Tag: 06.29.05

In Australia, “big film distributors are paying a professional teachers organisation to create study guides based on the latest blockbusters, bypassing the NSW Department of Education or the Board of Studies. The study packs – about films such as Kingdom of Heaven, Robots and Ice Age – are emailed directly to tens of thousands of teachers, who are also offered free entry to special screenings.”

“Recent history is littered with examples of the entertainment industry panicking about technologies that ended up proving harmless – and which might not exist today had they been subject to a ruling like this one. “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,” Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in 1982. Those arguments don’t apply here, the court said.”

“While the reality genre has matured, creating shows that commonly compete in the ratings with scripted entertainment, conditions for those who work on the shows have worsened, not improved, those workers say. Although the most popular reality shows compete with scripted entertainment, the genre remains a seat-of-the-pants culture, with some shows taking only weeks, rather than months, to be bought, produced and appear on the air. This has made for intense competition among reality-show producers.”

So Big Media has decided that filesharing networks are a threat to their existance and the courts hav backed them up. “Six years after Napster arrived, it should be clear that geeks and fans are simply going to bypass a legal framework that was built for sales of sheet music and discs. As they did with radio and television, copyright holders should make those volunteers their allies in marketing because, try as they may, they’re never going to find the Off switch.”