Peter Black's Freedom to Differ

Pirating the 2009 Oscars

Waxy has posted some amazing data on the availability of unauthorised copies of Oscar-nominated movies.  The data reveals that virtually all movies have been posted to file sharing networks and that the source for almost all of those movies are screener copies distributed by the studios and not the poor quality camcorded copies that the industry claims is the primary source of movie piracy.  Interestingly, the average time from the time screeners are received by Academy members to its leak online is just six days.

Read Waxy's post here.

A Thousand Words

Ted Chung's mesmerising short film, A Thousand Words, is deservedly beginning to go viral.  Jeffrey Wells describes it in this way:

... an elegant, concise and very affecting portrait of big-city loneliness and instant connections that flare up and are gone seconds later. The emotions are halting and delicate but true. Beautiful piano score.

And here it is:

A Thousand Words from Ted Chung on Vimeo.

We Live in Public trailer

Josh Harris has created a documentary We Live in Public, about the possibility of the virtual world taking over society in the future, which premiered this week at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival:

MacHEADS

ZDNet has a review of MacHEADS:

Prominent sex blogger and renowned Apple fangirl Violet Blue declares passionately that she'd never sleep with a Windows user. Dozens of Mac fanboys and girls drink and dance together at an Apple-centric party, jubilant that, for another year, Apple still exists. Girls hug their iMacs before tentatively handing them over to be repaired, while another caresses her Cinema Display, gently offering up a kiss to her Mac Pro's tower.

Apple fans are passionate people, both with each other and with the company's products. MacHeads, a new Chimp 65 Productions documentary from writer/director Kobi Shely and producer Ron Shely, documents the history of these Apple-lovers, looking at what underpins their fanatical obsessions. At just under an hour in length, this unbiased, unnarrated documentary takes a balanced approach to peeling the onion of Apple fanboyism. With insightful commentary from the likes of Apple Inc employee number one Daniel Kottke and ex-Apple employee and Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki, some of the compulsive fanboyism on display is mellowed by observations of what made an Apple fan an Apple fan in the first place.

Read more here.  And watch the trailer:

"The Christmas Classic that Almost Wasn't"

Ronald J. Rychlak explains how copyright law helped to make It's a Wonderful Life a Christmas classic:

The other night, along with many other Americans, I watched the Frank Capra classic It's a Wonderful Life. Starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, the movie has become a Christmas staple -- but it was not always that way, and how it attained its holiday status has as much to do with the intricacies of intellectual property law as it does with the storyline and the production values.

Read how here.

(Hat tip: The Volokh Conspiracy.)

Best media and entertainment posts from 2008

Continuing my end-of-year wrap ...

Here are what I consider to be some of the "best" media and entertainment themed posts from 2008.  Again, some of these posts are academic, some are trivial, some just link to what other people say, and some are a little random, but they do represent what interests me and what I have posted on this blog in 2008.  Also, due to a deliberate decision to change the mix of posts on this blog during the year, there were not as many media or entertainment themed posts as in previous years.

Television:

• Potential Big Brother housemates turn to Facebook - some potential Big Brother housemates  purchased advertising space on Facebook to promote themselves.
• Dance fiasco? How about news fiasco? - who would you ask if you wanted to know whether you could copyright a dance?
•  "I just don't see it as a TV series. Maybe a movie?" - talk that there might be an Arrested Development movie.
• "Someone get Patricia Hammond a Xanax" - FoxNews anchor Shep Smith has a wonderfully entertaining rant against an emailer accusing him of bias against Mitt Romney.
• It's time to go Big Brother ... for now - why I watched Big Brother and why it will be missed.

Other:

• Sad day for Australian journalism -  lamenting the end of The Bulletin and the Sunday program.
• Some comments on the US election - this post surprised a number of readers.
• Offensive, banned and rejected ads - some of these are amazing.
• Some interesting top ten lists - a few different top ten lists.

Video:

• Don't forget to check out my list of the best videos of 2008.

