Posts by Petra Jane
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Poor Eliza didn't have much luck with the fellas. I looked for husband #2 Fred Kennard on Papers Past and it looks like he abandoned Eliza and the family in 1899 - she took a case against him for desertion and was awarded 17/6 per week maintenance. The Magistrate's Court sentenced Kennard to a month's gaol with hard labour for defaulting on his maintenance payments at least half a dozen times between the maintenance case and his death in 1908. It looks like he must have been arrested for drunkenness quite a few times in those years, too. Court reports in the Press in 1906 and 1907 mention fines for breaching a prohibition order, which banned the sale of alcohol to people deemed to be "habitual drunkards" (typically, those arrested at least three times in a year for drunkenness).
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Only went to Laneway to see Cat Power, and I wasn't disappointed:
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This. So very, very this. Obviously as a woman, my head is only good for balancing ashtrays and being cropped out of photos, but I still can't wrap my head around why Moa are trying to establish themselves as a sophisticated, premium craft brewery by out-Tui-ing Tui.
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For some reason there is a consensus that our female athletes should look a certain way. One of Ostapchuk's track and field teammates, women's hammer throw contender Aksana Miankova, was lauded by Prime's commentators - not for her performance (she fouled half her shots and placed seventh of twelve) but because her curvy 80kg frame and pretty face were "proof you don't need to be a brute to succeed in this sport".
I discovered something while reading about why Caster Semenya probably threw her final: while the Olympics generally encourages "freaky mutants" (supertall basketballers, hypermuscular swimmers, cyclists with 28bpm resting heart rates) and the IOC doesn't bar athletes for being abnormally tall or tiny or broad-shouldered, it does reserve the right to bar female athletes it considers to be too butch - having elevated levels of male hormones. Androgens like testosterone are naturally present in all women, but can be elevated in women with conditions like polycystic ovary syndrome. As far as I can tell, hyperandrogenism is the only (non-doping-related) physical condition that can result in a qualified athlete being barred from Olympic competition, even though the links between female hyperandrogenism and athletic performance are tenuous at best.
For whatever reason, the IOC and the public regard masculine traits in female athletes as unsporting. Even if they're not caught doping with androgenic steroids, or with man-junk or stray Y chromosomes, any female athlete who looks too butch and burly must have an unfair competitive advantage over her svelte and sexy sisters, and that (apparently) makes them fair game for ridicule and scorn. That's why Prime's commentators feel they can be leery jocks, why Facebook is awash with the keen observation that the dude looks like a lady, and I suspect this is why Semenya didn't push herself to take the 800m gold. She wouldn't just be bombarded with prying questions about her private medical history - she would also face an inquisition over how much of her success she could take credit for, and how much was due to atypical testosterone levels.
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Russell Brown,
By using a CC-BY image without attributing it to Alex, those organisations aren't covered by the license. According to the Creative Commons FAQ:
A CC license terminates automatically upon a violation of its conditions. For example, if a user of a work distributed under a Creative Commons license fails to attribute the creator as required, then the user no longer has the right to continue using the work and may be liable for copyright infringement. The license terminates with respect to the user who violated the license, but it remains in effect for all other users so long as they are in compliance.
If you adopt a Creative Commons license and a user violates the license conditions, you have options for addressing the situation, from contacting the person and asking them to rectify the situation to consulting a lawyer to act on your behalf.
Of course, I don't expect most NZ journalists have a very clear understanding of how Creative Commons works. Again, education is the answer.
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Russell Brown,
Not under the stated CC licence. That only requires attribution.
Ah, but a Creative Commons license doesn't preclude a photographer negotiating other licenses for organisations to use the same photograph under different conditions.
I have several photos on Flickr under an Attribution-Non Commercial license. I can (and sometimes do) still negotiate an entirely separate license for a specific magazine or commercial website to use one of those photos. Creative Commons doesn't replace copyright or any other rights held by the author, it just says "here's the boilerplate license for anyone who wants to republish or reuse this work, if you want to use this work under these terms then you don't have to check with me first".
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Capture: Howling at the Moon, in reply to Alex Efimoff,
Cases like this one really make me despair - according to Wikipedia, you've licensed the photo under a CC-BY Creative Commons license. They don't have to pay or get explicit permission from the photographer of something licensed CC-BY, they only have to acknowledge who took the photo, and somehow that's still too hard for them to manage?
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Rather than comparing someone using your photos to theft/'borrowing' of physical property, I think a better analogy is discovering that your flatmate has been using your toothbrush on the sly. The toothbrush hasn't been stolen -- it's still there in the bathroom when you want to use it, and it's probably not going to materially harm you to keep using it, and maybe it really was an accident, but they've reduced the value of that toothbrush to you, and you'd still be justified in getting angry. You, as the owner of the toothbrush, should have a say about whose mouth it goes into.
I still think the best solution is to gently but firmly educate media outlets when they make these mistakes. Most of them gank photos (uncredited, usually) off Twitter because they're in a rush and honestly don't know any better. On Monday I did a quick straw poll of friends who work as journalists, and none of their workplaces had a policy about using images from social media, and none of them could recall covering the topic in the Grad Dip Journalism. It's largely left to the discretion of individual journalists/editors who in all likelihood picked up their knowledge of copyright and fair dealing in the playground. I've met altogether too many qualified, professional journalists who honestly believe that everything on the internet is "in the public domain". Like the pervasive myths about the 10% threshold and those ridiculous "no copyright infringement intended" notices on Youtube, these myths and rules of thumb get passed around the office in place of anything more official and accurate. If we want things to change, we need to assert domain over our own toothbrushes, and tell media outlets when they cross the line.
If the Herald had asked first, I'd wager that most people would have actually been quite chuffed. They could have checked who had taken the photo at the same time, to make sure that everything was cited correctly and all the photos were genuine. Instead, the collection dwindled from fourteen photos (most of them posted by local Twitter users) to nine, almost all of them from the Associated Press. One of the photos turned out to be from a French artist's book and wasn't even of the 'supermoon'. I wonder how much Herald staff time was wasted sorting out the mess.
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I'm still getting over the discovery of LOLbots! Where will this madness end??!
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Err...what do they really think this Code of Conduct is going to achieve, and how?
Will it act as a daily reminder to take a deep breath before stepping into a flamewar? History suggests otherwise intelligent, conscientious internet users haven't yet mastered that art. Will it make anonymous shit-stirrers front up and take responsibility for deliberately provocative remarks? Not when anyone can sign up for a free gmail address. Will the fringe-dwelling scaries use it to justify purging dissenting comments? Quite possibly.
Chris Locke's response made one good point: You Own Your Own Words. I'd much rather advocate that maxim, than this Code of Conduct. It can't exactly be enforced, but really...neither can O'Reilly and Wales' waffly playground rules.
