CNET’s Declan McCullough has the scoop on a new bill backed by the Bush Administration and about to be introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) that will greatly expand the digital copyright restrictions in the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Moreover, the draft legislation, the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006, will also expand federal police wiretapping and enforcement powers.
McCullough says the bill goes to great lengths to expand the punishable acts of copyright infringement. For example, attempted copyright infringement would become a federal crime punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Even worse, the bill would expand section 1201 of the DMCA that bars trafficking in or distributing software capable of bypassing DRM systems to make it a crime to “make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess” such software. The legislation would also permit wiretaps in cases involving copyright infringement, boost the jail time for copyright infringement, create a new unit in the FBI for investigating copyright crimes and, most problematic of all, permit copyright holders to impound “records documenting the manufacture, sale or receipt of items involved in” infringements.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:13 PM | Print | Comments (45)
The Boston Globe’s film critic Ty Burr has this piece today about the aesthetic pitfalls of watching movies on the video iPod.
You think you know where he’s headed when he starts out
I’m watching the attack on Aqaba sequence from “Lawrence of Arabia” on my iPod. It looks like an insurrection on an ant farm.
But Burr doesn’t completely pan watching full-length feature films on the iPod. Some films, particularly classic black-and-white features, are OK (but not great) to watch on an iPod.
The best movies for an iPod — correction, the least problematic — turn out to be concert movies and black-and-white classics. No surprises there, really. Rock concerts are primarily about the sound and seeing the musicians close up; watching “The Return of the New York Dolls Live From the Royal Festival Hall, 2004” was almost the equal of watching the film on TV while wearing headphones. And while I’d always rather see John Ford’s 1939 “Young Mr. Lincoln” on the towering scrim of a movie palace, the film’s luscious onyx-and-ivory compositions (courtesy of cinematographer Bert Glennon) make the transition with ease.
But Burr doesn’t point out that this tiny screen resolution is probably a transitory thing. The bigger screen video-capable iPod is on the way.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:56 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Can we ever get enough analysis of the red-hot phenom of MySpace? I think not. Part of the social networking site’s endless fascination is just how difficult it is to pigeonhole in traditional media terms.
The New York Times’ Saul Hansell has an in-depth piece today on MySpace and the challenges it faces as it tries to stick to its non-traditional roots while being a part of a very traditional media company, News Corp.
Clearly, Chris DeWolfe, founder of MySpace, is trying to protect the service’s anarchic roots at the same time that Fox executives are trying to monetize it through traditional advertising enhancements, goals that are seemingly contradictory. Still, Fox seems to “get” MySpace.
Mr. Levinsohn [Ross Levinsohn, head of Fox Interactive Media] calls MySpace the antiportal. “It’s not about a central hub, because that’s not where things are going,” he said. “The under-30 set wants choice. It’s not about one destination; it’s about 65 million.”
MySpace calls for some proper out-of-the-box thinking and I love the article’s description of how Fox created an animated square hamburger character that MySpace members could befriend.
The bigger opportunity, however, is not so much selling banner ads, but finding ways to integrate advertisers into the site’s web of relationships. Wendy’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers, for example, created a profile for the animated square hamburger character from its television campaign. About 100,000 people signed up to be “friends” with the square.
The big fear is that MySpace could be a relative flash-in-the-pan, and that trendy youth will move on to some other trend sooner or later. DeWolfe doesn’t think that will happen (and neither do I, at least not for a long, lucrative time).
Mr. DeWolfe argues that MySpace won’t suffer that fate because, in just two years, it has already become so entrenched in so many lives. “People are truly invested in the site,” he said. “All their friends are on it. They spent months building their profiles. And so the cost of switching is too high. If we keep building the features they want, they will stay on the site.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:05 AM | Print | Comments (1)
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