Freedom to Dither

• Finally, if you want more media and entertainment posts, check out my tumblelog Freedom to Dither.

"Australia: A Movie About Contract Law"

At Concurring Opinions Miriam Cherry offers a critique of Australia that is unlikely to boost its disappointing box office:

A few days ago, in a fit of holiday and pre-exam frivolity, I went to see Australia, the latest Baz Luhrmann – Nicole Kidman collaboration. It’s quite different from Moulin Rouge (no singing to speak of), yet it’s still a similar kind of oddball high-kinetic vision, and a lot of fun. The one flaw of the movie (okay, other than the fact that it lacks Ewan McGregor) is that it tries to weave too many strands together – a sense of the beauty of the outback, cattle ranching, business competition, racism, aboriginal rights, WWII, mysticism, a love story. Too much for one movie.

Aside from all these themes, I perceived that Baz Luhrmann wanted ... to make a movie about contract law. When Lady Sarah (Kidman) arrives in Australia, the dominating cattle baron, King Carney, offers her a lowball price for her cattle ranch. If she can succeed in driving her cattle to the port of Darwin, she will win the contract for supply of the army, thereby undercutting Carney’s monopoly. The climax of the first part of the movie (the first movie?) involves whether the army officer will sign Carney’s proffered contract before Lady Sarah rides into town with the cattle.

Unfortunately, the army officer does sign the contract before Lady Sarah arrives. But then the officer tells Lady Sarah that the contract is only binding upon delivery of the cattle to the ship. A race then ensues to load the cattle first. Who knew that the UCC could be so much fun?

So, there you have it. The epic of Australia is really a movie about contract law.

Read it here. 

Some interesting top ten lists

Over the past few days I've come across a few different top ten lists.  The first was Oddee's list of ten of the geekiest graffiti.  This was my favourite:

Next was Politico's list of the top ten political films of 2008, culminating with these two:

2 “Recount.” Helmed by Jay Roach (“Meet the Fockers” and the Austin Powers trilogy) and written by Danny Strong, this made-for-HBO film about the hotly contested 2000 presidential election hardly shows candidates George W. Bush or Al Gore, instead focusing on the backstage drama that took place in Florida between their surrogates. In this fictionalized replay of actual events, Laura Dern and Denis Leary steal the show, adding some zany comic levity with their portrayals of Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Democratic strategist Michael Whouley, while Kevin Spacey, as Ron Klain — then Gore’s attorney and now Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s chief of staff appointee — and Tom Wilkinson, as Bush’s proxy James Baker, give the story more gravitas.

1 “Milk.” Anchored by a near-perfect performance from Sean Penn, this biopic of the first openly gay American elected official focuses heavily on the political process that Harvey Milk saw as the gateway for social change. Director Gus Van Sant recently told Interview magazine about his first reaction to the script: “The personal parts of the story were always kind of filtered through the politics, which I’d never seen done before, really.” Van Sant needn’t have worried that the characters talk only about politics — Milk’s life was politics, and the film’s depiction of the struggle against 1978’s Proposition 6, regarding gay public school teachers, bears striking similarities to the ongoing battle over 2008’s anti-same-sex-marriage initiative, Proposition 8.

Read more here.

And the last list is Campaign's list of the top internet viral campaigns of 2008.  These are my favourites:

2 SFW XXX Party Invitation

To celebrate Diesel's 30th anniversary, The Viral Factory decided porn was the only way to party with a bang. After collating clips of 80s porn, it animated the rude bits and added toned down sound effects to avoid any potentially inappropriate scenes and make it SFW XXX (an acronym for "safe for work"). So far, 6,497,507 have clicked, with an average of 116,387 hits per day.

6 Budweiser's ‘Swear Jar'

It was banned on TV because of the implied bad language, but Budweiser's ‘Swear Jar' has been a hit online with over 3.3 million views on YouTube. Part of Budweiser's online viral effort at Bud.TV, it shows characters in an office, swearing their way to make enough money for a case of Bud in boardroom meetings, announcements, and by the photocopier.

