Update on the MoD Complaint About Me

Back at the end of January, I received a rather bizarre rejection on a Zazzle product.

I'd created it using an image of HMS Edinburgh, which I'd taken in Lyme Regis last year.  Zazzle wrote to say that the UK Secretary of State for Defence had a problem with that. They alone held the copyright for such things. 

I wasn't having a good day at the time, so took exception to this.  I complained to the Ministry of Defence about their complaint, ccing my own MP along the way.

I've finally received a response.  I did have a kind of holding e-mail before, from my MP, telling me that it was all being looked into.  But then a three page letter appeared on my doorstep.  It was the correspondence between my MP and Philip Dunne, the Secretary of State for Defence.

The latter denied ever telling Zazzle to remove my product.  He did say that his department had stepped in before, when other people's products reproduced the MoD's trademarks.  But on this occasion, no laws had been broken and no action was required.  I was free to take as many pictures of HMS Edinburgh as I wanted, and shove them on all the products I could create.

I've just let Zazzle know, having scanned in and attached all three pages of the letter.  You have to feel sorry for that poor company.  They were obviously just trying to cover their backs, after my government had slapped them before, but ended up caught between me on a bad day and the MoD again.

Let's see how that one pans out then.

But while we're on the subject of Zazzle, let me take this moment to big up one of my latest ventures.  I've created a website to cover my Beautiful Britain store.  I'd be really thrilled, if you'd take a look.

Complaint About Me - from the UK Secretary of State for Defence

I've been in some weird situations in my time, but this one pushed the boat out a little further than usual.

As many of you know, I've created a Zazzle store.  Originally it was to furnish monetised pictures for articles on places like Wizzley.  As time has gone on, I've grown to love the site.  I'm not exactly a visual person, so my comfort zone is in words.  Zazzle is all pictures.  Nevertheless, extra strings to my bow were added with aplomb.

Then representatives of the UK Secretary of State for Defence complained about me.  Apparently.  They demanded that a photograph that I'd taken of HMS Edinburgh be removed for copyright reasons.  I took the photograph.  It's the one pictured above.

I admit that my jaw dropped a tad, as I read the e-mail from Zazzle's Content Review Team.  The products made from it had been up less than 24 hours, when the Defence Department leapt upon it.  Naturally, I felt a letter to my MP and to the Rt Hon Philip Hammond coming on.  They were e-mailed just now.

The precise wording, in the Zazzle e-mail, was thus:

'We have been contacted by legal and commercial rights representatives of The UK Secretary of State for Defence, and at their request, to remove designs which infringe upon their rights from the Zazzle Marketplace.'

But surely, as a British taxpayer, it could be argued that I paid for HMS Edinburgh.  At least, I paid my taxes and a Destroyer was added to the Royal Navy using tax revenue.  I'm not saying that I could direct its manoeuvres, but there is a link here.  Also as a British taxpayer, any income I receive from the Zazzle products will be taxed too.  That's more money in the coffers to build military battleships!

Actually, put like that, it's probably for the best that the Secretary of State for Defence is wasting time and resources firing pot-shots at British businesses.  It stops them being diverted into wars, which aren't supported by the British people instead.

I'd be interested to read the response from Mr Hammond.  I'll keep you posted.

As a faintly amusing coda, another image of HMS Edinburgh, which was posted on the same day, same hour, same folder and sat right next to the one removed, was patently deemed admissible.   It's still there.

SOPA and PIPA Strike: On the Other Side of the Darkness

On January 18th 2012, the internet went on strike. It was to protest two American bills, which could seriously threaten the basic architecture of the world wide web.

I took a grand total of nine websites, blogs, clubs and forum profiles into the protest. Some were off-line completely, while the others were redirected or otherwise censored. I wasn't alone. An estimated 7000 websites joined in the action, including Google, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Craigslist and the instigators of it all, Reddit.

Here is a photostream of just some of the sites that I saw censored during the day.

SOPA Defeated! Obama Threatened to Issue a White House Veto!

Update: It seems that this was very premature. See edits at the end.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's hard work sometimes being a blogger with a conscience in cyberspace.

I've just spent an intense half an hour scrolling through code, as I prepared to join in the protest on January 18th 2012. On that day, huge giants of the internet would have entered blackout. Reddit, ICanHasCheezburger, Nerd Reactor and an increasing number of other websites were all pulling their pages for one day only. My friends and I have been watching that list growing daily - mega-sites pledging their support. The big question on everyone's lips was would Facebook and Google have the guts to join in?

