August 3, 2004

• Dear Diary,

  
  

  It’s almost  midnight here in California. I fell asleep early tonight (around 7:30pm, which “used” to be about normal.) Before Cancerboy got cancer, and started to stay home full time (he is now working except for Wed.’s when he gets “the treatment” and Thur.’s after the treatment) I would spend time in the living room before he came home (from 3:30pm to 6:30pm) and then usually go to bed, then wake up from around 10pm or so when he went to bed, until sometime right around midnight, and go to bed again for a couple of hours until I had to get up at 4am for work. With him home full time, I stayed in the media room full time, (“my” personal living room, converted from a bedroom) and my hours were almost “regular”. (Except for the times when I’m involved with a computer art project, at which time I would sometimes stay up rather late.) Cancerboy is back at work now for over two weeks, so things are almost “back to normal”, where I can have a few hours in the living room before he came home. Earlier today, after arriving home, I had to get our rent checks, and take them to the Management company. It’s the 2nd, and rent is due on the 1st, but that was Sunday, and because the rental company has given us trouble the last two times we “dropped the rent in the mail slot” rather than give the checks to them personally (to the point of sending process servers to our door with “notices to quit” because of perceived non payment of rent) we prefer to get a written receipt. So we had to wait till Monday. I got off work a little late this afternoon (today was a “free day” at Court, so I could work all day, and got a lot done) and wanted to get over to the Management office before they closed at 4pm.

  
  

  When Joel came home, I “switched rooms” and gave him the remote to the living room TV, came back into the media room, where my puter is, and signed in to Yahoo. I received a rather startling email from a correspondent and fellow poet. She had received a guest book signing at the site where she posts her poetry. The signer wrote: “Nice poetry. But you stole them from me. I wrote these poems in 2001″ My friend was “livid”, as she put it in the email, and wrote me asking for “help” in the situation. The best I could do was point her to the copyright site the Library of Congress has on the internet, and a couple other sites dealing with copyright law. I told her I believe if someone posts his work, as we Xangans do on our blogs, or the stuff I put on my Webshots gallery, or on the AllThingsMike website, or her poems on the poetrypoem.com site, by default, as soon as the written word/photograph/poem/etc. is posted online, it is, in fact © copyrighted, all rights reserved, by the author of the work. I have been “copyrighting” my work in this fashion on the internet for over five years now.

  
  

  Upon closer inspection of the “copyright law” I found that in truth, one should “register” his work with the copyright office. I told my friend that I didn’t know what I would do if anyone claimed ownership of my over 650 poems I am posting on ElectricPoetry. I live in L.A., California, “Sue City”, where everybody seems to sue everybody else on a regular basis, whether the suit is warranted or not, and I mentioned that she might have to sue the person who is claiming to have written her poems. (Including, I might add, some rather personal stuff, which made my friend feel as if she had been violated, which in fact, is akin to violation of one’s talent.) I mentioned that I knew only of cases where this happened in Yahoo groups, and usually the thief was banned from the group, but I didn’t know exactly how to help my friend, and I got a bit depressed. I could empathize with her, but give no legal advice except to say perhaps she might have to sue the other person. My friend is less “livid” now that the poetrypoem.com folks did ban the thief from their site, where my friend posts her poems. As I thought, by posting to the poetrypoem.com site, she was in fact copyrighting her pieces, so everything is all right as far as my friend is concerned, but things like this bother me.

  
  

  One thing I knew when I began to present my art and poetry on the internet, was that I am opening up myself to just this kind of theft. I do use the copyright symbol on all my site pages, and everything I post on Xanga is original, and if not, I attempt to credit the creator. My poor friend collected an “internet thief”. Like in real life, there are internet thieves, stalkers, and abusers. If one wants to exist on the internet, they have to be open to the susceptibility of attack. I learned this early on, attempting to preach liberalism, ex-hippie “love”, and peace on Message boards across the internet right after Sept. 11th, 2001, when America decided (certainly not “my” decision) to invade Afghanistan to fight an ideology. Everyone had turned into a “hawk” overnight, and I was “flamed” quite a bit for my preaching peace in a time of war. The experience soured me on message boards for quite a while.

  
  

  I hope my friend doesn’t experience too much more trouble, and she let me know in an email tonight, as I came on the internet just now, that she is registering her work with the copyright office tomorrow, and the legal upshot is that once she registers, everything she posts on the internet will be copyrighted in her name.

  
  

  Just another pot hole on the information superhighway, I suppose. But this has never hit this “close to home” before.

  
  

  Well, now it’s half past midnight, and I’m wide awake. I still have to get back to sleep, get up at 4am, and go to work for three hours before going in to Court. The Plaintiff has rested his case (after one week), and the Defense is next. I’m juggling my duties at Court, and work rather well, and with the extra day at work yesterday, I accomplished a lot. Good thing the requests for quotes aren’t too numerous, so I have time to create schematics and job packs for in house work. One of the salesmen (who gets “credit” for one of my projects, although I am in fact the “salesman” I don’t have that title) came into my office yesterday,  and mentioned that the customer wanted to place an order for another 20 panels (we just shipped them 10, and we already have 25 in production) and how soon do I think we could build them. I told him I honestly didn’t know. They ship us all the components, we have to order the special enclosures, and our Production manager would actually be scheduling the work, so I couldn’t give him an answer. I did tell him that it was my hope when I developed the product (over two years in research and development, and now we’re finally getting orders because the machine for which we build the panel is in production finally, and orders for the machine, which pumps concrete, are being placed) I knew that as soon as the sales started “taking off” we would get orders. That’s what we want. In the old days, when I was in charge of everything concerning “the panel shop” I would make sure the orders went out on time. When the department became the tail wagging the company dog, then we spread the responsibility around to others, so I can’t give final answers. Everything has to “go through channels”. I always get a kick out of salesmen. We develop product, and know how to build something with little or no problems after all the engineering kinks are worked out, yet when the orders start rolling in, everyone gets “upset fueled” by the customer’s requests and orders. All we can do is do all that we can. It’s fine that I don’t shoulder all the responsibility anymore (which almost caused me to quit at one point a couple of years back, before the responsibility was spread out) but when I did, I could better answer these requests from salesmen and customers. I also purchased most of the parts for the panels, which is now done through purchasing, and I acted as my own expediter. I have an elephant’s memory (knock wood, as I age, I hope I don’t become too much more “forgetful”) and I was always able to balance design, production, and purchasing rather well. Sometimes I worked 15 hours a day, or had to come in on the weekend, or hire temps, or do anything I could to insure everything went smoothly. Now too many “cooks” can spoil the soup, as it were, and nobody can answer the salesmen or the customers, so inevitably the request gets made to me anyway. I just laugh it off good naturedly, and say, “Well, you’ll have to pose that question to production. We’ll bring it up in tomorrow’s meeting.”

  
  

  Almost 1am now, time to get back in bed, and get ready to wake up and start another wonderful day, with Work, Court, and Life. My weight is atrocious, I know, although I am afraid of weighing myself these days. If I drink too much alcohol, especially beer, the belly inflates, and I admit I have been “enjoying” the cold beers on hot days after work and on weekends. Didn’t have but one “malt liquor” this evening, and I got to sleep (the first time, anyway) rather easily.

  
  

  Well, good night, Diary. Or should I say, Good Morning!   

  
  

  ©®2004 Michael F. Nyiri, all rights reserved. Courtesy AllThingsMike™

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