Hurry up and wait

Well, I signed up for the PLA National Conference to be held in Minneapolis this coming March, as a last minute "early bird". New vistas! Right now I'm most excited about attending the Friday luncheon meeting with Louise Erdrich, but the program is loaded with events I wish to attend. Now, what should I wear? I hope other MILI participants will come, too.

Beyond Fair Use?Lit/Folklore Instruction Aid? Enjoy the Widget!

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Good olde Led composed this piece on the basis of Lord of the Rings by Tolkien, who in turn received his inspiration from the Kalevala, the Finnish National Epic, ancient runes that were sung from generation to generation and gathered into a book in 1835. Eccentric British academics are nuts about Kalevala. So there, we're connected -- Finns, Brits, Led Zeppelin. Involves plagiarism and no concern whatsoever for copyrights. Grey area but brilliant results.

Praise the wiki

Interesting session on wikis and copyright issues in our meeting -- only I went home as confused as ever on copyright issues, especially with the conceptual side of it, dissemination vs. copyright protection. - But wikis, well, I became convinced of the virtues, if the community of a particular wiki really can be restricted for privacy, and yet no signing up required like Google likes us to do for everything, market research I'm sure for the most part. Never any real time these days for a thing to stand the test of time, just intuition, common sense, instant information, peer review will do for guidance, I guess--

http://www.esnips.com/doc/3e316533-cdb0-4d5f-a9da-bd24b5e5723d/03.The-Battle-Of-Evermore

Thing 10 again

Just a quick additional comment on copyright - at least one may use 10% or 30 sec of anyone's (?) video clip under the terms of fair use any time, apparently, with no dire consequences. Given all that's available out there, those are stringent terms I think!