We live more of our lives online, and governments and corporations increasingly peak at our private data, so encryption ought to be the order of the day.
But giving Google the keys? #samesame
No stretch at all. I think pretty much anyone who has worked in the film business is aware of this.
When one party to the contract is an established gorilla, pretty much the only negiotiation open to a starting out film-maker (or actor/writer/musician) is to sign or not to sign. It isn't a question of foolishness, but an imbalance of power. And although digital technology has dramatically improved indie options, getting indie films released theatrically remains extremely difficult.
Your contention that hollywood budgets are not absurdly inflated is unsupported by logic. The technology costs a fraction of what it used to cost. (Do they even make film prints any more?) Even you acknowledge there is rarely a net, which means that, in reality, royalties are rarely paid. Real costs have gone down (not a little, a *lot*) yet movies cost more.
Every time you go see one of these movies you're vindicating Hollywood. (Every time you pay full price to go see a "re-boot" of a superhero story, you're telling them that they don't have to support new ideas, and that owning the IP forever is a good thing).
Wait for the rep theatre or DVD release [not blu-ray]. Funny thing; I've not seen a first run movie in a theatre since they butchered The Spirit. There are a wealth of good movies no one has heard of (because they were made by indies, and the studios/distributors chose not to push them) in the remainder bins in local supermarkets. At least in Canada.
"Budget has never had anything to do with quality"
Characterizing an opinion you disagree with as "churlish" doesn't refute the argument. You can argue against it until you are blue in the face, but what you believe the law is/should be does not make it so.
Because the "Remus Shepherd" comment is anonymous, it could have been made by anyone for any reason, so there is no way to assess the validity of the assertions made. On the face of it, there is a dischordancy about the comment as it eEquate outing a victim with outing a perpetrator. It is odd in that it seems to argue to sacrifice the privacy of victims to protect the privacy of perpetrators, which in fact enables victimization to continue in the secrecy.
Whether this comment is real or a fabrication to illustrate a point, an anonymous story of unproven veracity does not outweigh the verified evidence of 15 year old Amanda Todd, whose victimization included this very type of assault, and which ultimately led to her suicide.
[And so here is the response from my blog]
The creative use of quotation marks fails to make the analogy. There is a difference between identifying someone with different beliefs and identifying a perpetrator. Behaviour that assaults another human being's privacy is not merely behaviour, it is assault.
You seem to have a predisposition to rely on the law as the way to get it right, yet last I heard, there were innumerable laws against homosexuality, as well as legal ways to protect attacks on homosexuality on the law books around the world. "The Law" has been the instrument of suppressing homosexuality much more often than it has been its saviour.
Governments like ours are scrambling to make laws that will make incursion into Canadian privacy the rule. Although you may wish online anonymity was protected anywhere, it is not. Even if protection of anonymity was in fact covered by law, as in most things, comission of a crime would allow law enforcement the ability to breach that anonymity via search warrants. Assault is always wrong, although the law does not always reflect this. Law allowed people to assault their spouse, or their children until recently. Law used to allow students to be assaulted by their teachers, slaves to be assaulted by their "masters" or employers to assault their employees, but although these assaults were allowed legally, they were not right.
I did not look at the photographs either, but you are assuming the photographs were taken in public. Yet we know from the article that photographs taken in a classroom were included. This is not a public place. There are many places that we see as "public places" that in fact are not. Places like theatres, and malls, or concert halls. But even in these private-public places, private individuals are still afforded an expectation of privacy unless we waive it. Concert tickets routinely include fine print which states that the patron waives this right as part of the cost of admission to the venue.
Private individuals have the right not to be photographed and such photographs published without their consent. Although I haven't seen these images either, it's a pretty good bet that none of them feature a cast of thousands. What is identifiable? Maybe you can't identify someone by their body parts, but there is every possibility they can. Amanda Todd certainly identified her own breasts when her assailant posted the photograph of her breasts on Facebook.
Your argument is willing to sacrifice the privacy of victims to protect the privacy of perpetrators. That is not socially responsible, nor can it ever create social justice.
You say you aren't "defending Reddit?s actions" but "explaining why they qualify as free speech" — but the problem is that under law, they don't qualify as free speech. Reddit is not "public" and so has no legal obligation to protect free speech under law. If the government stepped in to censor, *then* it would become a free speech issue.
Even if what was done on Reddit could be legally considered protected free speech, the fact that it is assault would supercede any free speech protection in the name of the public good. Free speech is not what you think it is, it is what the law says it is. That's how law works.
