Collected Data
"There's an old adage, and it applies all too often in the growth of giant digital media players: if you're going to steal, steal big."
Invariably, people point out that labels exploited artists for years, and use that as some rationalization for file sharing. But all it really means is that Napster made it easy for the fans to screw the artists too, and a few entrepreneurs got really rich instead of label guys. You can't support Napster by claiming some moral high ground.
5 Reasons The Major Labels Didn't Really Blow It With Napster
""We don’t want this to be 3-D TV all over again"
But there's no guarantee that Hollywood is the solution to the Valley's content problem. Traditional movie and TV types never took the video game world by storm. Maybe they're not the visionaries who will prove the future of VR, either. Plus, with no rules or standards in place, how can companies explain this new field to a layperson who just wants to watch a new kind of movie?
How Hollywood Is Learning To Tell Stories In Virtual Reality
The future of VR is not storytelling.
"The mobile ecosystem is no longer immune to ravages of the extension"
For publishers, ad blockers are the elephant in the room: Everybody sees them, no one talks about it. The common understanding is that the first to speak up will be dead as it will acknowledge that the volume of ads actually delivered can in fact be 30% to 50% smaller than claimed — and invoiced. Publishers fear retaliation from media buying agencies — even though the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats.
Ad Blocks’ Doomsday Scenarios
CBC News;
"We're not against advertising," says Ben Williams, communications and operations director for Eyeo, which operates Adblock Plus. "We think that advertising can be better."
AdBlock Plus mobile browser could devastate publishers
Since I stopped watching broadcast/cable tv and installed an ad blocker, I am always horrified when I actually see an advertisement. Sure, ads can be better, but I also think the products being sold can be better. Stop trying to sell me shit and I’ll stop blocking ads.
Actually, who am I kidding. I won’t stop blocking ads.
Watch: "Sitting Down with the Director of 'Mad Max: Fury Road'"
Mad Max Fury Road is amazing.
Read: "Nitrate days and nights"
There was also an argument for keeping nitrate around on artistic grounds. As Roger put it: “It’s pretty.” Everyone I know agrees. In the late 1970s Kristin and I saw at MoMA a double bill of two nitrate prints, Gance’s La Roue and Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. They glistened. Later, attending the Pordenone Giornate del Cinema Muto and Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato, we saw lots of nitrate prints and were always overwhelmed. The images, especially from very early films, seemed at once sharp in contour and soft in textures.
So nitrate images look great. But why? Some say that nitrate prints have more silver in the emulsion than acetate ones. In This Film Is Dangerous, John Reed suggests that the increased “silver load” yields solidity in shadow areas and vitality in white ones. He also speculates that nitrate-based copies may benefit from projector lenses, screen surfaces, and carbon-arc projection (this last a topic I’ve touched on briefly with respect to Technicolor). If all these factors are in play, the beauty of the copy may be only contingently related to nitrate as such.
Nitrate days and nights
Watch" Do Not Track" by Brett Gaylor
Do Not Track Press Kit;
Do Not Track is a personalized documentary series about privacy and the web economy. If you share data with us, we’ll show you what the web knows about you.
This documentary series will explore how information about you is collected and used. Every two weeks, we will release a personalized episode that explores a different aspect of how the modern web is increasingly a space where our movements, our speech and our identities are recorded and tracked.
We want to explore what this means to you, your family and your friends. From our mobile phones to social networks, personalized advertising to big data, each episode will have a different focus, a different voice and a different look.
Do Not Track
"The greatest threat by far in the west to ideals of free expression is coming not from radical Muslims, but from the very western governments claiming to fight them."
In essence, advocating any ideas or working for any political outcomes regarded by British politicians as “extremist” will not only be a crime, but can be physically banned in advance. Basking in his election victory, Prime Minister David Cameron unleashed this Orwellian decree to explain why new Thought Police powers are needed: “For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens ‘as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone.'” It’s not enough for British subjects merely to “obey the law”; they must refrain from believing in or expressing ideas which Her Majesty’s Government dislikes.
GREATEST THREAT TO FREE SPEECH COMES NOT FROM TERRORISM, BUT FROM THOSE CLAIMING TO FIGHT IT
"Lipsett’s filmmaking opened new directions and possibilities"
A Trip Down Memory Lane by Arthur Lipsett, National Film Board of Canada
Brett Kashmere;
When Lipsett, fresh out of Montreal art school, was hired to work in the Unit B’s animation department in 1958, an independent avant-garde cinema did not exist in Canada. In the absence of tradition, Lipsett blazed a new trail. His pioneering collage films imparted exciting possibilities for handcrafted, personal, cameraless, and found footage filmmaking, both in his time and in the present day.
Inventing a Tradition: Arthur Lipsett and the NFB’s “Studio X”
Arthur Lipsett was a genius.
"Agnès Varda Will Be Awarded Honorary Palme d’Or: Cannes"
Gleaners and I (2000. Dir. Agnes Varda)
Kinsey Lowe for Deadline;
Agnès Varda will be honored for the body of her work at the closing ceremony of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. She’s the first woman selected for this distinction. Only three other directors — Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood and Bernardo Bertolucci — have been recognized in this way for the global impact of their body of work.
From her first film, La Pointe Courte in 1954, Varda’s style reflected elements of what would become the French New Wave although because she preceded that movement her work is more Left Bank in style. Her next feature, Cleo From 5 To 7, was a documentary style look at a singer awaiting results of a biopsy, which foreshadowed Varda’s fascination with human mortality.
Agnès Varda Will Be Awarded Honorary Palme d’Or: Cannes
"When the prime minister returns from his travels, he may find that the political chickens have come home to roost."
