Category: Media Moguls

Gimme a break. The question of the day is, “Should the President be watching CNN (etc.) non-stop so that he sees what Americans are seeing about the war?”

Which question seems to be particularly imprortant to CNN (etc.).

The underlying question seems to be, if the President orders military action, should he be forced to watch the big booms, and realize that people are dying out there.

Well, if he’s so heartless or stupid as to not realize that, watching it isn’t going to make any difference.

If anyone thinks that Bush is not seeing what’s going on in Iraq, even if it’s he’s not glommed to Fox News or MSNBC or ABC or anyone else, I think they’re just silly.

And if Bush should be forced to watch what the American populace is watching, so that he can relate to their concerns and fears — does that mean he has to watch American Idol, too? Come on — not even Bush deserves that.

“Hard science fiction” is out, and Sci Fi is trying to save money. That’s the reason why Farscape was cancelled, they say.

All I know is that they cancelled Farscape, but they’re bringing back Battlestar Galactica.

Yeesh.

Not that I won’t watch it, mind you, but, still …

(via InstaPundit)

Because, remember: big media companies aren’t in favor of copyright because of power, or money. It’s because they’re taking a principled stand of behalf of creators.

Which is why the Finnish music industry is trying to get all kindergartens in the country to pay a 20 Euro fee per year for all the copyrighted songs they sing.

Which is right alongside past efforts of ASCAP to try and get Girl Scout camps to pay royalties on the songs sung around the campfire.

After finishing off hot dogs and s’mores for lunch, the Elves — senior Scouts charged with helping younger campers — gather in a circle with directors to decide what they can sing.
“Is ‘Row Row Row Your Boat’ copyrighted?” asks Holly Foster, a 14-year-old Elf with a turquoise happy face on her cheek. “Row Row Row Your Boat” may float, the directors decide, but “Puff the Magic Dragon” definitely is out.
“How about ‘Ring Around the Rosie’?” another Elf asks. The directors veto it.
“We wanted to sing ‘Underwear,’ but it’s set to the tune of ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,”‘ says Mrs. King, the co-director. “We’re not sure if that’s copyrighted; so, we don’t sing it.”
“When in doubt, don’t sing,” advises Site Director Leslie Shanders.
Even harder than figuring out which songs are which, directors say, is explaining it all to young Brownies. “They think copyright means the ‘mean people,’ ” says Debby Cwalina, a 14-year-old Elf. Mr. Holly explains it to them this way: “The people who wrote it have a thing on it. A little ‘c’ with circles around it. There’s an alarm on it. And if you sing it, BOOM!”
That explanation doesn’t always sink in. Alissa Fiset, age 8, crinkles her nose when asked why she can’t sing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” While squirting a friend with a water bottle, she says: “They did a rewrite on it. A copy thing. But why can’t they just take the ‘c’ away?”
Ascap, which is based in New York, defends the royalties. “Songwriters are small-business people who write songs to make a living,” Mr. Lo Frumento says. “The royalties allow them to send their kids to Girl Scout camp, too.”

Remember: it’s the principle of the thing.

(via BoingBoing)

We keep hearing from the RIAA and others that copyright protection keeps needing to be extended longer, and longer, and longer so that we stay in alignment with foreign copyright laws. After all, we don’t want the US to be thought of as paying less homage to Big Media companies creators than, say, Europe.

Except … oops! Turns out most of Europe has only a 50 year copyright on audio recordings. Which means that songs from the 50s are now entering into the public domain over there, even while they remain protected (and, no doubt, earning vitally needed profit for Big Media royalties for the impoverished estates of Elvis and Miles Davis) here in the US. And given the nature of the Internet, and P2P networking, that means that more of these songs are available for (illegal) download in the US, with no legal recourse against the dastardly villains doing so from, say, France.

So what do we have to do, you might ask the RIAA?

Well, the answer is obvious. We need alignment!

Alignment of US copyright laws to European standards, as has been argued for so long?

Don’t be absurd. Alignment of European copyright laws up to the higher US standard.

Yeah, I got your alignment right here … and it’s Lawful Evil, guys.

Better yet, it’s from the music industry, as I’ve noted before.

All you have to do is ask for it.

What are you waiting for?!

(via BoingBoing)

The Norwegian programmer who developed DeCSS code, then was arrested by Norwegian police after a complaint from the MPAA (!), has been acquitted in Norwegian court.

The DeCSS code can be used to unlock the copy protection on DVDs. Jon Lech Johansen says he wrote and distributed the code to allow folks to be able to view DVDs they own on Linux computers, just as folks on Windows and Mac computers can.

The Norwegian court found that Johansen was entitled to use the DVD he owned, and therefore could break the encryption legally. The DeCSS code, it noted, could be used for legal or illegal purposes, just as many other things could, and therefore was not per se illegal.

Of course, that’s Norway. Here in the US, the DMCA laws make such activities explicitly illegal, regardless of the purpose.

(via InstaPundit)

UPDATE: There’s a better article here. A few choice excerpts:

Head judge Irene Sogn, in reading the verdict, said no one could be convicted of breaking into their own property, and that there was no proof that Johansen or others had used the program to access illegal pirate copies of films.
“The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal … pirate copy,” the ruling said.
It found that consumers have rights to legally obtained DVD films “even if the films are played in a different way than the makers had foreseen.”

How refreshingly common-sensical. No response as yet from the MPAA.

The RIAA keeps yelling and ranting about how their sales are in the dumps, and it’s all fault of music pirates. “We’d be fixing prices and raking in the dough, if it weren’t for you darned kids!”

The problem is, the numbers from the RIAA itself don’t add up. Or, rather, they add up funny — because one reason why overall sales are down is because the music companies are publishing less product — but they’re making more per unit than ever before.

Feh.

Remember how the music industry was successfully found to have been fixing prices on CDs? Now you can claim your slice of the settlement ($67,375,000).

Simply affirm, under penalty of perjury, that you bought a CD, tape or (gads) vinyl record at a retailer between 1995-2000, and you’re eligible for an award of between $5 and $20, depending on how many folks file.

If too many people file for the money to be divvied up that way, then the settlement goes to “not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products.” What can you lose?

(via BoingBoing)

The RIAA, the folks who want to get laws passed to dictate to hardware manufacturers what sort of technology they can produce, aren’t filling me with much confidence that they understand anything about technology.

Yesterday [the RIAA] issued a press release announcing a piracy bust in New York which unearthed 421 CD-R burners.
Only there weren’t 421 burners, but “the equivalent of 421 burners.”
In fact, there were just 156. How did the RIAA account for this discrepancy?
“There were only 156 actual burners, but some run at very high speeds: some as high as 40x. This is well above the average speed,” was the official line yesterday.

Riiiiiiigghhhtt.

Not exactly the most “intellectual” of Intellectual Property folks, are they?

(via InstaPundit)

Edward Felton has an interesting approach to overreaching-ad-absurdem copyright assertions — ask for exceptions.

Call them and ask for exceptions. Call WalMart and ask permission to tell your friends about their prices. (WalMart told FatWallet’s ISP that that’s infringement.) Call Turner Broadcasting and ask permission to fast-forward through the commercials in their shows. (Turner Broadcasting CEO Jamie Kellner told Cableworld that commercial skipping is illegal.) Call Adobe and ask permission to read their e-book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to your kid. (One of Adobe’s licenses prohibited this.)

In a sense, this is sort of how common law works — by building up a set of precedents, you more reasonably define the boundaries of what particular uses are and are not prohibited. This helps counter one of the reasons why main reasons why these sorts of stupid assertions get put in place — the fear of “missing something” that will let IP get misused. In return, it can also help identify inconsistencies in policy that are helpful either to a company or to the court.

(via BoingBoing)

Stan “The Man” Lee is suing Marvel comics for a cut of the pie on the Spider-Man movie profits. In so doing, he joins a raft of other comics creators from the 50s and 60s who have tried to make a little money on creations they made, generally as “work for hire.” Such suits have rarely been successful, except to the extent that they’ve produced a moral suasion to rectify the extra-legal injustice.

(Remember that, next time media companies go on about Intellectual Property as being necessary to protect creators. Creators are generally screwed by the financiers, and those are the folks that IP law tends to protect. Not that there isn’t some justice in doing so, of couse, but let’s not let the matter be over-sentimentalized.)

Of course, as Art Buchwald could have told him, Lee’s being a fool to sue for 10% of the Spidey movie profits. No matter what happens, that movie will never actually show a profit on paper; no movie ever does, so as to avoid taxes (and payments to folks who negotiatiated a share of the profits).

What’s sort of interesting about this was that a few weeks ago, I watched a rather unfocused 60 Minutes II segment on Marvel comics in the movies. Lee was on screen for much of the time, waxing eloquent and enthusiastic about Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Hulk, and so forth, all current or future movie projects. He’s been a hell of an ambassador for Marvel, grossly underpaid just for all the goodwill he produces.

Then the interviewer asked him about whether he was making any money off of Spidey (nope, not one thin dime). And then pressed him about how he felt about it. Clearly he was unhappy, but just as clearly he wasn’t inclined to air the dirty laundry in front of the nation. That’s generally been his MO; he gets treated with respect, he gets to work on behalf of the characters he created and loves, and he doesn’t bitch about Marvel.

Perhaps what pushed him over the edge was seeing the cuts back to Avi Arad, one of the high Marvel honchos, on the set of Daredevil, telling the reporter that Lee had, of course, been compensated “fairly.”

That comment might come back to haunt him.

You’d think HBO would be pleased as pigs in poop that The Sopranos is so popular. You’d think that HBO would be wildly ecstatic that folks have to have their weekly Sopranos fix. You’d think they’d be having screaming orgasms that folks are so interested in their show that local bars and restaurants flip the channel to HBO on Sundaywhile it’s on.

They’re screaming all right. Bizarrely enough, though, they’re screaming cease-and-desist.

What a bunch of maroons.

(via BoingBoing)

Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) announces it will be publishing all its CDs in the future with copy protection, even though they won’t work in half the CD players out there.

And when sales plummit, I’m sure they’ll still blame it on piracy.

You know how sometimes you get a banner ad popping up on a web page when it’s totally inappropriate?

It happens on TV, too.