“Smithsonian Business Ventures was created in 1999 to coordinate the for-profit divisions of the Institution, such as Smithsonian magazine and other publications, the gift shops and Imax theaters. But the unit had an often-contentious relationship with the museum staffs, and its leadership was criticized for the amount of money spent on salaries and expenses.”
Month: June 2008
MPAA Says It Should Collect Copyright Damages W/O Infringement Evidence
The Motion Picture Association of America said Friday intellectual-property holders should have the right to collect damages, perhaps as much as $150,000 per copyright violation, without having to prove infringement.
Dance Show Dominates US TV Ratings
“According to preliminary national estimates from Nielsen, “So You Think You Can Dance” averaged a 3.0 rating/9 share in adults 18-49 and 8.8 million viewers overall to dominate the 9 o’clock hour and stand as the night’s top-rated program.”
Imax To Go (Giant) Digital
“Next month, the company will roll out the first three digital Imax installations with exhibitor AMC Entertainment — two in Washington and one in Baltimore. Three more will debut in August in Philadelphia. Imax expects to have digital systems deployed at 50 sites by year’s end, with the goal of converting its 296 owned or equipped theaters in 40 countries.”
Broadway, Fun. Tonys? Not So Much
“You would expect the Tony producers to take a more sanguine view of the current scene. Instead this year’s telecast seemed desperate to erase distinctions between the nominated shows and the (often justly) overlooked, between seasons present and past.”
A Stonehenge For Every Age
“Each age creates Stonehenge in its own image. For Enlightenment scholars it was ‘the Grand Orrery of the Ancient Druids’, to the Romantic imagination it was fraught with thrilling foreboding, for the 1970s counterculture it was the ideal place for a pop festival. The concerns of our own times seem reflected in the current crop of theories.”
Artists, Museums, And The Art Of Commerce
“It is the artists, and a certain line of thinking about art, that have given the people with the cash permission to buy and sell what amounts to nothing, and to do so for ever larger and more insane sums of money. All this sensational commerce is fueled by the anti-aesthetics that were born nearly a century ago among the Dadaists, and have by now morphed into the laissez-faire aesthetics that give collectors sanction to regard one of Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel balloon animals as simultaneously a camp joke and a modern equivalent of a Tang dynasty horse.”
New Canadian Copyright Law Full Of Restrictions
“Want to rip a DVD so you can show your film-class students a series of clips? Nope. Want to post a Battlestar Galactica tribute video to YouTube? Time to hire a lawyer. If it’s locked – and the definition of what constitutes a lock is terrifically vague – then in most instances you can’t touch it.”
Reconsidering The Women Writers Who Came Before
“In the 1970s a number of books were written to reappraise women authors and the literature they produced. For the most part these books focused on nineteenth-century Britain (to a lesser extent on the United States and France) and they clearly ‘started something’.”
The Case Against Second-Hand Books
“I can’t stand second-hand books. For me, as a literary experience, they are akin to sloppy seconds, a salad bar in a staff canteen at the end of a hot weekday, or a recently-vacated cubicle in a public toilet. Let’s be clear: I don’t merely have a mild preference for buying brand-new. No, I’m digestively squeamish about used books.”