little help putting them together into one PDF, and just posted the Forum UK story over at my blog.

http://inflate123.blogspot.com/

Just tested it again, link is fine, file is fine. So it is likely on your end.

Unzip it with StuffIt Expander (Mac) or WinZip/WinRAR (but Windows can unzip things natively now), then read the PDFs with Adobe Reader, available for free at adobe.com.

I knew I had seen some pretty detailed advice on the real-world inflation stuff from experienced people here, so I just meant "this is the first place I'd check." I didn't mean to suggest that the site was dedicated to it, but it does come up in conversation pretty often. I also know tensions have run high about the "it's safe/it's dangerous" stuff, and that had just gone down around the time of the interview. Maybe there's a better resource for the real-world stuff, but I dunno where it would be. I figured this was a good starting point. But she was pretty intrigued that some people really do inflate themselves, so I tried to offer some info.

I honestly expected there to be more people chiming in, so I sort of just spoke for myself through most of it. I thought she had cast a wide net of interviewees, and maybe she did -- maybe they didn't all respond. I really didn't expect to wind up with it just being CV and myself.

Whenever the media comes to call, I try to paint us all as non-threatening. It's not like we're running around shoving hoses into people on the street.

I hope people like what they see when we get AT running early next year. http://www.airytales.net is up with a teaser; I'll have more to discuss soon. The project has been in the works for over a year now and when Forum came calling, I thought that would be a cool way to announce it, even if we were still a few months away.

FWIW, the Forum UK article now has a permanent home.

http://airytales.net/?page_id=275