Copyright laws have been out of date for years. “The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 was supposed to clear up copyright issues in the Internet era. That hasn’t exactly happened. Instead, there have been a series of lawsuits between the recording and motion picture industries, private companies and individual users, seeking clarification on how intellectual property is protected as music and video moves to the digital world.” – Wired
Tag: 05.16.00
GOING GLOBAL
Film schools in the UK, US, and Australia have joined forces to launch The Global Film School, an online film school which will open later this year. Courses in directing, producing, screenwriting, editing, design and cinematography will all rely on digital technology to provide internet-based lessons. – BBC 05/16/00
THE GRAND BAZAAR
When most people think of Cannes, they think art and movies. “When the world’s more than 2,000 film buyers come to Cannes, by contrast, they think purely about commerce. And while many of them believe the work of auteur directors will sell tickets back home, many others have simpler needs better met by titles like ‘Spiders 2’ or ‘Turbulence 3’ (a hijacking saga on sale here with the tagline: ‘One killer. Forty hostages. Ten million Internet viewers.’).” – Los Angeles Times 05/16/00
HOOKED ON CHAPTERS
The introduction of the book superstore in Canada has been great for publishers, who have seen their orders rise. Chapters says it only represents 21% of the Canadian industry (including all retail venues), but it comprises 50%-60% of sales for many publishers. Some worry on that dependence. “If Chapters goes down, everyone will go with them. It would take down every publisher in Canada.” – Publishers Weekly
LITERARY STRATEGY
Internet magazine Salon.com has bought MP3Lit.com, a company that provides downloads of audio books over the internet. – Publishers Weekly
MONUMENT TO MUSIC
Frank Gehry’s swoopy droopy Experience Music Project (please don’t call it a museum) is opening soon in Seattle. Says Gehry: “This building is supposed to be a lot of fun. That’s what Paul Allen wanted. Fun. It’s supposed to be unusual. The (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum) in Cleveland wanted a straight-forward corporate look. Paul didn’t want that. He wanted what he called a swoopy building. Nobody has seen this before or will see it again. Nobody will build another one.” – Seattle Post-Intelligencer
PLANETARY SEQUEL
Colin Matthews’ new Pluto movement to finish up Holst’s “The Planets” finally gets a hearing. Though there’s no evidence Holst ever intended to write a “Pluto,” Matthews has completed the job. “Trying to replicate Holst’s musical style would have risked producing a feeble pastiche, so Matthews has composed as himself, yet he doffs his cap affectionately in some smaller respects.” – Financial Times
COMEBACK KID
In less than five years since Paul Kellogg has turned around the fortunes of New York City Opera. When he became the company’s artistic and general director in 1996, the company was $5 million debt, “had lost its sense of artistic direction and was coping emotionally with the death from AIDS of its previous director, the conductor Christopher Keene.” Now, in a miraculous turnaround, the debt is gone, and the company’s artistic purpose is clear. – New York Times
PIANO PRESTO
Renzo Piano just might be the world’s busiest architect: For Hermès he is designing a Far East headquarters in Tokyo. In America, he is working on the Harvard Art Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, an art campus in Atlanta and a sculpture gallery in Dallas. There is a telecom HQ in Rotterdam, a Paul Klee museum in Switzerland, a trio of new concert halls in Rome, an elegant tower in Sydney nearing completion, and a pilgrimage church in southern Italy which looks set to be the religious masterpiece of millennium year. In Berlin his Potsdamer Platz, a vast development spanning a blighted area on either side of the Wall, is nearly complete. – The Times (UK)
ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE
French intellectual Marc Fumaroli has very precise ideas about how our cultural history has gotten us to where we are. “Because I think that Renaissance is a continuity of antiquity, it is a rebirth, but at the same time it is a continuity. But with the French and the English at the end of the 17th Century, something new begins, and this novelty that has been acclaimed as a wonder, as a great period of Enlightenment, was perhaps full of the seeds of the Satanic elements that we have in this century, since spread in Europe and elsewhere.” – The Idler