By the way, the reason the Veggie Tales lawsuit has become important has nothing to do with the thrust of the case. The thrust of the case was that Big Idea unreasonably wanted too much money for the privilege of distributing Veggie Tales, and that even though there was no written contract, Big Idea acted as though there was and should have been held to what that contract would have been.

The first jury decided Big Idea was guilty of being unreasonable to the tune of $11 million. That was overturned on appeal, and Big Idea (that is, Veggie Tales) won. I won't go into why there was nothing wrong in Big Idea turning down the distribution agreement, even though (1) they had already worked with the distributor for a while without an agreement, and even if (2) the only issue was the money. While it covers a completely different issue, you can see into my thought process by looking at Haiku's "Corporations and You, a Basic Primer" (since it's all over the map, my argument boils down to, "I also found myself talking with a teenage girl about her first job. ... The teenager to whom I was speaking commented on the potential employers and the low pay that she could expect as a teenager in their employ. ... The teenager was convinced that her potential employers OWED her a wage that was adequate for her personal needs and bills. I explained that she would feel no compunction about walking into a store and buying stuff that was on sale, using coupons, etc. The store should have the same capability to try to bargain-shop." Now replace "teenager" and "employers" with the two sides of this argument and you'll have an idea of how I see this; especially since making the most money you can is a major reason to be in business).

However, that's not the part that's important. The part that's turned out to be important was the part dealing with copyright. One of HIT Entertainment's arguments was that Big Idea had given them the copyright over various Veggie Tales shows (not permission, but the whole copyright). Copyright law requires a written document transfer copyright, but judges haven't been very faithful in following that law. Big Idea's case fell into that bin. There was no written "Big Idea hereby gives copyright to HIT Entertainment for the following shows," but there was an internal memo regarding the lawsuit, between two non-lawyers saying they thought HIT might have a legal case, and that they may have accidentally given HIT the copyright. Since the law doesn' require any magic words (it doesn't even require a contract -- you can transfer copyright in your will, for instance), the "written document" standard is pretty broad. Part of the appellate decision was that the written document standard isn't broad enough to cover this case. Yep, that's something the first trial got wrong too.

Because of yesterday's comment about Veggie Tales, I spent quite a lot of time reading up on the company history. Before I go anywhere, let me make it perfectly clear that Vischer was capable of building a $40 million company. Yes, reading his account brought back vague recollections of Roc Games, but I'm not going to kid myself. Roc never made $1 million in sales. Roc never made $1,000 in sales. While I didn't see the figures, during the four months I was at Roc, I doubt we had a total of $200 in sales, and to be honest, that's probably highballing it by a lot. Of course, Roc was eventually sold to Inner Circle Games, and they seem to be doing good things with it.

And Roc didn't start with a $60,000 loan. The four months I was at Roc were four months of getting ten or fifteen product lines ready to sell, and actually releasing two. It was spent setting up the eCommerce infrastructure, and handling lots of strange details. It was also spent trying start a conversation with the market. It was a wonderful experience, and to be honest I'd love to give it another go if I didn't have all the adult responsibility I have now. If I did give it another go, I'd probably take up polyphasic sleep.

Back to the story. Reading about Big Idea's fall reminded me of Lucid's fall (PDF, starting on page 182, which is labeled page 177). It also reminded me of TJIC (by the way, if you missed this, you missed a lot), Coyote, Paul Graham, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, and several other companies and people that didn't fall.

Paul Graham got forced out of his company because his new MBA CEO read Crossing the Chasm, which recommended that the founder leave a company when it was trying to get past that dangerous ground that killed Big Idea (of course, the MBA CEO killed Lucid even so). Then again, Eric Sink swears by Crossing the Chasm. But following the advice in Built to Last seemed to help push Big Idea over the edge.

Vischer wrote

We were proposing to double our staff size, without increasing our ability to produce films. Of the 165 hires being requested, only a handful were in the animation studio. Ninety percent were in finance, HR, marketing, licensing and design. So at 315 people we would be able to produce no more videos per year than we had produced five years earlier with a staff of 10.