Free speech is *only* legally protected from government censorship. Individuals and corporations are legally allowed to censor speech in their own premises, forums, workplaces, homes, or anywhere else.
But what constitutes Free Speech?
The Crime
The written description of what was posted online:
"...surreptitiously shot photos of others, usually women, usually focused on sexually objectifying the subjects of the shot."
Twitter *is* a business. Regardless of the bonus goodwill generated by its past Free Speech posturing, Twitter exists to make money, not guarantee Free Speech.
The only way to ensure free speech online is to build distributed human networks; people need to stand up for free speech, because corporations won't. I blogged about this a while ago but rather than relying on Twitter, people could try Identi.ca and StatusNet
Full disclosure: I use Identi.ca and my "dents" flow into Twitter as tweets, but I'm not employed by, or have any financial interest in the company. I occasionally bug the founder about stuff I think he ought to improve, but mostly I just use their free/libre service.
I think that depends on whether or not you're trying to rule the world.
Um. They don't?
That's what governments do: they make up the rules, sometimes known as law.
What is at issue here seems to be jurisdiction. The MegaUpload prosecution is supposedly based on the fact that there were some US based webservers. But that's not true of young Richard O'Dwyer they are extraditing from England even thjough he didn't break UK law.
Your government is laying claim to ownership (and control) of the entire Internet. And our governments are letting it.
There's nothing wrong with being listed on IMDB if you work in film. You'll even find Nina Paley there!
Is USC really that bad these days? Anyone who thinks Nina Paley is talentless is simply not competant to judge.
This Taplin guy would seem to be a walking-talking anti-USC advertisement.
Or is he the PR shill there to ensure the dinosaur content industries will hire USC grads. If that's the case, USC would do well to teach its students that they are being trained to be employees these days (teach them important phrases like "yes, master")
Uh, no.
James Moore, Canada's own "Minister of Canadian Heritage" just turned 36, thinks he's tech savvy (because he knows how to buy Apple products) yet he's about to ram through the Canadian DMCA which will make it illegal to circumvent DRM for *any* reason, including (but not limited to):
As the parent of a U of T student O want to know where I can complain?
Having new "rights" doesn't help if you can't actually use them due to DRM... oh, sorry, in Canada's Bill C-11 we have "TPMs" -- which extend manufacturer controls beyond digital. This will make speciality screw drivers currently used to refurbish/recycle computers by non-profit computer recycling depots illegal
"The gatekeepers won't be successful in this effort until they can control software distribution all over the world and outlaw computers which can be modified by the user, and I just can't see this happening in a post-SOPA world, no matter how much the gatekeepers would like to believe that the SOPA backlash was a one-off event caused by "misinformation" and "undemocratic" processes. "
Erm. As per Grumpy, the new improved UEFI is coming, so Microsoft will be able to lock down all our general purpose computers...
Especially as our government is on the verge of passing copyright law that will make circumventing TPMs (aka digital locks or DRM) illegal, even if what you are doing is not otherwise illegal.
Say you want to watch the DVD you just bought on your linux box: no can do.
Or maybe read that Project Gutenberg public domain book. Or perhaps, installing linux on my general purpose computer... if the manufacturer doesn't grant me permission to replace their OS with free software, and if I go ahead and do it, I'd be breaking the law. Yeah, I can see Bill Gates giving me the go ahead...
The moment this law is passed (and since we have a majority government, nothing can stop it) I expect there won't be a device sold in our market that is not riddled with drm/tpm.
This power could very easily be translated into preventing us from accessing independent digital content.
Actually, it does debunk copyright's usefullness from a creator's point of view. Because I have lost something, the importance of which most non-creators will not be able to understand: the right to see the realization of my creative work.
Is piracy the answer?
I don't think so. I shouldn't *have* to pirate it.
If many people quietly pirate stuff, the law won't ever change. Every now and again they'll drop the jail on someone just to make an example ... to try and frighten everyone else.
Current copyright law is unreasonable for creators and culture.
Thanks for running this, Mike.
This series was made in Canada all those years ago. It's a different country, and the way things work here are not the same as they work there. Other companies I wrote for gave me videos; this one didn't, because it simply wasn't their policy.
This is simply one of the reasons why I've concluded that existing copyright law doesn't serve my interests.
Wrong. So long as the world in which we live constrains both creators and culture with copyright law, this is not remotely applicable.
Once we've abolished copyright, the Disney appropriation of her work without attribution could be considered a simple case of plagiarism.