Posted by: RFM on: October 16, 2009
It’s been an interesting and controversial week in the media.
On Monday, the Guardian published a mysterious article which said that they were unable to report an MP’s written question to a minister because a legal injunction prevented them from doing so. In other words, a law firm had stopped a British newspaper from even reporting [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 25, 2009
Big Day for the copyfight. Mandelson is going to try to win his David Geffen’s argument today at the BRIT school.
Apart from the profoundly undemocratic nature of Mandelson’s policy-making (reminder: nobody voted for him; nobody voted for Geffen; and his new policy goes against the government’s own published guidelines in the recent Digital Britain report), [...]
Posted by: RFM on: September 24, 2009
Via boingnoing, Cory Doctorow’s considered response to the pickle Lily Allen has got herself in with the copyfighters, when she posted an online rant about piracy. Snip:
Allen just hasn’t thought this through. Copyright is problematic for everyone: musicians, fans, bloggers. The absence of clear affirmative rights to make personal copies, to share with your friends, [...]
Posted by: RFM on: August 16, 2009
Media Studies is under the cosh again, as the Tories tout plans to revamp the education system, again, to “reward” schools who teach “harder” subjects like Physics and Maths.
Why not go the whole hog and go back to teaching Latin and Ancient Greek? Those are pretty hard. Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant. Oh, I [...]
Posted by: RFM on: June 21, 2009
As we proceed with our study of the impact of new media, you’ll be hearing the following a lot: copyright was never meant to be a pension scheme for the entertainment industry; the introduction of copyright was intended to foster creativity, to encourage people to create new stuff.
Any study of the impact of so-called piracy [...]
Posted by: RFM on: June 15, 2009
This story is a few days old, but it’s worth recording here as well as on BoingBoing, where the link goes to:France’s three-strikes copyright rule is unconstitutional and hence dead – Boing Boing.
Copyright and the internet is one of the key issues for students considering “the impact of new media”. There is no bigger issue, [...]
Posted by: RFM on: June 6, 2009
Via Boingboing come these useful links and this fantastic, fan-created mashup music video, featuring clips of 80s John Hughes films to a soundtrack of “Lisztomania” by Phoenix. The creator, avoidantconsumer on YouTube, just decided that the Phoenix track sounded like an 80s movie, so she “made it happen”. Apart from creating something so good that [...]
Posted by: RFM on: May 8, 2009
Peter Kirwan writes over at Wired (UK edition) on the surprisingly healthy state of the music industry.
It turns out that – surprise! – they can’t be trusted. The industry that exploited artists and ripped off fans for decades is – it seems – exaggerating when they whinge about how online “piracy” is killing them softly [...]
Posted by: RFM on: April 15, 2009
Via BoingBoing, I learned of this interesting experiment in Creative Commons licencing by the BBC, who have released files for download and re-editing or re-mixing under the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution license, v2. This means you’re free to do whatever you want with the files, as long as you include credit for the original creators, [...]
Posted by: RFM on: March 16, 2009
The paper covers how to change consumer behaviour and deal with persistent breaches of civil copyright law, how to support industry efforts in developing new and attractive legal ways for consumers to access content, how to enable technical copyright-support solutions that work for both consumers and content creators, and whether the agency should have back-up [...]
