Savage Popcorn

Lloyd Kaufman, Chairman of the IFTA, delivers a speech on media consolidation and the dangers it poses to independent art.

Ironically, I found this YouTube video by way of Kaufman’s MySpace blog.

Tired of being ripped off over the past three years on YouTube, the Monty Python team has finally taken action… by setting up their own channel on YouTube (via Slashdot).

No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing - HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.

What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!

And in return, all they are asking is that you click on the links and buy the films and TV shows. And you can’t say fairer than that.

Bahnhof, one of Sweden’s largest ISPs has just opened a new high-security data centre in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city and they have really gone to town with the design of the place.

“Since we got hold of this unique nuclear bunker in central Stockholm deep below the rock, we just couldn’t build it like a traditional – more boring – hosting center,” [Bahnhof CEO, Jon Karlung] said. “We wanted to make something different. The place itself needed something far out in design and science fiction was the natural source of inspiration in this case – plus of course some solid experience from having been a hosting provider for more than a decade.”

“I’m personally a big fan of old science fiction movies. Especially ones from the 70s like Logan’s Run, Silent Running, Star Wars (especially The Empire Strikes Back) so these were an influence,“ said Karlung. “James Bond movies have also had an impact on the design. I was actually looking for the same outfit as the villain ‘Blofeld’ in Bond and even considered getting a white cat, but that might have been going a bit far!”

The results, which can be seen at Pingdom (via Slashdot) are spectacular.

Cory Doctorow has an article in Locus Magazine (via) discussing why he thinks the current copyright model is broken:

When you hear a song you love, you play it for the people in your tribe. When you read a book you love, you shove it into the hands of your friends to encourage them to read it too. When you see a great show, you get your friends to watch it too — or you seek out the people who’ve already watched it and strike up a conversation with them.

So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it. And since “sharing” on the Internet is the same as “copying,” this puts you square in copyright’s crosshairs. Everyone copies. Dan Glickman, the ex-Congressman who now heads up the Motion Picture Association of America (as pure a copyright maximalist as you could hope to meet) admitted to copying Kirby Dick’s documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated (a scorching critique of the MPAA’s rating system) but excused it because the copy was “in [his] vault.” To pretend that you do not copy is to adopt the twisted hypocrisy of the Victorians who swore that they never, ever masturbated. Everyone knows that they themselves are lying, and a large number of us know that everyone else is lying too.

Go read the rest

So I started watching the election on Tuesday night and - partly because the delays between nuggets of actual news were so large, and partly because the BBC coverage was pretty dire - I found myself turning to the internet to see what conversations were going on. And, at this point, not much was happening and no-one was really saying anything…

… until I turned to Twitter who had an election stream set up and the comments were flying by. It was fascinating, if not illuminating and - consequently - I have overcome my resistance to microblogging.

This is all a long way of saying that I have finally signed up to both Twitter and Jaiku and will be digging around in the very near furure to see what WordPress plugins are available.

The French Senate has voted in favour of disconnecting internet users who persist in illegally downloading music or films, setting the stage for a fight between France and Brussels as the European Parliament approved by a large majority an amendment outlawing exactly this sort of measure in September.

Under France’s proposed three-strikes or “graduated response” law, Internet users accused of stealing content online for the first time would receive a cautioning email. A second time results in a warning letter delivered by post, and a third claim requires the user’s Internet service provider (ISP) to cut access for a year.

In passing the bill, the senators rejected an amendment proposed by senator Bruno Retailleau of the right-wing MPF party replacing internet cut-off with a fine. Retailleau accused the bill of being too severe and discriminatory as internet access is often bundled with television and fixed-line telephone services making it impossible to just cut off the internet.

I’ve posted on this before, but it bears repeating that people will share files and, rather than trying to identify who is sending what to whom, it would be a lot simpler – and a lot fairer – if the media industry recognised this fact and sought to build their business models around it.

It’s also been noted in the past that ISPs have expressed concerns and – in some cases – taken action to try and control the rising bandwidth demands imposed by the sort of rich media websites that are currently proliferating.

One way of addressing both of these issues would be for ISPs to offer two – or more – tiers of internet access; a cheap, limited bandwidth option and a more expensive, very high or unlimited bandwidth option. The ISPs would then need to negotiate with collection agencies, such as the Performing Rights Society, so that a percentage of the revenue is handed over to the national collection agency to be distributed to copyright holders in much the same way that they handle licensing fees from TV and radio.

The advantage of this approach is that it requires no policing. If you stay within your bandwidth quote, no additional cost will accrue. If, however, you want to download a bunch of films, you can do so safe in the knowledge that part of what you paid to your ISP will end up in the pockets of the legal owners of those films.

The latest wheeze in the Labour government’s War Against Sanity is to decide that anyone carrying a pre-pay mobile phone must be a terrorist - or as good as - so they’re building another database of mobile phone owners. That’s all owners of mobile phones, regardless of whether they have regular contract or a pre-pay phone.

Everyone who buys a mobile telephone will be forced to register their identity on a national database under government plans to extend massively the powers of state surveillance.

Phone buyers would have to present a passport or other official form of identification at the point of purchase. Privacy campaigners fear it marks the latest government move to create a surveillance society.

It can’t be long now until they realise that all crimes are comitted by living people and overreact accordingly.

Walmart, Microsoft and Yahoo have all put their customers in this position. And if you buy media encumbered with this broken solution you will - sooner or later - find yourself with a library you can’t access.

There has been much discussion recently about Google’s entry into the browser market, what it means for other browsers and what it means for Microsoft. But Neatorama (via) has found another significance by looking at the Chrome logo.

Well, I say there’s something else. See that glowing blue eye? It’s absolutely, positively from SAL 9000, the Earthbound twin of the HAL 9000 computer in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Huh? There are two of ‘em? Yep: HAL has a red eye, SAL has a blue eye.)

SAL, like HAL, was a sentient computer that hopefully wouldn’t turn into a paranoid psychopath like her older brother, which makes you wonder about the subtext of Google’s ever-expanding, ever-learning search algorithms. If Google ever “wakes up,” you better hope it sounds more like Candice Bergen than Douglas Rain.

The Large Hadron Rap