Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

New Feature To increase my posting back at my original home on the web, I thought I’d institute a new feature. Movie recommendations. Note, they’re not “daily” or “weekly,” but pretty much whenever I take a notion to go a-recommending. Also, they’re not really “reviews” since I’m not going to talk about movies I don’t care for. Just movies I like, and why I think they’re worth watching.

Today’s recommendation: Om Shanti Om.

Non-Bollywood viewers may be a little lost with this one, but it’s well worth the viewing. Lush colors, broad comedy, likable actors and a sentimental story that mixes comedy, fantasy, and romance and manages to avoid being sappy (Oh, okay, it’s really sappy. But I like it) make it one of the better movies-about-making-movies that I have ever seen.

Actors interested in improving their comedy could do much worse than to take notes on Shah Rukh Khan, whose dance skills, handsome look, and knack for physical comedy put me in mind of Charlie Chaplin. Directors can get a glimpse of how to use cartoon colors without overusing them. Filmmakers in general will see how to take one of the most boring ideas for a plot ever and spice it up with a few twists on the topic.

Got a Netflix account? they have it for rent.

Shop at Amazon? They have it on DVD. Also at Amazon, third-party sellers offer it on Blu-Ray for less than the cost of the DVD (for those of you who already have the player). The visuals in Om Shanti Omare so significant to the style of the movie, I think it’s worth the HD. Yes, those two are affiliate links. If you buy them from this entry, I make a few pennies.

Found via Daily Funnies.

An international media conference has been held in Beijing—a choice of venue apparently made without a shred of irony. In attendance and speaking were Rupert Murdoch and Tom Curley (chief executive of AP), who had some scathing words about what the future held for the internet.

This paragraph, of course, is where I would quote from the story—but the AP has previously announced they don’t want to be quoted on blogs. More to the point, at least a few words in the final sentence of the above paragraph should have been a link to the story so that you could read it yourself. However, it was part of Murdoch and Curley’s presentations that people online should get used to the idea that they will be charged for linking to a story from now on. So, you’ll probably have to find the story the same way I did—follow a link from a news aggregator to a search-engine sponsored page (that pays a fee to AP for access to their content) and read it there.

That is, if the AP and Newscorp will let you. Unloading on their own dwindling revenue stream with both barrels, their presentations specifically targeted search engines and news aggregators, while also snarking at bloggers (whom they prefer to refer to as “plagiarists”). Along the way, they listed such offenders as Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook. All of which allow you to post links to articles on money-making websites so that you can drive your friends to the websites where the AP and Newscorp (and other concerned attendees) can cash in on advertising revenue.

Murdoch even went so far as to call all of these venues and the people using them “content kleptomaniacs” (only two words quoted so far—still well under AP’s 5 word quotation licensing threshold). Apparently, having and sharing an opinion on the news and encouraging people to check the story out for themselves at the original publisher’s website is tantamount to compulsively slipping a stapler and fifteen pencils into your pocket when they aren’t yours to take.

Once upon a time, I thought it would be a good strategy to simply not quote any further AP stories. Given their new agenda, however, I think it’s time to ramp up the strategy.

All people who are reported on by the news media—in particular the AP and Newscorp—who are not being reported on for the commission of a crime should respond to said reporting by demanding a payment for their story. By all rights, any story told in the news media could be sold by its participants for adaptation into a book, television special or series, and/or movie. If search engines and aggregators steal value from news media, then news media steals value from these people’s life stories by pilfering them and publishing them without payment to their originators.

Demand damages for publication of your story without payment. Demand personal image licensing fees before they can take your picture. Sue for copyright infringement when they quote you or your writings without your express written consent. And never accept that simply having your picture in the paper/on TV is “payment enough.”

Further, anybody acquitted of a crime that is reported in the news media should also demand payment. After all, it is only if convicted that the law prohibits you from turning a profit on a crime. If you’re acquitted, you’re perfectly free to make a buck off the story. And who are the news media to go reporting all of the details of your case before you have a chance to profit off of it?

When you build a private industry around a public service, astoundingly bad ideas soon become the only ideas the market is capable of having. This is because public services are different from the kind of service given at a McDonalds’—or even from your local cable company. They are part of vital infrastructure, and a robust society can only be built on a foundation of free and democratic access to such services without fear of exploitation.

It might shock you to learn this post isn’t about health care. story is not about health care—it’s about prisons.

Debit cards are increasingly popular, so why shouldn’t jail inmates have them. How about a get-out-of-jail prepaid debit card when they’re set free?

They can. (Does this strike anyone else as kind of strange/funny?)

Strange, MSN Money? Yes. Funny? No.

