Caveat Lector

So the PRISM folks got caught with their pants down. They’re so uptight about copyright that they’ll… violate somebody else’s. Oops.

Look, this wasn’t malicious. (Unlike their campaign, which is.) It wasn’t intentional hypocrisy (again, unlike their campaign). Some poor webmonkey somewhere forgot to swap out some files, and nobody caught it in time. The webmonkey will probably be fired. (Unlike Eric Dezenhall.) Getty didn’t lose any money, because PRISM paid up—I suspect, as I said, that they’d already paid up and there was a plain old ordinary mixup on the webserver.

So I’m not pointing fingers, and for once, I’m not laughing at the perps. I’ve made similar mistakes, and cleaned up after them. (Not, I should say, in the course of my work. I’m quite careful about that.) I feel bad for the poor webmonkey. I can’t say I’m precisely sorry that PRISM now has a big black eye, because I still think they’re slime for reasons having nothing whatever to do with a mixup over paid images. But I’m not laughing.

Peter Suber, as usual, said it best Dave Munger, sorry: “Dealing with copyright and DRM is expensive and inconvenient.” Now perhaps some of the PRISM folks will start to understand how library patrons feel. That can only be a good thing.

And a whole bunch of people who would have let PRISM pass in silence are now spreading the word about the issues. That’s a good thing too. So this has turned into a win for the angels—but for reasons somewhat orthogonal to the actual event.