A BRILLIANT new UK-made film about the ongoing debates over intellectual property rights has been posted in entirety online: http://blip.tv/file/359180
As usual, if you like it please give them some money. Also, if you like it give me some money. Why not? I love money!
The man who legally changed his name to regain control of his copyrighted material from Warner Brothers, and then licensed that same name to Dayton Hudson for a big fragrance launch this summer, wants you to stop thinking you can use his music whenever you want. He's joined forces with Web Sheriff to sue a couple online videosharing forums where people've been using his work without permission.
"Someone has to start somewhere and we know this will make a serious impact - a hell of a lot of artists are going to follow suit," some representative of the anti-piracy org heading the crackdown told the Guardian. "We have to build a 21st century model for the entertainment industry."
Funny or fucked-up?: WKRP in Cincinnati is finally coming out on DVD, held up for years due to rights clearances, with Muzak dubbed in for the songs they couldn't acquire rights to.
By way of the awesome Rob Walker (robwalker.net), who does all the best blog-reading for me:
http://blog.wired.com/music/2007/04/wkrp_in_cincinn.html
I'm not sure why it strikes me as so odd to be using a blog to suggest that people pick up a magazine, considering our entire collection is paper-based and this blog is in fact a blog of a paper magazine.
This month's Harper's (May 2007, unfortunately not on their website yet, if you can't get it on a newsstand, just wait a couple of weeks) has an article on just that digital/paper dissonance, and presents an incredibly in-depth view of the Prelinger Archive in San Francisco. Never have I been so inspired to take our entire collection and organize it according to an esoteric whim, then continue to reorganize it ad infinitum.
So NewsCorp (that's the Rupert Murdoch-controlled owner of massive numbers of media companies including Fox News and now MySpace) announced today that they were going to begin cracking down on copyright violations of music on MySpace--files found to be in violation would be deleted and the users threatened with banning.
"MySpace is staunchly committed to protecting artists' rights, whether those artists are on major labels or are independent acts," said Chris DeWolfe, MySpace chief executive and co-founder.
The company said users who repeatedly attempt to upload copyright music files will be permanently barred from the site.
out now