Random notes and reviews
1. Further on the meat thermometer injury: when told about it the next morning, my 5-year-old son asked, “were you hot?” thus making the same joke his father had right after I stabbed myself. Nice to know the bloodline is running true, I guess.
2. Who else is watching Tower Prep? After last night’s episode, enjoyment has graduated into love. Former XF staff = cool visuals (though evident risk of incoherence in mythology already pending); I was genuinely creeped out. Also, gotta respect a show that’s willing to base an episode on the Odyssey.
3. I am, right now, incredibly infatuated with M.I.A.’s XXXO. It’s something about the surprise of going from “you want me” to the turnaround of “you want me [to] be somebody who I’m really not,” delivered in a way more aggressive than sad about that. I even like the director reference-“I could be the actress, you’d be Tarantino”-because even though the “actress” is generic, it’s pretty much the opposite of, say, a Hitchcock reference, given what Tarantino’s leading ladies are like.
4. The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense: I loved it!
5. Make a vid, if you want, for Akon’s No Labels theme song: I am not a supporter of the organization, but I can’t help wanting to see what a vidder would do anyway.
Appropriation, ed. David Evans: A compilation of excerpts of documents from the early 20th century onwards dealing with various types of appropriation art. Barbara Kruger’s uncompromising interview was the standout, where she smacks down the interviewer: “[Interviewer]: The subject matter of your present material appears to signal a shift from the focus on feminist discourse to one on the market. Kruger: You mean that even though my work continues to foreground issues of power, gender and reception, when I include the positionings of the market, it removes my practice from the concerts of a feminist discourse? Is your question another assertion of the need to categorize or does it also suggest that you think that feminism exists outside the discourses of capital, as a kind of primordial meandering which escapes all economies except those of birth and rhythm?”
Richard Stim, Getting Permission: How to License & Clear Copyrighted Materials Online & Off: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. I have some pretty detailed nits to pick with this book-most of them down to insufficient updating so that cases that were reversed are listed as good law-but I should emphasize that when it comes to books like this, I’m Mikey: I don’t like anything! That said, I thought this was a good practical overview, with a lot of useful forms, and introduced the concepts with a really pragmatic focus on risk management rather than the “always get permission” nonsense that no one who wants to get anything done ever does. In fact, I’d say that an “always get permission” ideology gets you in more trouble overall because when it is, inevitably, ignored, the people doing the ignoring often don’t know how to identify the real risks. Unfortunately, the book slips later into “it’s better just to get permission,” but I’d still recommend it for someone who needs to deal with disseminating material, whether informational or advertising, on behalf of an organization or business and doesn’t have a copyright background.
The trademark section and the discussion of linking are where the discussion tilts too heavily towards asking permission or just not mentioning the TM/not linking, especially with the latter. Stim recommends entering into “linking agreements” to avoid uncertainty, which is a rare triumph of legalism over common sense in the book. If you’re an Amazon Seller, follow Amazon’s policies with respect to linking, but taking that as a general rule for all types of online activity is just … odd.
On the law: Stim appears to endorse music publishers’ claim they’re entitled to double-dip on reproduction and performance rights from internet streaming and downloading, without mentioning that both the Copyright Office and all the judges to have considered the publishers’ argument have rejected it. There’s a weird failure to update some cases-the printing is current enough to include the Harry Potter Lexicon case and the Salinger/60 Years Later district court opinion, but it discusses the district court opinion in Perfect 10 v. Google (reversed 2007) and the district court opinion in Hoffman v. Capital Cities (reversed 2001) as stating the respective outcomes. Stim wrongly says that the FCC bars product placement in made-for-TV-programming. He also says that one needs to negotiate for public performance rights to incorporate music into merchandise (e.g., a card that plays a tune on a MIDI chip), which seems as incorrect to me as saying that one must negotiate for public performance rights to produce music embodied in a CD. That all said, the book still strikes me as an immensely useful resource for the nonexpert who will be making small but commercial uses of existing works.
George R.R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging: It’s been a while since I simply could not finish a book, and to have it be Martin was distressing. This is a compilation of sf stories from 1978-1985 about Haviland Tuf, an adventurer who ends up in control of a powerful seedship, whose ecological treasures make it prized and feared. Unfortunately, Tuf is smug, unpleasant, and prone to whining about how mean people are to him, and his antagonists are generally only better because they aren’t Tuf, though of course they’re always too selfish and dumb to beat him. There are hints of the complex situations and characters Martin later wrote, but overall: blech.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
2. Who else is watching Tower Prep? After last night’s episode, enjoyment has graduated into love. Former XF staff = cool visuals (though evident risk of incoherence in mythology already pending); I was genuinely creeped out. Also, gotta respect a show that’s willing to base an episode on the Odyssey.