I know what you're thinking: "don't add people without adding value, if your 165 hires weren't going to make it possible to make more movies, they weren't needed; leave a position unfilled for three months before deciding if you really need to hire somebody, etc." On the other hand, Big Idea was making $40 million per year at this time, and hadn't had anybody really watching the books. General Motors was the most profitable car manufacutrer during the Depression because Alfred Sloan (as in "MIT Sloan School of Management") decided to hire hoards of accountants in the 1920s, and those accountants were able to figure out that something was up before the big stock market crash. GM was able to react to the market before other manufacturers even realized something was wrong. And Competing on Internet Time says to build the infrastructure of a big business early, and grow into it (so does Business at the Speed of Thought). Then again, Coyote says that MBAs teach you how to run big companies with big accounting departments; his Harvard MBA doesn't help him at his "small" business.

Which is right? Well, clearly it depends on the specifics. You often need to make business decisions like the ones facing Big Idea in 1999 without the privelege of having all of those important specifics. Which, by the way, is why I would love another go at running a business. Maybe some day.

Another good TJIC post from the past.

I'll stay away from politics for a while after this. Paige and I are represented by Brad Miller in the US House. I wrote about him before. Apparently he's upsetting some of the local media guys by refusing to appear on shows that ask unscripted questions. Miller's spent the last four years as a DailyKos darling. His constituency isn't likely to be DailyKos fans. In fact, his constituency is largely African American Southerners who vote Democrat only because they don't get any good alternatives. Miller's current opponent is an African American Republican, and he's connecting with the voters.

What's Miller to do? What's the entire Democratic party to do, now that one of their reliable voting blocs is tired of being taken for granted? One option is to take positions popular with African Americans, which are more conservative than the positions the Democratic has taken. However, I don't think that's going to happen.

Another problem is that the DailyKos fans aren't likely voters. Apparently Robinson is withing 10 points in the polls, and those polls have an error margin of plus or minus four or five percent (meaning an eight to ten point lead isn't really a lead).

Additionally, Miller is still unable to get his message out. Robinson has defined Miller, and Miller's silence and refusal to take any public positions (outside of DailyKos) hasn't helped him with the voters. "He voted to let gay Americans bring their foreign gay lovers in to the country on a marriage visa?" (which, it turns out, is a fair description of what he voted for) Welcome to the world of politics, Brad.

I doubt the Supreme Court will actually overturn polygamy (and I don't care if it does, I already have the right wife; I don't need to get any more), but Southern Appeal has some food for thought. One commenter, in particular, is a good devil's advocate.

I was reading some old posts by TJIC, and came across a comment that means I may still have some hope. (No, I don't have $41,000 in debt, but I'm not 21 still, either).

Sounds like interesting times in Colorado health insurance. Something similar happened in North Carolina regarding Blue Cross/Blue Shield and some of the bigger hospitals in the state. It's very clear that the health insurance system we currently is based on broken ideas. I doubt any attempts to fix it will work unless they take care of this fundamental problem.

I had completely forgotten about this Da Vinci Code lawsuit until yesterday. The best quote from the lawsuit is "Fortunately I was told by both parties that there was no significant point of law involved in this case to trouble me. ... My initial feeling on the statements of both Counsel was [beware Greeks bearing gifts]" (paragraphs 137 and 138).

Attorneys work really hard to tell judges that their case is a clear-cut issue, nothing new, just like these other cases right here. So it's common to say that there is "no significant point of law" to be concerned with, and then spend pages and pages discussing those laws.

This lawsuit covered a book written as a "historical conjecture" that included a lot of false information that ended up in the Da Vinci Code. Apparently, in the 1950s, a frenchman decided to play a little game, and invented a hoax (and forged supporting "historic documents") regarding an organization called the "Priory of Sion." Holy Blood, Holy Grail was written based largely on that hoax. Dan Brown wrote the Da Vinci Code, on "historical research" and came to the same conclusions, although in this lawsuit he claimed he didn't know about Holy Blood, Holy Grail until he was halfway done writing his book. Oops.

Sounds a lot like Feist where a phone book company was accused of copying another phone book because "1,309 of the 46,878 listings in Feist's 1983 directory were identical to listings in Rural's 1982-1983 white pages. ... Four of these were fictitious listings that Rural had inserted into its directory to detect copying." Feist is important in the US because it got rid of the "sweat of the brow" idea of copyright (that is, you get copyright in anything that takes a lot of work; under current US law, you only get copyright in things that require some creativity). Apparently, "sweat of the brow" exists to some extent in the UK ("A work 'need only be "original" in the limited sense that the author originated it by his efforts ...' One looks at the labour expended in achieving the relevant work. Copyright is designed to protect a person from others taking the fruits of his labour and thus short circuiting the work that they must put in to it" [paragraph 143]).

A funnier case of something similar can be found here.

Hopefully we won't see this in the US any time soon.

The New York Times's previous record with leaked intelligence has a lot to do with why I'm upset about the NIE leak.

I wonder if the National Organization for Women will say anything about this. I know it has nothing to do with abortion, but it has a lot to do with women. If NOW doesn't, will it finally come clean and change it's name to National Organization for Abortions-on-demand?

I woke up this morning to reports that the most recent National Intelligence Estimate says things in Iraq are terrible, and we're worse off than we were before September 11, 2001. That blog post, by the way, isn't entirely fair. After listing severl attacks and attempted attacks, it goes on to ask if there have been any further successful attacks. That's an apple-to-oranges comparison, and leaves out very important attempts.

However, the post redeems itself by linking to another blog:

NIEs have certainly included some major blunders. The 1997 NIE, the last one before the 9/11 attacks on global terrorism, mentioned bin Laden in only three sentences as a "terrorist financier." ... And of course, it was the October 2002 NIE which was a significant factor in the decision to use force against Iraq by famously asserting, "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

Interesting. The same guys trumpeting this NIE probably disagreed with the last one. Just as those same guys won't ask for an investigation into the person inside the CIA who chose to leak it to the press. It's kind of a pick and choose strategy. It's also why the CIA is prone to fire contractors who claim to be breaking cover on covert operations and then say they were only kidding.

UPDATE President Bush has decided to declassify the executive summary to the NIE. He didn't launch an investigation into who leaked the document, though. According to somebody likely to know, the NIE isn't as gloomy as the press has made it out to be. Then again, a previous NIE said Saddam had WMDs and would get a nuclear weapon by 2010 if we didn't invade.

I'm going to have to check when I get home, but I think this is the router I will (eventually) use to set up our home network. More info on why people were trying to get these routers to run Linux.

If this is the router I have, I may be able to get things working without needing a second computer to handle all the things that our router refuses to do without a paid subscription.

UPDATE Yes, it is. However, it's a version that was stripped down so getting it to run Linux will be a little harder than I was hoping.

Paige will be happy to hear I may stay away from computers for a while.

Yeah, I really think I'd like meeting the Coyote (commenting on a bogus survey to categorise people as either young Turks or old guard conservatives: "Why is independence the opposite of respect for elders? Isn't this like saying Kleenex is the opposite of pudding? Isn't the opposite of 'independence' actually 'the desire to mooch off other people'? Why isn't the opposite of 'self reliance' in fact the 'desire to have the government run your life for you?'").

In related news, I'm apparently conservative:

You scored as Foreign Policy Hawk. Foreign policy hawks believe that the spread of liberty throughout the world is the historic mission of the United States, and that it is vital for our security. They can be found in both political parties, and are united in their desire for a large military and a highly assertive foreign policy. Foreign Policy Hawk 100% Pro Business Republican 95% Socially Conservative Republican 95% Libertarian 75% New Democrat 65% Green 45% Old School Democrat 25% What's Your Political Philosophy? created with QuizFarm.com

The guy who pointed me to the survey is much more libertarian.

Paige and I have a few Veggie Tales DVDs, and while I have to admit that their religious side often gets cheesy and enters generic new-aged "God loves everyone" territory more than I'd like, I like them overall. However, I can't imagine how NBC could have signed a contract to pay for permission to broadcast Veggie Tales without knowing that they have was a strong religious side. That's like getting permission to broadcast Sesame Street without knowing about the grouchy monster living in the trashcan.

UPDATE Much more information is now available. I actually knew about the lawsuit (PDF, which actually turned out to be an important copyright suit, and will be cited for years to come), but figured that since it had been overturned on appeal the judgement had been reversed and that Big Idea had only come close to bankruptcy. Looks like I was wrong.

Sometimes I wish I were a world-famous programmer, and sometimes I don't.