Of course, I'm not anywhere near that league, but I do have an internet presence. I did have a few things to remove on SOPA Day. My websites are easy. I have full access to them, so it would be nothing to insert a file which took them off-line. But everywhere else was a little more tricky.

I'd already sussed that I could place all of my Wizzley articles into draft mode, which would delist them all. But I would have to persuade the site owners to remove my section of Suite101, MangaBullet and Sal's Realm of Runescape. Technically, I could pull the draft mode trick for Sal's too, but I've been writing blog entries there since early 2007. We're talking well over a thousand pages.

Then there are my two Blogger sites. I have some access to the code there and this was where I'd spent the past thirty minutes. It took a great deal of trial and error, but I eventually cracked it. I have four templates saved - two originals from this blog and Jo's Library; then two doctored with redirects.

On January 18th 2012, anyone trying to access either blog would have found themselves here. There would be no way to read my content until I returned the templates back to their original form.

All ready and set to go! Phew! I went to see which other sites had signed up in the interim and that led me to the news. An hour ago, President Obama signed a formal veto which effectively shelves both SOPA and PIPA.

Wow!

It's early minutes yet. I'm going to keep my prepared coding safe on my hard-drive and we'll see how this pans out. Not that I'm a cynic, but I've seen the other foot falling one too many times. For now, I'll just cheer with the rest of the free world. It looks like it was another round for freedom of speech.

Edit: News I'm getting now is that Wikipedia is going ahead with the blackout. SOPA is shelved, not dead; and/or PIPA is shelved, not dead. Still monitoring Twitter and occasionally the less up-to-date press too.

5.06pm: AnonNews has just confirmed that the blackout is still on. PIPA going to the Senate on January 24th.

5.09pm: Reddit have confirmed that their blackout is also still on. I think it goes without saying that mine was back on the books the second the doubt crept in.

5.16pm: Jimmy Wales is Tweeting that he thinks it's just a tactic to ward off the blackout. Full steam ahead!

8pm: I'm still not getting a consistent story. It seems that this is the source. Though Eric Cantor may or may not have shelved it. Either way, every site that signed up is now saying that the protest is going ahead. I'm with them too.

Amazing Video Posted on YouTube: Speech from the Great Dictator

Vladcubax, who uploaded this onto YouTube, wrote, 'WOW !!! YOU CAN REPOST, RE-UPLOAD, LINKS or whatever...peace and love to all.'

Accepted and in agreement.

New York Observer: Exclusive "Occupy Wall Street" Unaired Fox Footage

Grace Petrie Interview and 'Farewell to Welfare'

The Importance of a Picture: Using Creative Commons 3 to Get the Word Out

Publicity is the key to success for any event, be it a garden fete or a mass protest in the streets of New York. But those wishing to achieve it often overlook a tiny detail - the licence designation on their photographs. For those with a controversial cause, it can make the difference between a sympathetic article reaching readers in time or negative responses too late in the day.

This is an insight into an all too common scenario, which played out this morning.

Finding an Image for #OccupyWallStreet

It was September 17th 2011. For weeks the social networking feeds had been buzzing with the Adbuster arranged activism that was taking place this day. Anonymous were on board, as were US Day of Rage and other groups. There were publicity posters, leaflets, photographs and other images all over the internet. Many were produced by hacktivists with the full implication that they could be reused by whomever had such inclination.

As a journalist and a writer for Suite101, I set out to produce an article. I wanted it to published well before noon GMT, the proposed time that the protest was taking place. There was method in my madness. When ordinary New Yorkers stumbled across the event, they would want information. I wanted my article to be ready and waiting, in Google News, for just an occurance.

But there was a problem. Not one of the mass of images on the internet specially carried a Creative Commons 3 licence. This allows for commercial reuse and Suite101, mindful of law suits, demands it. They have advertisements on the site, which counts as commercialisation. Without an image, my article could not be published.

The Devil is in the Detail

There is an old adage, purportedly from the Battle of Bosworth and Richard III's alleged cry, 'My kingdom for a horse.' (Historically inaccurate; Shakespeare made it up.) It goes: 'For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the kingdom was lost.' It felt like a very apt saying this morning.

