Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Required reading on the consumer-digital-rights front, EFF’s Frequently Awkward Questions. Highlights include…

1. The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That’s over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where’s all that money going?
2. The RIAA said that it only went after individual file sharers because you couldn’t go after P2P system creators. After the Supreme Court’s Grokster decision, shouldn’t you stop going after music fans?
3. The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios’ bottom line in any significant way?

Of particular interest to me, however, is this question:

Is it ever legal for me to use software like DVD Shrink or Handbrake to rip a digital copy of a DVD I own onto a video iPod or my laptop? What if I want clips to use for a class report? Or if a teacher wants to include a clip in a PowerPoint slide?

I recently took a class in comedy, and as part of the class we were required to do an in-class presentation. My subject was the humor of “Mork & Mindy” versus the solo humor of Robin Williams.

I paid roughly $50 for the first season of “Mork & Mindy” on DVD. I bought the DVD of “Robin Williams Live on Broadway” for $9.99. I bought the companion CD, “Robin Williams Live 2002,” because of the variation in the material from night to night and the bonus “local material” for $14.99, and I paid $12.99 for the CD of “Robin Williams: A Night at the Met” because it was the only other stand-up material I could find in print. All of this was purchased at local retailers because this was a three-week summer course and I didn’t have time to depend on getting the material from online retailers where I could have shopped around. The rather depressing math shows that I spent $87.97 before state sales tax on research and material for my final presentation. Considering that the local sales tax rate is 7%, that brings the estimate up to roughly $94.13, putting me just short of $100.

I think, at this point, we have established that I am not a criminal freeloader just looking for a handout. And yes, I did eat a few packs of Ramen that month.

Here’s something to consider, however. There is a situation in which I would have been willing to pay more. Not for the material I cobbled together, but for the material that was missing. There is a video of Robin Williams’ concert at the Met. There is also an earlier HBO special featuring Robin Williams in an informal night club style setting (“An Evening with Robin Williams”). Neither of these, however, is currently in print. Both have been released on VHS… and that’s it. It pretty much goes without saying that the VHS is long out of print, as well. At one point I was desperate enough to find some stand-up that was close to contemporary with “Mork & Mindy” that I took off on a mad tour of the local thrift- and used book shops around town, pawing through their selections of heavily-used VHS for some legitimate copy of any of this material.

You know how hard it is to find exactly what you’re looking for in a Salvation Army thrift shop? Especially when it’s on VHS? In good news, I did find a Brother Dave Gardener record that I had never heard, and it only cost me $0.50.

A quick search of the net will find that both the video of “A Night at the Met” and “An Evening With Robin Williams” are available online. They’re available through Limewire. And through BitTorrent. And you can probably find somebody who has posted them to RapidShare.

All of these are illegal.

And before anybody points out that used copies are available on Amazon, let me remind you – the RIAA/MPAA don’t like those, either.

Say what you will about popular culture, the fact is that this is part of our heritage. My generation grew up with Nick at Nite telling us to take pride in “Our TV Heritage.” Even so, our scholarship on these points in our culture is going to be lacking over the next few years because the material is only widely available either in old copies on a decaying medium that has been rendered obsolete or in illegal, poorly-sourced digital copies that we can be sued for accessing.

What makes this even more irksome is the fact that we live in the age of Lulu.com and Kunaki, not to mention the iTunes video store. On-demand publishing is a reality in the modern age, and all it takes is the disk space for the digital master. I can think of no real reason why anything that is of interest to even a small portion of the public should not be available somewhere legally.

How to Write Screenplays. Badly. hits the nail on the wossname with alarming frequency. Today’s discussion of character motivation is no exception.

HORROR: Marine biologist and former Navy SEAL Riley Hammock embarks on a relentless quest to prevent the the mutant Octopoids reaching Pastor’s Cove because:

a) He was part of the crack scientific team that helped develop the Octopoids as living weapons. Though he quit because of project leader Henrik Lancerson’s increasingly apparent egomaniacal qualities, he never spoke up about his concerns for fear it would hamper his own career chances. With the creatures on the loose, Riley realises that only he knows the secret to destroying the tentacled horde before hundreds of innocent bathers are inked to death – including his own spunky ex-wife who moved to Pastor’s Cove after the divorce, and for whose soft undulating embrace he still secretly pines.

b) They’re gross.

Do you have any idea how many movies I’ve seen lately that opt for “b”? And how many of them are directed by Uwe Boll?

Yeah, I said it, Uwe! Step into the ring!

Edited to Note: For How to Write Screenplays. Badly. we have +5,000 bonus points for the use of “soft, undulating embrace” in a sentence not found in a Harlequin romance.

Cinematical wants to know, what is it about those damn pirates? After all,

By now, you’re probably already aware Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest absolutely rocked the box office this past weekend, shattering Spider-Man’s previous three-day record of $114.8 million back in 2002. Yes, it beat Spider-Man. It beat Star Wars. It beat Superman. It beat Jesus. And it beat Spielberg. Even despite a round of “not as good as the first one” reviews, Captain Jack and friends still managed to shock everyone by taking over the top spot.

The question, of course, is why. Superman was a hotly anticipated relaunch. The DaVinci Code was a controversial blockbuster. Spider-Man and Star Wars had fanboys everywhere drooling for months in anticipation – and the same, interestingly enough, could be said about Jesus.

The easy answer is that audiences want to see what Johnny Depp is going to do next. Depp does more than just play Captain Jack Sparrow, he plays him with gusto. His passion for the role and the fun he has playing it comes through in every frame of film. We see the movie because we want to see more Jack Sparrow.

But, as I said, that’s the easy answer – and easy answers, while they may have some truth, are rarely (if ever) the entire truth. I think part of it has to do with savvy marketing. True, we’re surrounded by piratical product tie-ins (Arr!) but the saturation of the market feels less intrusive than the billions of S-crested products that marked the return of the Last Son of Krypton. And let’s bear in mind that the first Pirates of the Carribean was a movie that arrived with little fanfare and took off as a surprise hit.

Audiences are flocking to Pirates because for once it’s a blockbuster we’ve all been looking forward to without being told every minute of every day that we’re supposed to be looking forward to it. It’s a flick. It’s a flick we’ll enjoy. It’ll be entertaining. And the people turning it into an “Event” with a capital “E” are the audiences and not the marketing gurus.