Category: media

Coverage of the Grokster ruling has focused almost exclusively on peer-to-peer file sharing networks. But other corners of the online media world could be in trouble, too, notably Apple’s new podcasting hub…

In Australia, “big film distributors are paying a professional teachers organisation to create study guides based on the latest blockbusters, bypassing the NSW Department of Education or the Board of Studies. The study packs – about films such as Kingdom of Heaven, Robots and Ice Age – are emailed directly to tens of thousands of teachers, who are also offered free entry to special screenings.”

“Recent history is littered with examples of the entertainment industry panicking about technologies that ended up proving harmless – and which might not exist today had they been subject to a ruling like this one. “I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone,” Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in 1982. Those arguments don’t apply here, the court said.”

“While the reality genre has matured, creating shows that commonly compete in the ratings with scripted entertainment, conditions for those who work on the shows have worsened, not improved, those workers say. Although the most popular reality shows compete with scripted entertainment, the genre remains a seat-of-the-pants culture, with some shows taking only weeks, rather than months, to be bought, produced and appear on the air. This has made for intense competition among reality-show producers.”

So Big Media has decided that filesharing networks are a threat to their existance and the courts hav backed them up. “Six years after Napster arrived, it should be clear that geeks and fans are simply going to bypass a legal framework that was built for sales of sheet music and discs. As they did with radio and television, copyright holders should make those volunteers their allies in marketing because, try as they may, they’re never going to find the Off switch.”

Everywhere you look this summer, there are movie remakes and retreads. “Is it any wonder this avalanche of retreads has come at a time when theater attendance is headed toward its lowest level since 1996? Young moviegoers, who make up the bulk of film audiences, crave surprise, sensation and authenticity. So if the multiplexes are full of homogenized pop baubles, why wouldn’t more people than ever be happy to stay home and fire up a DVD on their new plasma-screen TV?”

Frank Rich writes that “the right’s new assault on public broadcasting is toothless, far from it. But this time the game is far more insidious and ingenious. The intent is not to kill off PBS and NPR but to castrate them by quietly annexing their news and public affairs operations to the larger state propaganda machine that the Bush White House has been steadily constructing at taxpayers’ expense.”

Monday’s ruling by the US Supreme Court that tech companies can be liable for copyright infringement by those who use their technology will have serious implications for tech development. “While entertainment companies touted the victory as a crystal clear decision about right and wrong business practices, technology groups said they are left with a murky, unclear standard of what it means for a company to encourage, or induce, its customers to infringe copyright, and this will lead to more litigation. ‘This really has given a tremendous amount of leverage to content owners to dictate the kind of technology that consumers will have available to them’.”

Sure, Monday’s file-sharing decision by the Supreme Court was unanimous. But it’s clear the Big Media companies “didn’t win anything like what they had been asking the Supremes for—a rule that would penalize any company that made money off a product widely used for infringement, regardless of what the company intended. And though the technical companies and consumer groups are troubled by the outcome in this case, there’s still much to encourage them.”

Canadian arts groups are protesting a decision by the federal government to introduce pay-satellite radio service in Canada. They say that the service will erode efforts to produce Canadian content on radio…