Steve Jobs

Samsung or iPhone? A screenshot worth a thousand tweets

18 October 2011 - 8:29am | Laura Scott

screenshots of maps apps on Samsung and iPhone

(Okay, maybe not a thousand. But a lot!)

So last night, I saw that John Gruber had favorited one of my Flickr photos from 2008: a screenshot of the Google Maps app on the iPhone. Hmm, what was that about?

It turns out quite a bit. I found Gruber's Daring Fireball post pointing out what appears to be Samsung's alteration and reuse of a screenshot image I created in 2008. You see, three years ago I blogged about iPhone apps I thought were a big deal — "game changers." (The post was cross-posted on BlogHer, where it got noticed.) Scroll down to see my excitement then about the ever-useful maps.app, with screenshot in question.

Some nice sleuthing there, John! I tweeted about it and went to bed.

New details in the sunlight

This morning greeted me with more references as this issue caught on. Retweets. The Next Web. Gizmodo. All the scraper sites that pull from them. (I haven't done a thorough search.)

Embarrassing for Samsung, if true. I'll leave judgment to you. But if it's true, it's also a violation of copyright and the Creative Commons license. Not that it's any skin off of my nose. But it's never good for image when marketing gets caught hawking apparent bulloney. (I can't help but wonder why a marketing department would not use screenshots from its own device? Would the Samsung version of the app really so unappealing?)

"The world has infinite knowledge," writer Jascha Kessler would tell his students, meaning that you really need to write what you know and research what you don't know, because the readers will see your bullshit. Of course, that's all the more true now in the web world, where search, social links, and literally a world full of readers are archiving, contextualizing, tagging, bookmarking, and remembering what you put out there. I'm not sure how Gruber found the image match. One of the image search engines, possibly?

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

Setting aside Picasso's original meaning for the moment, l leave you with the late Steve talking about design in 1994.

Good publicity out of the bad

Oh, and by the way, Efrain's II is indeed the best Mexican food in Boulder. I'm glad they got some free indirect publicity from all this. The green chile is to die for.

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"We don't want the whole world to be a college dorm"

5 May 2007 - 7:20am | Laura Scott

So says Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and US sales for Sony BMG. That's right, the company that betrayed such contempt for the consumer by deliberately infecting its music CDs with its Rootkit, before stopping when it faced major PR and legal backlash, still has plenty of contempt for the consumer.

The article on the Forbes website -- itself littered with interstitial and numerous pop-up ads that make you just want to hurry back and experience more -- covers how music industry executives are fretting over life in the digital age.

“No intellectual property business is going to cross the digital divide without figuring out how to protect its content and to ensure that transactions are associated with the acquisition of content,’’ Nash said. “The music industry simply has to solve the content security problem or risk the obsolescence of its business model.’’

So says Warner's senior vice president of digital strategy and business development. In other words, the world must conform to their business model, not the other way around.

At issue is that people who buy and download music might do what they have been able to do for decades: copy it and share it, which is something you still can do if you buy a CD.

Says MacDailyNews:

The horse left the barn decades ago when the music industry opened the doors wide and began selling billions of Compact Discs without DRM. Hence, most of the music sold today is already without DRM and, we can get any new release for free - just like being in a college dorm - on the day of release via P2P. Don't steal music.

Lastly, it doesn't matter what the music labels' agendas are, the only agenda that really matters is Steve Jobs' - and his seems focused like a laser on DRM-free music sales.

DRM-free music is already here via CDs and P2P. There is no logical reason to try to restrict legal online downloads with DRM - all you are doing is turning people towards pirating music and/or turning them off from using legal online stores like Apple's iTunes Store.

It never fails to amazes us how some people in the music industry don't understand the absolute basics of their business model.

We're all criminals. Especially those of us in college. That seems to be the message from the executives. How's that for "business development" strategy?

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