Re: [AGA-mcm] Legal Stuff

[Larry Lampert <l_lampert@yahoo.com>]

Yeah a lot of this really makes my blood boil when you
consider that each of the speakers got a personal
email from me explaining exactly what I had available
and asking them to detail any special AV needs. I
guess in their minds their needs were not "special"?

The funniest part about the speaker who deleted his
talks was that his slides were not that great. It was
his delivery and interaction that made them great. If
you just tried to use them without him they were very
mediocre at best.

I agree we have a good thing going, I only wonder for
how much longer. 

I stand by my original intent though. The first
priority is to archive for historical purposes the
talks. I understand that most folks don't think the
talks will have any historical value in 5-10 or 20 yrs
as they become dated but that is what they said about
my dad's baseball cards from the 1940-50s when they
through them out in the 1970s !

Having the DVD for sale is a great value add but it is
secondary. That being said there are a number of other
things that also make our group easier to work
with.....

Regards,
Larry
--- Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com> wrote:

> 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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