Son of Web Pages That Suck

Chapter 4
Design Issues Even Martians Should Know

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Hoist the Jolly Roger

While WebPagesThatSuck.com receives its fair share of suggestions for sites that are "under the influence," there's a site dedicated to exposing kids today who design a little too much under the influence called Pirated Sites (www.pirated-sites.com). This site's whole purpose is to expose pirated sites.

More Balls Than Most

One activity that has brought me a great deal of personal satisfaction is learning how to juggle. My favorite set of juggling balls is a set I bought at a trade show, called "More Balls Than Most."

Speaking of having "More Balls Than Most," check out the site shown below:

Hmm. Have I seen this before?

Now take a look at the next figure.

Adobe

"I see what you mean, Vincent." The Atlantis site has not only copied the look of a very well known site, it has even "borrowed" some of the same graphics.

The Wayback Machine

There are times when you're visiting a site and you can swear it looks just like, say, the old IBM site but you can't be sure. How can you go way back and find out how a site looked three redesigns ago? There's good news and bad news. The good news is there's a Web site called the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that's dedicated to preserving old Web sites. It's a nice trip down designer memory lane and it's also a way to possibly catch someone in the act of thievery.

The bad news is that many sites are missing and there are often missing elements on the page.

Go way back at the Wayback Machine
web.archive.org/

Big Picture Issue #3 — Music Files, The Law, And You

You don't see Fortune 1000 corporations using music on their Web sites unless they've paid for the right to do so. In fact, if I were given one dollar for every Fortune 1000 site that used music (not counting media companies), I probably couldn't buy lunch.

I wish some small business sites and personal sites exercised the same discretion. Somehow, the people behind these sites believe there's no legal problem with putting the theme from "The Godfather" on a collection agency site. Why?

Because people just don't understand the copyright laws. Period. At best, people think it's OK to play a MIDI version of "Stairway to Heaven" but wrong to play the original Led Zeppelin recording.

In the Daily Sucker section of WebPagesThatSuck.com, I once discussed a marching band music company that was illegally using a music file ("Star Wars") on their site. This discussion caused someone "in the business" to send me an email explaining musical copyrights. Hopefully, after you read the explanation, you'll understand all the issues.

Working in copyright in a classical music publishing company for most of my adult life, I greatly enjoyed your Daily Sucker about the use of the Star Wars theme.

I track infringements on the Internet with some regularity. My company owns a couple of compositions that get infringed on all the time-most notably Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana." If you've seen any adventure movie trailer in the last ten years, you know the music. I just had the distinct pleasure of licensing its use in the trailer for the "South Park" movie!

From my 'insider' position, I can tell you that I think the reason people don't understand that the audio expression of music is something that can be 'owned' is because it isn't in a physical format, like the sheet music, or (as you so aptly pointed out) the recording.

My favorite way of explaining the concept of intellectual property to the illiterate tribesmen I encounter daily is "Okay, imagine that all the sheet music in the world burned up in a huge bonfire, and then imagine that they threw on all the CDs. You can still hum the music, right? The music still exists, right? Well, that thing you can't touch, or buy, or break...that is what we own."

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