Arrington's post about photography and copyright is excellent.
Of of all the media wars: Video; Music and Images - photography is the most important. The reason - everyone is now a photographer with unlimited film and photographs can't be quoted as a snippet.
1. Zero cost trial and error creates professional looking results. The photography marketplace is decreasing.
The zero cost ubiquity of digital images mean that the sum total quality of amateur output is often better than the sum total of professionals. Search on Flickr for something that you would normally buy from a stock library.
The professional photography market is moving from a craft dominated industry of recording events to an artistic one with room for a minority of top creatives, in the same way that it did for painting in the 19th Century.
The same number of photographers are fighting for less dollars.
2. The Internet creates cheaper publishing costs, more media is produced. The perceived photography marketplace is increasing.
The biggest recent change to online publishing is the ubiquitous inclusion of images and clips in things like blogs posts. Gizmodo launched without images, today every post has an image or video.
Video is sometimes ignored by the copyright owner if it is a clip, but a photograph cannot be clipped. Since there is no real mechanism of cheap pay per view photographic distribution even people who want to pay cannot afford the rates or the time it takes to purchase distribution rights. The whole industry is geared around print production and professional publishers. Gizmodo can afford a Getty subscription but most Tumblr bloggers can't.
Overall usage of images in media is increasing, because of the internet and zero media distribution costs, meaning that photographers perception is that there should be more dollars.
3. You cannot quote a photograph. There is no Internet compromise with teaser clips, as there is for music and video.
The final problem is that other media have settled on a compromise which benefits professionals in a digital age - distribute a teaser. But there is a problem, you can listen to a clip of a song and a video and you can quote a piece of text.
A shrinking marketplace is perceived to be increasing. The current law is on the side of the photographer but the de facto practice isn't and there is no available solution for those who want compromise.
This is why there will be war.
Fair Use Vs. Free Speech in the Internet Age: The Lane Hartwell Problem
Adam Curtis' (The Power of Nightmares) latest documentary is currently being shown in the UK. It traces libertarianism to the Cold War, number theory and the rise of the self.
The title refers to a version of the prisoners' dilemma developed by John Nash who is interviewed in the documentary and was the inpiration behind Ron Howard's clawing 'A Beautiful Mind'.
Part 1 is below, the remainder of the series hasn't yet aired.
Exactitudes is a fantastic project, where a Dutch couple take pictures of people from a similar socio economic background and show how similar they are, particularly in their almost identical attempts at individuality.
via emily
Threads, was a drama, about the build up and aftermath of a full scale nuclear war - like 'The Day After' but less sanitized. It terrified me when I first saw it in 1984, it still terifies me.
Nuclear War was the anxiety of my generation, as we grew up. Yet today, in part due to the incompetence of the Bush foreign policy, the nuclear threat is possibly greater than ever.
Watch Threads and realize just how pathetic war is.
Britney Spears' Crotch-A-Thon Inspires London Adverts
The Relativist is an hilarious piss-take of New York Times Magazine's priggish, pompous ass, 'The Ethicist'.
Very structured, short-form content like lists or questions and answers work well on the web, so the Agony Aunt format is a great idea for a blog.
"I recently instructed law officers to deport an immigrant to his home country, where he was to be interrogated until he provided information useful to our government. I’ve now discovered that law enforcement was directed to the wrong address, and arrested a man named Fred who is a native born certified financial planner."
You occasionally get Cricket stories on the front page of Google news (because, as Digg has proven - news driven by robots is crap compared to human editorial), but on the New York Times front page!
The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia
Fakes on a plane - was the online buzz faked?
"After months of online buildup and frenzied media attention, Snakes on a Plane turned out to be just another horror flick...The R-rated thriller became an Internet and media darling by catering to bloggers and online fans"
I suspect that Snakes on a Plane went one step further than Subservient Chicken, to try and create buzz from the ground up, by seeding online communities with fake blog postings.
Wherever you looked, all the talk about Snakes on a Plane was smattered with superlatives - 'best movie title ever' etc. - it smelled as if those comments were being seeded by flacks.
If I'm right, then there is hope that webloggers are actually less brainwashable than mainstream media, because the excercise looks like it may have failed.
USATODAY.com - 'Snakes' rattles Web hype
Is Fox News Anti-Semitic?
Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Christian branch (protestantism) that dominates neo-conservatism was a rabid anti-semite. But it wasn't always that way, in fact Luther was fluent in Hebrew and a renowned scholar of Hebrew text.
Luther's anti-semititic volte face came when he realized that his belief that Jews would accept Christ prior to the Last Judgement was hopelessly naiive. And so he turned his energy towards hatred.
