Urgly burgly! It’s all been go in our house these past couple of days. Whilst I’ve been finishing some rewrites on my 2nd book (which will be the first rewrites of many), my Laura wife has been fighting for the rights to her own business!
Bla bla bla, you can read all about that headache over on her blog. The cool stuff that I want to tell you about is how the entire internet world has gotten behing her and rallied in her defense (Whooh! It’s a good job ‘defense’ doesn’t mean anything rude, like… I better not finish that sentence, because I don’t want to die).
Anyway, anyway, anyway, she had this big thing where one of her designs was being all copyright theft…ed (or infringed, I don’t know) and she wrote a blog post and tweeted about it, and before you know it her story is running on the front page of some things (can you tell I researched all the details real good?) and the entire crafting community jumped to her aid and it’s become really big and everything.
How awesome is that? She was in need of help, and even though they had nothing to gain from it, a mass of people came to fight in her corner. I LOVE this! A similar thing happened in the crafting universe a few years ago when one blogger’s little egg cosy design began to appear in a huge supermarket beginning with T and ending with ESCO. Aparrently this kind of thievery goes on a lot in the land of craftdom, but luckily there are the craft warriors all looking out for each other, and fighting the corporate bullies into submission.
So, yes, the internet can be used for bad things, like arranging riots and looting and horrible crimes and bad porn, and searching for independent designer to pilfer from, but it can also be used for good things too, like catching looters and preventing horrible crime, and nice porn, and gathering together to protect the little man (I mean the everyday person, not just Warwick Davis). Yes, people and the internet can be and are awesome.
Does this happen in other industries too? I only ever hear of it happening with crafty designer folk (the mass internet defense, not the mass corporae thievery unfortunately). I hope so. I also hope it happens in day to day life stuff too, because I have a serious bone to pick with one particular nob of a bus driver… and traffic warden… and train ticket inspector… and lady at supermarket checkout…
United we stand.
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Your wife’s industry cannot loose now Mr Clempson! (Can I call you Tom? I’m going to call you Tom)
*Rephrase*
Your wife’s industry cannot loose now Tom!
P.S I can’t wait to find out more about Jack Sampsonite 2, I leant it to a friend and they loved it as much as me!
PLEASE just answer one question… Does it have an equally long subtitle?
Completely forgot to reply to this! Sorry Nathan. In answer to your question… It’s only a working title but… *counts number of words in title*… exactly the same amount of words! (five syllables shorter though, but shhhh, no one needs to know!)
I went through a very short lived phase in high school of enthusiastically trying to “get into” comic books (I’m sure a guy was involved somewhere) and decided that a brilliant sleeper superhero (sleeper: seemingly innocuous) would be an old granny who goes ape shit with a set of knitting needles, ninja throwing stars style.
This story has reminded me of this dormant, but brilliant idea.
Oh, and this story has shocked and appalled me too. Subject wise I mean, not writing style wise.
I also have to admit it adds a bit of sexy, dirty intrigue to the craft world that I would not have otherwise attributed it with.
I saw Laura facebooking and tweeting about this, it was just disgusting. But so awesome that so many people got behind her.
It happens in the book world too! Either earlier this year or sometime last year, Speak by Laurie Halse Andersen was criticised by a religious bloke in America who didn’t think it was suitable for young adults, said it was soft porn because a girl is raped, and wanted it banned (if you’re interested, more here: http://madwomanintheforest.com.....rnography/) . As you can imagine, the book blogging world went mental. Despite all the disgust at what the guy said, it was really quite awesome to see so many people – readers and other authors (of adult as well as YA) – defend Speak. It was awesome!
Thank god (or someone) for bloggers!