In defence of NonCommercial clauses

Check out the definition of in, regarding the matter of sharing an essay in a book. I guess, though, your point is that you don’t want your essay in a book. Mission accomplished, in that case.

The current interpretation is that adverts are fine and don’t constitute commercial use.

Please cite caselaw so I can be sure this would mean I’m protected, rather than just taking the word of an armchair “lawyer”.

An email might suffice — if you haven’t been hit by a bus, if you choose to respond, if the email address I use to try to contact you has not been abandoned or compromised, and so on.

NC is not this big barrier to sharing.

. . . except when it is.

It’s obvious you disagree, but saying so then offering a few special-case scenarios doesn’t dispute the rest of what I’ve said. There are many circumstances and contexts where a short snippet and a “link” (as in, say, a print book not intended to require a nearby Internet connected computer to get full value from reading) is not a reasonable answer to the problem.

I didn’t say that an author using a non-commercial license will necessarily fade away into obscurity. Please don’t put words in my mouth so you can argue against a strawman. I pointed out that limiting distribution increases the likelihood that the author’s works and name will fade from public knowledge, and make less of an impact in the world. My point was not about guarantees — it was about probabilities. It’s you who made claims that do not stand up to scrutiny when you claimed I said anything about guarantees and certainties.

If you assume that the only effect that matters is that you get traffic to your website, and that people are as likely to link to your website with a snippet quoted from your essay as they are to link to it as part of an attribution statement after quoting the entire essay, then sure — you get the same effect. Someone editing and assembling a book of essays, on the other hand, is pretty obviously not going to be happy with assembling a fifteen page book of Twitter-length snippets of text with URIs printed under them.

I’m a pretty strong supporter of the notion that what people who still think the Internet is a newfangled, confusing contraption call “new media” is something that should be embraced and leveraged to positive effect. In fact, it is in part because of my embrace of what people like Mike Masnick are calling the “economics of abundance” that I am able to look at the situation without the biases of people used to traditional content industry focus on artificial scarcity as a means of generating revenue, and come to the conclusion that the single most important change in our business models we can make is probably to develop models that in no way, shape, or form assume any ability to control distribution beyond choosing the time, place, and form of initial publication. Even so, I do not so casually and unthinkingly dismiss the importance of paying some attention to somewhat more traditional forms of publication as you do — because the fact the world is evolving away from assuming publication is a tedious process of typesetting, printing, advertising, shipping, and retail sales from physical storefronts does not alter the fact that it is attention that is the real scarce resource here, and delivering complete works in conveniently packaged, homogenously presented formats often serves the information consumer’s needs better than scattered snippets that add up to a whole lot of nothing. A book full of snippets will almost certainly do nothing but bore people and consign your work to the dustbin of history.

With that in mind, it quite definitely does matter whether the essays that might be collected in such a book are “Free” or not, because when the editor of a collection of essays is considering inclusion of two works in such a collection, the guy whose work is more liberally licensed is going to get the nod and the attribution, while the guy whose work is less liberally licensed is going to get ignored.

you keep assuming that just because something is not Free it will not get included in other works

There you go again, trying to put words in my mouth. No, I don’t assume that.

I simply point out that your work is less likely to be included in other works when it is restricted in a way that requires more effort and more legal compatibility issues when trying to include it. The very fact that Carlos can cite a specific case of this occurring is clear evidence that this is the case, at least sometimes, and pretending that is never the case does you no good. The fact you “have also agreed to include academic articles in educational book collections when asked (for free)” has nothing to do with it.

Because we all know that it is impossible to check a link or a URL at a later time when an Internet connection is available

. . . because we all know that answering a valid point by pretending a different point was made is a reasonable response. Oh, wait — no it isn’t. It’s just a strawman fallacy.

You said WILL, not MIGHT, the certainty is clearly in what you wrote.

Define “too restricted” for me. The “might” comes in with the question of whether, in a specific case, a non-commercial license is “too restricted” to reach above that threshold to achieve enough widespread distribution so that it will not end up forgotten and unacknowledged.

Context matters.

I do not propose that people should reprint tweets, I mean that in a world of sharing digital works, content is one click away, and the same effect can be achieved by linking to a work than to include it in its entirety.

I’m not talking about reprinting Tweets, either. I’m talking about books, and you’re talking about making content “a click away” from a book, with nothing but the equivalent of a tweet excerpted from an essay.

This assumes that editors make decisions solely based on licensing, which is not the case in my experience.

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Sometimes, licensing trumps other concerns — such as when publication is self-funding and one of the licenses in consideration is only available under a license that prohibits inclusion in such a work without getting sued.

I sent an email to the author and they authorised me to use the picture for commercial purposes without having to pay.

You’re lucky that worked out for you — and completely missing the point that this is not a 100% solution (or probably even a 50% solution). Read some of my earlier commentary here to see why. Ignoring my points does not refute them.

So on the one hand I have had real life experience that NC has not been a barrier to sharing.

You still seem to think that if something works a few times, it must work all the time. Why do you keep saying things that suggest you think that? Do you really, truly believe that?

On the other hand, we have your continuing assertion that editors will choose content based on Free licensing.

All else being equal, they probably will. Why jump through bureaucratic hoops or risk legal saber-rattling and possible infringement suits when there are easier, safer options available?

Most people do not make decisions based on ideological considerations.

Some will — and for the rest, convenience and safety trump both ideology and your fantasy world where there is no convenience or safety cost perceived in dealing with non-commercial licensing.

I never said that it doesn’t happen, my point from the start is that even if you cannot use the work, this is not such a big problem as it would be with software.

What you have been saying is that you will make exceptions, if you feel like it, but usually you just want people to link to your original content from their printed, dead tree format books, and there’s no problem at all with non-commercial licenses because there just isn’t. Then you’ve gone on to ignore my points, and accuse me of employing a strawman fallacy when I just make reference to a real-world example that shows how a more restricted work is less likely to be included in a collection. How the bloody blue hell does citing an example of restrictively licensed content not getting included in what amounts to a performance collection because of that licensing, to demonstrate the fact that restrictively licensed content is less likely to be included in a collection, a straman fallacy? You’re high, you’re confused, or you’re screwing with me.

It’s the author’s prerogative to make a licensing choice which may forbid commercial uses in the future.

I’m aware of that fact. Check the law; it’s pretty clear. This has nothing to do with what I’ve been saying, other than the simple fact it creates the situation I address. It disputes nothing I’ve said. I never said you are incapable of licensing something however you like, so long as the license stands up in court.

There are borderline cases in which people will not use the NC work (I believe that Carlos was unjustified in his extreme care, he’s also from Costa Rica, and nobody ever sues anyone here for copyright infringement or licence breach, we are a non-litigous bunch, but that’s besides the point).

The borderline is the problem — and it’s constantly moving closer and closer to the core of restrictive licensing, as people are leveraging free distribution methods more and more to improve the reach of their works.

You also seem strangely unaware of the fact that the US (for instance) reaches into countries like the UK to extradite people for things that don’t involve copyright infringement, and don’t even involve facilitating copyright infringement, but in fact involve nothing but linking to people who facilitate copyright infringement. If someone uses a non-commercial work under US copyright in a commercial endeavor by US law, that’s a direct infringement of copyright, and even if the alleged infringer can get the case thrown out of court after that person’s government allowed him or her to be kidnapped by US law enforcement agents to stand trial, and spent most of his or her life savings fighting the charges, that person gets a hollow victory at best.

The point is that he could continue with his event, he just chose other music.

. . . which leads back to my earlier statements to the effect that an author/composer of a work gets less publicity, less distribution, and less cultural significance and durability, thanks to the choice of a non-commercial license.

They have my email, if they choose not to contact me, it’s their fault as far as I’m concerned, people can easily and freely access the content otherwise.

It seems strange to me that you cannot see the value in being more widely published, of having a more widely recognized name as a writer.

Only time will tell if this choice will relegate me to the dustbin of history, as you keep implying.

Only time, I suppose, will tell whether you will eventually learn the difference between “will relegate” and “increases the likelihood that you will be relegated”.

By the way, WordPress sucks. A competent web developer — not even expert; just competent — could produce something better, given the features of WordPress I actually see you using here, in a few days.

But as I keep saying, this doesn’t preclude the editor from simply sending an email and asking the author.

