I’ve mentioned The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore before. The app still looks brilliant; I still don’t have an iPad. But this is not an app, it’s a short animation, nominated for this year’s Oscars.
If I were able to, I’d vote for it. Magnificent.
The first in the terrific second series of podcasts by Robin Ince & Josie Long (for Comedy Central), featuring the Wizard of Northampton himself, Alan Moore.
- the whole series is totally worth a listen and can be found here and here
EDIT: Here’s Alan wandering around Occupy London:
SOPA, or why I got over time travel
In his ruling in the case against UPC in October 2010, Mr Justice Peter Charleton said internet piracy was “devastating” the recording companies’ business in Ireland.
Not only did it “undermine their business” but it was also “ruining the ability of creative people in Ireland to earn a living”. The retail sector was also affected by this “wholesale theft”. Solutions are available to the deal with the problem of internet piracy but the 2000 Copyright and Related Rights Act lacked the proper provision for blocking, diverting and interrupting of illegal downloads from the internet, he found.
via the Irish Times
SOPA by any other name…
Verbs like ‘devastating’, ‘ruining’ and ‘undermining’ are perfectly true in one sense, but they are also hugely emotionally loaded, and squeeze out rationality. ‘Devastating’ is very different from ‘inconveniencing’, which I submit is closer to the truth.
The reality is that the music industry (to take one of the many pursuing this legislation around the world) was the beneficiary of a copyright boom in much the same way as Ireland was at the lucky end of the late 90’s/early 2000’s credit boom. Like the vanishing Kodak, music publishers owned all the gates and the keys - if you wanted access, you had to go through them. Piracy existed, but it was easy to catch; it was also easy to tell the difference between a company engaging in large-scale copyright fraud or bootlegging, and a teenager making a mixtape for their girl/boyfriend. It’s probably worth noting that in the eyes of the music publisher, the latter was always illegal, but because it was difficult if not impossible to connect the two in the public mind, there was no political capital or profit in dragging teenagers through the courts.
But the past is a different country; they do things differently there. We cannot go back to the technology of yesteryear, nor would we want to. Nostalgia is only worth something if you can step away from it. Much as I like and miss the old rotary dial phones, I can’t imagine the irritation of having to use one exclusively.
So the alternative, as has been posited in the USA, and looks like it may be on its way here to Ireland, is a version of the Great Firewall of China. Here’s why it is a bad idea and won’t work:
1. Ireland is not China. The state has nothing like the same control or resources to censor applications - there will be workarounds for those prepared to look.
2. Everyone will look for a workaround. Proxy IP’s are nothing new - they will become everyday. For the authorities, it will be equivalent to trying to stop the tide with a fork.
3. It will not stop piracy. Certainly not the (I suggest, mythical) pirates who are the supposed Sauron’s of the digital age. For music publishers, this is a global problem: to say Irish piracy is a drop in the ocean would be to overestimate the word ‘drop’.
4. Copying will only ever get easier. I posted a link to a Cory Doctorow opinion piece on the future of general purpose computing last week. It’s worth reading in it’s entirety, but here is a salient paragraph:
In short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did not oblige them. Copying only got easier following the passage of these laws—copying will only ever get easier. Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn’t get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn’t even notice it was doing it.”
5. Change is inevitable, to badly paraphrase Dr. Brian Cox. The brief state of affairs that held from the early 20th century until Tim Berners-Lee started networking was necessarily finite. It depended on a number of fluid systems (business, technology, communication) remaining static. This is not how the world works. That situation, in which music publishers and some musicians, could make huge amounts of money, has passed, as it was always going to. That doesn’t mean we are entering a chaotic age; it just means that the current big players in the field haven’t adapted to the new order (and now we have new big players, like Apple and Amazon).
6. I’m a freelance journalist, which makes me dependent on another industry whose earning model has been badly hit by the evolution of technology. Personally speaking, it’s much harder to get work these days; the remuneration is less; and alternate employment is a fact of life. This is probably true for most in my industry, all around the world.
The competition for attention created by the internet makes it much harder for work to be seen to the degree it might have been 20 years ago, because I’m not just competing with other local journalists, but also Facebook, TMZ, Boing Boing, every other newspaper ever, Twitter, other bloggers, YouTube memes - everything. I care about copyright too - it affects the value of what I do for a living and protects my work - it’s essential. But this is not the way to protect creative work.
On one level, this sucks. Of course I’d like to have more time to work and to be able to earn a better living doing so. It is disheartening on some levels. But: I’d like to have olive skin, a six pack and a movie deal too - I am able to reluctantly accept that wanting something doesn’t make it happen. I can’t go back in time and alter my parents’ genetic structure so I tan instead of freckling.
I’m still hopeful about the other two. But I am realistic about the job (and my skin). I cannot order the world to change, just because it would suit me. The change in the media world (or in music, or film) is not analogous to a crusade against racism or bigotry. Those who are behind the various legal and political reactions against the changes are employing the same sort of pseudo-logic as intelligent design advocates, whether they realise it or not.
It’s the same fantasy of turning back the clock as my dream of time traveling DNA adjusters. Yes, there are downsides to living in a constantly evolving society, but I would rather have CERN than a rotary phone. If we are talking about the future of intellectual property, then the threat to the future lies far more with copyright trolls than bittorrenting. That will be the real battleground.
- There’s a petition for anyone who would like to register their disapproval, here.
- I linked to a TED talk by Clay Shirky on the US SOPA debate here. It turns out I had more to say about SOPA…
via The Hairpin (& The Awl):
Terrific series of profiles of classic Hollywood stars, by Anne Helen Petersen. Addictive reading, even if you think you’ve already heard it all.
(one thing - I think - that makes the internet so much greater than much-missed print magazines like Neon, is the ability to show the reader just what it was that made these people so iconic).
EDIT: the whole clip is great, but everything from 1:25 is gold.
RIP, another much-loved icon of my childhood.
(pic by Cinemárvore & Creative Commons licenced).
“”The Inquisition, with its stipulation that torture and interrogation not jeopardize life or cause irreparable harm, actually set a more rigorous standard than some proponents of torture insist on now. The 21st century’s Ad extirpanda is the so-called Bybee memo, issued by the Justice Department in 2002 (and later revised). In it, the Bush administration put forth a very narrow definition, arguing that for an action to be deemed torture, it must produce suffering “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”
To place this in perspective: the administration’s threshold for when an act of torture begins was the point at which the Inquisition stipulated that it must stop.
