Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Remember USANext and their internet-only ad? The one that suggested the AARP wanted to do away with American soldiers in favor of gay weddings?

Yeah. About that. The couple pictured is suing USANext (Salon.com article requires Premium or free Day Pass, link via Thud)

According to the Tribune, Montini may have tried to cover his tracks for using the photo without the paper’s permission; after the ad appeared, Montini visited the Tribune’s Web site and tried to purchase a similar photograph of Raymen and Hansen. The Tribune stopped him, and Montini sent an email message to the Tribune’s photo department in which he said it looked “more and more like we did make a mistake and ran with the ad prior to getting your approval.” USANext President Charlie Jarvis apologized to the Tribune for using the photograph without permission—and blamed the Montini firm for it. “We hired this company to buy commercial rights for anything we use on our Web site,” Jarvis told the Tribune. “There will be beatings of a severe nature. In business terms that means fines and penalties. I’ll have to go back to the group and find out what’s going on.”

Wow. You can do that? So, if I’m running an illegal mp3-swapping website and the RIAA sues me, can I claim that I have a firm that’s supposed to buy commercial rights for everything I use on the website, so I’m not responsible? Hey – a whole bunch of us could incorporate independently as “rights purchasers!” Then we could each outsource our contracts to other “rights purchasers” and create an absolute labyrinth of red tape so that it would take the legal departments of any rightsholder decades to discover who’s ultimately responsible for the copyright infringement! It’ll be anarchy! Glorious, glorious anarchy!

Both USANext and Montini are named in the suit. USANext seems to be stating that they shouldn’t be named because it was Montini’s responsibility to make certain that the rights were cleared.

This doesn’t seem to be based on any legal precedent as far as I can tell. If I hire a lawyer, tell him to clear all of the rights for music on my website, and then get sued by the RIAA, I’m the one who gets sued. I would be the one who put it up without checking the work of my lawyer.

What you actually see in the above quote is the first three steps of Denial of Responsibility ^TM.

1. Try to make it seem like you asked permission, they’ve just forgotten it (this, by the way, is what they actually busted Martha Stewart for – not insider trading).
2. Blame your business partner.
3. Make an unfunny joke (“There will be beatings of a severe nature”).

But wait! There’s more! Below, you’ll find the all-important final step in Denial of Responsibility ^TM – “Change the Subject.”

Jarvis has offered no such apology or explanation to Raymen and Hansen. “They ought to be suing all the left-wing blogs for circulating this [ad],” Jarvis told the Washington Post last week. “That’s who they ought to be asking for an apology.”

In further news, the RIAA announced today that it will be dropping charges on all file sharers so that they may file suit against Wired Magazine, USA Today, CNN and other prominent news outlets for the stories they ran on Napster, claiming that the companies “incited copyright infringement by telling people of the existence of P2P software.” The MPAA announced a similar strategy. Additionally, law enforcement officials announced that they have released Charles Manson from prison and are issuing arrest warrants for Vincent Bugliosi, John Gilmore, and Tommy Udo – among others – for commiting the real crime by publishing books on the Manson Family.

I really don’t know what to make of the fact that Star Trek: Enterprise fans are turning to the PBS model to save their show.

TrekUnited.com, the fan campaign to raise over $30 million to pay for a fifth season of Star Trek: Enterprise, announced today that three anonymous contributors have pledged $3 million toward the effort to keep the series on the air.

In an announcement posted at SaveEnterprise.com, TrekUnited.com provided an excerpt from the benefactors’ statement explaining why each of them was willing to offer a million dollars to save a series cancelled by its network, UPN.

Who needs advertisers? The network has fans to support its shows, now! Hey – anybody wanna see a new season of Firefly? Get out your checkbooks…

DVD’s just make life more and more complicated. First, Fox had to go and renew Family Guy. Then, Firefly turned out to be a huge hit on little plastic discs (although Sci-Fi has yet to announce that they wanted to renew it). And that’s not to mention the thousands of Trekkies who bought the discs just to be completists, then discovered that Deep Space Nine was possibly the Best! Trek! Ever!

But with our constant demand for our favorite TV shows, have we ever stopped to consider the poor production companies? Have we ever stopped to think that maybe this might actually cost them money? Money that could possibly be better spent on hookers and blow?

Take, for example, the problem of licensing music used in these shows. Oh, sure – some shows it’s easy. The music doesn’t matter, right? Just stick any old thing in there. But when it’s WKRP, you just don’t mess with Fever’s playlist.

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.

What’s disturbing to me is not so much the idea that the companies responsible for this have to pay extra to use the music as it is the fact that sometimes the companies save money by cutting out the original music and replacing it with needle drops.

I guess I’m just one of those purists who make things difficult. But I’v realized lately that I place a lot of importance on the music that underscores, well, everything. I understand that in some cases, the artists responsible for the creation of the project are willing to sit there and rate the importance of the music to the piece – as they apparently did with the American Dreams DVD’s, where they labeled music as either indispensible or replacable and acted accordingly. But as someone who works creatively and who enjoys creative entertainment in his spare time, I can’t help but feel that something is lost by doing this. You change the music and you change the show. That’s just the way it goes.