The Sures’ book was incidentally the subject of my second blog post ever.

Gosh.

pubkeeper Bilbo trying to make sense of threatening legal missive from Mordor

The copyright orcs at the Saul Zaentz Company were trying to shut down a pub named after The Hobbit, but thanks to enormous internet backlash, including Hobbit actors Ian McKellen (“as if it were possible to control the way Tolkien and his characters have entered the culture”) and Stephen Fry (“what pointless, self-defeating bullying”), as well as a facebook support page set up by student Heather Cartwright (“how long do we need to protect works for? do we protect the works of Mozart and Shakespeare?”), the orcs have backed down, saying it was all a “misunderstanding,” and the pub now need only pay a tribute of $100 a year – which is still too much (the right to freedom of speech shouldn’t come with a pricetag), but it’s a lot better than being forced to change their name or go out of business.

It’s good to see that concerted activism can succeed in shaming these companies out of their cyberbullying. And it’s more evidence for the strategic effectiveness of direct action over legislative reform.

Attempts to decrease the similarities by “turning the white male cop into a black female lawyer and giving the loner hacker a boyfriend” apparently weren’t good enough, because “the series is based around [sic] a hacker.”

Wtf? Sony claims ownership of the mere concept of having a hacker as a main character?

Or is it just that it’s a female hacker? Maybe DC comics should be suing Sony then.

In related news, the Moffat-Vertue axis is still sabre-rattling against CBS for daring to imitate the idea of an updated Sherlock Holmes series.

Now I love the hell out of Sherlock, and I doubt that CBS’s effort will even remotely measure up. But before the BBC folks decide to resort to violence over this, they might remember that the idea of Holmes-in-the-present-day is not exactly one they invented.

That has the virtue of sloganesque pithiness and the vice of being subject to obvious counterexamples. But I think it captures an important truth. Anarchism, for example, in effect calls for the open-source abundance, multiplicity of choice, and non-hierachical flatness that characterise the internet to be extended to the realms of politics, economics, and law. (And 3-D printing does the same thing for production.)

At a less substantial level, this story about how customers may soon be able to determine which movies are playing at their local meatspace theatres is another example of the same phenomenon.

DC is producing a prequel to Watchmen.

What Alan Moore thinks about it.

Why Alan Moore’s reaction is hypocritical.