Who owns the network news?

My old pal George “Hotchner” Scriban uses the phrase “Big Content” on his blog, Blogaritaville. Dave Winer likes to bandy about his terms “BigCo” (Big Companies) and “BigPub” (Big Publishers).

Wanna know who these knobs are (by “these knobs” I mean Big Content, not George and Dave…usually)? If you have Acrobat Reader (or similar software that can read .PDF files), take a gander at PROMO’s (the PROject On Media Ownership) Who Owns the Network News map. You’ll be amazed at just how much is owned by just five companies: General Electric, AOL/Time Warner, News Corporation, Walt Disney (a.k.a. Big Mouse) and Viacom.

(I love it that GE has stakes in both the WWF and Polo Ralph Lauren Media. I wonder how often those two companies’ target markets overlap.)

Thanks to my friend and former co-worker George Purdy for pointing me to PROMO’s map.

Canadian hearings on digital copyright hit Toronto tomorrow!

Just got this news from my friend Paul Huggins at Yahoo:

Significant “Digital Copyright” legislation is currently in the public consultations phase.

This is the process: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01100e.html

This is the consultation paper itself: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01099e.html

This legislation will impact all of our lives on both the professional and the personal level. In the smaller sense by creating rules and regs. to control/define much of the legal (and not so legal) freedoms that we take for granted on the Internet.

In the larger sense it impacts us by formalizing a new balance between the interests and rights of creators vs. brokers vs. consumers of intellectual “property”.

If you want to say to your grand-kids, “I was there when they wrote that piece-of-junk || excellent bill”, you might want to attend these hearings.

The public hearings are being held in Toronto at the Holiday Inn on King Street tomorrow from 8:30am to 5pm. Registration is free — check here for the details.

A lesson from the commies

Cory at BoingBoing points to this Observer article “comparing the music-industry’s attempt to mandate copy-prevention and the Stalinist regime’s tight control on photocopiers”:

There is, however, one sobering statistic which may eventually cause even Congress to balk at the studios’ arrogance. US domestic spending on computing technology is running at $600 billion a year, while Hollywood generates a measly $35bn.

To concede the demand for copy protection would be tantamount to compelling a huge, dynamic industry to march to the soporific beat of a technophobic industry desperate to preserve its obsolete business models.

Well, I’ll be. For once, the adage “money talks, bullshit walks” works in the good guys’ favour.

“The only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized.”

What the past will look like someday is an interesting essay on the true outcome of copy protection that appears in Mark Pilgrim’s blog, diveintomark:

Sonys and Broderbunds of the world, pay attention: the only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized. Long after my Playstation console falls apart, long after all the original, legitimate, uncopyable Playstation discs have crumbled into dust, long after the no-doubt-teenager who cracked Spyro 3 has grown up and joined polite society and found better things to do with his time, Spyro the Dragon will be remembered. Unfortunately, it will also be associated with that damn ugly crack screen, because no other versions will exist. This is what the past will look like someday. And we’ll just shrug, skip intro, and get on with it.

Point of information: The term “crack screen” may be unfamiliar. In a game that’s been “cracked” — that is, a game that’s had its copy protection mechanism defeated — the people who did the cracking often add an extra screen to the start of the game as their calling card, kind of like the “20th Century Fox” or “Paramount” logo at the start of a movie. That screen is the “crack screen” to which Mark refers.

Thanks to Johnathon Delacour’s blog, which pointed me there. Johnathon also points out that:

…there’s no point wondering why no-one is making the creative leap to find solutions that generate revenue for content producers while recognizing the inevitability of copying. No-one’s making the creative leap because, as Dave Winer points out, (with a few exceptions) the suits resent the talent — and it’s the talent who have a lock on the creativity.

I could’ve told you that!

According to the Which ’80’s Movie Icon Are You? online test (yeah, I know, online tests are so September 10th, but a firefighter cute guy like me can get away with it, right?), I am:

The Great Man himself!

Not everyone agrees with me about the greatness of Ferris Bueller. My friend Adina hates Mr. Bueller; she says he’s a sociopath. I say he’s a charismatic, skillful negotiator with a rogueish streak. Adina’s idea of a hero must be an accountant who leaves the “8 items or less” line when he realizes he’s got nine items in his cart. You go, girl.

Go on, ‘Dinster, be a tool of the Man. Obey like a good lil’ doggie. I’ll know it’s you who handed my name to the Music Industry Secret Police!

Sabado, Sabado, Sabado!

Another guy’s take on how the music industry is killing music

One of the best things about the Web is the opportunity for serendipity. You can follow a trail of links, end up someplace you’d never expected to go and find something that you’d never have looked for. Case in point: this essay about the record industry by comic book writer Steven Grant, who wrote this blurb as part of his Permanent Damage column in Comic Book Resources. Check it out (by the way, I added in some “linkatorial”)…

I’m told last year was the worst in decades for the record industry. They’re all wailing and moaning (and trying to figure out how the soundtrack to O BROTHER WHERE ARE THOU became a Grammy-award-winning hit (go, T-Bone!)) and blaming their losses on Internet file trading despite study after study indicating people who swap MP3s are likely to spend more on recorded music, not less. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that what they’re sinking most of their money+ into sucks, and is so lukewarm and programmed that the audience has been running like it’s the Chicago fire. (Two words: Mariah Carey.)

