The fact that people borrow our music CDs for one night now (instead of 3 weeks, as before) indicates that they simply upload it to their PC. We don't approve, but have no control over that.
These problems will not go away, but they are far too big for a brief blog post.
As a user of blogs for years, and a friend to hip-hop and DJ mixers and other samplers, and a fan of William Burroughs and the cut-up method, I know that every time I grab an image from Google Images I should check if I am entitled to use it, but I don't have a whole team of researchers on the payroll, and would willingly acknowledge and credit (or remove) wrongly posted images, but the whole trend of the Web remains in the opposite direction, of 'information wants to be free!'
I know we have to find a way to pay our artists, authors and musicians. Of course, anything they do live is still within their control (Banksy, Will Self writing in a gallery, any live music gig), but recordings have become contentious ever since the means of re-production fell into the hands of the consumers.
So, just because I was echoing Conan the Librarian when I named this blog, I will put the original image here. After all, I found it easily enough. Or should I just point you to Flickr, and make you click through once? Um.
According to Wikipedia:
Probably the first printed Conan the Librarian reference is in a 1987 Mother Goose and Grimm comic. A pig returning a book to the "Overdue Books" section faces across the desk a scowling and muscle-bound librarian, in typical Conan the Barbarian dress, who from the placard on the desk we know is "Conan the Librarian."
Full Entry in Wikipedia - now, I know some people still sneer at the fallibility of Wikipedia, but you won't find any of that information in The Encyclopedia Britannica
And anyway, as Robert Anton Wilson pointed out, even printed Encyclopedias do not all agree on facts...
"Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia."
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