The story is a further sign of how our society is now actively turning our prison facilities and inmates into a potential revenue stream. Incarceration and the actions of the justice system should be a public service. It should exist to see to it that justice (whenever possible) is done, and that those who can be rehabilitated get the help they need to re-integrate into society.

A system like this is full of flaws.

• It builds a private, profit-based monopoly whose market is literally captive.
• Being profit motivated, it is structured find ways (surcharges, service fees, etc) to leech money off of taxpayer funds, as well as from people who genuinely don’t need any more leeching done to them.
• It further underscores the importance of a debit/credit card to a person’s identity in modern society. Now, when children who grew up using pretend credit cards get busted for any number of possible infractions, they can rest assured that they will have a debit card waiting for them, full of their sub-minimum wage earnings—minus the registration, monitoring, fraud protection, and transaction fees.

Perhaps worst of all is that the range of services offered includes a “self-serve kiosk” that permits you to pay bail with a credit card in the event that you’re arrested—or allows your friends and/or family to pay your bail “from the comfort of their own home.”

Streamlining processes and making them easier to handle quickly is a good thing, yes. But putting somebody in a situation where they can swipe their credit card or face a night in lock-up puts them in a situation that immediately drives them into debt. And bear in mind that bail is not always paid by the guilty, meaning anybody stopped by the police can find themselves relying on the Visa or Mastercard to get them out of a jam.

Worst of all about that idea, however, is the fact that it suggests a revolving-door approach to the justice system. Systems like this are only profitable when they have a high flow of customers. Putting in bail kiosks is a blatant expression that in the future, the justice system will be the major cash cow of Wall Street.

Ask yourself this: Do you want to drive—even at the speed limit—past a police officer whose district is controlled not by public service, but by private industry? Do you want to walk down a street patrolled by a police officer whose office can only turn a profit if he meets his daily quota? The profit motive has no place in our judicial system.

If you haven’t subscribed to my pulp movies blog over at bringbackmidnightmovies.com yet, then now might be a good time to do it. I’ve got some killer updates planned soon, including news on the Suspiria project and some upcoming contests featuring fabulous prizes!

I think that one thing that should be taken away from this madness is that Ann Coulter thinks the Birther movement is foolish and that Orly Taitz is a crank.

That’s like Josef Stalin looking at you and saying, “Dude, you need to crank your intensity down a notch or two.”

Here are two stories that show two wildly different reactions to new media and viral video.

First on the block, we have Warner Music Group. Someone on YouTube recently mixed the wildly popular Keyboard Cat meme with a performance by a young Helen Hunt portraying an acid trip, then followed it with a Hall and Oates music video that had Keyboard Cat spliced in as a member of the band. It was cute, it was funny, and it added a new take to an existing meme. As videos like that tend to do, it went viral and got across the web faster than your average porn spam—which is saying something.

Such massive exposure for Hall & Oates’ “You Make My Dreams Come True,” which hasn’t had cultural relevance for a couple of decades now, was certain to grab Warner’s attention. So they quickly responded by demanding YouTube remove the audio from the track. This is a new tack that the RIAA member companies are taking with YouTube. This will encourage users supposedly to swap the audio out with music from YouTube’s licensed library, although that would kind of ruin the joke.

I’d also like to point out at this time that YouTube’s licensed library is only available to you as an after-the-upload option. You have to be willing to swap out the audio on your video for the music in their library. All of the audio. Because that’s so much easier and better for producers than simply letting them access a database that tells them the titles of the songs they can use, letting them build their productions around it.

Of course, this move has drawn a lot of fire for WMG. They took one of the most popular videos online and overnight pulled the plug on it. If they didn’t expect a backlash, then they are either extremely stupid or extremely out of touch. And I haven’t quite ruled out the possibility that they may be both.

Switching gears, DJ Steve Porter created a YouTube phenomenon with “Rap Chop,” a video in which he remixed the infamous Slap Chop infomercial (“You’re gonna love my nuts!”) to a hip-hop beat, autotuning hawker Vince’s voice to fit the new beat and melody. (I am currently converting this to my ringtone. Yes, I know I’m a geek.)

When the powers behind Slap Chop learned that this viral music video was racking up more hits than a hyperactive mafia enforcer, they had a very natural reaction to it.

They licensed it from DJ Steve Porter to air as their new infomercial.

Natural, yes, but also incredibly smart. Rather than step in and be the bad guys who shut down a viral phenomenon, they claimed it and recognized its ability to sell more of their product. Which was pretty brilliant. My father’s reaction to seeing the music video? “It really makes me want one of those!”

