Cite?
Cite?
Cite?
I note that the second half of your post was cited. So OK, I’ll buy that. Please make the remainder of your argument compelling instead of innuendoish.
Statement from Webb alleging Moore stole image: NOT CHECKED
Oh, how embarrassing. When it seemed so simple.
You posted it yourself in this very thread:
It sounds like you are now admitting that Moore did not dupe soldiers outside of Abu Ghraib. If that is not your position, please clarify.
Moore never really characterized it at all. The media did.
You implied it yourself when you said that Moore should have “reported” the footage. If there was no criminality then why should he have reported it (and who should he have reported it to?)
I would have to see more of Moore’s comments in context. It seems to me like he was conflicted because while the footage did not show criminality it still might have been newsworthy. On the the other hand, it was not so shocking or newsworthy that it would have been received in good faith by the media. He would have been crucified. I think he came to the (correct) decision that the footage was not significant enough to warrant any urgent public release. I would also hazard a guess that if he had done so, and you had actually seen this footage you’re getting so worked up about, you would have defended the soldiers in question and attacked Moore for scandalmongering and self-promotion (remember, nobody, including MM, knew about the AG torture photos yet. The behavior in the F9/11 footaghe only seems omnious in light of those photos. Without the knowledge of what went on inside Abu Ghraib, the footage seems like nothing.
Then why did you say that he duped soldiers outside of Abu Ghraib?
Why does it matter if those soldiers in the hospital knew who they were talking to, btw? How does that undermine the validity of that footage? How were those soldiers injured?
Argument for what, exactly? Is this supposed to prove that Moore deleted Webb’s credit and comments? Various posters on this thread, including myself, first saw this image without any credits on November 3; it showed up on blogs all over the net on that day in the same form. Judging by the report at moorelies.com, the image first appeared on Moore’s site four days later, on November 7. (Has anyone even seen a version of the image prior to that that did include the credit?) Liberal reports that the image appeared in Spiegel Online; Webb’s own comments imply that it has appeared in newspapers. Yet somehow the circumstances are supposed to point to the evil Moore’s having been the one who intentionally removed the artist’s credit from the thing.
It’s an already widely circulated internet joke, for Christ’s sake. You’re not going to see it credited when it appears any more often than you will the picture of the cat giving the finger or the list of wines sold at Wal-Mart.
Bowling for Columbine: the title.
Bowling for Columbine: see above.
Bowling for Columbine. And Matt Stone and Trey Parker are not very happy about it.
I really didn’t think I’d have to cite, especially since his M.O. extends all the way back to Roger and Me. But I’ll do just about anything for a fellow Coloradan… 
[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
Bowling for Columbine: the title.
How is the title “ripping people off?”
You are aware that parody is protected free speech, are you not? You are aware that a title cannot be copyrighted, are you not? You’re flat out wrong on the law here.
Are you fucking serious? This is your fucking lame ass attempt to show that Moore has a history of using unattributed work? That he used a play on words in one of his titles? Have you been eating fucking paint chips? This does not count a as a cite, fella. Try again. You have failed to support either of your first two statements.
You’ll have to be more specific. How did Moore “alter images” of Stone and/or Parker in BFC?
I’ll take that as a confession that you can’t cite shit. Big surprise.
I am shocked to hear that making a play on words on the title of the old show Bowling for Dollars is considered a rip off. You may be thinking of Fahrenheit 9/11. Titles are not copyrightable. If I chose to, I could write books titled The Sun Also Rises, Shane, or The Silence of the Lambs. There is no legal, or, more importantly, ethical reason I couldn’t. Sorry, I don’t think your argument is compelling yet.
Well, let’s not turn this into another movie debate. Oh, and the worst sunburn I ever got in my life, almost sun poisoning, was at Vega Reservoir. Can you fix it so it’s safe for me to go there again sometime? Turn down the sun or something? I liked it.
That Michael Moore continually commits one or more Straight Dope Cardinal Sins. If he were a member, he’d have been banned a dozen times by now. Yet when he says anything against the Bush Administration, he’s all but lionized.
I’m pretty puzzled about that.
And I couldn’t care less who drew the map, but how fecking hard is it to attribute it to someone? Even “unknown author” is better than what Moore has done.
Same, same. Dude, Where’s My Country does it too.
Yep, you could write them, but you’d be considered a hack, just like Michael Moore. A political book about the 2004 election titled The Silence of the Donkeys has a nice ring to it, sure, but the author would clearly be springboarding off of the original art. Unlike a true parody, this pays no proper attribution to The Silence of the Lambs, it just ganks the title. That’s not right, and as an author, I think it’s unethical.
I am wearing sunscreen right now. Inside the house.
There’s nothing unethical about it. Plays on other titles are as common as dirt for movies, books, songs, you name it. It’s only a “ripoff” if an individual is tryingto claim credit for someone else’s work. No one with an IQ over 50 would say that Moore was trying to claim credit for Fahrenheit 451 or for Bowling for Dollars or for Dude, Where’s my Country. It is self-evident parody.
You have still not been able to substantiate your assertions against Moore.
Dude, Where’s My Car.
To Carnalk:
Michael Moore is incapable of irony. That would require more than the particle of brain that is currently lost somewhere in the fatty mass between his ears.
