Few people, when deciding to work on a business book, recognize what they are really creating. A book is not just an idea made real and and powerful. It’s not just a way to spread influence and generate business. It’s a database that you can mine to power much of your work moving forward. How…
The Kansas City Chiefs weren’t the only group of people who made astoundingly bad choices in the Super Bowl. Add these folks to your list of villains: the rapper Ye (formerly called Kanye West), who hawked swastika T-shirts, and Guy Bar and Ori Bejerano of the Israeli ad agency BBDO, who appropriated celebrity images to…
What’s the difference between fair use and piracy? Fair use is when I use your content. Piracy is when you use my content. That sounds like a joke. It’s not. It’s how people behave. And if the entity alleging piracy is a large company, it’s a business model. I touched on this Wednesday. But the…
After a year of study and more than 10,000 comments, the US Copyright Office issued its second report on AI and copyright. This report attempts to address the question of when works created with AI tools can be copyrighted. (A third report, to be released later, will address the contentious issue of the legality of…
The em-dash (—) is getting a lot bad press these days. Writers overuse it, and not coincidentally, so do AI language generators. An em-dash is a perfectly reasonable piece of punctuation, but if you’re going to use it, you might need a little more detail on when and how. So here’s a tutorial on the…
Popular Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin announced that she’s leaving the Post and joining a number of other writers to start a subscription-based Substack channel called The Contrarian: Not Owned By Anybody. To me, this looks like the start of a rush towards the exits for popular newspaper writers and what will be an increasingly…
I readily admit that I find the special-effects and superhero movies now flooding the multiplexes and streaming services to be tedious. But I recently discovered the antidote to all that: a movie that is utterly unique, action-filled, humorous, fun, and filled with drama and romance. It’s called Hundreds of Beavers. Prepare to have your mind…
Newsletter 71. Why technology’s long-term impact is unknowable, HarperCollins pays you to train AI on your books, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s imaginary world, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Everyone predicting the AI future is wrong I spent last Friday at MIT, attending a conference called “BIG.AI@MIT” (Business Implications of Generative…
When independent analyst Zeus Kerravala wrote up his own analysis of a Gartner “Magic Quadrant” review of vendors offering Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), Gartner insisted that his use of their graphic was a copyright violation. He ended up taking down the post. But the case raises an interesting question: can subscription-based research companies…