explodedlibrary.info

movie promotional blogging templates + digression on illegal art

I remember the controversy when film studios and other intellectual property owners forced numerous fan sites off the web. I'm thinking particularly about Star Trek and Harry Potter - which was a particularly mean-spirited example, seeing that most of the fansites were created by children and were about the books, not the film version.

So it's now very interesting to see that Sony is providing free templates to bloggers that promote Spiderman 2. These promotional templates are available for Blogger and LiveJournal. There are also RSS feeds on the movie's website.

In addition, LiveJournal users can download animated icons with characters from the movie.

I wonder if this is a new trend and an advance in the mainstreaming of blogging, or if it's just a quirky marketing idea which is just a dead end. A number of LiveJournal users already have icons which promote particular movie & TV characters, singers and other personalities. Of course, all of those icons are unauthorized. So is this one Hollywood studio thinking, "if you can't beat them, join them" and attempting to get some good-will from bloggers as well as free advertising? It's also a sign that the business side of big media is starting to notice the blog medium. One implication of this is that they will try to work with us and use us - and maybe there is some chance of a win-win situation here. But does this mean that bloggers will need to be more careful about recycling intellectual property? For example, I can imagine that some bloggers might download these Spiderman templates and alter them in a way which subverts their marketing purpose. What would Sony do then? Would it follow Starbuck's example in suppressing the Corporate Whore parody?

Incidentally it is a lot more difficult to find the Corporate Whore logo than it used to be. Go to the Illegal Art website, take a glance at the hilarious click-through agreement, and go into the Visual section. Salon also wrote an article about illegal art, which is well worth a read.

open source legal research

I was going to write about the recent Salon article about Groklaw and open source legal research on the SCO case, but Copyfight's Jason Schultz has already written about it, so I'm just going to link to that and post a brief excerpt from the Salon article.

[Pamela] Jones [of Groklaw] has been praised by just about everyone in the open-source world for her efforts to undermine SCO. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that Groklaw shows "how the open-source ideals end up working in the legal arena, too, and I think that has been very useful and made a few people sit up and notice." Bruce Perens calls Jones "paralegal to the world." Clay Shirky, the influential tech pundit, points out that "Groklaw may also be affecting the case in the courts, by helping IBM with a distributed discovery effort that they, IBM, could never accomplish on their own, no matter how many lawyers they throw at it." [hypertext from original not included]

NYT on electronic literature

From "Call me e-mail: the novel unfolds digitally", Adam Baer, New York Times (April 15, 2004)

"My younger employees say they don't have time to read books and instead focus on e-mail and Web writing," he [Eric Brown, creator of DEN] said. "There's this huge group of readers in our office - a communications company! - and they're reading snips and pieces.
...
A small community of so-called hypertext writers, many of them affiliated with academia, have been publishing more experimental work in online journals like The Iowa Review Web (www.uiowa.edu/~iareview) and BeeHive (beehive.temporalimage.com) for more than a decade. Such writing includes texts with animation and works created by using rules and random processes to generate something different for each reader.
...
What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. "Think of the textual analogue to video games," he said. "You can't really capture the way a video game works by printing it out; that's what will have to happen with electronic literature for it to become popular."

P.S. Now that the New York Times is making it very difficult to view older articles for free, I will be a lot more sparing in my links to them, and will only provide them with some excerpt.

please sign this petition against the IP provisions of the Australia-US free trade agreement

Kim Weatherall has written about how the FTA will affect Australia's intellectual property laws. To summarize, if Australia signs onto this, we're going to be stuck with - copyright term extension a la Sonny Bono & Mickey Mouse, strengthening our anti-circumvention laws, weakening exemptions including ones granted to libraries, and the creation of some sort of ISP take-down rule.