I've been here before. I've had articles in mind, then searched for an image, as I know I'll need one. There aren't any with the status, 'for commercial reuse', so I don't bother with the article. I move on to something that I can illustrate. But I felt that the occupation of Wall Street was important. I wanted to write about this.

For the best part of an hour, I searched websites and blogs for that all important Creative Commons 3 tag. None of them included it. It was seen as implicit that the images could be used. My editor wasn't going to see it that way. All the time, the clock was ticking. The protest would have started before I got this up. In desperation, I Tweeted owners of likely images. They weren't online.

Meanwhile, news articles were starting to spring up. They were from mainstream news outlets, like Fox and CNN, who could afford to have photographers on the scene. Small indpendents, like myself, are so reliant on participants. We don't have the big business funding that they have, to use in our coverage of anti-big business protests.

Educating Anonymous and Sourcing an Image

Fortunately, I did have one more avenue to try. After having now wasted an hour on trying to source an image, I decided to be cheeky. A few days ago, AnonCMD had sent me a link for an Anonymous IRC Channel. It was meant to be used to interview AnonCMD about RefRef, but they didn't show up. I used the same link now, in the hope that other members of Anonymous were around. After all, these hacktivists were responsible for half of the pictures I'd found.

True to their nature, the resulting conversation was placed in Pastebin by Anonymous. After hearing me out, one of them then took my favoured image and stuck a notice on it: 'for commercial reuse'. I had my illustration!

However, it had taken so long to find, that I was now just an hour away from the start of the protest. I wrote and researched fast. It wasn't quite as well crafted as it might have been, if I had twice the time in which to pen it.

Publicising the Protest with a Picture and an Article

My article went live at ten minutes past noon. Anonymous Amongst Protestors in Occupy Wall Street Demonstration carried with it the image kindly created for me by a member of Anonymous.

The timing (and the fact that Anonymous subsequently Tweeted it through dozens of their channels) was critical. For a start, it pushed my article to the top of those listed in Google News, above heavyweights like CNN and the Huffington Post:

In short, it was the first option available for ordinary people searching for news about the protest in Wall Street; and it was sympathetic to the demonstration.

Moreover, within minutes, it had been collected by the New York Daily News, a Paper.li, edition. It was featured, because it had an image.

So mine was the version of events that New Yorkers were reading on Paper.li. Just an hour and half after the article was published, it has been already been read by 551 people.

What Can People do to Facilitate These Kind of News Stories

Bear in mind that journalists like myself are bound by the rules of our publishers. We can't put articles out without images; and we need somewhere to prove to our editors that the images are 'for commercial reuse'.

When putting out pictures, all that is required is a simple line beneath them, or somewhere in the blog entry: 'This content/image/photo/poster is licenced under Creative Commons [add which one]'. For commercial reuse, the following are applicable:

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0)

Just find the one you prefer, then link it somewhere in the vicinity of the images that can be used. It doesn't necessarily have to be in the picture itself, as we can link back to the source for the licence attribution.

Finally, thank you very much to the good people of Anonymous, who took the time to create an image for me this morning. Good luck with the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration.

9/11: Tenth Anniversary Memories

It's one of the truisms of our generation that we can all remember where we were on September 11th, 2001. More specifically, we can all picture very clearly how we learned that two passenger 'planes had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in the USA. The last one, the hijacking of Flight 93 seemed to creep up a little more slowly. Maybe because there were no great landmarks to seize in the imagination. It was a confusing day; one which left those who experienced it (even from afar) breathless with the possibilities and stunned by the actualities.

I was at work, in the Graduate School of the University of Wolverhampton. The room was in an Edwardian building, all high ceilings and lots of light. Campus the elderly cat was curled up in my inbox, as she was wont to do. Best inbox I ever had! It was quite warm, but not stiflingly so. Just an average autumn day on Castle View, in Dudley.

Being in the heart of the Black Country, it didn't mean that I was unconcerned with American affairs. In fact, this was towards the end of my dinner hour and I was in furious e-mail conversation with a friend from Wyoming. We were always going to be opposed. She tended towards the right wing and I was a Red Flag waving Socialist. She was more worried about what to cook for tea; while I was incensed about the situation in Palestine and Israel.

I was obsessed and she was only engaging me in debate, because I kept criticising America's foreign policy. She didn't even know about said foreign policy, until I brought things to her attention. However, she did hear someone not loving her country, so she went on the attack. It got quite nasty in the finish. But that day, we were at least communicating.