Read more here (from Brand Republic).

Inspirational movie speeches

Forty inspirational movie speeches in two minutes:

Tech Wired Australia podcast

This afternoon I was interviewed by Ben Grubb from Tech Wired Australia on the iiNet copyright lawsuit.  You can listen to or download the podcast here.

Prop 8 - The Musical

Although I'd normally post a video like this on my tumblelog Freedom to Dither, I thought it deserved a more prominent post:

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Weatherall on the iiNet copyright lawsuit

In between papers yesterday at the Media, Communications and Public Speech Conference I posted a link to a news report about the iiNet copyright lawsuit (see here).  Although I haven't had time to look into or think about the case any further, Kim Weatherall has obtained a copy of the statement of claim and posted her initial thoughts:

As I noted yesterday, a legal action has been launched by some 34 applicants from the television and movie industry against Australian ISP iiNet, alleging that iiNet has authorised copyright infringement by failing to take (adequate) steps to prevent sharing and downloading of films and TV shows via protocols like BitTorrent. A kind little birdie has sent me a copy of the Statement of Claim, so I have a bit more info. It makes for some interesting reading.

There are a number of interesting questions at the heart of this potential case:

1. What, exactly, are ISPs required to do when they become aware that users are potentially infringing copyright? Do they have to terminate people alleged by the movie industry to be ‘repeat infringers’?
2. How much responsibility will Australian courts put on intermediaries for ‘doing something’ about copyright infringement? So far, Australian courts have been pretty ready to impose liability on people they thought were ‘profiting from copyright wrongdoing’ - Kazaa with its P2P network, or Cooper with his ‘mp3sforfree’ website and his ISP host. What about others whose nefarious or infringing purpose is not so obvious? What, in other words, of more ‘ordinary’ service providers?
3. When the legislation requires that ISPs, in order to ‘gain absolution’ or immunity from damages, should ‘adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the accounts of repeat infringers’ - what does that really mean? Is it sufficient to terminate only those found liable for infringement? Is the court allowed to determine whether the policy is real or sufficient?

Politically, there are some equally interesting questions. Will the Internet industry respond to the lawsuit by looking for a settlement deal that goes some way towards creating the kind of ‘notice and terminate’ system that copyright owners have been pressing for? Will the government’s past approach of protecting ISPs from liability in order to further the digital economy hold? Or, has the tide turned: are we now in a climate where the courts, like the government, decide to hold ISPs to a higher standard, just as the government is trying to get ISPs to engage more actively in filtering adult content? And is this all just an attempt to promote a certain filter that purports to filter both porn and copyright infringement…?

Read the rest of her initial first impressions here.

iiNet sued for copyright infringement

This news report was drawn to my attention during a break today at the Media, Communications and Public Speech Conference:

The Australian film and television industry has launched a major legal action against one of Australia's largest internet service providers for allegedly allowing its users to download pirated movies and TV shows.

The action against iiNet was filed in the Federal Court today by Village Roadshow, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 20th Century Fox, Disney and the Seven Network.

Mark White, iiNet's chief operating officer, said the company did not support piracy in any form but it could not disconnect customers just because the movie industry claimed they engaged in illegal downloading.

Adrianne Pecotic, executive director of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT), said the action followed a five-month investigation by the industry.

...

The action follows months of wrangling between the movie and music industries and ISPs over the lengths to which internet providers need to go to prevent illegal file sharing on their networks. The industry wants ISPs to agree to cut off services for those who repeatedly infringe copyright.

However, internet providers have argued that the courts already provide adequate remedies for copyright holders and they should not be forced to police their users.

"This is a very important test case for the internet industry in Australia," said Peter Coroneos, chief executive of the Internet Industry Association.

"It will test the effect of the safe harbour provisions that were introduced with the US free trade agreement, which provides immunity for ISPs in certain circumstances such as transmission, hosting, caching and referencing activities."

