3 posts tagged “copyright”
So, the Sound of Sleep sponsored community on LJ has created the biggest ruckus since the default icon/nipples-are-indecent/I just want to feed my BAYbeeee scandal created by hardvice because his Bea Arthur breast-tassel icon got censored.
I've been following it all, because I find LiveJournal meta-drama to be incredibly fascinating. That wasn't meant to sound sarcastic -- I honestly do. I even read the LJ Wikipedia discussion page to watch random LJ obsessives argue with regular old Wikipedia users about which information is VITALLY IMPORTANT to be included on the Wikipedia page. It's hella fun.
Anyway, I'm a paid user and have been for a long time. And I really don't have much of a problem with occasionally accidentally running into advertising -- I'm not going to clutch my pearls about it. I've always said that the current web 2.0 situation is untenable -- if people are going to be able to sustain sites, they have to make money. I prefer subscriber models, but given the number of 14-year-olds who just want to start 8 million LJs named after whatever-the-hell manga character and abandon them and never pay a cent -- they've got to cover their bandwidth costs somehow. Advertising models are the only way that web-commerce at this size can really function. I don't love it, but I accept it -- these people need, and deserve to, get paid for all the work they put in. (There's a whole other discussion here about the poor support volunteers who are bearing the brunt of all this drama and not getting a cent from SixApart for dealing with it. And then there's a whole other discussion about the corruption and inequity of the support structure in:re suspending accounts and shit. But I digress.)
The one thing that totally does concern me is all the copyright violation that happens on the site. But as Burr86 stated in a recent lj_bi post, all the copyright violations have ALWAYS been actionable; it's just a question of whether companies wanted to act on it or not. Obviously, now that the corporations have taken an interest in LJ, there's going to be way more opportunity for them to poke around and find stuff they don't like, and it will be a YouTube-esque situation where content gets pulled. But you can't stop the flow of copyright violations on the internet -- it's been shown time and time again. If fan communities have to become friends-protected and totally word of mouth, that's the way it's going to be. But it's like a hydra -- you cut off one head and three grow in its place. The copyright violations are out there, and if you know where to look, you can get anything you want. And corporations, despite their billions of dollars, haven't been able to stop it yet. I can get pretty much any television show I want, any time I want, perfectly free on the internet if I just poke around long enough. And if they shut down one LJ, or one torrent, or whatever, another one will come around. So I think their fight is kinda futile.
Everything is going to work out. I would recommend being much more careful about what you post publically, but I think that's a lesson everyone should learn, whether corporate info-mining was an issue or not. And I'd back up your journal regularly, in whichever incredibly clunky way you choose to do it. Just in case. But honestly -- I can't go anywhere else unless EVERYONE ELSE I'm friends with leaves, because the social function is the one thing that still keeps me there. But if another site came up with a functionality that would let me export 5-plus years of journaling, and everyone I wanted to talk to left along with me, yeah, I'd be out of there by now probably. I don't feel any particular loyalty to LiveJournal as an entity.
So the Question of the Day is about the TV shows I plan to watch in this upcoming season. I have to say, there are a number of shows that I read about in the Entertainment Weekly Fall TV Preview issue that looked pretty interesting. But, of course, I will never watch them as I don't have a TV with anything resembling reception. Well, that's not completely true -- we get Fox pretty clear. But in general, all of my TV watching either comes in the form of DVDs or downloads.
I planned to download Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from iTunes, only to find that it wasn't being carried, which surprised me. So I downloaded a torrent and am planning to watch it tonight. I regularly download The Office and Lost from iTunes, which has worked out quite nicely. I'm excited for the new Comedy Central cartoon Freak Show, created by David Cross and Jon Benjamin, which I'm assuming will be on iTunes. Basically, iTunes is my best friend. It's cheaper than getting cable and just sitting around frying my brain for hours on end. This way, I can actively support quality shows. You can also subscribe and get a month of The Daily Show for $9.99. I download torrents of Veronica Mars, from a super-secret LJ community that I won't identify in case it were to get shut down. But if that were on iTunes, I'd pay for it. I make up for my illegal downloading by purchasing the DVDs when they come out, though.
