Category: Media Moguls

No time to give this the full measure of bemused contempt it deserves, but I certainly urge you to check out this fine post from the Decrepit Old Fool on a particular example of public “art.” The artist’s commentary on why his $200K piece was finally pulled from display (which I can only label as “blaming the victim”) is particularly telling:

The chasm of incomprehension between public art and its intended audience remains as wide as ever.

Seems to me that if you intend a piece of art for a particular audience, the responsibility to bridge that particular chasm is yours. But I’m sure that’s a horribly reactionary attitude on my part.

Everything you ever wanted to ask about copyright law and the Net — but no good answers, alas, which I think is one of the points of the post.

Interesting article on how some TV series are unlikely to make it to DVD … because of the cost of relicensing the music that was originally used for it.

WKRP in Cincinnati was one of the most popular television shows of the late ’70s and early ’80s, but it is unlikely ever to be released on DVD because of high music-licensing costs.

The show, which centered on a fledging radio station with a nerdy news director and wild disc jockeys, had a lively soundtrack, playing tunes from rock ‘n’ rollers like Ted Nugent, Foreigner, Elton John and the Eagles.

For many TV shows, costs to license the original music for DVD are prohibitively high, so rights owners replace the music with cheaper tunes, much to the irritation of avid fans. And some shows, like WKRP, which is full of music, will probably never make it to DVD because of high licensing costs.

“The indication from the studios is that we may never see (WKRP in Cincinnati) because of all the music that would have to be licensed,” said David Lambert, news director of TVShowsOnDVD.com, a clearinghouse of information on TV shows released on DVD. “As the DJ spins the record as he’s talking to Loni Anderson, if there is music playing even for a couple of seconds, then the people producing the DVDs would have to license it.”

The dramatic (and welcome) increase in releasing TV shows to DVD has made this a much more visible issue.

The original theme song for the show Married … With Children — “Love and Marriage” sung by Frank Sinatra — was replaced on the third-season DVD. Fans also complained when the song “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues was missing from a critical scene in the Wiseguy DVD set. The second-season DVD sets of Quantum Leap and Northern Exposure both contain noticeable music replacements. And DVD distributors don’t always reveal on the box cover that music has been replaced, either.

Only selected episodes from the first season of Ally McBeal have been released in the United States because of the high cost of music licensing. But in the United Kingdom, where different licensing deals have been struck, viewers can order all five seasons of the show.

Ultimately, the music studios are going to need to make relicensing costs a lot more reasonable for this stuff. If they don’t, TV producers will, looking forward toward DVD sales, simply not use “real” music. Which would be a loss for everyone.

I wish I could be excited, or outraged, or really torqued off, or otherwise moved by the cancellation of the 04-05 NFL NHL hockey season — but, frankly, unless the Avs are in the Stanley Cup or something, I really don’t pay much attention.

The league and players’ union traded a flurry of proposals and letters Tuesday night, but could never agree on a cap. The players proposed $49 million per team; the owners said $42.5 million.

“We weren’t as close as people were speculating,” Bettman said.

Sure you were. What’s $6.5MM per team between friends?

Okay, I’m truly outraged now:

For over half a century, kits have been sold that enable military history buffs to assemble scale models of military ships, aircraft and vehicles. But that era is coming to an end, as the manufacturers of the original equipment, especially aircraft, are demanding high royalties (up to $40 per kit) from the kit makers. Since most of these kits sell in small quantities (10-20,000) and are priced at $15-30 (for plastic kits, wooden ones are about twice as much), tacking on the royalty just prices the kit out of the market. Popular land vehicles, which would sell a lot of kits, are missing as well. The new U.S. Army Stryker armored vehicles are not available because of royalty requirements. Even World War II aircraft kits are being hit with royalty demands.

These royalty demands grew out of the idea that corporations should maximize “intellectual property” income. Models of a company’s products are considered the intellectual property of the owner of a vehicle design. Some intellectual property lawyers have pointed out that many of these demands are on weak legal ground, but the kit manufacturers are often small companies that cannot afford years of litigation to settle this contention. In the past, the model kits were considered free advertising, and good public relations, by the defense firms. The kit manufacturers comprise a small industry, and the aircraft manufacturers will probably not even notice if they put many of the model vendors out of business. Some model companies will survive by only selling models of older (like World War I), or otherwise “no royalty” items (Nazi German aircraft) and ships. But the aircraft were always the bulk of sales, and their loss will cripple many of the kit makers. Some of the vehicle manufacturers have noted the problem, and have lowered their demands to a more reasonable level (a few percent of the wholesale price of the kits).

(Emphasis above mine.)

I cannot begin to express how asinine I, as a one-time model-maker, think this behavior is from these aerospace manufacturers — especially since the aircraft in mind were designed for the US government, i.e., the taxpayers.

Though it goes right alongside copyrighting images of the Eiffel Tower.

(via BoingBoing)

No, it’s not a planet on Star Trek, but something new (I believe) at Amazon: Amazon Prime.

Unlimited Express Shipping

* Free Two-Day Shipping on over a million in-stock items
* Overnight Shipping for only $3.99 per item?order as late as 6:30 PM ET

Effortless Shopping

* No minimum purchase required
* No need to consolidate items to save on shipping

Convenient Sharing

* Share the benefits of your Amazon Prime membership with up to four family members living in the same household

For $79/year (special introductory price).