Coroneos said the IIA board will shortly convene to develop a response on the legal action against iiNet.

But while the movie industry has now stepped up its aggression, the music industry has yet to take legal action against any internet providers over the issue.

Read more here (from the Sydney Morning Herald).

UNSW thinking about stopping free wi-fi ... what is this really about?

The Fairfax papers have a story today about the University of New South Wales considering stopping its free wi-fi internet for students because so many students are using it to download illegal files:

The University of NSW has threatened to axe its free wireless internet service because students are bringing in their laptops and using them to download pirated music, movies and games.

The university's director of IT, Michael Kirby-Lewis, said complaints about illegal downloading by students had risen from one or two a month to "a number a day", putting UNSW and students at risk of litigation for copyright infringement.

UNSW has been issuing fines of up to $1000 to students who use its free wireless network for illegal downloading. Money generated by the fines is donated to fund student facilities around campus.

Sabiene Heindl, general manager of the music industry's anti-piracy arm, Music Industry Piracy Investigations, said research by the Australian Recording Industry Association had found one in three under 24-year-olds downloaded music illegally.

She pointed to recent research by German online traffic management company iPoque that found 57 per cent of all Australian internet traffic was generated by peer-to-peer networks, which contain mainly pirated content.

Heindl welcomed the decision by UNSW to educate students about the risks of illegal downloading but denied the music industry had threatened the university with legal action.

On Friday afternoon, Kirby-Lewis sent a note to all students warning that the viability of the university's free wireless network had been "placed under threat" due to incidents of illegal downloading.

Students caught engaging in the practice would have their wireless access blocked for the remainder of the session and be subject to formal disciplinary action including fines of up to $1000.

Read more here (from The Age).  To be honest I can't blame the UNSW for thinking about taking this action - not only is the university potentially leaving itself open to litigation against it, but the numbers of people using the network in this way would be placing a strain on the network itself.  However, at its core this is merely a sympton of a much bigger challenge facing the entertainment industries. 

Despite extensive advertising campaigns and some high profile lawsuits in the US, young Australians continue to believe that it is acceptable to download music, movies and TV shows unlawfully rather than pay for them or wait for them to be released or broadcast in Australia.  Indeed, I am suprised that ARIA has found that only one in three under 24-year-olds downloaded music illegally.  Based upon my discussions with students (and law students at that, including students who are stuyding copyright law), I would have thought that figure would be much higher.  It seems to me that the entertainment industries are facing a losing battle and that they need to introduce new business models that embrace the reality that the future of entertainment is online.  iTunes, YouTube and Hulu are all steps in the right direction, except for one fatal flaw - they continue to insist on imposing national boundaries on the internet.  Not only are the various geo-identification techniques they use to impose these artificial national boundaries on the internet flawed, they fail to apreciate that the future of entertainment is not only online, it is also international.  The entertainment industries are not only losing this battle, they are losing the war - they need to move forward and embrace the future of digital entertainment.

And you thought I was obsessed with reality TV

Two psychiatrists from Montreal claim there is a recognisable psychiatric illness known as The Truman Show Delusion:

Joel and Ian Gold, brothers and psychiatrists from Montreal, believe they have discovered a signature mental illness of the YouTube era: patients who claim they are subjects of their own reality TV shows.

They have named the malady the "Truman Show Delusion," and though they are in the process of putting together a medical paper on the topic, their discovery is already causing a stir.

While traditionalists insist that this delusion offers nothing new -- it is no different from, say, a deranged man who believes that the CIA has planted a microchip in his tooth -- the Gold brothers argue otherwise.

"It's really a question of the extent of the delusion," said Joel Gold, 39, who has been on staff at New York's Bellevue Hospital Center for eight years. "The delusions we typically treat are narrow: There is Capgras Delusion, where someone will think his family has been replaced by doubles. Or the Fregoli Delusion, where someone believes that one person is persecuting him: a doctor, mailman, butcher. The Truman Show Delusion, though, involves the entire world."

