Episode 5 Slough of Despond. Part of the storyworld for Networked Media, a course from RMIT University. geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop

1. geniwate.com/admin/mipandmop
Concept based on The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan,
and written for Contemporary Media Work Practices,
a course at RMIT University
(www.rmit.edu.au)
c. geniwate 2012-5
Slough of Despond 5

2. Mip and Mop were sitting out the front of
their edifices, serving lemonade to people
who were dropping by, sometimes
several people every day. There was quite
a lot of interest.
‘I think I really have built TBTCTW’, Mip
boasted.
‘I don’t think anyone has ever combined
astrophysics and graffiti before’, Mop
observed. ‘Well done.’

3. Just then, an official-looking man in a suit with a briefcase turned up. He started sniffing around
Mip’s building.
‘Looking for anything in particular?’ Mip asked. ‘Just try my blog’s search engine -‘
‘Ministry of Blogging’, the man announced, and presented his card. I’m looking for persons and
people breaking the law’.
‘Nothing like that going on here’, Mip replied smugly. ‘Try Vanity Fair’.

4. ‘Looking for embedders. Any embedders here?’
Mip had never heard of a crime called embedding. She asked the man for
an explanation, and was soon given to understand that embedding any
media that did not expressly give copyright permission to do so was
potentially illegal, and if the media was from a big corporation , they could
possibly take her to court. Mip immediately thought of Mop, who had
been embedding music videos in his blog, not to mention the whole corpus
of Duran Duran. She waived at the man. ‘I think I saw an embedder go -
thatta way. When she’d seen him off, she rushed across to Mop and
pursuaded him to remove almost everything he’d embedded.

5. ‘You’ll have to ask them for permission’, Mip advised.
‘They’ll never even take the time of day to read my email’, Mop replied
morosely. Unfortunately, Mip thought that might well be true.
‘You know’, Mip replied, we should protect our own work too. We should
start putting copyright notices on our stuff, it’s only fair. We’re all making
content, we don’t want it ripped off.’ So she went off to the search engine,
and found out about copyright licenses, and made one for herself, and
another for Mop.
Another piece of coral appeared.

6. copyright