Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Concerns over Intellectual Property law are beginning to come to a boil, and more reports are coming in every day from the Western Front. Take the case of Thomas Giovanetti. Giovanetti is an MPAA/RIAA apologist who has published screeds defending DRM in the marketplace, characterizing all anti-DRM speakers as pirates and criminals, and who has attacked Rep. Rick Boucher’s attempts to reform the DMCA to allow for fair use. Giovanetti’s blog now reveals that he has his own problems as a result of DRM – and he’s none too happy about them. [link via The Technology Liberation Front]

The problem is, we have been using the PVR to record 2 years worth of a Spanish language curriculum that is broadcast over an educational channel, and we’ve been using this content to teach our son Spanish. Now the curriculum is gone. It’s not like I’m just inconvenienced in not being able to watch my “24” episodes. An educational curriculum is lost.

There is no way to hook any kind of backup device to the PVR unit in order to back up this content. And since PVRs use hard drives, they are ALL going to fail, eventually.

Of course, Giovanetti is still not quite there yet. After all, he’s still clearly superior to the rest of us pirates and hoors. He’s not talking about “24,” fer cryin’ out loud – he’s talkin’ educational programming. For his son. Of course, people who are incovenienced by not being able to watch their “24” episodes are not likely to be storing two whole seasons on their PVR.

What I find sadly funny about this story is the fact that Giovanetti has recognized the problem he’s having, but he has yet to recognize that it’s exactly what he’s been arguing against all this time. People want the ability to make back-ups of material they’ve paid for and the ability to use the media that has entered their homes in a way that is in line with their fair use rights.

Meanwhile, the devious thought-criminal pirate hoor Geek With Family offers a full confession of how he wantonly broke DRM in a quest to – gasp! – actually watch the video he had just rented.

Disney’s Atlantis the Lost Empire was one of a few discs at the time that were mastered with bad audio flags (including Pearl Harbor and Jurassic Park 3), that in combination with my Onkyo AV receiver output a few seconds of audio mixed with a few seconds of silence every few seconds.

Disney DVD’s solution was to try a different receiver. Onkyo’s solution was to avoid Dolby Digital and run the DTS track, only available on the $40, non-rentable Atlantis Special Edition 2-disc set. Both of these solutions were unacceptable. I turned to the internet for answers. I found you could re-encode the Dolby Digital track with proper flags with Apple’s DVD Studio Pro. So all I had to do was grab the separate video and audio tracks from the disc, repair the audio and then burn the fixed movie to a DVD-R.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

Oh – and, Giovanetti, perhaps you’d be interested in building your own PVR. Of course, it wouldn’t have that DRM goodness – but it would allow you to back the durn things up.

The BBC reports that the logo for the new British Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) looks an awful lot like the logo for the Thundercats.

Of course, the Thundercats logo is much more correct, heraldically speaking. When turned side-on, the Thundercats cat is pursuing the criminals – the SOCA logo is fleeing them.

As for my own thoughts, I think there can’t possibly be anything disturbing about a new law agency operating under a logo that features a wild cat with its claws outspread over the entire globe and its fangs bared. Nope, I feel perfectly comfortable with that.

When actors get older, sometimes they just fade away. Other times they stick around. The ones who stick around have a lot of options for dealing with their aging.

The best ones do just that – they deal. George Burns tells the story of a hot young vaudeville singer who used to cap off her act with her rendition of “Wherever Mama Goes, Papa Follows.” As she got older and her looks started to fade, she continued to close her act with the number – only now she performed it with a six-gun in each hand.

Sean Connery fully recognizes the elder-statesman quality that his aging has lent him and uses it to his advantage. Clint Eastwood has always depended on his chiseled appearance, and wrinkles just add to the effect. There is a double standard when it comes to age, however – for every 500 “elder statesmen,” there’s only one Dame Judi Dench.

For those who can’t deal with aging, however, there’s plastic surgery. A few minutes under the knife and you’re good to go. Of course, if you do it too much you can wind up looking like a freak. As one surgeon apparently tried to tell Tom Jones recently. (link via pesky’)

The 65-year-old says: “I went to see a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills and he said: ‘You’ve got to be careful with your lower eyes.’

“He told me: ‘Your eyes will be bloody popping,’ he said I should try to look as natural as I can.

“I’ve had some nips and tucks. I don’t know, it depends on what I think needs doing.”

With every story that hits, it seems like the question becomes not so much whether or not we’ll see changes in the intellectual property laws so much as when we’ll see those changes. At this moment in time, so many people have been alienated in the attempt to “protect the artist” (which generally translates to “protect the distribution company’s pocketbook”) that it’s a wonder anybody still buys their product.

And in the middle of all the DRM-madness, litigation insanity, and steroid-abusing media conglomerate muscle flexing, the Smithsonian signs an exclusive deal with Showtime. Wait—the Smithsonian?

On March 9, Showtime and the Smithsonian announced the creation of Smithsonian Networks, a joint venture to develop television programming. Under the agreement, the joint venture has the right of first refusal to commercial documentaries that rely heavily on Smithsonian collections or staff. Those works would first have to be offered to Smithsonian on Demand, the cable channel that is expected to be the venture’s first programming service.

A Smithsonian official who is managing the institution’s content and production assistance for the venture said yesterday that while the new arrangement did limit the ability of commercial filmmakers to sell some projects elsewhere, it ultimately would affect a small number of the works that draw on the museum’s resources.

“It’s not our obligation to help independent filmmakers sell their wares to commercial broadcast and cable networks,” said the official, Jeanny Kim, a vice president for media services for Smithsonian Business Ventures.

Well, yes – there’s a point there. It’s not the Smithsonian’s obligation “to help independent filmmakers sell their wares to commercial broadcast and cable networks.” According to Secretary Lawrence M. Small’s vision statment:

“The Smithsonian is committed to enlarging our shared understanding of the mosaic that is our national identity by providing authoritative experiences that connect us to our history and our heritage as Americans and to promoting innovation, research and discovery in science. These commitments have been central to the Smithsonian since its founding more than 155 years ago.”

Of course, the best way to enlarge our understanding of “the mosaic that is our national identity” is by running a cable network and demanding that artists and filmmakers who use your (previously freely-available) archival materials give you their work for first-refusal rather than letting them choose how to distribute it themselves. And that’s perfectly in line with James Smithson’s vision of the institute as an “Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge.”

Somewhere, access to intellectual property is going to need expanding – and the laws that govern it are worn so thin already that they’re ready to burst. At the moment, it seems that documentary filmmaking may be the place where it finally breaks.