Looking at Amazon’s usual shipping, standard book shipment is $3/shipment, $1/item, for 3-5 days. If you bought individual books, that’s 20 shipments break-even cost for 2-day shipping. DVD’s are $2/shipment, $1/item.

On the other hand, while I buy a lot through Amazon, I (a) rarely buy just one thing at a time, so as to minimize shipping, and (b) usually buy at least $25 a pop to get free shipping. So the cost savings for me would be less likely.

On the other hand, I’ll confess that sometimes I buy something extra just so that I can get that $25, so if that were reduced, I’d save money sooner.

On the other hand, it’s not clear how many items it will apply to, and I’ve been doing more shopping via Used Items of late, which certainly won’t apply (but which increases the one-off costs).

*sigh*

Something to ponder, and an interesting idea from Amazon, as once people are “locked in,” they’re certainly more likely to keep buying …

It’s already been widely commented upon, but, heck, I, too, think it’s ironic that one of the spun-off “Baby Bells” has acquired the (remains of) “Ma Bell.”

Copyright is important. But it’s turned into a money pit, and the result is not just abstract, but concrete: a loss of of documentaries due to “copyrighted” film footage.

As Americans commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today, no television channel will be broadcasting the documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Produced in the 1980s and widely considered the most important encapsulation of the American civil-rights movement on video, the documentary series can no longer be broadcast or sold anywhere.

Why? The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize‘s tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive.

This is particularly dire now, because VHS copies of the series used in countless school curriculums are deteriorating beyond rehabilitation. With no new copies allowed to go on sale, “the whole thing, for all practical purposes, no longer exists,” says Jon Else, a California-based filmmaker who helped produce and shoot the series and who also teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of California, Berkeley.

And even where there’s a claim that the long-standing “fair usage” doctrine should cover such stuff — money again stands in the way.

Broadcasters and film distributors, in turn, have become more stringent in making sure they are legally covered, too. As illustrated in a recent study by the American University in Washington, which interviewed dozens of documentary-makers on the myriad problems of getting copyright clearances, broadcasters and film distributors insist that a documentary have what is known as errors and omissions insurance, to protect against copyright infringement. Of course to get it, all copyrights in the documentary have to be cleared anyway.

Ironically, because documentaries have become more popular, more folks are seeking to use copyrighted material — which means that the interests (often corporate) that hold those copyrights are more likely to see them as valuable, and charge more for them.

Before the digital and documentary explosion, a clip of President Nixon speaking, for instance, usually could be licensed “in perpetuity,” meaning that the film could continue to use the footage indefinitely. Now the incentive is for copyright owners to grant only limited permission. “Increasingly, it’s harder and harder to get ‘in perpetuity,’ because rights-holders realize that somebody will have to come back in five years or 10 years and pay more money,” Flahive says.

It also means that documentary makers have to be all the more careful even when they shoot footage themselves.

It’s enough of a legal rigmarole to make underfunded filmmakers simply avoid using archival clips altogether or to remove footage that they shot themselves that might include someone singing a popular hit or even Happy Birthday to You (a copyrighted song). […] The American University study is a fascinating, if dispiriting, look at the tricks documentary-makers have to pull to get around copyright restrictions, from turning off all TVs and radios when filming a subject indoors to replacing a clip of people watching the World Series with a shot of professional basketball on the TV set instead because that’s what the filmmaker had rights for.

Explain to me again how this helps protect creativity and innovation?

(via BoingBoing)

Interesting article via BoingBoing on the economic justification of database copyrights. Under US law, databases of unoriginal material cannot be copyrighted — nobody can copyright the basic phone and address info in your phone book, for example, leading to a plethora of white pages out there. In Europe, the opposite is true. The result? US database publishing is a hot and profitable business, while in Europe it’s moribund. That doesn’t keep US database publishers from trying to change the law, of course, in their own vested favor.

Are database rights necessary for a thriving database industry? The answer is a clear “no.” In the United States, the database industry has grown more than 25-fold since 1979 and — contrary to those who paint the Feist case as a revolution — for that entire period, in most of the United States, it was clear that unoriginal databases were not covered by copyright.

The figures are even more interesting in the legal database market. The two major proponents of database protection in the United States are Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis, and Thomson Publishing, the owner of Westlaw. Fascinatingly, both companies made their key acquisitions in the US legal database market after the Feist decision, at which point no one could have thought unoriginal databases were copyrightable. This seems to be some evidence that they believe they could make money even without a database right. How? In the old-fashioned way: competing on features, accuracy, tied services, making users pay for entry to the database and so on.

If those companies believed there were profits to be made, they were right. Jason Gelman, one of our students, points out in a recent paper that Thomson?s Legal Regulatory division had a profit margin of over 26% for the first quarter of 2004. Reed Elsevier?s 2003 profit margin for LexisNexis was 22.8%. Both profit margins were significantly higher than the company average and both are earned primarily in the $6 billion US legal database market, a market which is thriving without strong intellectual property protection over databases. (First rule of thumb for regulators: when someone with a profit margin over 20% asks you for additional monopoly protection, pause before agreeing.)

Indeed.

W00T. Overriding the “lock” on the software on an ink cartridge (for purposes of replacing it at a price somewhat less than the exhorbitant amount that the original manufacturer wants to be able to charge you) is not a violation of the DMCA. Take that, Lexmark.

(via BoingBoing)