Yes — you do keep saying that, as if I don’t keep responding that this is far from a universal answer, that it doesn’t cover cases where the author gets hit by a bus, is on vacation for a month, loses the incoming email in a spam filter, lost control of an email address to spammers, or otherwise doesn’t get the email, doesn’t respond to the email, and so on. It also doesn’t account for people who have already had bad experiences with non-commercial licensors saying “no” in lengthy streams of invective, or with licensors who’ve said “That doesn’t sound commercial, so don’t bother asking,” then threatened lawsuits anyway, or who can’t even find suitable contact information for licensors at all, to say nothing of those who just figure anyone with an unfriendly license is probably ideologically attached to it and won’t make allowances so never asks.

You keep offering a hypothetical editor who doesn’t have access to email and therefore finding NC content is an insurmountable barrier. I keep offering examples to the contrary.

An answer that might work, but doesn’t always work, is not a meaningful replacement for something that always works (i.e. crossing one’s fingers while begging for special dispensation, and often not getting that dispensation, is not a meaningful replacement for licensing that doesn’t require someone making the effort to track down authors and beg them for their good will).

Editors do email authors to obtain permission to use the content, it has happened to me.

I have seen the opposite happen, too. I’m preparing to work on a project with someone who took a month of emails back and forth to agree to allowing me to use some of his non-commercial content as part of a larger work just because it was going to be offered under a slightly more liberal license, and not even for any specific desire to make money directly from it — an effort that I was beginning to think was wasted. In the other two cases where I’ve tried to negotiate something with a non-commercial clause user, the answer has been “no”, even though in neither case did I specifically want to use the material in a money-making scheme.

I am not ignoring your points, I am offering examples that refute your assertions.

What part of “it’s far from a 100% solution” is refuted by “this one time, it went the other way”? You’re going to need to cite your source that says your personal anecdotal case of having let someone use your content once or twice adds up to a 100% solution to the problem before I’ll accept that as a refutation of my point.

In my experience, this has not been the case whenever I have wanted to use NC content.

Oh, well, if it worked for you a couple of times, I guess it must always work for everyone else. That, or you’re missing the point, probably intentionally by now.

The fantasy world is one in which people do not have access to email.

I know a guy who didn’t have access to email for a week last year because of financial problems crashing down on his life. I know two or three people who have had to abandon email addresses that were not only their only publicly accessible contact information but also associated with accounts they had for sites where they made their material available so that they could no longer log in for several months, all because of their email accounts being compromised. I have seen people’s entire digital lives wiped out by local system infections. Yes, you live in a fantasy world where nothing ever goes wrong, where people don’t get in car accidents like a friend of mine who was killed on an Interstate on-ramp in 2004, where people don’t get literally thousands of malware infections in a matter of days requiring me to come by and recover their data at a cost of hundreds of dollars when I was doing security compromise recovery work in that same year, where WinXP SP2 didn’t reject the SATA controller’s driver on one of the computers in a client’s office so that the operating system would not finish loading from the SATA drive so that the consultancy that employed me had to send me to his office and get things working again — where, y’know, people aren’t able to deal with email for a while, data might be lost, and so on. Out here in reality, things go wrong. Screws fall out all the time. It’s an imperfect world. If you think everything is always rosy just because you personally are glued to your email every day and have answered “yes” when asked whether people can use your content, you don’t live in the same imperfect world as the rest of us.

But that is the author’s prerogative.

I did not make the argument that it is not the author’s prerogative, so I do not see how that disputes anything I’ve said.

You continue to ignore the examples that I have given where my content has been reused commercially, or where I have used NC content commercially simply by asking.

I don’t ignore them. I point out that they do not prove anything about the general case, and that there are plenty of cases where things don’t go that way. Notice in Carlos’ case that he said most lincensors never responded. That’s not even the significant minority it would take to make a reasonable person sit up and take notice of the fact that non-commercial licenses create real problems — that’s most people in that case. More than half. If you were one of the people who did respond — if you and all your friends were among the people who responded — and said “yes, go ahead, use it,” that would not in any way change the fact that most people did not. Your argument, however, seems to suggest that it does change that fact, and when I point out it doesn’t, you have the gall to pretend I’m somehow ignoring your statement. Poppycock.

I do not think that NC is as much of a barrier to sharing as you clearly state. I have offered real personal examples where I and others have been able to successfully reuse NC content.

I wonder how many times I’ve pointed out by now that a handful of anecdotal bits of “evidence” do not prove a systematic “everything is cool” condition, and does not even guarantee that the next time either Carlos or I ask someone the answer will be “yes”.