It is a horrifying prospect to be saddled with the worst of US intellectual property law. But the most pathetic thing is the way that it's been imposed on Australia. The DMCA is an awful law for the US, but at least it was a genuine product of the American legislative process. At least it went through the various committees and was debated, and voted on as to whether that particular law was good for the country or not. It is pathetic that Australia is poised to rubber stamp elements of this law at the behest of another country.

These are significant changes to our intellectual property laws. Whether you support them or oppose them, these changes should be fully debated by the Australian people.

But there is not going to be a debate about the proposed changes to intellectual property laws in isolation. The negotiation is finished and now the only choices are to ratify or reject the FTA. Now we have the situation where our government is forced to consider all of these disparate issues which have bundled together. How can one weigh the restrictions on Australian creativity and freedom that will be caused by these IP laws, against protecting Australia's Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme which gives us affordable medicines, against the livelihoods of Australian sugar cane farmers, against the benefits which we would gain from otherwise free trade with the US?

Enough ranting for now. The Age has reported that Australian open source advocates are sponsoring an online petition against the IP provisions of the FTA. Please sign it - especially if you are Australian or American (if you dislike US intellectual property laws and would hate to see them exported and imposed on other people).

fictional blogging

Jim McClennan, How to write a blog-buster, the Guardian (8 April 2004). I found this to be a very interesting article and am linking to it so I can read it again - and some of the fictional blogs mentioned.

This is something which I would like to do, but I'm still pondering a manageable and sustainable way to approach it. I did dabble with This is not me and New Dark Ages, which I've discontinued and taken off the web. It is more difficult to maintain a blog "in character", at least for me. I tend to be more self-conscious about my fiction writing, which makes it more difficult to create even 1-3 entries a week.

To succeed as a fictional blogger, I would need to appreciate that it is a fundamentally different and paradoxical form of writing. It is part improvization. It needs to be good, spontaneous and most importantly, not belaboured or over-edited. I believe strongly that fictional blogs should not be revised in any significant way after they have been written. It will have flaws which fixed writing would never countenance, but this is what makes them real and engaging. Although it possible to publish a novel, short story or poem on blogging software, this would only be an innovation in the means of publication, not an innovation which took advantage of any characteristics of the blog medium.

I certainly would like to try this again. I'm mulling over aspects of characters, setting (as a real blogger, this is something I don't need to invent) and plot - and how to change these artificial ingredients into something that's real.

technology meanderings

The good news is that I have a dsl connection at home. This is will make it a lot easier for me to work on this blog – and keep up with other blogs. Tying up the phone line has been a bit of an issue and impediment lately, and now I won’t need to worry about that. The bad news is that this is broadband connection is on an IBM (literally), not my iBook. Later on, I should be able to get the iBook on the dsl connection, but for the time being, I am content to use the web on this IBM.

This means that I’ll be taking a break from Net NewsWire as my news reader and will be giving Bloglines a shot. It was very easy to get started – just importing my OPML file (exported from Net News Wire). So far I’m impressed and I’m only just beginning to explore it. If you're curious, you can see the feeds which I'm reading.

Now I need a spam filter for my email. I had been using SpamSieve on my Mac, which had been working very nicely with Entourage. Well, I’ll worry about that another day.

I’ve been trying to break into the iTune Music Store – no, not to steal anything. I just want to be able to waste my money on them from Australia. The key is an US address and credit card. I still have an American credit card, but it’s now associated with an Australian address and so won’t work for iTunes. Amazon is more than happy to mail me an audio CD over the Pacific so that I can rip it into mp3 format, so why is it such a controversial thing for a non-American to buy DRM-protected music from the iTunes Music Store? I’ve just tried the BigPond downloading service. As much as I like to support things Australian, its interface doesn’t hold a candle to iTunes. Its collection has a few more Australian artists, which is welcome, but overall it doesn't compare with iTMS. BigPond only supports WMA. I guess I’ll be able to burn a playlist to a CD and then rip them into iTunes. I'll lose some sound quality, but I’m not an audiophile.