The 2nd Annual Browncoats Backwoods Bash!

, , C. David Dent ,

Saturday, September 19th, at Spring Mill State Park just south of Mitchell, Indiana, at the Sycamore Shelter House, from 10:30am- Dark.

Come join your fellow Browncoats in a day of fun at our Annual Sereniverse Celebration. The Browncoats Bash is a pitch-in style picnic and so much more! The only mandatory cost is admission to the park, which is $5 per carload. Any other expense is purely voluntary. Here are some of the things we will be having and doing this year:

• A Singalong of the Firefly theme and "Hero of Canton" (earplugs optional)
• A Sereniverse Costume Contest, with prizes for both "Best Character Costume", and "Best Sereniverse Costume". So, dress in your best Western/Oriental clothing combination, and see if your "look" is a winner!
• Coloring for the kids and more! The Sycamore Shelter is right next to the playground, so please... bring the Little browncoats.
• Food! Like last year, "Good Dogs" will be provided, along with hot dog buns and condiments. There will be about 2 gallons of sweet tea, and a couple dozen cans of pop, so bring more if you're thirsty! There will be sliced apples with carmel dipping sauce (Grenades cost extra), and some kind of Hot Cheese for the Chips.

Please RSVP by e-mailing fossilfan_47401@yahoo.com if you plan to help out and bring anything. Chips and Vegetable trays are handy, and deserts are, well, yummy.

• Videos! I'm bringing the big TV again this year, to watch Firefly and maybe more, if we have time.
• Tour the Pioneer Village. We are tenatively planning to "theme" the Village Tour this year. If the Village Staff will allow it, we will plant pictures of various Firefly Characters in the Village. The name of the game is, "Where's Saffron?" Find the picture of Saffron, and you will win a prize. If it turns out we can't do this, we'll still tour the Village, because it is just TOO Shiny for words!
• Sereniverse Museum. A small table will be set up, with actual props from the Big Damn Movie. If anyone has an item they'd like displayed, please PM me.
• SWAG! We will have items for sale this year, with the proceeds going to a local Charity, Middleway House in Bloomington. They're a Shelter for and Counseling Center for abused women and children; a very worthwhile cause. Among the items available will be copies of the BDM, The Series Box Set, Dr Horrible's Singalong Blog, and more. Any additional 'verse-themed items donated will be gladly accepted.
• "Official" Merchandise! I have opened a cafepress shop, with Browncoat Bash tee shirts, mugs and tote bags. Proceeds will help defray the costs of throwing this little Shindig. So please, take a look and buy two of everything! http://www.cafepress.com/sibrowncoats

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED!

Obviously, we're hoping to do a lot this year, so any on-site help will be appreciated. If we have a lot of kids, someone to help monitor the playground would be helpful. Someone to manage the swag table while I burn the hot dogs... things like that!

A BIG advance Xie-xie to those planning on attending. And if you're not coming... why not?

"If you can't do something smart, do something that's Right!" -From the film "Serenity"

Care to Comment?

Twitter vs Copyright

, , C. David Dent ,

Does a "twitter novel" have a copyright? If you publish a "twitter novel" is that the same as throwing it away? Can someone else steal your work and claim it as their own or make money off of your ideas? This is what prompted this exchange:

Aloha Arleen The problem with tweeting a novel - It becomes public content which you no longer control or copyright.

MrDave2176In reading Twitter's Terms I don't see that. While the individual lines of your twitter novel may be hard to copyright indiv...

MrDave2176..idually the work as a whole remains yours. And it can be published, collected, or whatever. Controlling the distribution...

MrDave2176..of said work may prove difficult, but if the distributed version is altered or presented as original work you would have...

MrDave2176...a strong case. Sorry for the really long continued tweet.

AlohaArleen: the problem is that it IS a "case' in the 1st place! Consider content here free game. Unless quoted and/or copyrighted

MrDave2176 But the act of "publishing it" to the API with your name (your username) and a time stamp makes it copyrighted automatically.

MrDave2176 Your becoming a member of Twitter is an unlimited license to the API to re-publish your work for free.

MrDave2176 If someone published your work without using the API to retrieve it then you can reserve your rights if you so choose.

AlohaArleen so complicated and so very difficult to enforce...

MrDave2176 Very true. But the timestamp is the proof. It firmly places your work in a medium at a time. It estab. means and opportunity.

Matt Stewart is tweeting his entire novel "The French Revolution" on twitter. This novel has already been self-published. It is complete. Matt states that he's unconcerned about people stealing the novel. He is, as he puts it, "retaining all the copyrights. If you want to copy and paste 3700 tweets into a tangible book and sell it, we can wrastle [sic] over that later."

Author W.J. Howard's twitter novel The Courier isn't her first novel, but it is the only one she is twittering.

Writers have very specific rights concerning publication, copyright and ownership. The best summary of these I've seen is at Fiction Factor

"Rights = Usage, not payment. All rights cannot revert back to the writer. Once first rights have been used they cannot be reclaimed. One-time rights are self-limiting, make certain the market you're submitting to has a set time limit for usage."

In short legalese, publishing to Twitter means you are granting first e-rights to Twitter with an unlimited time limit to their API. While you can delete your tweets, they are still accessible to their search API as long as your are enrolled. The only sure way to remove them is to nuke the site from orbit delete the account. You do this for free. Twitter's terms of service mean that they do not hold any claim over your work (you do that) and they "encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms." By "progressive licencing" I assume they mean one of the many open-source licences like Creative Commons.

The way I see it, the best way to publish via twitter is to create an account for your novel. Tweet your novel tweets to it exclusively. Place a license statement in your description for the account along with a link back to the author account you use. Let people follow you as they will and if you want to withdraw the novel from Twitter, just delete that account.

Care to Comment?