Even if a person cannot share NC content (I have never claimed that this never happens, hence the strawman)

No, that is not how it works. I did not argue that nobody ever allows something distributed under a non-commercial license to be distributed commercially. I did not even argue that it usually happens that way, if only because the statistics to prove the case have not been gathered. I just pointed out that it is a problem that occurs, at least sometimes. You, somehow, seem to think you’re disputing what I say by one of two mechanisms, depending on which fallacy you want to employ:

1. Sometimes, you point to yourself and one or two other people you know as counter-examples, as if the fact you might allow a non-commercial work to be distributed commercially somehow solves the problem Carlos had with people who did not respond to give him permission to use their works.

2. Other times, you make bizarre assertions that I’m claiming things I’m not, which is your horribly misaimed strawman fallacy.

this is not problematic from the user’s perspective, as they can use other content.

. . .

This is the one that I get the least. How is “love it or leave it” a good argument for disagreeing with political policy? How is “you don’t get to use this, but that’s fine, because if someone else wrote something that serves the same purpose you could always try to beg them to let you use it instead” not the same damned thing as “love it or leave it”?

Talk about scaremongering! I am perfectly aware of the realities of copyright enforcement, and the application of your scenario to open content is laughable to say the least.

Don’t even try. You are the one that claimed that the fact you think people in your country are more easygoing about lawsuits than in other countries somehow makes the use of non-commercial clauses a non-issue for everyone in the world who wants to use any work under a non-commercial license in a borderline case. I’m not scaremongering; I’m pointing out the simple fact that your “Oh, don’t worry about it, nobody’s ever unreasonable about licensing!” nonsense is directly contradicted by how things work in the real world.

Are you really suggesting that the power of the US enforcement machine will fall upon anyone who ever misuses an NC licence? Really?

No, not really. That’s you putting words in my mouth. That’s you exercising strawmen again. That’s you not actually addressing the arguments I make, and instead attacking things I never said, because you find it easier to ridicule something you invented for the express purpose of making it ridiculous than to actually have an honest discussion with someone who doesn’t buy your line of BS.

The reality is that here in Costa Rica people infringe copyright every single day in events, bars, cafes, businesses and concerts, and not a single one is extradited.

Once again, that has nothing to do with the way things work in other countries. That was my point, and here you are blatantly ignoring it to pretend I’m somehow saying that everyone everywhere is always going to prison for violating a non-commercial license. No. That’s not what I said. Stop trying to lie to my face about what I said. I know what I said; you can’t convince me I said something I did not say. Do you understand yet?

I don’t care if you will never be extradited. I’m more worried about whether I will be extradited. I do not live in Costa Rica. I do not want to move to Costa Rica. Your claims about how your country works do not affect the reality elsewhere in the world — but your choice of license does, especially when you write essays trying to convince other people all over the world that it’s okay to use the same restrictive license while downplaying the actual effect such a license might have in cases that, frankly, are more likely to differ from yours than to exactly duplicate yours.

I have not seen any evidence whatsoever that my using an NC licence has deterred anyone from sharing my content.

Oh, well, the fact you don’t see people who note the license then choose to avoid your work must mean they don’t exist. Anyway, this isn’t all about you.

I am willing to concede that some person cannot reach me in the future, and that they would not be able to share my content in a book. That hypothetical possibility is acceptable to me given the reality that NC has been good to me.

That is a very different message than what you have been peddling so far — and what you have been saying before this point is the stuff to which I objected. If your message had been “I understand the problems, and I accept them,” that would be a very different thing than your tendency thus far to ignore, dismiss, or even try to refute things that really do happen in the real world.

It has allowed me to get the book published under a CC licence, and it has allowed me to get paid on two occasions recently. Reality trumps hypotheticals.

I’m pretty sure I already said that when the most-open license you can get the publisher to allow is a non-commercial license it makes sense to choose that rather than nothing, all else being equal. You’re not just arguing for that, though. You’re arguing for the notion that for anything other than software there’s really not much (if any) benefit to a more-free license.

I don’t claim to be a web developer, and never have, not even a competent one.

I didn’t say you were. I responded to what you said about WordPress, and pointed out that there are other options.

WP works for me.

You’re the participant in this discussion who said something that suggested keeping up with two threads of discussion was too difficult because of your lack of WordPress skills, here — not me. I just responded to that.

