First, Dr. Dave is a decent guy and the information he puts out is great. I don't always agree with his "tactics" but overall the volume of his work speaks for itself and there is a LOT that people can learn just from what is provided for free on his site.
Where Dave Segal (Spidey) is correct is that Dr. Dave has taken the core information that others charge for and presented it on his website without permission or compensation and completely and deliberately against the wishes of the authors.
So if turnabout is fair play then one could purchase this package and spend the time to diagram the shots on the CueTable, posting them all for free to the
www.pool.bz website or here on AZB or both, paraphrase the descriptions, and possibly even provide their own free YouTube vids of the drills being done. The net effect is that in the end the work that Dr. Dave and Bob Jewett put in to compile and present the information would be available for free and every time Dr. Dave would link to his commercial set then someone else would link to the free version and that WOULD mean less sales.
That's the point that Spidey is making.
Along with that I would add that Dr. Dave has not always held himself to be an impartial academic researcher. He has gone out of his way to ridicule others and this has left people with a bad impression. I do not think that Dr. Dave is a bad guy at all and I DO think that he IS an asset to the pool community and an asset to the promotion of pool online. (for one thing having a vast compendium of pool related content for Google and others search engines to index is good for pool)
It's too bad that the situation has deteriorated to the point that there are two "camps" and basically good people are at odds with each other.
I think it's time to let sleeping dogs lie so to speak. Let Dr. Dave do his thing and the Aiming System folks can do theirs. At the end of the day Aiming Systems are being proven to work and accepted by more and more people. It's just a fact of life that no matter what you do there are people who find issue with it. Even Mother Teresa and Ghandi have detractors. People like Hal Houle and Ron Vitello and Gene are always going to have negative people trying to tear them down. And at the end of the day is that such a bad thing?
If the system/method etc... really works then it can withstand the criticism. In fact withstanding the criticism and lowbrow ridicule and outright defamation IS what proves the concept. At the end of the day the people who try to tear it down end up making it stronger.
Dr. Dave knows he has opened the door for his compilations to be diagrammed, repackaged and offered for free. If that happens then it happens and he will probably be ok with it since he does it to others. It probably won't happen because most people are too lazy to do it and most people have their own sense that it isn't "right" to do it. (notice I didn't say illegal).
So let's all just celebrate that there is more pool instruction than ever out there for anyone who wants it. Plenty of paid instruction, plenty of free instruction, plenty of free video, plenty of paid video, it's a good time to be learning to play pool. Someday perhaps all the people who have had issues with each other will have a group hug and agree to work together moving forward. (good luck with that)
No really, there are people on here that I consider to be grade A jerkoffs with little redeeming social qualities, real wastes of carbon, if they disappeared the world would not be any less nice to live in. I find that Dave Segal and Dave Alciatore fit into the categories of folks I would miss if they weren't around.
And that is the end of my brown-nosing spiel. I expect appropriately sized checks in the mail fellas.
:thumbup:
