‘Cause you know you wanted it
February 18, 2012 – 2:06 pmQuentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained
Shooting Mickey
October 20, 2011 – 11:07 amIt’s a battle to use copyrighted media in this digital age!
The poop on Spaghetti Westerns
April 2, 2011 – 4:42 amEverything you never wanted to know about them. And psst, Karl May was Adolph Hitler’s favorite writer.
Wired For Change – videos for remixing
March 28, 2011 – 12:11 pmSome raw material for you and your projects:
Jenny Toomey at the Ford Foundation is going to allow all the videos from the recent Wired for Change to be downloaded and freely remixed. A full searchable transcript will help remixers find the key points they need for their videos. We are exploring the possibility of creating a video contest to promote the videos and give students a chance to engage with the core ideas of how to build a more just, useful, and equitable Internet. As part of this we might provide a pool of “b-roll” clips free for remix, or at least point to some good sources like archive.org, cc.aljazeera.net, etc. The student winner would get a free trip to the next Wired for Change conference (which features some pretty amazing speakers, celebrities, etc.) But we have to move fast as many of the core ideas will quickly be dated (Internet time moves fast!). I’m trying to get a quick read on how many submissions we might get if we did this. Jenny wants to know if we could get some critical mass of submissions, possibly by asking professors to assign the task of submitting remixes as part of the final stretch of this spring semester. Are any of you teaching courses for which this would fit in? Or do you know others that might? Or are you on listservs you could quickly poll?
Your text will self-destruct in 10 seconds?
March 26, 2011 – 1:48 pmDigital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions on use of HarperCollins digital books has serious implications for libraries.
Librarians turn militant in an open letter to HarperCollins.
Google won’t have unlimited license to digitize
March 23, 2011 – 11:35 amJudge Rejects Google’s Deal to Digitize Books
By MIGUEL HELFT
Published: March 22, 2011
Google’s ambition to create the world’s largest digital library and bookstore has run into the reality of a 300-year-old legal concept: copyright.
Situationist app
March 8, 2011 – 1:11 pmSituationist is an iPhone app.
What is Situationist iPhone app? An iPhone app that makes your everyday life more thrilling and unpredictable. It alerts members to each other’s proximity and gets them to interact in random “situations”. These situations vary from the friendly “Hug me for 5 seconds exactly” or ”Compliment me on my haircut”, to the subversive eg “Help me rouse everyone around us into revolutionary fervour and storm the nearest TV station”. Members simply upload their photo and pick the situations they want to happen to them from a shortlist, in the knowledge that they might then occur anywhere, and at any time.
Who is behind it? Benrik, artists and authors of the cult bestselling ”Diary Will Change Your Life” series.
Outrageous interpretation of copyright law?
March 7, 2011 – 4:59 pmPost a link and go to jail? That’s what happened to Brian McCarthy for sharing YouTube and other videos. Homeland Security’s Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement division (ICE) has been getting more and more aggressive in hunting down copyright violators. While pressing charges for copyright violations is clearly within ICE’s domain, should these be criminal charges (as opposed to civil)? Furthermore, if sharing links is a criminal act, then what is the Web all about?
There’s a petition here on McCarthy’s behalf, fyi.
Rango with Johnny Depp
March 4, 2011 – 5:58 pm
Rango is the newest installment in this Western genealogical tradition, which includes Yojimbo (1961), Sanjuro (1962), A Fistful of Dollars (1964, etc.), Django (1966), Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo (1970), W Django (1972), Mad Max (1979), Road Warrior (1981), Last Man Standing (1996), Lucky Number Slevin (2006), Sukiyaki Western Django (2007).
If you aren’t familiar with this tradition, you might want to read this review of Sukiyaki Western Django. It is probably a good idea to watch Kill Bill (2003, 2004) before Sukiyaki Western Django if you aren’t familiar with Quentino Tarantino’s work or this family of films.