Last week I saw a Fox News 'anchor' reporting from Northern Israel, as a rocket had just landed injuring a civilian. Around him, everyone was wearing normal clothes, however he was wearing a helmet and full body armour, it would be less worrying if this were cowardice rather than showmanship.
As the injured woman was lead into an ambulance, she desperately tried to wave the camera crew away, she was covered in blood and did not want to be on TV.
Ignoring this single injured woman's wishes for dignity, to promote a political agenda, which may or may not co-incide with that woman's political beliefs seemed to be a metaphor for Luther ignoring the beliefs of Jews for his own.
The problem is that this is not a metaphor. Fox news depends on a political slant that is characterized by a political shift towards the same beliefs as Luther.
Number of articles in english language version of Wikipedia: 1,000,000
Total articles in Wikipedia: 3,300,000
Total articles in Encylopedia Britannica: 65,000
Number of articles edited per day on Wikipedia: the same number as the total articles in Britannica.
You don't get what you pay for.
Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article - Wikimedia Foundation
'Crude or profane language
Little and his dad both use "Oh snap!" as a euphemism. Dad interjects "Jeez." Name-calling includes "loser.'... and Little's dad keeps calling him a daft wee feathered c*nt - I don't think so.
Sony's latest cockup with DRM in CD's shows that they haven't a clue - or rather that the media bods in Sony don't have a clue.
More than ever, Sony needs to split its hardware and media divisions before one drags the other down.
Such a spectacular failure in DRM attached to physical media sets a huge precedent - Sony will have to change tactic. Their real fight now is with Apple since Apple's DRM is flowing onto iPods without people really noticing while their own attempt got caught by being stupidly aggressive.
Anyone who has visited a used CD store recently and looked at the prices, can see that the very CDs that the music industry fought so hard to push, with inferior artwork to vinyl, are its worst enemy - they have created the sneakernet Napster. The price of used CD's is dropping as they change from a product of desire (the inferior artwork is not enough to collect) to one of convenience - serial numberless disk storage media.
One of the things that may happen is that Sony pretend to repent and donate money into the cash strapped EFF to force Apple to open up their own DRM or place warning notices on iTunes downloads that the songs will only ever play on Apple products.
This would be Sony's true Trojan horse as their ultimate interests would be orthogonal to consumers.
What is happening to all media is that the distribution has changed and that we don't need the distribution companies. From MySpace to my iPod there is no role for them, just like there is no real role for Blacksmiths when people have cars.
I wonder if this Slate article, Are Subway Searches Legal? - The rules for searching bags. By Daniel Engber was written by someone that :
thought he had a point then realised that his argument was flawed;
added the paragraph at the bottom marked 'bonus explainer' which tries and fails to defend against the flawed logic in the main piece;
ran the story anyway.
There are very real civil liberty concerns post 911, they highlight the fact that democracy is built from a peaceful society. But cummon, screening bags for bombs before travelling is not one of them. There is nothing that takes away your liberty more than being blown to pieces.
Summary - piece highlights a claim that searching subway bags is 'unconstitutional', realizes that could be argued that is no diff from air travel searches. Tries to say that air travel is different because:
1. You have other travel options when flying vs taking the subway. (In fact it is more likely that you have more travel options when using the subway, as people from Hawaii).
2. Airline searches search everyone and where some people are singled out it is not at discretion of the security personnel (Er - bullshit).
PBS' Guns Germs and Steel documentary took an hour and several tons of jet fuel to explain, well nothing. The documentary merely stated, but neither explained nor tested the hypothesis.
A great shame, because the book is still a hypothesis worthy of testing. I saw Jared Diamond talk about a year ago, and he had plenty of new evidence to add.
"The information density is appallingly low, and what we got in an hour was the equivalent of reading a handful" of pages from the book."
I received a boat-load (very small boat) of email about me moaning about political blogs. So just to redress the balance, the mainstream media is crap too. Bah Humbug.
As an example, I always had a feeling that Wall Street Journal opinion pieces were written by cub hacks, or even cub scouts, rather than the editor. Its an otherwise excellent newspaper, ruined by painting by numbers editorial.
As Josh Marshall points out, today's is a particularly side-splitting classic of obsequious, foppish garbage, worthy of the court of Louis XVI:
"Wall Street Journal headline: "'Karl Rove, Whistleblower.'"
Translation: Rove told the truth, shower him with medals, everyone else has no integrity and is wrong.
Marshall:
"... can you blame them? Most of the kids there want White House jobs or other GOP-based promotions."
