Creator of the GIF: "It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of story." http://t.co/jOXN1Hgv3p
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 21, 2013
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Category: Uncategorized
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Interview featured on the Optimizely Blog
I was featured in an interview with Cara Harshman for the Optimizely Blog in 2013.
While the original post isn’t live any longer, Archive.org comes to the rescue. It can be seen here:
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Jonathan Coulton, Baby Got Back, Glee, and Copyright
Disclaimer! I am not a lawyer! These are just my musings, if you ARE a lawyer, I’d love to hear back from you as to whether I’m on track. Also, I call myself a Code Monkey. That’s also a song by JoCo. It’s awesome, and you should listen to it.
If you’re here, I’m going to assume you’ve heard some details on the current situation of Glee ripping off Jonathan Coulton’s cover of Baby Got Back. If not, read JoCo’ summary first.
My understanding of the general consensus is that as the “cover” is a licensed cover, he doesn’t have any specific rights to protect it from Glee using it.
The musical arrangement that the covered lyrics were set to was 100% original, and JoCo released a Karaoke track that omits all of the covered lyrics.
It is my contention that the Karaoke track is not a cover, and is instead a wholly original work, and as such, JoCo owns rights to the melody to which his cover was set.
Let me rephrase it another way:
If I write a little tune that I find to be catchy, and release it, I would own the rights to it. If, later, I purchased the rights to cover a song, and put the lyrics of the song to my completely unrelated tune, would I still have rights to my original tune? Or would the fact that I happened to combine the two rob me of the rights to my original tonal creation?
If you believe I would lose my rights, then I licensed my tune non-commercial Creative Commons (as JoCo did) and a third party took it and did a non-commercial cover version of a different song to said tune, would that then rob me of by rights to the tune? The actions of a unrelated third party licensing it can rob the original rights-holder of his rights to the licensed tune?
If you have a different answer to each of the last two questions, I’ve gotta ask why. Because, for me, both of them seem to be a firm “Yes, I should keep the rights to the tune”
In fact, that is why the law reads:
A compulsory license includes the privilege of making a musical arrangement of the work to the extent necessary to conform it to the style or manner of interpretation of the performance involved, but the arrangement shall not change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work, and shall not be subject to protection as a derivative work under this title, except with the express consent of the copyright owner.
As such, I question whether the portion of JoCo’s Baby Got Back that was a wholly new melody (that was ripped off by Glee) would suffer the same shackling to the original rights holder, when I would consider that melody to not be a derivative work, and the ‘cover’ to in fact be a derivative work (as it has a wholly new melody).
The law says that it can’t be a derivative work if it keeps the original basic melody. JoCo didn’t. So — derivative work?
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CSS3 Snow!
So I got a bit irked the other day when looking to sort out what sort of method I’d like to use for putting snow on a website. All the options just looked bad. Some were using images (which I’d prefer to avoid) — others were using crazy javascript hijinks. I figured there’d have to be a simpler way.
So I wrote one. It’s not perfect, and it’s not quite a ‘drop-in’ (read: you’ll need to test it before pushing it live. Tweak the speed, height, etc to your heart’s content). It was originally written to only put snow in the header of the site — not over the whole page.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5581009/snow.html
Enjoy! Any questions about implementation are welcome!
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The Seven Deadly Theming Sins
Here’s my slides from my talk earlier at WCPhilly
Download: Seven Deadly Theming Sins
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I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Philly 2012!
Looks like I’ve been accepted to speak this year at WordCamp Philly! I’ll be rambling on about the “Seven Deadly Sins of Theming” — a look at the ghastliest and most horrifying grievances that are made against best practices when making themes — specifically those for commercial consumption.My main bullet points (so far) are:
- Copying Snippets (without understanding what they do)
- Bundling Plugins (just slapping them in your theme directory)
- Assuming Plugins (calling plugin functions directly from your theme without checking that they are available first)
- timthumb.php (using it when the existing WordPress thumbnails functionality is secretly better)
- CDN-Hosted JS, and using it the wrong way.
- Hardcoding CSS & JS links (rather than enqueueing them properly)
- Ignoring Child Themes (or, why your template directory is not the same as your stylesheet directory, and the importance of knowing the difference)
- Failing to take internationalization into consideration
- Hacking Core Files. (I’ll punch you in the throat through the internet if you do it)
I’ll probably be cutting or merging a few (to keep it at seven) — but please feel free to make any suggestions of egregious violations that you’ve seen in the comments section below!
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WordCamp Boston 2012
I’ll be speaking this year at WordCamp Boston! Date and time to follow as I learn more, but my talk will be titled “Old, New, Borrowed, and Blue” — we’ll be looking at the classic ‘Kubrick’ theme that shipped with WordPress until 3.0, and bringing it up to date with HTML5 and CSS3!The theme has traditionally used images to achieve the rounded borders and gradients it displayed. Fortunately, these are all achievable with modern CSS technologies, and in this talk, we’ll look at why and how we can implement them!
Come say hi!
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Detect mobile devices in WP 3.4
So there’s a new function in town for detecting mobile browsers — no need to rely on the syntactically incorrect $is_iphone!
Azaozz added in the new wp_is_mobile(); — no parameters, and it returns a Boolean — true or false. Its a great way to future-proof your code, and outsource the browser detection to core, rather than having to maintain it as new browsers and devices get released.
Enjoy!
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Windows Phone 7 is Obnoxious
Especially when trying to manage dropdown/flyout menus.
I’m trying to sort out a way to make the WP core admin UI friendly to Mobile IE, but it doesn’t actually care about the `ontouchstart` event. At all.
All it sees are clicks.
George Stephanis 