You do not have to spend more than five minutes at Michael’s website to spot the obvious: He really is rooting for the bad guys. He sincerely wants to see America suffer a bloody defeat in Iraq. He probably masturbates to the beheading videos (assuming he can find his dick under that massive gut of his). His wife actually shares a bed with him? <shudder> <shudder> <shudder>
Kudos to aldiboronti and **El Cid Viscoso ** for simply dismissing this slob for what he really is - a big, fat, hairy dingleberry on a hyena’s ass.
So you’ve got what, like a 5% success rate on admitting when you’re wrong? Certainly you’ve got too much time, and not enough compassion and decency, on your hands.
Daniel
That’s a valid point of view, and one you share with Ray Bradbury. I will admit that I would be more comfortable with the naming if the art shared some points of reference with the original. That said, I disagree that it is unethical, and I suppose we’ll continue to disagree.
I’ll take “Rhetorical Questions” for 200, Alex.
If you go to the picture on Webb’s site that Liberal originally posted, you will note that it says, “Please copy, don’t link.” It sounds like Mr. Moore is using the picture responsibly, though he apparently has an older version that doesn’t have the text.
It’s a rare turn, around here, when disagreement can be so terribly pleasant.
You’re right. I stand corrected. They are indeed separate incidences, and I knew better.
Actually, the things I’m saying here are what Moore said himself to Matt Lauer in an interview that I saw on television.
As I said (and he says), he himself thought it sufficiently bad that he pondered reporting it and decided not to — not because it wasn’t bad enough, but because he didn’t trust the mainstream media. And again, that was ironic because he was making the rounds of the mainstream media to promote his movie. And he was speaking to a mainstream media guy, Matt Lauer.
Here is a transcript:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5239322/
I suppose because I was sloppy. Dealing with Moore’s dishonesty is like dealing with Marcia Brady’s petty problems — it’s just a thicket of things melding together, all sounding much the same.
I can’t believe I have to explain this to you. A man has a right to know who is asking him questions and how he intends to use the answers. Aren’t you the one with whom I was discussing levels of misrepresentation in debates? Shouldn’t a wounded soldier merit at least as much consideration as a debating Doper?
Just as I suspected, I was once again wrong — this time in thinking that you might muster sufficient self-respect to retract your wrongheaded implication despite proof that you were full of shit.
Just because it is difficult to enforce doesn’t mean that the original artist doesn’t still own copyright. There are plentiful cites out there which indicate that yes, even if a lot of people swipe it from an artist on the Internet, it still belongs to the artist. Of course copyright applies to work distributed on the Internet.
Are you trying to say that unless the artist tries really hard to prevent theft or plagarism, that somehow it’s like they’re giving “permission” for people to steal or use the work? That doesn’t wash.
Let me give a “for example.” Let’s say I have a cute little idea and I make a graphic and I put it on my website. Within a short amount of time, it takes off far more than I imagined, and everyone’s stealing it. Then I alter the graphic and add my signature to it, but that original one is floating out there, other people have done stuff to it, including claiming ownership of it, and so forth.
Or, I make the little graphic, go back to hiding in my little hole for a week, and have no idea that other people have taken it, added their own signature to it, published it on their sites, claimed that they designed it (just adding your name to the bottom of a graphic and saying you designed it doesn’t prove that you did). People are doing all of this, and I’m none the wiser. Does that mean that I’ve given permission for everyone to use it and that now it is essentially akin to being in the “public domain”?
How so? If the graphic is watermarked, all one has to do is take a screen shot of the graphic and the watermark is gone.
Damn straight it’s not.
Okay, maybe the original artist (and by original artist I mean someone who can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that they’re the original artist—not just someone who put their name on the graphic or published a web page with their name on the credit as the artist), gave permission. But unless everyone who has re-published this graphic knows this, they are (technically) risking violating copyright.
We just don’t know. The artist could be offline and not be aware (yet) that the work is being copied hither and yon (unlikely, but possible). The artist could somehow missing the fact that the graphic is being used—could be only visiting eBay, not reading political sites, whatever. (Once again, unlikely, but possible). Hell, the artist could be in the hospital all this week, for all we know. It is extremely foolish to just assume that silence from the original artist means that everyone has license to use the graphic. If that were the logic, all the people who have swiped my graphics and photos (and who I don’t know about yet) have “permission” to use my work, because I haven’t discovered them yet and told them to stop. And that obviously makes no sense.
Probably, but since we don’t really know who the author of the graphic is, we don’t know that he has permission. Yes, I know that a reader from buzzflash says that Dave Ruderman did the graphic, but they could be mistaken, Dave Ruderman could be a fake name or he could be lying, we just don’t know.
Now, just so it’s clear again, I suspect that the original artist (and we don’t know who he is, though sure, it might be this Ruderman guy) is delighted that Moore, etc., are distributing his work. I suspect that he’s given permission in some form. It’s all probably quite all right. But as far as I can see, none of us really know for sure.
Admittedly, I am ignorant of the bandwidth aspects of web sites. Why is that Moore would be behaving responsibly by requesting the picture be copied rather than linked to. Is it to reduce bandwidth usage on the site Moore got it from? (And for that matter, if you link to a site are you using it’s bandwidth the entire time you’re linked to it, or just when you click on something or refresh the page?)