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall
When 911 happened, most people hadn't heard of bloggers or Wikipedia, there was no Feedster or Technorati, Google News did not exist*, there was no Flickr and people did not have camera phones.
These products and services are not a result of 911, but this was the event that created one facet of what is now an unshakable trend, real-time, ubiquitous, truly democratic media. The second phase of the web, where people could publish as easily as they could browse, was being born.
The thing that people used to laugh at when we pitched it originally while at Moreover, actually happened.
After the attacks last week in London, I thought that this would be the point where image sharing reached mainstream awareness for news gathering. Camera phones with ability to post via the web are more widespread than in the US and photo sharing has reached an inflection point.
In some ways this did happen, within a couple of hours, amateur pictures posted on the web were picked up by mainstream news services and there have been articles since pointing out the role of digital cameras and camera phones.
When I tried to create a real-time list of aggregated thumbnails of amateur news pictures, using Wists, I realized that things are still nascent.
I looked at over twenty photo sharing sites (some of which have far more users than Flickr) and other than a few images from moblogging sites in the UK the only site with images was Flickr and therefore there was little point in aggregating them.
In addition, the majority of the photos on Flickr were taken from people pointing their camera phone at television news. After the event, the most important images are those taken by CCT surveillance cameras.
None of this is that surprising, however, I'll bet one thing - that Google develops something more like Flickr and less like Picassa at some point, cos Flickr clearly demonstrates the future of image sharing.
*The fact that other search engines such as Alta Vista had news search (through Moreover), largely prompted Google to develop a news product.
Google News Search: "senior White House official.
Several hundred news items with various 'senior White House officials' quoted as sources for a bunch of stories.
One good thing that could come out of the Plame case is less of this speculative nonsense or spin.
One of the problems that I have with the current Supreme Court ruling over file sharing is the assumption that this stuff can be legislated absolutely.
As media is reduced to an atomic state of bits, it starts to show quantum-like uncertainty, is it a thing like an LP or a transmission like a song on the radio, a particle or a wave?
Hidden within the Supreme Court ruling is the other side of the coin:
Just as people have created software that allows people to share things they don't own, with copy protected digital media nobody owns anything. Everything you buy is actually rented.
Why is it legal to develop software which necessarily prevents ownership of something you buy?
At the moment I buy albums in flea markets for 10c a song, read books that I bought in the UK in the US and can read all the books I want by checking them out of the library.
I cannot buy second hand MP3s, watch DVDs I bought in the UK (without hardware that will surely be banned at some point) or check out unlimited electronic books from the library.
The bottom line to all this: stuff should just be a whole lot cheaper and the problem would surely go away.
The role of the media industry has always been to promote and distribute media - when the network replaces these what is that role?
Notes on RIAA and MPAA Press Conference: Corante
What is acceptable on TV:
a.) A nipple - not actually visible, but it's shape visible through clothing.
b.) Two people re-enacting creating life in a loving manner - fictionally.
c.) Minor swearwords.
d.) Encouraging violence and hatred. Racism, homophobia, misrepresentation and extortion.
Answer d.)
And for this madness, Max Blumenthal encourages people to complain to the FCC about a specifically odious example.
At the moment 90% of FCC complaints come from one organization on the lunatic fringe. If Max can encourage enough bloggers to write to the FCC, at the very least it will help redress the balance.
It may even help the FCC re-address how they deal with the fact that their complaints currently come from a minority group and therefore their guidelines do not reflect the 'true moral majority', the mainstream of America which is largely benign and moderate.
Here is where you file complaints. Complaints can be via email
via Jeff
Tabloids are big in the UK, and its always been a mystery to me why in a country like the US, which is the king of popular culture, there is no real-news tabloid.
I like tabloids cos they are funny and I like Sploid even more because it is like Slashdot meets the Onion, edited by Richard Dawkins.
The really strange thing about the Durst scandal is that they are suing for copyright infringement for 'linking' - posting a link to something that may infringe copyright.
So lets get this right, if that is indeed against the law then the everyday business of:
Google
Yahoo
MSN
er... the entire web, is illegal.
Fred Durst Sues Over Stolen Sex Video - March 4, 2005:
"the Limp Bizkit front man has filed a $80 million lawsuit against web sites that posted the footage and stills from the singer's X-rated romp with a former girlfriend."
It turns out that the reason there has been 1000 times more complaints to the FCC isn't just because activists are spamming them in general. It is because a single group - the Parents Television Council - is responsible for 999 out of 1000 complaints.