He also says that The Truman Show had an impact on patients that other films did not, no matter how powerful they were. "I never heard people say, ' The Godfather, that's my life.' "

While Dr. Gold says they could have easily called their new disorder the EDtv Delusion or the Matrix Delusion -- both films that refer to an unreal existence-- three of the five patients he treated at the storied mental health hospital directly likened their plight to The Truman Show, the 1998 film about Truman Burbank, an affable suburbanite who slowly becomes aware that his every movement is broadcast 24/7 to voyeuristic viewers around the world.

Read more here (from canada.com).  (Hat tip: The Volokh Conspiracy.)  And for the record, I have a movie poster mounted in my office at work of The Truman Show ...

Marketing movies on Facebook

ClickZ looks at how Indiana Jones has been promoted on Facebook:

Paramount Pictures is expected to have a monster hit this Memorial Day Weekend with "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." Regardless of how the film does in theaters, the studio has scored big on Facebook.

Not with the movie, necessarily, but with a virtual Fedora. Starting Wednesday morning, Paramount offered Facebook users a chance to send their friends a small digital version of Indy's iconic brown hat as a "virtual gift." While some gifts require a $1 fee, the Fedora was offered as a free sponsored gift from the studio.

The Fedoras became available at 4:30am on Wednesday morning, the day before the movie hit theaters. By 3pm, all 250,000 had sold out.

Matt Hicks, a spokesman with Facebook, said that the company couldn't confirm whether it was the fastest a virtual gift had gone, but said it was "definitely among the fastest we've ever seen," especially considering that "people weren't really awake for the first few hours it was available."

Hicks said it was standard practice for advertisers to set an inventory limit on virtual gifts in order to drive demand.

The Fedora was only one part of a larger marketing campaign on the social network, however. Each gift provided a link to the movie's Facebook page, where fans could find local showings, read other users' reviews, post messages, download widgets and other applications, and view stills from the film's production.

The page also included a space for users to upload videos and photos of their own, including an instructional video on "How to Crack a Whip Like Indy" and the infamous Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair photos of Miley Cryus with a brown Fedora superimposed on her head.

Paramount also ran a series of display ads on Facebook pointing users to the page. As of Thursday afternoon, the page had more than 62,000 fans.

The movie itself, however, seemed to have fewer fans than the page. Paramount established a dedicated section of the page for reviews of the movie, which opened on Thursday, the majority of which were less then flattering. One user called it a "flipping mess," while another called it an "atrocity."

"That's the price you pay for being open," said Ian Schafer, CEO of marketing firm Deep Focus, who has run a number of ad campaigns on Facebook. "That's what you have to do when you advertise in this sort of community." If Paramount had not given users a place to review the movie, Facebook members "would be lambasting them for that," said Schafer. "You're kind of damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

Read more here.

It's just a flesh wound!

An inspired use of Monty Python's Holy Grail to highlight Hillary Clinton's struggling campaign:

Stephen Spielberg presents: John King

Close Encounters of the magic wall kind:

(Hat tip: Blawg Review editor.)

Sad Kermit

A very sad Kermit re-enacts the suicide attempt scene from the Royal Tennenbaums:

See more funny videos at CollegeHumor

Google Me

CNET News.com reports on an unusual new film:

You know you've done it. Like just almost anyone who knows how to use a computer, I'm willing to bet you've googled your own name to see what's out there about you, and to see who else has the same name.

In the case of a sometimes actor from Los Angeles named Jim Killeen, that search instinct not only led to at least 24 namesakes, but also to a documentary about his experiences tracking some of them down and visiting them around the world.

Killeen's film, Google Me, which he is debuting on Friday on YouTube, is an exploration of identity, modern technology, the human soul and, among other things, chili.

Along the way, Killeen tracked down six fellow Jim Killeens: a priest from Cobh, Ireland; a traffic engineer from Edinburgh, Scotland; a CEO from Melbourne, Australia; a "sexual swinger" from Denver; a retired police detective from New York City; and a father of eight from St. Louis.

