Korean Job Discussion Forums

NYC_Gal 2.0 · Joined: 10 Dec 2010

Logos aren't always appealing images. You don't know what you're talking about.

Copyright and patent offices exist for a reason. If I design something, I have a right to profit from that design. If someone creates a different, better design, then they have a right to take my customer base. If they blatantly copy what is mine and copyrighted, they are thieves and can be prosecuted. Good luck, Robin Hood.

Fox · Joined: 04 Mar 2009

NYC_Gal 2.0 · Joined: 10 Dec 2010

Logos serve more than just that purpose. They are recognizable brands. Sure, one wants them to look appealing, but it is a signature. That is the main purpose of a logo. Clear enough for you?

You say desperate, but you're the one with the weak argument. Project much? Have a lovely evening. Try not to steal anything.

Underwaterbob · Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Location: In Cognito

The problem I see with copyright laws is that they are little more than self-serving imaginary lines drawn between plagiarism and originality. For example, there's a definite length in seconds you're allowed to sample from a song and not pay royalties, over that and you're plagiarizing. Just take a look at the ridiculous hoops you jump through/evade to do a cover tune:

http://www.musicianwages.com/the-working-musician/recording-releasing-performing-cover-songs/

In the end, the institutions who invent and enforce these imaginary lines profit far more than your average artist.

Koveras · Joined: 09 Oct 2008

But Fox, she raises a good point. In a world without trademarks, how are my designer garments to retain their conspicuous exclusivity?

Madigan · Joined: 15 Oct 2010

Damn! Athena wants her Swoosh back. She should sue.

NYC_Gal 2.0 · Joined: 10 Dec 2010

There is a ratio to the Nike swoosh. It's more than just a brush stroke. It's vector art. The curve is always exactly the same, the angle, the head to tail proportion, etc... Athena's wasn't as detailed. That's why it's okay to copy the look of a Louis Vuitton bag, but once the LV logo is copied, it's a knockoff.

Anyway, to the OP, check out the Gutenberg project. There are plenty of legal free e-books from before 1923.

SinclairLondon · Joined: 17 Sep 2010

Too lazy to summarize the Gutebeg Elegies, which I read in college, but here is a review from Amazon..

Sven Birkerts doesn't approve of what you're doing right now. Reading (or writing) an on-line review of his recent book, _The Gutenberg Elegies_, is like discussing an exercise program over hot fudge sundaes: we are participating in the burgeoning electronic culture that Birkerts urges his readers to resist. He recommends we turn off the computer, stop our superficial surfing through web sites and TV channels, curl up somewhere with a good book, and -- here's the hard part -- actually read the thing.

Birkerts argues that reading books has become difficult for us, precisely because of our saturation with electronic communications media. Television began the destruction of reading; the computer and its electronic attendants have arrived to finish the job. As Birkerts' argues compellingly, the decline of the printed word means the tranformation fo the reading experience, which involves the deep and deliberately slow processes of imaginative thought. Such experience is undone by our desire for increasingly rapid movement across large arrays of text and images -- a desire both inflamed and fulfilled by evolving systems of electronic communication.

In _The Gutenberg Elegies_, Birkerts claims his place in a long and noble line of embattled humanists who have refused the seductions of the technological. According to Plato, the Egyptian god who introduced writing as a new technology praised its usefulness as an aid to memory and wisdom. The king of Egypt, however, took a different view. He saw the destructive potential of this new form of communication, which would eradicate the need for memory and the more patient routes to wisdom. Birkerts similarly asserts grave doubts about the electronic dispensations and sunny reassurances of such modern divinities as Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte. He asks us to tally our losses as we turn from ink marks on paper to strands of binary code flowing through microchips. Like the Egyptian king, he fears that we will learn to access archives without using our memories, and to command information without possessing wisdom. We will forget, Birkerts maintains, the importance of the private reading experience to the development of our secular souls.

We are unlikely to get a more eloquent champion of the sheer pleasures of reading books. Birkerts devotes his first seven chapters to the delightful sensual and mental phenomonology of the reading process. This is a book that makes you want to read more books, not by inflicting guilt so much as by reminding you of the unique satisfactions they -- including _The Gutenberg Elegies_ itself -- can provide.

The second half of the book considers our "proto- electronic" age and the slick beasts that slouch towards Silicon Valley to be born. As the father of a 5-year-old, Birkerts is particularly anxious about the evolution of human interaction in the coming decades. Often his book seems less of an elegy for something that is dead than a prophetic announcement that the moment of choice has arrived. In his happier moments, Birkerts hopes we may still stem the tide of electronic images and sounds, assert our love of printed materials, return to that comfortable chair with a cloth-and-paper codex in hand, and start reading again.

"Reading," for Birkerts, means reading novels. However, asserting this as an essential activity of humanity is historically problematic. Novels began to appear only about 200 years ago, and were themselves greeted by fierce denunciations from moral leaders, who saw this new entertainment as a corrupter of souls, an unwholesome distraction from more serious (i.e., Biblical) reading. Birkerts position curiously parallels this one, in that he emphasizes the "soul-making" importance of literature, now facing its successor in the form of the unholy electronic multimedia display. Is the novel another shell we've outgrown, or are we abandoning it, as Birkerts claims, "at our peril?" Birkerts neglects the similarly short history of the private reading private reading experience he champions, itself a luxury of the upper and rising middle classes of the past two centuries, who could afford literacy, leisure, and light to read by.

One can only praise _The Gutenberg Elegies_ as a moving record of one man's ongoing struggle with our brave new world. Even Birkerts' blind spots -- his inability to appreciate anything technological, his insufficient consideration of history -- are the result of his passionate sincerity. Everywhere his prose reminds us of its writer's commitment to intelligent human discourse: our birthright, which we may be trading away for a mere mess of data.