I have never claimed that these experiences are universal. I have never claimed that NC works for everyone all the time. I keep stating that in my non-negligible experience, it has worked as intended in all situations.

It is true that you have not explicitly claimed your experience is universally representative, and I have never (improperly) asserted that you made such a claim — though you have improperly asserted that I made universal claims that I never did. You have also used examples of your experience to try to dispute my statements about non-universal problems with non-commercial licenses, as though your experiences were universally representative, even though you did not explicitly claim they were universally representative. This, right here, is my biggest problem with your arguments.

Your experience, by the way, may be “non-negligible” to you, but to many others who have to deal with the other side of the equation and other people than you, your experience really is pretty negligible, because it offers them nothing.

You on the other hand continue trying to offer hypothetical situations in which people may not be able to share my content to try to dissuade me (and others) from using NC.

They’re not all hypothetical.

I will state this again because you seem to be having trouble understanding this. I am fine with that possibility.

Yes, I know. I also know that you’ve tried offering arguments against licenses that allow commercial use (or at least in favor of non-commercial licenses) based on spurious claims that non-commercial clauses don’t cause any problems, and many of your arguments are based on claims that I’ve said things I haven’t, including the statement I just quoted that implies I somehow don’t understand that you are fine with the possibility that it screws with other people’s ability to create new things.

Most of this discussion has not been about whether you are fine with the possibility of your work being less widely distributed, your name being less widely known, others finding it more difficult to use non-commercial licensed content even for projects whose only “commercial” intent is to not take a loss, and so on. It has been about the fact that you recast my statements so that they say things I did not actually say, and you waste a lot of time dismissing arguments based on half-assed justifications rather than addressing what I actually said.

Then you continue offering Carlos’ example as a failure of NC licences.

When you make a claim that amounts to “That’s not a problem,” I just point out that yes, it is, at least sometimes. Saying you’re fine with that problem does not make your claims that there is no problem any more accurate.

I think that Carlos misread the licence, and that the use was clearly non-commercial.

Nice of you to take his comment to mean he’s an idiot, and to assume things about the situation that were not stated here. Good job.

Moreover, copyright infringement of this type is NOT a criminal offence, therefore your talk of extradition is ridiculous. The USA is not going to extradite Carlos because he used some music at an event.

My references to extradition were to the general case, and not specifically to Carlos’ case. Please stop trying to recast my arguments to mean things they did not actually mean. It’s rude, and logically fallacious.

Even if we ignore points 1 and 2, he was still able to use other music in the event. NonFree content is not the impediment that it is in technical fields.

Do you know anything about technical fields? Are you aware that GPL advocates make exactly the same argument you do? In fact, one could argue that because different people can implement exactly the same software functionality with source code different enough that it is separately copyrighted the real problem is with non-software works, because getting the same “features” from a song or essay requires duplicating the content of the copyrighted work, because form and content are the same thing. With software, they are not; the content is source code, and the form is functionality. I think you have your notions of where things are a bigger problem backwards.

I am not claiming that NC works 100% of the time, so will you please drop that line of reasoning?

You aren’t making that claim, specifically, but you are using your claims that it works at least sometimes to try to refute my statements that it doesn’t work 100% of the time, which is kinda like trying to have your cake and eat it too.

It is not “love it or leave it” because we are not talking about a binary proposition, it is more nuanced than that. It works like this: you find a picture on Flickr that you really like, and you want to use it in a commercial book. You realise that it is under CC BY-NC-SA. What do you do? I see a whole range of possibilities:

Yeah, let’s have a look at those possibilities.

You disagree with the person’s use of an NC clause, so you do not use that image. This is an ideological decision, and it is perfectly valid, but do not blame the author if that is your choice.

That’s the “love it or leave it” part of the situation.

You contact the user through Flickr mail, email, or Flickr comment page and ask for permission, the user responds positively and allows you to use the content.

That’s equivalent to the “change the law” case. It often does not work, setting you back in the “love it or leave it” situation.

You try to contact the author and do not receive a response, so you decide to use another image instead.

That’s another “love it or leave it” case.

You seem to imply that 3 trumps all other considerations.

Depending on how you mean that, either “yes” or “no”. I don’t think that’s the only possibility. I do, however, think that when it happens, you’re screwed if you can’t find an equivalent or better option. On top of that, it’s kind of sad that the author of the work in question loses the opportunity for more widespread recognition of his or her work.

