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.

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?

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.

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

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.]

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.

It wasn’t that I outgrew comics. It was just that… well, I was a college sophomore and money was in short supply. As important as comics had been in my early life, they weren’t quite as important as having something to eat other than Ramen noodles. Especially with all of the major publishers constantly raising their prices and increasing the number of ads, and with indie publishers having to raise their prices even higher just to stay afloat. Suddenly, 24 – 36 pages of comic entertainment didn’t seem all that important when the price hit somewhere between $2.95 and $4.95 a pop.

Plus, there were these:

If you’re a comic geek, those probably look familiar. They’re longboxes. And those aren’t the only ones I have. So, here I have massive amounts of moldering paper just sitting around in longboxes. I’m scared to touch any of them because 1) they might be valuable, and 2) they might have once been valuable, but now be in poor condition, which would be kind of heartbreaking.

Which also means none of them get read any more. Which is why I have come to love the idea of digital comics. You can read them. Again and again. Enjoy them consistently, and not have to worry about longboxes taking up floor space or comics getting damaged. Sure, your digital edition doesn’t gain value as a collectible, but wouldn’t that mean you just get the comics you love reading?

And here’s my current dilemma. My relationship and my love of comics is currently in a boom-bust-boom-bust cycle. Even as I rediscover time and again how much I love the medium by seeking out trades of comics written by people like Garth Ennis and Allan Moore, I keep having my love of comics smacked down again and again by an industry firmly entrenched in 1996. Witness the state of digital comics today:

Marvel Comics: The so-called “House of Ideas.” Once upon a time, they were the young upstarts who dared to take on the entrenched superheroes of yesteryear. In 2007, they launched their digital comics subscription. Comics had to be read on your computer screen in a proprietary reader, and nothing could be downloaded. New comics were posted twelve months after they had hit the stands. Critics and fans alike laughed. It’s two years later. Swine are still earthbound. Hell has a significant lack of snow days. Catholicism has yet to select a Pope who does not share their religious views. So, of course, Marvel has done nothing different except to change the lead time to a mere six months.

DC: The house that Superman built. The old war horse of the comics industry, but a company that lately has been given to flights of re-invention. And by “lately,” I mean, “ever since the early 90’s when Marvel took the lead in the market.” They arguably began the mainstream “For Mature Audiences” trend with adult-themed stories in Batman, Superman, and Swamp Thing, then solidified themselves in that market by introducing the Vertigo line with comics like Sandman, Preacher, and, um, Swamp Thing. A while back, they offered some Vertigo previews in PDF format. Aside from that, DC seems to be waiting for this “internet” fad to blow over.

A quick note: Not every situation from every medium applies to every other medium. I heard somebody recently say that DC and Marvel didn’t have full archives available because “It’s tough to clear the rights on a lot of those old comics. You have to pay the creators.” This is true about music used in the original WKRP. But while DC and Marvel were creating comics as we know them today, they habitually screwed over their creators with binding work-for-hire contracts. DC and Marvel own pretty much everything published up through the end of the 70’s lock, stock, and barrel.

Image Comics: Rogue creators from DC and Marvel split off to create Image—a company founded on not ripping off the creators. Of course, they’ll be absolutely thrilled to avoid any further innovation. Image Comics offers the first issues of their series as free digital comics. Read them online—without a proprietary reader—and then rush to the store and buy paper. Yes, only the first issues are available digitally. Anything beyond that and you’ll need to shell out for a print edition.

And now, a sample of independents.

WaRP Graphics: Publishers of ElfQuest who, lately, have not had that much success with the print world. This past year, they finished putting online every issue of ElfQuest ever published. They’re intended to be read in your browser, but unlike Marvel they’ve actually been released at high resolution, and not in a proprietary reader. And they’re free. Still far from perfect, but a damn sight better than the big boys.

Aardvark Vanaheim: Love it or hate it, Cerebus is a significant work in comics history. A truly longform epic with a main character who aged in real time (most of the series). And creator Dave Sim certainly didn’t make any friends with his snide commentaries and constant bashing of the industry. So, certainly this rebel who constantly called to tear down the system that exploited creators and idolized merchants would jump at the chance to do away with the middleman and the archaic print distribution system for his new series, right? Oh, what’s that you say, Dave Sim’s official website for glamourpuss? “You can only buy glamourpuss in really, really good comic book stores (like these ones listed here) No single copy orders, no subscriptions, no exceptions?” Oh. Well. Settles that, then.

Boom! Studios: Boom! Studios sprang onto the scene in a big way by offering free downloads of their… first issues. But in cbr format! The most open and easy-to-use digital comics format—essentially the medium’s version of mp3. Of course, their follow-up to that was to encourage people to rush to the stores and buy more paper.

There are plenty of pirates stepping in to fill the gaps. And plenty of comic artists complaining about it—only to later be exposed as pirates, themselves. Whether they’re downloading gigabyte after gigabyte of Torchwood without sending the BBC a dime, or just drawing other creators’ characters at conventions.

So, where are the sources for (legal) digital comics downloads?

Well, you could try the fine folks at Modern Tales and their affiliate sites, all offering free, no-DRM .cbr files from their creators. The selection doesn’t change much, but they’ve got the right idea.

There’s Drive Thru Comics. Most of their content is in .pdf format, but their prices are reasonable. Too bad they don’t have much in the way of publisher support—but they do carry Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

There’s Pullbox Online, which has the iTunes Store of digital comics interfaces (although they’ve skipped the pesky DRM phase), but has almost no support from publishers. Good ideas often have a hard time catching on.

Speaking of the iTunes store, if you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you can buy comics through the app store now. There’s the excellent ComicZeal which will let you download Golden Age (read: public domain) comics, and which can be fed with cbr files. And then there’s the seemingly infinite offerings from iVerse, who wants you to buy an app for every single issue of a series for $0.99 a piece (first issue free!).

The fact is that the comics industry, at a time they should be moving forward into a digital future by leaps and bounds, is still struggling with a mid-90’s mentality. They still want the digital to be a means to move paper. But paper was popular solely because it was the best distribution method of its time. Now digital is the medium that offers the most convenience and durability.

Don’t get me wrong—there will always be a market for paper comics. There’s a feel to a comic book that you don’t get reading it off of an iPod. But if comics companies are going to survive (and there’s some doubt to that), then they’re going to have to learn that digital is not a means of promotion—it’s a means of distribution. A fast, easy, and inexpensive means of distribution.

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?

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.