What we can see in these two parallel stories is two different approaches old media can adopt toward new media. You can battle it, suppress it, and attempt to sue it out of existence, or you can embrace it and all of the good that it can do for you. The latter gains you new fans and allows your customers to see you as a company (or individual) with a sense of humor who knows a good thing when they see it.

The former makes your customers see you as the bastards who are ruining the internet.

[Note: If you’d like to see the way the new “silencing” tactic destroys internet videos, take a look at “Internet Date”—a video from one of my favorite sketch comedy troupes that had its audio silenced due to a complaint from WMG. Most of the joke is lost as a result.]

I was a comic geek once upon a time.

From the time I was a little kid until almost a decade or so ago (was it really a decade since I was a college sophomore? Yeesh), I was an avid comic collector.

As a kid, I bought pretty much any superhero comic I could get my hands on—particularly anything with Spider-Man, Batman, Captain America, or Superman on the cover.

As a young teenager, I discovered ElfQuest and learned the joys of longform comic storytelling—something I had never quite gotten the hang of with superhero comics. And by the time I was the aforementioned college sophomore, my comics intake consisted pretty much entirely of Strangers in Paradise, Books of Magic, and brief flirtations with Cerebus and Sandman Mystery Theatre, as well as Bone (which I loved, but I got into way too late at the time).

And then it stopped.

All of my friends know I’m a copyright geek. Well, actually, a copyright reform geek. I feel our current copyright laws are ridiculously draconian, and I’m constantly railing against the myth of perpetual copyright and arguing that DRM violates the doctrine of fair use. By the way – do you know the MPAA just said in court that you’re a criminal if you make even one back-up copy of a DVD? According to them, if you pay $19.99 for a movie and the disc gets damaged, your only legal option is to pay $19.99 for a new copy. This despite the long-standing doctrine of Fair Use, and despite the fact that blank media actually carries a few cents’ tax to cover royalties from copyrighted material being copied to them.

In the past few years, I’ve been told I needed to defend the “position” that the works of Bram Stoker, Jules Verne, and Mark Twain are in the public domain by people who wanted to stop somebody from adapting one or the other.

First of all, all of those authors’ works were published prior to 1923, which makes them public domain in the United States. This is because anything printed in the U.S. prior to 1923 is in the public domain.

The original U.S. copyright lasted for a 28-year period, which could be renewed once.

The current copyright law – thanks to Sonny “Look Out For That Tree” Bono – is that copyright lasts for the life of the artist, plus 70 years.

This means that if the copyright of works by Stoker, Verne, and Twain were subject to the Bono Copyright Extension (which, I would like to remind you, they are not), then Stoker’s works would have been in the public domain since 1982, Verne’s since 1975, and Twain’s since 1980.

But they were public domain much, much earlier than that because they were published prior to 1923 and the Bono Copyright Extension never applied to them. The maximum any of these works could have lasted under copyright was 56 years, and most of them probably only remained under copyright for 28 because—as was the case with H.P. Lovecraft’s works—nobody ever thought to renew the copyrights.

Again: However you slice it, these works are in the public domain in the United States. Plain and simple. Close the book, drink a cold glass of water, go to bed.

Then, tonight, I had one of my friends text me while I was waiting to hear a speech.

He said, “I need a simple, easy-to-read source on copyright. Somebody on my project is insisting Poe’s stories are copyrighted.”

Yeah.

Poe died in 1849.

1849!

1849!

Even if the Bono Copyright Extension applied (and it doesn’t), that would mean his work had been in the public domain since 1919.

Copyright hawks and lawsuit-happy professional organizations like the MPAA and RIAA have created a mythology of perpetual copyright, and it is destroying our ability to build on our cultural foundations. Kids today are terrified to build off of Edgar Allen Poe – a man who has been dead for over a century and a half. How long will it be before somebody is insisting that Shakespeare’s work (he died in 1616, for those of you keeping score) can’t possibly be in the public domain?

Every now and then, you wish some people would keep their big mouths shut. Not because what they say is stupid or annoying, but because comprehending their statement would unveil a world of lovecraftian horror whose stygian depths are broken only by the merest hints of the movement of the cthulhoid terrors that inhabit them.

Behold, the non-Euclidean geometry of (D – Nebraska) Sen. Ben Nelson’s mind as he reads what can only be a thank you note to Mutual of Omaha.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said Friday that he will oppose legislation that would give people the option of a public health insurance plan….

Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”

Yes. That’s Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska stating that he won’t support a public health care option because it would just be too good. Apparently, our government must now be prohibited from actually helping people in need because it’s bad for private industry’s profit margins.