DISQUS

Yeah, I think this is the bottom line: it's not about "protecting users from themselves" or "maintaining the integrity of the iPhone experience". It's about inadequate power management. I've got a Nokia e65, a Nokia N95, a Sony-Ericsson P1i, not to mention several Windows Mobile phones, and they all manage to enable background processing without the battery dying after four hours, without exploding, without anything noticeably awful happening.

(They also support A2DP, another egregious failing of the iPhone.)

Fair Use is not a slam dunk, and particularly not in the case of photographs, music or video, which--unlike the text works which copyright law was originally intended to protect--can't be easily "edited" or "summarized": it's pretty much 100% or nothing. There's a possibility that the video maker could claim that his use was de minimus, since the photo appears for a very short period.

People seem to think that all one has to do in a copyright dispute is shout "Fair Use For the Win!!11!!", but it doesn't work that way. You can assert Fair Use, but unless a judge agrees, it's just an assertion.

Matthew, they didn't make themselves part of the story: they were "the story", in its entirety. This story wouldn't have existed without their efforts to disrupt things.

How is this different (other than the cowardly anonymity of it) than standing in the back of the crowd during a presentation and shouting out profanities from time to time, or firing off Nerf weapons at the presenter? After all, "no one gets hurt"...

What exactly do you see the Gizmorons "reporting on" in this particular instance, other than themselves....?

Matthew, I can't find a better word than "sabotage" for what they did at the Motorola presentation. Would you think it as amusing if it were, say, someone from Nokia or Samsung or another of Motorola's direct competitors who repeatedly interfered with Motorola's efforts to present...?

When someone can't be relied upon to behave themselves decently with even moderate consistency, then I'd say their "evilness" outweighs their "goodness". Looking a Gawker's recent antics (sabotage, invasion of privacy, etc.), I'd have to assume that any goodness was pretty much inadvertent, simply a consequence of the Law of Large Numbers...

Zoli, the core issue here is that this stunt was perpetrated by a couple of the Gizmodo kiddies who had been given, not "blogger" credentials, but actual press passes to CES. They were there as "accredited journalists", and broke the most basic rule of journalism: the reporter is not supposed to be the story.

Now, Brian wants to portray this as some sort of evidence of their "integrity", when it's simply evidence of their complete lack of anything remotely resembling professionalism.

Watching Gizmodo over the past week, I've noticed a distinct lack of ads from anyone other than Gawker Media on the site. Taking a look at Alexa, I see a precipitous drop in readership over the past week. Coincidence...?

Matthew, I'm not following you at all. Does someone's assessment that CES isn't interesting enough justify an ostensible "journalist" (over on Dave Pogue's blog, Richard is claiming that, rather than that, he's an "artist"...) making the news (and then reporting on the "news" he made)....?

Does it not occur to you that the response of the audience during a presentation which was disrupted by the Gizmodo kiddies that the company in charge there is a) incompetent or b) makes unreliable products....? It's certain that no one would immediately think, "Hey, I bet someone's fooling around with a TV-B-Gone!"

This is another low for Denton's ill-behaved children. I guess we should be grateful that no one gave Richard an irresistable portable projector so he could throw images of "Tubgirl" on people's screens. Oh, wait: he couldn't have done that anonymously!

A very bold guy. Hm.