She'd said something along the lines of America being the policemen of the world, and always promoting democracy and freedom. I replied unkindly, then rushed off to Google News to find an article that would back up my position. That's when I read about the first 'plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I told my Wyoming friend and she freaked. All arguments were off.

The boss was out and my work was up-to-date. My colleague was supposed to be giving me work for the afternoon, but she was struggling to find any for me. As we discussed what I could do, the news up-dated to say that a second 'plane had hit the South Tower. Until then, we'd believed that it was all a terrible accident. The second one changed things considerably. That made it deliberate, especially when other reports were coming in.

Meanwhile, my Wyoming friend was in bits. She was convinced that the next 'plane would be landing on her house. I e-mailed back that this was highly unlikely. She wasn't consoled. My colleague suggested that I went into the boss's office and spoke with my friend in real time in chat. My work, that afternoon, was to keep everyone else informed on developments.

I did that for the next two hours, flitting between internet news pages, while trying to keep the woman in Wyoming from having a nervous breakdown. She barely mentioned New York, Washington nor any of the other places. Bear in mind that, at the time, information was very confused. There were a lot of 'planes in the air and every second brought a new scare. My friend kept on about Wyoming definitely being a target. I couldn't think of any good reason why it should be, so told her so about every other minute. For the first time ever, she trusted my world affairs savviness over her own. She eventually calmed down enough to drive, then left to get her kids out of school.

Meanwhile, it was knocking on half 3. Another friend, who lived locally, would be leaving her place of work and collecting her own kids. I called her and she invited me round. I had lots of flexi-time built up, so I spoke with my colleagues. They were happy to kick me out for the day. So off I drove to Bradley, in Bilston, listening to the radio en route. Me, Kate Morgan and her two young children sat and watched the constant coverage, on the television, until late at night.

In the zest for information (and being calm for the Wyoming woman), the events hadn't really hit me emotionally until then. I wasn't completely dispassionate, but I was analysing it all with an historian's mind, against a context of all of those news stories that I'd been arguing with for weeks.

But sitting on that settee, we saw close-ups of the people trapped above the crash-line. They were waving white sheets, perhaps a handkerchief or a shirt. I'd just assumed that people had been evacuated or were dead. Seeing them up there really brought home the scale of this crisis. Also we were watching something which barely turned up on the news footage after that day - the jumpers. Cameras followed some of them down, so we were well aware of what was happening. As a pyrophobe, it really shook me, when I thought of the conditions they must be escaping from. Something so bad that leaping to certain death was preferable.

My friend's daughter was only little. She viewed it all like a movie. After all, she'd seen New York destroyed in so many films before - Ghostbusters, King Kong, the list goes on. Since then, it's still gone on - Day After Tomorrow, Cloverfield. She was getting bored. "When will there be another 'plane crash?!" Her Mum had to sit her down and explain that this was real.

One thing that is throwing me, in memory, is the timing. I distinctly remember seeing the Twin Towers collapse, while in Bilston. But according to the accounts, I couldn't have. The South Tower went down just before 3pm, while I was still in Dudley. I'm wondering if I left work at half 2, not half 3, but that wouldn't explain why Kate and the kids were home. She didn't get out until 3pm, unless she was on holiday that day.

For all my previous raging at my friend in Wyoming, I was utterly naive on my prediction for what this catastrophe would mean for America. I was convinced that it would lead to world peace. That it would alert the American people to the fact that their country's foreign policies were leading to terrible atrocities in the Middle East. That it would make the American government think twice about their assumed safety. Just about everywhere in the world, there was sympathy for the USA right now. I thought they'd use that to create treaties and resolve all of the ills that had contributed to the events of 9/11.

In short, I was believing more of my Wyoming friend's bullshit than I realised I was.

The first sounding of a wrong note was when it was announced that Al-Qaeda had done this before that organisation had claimed it. I remember exchanging puzzled glances with Kate, because that was way too soon. We're British and we grew up with the IRA bombing England for decades. We both knew how this was supposed to play out. It didn't even sound like speculation. It was Al-Qaeda and that was that. I let it go, figuring that the truth would come out in the wash. Al-Qaeda did subsequently claim it, so that early call was proved correct. However, it's always left a small grain of suspicion in the back of my mind. I have nothing but that too early call to fuel it and I don't genuinely believe that anyone but Al-Qaeda flew those 'planes. It's just a niggling deep inside.

