Clay isn't paying a dime for hosting.
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Pacific Pinball Museum just sent you a full refund
- Thread starter pinballDan
- Start date
Clay isn't paying a dime for hosting.
quses
Member
That's not relevant to the issue at hand, but if that's the excuse you want to pull in order to stick your head in the sand, go for it.
I've offered to host his site for free too. The bottom line is SOMEONE is paying for the hosting, and it's not the whining complainers from RGP.
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You're batting .1000 ....
My whole argument in a nutshell:
Blocking access to this information is bad for pinball. Period.
That is where I stand. It's not about the dough ($10 is nothing). It's not about a "cause". It's simply about being "bad for pinball".
Nothing more. Nothing less.
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quses
Member
Yea, well you all seem to think that it's Clay's job to selflessly dedicate his life to pinball and when he stops for a moment, everyone jumps on his case.
Apparently, the moral of this story is: Don't do anything benevolent and nice for the pinball community because they'll expect suck on your teats for eternity and the first time you change anything, you'll be quickly demonized as the Fidel Castro of pinball.
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Uh? Huh. No one is asking Clay to do anything other than put the files back online. He's not paying for it. He's doesn't need to continue to contribute to it. Hell, it took more WORK to put the paywall up than it would have to simply abandon the thing and just not contribute any more.
What is your motivation in this? I'm simply looking at this from a "pinball community" point of view. If it cost the guy a single cent or would require a single moment of the guys time where he doesn't want to contribute any more... I could see the point.
No... the moral of the situation is it's screwed up to be an "Indian Giver".
Don't give something to the community and then take it away when when one or two (or even three or a dozen) of the HUNDREDS pull a douchebag maneuver.
EDIT: I'm done sparing with you on this matter. We don't agree. Life goes on. Beer?
quses
Member
No problem. I think ultimately we all want the same thing. If you want to use cliches as a reference, id say I feel some are, "looking a gift horse in the mouth."
Lindsey
Well-known member
Whether it's legally his to sell is debatable. The fact that huge sections of content were donated with the intent that they remain free is undeniable.
Obviously no one is going to be sued over anything. People contributed information with the intent that it be freely available. They have a right to complain that it was being sold. I think it's gotten way out of hand on both sides and all I personally said was that it "wasn't cool" to sell them without the consent of people who contributed content. I certainly wouldn't ask for content to be removed or for them to stop selling the DVDs. That's still how I feel about it. I never expected the donations to be refunded and it to get so out of hand. The information is still available and will be forever so it has no effect on me whatsoever. It's no secret that huge chunks of content were contributed by others. Of course Clay could have written those sections himself. So could I and so could dozens of people. He didn't do that and people are understandably upset. Obviously some far more than what could be considered reasonable.
People who haven't contributed anything don't have much to complain about. Sure... be upset about it all you want but Clay deserves respect for the thousands of hours he's donated to all of us.
quses
Member
Where is that "undeniable?" Do you have copies of legal agreements between people who donated "huge sections of content" making such a restriction?
The guides have apparently always said, "copyright cfh, all rights reserved". That flies in the face of them being "free". On almost every guide page, that copyright and all-rights-reserve notice is there. Go pull up a page. It's there. Look on the same page and see if it says "these documents are free!" I don't see that anywhere. So I don't get where that is "undeniable." I'm sorry.
I donated various content and pictures to Clay's guide over the years. There was never any implicit conversation between us where I requested certain rights or conditions in return for my contribution. Now if someone else has such documentation, they might have a case, but pointing to something on the site that says, "I'm putting these up for everyone" is not it.
The way I figure, I've profited ten times more from Clay's work than he ever could from mine, so he doesn't owe me anything.
Again, no. I did not contribute "with the intent that it be freely available." I simply contributed because I was appreciative of the resource. Maybe I ASSumed the information would continue to be publicly posted, but I didn't make any stipulations, and I'd bet neither did anybody else. That's an important distinction.
Obviously, anyone can sue anybody for anything. That doesn't mean there's a strong case.
Since PPM pulled the whole DVD selling deal, we can speculate why that might be... maybe the same person that pulled the CL Tiltown fiasco sent a threatening e-mail to PPM causing trouble? Maybe Clay wants to remove all non-original parts of the guide before doing the deal? Nobody knows. But until he speaks and says what he's going to do, I'm not going to judge and convict him of "hurting the community" or taking other peoples work.
I understand you feel that way. As someone who also has contributed content, let me officially say I don't give a rat's ass whether he sells my content/contribution or not so not everyone is bothered by it.
Therefore, rather than pick some fictitious perspective and defend it, if you have content in the guide, make it clear, and have it pulled. I think Clay should be free to do whatever he wants with HIS guide. Another area we will agree-to-disagree on is how much of it is his verses other people. I think overhwelmingly it's his original content and whatever "significant" portions other people have contributed can be easily replaced or omitted without undermining the value of the resource. Then we can put this matter to bed and people can stop complaining about nothing.
You might ask, if I don't care one way or another, why defend him? Well, I think people like Clay are rare, special people. He's given so much to this community that if anybody deserves to get a "free pass" or "the benefit of the doubt", it's him. His history of charitable gifts to the community is unparalleled. The way people are running around subtly bad-mouthing him really hurts my heart. He's one of the good guys as far as I'm concerned and I hate seeing the mob turn like this. It seems so ungrateful and hateful. And yea, I know everybody has their own "spin" on things and they'll argue their little "talking point". But in the big picture, the real damage to the pinball industry isn't being done by Clay, but by his critics, none of which could ever replace his contributions.
That's just my 0.02. For what it's worth, which probably isn't much.
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Lindsey
Well-known member
The people complaining all over RGP would be a start. I can't comment on any legal documents and that's a ridiculous conversation anyway. My point was that there ARE people who are upset that their content was sold and they have a right to be upset but not go crazy over it. That's it. People are over reacting all over the place.
What I said was, it's undeniable that people contributed content that didn't want it sold. Unless those people's words after the fact are lies then I would have to call them undeniable. Again, I never said that the guides were intended to be free forever. Taking them down and selling them are two different things. I said that SOME people contributed content with the intent that it remain free. Don't confuse me mentioning that fact with me being one of those people.
Congratulations. You're obviously not complaining about it. Other people are and that's the whole issue.
I've said basically the same thing over and over for years. I'm proud of my work and happy to have people use it. I also support other people in not wanting their content used the way it was.
Me too. We're not the only contributors. The fact remains that other people have come forward and explicitly stated the opposite position regarding their content. If they hadn't then there would be no argument. I already said that people who have not contributed have meaningless opinions on the matter. And again, the whole thing is overblown.
There will be no case. The fact that it has come to this discussion is completely fucking ridiculous. I already said I didn't give a shit about my content and the donations shouldn't have been refunded. How much clearer can I be about that?
I'm not judging him either. I said exactly that. The "taking other people's work" part happened. That much is a fact. I think it's also obvious that he had no ill intent so he doesn't deserve to be thrown under the bus for it. I certainly didn't say he hurt the community. In fact I said the opposite of that.
I said the same thing in my last reply. I never implied everyone was bothered by it. The very fact that I said I was not personally bothered by it demonstrates that.
I already said I didn't want that in plain english.
Again, I said the same thing.
Again, I said the same thing. I've shown my support for years. Not just now. Just because I disagree with his decision to sell the guides doesn't change that. I don't know how "not cool" turned into all this bullshit.
And I'm sure he would agree that the guides wouldn't have been as good without the help of everyone. The whole situation is really sad.
My points have been made. The whole thing is sad. I have no intention of arguing further when it's obvious we agree on the important points.
/didn't proof read
//stupid bullshit over nothing anyway
quses
Member
Yea I guess it's pointless to try to argue about whether or not the denizens of RGP have legitimacy in their "outrage." That's kind of like debating whether or not a bear shits in the woods. ; )
mickster0150
Active member
clay does not pay for the hosting. Now that I have told you that you are wrong on that point, just start to guess on how much of the rest you are wrong on. Actually you have that last paragraph backwards, clay decided to exploit others hard work by taking their information, locking it down and forcing the community to donate to the place of his choosing. Before you champion clay, you really should read into the history of the guides, its pretty easy to see how much was clay's and how much was others (williams 3-7 system guide for example). Also there are tons of Gottlieb stuff that can't be sold, and a ton of roms to go with it on the site mirror. The best thing that every happened for the PPM was collectors bitching, because Gottlieb wasn't going to bitch, they would just sue. PPM would have been screwed if they would have actually sold any of those discs.
While you may be a lawyer, you really need to do your homework on this one to know whats going on. While clay has done tons of work, the best way to sum it up is that in much of it he was the work of a librarian and not an author. Just because a librarian works for 10 years at the same building does not mean somehow they own the books.
Also, I am a guy that has my words and pictures verbatum in the guides.
mickster0150
Active member
all he had to do was just stop updating the guides. That's it, but that wasn't good enough for him in his current state.
The moral of the story is, if you want to be mad and take your ball home, you better make sure you own the ball, or the owners are going to chase you home!
mrgone
Well-known member
the part of this whole drama that bothers me the most is that it is dividing us pinheads.
we are a small yet intelligent group of players/collectors/pinball fanatics.
IMO,the whole point of this and other pinball sites is to find others who share our love/passion for all things pinball.why dont the parties involved just sit down together,break bread and work this out.and then play pinball. just my 2 cents.
we are a small yet intelligent group of players/collectors/pinball fanatics.
IMO,the whole point of this and other pinball sites is to find others who share our love/passion for all things pinball.why dont the parties involved just sit down together,break bread and work this out.and then play pinball. just my 2 cents.
mickster0150
Active member
The problem is its not just the guides, its the shows, its repro parts, its shill bidding. Its a very active hobby with tons of info, parts, and money changing hands daily. Add on top of this that every hard core pinball group 'knows how to save pinball'. While I have found many people nice in this hobby, there are plenty of other hobbies with a higher percentage of nice people. There just aren't enough games around for prices to deflate and everyone to relax.
One example of this is at the chicago expo, I saw one 'passionate' guy come into another passionate guy's presentation (during the presentation), argue with him and then dump a full soda can into the laptop that was doing the presentation. I couldn't believe what I saw, and it was all over pinball.
mickster0150
Active member
I have emailed him personally (with no reply) I have also emailed the ppm with no reply.
Also, its funny in earlier posts you praise clay for paying for the hosting all these years, but when you find out that he didn't pay, then its a trivial detail.
None of my posts were hateful in anyway, I just posted my side of the story and and what I personally asked to have done (just that if the guides were sold, to remove my info.)
Clay is not a innocent child, he is just as web savy as the rest of this. Nothing has happened that shouldn't have been predicted by clay if he spent more than 2 minutes thinking about it.
Its also interesting how you want the people against what clay has done to 'quit bitching' but yet you have no problem bitching and cursing for him.
Like I said in an earlier post, what clay wanted was NEVER going to happen unless massive editing was done to that guide. There is way too much in there that is protected by active copyright holders (for some reason the pinball manufactures (especially gottlieb)) just are never going to give up on this stuff. I imagine its because there are so many companies manufacturing parts. That site backup on disc that the PPM had (if it was complete) was loaded with roms that never should be sold. I still can't believe the PPM was naive enough that they even considered it. That is really the oddest part about this entire situation. If you are running an organization that big and were going to make that HUGE mistake, I can't even imagine the other errors that are happening. When you get as big as the PPM is, you just can't make those kind of errors. Tilt town is actually a good example of this. Clay got big enough that when he sorta went public (I realize it was a private club, but I imagine the laws of assembly were all about public code) I don't think he had any idea of what he was risking if anyone ever got hurt at that building. If there really was that many violations that you can't even make repairs without shutting down the whole place, would you really want to stuff it full of all your friends and a bunch of old games that have electricity wrapped with 50 year old paper and cloth!!! Shutting down Tilt Town just might have saved someone's life and Clays life savings/house/everything he owns. I feel bad for him, but once again 2 minutes of looking ahead would have saw a lot of the problems that he ran into. Whenever you have a group of guys, its not unusual for someone to get pissed and then go and complain. Those complaints will be followed up and the people in charge will always do the easiest thing, shut you down. For that reason, when he started to setup he should have made sure that building was 100 percent up to code (or beyond).
Its too bad it all happened, Clay is probably in the top ten of the most passionate pinball guys, problem is you have to keep that passion pointed in a positive way, sometimes that's hard to do (for anyone).
Edit/Delete Message
quses
Member
So Clay hasn't responded?
Why am I not surprised?
So are you not going to be happy until he completely abandons helping the community? Because if you ask me, that's what I think people like you are pushing him to do.
I don't know why I am defending him - I don't think he really needs defending. I just really appreciate what he's done and I don't want a few bad apples to spoil the whole bunch. I apologize if I've been too acerbic on this issue.
mickster0150
Active member
Well you felt I should contact him instead of talking to the public. I just told you what I had done. I haven't pushed clay to do anything. All I did was send an email that stated if you are going to sell the guide, to remove my info. That is hardly driving someone to get out of pinball altogether.
your saying above fits the situation, but replace people that disagree clay, with clay's bad ideas that are not thought through. He has had a few bad ideas that have sorta spoiled a lot of what he did.
1) Helped with pingame journal, but pushed so hard for his own direction to cause more havoc than helped. Especially the last issue with nudity.
2) Tilttown, while its horrible that someone posted that craigslist ad, the amount of work that he did there was doomed from the beginning when he didn't have a proper building to begin with. Seeing the pictures of how they renovated the building its obvious they put tons of time into it. Just a little time in the beginning during planning would have saved all that work.
3) the guides, he has been very 'unstable' as far as his views on the guides. At one point, he was upset that people would d/l the guides instead of regularly view them online (the reason was he wanted people to always see the current version), but his solution was to threaten to take the guides down (which in turn causes more people to d/l the guides because they might disappear)
4) trying to remove something that has helped everyone in pinball to try and funnel it to help his current pinball direction. Funneling the guides to PPM has got to be the most rediculous idea yet. Anyone with half a brain on how information is spread and protected in 2011 should have known better than to try what he did. He should have known better (even if his heart was in the right place) and the PPM should have known better (for their own protection).
Clay is a great guy and a great at organizing information, but the four ideas above could and should have been stopped before they ever started. If clay could direct some of his passion to fore-thought he probably would be much happier.
Also, would you call Gottlieb a bad apple for protecting its assets? How about williams/midway? You complain that a 'guy like me' should stop complaining and just contact the parties involved to fix the problem. That's exactly what I tried to do, and I received no response. I even called the PPM and left a message with no return call.
I will agree that Clay doesn't need you protecting him. He is a big boy and is perfectly capable in defending himself (if he chooses too). I imagine he would prefer you not to protect him when there are so many errors in your 'facts' of this case.
I'm a practicing attorney, working exclusively in IP and licensing for the past 10 years or so. I don't care if you are moved or not. And others have responded in more depth to your misstatements better than I can. I will say, based on personal offline knowledge, that PPM may well have found itself in hot water if it tried to sell those DVDs. They did the right thing by reconsidering. And heck, I donated to them after the fact, in sympathy (even though I doubt I'll ever make it to their museum) because I think they got caught up in this mess innocently.
I'm really tired of debating/explaining this whole fiasco. I hope it settles down. We are all here to support and enjoy pinball. So moving forward, I won't be posting anything related to repair guides, except to offer assistance (which may be mostly editorial in nature) to any new guides/resources that people are putting together. (I've already done so in 2 cases.)
Gonna play me some pinball today! I suggest everyone else does too.
quses
Member
Not exactly the whole story. The real story is (if I remember correctly) the publisher Jim didn't have the time to run the magazine and asked Clay to help. Clay agreed and produced a few issues, then the publisher sat on his butt and didn't send the issues Clay produced to the paid subscribers. Clay complained privately and some of the RGP "asshat cabal" published the private e-mails in the newsgroup in an attempt to destroy Clay's reputation. It backfired miserably.
And regarding the "nudity" thing...
That situation is exactly typical of the kind of whiny-ass babies some in the community are. Clay wanted to run a story on pinball design artwork, and some of the concept art was R-rated. Big whoop. From what I gather, Clay had journalistic integrity and got upset that the story he prepared was hacked and ruined. The issue had to do with "telling the story right" regardless of whether it was politically correct. As if people have never seen a picture of a hand drawn boobie before - oh my god, that'll destroy PGJ's business. It's another example of him investing time to help someone and getting shit on and taken advantage of. If I remember correctly, he put in a bunch of work, and then the publisher didn't get off his butt and take the products to market - Clay was upset because people who paid for the issues weren't getting them in a timely, promised manner. He produced the issues. The publisher wouldn't send them out in a reasonable time frame. I'd be upset too.
In classic "Clay-style" what ended up happening (if I recall because it was a long time ago) was that someone (Clay?) ended up posting the original article online so everyone could see it the way he wrote it and see how it was edited. What Clay did was to give the public something more than what a few select people thought they shouldn't see.
By the way, PGJ has been badly run for a long time. Clay had a legitimate point. The publisher would go months without sending an issue out, and then 2 in the same package. WTF? He started selling products he didn't have in stock (like the Pinball 101 DVDs) and lots of people paid and never received their orders and had to cancel. Not well run.
I gather that Clay is a somewhat outspoken type who isn't afraid to challenge people when he thinks something is wrong. Apparently sometimes that upsets certain groups of others in the community. But the operative thing here is he still has done more benevolent work for virtually every facet of the pinball industry than everyone else combined. He produced over 70 podcasts; he's produced somewhere around a dozen educational DVDs; he put up a blog detailing 500+ pinball repairs in a 365-day period; he travels around and speaks at almost all the shows; he tried to open up a community pinball club and it was sabotaged. And yet you still want to talk crap about him. Everything you bring up is trivial, nit-picking.
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