TV on DVD is my big fascination (and largest recreational expenditure). I think it's an amazing new form of media distribution: utterly genius. In the last month or so I've bought season 8 of The Simpsons, season 2 of Veronica Mars, season 2 of The Office (even though I already purchased the individual episodes on iTunes -- I love the show THAT MUCH), and season 2 of Fraggle Rock. I'm gearing up to buy season 5 of Kids in the Hall, season 7 of Seinfeld, and volume 4 of Family Guy, not to mention the upcoming box set of old Sesame Street episodes and the long-awaited season 2 of Twin Peaks. The Twin Peaks release is still a rumor, and I doubt it's actually going to happen this fall, but that's what's been floating around. Much like the constant rumors about The State box set. I actually already have season 2 of Twin Peaks, but it's a crappy Spanish region 2 bootleg copy that I payed far too much for on eBay. Other bootleg TV shows I have include My So-Called Life (which was released in 2001 but quickly fell out of print and is ludicrously expensive to get a legit copy of), Sifl and Olly, The Jim Henson Hour, a couple episodes of Muppet Babies, and the mid-80s soap-opera parody miniseries Fresno (best thing EVAR). And, of course, I still await the eventual release of Daria, so I can get my Trent fix.
The problem with Daria, and The State, and the delayed-but-definitely-coming season 2 of The Muppet Show, is that they all have a ton of background music that the studios (MTV/Viacom and Disney, respectively) don't have the rights to distribute on video/DVD. When the music was licensed for the TV show, no one was expecting for there to be a market for TV on video. And then DVD came out, and it became possible to put an entire season of a show on 4 discs -- super cheap to manufacture, too. But because the licensing contracts didn't have home video distribution rights written into them, the studios have to go back and sign new contracts for every song. And a lot of the time, the artists (or their publishing companies, or labels, or whoever) want a lot more money for the rights to the song than the studios are willing to pay. The first season of The Muppet Show was very nearly complete -- they only had to cut about 4 songs, which for a 24-episode season that's made up pretty much ENTIRELY of songs that aren't in the public domain is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the sketch with Vincent Price singing "You Got a Friend" was one of the missing pieces, but I found it on YouTube.
The second season is taking so long to come out because Disney really seems committed to getting the rights to as much content as they possibly can, which takes a while to finagle legally. Thomas Lennon of The State mentioned recently (at ComicCon, I think, which...why was Tom Lennon at ComicCon?) that MTV has rescored all of The State episodes so that it can finally be released, but that's still merely a rumor.
Working at Kim's, I learned a lot about all of this stuff, which was really helpful to be able to explain to customers why such-and-such show wasn't available. And Kim's has a fantastic TV on DVD rental section, although it's gone to shit since I left and am not there to pester the buyer to get every random show I could think of. What's the good of only having season 4 of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? I'm a total completist, so things like that bug me a lot. There are plenty of shows at Kim's that I've been meaning to rent forever. Foremost on the list is Battlestar Galactica, but also Grey's Anatomy, Nip/Tuck and The L Word. My friend Ryan loves both The Wire and Deadwood, but I just haven't been able to get into either of them -- though admittedly I only watched the beginning of the first episodes of both of them.
I would like to explicate upon the random things I have hanging out in that sidebar over there. One of my main complaints withLJ for years has been the inability to put real honest-to-god HTML in your sidebar, to create nice little "I'm reading/listening to..." collections instead of putting them in the bottom of each individual post. So, presented with that opportunity here, I honestly didn't know quite what to put up. So, there's an mp3 by the Twilight Singers, probably my favorite band. It's a cover of a Massive Attack song, and it's actually sung by Mark Lanigan as well as Greg Dulli.