Probably the week's most stinging blow came from Harper's home province of Alberta where, on Tuesday, in a stunning election upset, the provincial NDP won a majority, toppling a 44-year reign by the Conservatives.
Only winning an international hockey game would make Canadians more jubilant than they were on Twitter on Tuesday night. The "Orange Crush", named for the NDP colours, had rolled over tar sands country, hard hit by the tanking price of oil, right in the Harper heartland.
Canada's right-wing agenda is coming undone
"This is about trying to scare people."
In January, Canada's then foreign affairs minister, John Baird, signed a "memorandum of understanding" with Israeli authorities in Jerusalem, pledging to combat BDS.
It described the movement as "the new face of anti-Semitism."
A few days later, at the UN, Canadian Public Security Minister Steven Blaney went much further.
He conflated boycotts of Israel with anti-Semitic hate speech and violence, including the deadly attacks that had just taken place in Paris on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a kosher supermarket.
Blaney then said the government is taking a "zero tolerance" approach to BDS.
Coming as it did from the minister responsible for federal law enforcement, the speech alarmed groups that have, to varying degrees, supported boycotts, believing them an effective tool to bring about an end to Israel's occupation and colonization of the West Bank, and its tight grip on Gaza.
Some of these groups had noted that the government changed the Criminal Code definition of hate speech last year, adding the criterion of "national origin" to race and religion.
This change could, they feared, effectively lump people who speak against Israel in with those who speak against Jews.
Micheal Vonn, a lawyer for the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, says the expanded definition is clearly "a tool to go after critics of Israel."
Ottawa cites hate crime laws when asked about its 'zero tolerance' for Israel boycotters
I have no opinion about BDS but I don’t need to have one to know that protest is not a crime in a free and democratic country. Making boycotts and protests against governments a hate crime is Fascist level shit.
What next? Protesting the Canadian government is ‘Anti-Canadian’ hate speech?
Tories deny plan to use hate crime laws against Israel boycotters
Of course they do. Thank goodness they are so trustworthy. Oh wait…
But the response from the Tories appears to contradict the email comments by a public safety ministry spokeswoman, who cited Canada's hate crime laws when asked specifically by CBC News about the government's "zero tolerance" for Israel boycotters.
EMAIL EXCHANGE BETWEEN CBC AND PUBLIC SAFETY DEPARTMENT SPOKESPERSON ON BDS PROSECUTIONS
Also read Glenn Greenwald’s take…
CANADIAN GOVERNMENT SAYS FREE SPEECH IS FOR OFFENDING MUSLIMS — NOT OPPOSING ISRAEL
"What if I disagree with the interpretation of the CSIS agent about what exactly any text I wrote is supposed to mean, how are we going to resolve this conflict?"
Without a clear definition of what “supporting terrorism in general” means, I can’t see how I can be sure to avoid violating this law by accident, whenever I express my views as a Muslim. If I am expected to not violate a law, it should be at least possible for me to understand it. If the law says that the government decides when the law was violated, then for me to make sure I don’t violate the law, I have to either check with the government about every sentence I want to write, or wait for the government to come and arrest me after I write anything, and if they don’t show up, I will know I didn’t violate the law this time!
Terrorism bill C-51 only creates more insecurity
"The term “judicial oversight”, as used by members of the Conservative Party in this debate, is truly a perversion of reality."
Sitting here today through third reading, I heard a great number of propositions from Conservative members of Parliament. I have no doubt that they believe those propositions in their speaking notes to be true, but they are consistently repeating fallacies that I would like to try to explain and deconstruct so that Canadians will understand why these repeated bromides are just not true.
The three fallacies I want to address in the time I have are the following. One notion is that information-sharing, which is part one of the bill, is designed to ensure that our security services, which are the RCMP, CSIS, Canada Border Services Agency, and CSEC, the agencies of policing and intelligence, share information with each other. That was put forward earlier today several times, and that, indeed, is something that must be done, but this bill does not do it.
The second fallacy is that there is judicial oversight in this bill, because judges are involved in one section. I want to deal with that one as well.
The other fallacy is that the terrorism and propaganda sections in the amendments to the Criminal Code in this omnibus bill would actually make it more likely that we could stop youth from being radicalized.
Elizabeth May makes impassioned speech against Bill C-51
The Conservatives are either ignorant or lying. I don’t know which is worse.
"It really does appear the Conservatives have been in power so long that they’ve truly lost touch."
Wow -- this is how Conservative MP Laurie Hawn responded to the now 140+ businesses who have raised concerns in a letter published by the National Post about reckless spying Bill C-51:"[They] should seriously reconsider their business model and their lack of commitment to the values that bind us as Canadians".
Conservative MP Laurie Hawn attacks Canadian Businesses that raised concerns about Bill C-51
"The Harper government's promises to help jobless youth, the disabled, immigrants and illiterate adults fell short last year by almost $100 million."
"The federal government's controversial new anti-terrorism bill has won the approval of the House of Commons."
The Anti-Terrorism Act, also known as Bill C-51, easily passed third reading by a margin of 183 to 96, thanks to the Conservative government's majority and the promised support of the third-party Liberals.
Bill C-51 passes in House of Commons
The 183 members of Parliament who voted for this have no respect for the rights of Canadians.
Read: "Advertising Philosopher: An Interview with Faris Yakob"
Content is the new solution célèbre in advertising, and most of the time we can’t agree as to what it means. Personally, I feel brand content, as we are using the term, is something created by / for a brand that people choose to consume – as opposed to advertising which we essentially pay people to consume, indirectly.
(…) you get linguistic confusion, where you can watch a “television” show online, or what to call shows made by Netflix, which has nothing to do with television, although you can certainly watch it on the screen formerly known as that.
Advertising Philosopher: An Interview with Faris Yakob Part One, Part Two, Part Three
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