Two years after his high-profile and bitter departure from Disney, Michael Eisner is firmly back in the saddle, hosting his own TV show and spearheading a web video company called Vuguru, disproving F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement that there are no second acts in American lives. The Financial Times today reports that Eisner has struck a big-time deal with News Corp.’s MySpace for Vuguru’s original professionally developed online video series “Prom Queen.”
NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes has this recent interview with Eisner, which is notable for what seems to be modesty or downplaying on the part of the former Hollywood superpower, who had a reputation for egotism and despotism. Note that Eisner, who spent 40 years atop the broadcast TV and Hollywood worlds, characterizes himself as a “semi-professional” in the entertainment business, and portrays himself merely as a theater/English major applying his skills to the web.
If I was doing it in 1964 it would be user-generated content, but I have 40 years of semi-professional work in this field. So now we just put a new noun against me, which is professional, rather than user. I mean, there’s no difference except I’m taking my training as an English and theater major onto the internet.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:22 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Google Managing Counsel of Litigation, Michael Kwun, has a letter to the editor in today’s Washington Post responding to Viacom’s op-ed piece which appeared in the Post last Saturday. Resisting the urge to “litigate in public” (no doubt a sly slap at Viacom for putting so many of its legal arguments in its opinion piece), Kwun says Viacom is trying to rewrite copyright law with its “baseless lawsuit.
In particular, Kwun chides Viacom for attempting to turn the DMCA on its head, a law that Viacom itself worked to pass.
Viacom’s lawyers helped craft this law but apparently don’t like it, after all. They want to shirk the responsibility Congress gave them.
Google-owned YouTube, the defendant in the lawsuit, is abiding with the law, having already fulfilled its obligations under the statute to take-down infringing material, Kwun says. Moreover, Viacom isn’t even clear about what content constitutes infringement.
Viacom later withdrew some of those requests, apparently realizing that those videos were not infringing, after all. Though Viacom seems unable to determine what constitutes infringing content, its lawyers believe that we should have the responsibility and ability to do it for them. Fortunately, the law is clear, and on our side.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:33 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The U.S. now ranks seventh globally in terms of technology innovation, according to a report from the World Economic Forum. The group produces an annual Global Information Technology Report, which looks at four measures of information and communications technology readiness for countries around the world.
This year the Forum examined the “network readiness” of a 122 countries, double the number it looked at in 2000, the first year the report was produced. According to the analysis, the U.S. has dropped from the top slot on these measures to seventh, with Nordic nations including Denmark (which ranked number one), Finland, Sweden amoving up rapidly to top the U.S. Also beating out the U.S. were Singapore, Switzerland and the Netherlands.
Notably, Estonia, a growing hot-bed of technology export, has entered the top 20 nations globally for the first time.
Clearly the role of government places a big part in the Nordic countries’ climb up the ranks.
“Denmark, in particular, has benefited from the very effective government e-leadership, reflected in early liberalisation of the telecommunications sector, a first-rate regulatory environment and large availability of e-government services,” said Irene Mia, senior economist at World Economic Forum.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:12 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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