I've just joined WWTID? as co-author with Gunther Sonnefeld, Len Kendall & Sasha Grujicic, & our new post on online piracy SOPA is up. Sasha will be posting a follow-up. Here's an excerpt and we'd love to hear your thoughts!
Excerpt:
What actually constitutes an illegal download or illegally shared material?
[Gunther]: An anti-piracy legislator or lobbyist will tell you that any action or material that doesn’t adhere to copyright law is illegal. Funny thing is, Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig has long maintained that copyright law hasn’t changed in the last 200 years. Considering that the Internet has grown by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years, we’re in a real pickle, because any good lawyer will tell you that digital copyright is largely unenforceable. Just look at the calamity the music and film industries continue to experience.
[Len]: I googled this exact question and examined the first 5 results to get more clarification on the subject. I was left far more confused than before. Some might argue that clear information about what actually constitutes as illegal downloading is available, but the act of downloading certain things simply hasn’t been something we’ve inherently known to be wrong. It’s not clearly breaking a commandment, or a deadly sin, or something that our parents taught us not to do. There are people who have made interpretations of relatively ancients laws to apply to new times but because such large portions of society don’t know or care about these rulings, adoption remains flimsy.
[Siobhan]: In addition, TorrentFreak has helpfully just released stats on the most pirated films, games, and tv shows of 2011. The numbers are quite indicative of our society’s feelings on the matter:
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2011-111230/
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-tv-shows-of-2011-111216/
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-movies-of-2011-111223/
The full post is here:
Research Papers & Articles:
- “Cautionary Tales in Transmedia Storytelling,” Wired Magazine, March 30, 2011
- “JWT Explores Transmedia,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 7, 2011
- “Reclaiming the Transmedia Storyteller,” Brian Clark, May 2, 2011 (need to login to Facebook)
- “Revenge of the Origami Unicorn” Part 1 and Part 2 , The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, December 2009
- “Transmedia: What Is it?“, PFSK, April 20, 2011
- “What the hell *is* Transmedia?” StevePeters.org, May 18, 2011
- “Why Transmedia is Catching On” Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, Nick DeMartino, July 2011
- “Your Mom is Transmedia,” 4DFiction, March 21, 2011
check out Veria's resource page for the all of the lists
This is an excerpt from Debbie Cook's email to Scientologists warning against the focus on fundraising within the organization to the detriment of other Hubbard dictums. Fascinating window into a very closed world:
"...LRH Command Structure: LRH left us with a complex and balanced command
structure, with our orgs led by the Office of ED International. This office
was considered so important that LRH created a special management group
called the Watch Dog Committee whose only purpose was to see that this
office and the other needed layers of management existed. LRH ED 339R speaks
of this extensively as the protection for our Church. But these people are
missing. And not just some. As of just a few years ago there were no members
of the office of ED Int on post, not to mention top execs throughout the
International Management structure.You may have also wondered… where is Heber, the President of the Church?
What about Ray Mitthoff, Senior C/S International, the one that LRH
personally turned over the upper OT Levels to? How about Norman Starkey,
LRH’s Trustee? What happened to Guillaume – Executive Director
International? And Marc Yeager, the WDC Chairman? What happened to the other
International Management executives that you have seen at events over the
years?The truth is that I spent weeks working in the empty International
Management building at Int. Empty because everyone had been removed from
post. When I first went up lines I was briefed extensively by David
Miscavige about how bad all of them were and how they had done many things
that were all very discreditable. This seemed to “explain” the fact that the
entirety of the Watchdog Committee no longer existed. The entirety of the
Executive Strata, which consisted of ED International and 11 other top
International executives that were the top executives in their particular
fields, no longer existed. That the Commodore’s Messenger Org International
no longer existed. All of these key command structures of Scientology
International, put there by LRH, had been removed.There were hundreds and hundreds of unanswered letters and requests for help
from org staff, written based on LRH ED 339R where LRH says that staff can
write to these top executives in the Exec Strata for help. But this is not
possible if all these execs have been removed and no one is there to help
them or to get evaluations and programming done to expand Scientology.Well, after that I got to spend some quality time with Heber, Ray Mithoff,
Norman Starkey, Guillaume, as well as the entirety of International
Management at the time, who were all off post and doing very long and harsh
ethics programs. These have gone on for years and to the only result of that
they are still off post. There is no denying that these top executives have
all gradually disappeared from the scene. You don’t see them at the big
events anymore or on the ship at Maiden Voyage.David Miscavige has now become the “leader” of the Scientology religion. Yet
what LRH left behind was a huge structure to properly manage all aspects of
the Scientology religion. He put a complete and brilliant organizational
structure there, not one individual. There never was supposed to be a
“leader” other than LRH himself as the goal maker for our group...."read the full email on markrathbun.wordpress.com
One of a number of intriguing descriptions:
"2. Bromium
Little is known about Bromium other than that is plans to use virtualization technology as a tool for securing the myriad endpoints (e.g., desktops, mobile phones and tablets) that connect to enterprise networks. While securing cloud servers, as other startups such as CloudPassage attempt to do, is important, the advent of consumerization means endpoints need security. Among Bromium’s founders is Simon Crosby, who co-founded XenSource and served as virtualization CTO at Citrix Systems..."
Read Derrick Harris' original post here:
There are many reasons why SOPA and other legislation like it should never be passed, e.g., it fundamentally changes how the internet functions, but here are just two things that should get you thinking:
I've worked in the film industry for two decades as a screenwriter, director, assistant director, script supervisor, production assistant... I've seen a lot of change in the film industry in the last decade and realized at some point that I was witnessing a transition arising from the internet; the same transition that happened to the music industry in the 90s. For many of us in the music and movie industries, media piracy was a looming threat on the horizon, a planet killer whose orbit circled ever closer.
- In 1999, I was vehemently against media piracy. It was wrong, I felt, to "rip off" artists without their permission.
- In 2011, I can say with absolute conviction that I was the one who was flat out wrong.
Here are Ross' bullet points - You'll want to read the full post to get the deets:
1. SOPA won't even affect its target group.
2. The net sees censorship as damage and reroutes.
3. You can't miss a future you don't yet know.
4. Piracy is a symptom of a new technology. You can't stop piracy any more than you can stop spam.
5. "Piracy is a service issue, not a technology issue."
6. On the road to innovation, you remove roadblocks -- not add more.
Read Ross' full post here - well worth it:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111111/12040916725/why-all-filmmakers-shou...
Excerpt from Christina Bonnington's original post in wired.com:
"Chances are, you use your iPad while watching TV. And if you use your iPad to complement your TV experience, you might as well have an app that acts as a friendly companion — nay, an intelligent companion — to what’s happening onscreen.
That app is IntoNow. It analyzes the audio from TV (or even YouTube) to figure out what you’re watching and deliver specifically tailored media to complement your video content. IntoNow has had smartphone apps for a while, but today, it introduces a new iPad app to take advantage of the 70 percent of us who use tablets while watching the tube.
To some degree, the app is like Shazam, but for TV content instead of songs you hear on the radio. You open IntoNow on your iPad and click a button. The app analyzes what it’s hearing from your video source for four to 12 seconds, and then delivers related content in the form of relevant tweets, news headlines, and even sport stats when applicable. When it was demoed for me, the app correctly identified Wolf Blitzer on CNN, and an obscure clip from Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that was primarily comprised of basketball dribbles and hand clapping..."
read the full article here: