Category: media

The music and movie industries have been combatting digital copying and downloading. Now the porn industry, which has led the web in many of its money-making innovations, is suing to protect its content. Last week adult entertainment businesses sued credit card companies that service websites that offer stolen porn. “The reason it was so hard to make money is because while we were paying for our content, there were many websites out there that were competing against us that were stealing theirs. It’s pretty impossible to compete in that situation.”

“The advent of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ has brought with it a controversy that seems, at least at first glance, familiar, even ritualistic. Once again a filmmaker has brought his interpretation of Scripture to the screen and once again, before most audiences have had a chance to see the picture, there are expressions of outrage, accusations of bigotry and bad taste, and an outpouring of contentious publicity.” But this time, the pious are standing with the Hollywood elite, and the protesters are those who view the film’s pro-Christian message as narrow-minded at best, and anti-Semitic at worst. We’ve come a long way from the era when religious blockbusters were at the core of Hollywood’s popular appeal.

Taking a page from the music industry’s playbook, Warner Bros. film studio is suing several people in believes have been distributing pirated versions of its films online. One of the individuals on the receiving end of the studio’s wrath is a Hollywood actor whom the studio says passed the ‘screeners’ he was sent to an electrician in Illinois, who then began distributing them online. “The lawsuit also lists 10 unnamed defendants as part of the alleged plot to distribute digital copies of the movies on the Internet.”

Computer animation studio Pixar has broken off talks with the Walt Disney Corporation for a new distribution deal. Since 1995, when the fledgling company released Toy Story, Pixar has generated $2.5 billion in revenue, at a time when Disney’s overall hold on the animation market has been slipping. Pixar’s latest film, Finding Nemo, has generated $500 million in global ticket sales, and was nominated this week for four Academy Awards.

With traditional network television continuing to hemorrhage viewers, and cable networks splintering the market more with every passing day, the landscape of American television is on the verge of revolutionary change. Among the options being looked at by the over-the-air nets are flexible schedules, eliminating reruns (unless they can be strategically used to draw new viewers,) and maybe – just maybe – the eventual elimination of the absurd and indefensible “sweeps” periods.

The U.S. Congress is strongly urging American broadcasters to take the initiative in scaling back the amount of sexual innuendo and coarse language on the nation’s TV screens. The FCC may be on the verge of issuing stricter rules regarding on-air obscenity, and more than two dozen congressmen are sponsoring legislation to increase the maximum fine for obscenity violations tenfold. The renewed push to clean up TV comes in the wake of a flap over the FCC’s decision not to punish NBC for allowing a curse word uttered by a rock star to air during a live awards show broadcast.

Greg Dyke, the director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, has stepped down in the wake of a damning report by a UK judge involving the death of a BBC source who had accused the Blair government of “sexing up” a dossier on the threat posed by Iraq. The suicide of Dr. David Kelly, who anonymously provided information to a BBC reporter before being revealed by another media outlet, led to six weeks of hearings before Lord Hutton, who also cleared the Blair government of all wrongdoing in his report.

Greg Dyke was “a fantastically popular director general,” and that may have been part of his undoing at the BBC. But despite the humiliation of being accused of shoddy journalism by Lord Hutton, the BBC is circling the wagons, and firing back at Prime Minister Tony Blair and his supporters. One former BBC staffer has publically accused the government of “trying to grind an independent broadcaster into the ground. The staff are determined that it won’t happen.”

Sony will have to answer to charges that it invented a movie critic and attached quotes from non-existent reviews to several of its films. The studio admitted to having concocted the critic known as David Manning, but had argued that free speech laws shielded it from prosecution for the deception. The California Court of Appeals disagreed, declaring Manning’s quotes to be commercial speech, which the Supreme Court has said does not enjoy full First Amendment protection.

“Tuesday’s Academy Award nominations were filled with surprises, featuring more ethnic minorities in top categories than ever before, nods to comic performances as well as dramatic, the first best director nomination for an American woman and a plethora of nominations for small films. Oscar is apparently loosening up.”