Activists Dominate Content Complaints
Thanks Nick
- and yes, this may be a shoe on the other foot scenario, but in my opinion its the right, not the left, that tend to be most vocal and indignant online.
The FCC obscenity complaints stats show:
Number of complaints and fines in -
year: 2000, complaints: 111, fines: $48,000
year: 2001: complaints: 346, fines: $91,000
year: 2002: complaints: 13,922, fines: $99,400
year: 2003: complaints: 202,032, fines: $440,000
year: 2004: complaints: 1,068,802, fines: $7,928,080
There have been 10,000 times more complaints in 4 years and 20 times as much in fines.
If complaints are as representative of Americans' feelings as 4 years ago, and 10,000 times more people really are offended by broadcasting, then the FCC is 500 times less effective (since its obscenity guidelines are governed by popular consensus and fines levied accordingly).
If the fines are legitimate and comprehensive, and that there is therefore 20 times more obscene material being broadcast now than 4 years ago then the FCC has to spend 500 times as much in tax payer money to deal with unwarranted complaints (if it deals with complaints individually).
If, on the other hand, you don't believe that Americans are between 500 to 10,000 times more prudish or broadcasters 20 to 10,000 times more obscene now than 4 years ago, then there is something wrong with the system of complaints.
This brings about a Malthusian problem, where the fines levied grow arithmetically but the population of complaints (and the cost of dealing with them) grows geometrically. In other words, if the FCC were a company, it would bankrupt them.
The real problem is created by the fact that the cost of making a complaint (via their website or email) is far less - and organized religious activists are exploiting this to swamp the FCC in flashmob fashion. It is the equivalent of a spam email campaign, but we are all paying for it.
Like spam, the only solution to this is to either make it more difficult or introduce a cost to send a message to the FCC, or to deal with large volumes of complaints like spam. In the latter case, the number of programs being complained about has only increased 3 times, so the value of an individual complaint, and the time spent dealing with it, should be inversely weighted when there are a large number about a single broadcast.
Jeff Jarvis points to an LA times piece on the latest antics of the 'F*CCed':
"The FCC posted the complaints on its website. One person reported hearing an obscenity; one objected to the male anatomy on a representation of Greek sculpture; another thought a woman's breast had been revealed; and yet another claimed to have seen a couple making love."
PDF of Olympic complaints from FCC website - much more entertaining than the Olympics themseves.
The classical architecture of Capitol Hill may be similarly peni ridden and has anyone ever been to a sports event where there wasn't swearing?
Should all Christian religious programming should be censored - for containing an image of a naked man being tortured to death?
If the FCC is seriously going to waste time and money considering complaints from people who have clearly lost their marbles, then perhaps we should all start complaining about everything being broadcast, to drown out the background noise from the nutcases that the FCC takes seriously.
" Dear MR. Powell, Commmander in Chief, F**,
Since you are now operating in zero tollerance mode, please could you change your name to something that reminds me less of FUCK. I realize that you F*CCers are trying to do your job, but all my family are undergoing therapy at vast expense having been exposed to things that remind us of rude words and playing hide the sausage.
Sincerely
Condo Lisa"
It would be fun at least.
Since When Is Greece's Culture Obscene?
Business Week on the New York Times:
"A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering."
That's a problem indeed, but nothing compared with local newspapers' loss of classifieds to Craigslist and the like.
I can't help but feel that there may be an opportunity for newspapers in premium, Zagat-like online directory businesses.
Joi Ito's Web: The Future of the New York Times
Instead of meeting halfway with consumers, the music and movie industries seem to have shifted their attention to hardware and software media players in a war of attrition.
As a result consumers are being ripped off. A Byzantine maze of restrictions, poorly thought out and being debugged on-the-fly by end user guinea pigs stops people from viewing or listening to things they have legitimately bought. (I can't watch UK DVDs in the US for example which really pisses me off). This is clearly going to get worse.
Is there already a specific consumer rights group to tackle this? If not, someone like Cory Doctorow would be great as a DRM Czar.
Below, Jenny, AKA The Shifted Librarian, wrestles with a Kafkaesque DRM nightmare:
"I spent about an hour trying to play back a disc I legitimately bought and went as far as installing and updating a 3rd party application to my system that would allow me to do so, and now I'm only being given a temporary license, where's my rights as a consumer?"
The Shifted Librarian: DRM Locks Out Library Patrons?
Arguably the first music video ever, and possibly the first Powerpoint presentation, in "Don't Look Back," Bob Dylan holds up cue cards with words from the song Subterranean Homesick Blues on them and flips them, while staring at the camera, as the song plays:
'Johnny's in the basement
Mixin' up the medicine...'