In the months and years that followed, a great wave of anti-Americanism swept over Europe. Someone got knifed to death in Hyde Park, just for being American. All of the old, racist Irish jokes got brought back out with the nationality changed. New ones were added to it, all of which perpetuated the stereotype that all Americans are unintelligent, as well as being vicious thugs. The jokes became so commonplace that even I, usually so vigiliant in cracking down on racism, stopped noticing them. It took a wake up call from an American friend, shocked that I hadn't spoken up, to knock me back on track.

The reason for it all was disappointment. We'd seen an opportunity for world peace, which instead became an excuse for endless war, the removal of civil liberties and a concentration camp built in Guantanamo Bay. Ten years on, I still feel so sorry for all and everyone who was lost that day; and all killed since in the name of 9/11.

Grace Petrie Will Own Your Soul

I unashamedly love Grace Petrie.  It's always nice to hear the thud of something coming through the post that isn't a bill.   But when it's a jiffy envelope with the latest Grace Petrie CD inside, then you know that your day is about to be wonderful.


'Tell Me A Story' comes in a fold around, recycled cardboard cover.  Inside, it informs us that 'no trees were harmed in the making of this CD case'.  LOL  She included a couple of coasters, bearing doodles and the legend:  'Be strong, be resilient, be young, be fucking brilliant'.   It's a refrain that we all know from the last album, as it's belted out in the song, 'Inspector Morse'.   I didn't actually need the physical CD, as I'd already downloaded the electronic version of this album.  But Grace Petrie is going to be huge.  I want the kudos of saying that I bought the CD before anyone had heard of her.

It's not often that you watch the heir apparent to a rock'n'roll legend being handed a touch of the baton.   It may have happened in private already, or in some Leicestershire music venue, but this was the public bestowing.    Glastonbury, Leftfield, 2010.   Grace Petrie's festival debut.

In truth, we were only in there because it was so unbearably hot outside.   This was a marquee.   It had shade and, if you braved a quick dash in the sunshine, a nearby vendor of fine ciders.    Billy Bragg told again his oft-repeated story of attending the Rock Against Racism gig, in London, some time in the Middle Ages to hear him tell it.  He saw the Clash and was politicised by the passion of that great punk orator, Joe Strummer.   To say that Billy Bragg then spent the next few decades being inspirational, to a generation of left wing leaning people, is like implying that the Pope is influential in the world of Catholicism.  

One such fan is Grace Petrie.   She listened to Bragg, in both the music and the politics, and learned to play guitar.   When Bragg turned up to play a gig in her native Leicester, she waylaid him afterwards and handed him a CD of her songs.   He liked them so much that he contacted her and asked her if she would like to play Glastonbury.

Can you imagine that?  How must that have felt?   "Hello, this is your idol on the 'phone.  Would you like to play your own songs at the biggest, most legendary festival of all time?"   I wonder if she actually screamed down the receiver, or managed to keep her decorum until she had hung up.  

I was in the Leftfield, sipping cider in the shade, when Billy Bragg introduced her.   Everyone was sitting on the grass, but one woman stood up, right in front of me and my friend, totally blocking our view.   We raised our eyebrows in silent indignation, but being very British and polite, we held our tongues.   It was nothing that a bit of shuffling across couldn't solve.

(Later on, we had to forgive her.  This turned out to be Molly, Grace's girlfriend, with her face moist with proud tears, standing up there so she could film this momentous occasion.  Molly gave me such a hug afterwards, overwhelmed with it all to the point of trembling.  With the gig and Grace playing; not with the fact she was hugging me, just to be clear here.)

Grace Petrie's set was amazing.   We all paid attention.   As the songs poured out, one after another, we even got up to dance.   There was a familiarity here.   None of us knew her (apart from Molly and the gang from her 'hood, obviously), but she was a fan.  She was an ordinary person, who had got to go up on the stage and she was so gleeful about that.   She took us with her.   It helped that the songs were good.    She was 'our' Gracie by the end of it (Gracie Fields held that fond moniker for way too long).    


She came back to the Leftfield this year.   2011 was a year of mud and sunshine and the crowd was even bigger.  Word was getting around.   Another friend came with us to see what all of the hype was about.   "She's like a female Billy Bragg, isn't she?"   Yeah, she is.   Just like Billy Bragg is a protegy of Joe Strummer.   I saw the baton being passed on.    It was great.