Workbench

Villains & Vigilantes Creators Win Rights to Game

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:10:04 -0400

After a 20-month legal battle, the creators of the super-hero roleplaying game Villains & Vigilantes have prevailed in their court fight with the game's longtime publisher. Magistrate Judge Mark E. Aspey of the U.S. District Court for Arizona ruled on January 15 that Jeff Dee and Jack Herman own the rights to the game based on the 1979 contract they reached with publisher Scott Bizar of Fantasy Games Unlimited. The court also found that Bizar never had the right to sell derivative products or ebook PDF editions of the game, two things he has been actively doing in recent years.

Villains & Vigilantes, one of the first super-hero roleplaying games, was created by Dee and Herman when they were teens in 1979. Bizar published the game and a subsequent 1982 edition and it was commercially successful, selling thousands of copies during a tabletop gaming boom sparked by the popularity of Dungeons & Dragons. But in 1987, Fantasy Games Unlimited curtailed most of its business activities after encountering difficulties with distributors. Bizar became a high school teacher and ran a game store in Gilbert, Ariz., selling the games by mail order and online for part of the last two decades. The store closed in 2007. Bizar shut down Fantasy Games Unlimited as a New York corporation in 1991 and founded a sole proprietorship of the same name in Arizona that continues to market games he published in the '70s and '80s.

In 2010, Dee and Herman started Monkey House Games, LLC and published a new edition of the game. Dee told Ain't It Cool News that they had never been informed by Bizar that Fantasy Games Unlimited, Inc. was dissolved as a corporation, which under the terms of their publishing contract should give them all rights to the game. "[T]he contract clearly stated that if FGU, Inc., ever ceased to exist, then the publication rights reverted back to us," Dee told the site.

Judge Aspey did not rule on that argument, but instead found that the 1979 contract between Bizar, Dee and Herman only gave Bizar the right to publish the 1979 and 1982 editions of the game in printed form. "Because Defendants Dee and Herman hold the copyright to the characters and setting, Defendants presumably may create and market derivative works and obtain the financial benefits therefrom," the ruling states. "Additionally, because the marketing rights to the game do not appear to have been transferred, defendants hold the right to produce and sell or license such items as clothing, video games, card games, and movies or television programs."

Both parties in the lawsuit attempted to register Villains & Vigilantes as a trademark in 2010, prompting a Trademark Trial and Appeal Board case that was put on hold until the suit was decided. Judge Aspey ruled that because Bizar did not sell any copies of Villains & Vigilantes from 1990 to 1994 and 1999 to 2004, he lost any rights he might have had to the trademark. "The court therefore concludes that any right to the trademark 'Villains & Vigilantes' was abandoned by plaintiff at least when he ceased to use the mark from 1999 to 2004," he states.

The ruling calls Bizar the plaintiff and Dee and Herman the defendants because he sued them in Arizona and two other suits were consolidated with that one. Judge Aspey concludes, "[O]ther than possessing a license to produce and market the printed book forms of the 1979 and 1982 Works, Plaintiff has no right to the copyrighted works of Defendants. Specifically, Plaintiff was not licensed to produce or market a PDF form of the 1982 Work or to produce or market such items as comic books, apparel, or other merchandise utilizing copyrighted elements of the Villains and Vigilantes role-playing game created by Defendants."

Bizar is currently selling PDF editions of the game and over 40 supplements through the Fantasy Games Unlimited website and RPG ebook retailers. He's also selling some of those products in print editions on his site. Bizar's attorney Sterling R. Threet appealed the decision Feb. 19 with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

With the judgment, Monkey House Games appears likely to be granted its registered trademark and can continue to sell printed and electronic editions of Villains & Vigilantes and related products. Unless he wins the appeal, Bizar cannot sell anything but printed copies of the original 1979 and 1982 editions of the game.

The case could have an impact on Bizar's other games. All of them originally were released in the late '70s and early '80s, long before electronic publishing rights were anticipated by most publishers. In the 2002 case Random House vs. Rosetta Books, the New York state court of appeals ruled that unless a publishing contract explicitly grants ebook rights to the publisher, those rights are retained by the author. Even a contract that gives a publisher rights "in book form" would not be interpreted to cover ebooks. The court ruled, "[T]he law of New York, which determines the scope of Random House's contracts, has arguably adopted a restrictive view of the kinds of 'new uses' to which an exclusive license may apply when the contracting parties do not expressly provide for coverage of such future forms."

Another thing working in Dee and Herman's favor is a provision of copyright law that enables authors to cancel publishing contracts they entered into 35 years earlier. In 2014, authors can employ these termination rights for works published in 1979.

Memo to Self: Don't Anger Elisabeth Moss

Rogers Cadenhead — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 15:01:54 -0400

There's an amusingly awkward exchange between Mad Men actor Elisabeth Moss and New York Times interviewer Andrew Goldman in a new Q&A:

Q: You were brought up as, and continue to be, a Scientologist. I feel as if everyone who's not a Scientologist sees it as a cult. Does this bother you?

Moss: It doesn't bother me, but I don't want to talk about it. For me, you gotta make up your own mind about anything in your life, whether it's a relationship or a job or religion -- or Pilates.
Q: You said of your very short marriage to Fred Armisen, "He's so great at doing impersonations, but the greatest impersonation he does is that of a normal person." I read that and thought, Wow, that's rough.
Moss: Thank you.

Meow!

Predicting the Next Pope's Name

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 09:05:58 -0400

Eight years ago, I registered Pope Benedict XVI's domain name three weeks before he was selected pope. Because of this achievement in pontification, I was invited to be on the Today Show, where Katie Couric called me the popesquatter in front of millions of people.

This made me as big a celebrity as the Virgin Mary viaduct stain -- but it only lasted 36 hours. Just when I started getting used to all the attention and began making plans to hire a publicist and have my teeth capped, a woman fell on the ice singing the National Anthem and sucked up all my fame.

Today at 11:30 a.m. Eastern, 115 Cardinals will lock themselves in the Sistine Chapel and won't come out until they've chosen a new pope. Any male Catholic is eligible -- I'm hoping to get one or two votes in the first round -- and when they have reached a two-thirds majority to select someone, he is asked whether he'll take the job. If he says "accepto," he immediately announces his new name.

In the hopes of continuing my reign as popesquatter, I have the following names as dot-com domains:

Clement XV
Innocent XIV
John Paul III
Leo XIV
Paul VII
Pius XIII

Five of these are because I couldn't bring myself to drop them after the last pope-a-palooza. I acquired the sixth, John Paul III, for $75 in 2009.

The Irish betting site Paddy Power has Leo as the favorite at 3-to-1, followed by Peter at 2-to-1, Gregory at 6-to-1 and Pius at 8-to-1.

Don't pray for me to win, because it could be considered tampering.

I wish I had Joseph I, but some other popesquatter wants $1,695 for it. I'm tempted to buy it, but that's too expensive when you factor in the cost of a divorce once my wife finds out.

I like Joseph as a longshot, even though it has never been used before. Because Jesus' dad was a carpenter, Pope Joseph I would have instant working-class cred.

I acquired John Paul III because the Vatican has a tradition of picking a pope who differs from the last one, a sentiment they express with the saying "always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope." Pope John Paul II was charismatic, talented and universally popular -- choosing his name is like picking Justin Timberlake to host Saturday Night Live.

A reporter for the French edition of Slate asked me how much it cost to own these domains. At $13 a year apiece over eight years for six pontiffs, I've paid $624. I never did the math before. Good lord that's a waste of money.

In keeping with tradition, if I win I will issue a list of demands.

Update: Francis?

The Pitch for My First Novel

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:06:54 -0500

I completed my first novel and entered it in the Amazon Breakthrough contest last month. A few days ago I learned that it advanced to the second round along with 399 other thrillers based on this pitch:

No marriage is without its secrets, but Clemson University professor Jessup Clark accidentally uncovers one that threatens more than his happiness.
A discovered airplane ticket stub reveals that his wife Shani lied to him and took a flight to Chicago when she claimed to be in Atlanta for business. When he confronts his wife about what looks like an affair, she undertakes a ruthless campaign to destroy his life, take away his job and rob him of his freedom. A happy marriage shatters as she concocts a domestic violence charge and has a mysterious associate punch her brutally in the face, telling the police she was hit by Jessup. A loaded gun is planted in his car, scaring his workplace after a tip is called in to security before he arrives one morning. A story is planted in the newspaper, sharing Jessup's darkest family secret to make him look even more guilty.
It makes no sense that Shani, a loving spouse and the dignified daughter of academics, would engage in an extramarital affair -- much less go to such extreme lengths to destroy Jessup after getting caught.
While his life is being taken apart piece by piece and the police begin pursuing him over the crimes for which she has framed him, Jessup must uncover the real reason she is doing this -- an event that occurred 10 years earlier at an Afghanistan tribal leader's compound in the Shah-i-Kot Valley.
THE ENGINEER is a thriller about marriage and other disasters.