OK, OK, the album cover up there is from what I bought the other day, the Girl Talk album Night Ripper. It's pretty insane and sure to be pulled from the shelves before long for MASSIVE copyright violations. I plan at some point tomorrow to sit down and figure out how many of the samples I can pick out. It's like Name That Tune! Did anyone reading this ever watch syndicated reruns of Name That Tune? It was pretty awesome. I think if it were 1975 and I was on that show, I would just guess that every song was "Afternoon Delight" and by the law of averages I would come out on top. The one sample that stuck in my mind was where he blended "Heartbeat" by Annie with "My Humps". And there was a lot of Ludacris on there, I think. I've got to listen to it again.
Books, I've got Copyrights and Copywrongs by Siva Vaidhyanathan up there. I'm only two chapters into it, even though I've had it for about a month and a half now. It's not a hard read at all, and it's very entertaining and enlightening. But I just have so little free time to read these days, now that I'm working in a job without a lot of free intarwebs leisure time. I have to get all my tech yayas out at home, and that eats up the normal reading time I used to have. Don't even talk to me about my thesis. That's a whole other thing -- that's writing, not reading. The reading is done, and no, none of those books are going to be listed in my sidebar. Because no one other than me should ever have to read Ben Wattenberg's ideas on neomanifestdestinarianism if they don't have to. And yes, that's a word. I think it usually has hyphens in it somewhere, but the general idea is right. ("Anti-distinctly-minty-monetarism!")
The other book I have in the bar, which ties in with the apparent copyright law theme of my interests as expressed in this post, is Lost Girls by Alan Moore. Yes, the graphic novel porn staring Wendy from Peter Pan, Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, and a very agressively dykedelic Alice from Alice in Wonderland. It's organized into three separate books, kept in one slipcover box. I've read the middle book, because my husband started with the first book but I wanted to read, too. It was a little more short on plot than I thought it was going to be. Don't get me wrong, I knew it was going to be primarily "erotica", as that was Moore's intent. But I thought there'd be a little more narrative, instead of just "Isn't it subversive to have the beloved characters of children's literature fucking each other with strap-ons?" Oh, and then Franz Ferdinand gets shot. Unfortunately, not the band. The duke. And then the war starts, and everybody leaves this hotel in Austria except these three women and some debauched hotel maitre'd-slash-pimp, and they have an orgy. That's as far as I've gotten into the third book. But throughout, I've gotten to see Dorothy do it with the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow (I know I'll be getting to the Tin Man soon) while she longs for her Uncle Henry, and Wendy get jerked off on by Captain Hook and fuck Peter Pan while Michael and John watch. Alice's stories are less entertaining, and mostly she just pisses me off.
Anyway, the copyright issues here seem pretty cut and dry -- Wendy is not a character in the public domain, and the people who own the rights to Peter Pan are NOT happy about this book and are trying to stop it's current publication in England. Alan Moore, being Alan Moore, just doesn't seem to care and thinks they're a bunch of wankers. He's kind of a bad-ass. The book is worth a look, if you can somehow get your hands on it without paying an arm and a leg -- its list price is $75, but it's not being carried many places so add some hefty shipping charges in to that. Unless you happen to live near a decent comic book store in New York City, because I hear there are a few copies floating around. I was shocked to see it at the Kim's where I used to work, because one of my best friends is in the book department and he expressed doubt that they would stock a book that expensive that would probably not immediately sell. I proved him wrong by, well, buying it immediately and getting a nice little discount from a current employee or employees who shall remain nameless. Whatever the circumstances ended up being, I now have the book for under $60 and only had to get harassed by a suspicious security guard to get it. And it's a pretty nice book, presentation-wise and, I suppose, content-wise. I also like the idea of having it if it gets pulled from the shelves and becomes the subject of a cool fair-use trial. All very controversial and fun, I think.