3. I am, right now, incredibly infatuated with M.I.A.’s XXXO. It’s something about the surprise of going from “you want me” to the turnaround of “you want me [to] be somebody who I’m really not,” delivered in a way more aggressive than sad about that. I even like the director reference-“I could be the actress, you’d be Tarantino”-because even though the “actress” is generic, it’s pretty much the opposite of, say, a Hitchcock reference, given what Tarantino’s leading ladies are like.
4. The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense: I loved it!
5. Make a vid, if you want, for Akon’s No Labels theme song: I am not a supporter of the organization, but I can’t help wanting to see what a vidder would do anyway.
Appropriation, ed. David Evans: A compilation of excerpts of documents from the early 20th century onwards dealing with various types of appropriation art. Barbara Kruger’s uncompromising interview was the standout, where she smacks down the interviewer: “[Interviewer]: The subject matter of your present material appears to signal a shift from the focus on feminist discourse to one on the market. Kruger: You mean that even though my work continues to foreground issues of power, gender and reception, when I include the positionings of the market, it removes my practice from the concerts of a feminist discourse? Is your question another assertion of the need to categorize or does it also suggest that you think that feminism exists outside the discourses of capital, as a kind of primordial meandering which escapes all economies except those of birth and rhythm?”
Richard Stim, Getting Permission: How to License & Clear Copyrighted Materials Online & Off: Free LibraryThing Early Reviewer book. I have some pretty detailed nits to pick with this book-most of them down to insufficient updating so that cases that were reversed are listed as good law-but I should emphasize that when it comes to books like this, I’m Mikey: I don’t like anything! That said, I thought this was a good practical overview, with a lot of useful forms, and introduced the concepts with a really pragmatic focus on risk management rather than the “always get permission” nonsense that no one who wants to get anything done ever does. In fact, I’d say that an “always get permission” ideology gets you in more trouble overall because when it is, inevitably, ignored, the people doing the ignoring often don’t know how to identify the real risks. Unfortunately, the book slips later into “it’s better just to get permission,” but I’d still recommend it for someone who needs to deal with disseminating material, whether informational or advertising, on behalf of an organization or business and doesn’t have a copyright background.
The trademark section and the discussion of linking are where the discussion tilts too heavily towards asking permission or just not mentioning the TM/not linking, especially with the latter. Stim recommends entering into “linking agreements” to avoid uncertainty, which is a rare triumph of legalism over common sense in the book. If you’re an Amazon Seller, follow Amazon’s policies with respect to linking, but taking that as a general rule for all types of online activity is just … odd.
On the law: Stim appears to endorse music publishers’ claim they’re entitled to double-dip on reproduction and performance rights from internet streaming and downloading, without mentioning that both the Copyright Office and all the judges to have considered the publishers’ argument have rejected it. There’s a weird failure to update some cases-the printing is current enough to include the Harry Potter Lexicon case and the Salinger/60 Years Later district court opinion, but it discusses the district court opinion in Perfect 10 v. Google (reversed 2007) and the district court opinion in Hoffman v. Capital Cities (reversed 2001) as stating the respective outcomes. Stim wrongly says that the FCC bars product placement in made-for-TV-programming. He also says that one needs to negotiate for public performance rights to incorporate music into merchandise (e.g., a card that plays a tune on a MIDI chip), which seems as incorrect to me as saying that one must negotiate for public performance rights to produce music embodied in a CD. That all said, the book still strikes me as an immensely useful resource for the nonexpert who will be making small but commercial uses of existing works.
George R.R. Martin, Tuf Voyaging: It’s been a while since I simply could not finish a book, and to have it be Martin was distressing. This is a compilation of sf stories from 1978-1985 about Haviland Tuf, an adventurer who ends up in control of a powerful seedship, whose ecological treasures make it prized and feared. Unfortunately, Tuf is smug, unpleasant, and prone to whining about how mean people are to him, and his antagonists are generally only better because they aren’t Tuf, though of course they’re always too selfish and dumb to beat him. There are hints of the complex situations and characters Martin later wrote, but overall: blech.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.