On March 12, I find out if it's one of the 100 thrillers to reach the next round based on what judges thought of the first 5,000 words. The first prize is a $50,000 publishing contract.

Mister Mystery: Why Papers Keep Using Honorifics

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 12:40:30 -0500

This paragraph in a Wall Street Journal story on Lance Armstrong does a nice job of demonstrating why I hate the use of honorifics such as "Mr." on second reference in news stories:

Mr. Armstrong's Austin lawyer, Mr. Herman, called Mr. Tygart and offered to dispatch Mr. Armstrong's legal team to Colorado to meet with him. Mr. Tygart said he wanted Mr. Armstrong to come. When Mr. Herman pushed back, Mr. Tygart called the meeting off.

This practice has been dying out in American newspapers, but the New York Times is keeping it alive, though with some weird rules. Osama Bin Laden was Mr. Bin Laden in the paper for a while, but now like Hitler and Stalin he gets to be more readable in news stories than the average mister or missus.

Christopher Tolkien Hates the Peter Jackson Movies

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 18:00:40 -0500

Christopher Tolkien, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien, gave his first interview to the media last year after being his father's literary executor for four decades. Speaking to the French newspaper Le Monde, the 87-year-old expressed great unhappiness with the Peter Jackson movies even though they helped sell 25 million copies of the books in three years, a 1,000 percent increase:

Invited to meet Peter Jackson, the Tolkien family preferred not to. Why? "They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25," Christopher says regretfully. "And it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film."
This divorce has been systematically driven by the logic of Hollywood. "Tolkien has become a monster, devoured by his own popularity and absorbed into the absurdity of our time," Christopher Tolkien observes sadly. "The chasm between the beauty and seriousness of the work, and what it has become, has overwhelmed me. The commercialization has reduced the aesthetic and philosophical impact of the creation to nothing. There is only one solution for me: to turn my head away."

I grew up reading Tolkien and eagerly attended the first Lord of the Rings movie. I haven't seen the rest yet, but the original film did not cheapen the books, which were full of action that appealed to young readers. When I was a teen, I did not devour The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings because of their "seriousness," though I suspect I would value that upon a rereading. I don't see how any movie or TV adaptation could damage the experience of reading the book on which it's based, particularly an enduring classic like the novels of Tolkien. The words are still there in the proper order.

Amazingly, the studio that made Jackson's films told Tolkien's estate they didn't make any money -- so it wasn't entitled to a cut of profits. "We were receiving statements saying that the producers did not owe the Tolkien Estate a dime," said Cathleen Blackburn, an attorney for the estate.

I hope the accountants were mumbling "my precioussssss" to themselves as they cooked the books.

AP Launches News Archive Going Back to '70s

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 16:34:24 -0500

Associated Press has quietly launched a beta of the AP News Archive, a free searchable database of AP news stories that goes back as far as 1974. The archive comprises at least 1.5 million articles at present, based on the approximate number of results returned in a Google search of the domain apnewsarchive.com.

The AP touts the archive as being more accurate than that dodgy, not-to-be-trusted Internet:

If you've tried to do historical research online, you know that there's a lot of misinformation floating around the Internet. It can be time-consuming, to say the least, to comb through dozens of sites and search results to find the information you're looking for.
Imagine that instead, you could find accurate, reliable historical information quickly and easily, all on one site, and all up to the highest standards of journalism.

Though the archive stretches back decades, I had trouble finding subjects I'd expect to be there -- such as the Drudge Retort's fair use copyright dispute with AP five years ago. I'm not in the database at all, which hurts.

I did find a few stories that my wife Mary Moewe or I covered while we were Fort Worth Star-Telegram stringers going to the University of North Texas in Denton from 1988 to 1991:

A story I was hoping to find was one that Mary broke about a youth soccer player from Lewisville, Texas. The girl was so good in a playoff game that two dads from the opposing team demanded that referees conduct a "panty check" to confirm that she wasn't a boy. (Thankfully, this did not happen.)

The story, which went all over the planet, turns up on the Baltimore Sun. Mary got great quotes from the 10-year-old girl:

Natasha Dennis, a 4-foot-5-inch fourth-grader with short brown hair, admits to being boyish. "I hate dresses," she said.
Still, Natasha, who has changed her hairstyle, said she did not appreciate the men's accusations.
"I think they should go somewhere and check and see if they have anything between their ears," she said.

Now Serving: 45,000 Restaurant Menus

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 15:35:04 -0500

I found a cool resource today for writers of fiction set in past decades. The New York Public Library offers a historic restaurant menu database of 45,000 menus dating back to the 1840s. So far, 16,000 of the menus have been transcribed and volunteers are needed to help with the rest.

If you were thinking about eating at New York City's Louis Sherry restaurant at 300 Park Avenue in 1947, the smoked salmon appetizer, Catskill Mountain smoked turkey, fresh strawberry tartalette and Ballantine's XXX ale would set you back $4.60.

At the Brown Derby in Hollywood a year later, the famous Cobb Salad dish invented at the restaurant cost $1.50, is mixed at your table and has this description: "Chicken, crisp bacon, avocado, tomato, eggs, chives, Roquefort cheese, lettuce, romaine, watercress, chicory) all chopped fine served in chilled salad bowl with old-fashioned Derby dressing."

Media Can't Bury a Mass Shooter's Name

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 20:05:56 -0500

There's a lot of talk about how the media should adopt a self-imposed blackout on the name and life story of mass shooters. This makes a lot of sense because so many of these spree killers are motivated by a desire for notoriety. The media occasionally omits information for the greater good, such as when the names of rape victims and children accused of crimes are not reported.

Just this week dozens of media outlets hid the news that NBC foreign correspondent Richard Engel had been kidnapped in Syria along with a cameraman and producer:

A number of news operations in Turkey reported that Engel and a Turkish journalist were missing in Syria, and that story was picked up by the UK's Daily Mail and websites like Gawker. But, for the most part, NBC and an informal group of reporters and aid workers jaw-boned most of their colleagues into not following the story, arguing that reporting could put them in danger.

But when I read the suggestion that the Newtown killer's name be obscured to discourage future fame-seeking murderers, it makes me wonder whether people realize how uncontrollable the media environment has become.

There was a time when the media could have enforced a blackout policy successfully. Almost all of the news came from large professional outlets such as newspapers, wire services, TV stations and cable networks.

Today, those outlets are competing with millions of bloggers, online journalists, social network users and message board members, any of whom is capable of breaking a story that goes global.

The Newtown massacre is sending millions of people to their web browsers for more details. If the old media goliaths silenced all mention of the killer, the new media davids would stand to make an enormous windfall in traffic and ad revenue if they outed him. And nothing is capable of stopping them.

Twenty one years ago, the media hid the name of the woman who accused William Kennedy Smith of rape. She was still obscure enough that it was news six months later when she chose to reveal herself.

Nine years ago, the media hid the name of the woman who accused Kobe Bryant of rape. Her name was revealed by a no-name web site that received millions of hits. By the time she sued Bryant in civil court and some of the old media identified her a year later, it was a moot point.

What changed? In 1991 there wasn't a single web server in the entire United States.

Oklahoma City Time Capsule Buried in 1913

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:57:47 -0500

While doing some research in Google Books, I found an item in the May 1913 issue of Santa Fe Employees' Magazine that described the burial of a 100-year time capsule:

A unique service was held on April 22 at the Lutheran Church in Oklahoma City, Okla., when a copper chast containing phonograph records of speakers and singers, writings, musical compositions, daily newspapers and many other records of current events was buried. It is to remain intact until the year 2013, when it will be opened and the gap of a century will be bridged; and the future generation will hear the voices of our great men of today and read the writings and papers which we read today. The event was to celebrate the twenty-fourth anniversary of the opening of Oklahoma for settlement.

Sometimes time capsules are forgotten, but that's not the case here. The leaders of First Lutheran Church recently found the capsule with ground-penetrating radar and will be unveiling the contents of the Century Chest on April 22 as planned. The congregation gathered once a year at the time capsule's burial site and pledged to remember it. "They didn't want this to be forgotten, and it won't be," said Chad Williams of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Remember Friedrich Franz III No More

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 17:39:42 -0500

Less than two weeks after she became the world's oldest person, Dina Manfredini died Monday at the age of 115 years and 257 days. Manfredini had been living at the Bishop Drumm Retirement Center in Johnston, Iowa.

Born in Pievepelago, Italy, on April 4, 1897, Manfredini became the oldest Italian and oldest immigrant who ever lived. She emigrated from Italy to Des Moines, Iowa, in 1920 with her husband Riccardo and raised four children, working at an ammunition factory during World War II and cleaning houses until she was 90. She lied about her age so people would still hire her. "I'm old, old lady, but I work. Work hard. I like work," she told the Des Moines Register in 2004 when she moved to a nursing home for the first time.

The newest oldest person, the Japanese man Jiroemon Kimura, was born 15 days after her on April 19, 1897.

With such a short jump forward, the line of oblivion doesn't gobble up much living history. But there's no longer a person who could have seen the UFO that reportedly crashed in Aurora, Texas, on April 17, 1897, northwest of Fort Worth, leaving behind the body of an extra-terrestrial pilot. An article in the Dallas Morning News two days later recounted the event:

It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with Judge Proctor's windmill and went into pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge's flower garden.
The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.
Mr. T. J. Weems, the United States signal service officer at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he was a native of planet Mars.

There's also no one who could have known Friedrich Franz III, the second-to-last grand duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in Germany. The grand duke's death on April 10, 1897, was a subject of some confusion at the New York Times, as evidenced by these headlines: "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin Shown to Have Committed Suicide" (April 13) and "The Grand Duke of Mecklenburg Schwerin Did Not Commit Suicide" (April 15).

Review: 'Kiss of the Spider Woman'

Rogers Cadenhead — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:38:10 -0500

I just finished reading Kiss of the Spider Woman, the 1976 Manuel Puig novel that became a terrific 1985 film. William Hurt won an Oscar playing Molina, a gay window dresser sharing a prison cell with Valentin, a straight Marxist revolutionary played by Raul Julia. To pass the time, Molina retells his favorite movies to Valentin.

The book held my interest but was difficult to read because of the experimental fiction techniques used by Puig. Most of the book is told through dialogue between the two men but the identity of the current speaker is never provided. Instead, an em-dash marks where a new person has begun to talk, as in this passage:

--She goes to the kitchen and makes toast with butter, and that crunchy cereal they have up there, and ...
--Don't talk about food.
--And pancakes ...
--Really, I'm serious about it. No food and no naked girls.
--Okay, so she wakes him up and he's happy to see her so comfortable in his home and he asks her if she wants to stay and live there forever.

You're never told who the speakers are. Instead, you learn gradually about the two men and the reasons for their imprisonment. The majority of the dialogue is devoted to Molina retelling movies at great length, but Valentin interrupts and the men occasionally talk about themselves. The funniest parts of the book are where the super-serious Marxist gives running commentary on films that would never appeal to him, each a tragic romance with a glorious leading lady in fabulous attire.

The rest of the novel consist of official transcripts of conversations between Molina and the warden, surveillance reports on one of the men after his release, weird academic footnotes regarding the psychology of homosexuality and an awesome stream of consciousness that goes on for six pages without a single verb:

--a European woman, a bright woman, a beautiful woman, an educated woman, a woman with a knowledge of international politics, a woman with a knowledge of Marxism, a woman with whom it isn't necessary to explain it all from A to Z, a woman who knows how to stimulate a man's thinking with an intelligent question, a woman of unbribable integrity, a woman of impeccable taste, a woman of discreet but elegant dress ... a woman who understands the problems of a Latin American, a European woman who admires a Latin American revolutionary ...

The passage reminded me of a song by the alternative band Cake: "I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket."

Boot Device Not Found, Brain Also Missing

Rogers Cadenhead — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 17:46:15 -0500

My desktop PC, an HP Pavilion p6000, crashed this morning and won't boot successfully, displaying an ominous "Boot Device Not Found" error instead. This used to be the kind of situation that would send me into a fetal position mumbling "why didn't I make a backup?" over and over to myself.

But a few years ago, I burned to CD a free copy of Knoppix, a stripped-down version of Linux, that can be used in an emergency like this. I booted the computer off this CD and found all of my files are still accessible. Even if you don't know anything about Linux, it's easy to figure out how to copy all the files off a drive onto another media such as an external USB drive.

So that's what I'm doing, copying 1.7 terabytes of files while I use an Apple iPad to research why my Windows 7 PC has forsaken me. Apparently the master boot record has become corrupted, a problem that's easily fixable with a Windows System Recovery Disk.

Why didn't I make a System Recovery Disk?

Update: I was able to choose and start Windows 7 manually by hitting Esc and F10 during boot up to run the BIOS setup program. A corrupted master boot record (MBR) was the problem. When I used BIOS setup to change a setting and save it, the MBR was fixed and the PC now boots normally.

Times Responds to Roger Cohen's Mistake

Rogers Cadenhead — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 17:50:47 -0500

I sent New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan an email yesterday describing how Roger Cohen borrowed quotes in his recent column on oversharing. She got back to me today letting me know that this editor's note was added to the column:

In this column, the author suggested that he was moved to talk about over-sharing and anxiety online after he came across two comments on Twitter. In fact, both comments were taken from a Web site, overshare.com, that the writer consulted as part of his research. One of the comments, from Claire, was from a Twitter feed; the other, from Deanna, was from Facebook. They were both written in 2010. The writer should not have implied he stumbled across them while reading recent Twitter feeds.

This situation feels like a triumphant scream is required.

By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!

Times Columnist Roger Cohen Borrows Quotes

Rogers Cadenhead — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:00:18 -0500

The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen engages in some ethically questionable journalism in his column Thursday about people sharing too much on Facebook and Twitter.

In his commentary, Cohen shares this lament:

Now I was determined to get through 2012 without doing a peevish column ... but everyone has a tipping point. Mine occurred when I came across this tweet from Claire:
"Have such a volcanically deep zit laying roots in my chin that it feels like someone hit me with a right cross."
Good to know, Claire.
I was just recovering from that when I found Deanna tweeting that she had "picked up pet food" and was heading to "the dreaded consult on colon stuff. The joys of turning 50." As for Kate she let the world know the status of her labor: "Contractions 3 minutes apart and dilated at 2 cm."
Social media does not mean that you have to be that social.

Cohen makes it sound as if these are people he interacts with on Twitter and Facebook, but it's far more likely that he found them on Oversharers.Com, a site that's the top Google search result for the term "oversharing." The quotes from Claire and Deanna are the first and third entries on the second page of the site's archive. The zit tweet was something Claire shared with her followers in February 2010. Deanna's "colon stuff" status update, which Cohen incorrectly calls a tweet, was posted to her Facebook friends no later than July 2010, if the date on Oversharers.Com post is correct.

He never credits Oversharers.Com as the source of these quotes. There was no "tipping point" that roused his inner curmudgeon about people sharing too much. He was fishing for examples to write a column around. More seriously from a journalistic standpoint, Cohen has no way of knowing if the Deanna quote is real. It's just a screen capture on a humor site with no link or full name of the author on Facebook. Someone could have made it up.

Regarding Cohen's premise that we're living in a too-much-information age, that's hard to argue.

But there's something obnoxiously elitist about a New York Times columnist ridiculing ordinary people for sharing observations about their lives on social networks to an audience of people who've specifically asked to receive them. Two years ago, Cohen used his column to share the text of a suicide note written by his mother:

That jolted me -- and sent me back to my mother's suicide note of July 25, 1978: "It's as though I've turned to stone. I can't relate, I can't communicate and I can no longer bear the pain and gloom I cause to those I love most. ... At present I am filled only with self-hate. I do love my family and dear friends but I can't go on and on like this."
My mother survived, just. But the bi-polar state that led her to try to take her life that day never entirely relaxed its grip.

What would Cohen have thought if he found something like that on a Facebook wall?

Update: The Times has acknowledged that Cohen made improper use of those quotes.