Slideshow presentations went downhill from then on:
Times Roman font, meaningless bullet points, a blue blend background, droning presenters wearing company polo shirts and pleated khaki pants. Powerpoint is an art crime.
Because of this, I rarely pay much attention to conference presentations. However, one of the best things I saw at at Web 2.0 was how Larry Lessig has perfected his trademark slideshow.
Like in Subterranean Homesick Blues, the slides flow along nicely with the lyrics. A lawyer defending the right for people to create digital collages produces a presentation that is an art form in itself, his mash up being a pretty good example of the type of creativity that he defends so well.
What makes a Lessig presentation different?
Style: Lessig uses a cracked courier typewriter font. It is a perfectly ironic use of something intrinsically analogue, used in a digital medium.
Structure: Each slide in a Lessig presentation is a piece of microcontent, it can be a word a symbol or an entire movie clip. There is no notion of a page.
Timing: As Lessig raps to the slide presentation, the rhythm of the slides has a non-linear flow i.e. a slide may emphasize a point 'so and so: slide 1 - did this: slide 2 - which resulted in this: slide3" where each slide is punched out subliminally to the rhythm of him talking.
So, all you fathead music industry types, if you want to prevent people from making collages, all your slideshows are going to suck, and nobody will listen.
Gawker launches 3 new blogs:
Screenhead a funny-stuff compilation.
Jalopnik a cool-cars blog.
Kotaku a video games blog.
My car is crapped out and I have to avoid video games, because I will play them till my eyes bleed, but I'll be a regular reader of Screenhead.
Niall McKay:
"the philosophy and theology in the first movie that prompted books like The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real and Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix are replaced by a series of platitudes such as "believe," it's just about "choices" and "that's karma," baby."
From Aristotle to Russell philosophers have always been good at asking questions but bad at explanations or conclusions. No surprise then that the conclusion of the Matrix trilogy wasn't exactly profound.
The audience for the Matrix at the IMAX theatre in downtown San Francisco was more entertaining than the film. 1:30pm on the opening day and every seat taken by under employed engineers. The guy next to me was wearing a combat kilt and started talking about mac clusters and OS X. Apple seem to have taken their ubiquitous movie product placement to a new level, with avatars that sit next to you and pitch - classic.
Wired News: Matrix Imploded: Trouble in Zion
"We named the company Netflix and not "DVD By Mail" for a reason, which is we plan to lead the downloading market and over time we will offer both DVDs by mail and downloading."
At this point the music and film industry diverge. Because watching a film is a significant investment of time, the issue of 'all you can eat ' downloads is not such a problem if people rip DVDs. As a result the DVD sales market is less than the rental market. You pay to see movies or they can be supported by commercials both within the movie (product placement) or as interruptions during it.
With music it is the other way around - you can listen to music for free (without commercial interruption during the song) but the sales of CD's are a big market. So in this way it is hard to imagine the RIAA putting up all you can eat vs. Apple style 'a la carte' payment for individual songs.
Fool.com: Netflix Battles Pirates [Special] October 30, 2003
Fox's Simpsons show ran a joke banner at the bottom of the screen:
The cartoon ticker read: "Pointless news crawls up 37 per cent ... Do Democrats cause cancer? Find out at foxnews.com ... Rupert Murdoch: Terrific dancer ... Dow down 5000 points ... Study: 92 per cent of Democrats are gay ... JFK posthumously joins Republican Party ... Oil slicks found to keep seals young, supple ..."
But Fox news didn't get the joke and therefore Fox threatened to sue itself.
Doh! Murdoch's Fox News in a spin over 'The Simpsons' lawsuit
My Diana conspiracy theory is that Dodi Fayed never existed because his father is too preposterous to be real. Even if he were, Siegfried and Roy's stylists already have all their work cut out to have time to cultivate such an entity.
Today, the UK tabloids are all a flutter with the publication of a note written by Princess Diana that predicts someone would try and bump her off by tampering with the brakes on her car.
In this note, she names the person but the press are refusing to reveal who it is. Only a matter of time before someone blogs it - but until then, Conspiracy Planet have a large picture of Prince Phillip under the headline" Princess Diana Names Her Killer".
Diana conspiracies are particularly entertaining due to the aforementioned weirdness of her partner, Dodi Fayed's father, Al Fayed, who is often to be found fueling them.
The photo accompanying this post is actually endorsed by big Al. Check out this and other hysterical items on the utterly bizarre official Al Fayed website.