One of my relatives is a pretty hip 13-year old girl who just a couple years ago couldn’t stop talking about popular music and bought all kinds of CDS, and now she never mentions it because everything’s so boring. (She only listens to Spanish music stations on the car radio now.) Instead of actually trying to find out what music might actually interest an audience today, the record industry has been trying to ram draconian anti-technology and anti-competitive legislation through Congress and taking even more steps to make musicians de facto work-for-hire employees. After decades of creative bookkeeping and screwing artists out of royalties, the music industry actually has the gall to claim they’re trying to look out for the artists’ interests when battling MP3s and wide dissemination of new recording technologies and crippling the applicability of their product.

Meanwhile, potential buyers are left to turn their attention and wallets to other things or scrounge to find interesting material that falls between the cracks of the music industry’s pigeonholing and demographic biases, while executives refuse to consider the possibility that the world is changing or they’re just wrong.

The Pain

I’ve had a couple of days with my trainer at my new gym, and every muscle in my body is killing me. The things I do just to fit into my old pants…

Mike, my trainer, is built like a Mack truck. He has biceps that look like Volkwagen Beetles. He caused a bit of a commotion when he loaded the leg press sled to the max (about two dozen 45-pound plates) and did his workout. On top of that, he’s also the guitarist and backup vocalist for a KISS tribute band! He probably looks more like the hyper-muscled Ace Frehley action figure than Ace himself ever did.

It’s never been called that before…

Some guy on the street, pointing at my accordion: Hey man, that’s a really cool…uh…xylophone…?

“I say we nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure…”

Friends of my friend and former co-worker Justin Chapweske are unemployed and have a messy house. However, they hope to turn their lack of hygiene into good fortune in Apartmests.com’s Messiest Apartment Contest. They’re finalists, and they need your vote to win some prize money (US$10,000, which should help pay the rent) and a free visit from a cleaning service. Their apartment is pictured below — click on the photos to see larger versions and feel the horror…

If you check out the other two competitors, you’ll see that Justin’s friends are way ahead (although the UCLA apartment’s toilet has this horrible brown ring).

All of a sudden, I feel the urge to do some housekeeping. Or gouge out my eyes so I never have see such horror again.

Updated 6:25 p.m. EST — read it again!

I’m just a Catholic accordion-playing boy trying to do his good deed for the day…

Meryl wrote to say that she thought this little thing I wrote last week was funny:

At one point in the article, Dr. Al-Jalahma states that during Purim “the Jews wear carnival-style masks and costumes and overindulge in drinking alcohol, prostitution, and adultery.”

That’s not Purim, you moron, that’s Mardi Gras!

Being an affable fella from the tropics gives me a hate-on for hate lit, and a Catholic upbringing and schooling to made me familiar with all the Christian holidays, especially those that involve boozing and loose women. Being Catholic has other bonuses, such as that guilty feeling that makes sinning that much more fun. And being allowed to eat cheeseburgers, rare steaks and mu shu pork. And the schoolgirls. Oh, the schoolgirls.

(Of course, if you’d like to go out with this wonderful accordion-playing guy, religion isn’t a major factor. I was even tempted one by this really cute Satanist in Kingston, but I figured that she’d end the date by turning me into a human sacrifice.)

Double yolkiness

On Monday, I wrote about “Super Bon-ee” double-yolk eggs, on whose carton was a guarantee that at least half the eggs would have two yolks. It looks as though I’m not going to call the “Super Bon-ee” folks demanding a free carton this time; out of a total eight eggs we’ve used so far, seven have had double yolks.

George Lewis wrote to me and confirmed my suspicion that you could test eggs for double yolks by examining them under a bright light. Here’s what he wrote about the time he worked at an egg farm in his early teens:

the place i worked was not technically current, a pretty small shop compared to standards i guess–but they had a “dark room” that was part of the process of taking eggs from chickens and sending them out in boxes. they came throuugh on little rollers after they were washed/cleaned, and in this dark room, lights underneath the rollers/eggs lit up the eggs, so bad eggs could be spotted, chips/cracks in the shell could be spotted, etc… this also makes clear the eggs with doulbe-yolks. the place it was at was pretty small time, so whoever had that job just picked out the double-yolkers by hand and set them aside, and they were packaged/crated later.

in bigger shops, i’d bet they do it strictly by weight, but not 100% sure on that. double-yolks kick ass.

They certainly do. Delicious, golden, creamy, cholosterol-laden-but-who-gives-a-crap ass. In honour of the wonder of double-yolkers, here’s the Chinese pictogram for “double happiness” in two golden circles.

I think I’ll listen to Egg Man by the Beastie Boys right now. Oh, yeah and the Beatles’ I Am The Walrus, too. Goo goo g’joob.

It’s time to pimp-slap Big Content and their stupid laws

If you haven’t heard yet, there are all kinds of terrible things being done in the name of copyright:

• The Church of Scientology has been (mis)using copyright law to silence their critics for a long time. In their latest attempt, they managed to scare Google into removing Operation Clambake, a Scientology-debunking site, from their database, claiming that by reprinting portions of their sacred texts, they were violating copyright.
• Senator Fritz Hollings, a Hollywood pawn who’s received over a quarter-million dollars in campaign contributions from Big Content companies, has proposed a bill making it illegal to sell electronic gear without built-in copy-prevention devices. (I know they like to use the term “copy-protection”, but Big Content is represented by greedheads who don’t even like the idea of people making mix tapes.)
• In less than two months, Big Content will have forced a law that would price all but the most monied Internet radio broadcasters out of business. But once they’re gone, you’ll be able to subscribe to the record companies’ pay-for-subscription based Internet radio services…

What can you do? My pal Cory e-mailed me a very good suggestion:

Join the EFF!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation are — to borrow a phrase from Babylon 5 — the last, best hope for freedom in the digital age. When the law (or the big corporate interests who thinks laws should be set up to suit them) and technology collide, the EFF is there fighting for freedom:

• They helped set the precedent that e-mail cannot be subject to search and seizure withou a warrant.
• They fought for the right of people to publish information about encryption.
• They spoke out against the draconian Communications Decency Act.
• They’re now fighting on behalf of the Norwegian teenager who wrote some some software so that he could play DVDs on his Linux computer (current U.S. laws say it’s illegal to reverse engineer something designed to prevent copying, which he needed to do to crete his DVD-playing software).
• And now that Big Content is trying to set ridiculous limits on what you can and can’t do with your DVDs, CDs and video recorders (they’d like it if your video recorder erased those X-Files episodes you recorded after a while so that they can sell you DVDs of those same episodes), the EFF are in your corner.

Support the EFF!

Legal Notice (update Friday March 22, 6:25 p.m. EST)

I just got this “Cease and Desist” order from George:

“Big Content” is copyright © 2002 george scriban. the unauthorized use of Mr scriban’s copyrighted material is prohibited under the DMCA, jackass.

regards,

george scriban

The judges rule that Tina wins

The divine Miss Tina, guitarist and vocalist for local glam-punk band Fresh Meat (who appeared at Indie Incubation) writes:

Dear Joey,

I’d like to draw your attention to the fact I won the bottle shoving contest [the one that took place at last week’s Kick Ass Karaoke — Joey]. And you can see here all the contestants are trying really hard, but only one is victorious.

(That’s Lindi on the left and Tina in the middle. All right, I declare her the winner. I also plan to dress up as a beer bottle this Hallowe’en.)

Love, Love,

Miss Tina.

Like Tina and the Highlander say: “There can be only one!”

I’m quite certain that none of my friends — well, with the exception of Rob — would ever have ended up in a Norman Rockwell painting.

(This was written up in a recent edition of the Las Vegas Mercury.)

Here’s the scenario: a young woman meets a guy in a library. Their eyes meet, conversation ensues, leading up to a date that goes quite well. The next day, they — without planning it — run into each other at the library and make plans for another date. She’s full of anticipation.

So far, so good.

She decides, just for a lark, to enter his name into Google and finds his weblog. Thinking it might give her a better idea of what this guy she just met is like, she reads:

Thursday, 3:45pm: Met a sexy girl at the library. She sat across from me. The whole time, all I could think about was taking her in the stacks, just getting crazy dog-style sexy all up in that. All tantric and kama sutra up in the periodicals! Oh man. But I’m pretty inadequate sexually. Only been with five girls. Anyway, I ended up asking her out and we’re going out tonight.

Friday, 2:15am: Library girl and I went out and had a great time. I was hoping she’d give me a hand job, but she didn’t. I don’t think she’s a very good kisser, her tongue seemed really long to me. Not many women usually find me attractive so I’m kind of bummed about this tongue thing. I’d like to go to her house again and see if she’ll give me a hand job. Sorry to be obsessing over hand jobs, but I just tried mushrooms for the first time…I’m 25 and just starting to take drugs! Yipee!

Friday, 4:27pm: Saw library girl at the library. We’re going out tonight, though I’m gonna call her in about 10 minutes and suggest I just come over with a movie. I want to be a screenwriter and she wants to be a writer so maybe she’ll find this really romantic and she’ll give me a hand job.

Needless to say, that second date never took place.

However, the guy seeking a hand job probably got one later that weekend — it turns out that a woman he’d met through her online journal was flying in town for a weekend romp with him. This was documented in the guy’s weblog, of course.

The lesson here is so obvious that I won’t even bother stating it.