Re: [AGA-mcm] Legal Stuff

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

All this posting reminded me of a couple other things...

Larry and I decided to try and sell DVDs of the speakers like I do with 
AGA.  I ran the idea by the ACA board, and between all the "that sounds 
great" messages, one came from their legal council, an Intellectual 
Property Lawyer, who told me I have to make the speakers sign over a 
waiver that essentially says the ACA can do whatever it wants with their 
talk slides.  When I asked about making it more friendly towards the 
speaker's rights, he hemmed and hawed about how that made it less 
defensible in court and all that.  Turned out that just SHOWING the 
speakers the !*@& waiver caused them to completely back off.  The cichlid 
folks are about ten times more scared about having their work ripped off 
than Christel even was, and as a result, I even had one guy rushing back 
to Larry's laptop after his presentation and making sure his talk was 
completely deleted off the hard drive.  Yipes!

I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a small club like ours 
can get *anything* interesting done in a 100% "legal" manner.  I am sure 
that if we had an IP lawyer on the board, we'd never be able to set up our 
e-mailing list (let alone a forum), and we'd have scared off all our own 
speakers from the DVD that everyone now just traditionally assumes will be 
sold.  Made me appreciate this group a lot more.

The other thing I appreciated was conventions that don't include 
Thursdays.  Both Thursday and Friday night the talks (some "snuck in" at 
the last minute) went on until 2 AM, and the next days' schedule proceeded 
at 9.  Not a lot of sleep, as Scott noted.  Pretty loopy by the end.

And I've never seen so many speakers with "special needs", as well as 
self-righteous spontaneous A/V geeks (hey, *I'm* supposed to be the 
only self-righteous A/V geek):

  *     Playing a video through an iPod that had the one connector
        combination I hadn't brought.  Could have downloaded the MP3 of
        "Money" by Pink Floyd and played it on my laptop & would have
        worked just as well.

  *     Needing a special mike that would work with "something I'm going
        to be wearing but I can't tell you what it is until it happens".
        Huh?

  *     bringing a talk on a Mac but without the VGA-out connector to
        actually play it

  *     Powerpoint talks with video clips, but forgetting to include the
        clips on the CD.  Boy, the ACA PR/graphics guy really wanted to
        argue with me how the problem was actually that the computer
        wasn't set correctly.

  *     Slide guy bringing his own remote and fretting for an hour before
        the talk that we wouldn't have the screen in the optimal position.
        (Actually this sounds exactly like something I'd do.)

  *     And the real zinger has to be the guy with the DVD that crashed
        Larry's laptop.  With the five people all trying to help & him
        sitting there insisting "it worked earlier" instead of trying
        another laptop, I think it was the one time I actually had to just
        walk away and say "OK, *you* figure it out then."   Ultimately
        worked on another laptop, but we didn't have enough time to set
        the aspect ratio right & it came out square.  Ironically, he
        refused his talk being included on a sale DVD, but wanted to know
        if he could get a copy of one of the other speaker's talks!

Not as bad as last year with the guy who brought his own projector rig 
that ran on 220 volts & required us to buy a hulking converter off EBay, 
but the breadth of unusual problems was larger.

  - Erik

--
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com
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