The goal? To find out who Jim Killeen is, in all his shapes and sizes, and to try to pin down what, exactly, is in a name.

Read more here.

The Truth According to Wikipedia

TechCrunch reports that Dutch filmmaker IJsbrand van Veelen stirred a lot of controversy last week at the Next Web conference when he premiered his documentary The Truth About Wikipedia.  Read more here.  The documentary is now available to watch on YouTube:

GW Law Revue presents Abuse of Expression

There are nine entertaining videos from the George Washington Law School Law Revue - Abuse of Expression - available on YouTube here:

Finding talent on MySpace

Wired has a very interesting piece on how Hollywood is beginning to use social networking sites to find fresh talent, using Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park as a case study:

He's worked with Matt Damon, Sean Penn, Nicole Kidman and Keanu Reeves, but director Gus Van Sant had no interest in casting movie stars for his skateboard drama Paranoid Park. He wanted real kids. So in July 2006, Van Sant created a MySpace page for Paranoid Park and posted a casting call for "skaters, honor roll [students], cheerleaders, punks, drama kids, musicians, artists, student council [members], athletes, award winners, class skippers, photographers, band members, leaders, followers, shy kids, class clowns."

"We were just trying to figure out the best way to get the word out to nonprofessional people to cast in the film," Van Sant says. "Now that MySpace is so prevalent, I think this is how all casting agencies should go about casting high schoolers."

It worked. A whopping 2,971 Portland-area teenagers turned up for cattle-call auditions. Among them: the film's star, Gabe Nevins.

Van Sant is one of an increasing number of movie makers to use the internet as a casting tool.

...

"I actually never thought about being an actor, but just thought it would be fun to go mess around downtown," says Nevins, now 16. "I was an average skateboarding teen before the movie and very innocent about the film industry, let alone acting. This made me relate to my character a lot because my character was an average skater like myself."

Has the movie influenced his ideas about a future career? "I don't have an agent yet but don't know if I want one," Nevins says. "I'm still an average kid in high school."

Net-casting fresh faces for Paranoid Park made sense because Van Sant, Oscar-nominated for Good Will Hunting puts a premium on authenticity. The film's casting director Lana Veenker explains, "Gus wanted to find a real skateboarder who hadn't been 'spoiled,' because a lot of times the only thing kids learn in high school or junior high drama departments is how to mug and it looks fake."

Trained actors with agents and head shots remain the rule rather than the exception in Hollywood, but when it comes to finding quirky unknowns, Casting Society of America board member Laura Adler says internet searches are fast becoming a go-to tool among her colleagues.

Read more here.  And here is the trailer for Paranoid Park:

Bad movie titles

Jack Lechner explains why Quantum of Solace - the title of the next Bond movie - is a bad movie title:

It’s official: The next James Bond film will be called Quantum of Solace. This announcement has already caused much head-scratching throughout the world – or at least the part of the world that cares about James Bond, which is a significant fraction of same. Apparently, Quantum of Solace is the title of a short story by Bond creator Ian Fleming, and after 21 movies, the Bond producers have used every other Fleming title except for his non-fiction books Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers. Either of which, by the way, would be a better title for a James Bond movie than Quantum of Solace.

I used to work for the director Alan Parker, who once told me that “A good title is the title of a successful movie.” His point was that if the movie works, it carries the title along with it. Of course, he made this point while explaining why he wouldn’t change the title of his film Come See The Paradise, despite the fact that it had only a vague connection to the story. Did the title keep the movie from connecting with its audience? Sir Alan may still disagree, but I think it did.

What makes a title bad?  It’s usually one of these factors:

1) It’s incomprehensible until you see the movie – but not intriguing enough to make you want to see it ...

2) It sends a misleading signal about tone or content ...

3) It's just boring ...

4)  It’s Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever ...

Read more here.

Where's Waldo?

College Humor presents The Waldo Ultimatum: