“The office contributed more than 636,000 copies of books, serial publications, motion pictures, sound recordings, printed music and other creative works to the library’s collection last year; the average annual value of newly copyrighted works is $30 million.”
Category: issues
UK City Of Culture May Cancel Events For Lack Of Interest And Funding
Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland’s second city and the host of Great Britain’s first year-long City of Culture programme, has seen both ticket sales and sponsorship running well below expectations. The province’s culture ministry warns that some events may have to be cut as a result, though the programme’s management remains optimistic.
Fame Is Not Fleeting, As It Turns Out
“Newly published research concludes that, contrary to Warhol’s prediction, genuine celebrity status does not disappear as quickly as it appeared. Once you become famous, you tend to stay famous.”
Board Games And Comics Teach Polish Kids What Life Under Communism Was Like
“Shopping in communist Poland was a dreary gantlet of shortages, rationing lines and – if you managed to buy something – Soviet-Bloc dreck. So Karol Madaj has turned it all into a board game called Queue. The challenge: Buy everything on your shopping list. Players wait outside empty government stores, fend off line-jumpers and haggle with black marketeers.”
Hey, British Arts Orgs – Want More Funding? Ask Brussels
“The current European Union culture fund draws to a close this year, to be replaced by a new support programme for the cultural and creative sectors, Creative Europe. Given the diminishing funding pot in the UK, is it worth UK arts organisations looking again to Europe for growth?”
The End Of Privacy
“Drones in public discourse appear to have become a symbol of an inchoate fear of a future in which privacy is nonexistent. This is not an unreasonable fear, but it is somewhat anachronistic, because in reality that future is already here–not because of drones, but because of pervasive video recording, RFID systems, massive data collection systems, and other, less obtrusive technologies.”
How Do Highly Creative People Do What They Do?
“There’s no such thing as the way to create good work, but all greats have their way. And some of those ways are spectacularly weird.”
The Impossibility Of Copyright In The Age Of Instagram
“You can see it all the time online: a photo is tweeted, someone cross-posts it to Facebook, someone else reposts it to Twitter from there, it makes it over to Tumblr, and then is incorporated into a Storify which a media organisation reports on. In such circumstances, it can very quickly become nearly impossible to track down the original image. That’s why the law has been nicknamed the ‘Instagram act’.”
Did Climate Change Create Social Unrest In The 17th Century?
“Data from both northern and southern hemispheres studied by climatologists confirms that there was a drop in global temperature of one or two degrees Celsius over this period. Could this be directly linked to wars, invasions and government collapses?”
What We Lose When We Lose Professional Critics
“One question is what is happening to criticism itself when the evaluative architecture on a site such as Amazon is the same for leaf blowers as it is literature, when everything seems to be quantifying one’s hedonic response to a consumption activity; when we are forced into a ruthless dyad of thumbing up or thumbing down, or channeled into expressing a simple “liking” for something when the actual response may be more complex.”