My point is that in my experience, the large possibilities of success of point 2 lead me to believe that NC works as intended . . .

. . . sometimes.

I am perfectly happy to “beg” to use it. You seem incredibly reluctant to acknowledge that this is a viable option, and offer 3 as the killer argument against NC.

No. I’m not reluctant to acknowledge that it is an option, at least sometimes. I’m just interested in pointing out that it is also not an option sometimes, despite the fact you are highly resistant to accepting that this is a problem (at least for some people, though you apparently are perfectly happy with other people having problems as long as you never have to deal with those problems).

I do not think that we will agree on this point.

I never tried to make the point that it’s never an option, no matter how much you keep trying to pretend that I did, so yeah, I guess we’ll never agree on the point that I never made but that you keep insisting on attacking as though I did.

NC is a publishing strategy. It is not perfect, it might get in the way of some people sharing content in the future, but this is a chance NC licensors are willing to take.

1. Non-commercial licensors who are aware of the risk may be willing to take that risk, but those who have not thought things through enough to realize all of the consequences of such things — like the fact that they may never even know someone passed over their work because it’s easier to use another work of roughly equal value but a more permissive license than to beg for permission to use a more restrictively licensed work, for instance — may not be willing to take these risks if they should eventually learn about them. Thus, I think it is important to ensure that all factors are available for consideration, and I like to see the possible consequences brought up when people talk about the relative value of a non-commercial license.

2. Non-commercial licenses are often presented as being “free” or “open”, even though in reality they are not in any meaningful sense relative to other licenses.

3. Your original piece of writing on why you think non-commercial licenses are great largely ignores or dismisses the negative consequences, and downplays the free/open aspects of the whole thing (which prompted me to start trying to point out these shortcomings). The fact you then went on to argue against my attempts to correct the oversight is kind of annoying, considering you’ve done so by misrepresenting my arguments so you can attack things I never said (strawman fallacy), using personal anecdotes that are simply not universally representative as though they dispute my statements pointing out that there are problems (not universal problems) that could arise, and finally end up acting like none of it matters because you like non-commercial licenses and are willing to take the hit (thus ignoring the fact that you’re evidently trying to influence others to believe similarly without presenting all the facts).

What I am trying to get you to see is that not everyone shares your values, ideologies and political decisions.

I never said, or even implied, that they do. Once again, you are misrepresenting my arguments. What I did was try to point out the fact there are consequences, potentially quite negative, to using restrictive licenses.

I value personal freedom of choice, fairness and self-determination higher.

It is not the case that everyone shares your values, ideologies, and political decisions. What you call “personal freedom of choice” others would call “power to restrict others from exercising personal freedom of choice”. What you call “fairness” others might call “bullying”. What you call “self-determination” others might call “exercising monopoly over what others possess”. Saying all of that immediately after you try to play the “we don’t all agree on issues of morals and politics” card is pretty hypocritical. The problem in this case is not that you have different values; it is that you define terms according to your values as though this somehow obviates anyone else’s ability to refer to personal freedom, fairness, and self-determination as arguments for something different from what you want people to believe.

The entire point of this blog post, and the ensuing discussion, is that these are valid choices.

When they are informed choices, that may be so. I commented to help inform people about the possible consequences of their choices. I’m pretty sure I never said anything about my purpose here being to suggest you should be locked up in prison for holding different opinions on these matters than me.

Maybe you should do me a favor. Stop trying to twist what I say to make it sound like something it isn’t. I asked you a question. That’s it. I did not call you names. I did not question your mental capacity. I just asked you a question so that I would not have to do friggin’ research into your private and professional life to get an idea of how much you know about the subject you’re trying to address.

If you do not have a meaningful response to my point, perhaps you should just accept that fact rather than try to turn this into some kind of case of being vicitimized by someone wanting to ask a question.

Most of this discussion has not been about whether you are fine with the possibility of your work being less widely distributed, your name being less widely known, others finding it more difficult to use non-commercial licensed content even for projects whose only “commercial” intent is to not take a loss, and so on.

I have a proposal of order to make this manageable again. We could abandon the mutual accusations of word-twisting, the animosity and the like, and concentrate on this point.

Do you have any evidence for the above, other than your say-so. This seems to be an important early point for you.