DailyDirt: Christmas Dinner Isn't The Same Without...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If you're getting ready for a holiday meal meal with family, you might be planning anything from going to a Chinese restaurant to an elaborate home-cooked turkey. Whatever the case may be, there are more than a few holiday traditions out there. Check out a few of these delicious dishes.

• Here's a Christmas tradition that you might not be aware of: buying a live carp, having it live in your bathtub for a while until Christmas Eve, then serving it for dinner. Apparently, several European countries have practiced this (eg. Slovakia, Poland, the Czech Republic, Austria, Germany and Croatia), and it's a ritual that's not even restricted to Christianity. [url]
• In the Philippines, the Christmas Eve feast after midnight mass is rellenong manok -- a stuffed boneless chicken. This dish is related to the Spanish pollo relleno, but it has changed significantly over the years with influences from American cuisine. [url]
• In Japan, KFC's successful Kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii! (Kentucky for Christmas!) campaign from 1974 has created a tradition of Japanese people eating far more fried chicken than anyone would otherwise expect. Only about one percent of the Japanese population is Christian, but people stand in line for this commercial tradition. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: carp, christmas, culture, dinner, kfc, kurisumasu ni wa kentakkii, meals, rellenong manok, traditions
Companies: kfc

Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Universal Music Takes Down Fun Mashup Of Taylor Swift's 'Shake It Off' And 1989 Aerobics Video

from the because-universal-music-sucks dept

Last year, when Daft Punk released it's super popular single "Get Lucky" the first time I actually heard it was when someone I know linked to a fantastic video of the song put over a danceline from Soul Train. It's pretty amazing how well it works. You can see it here. That video has about 4.5 million views. Not bad.

As you may have heard, Taylor Swift recently came out with a new album, "1989," and she's at war with Spotify over it and making some statements about streaming royalties and such (which we've mostly been avoiding covering because this fight has gone on long enough already and it's silly and mostly misleading).

However, in the last day or so, someone tried to do the equivalent of the Soul Train/Get Lucky video above with Swift's song "Shake it Off." They matched the song to an aerobics competition video from (amusingly) 1989 -- and it worked quite well. It got lots of attention with the Huffington Post and Slate and others writing about it. So, I went to check out the video and got this instead: Yup. Thanks, Universal Music and copyright for taking down something that was getting this song more attention. Of course, multiple other copies appear to have shown up in response (not all identical, but all using versions of the same footage). Those are all up as I post this, but I imagine they're likely to disappear soon too.

It makes you wonder what's the point here? Yes, legally, Universal/Taylor Swift may have the legal right to pull the video down (though, some could make a reasonable fair use argument), but it seems pretty futile. Here are people having fun with her music, doing something of their own free will to get it more attention (I hadn't heard the song at all before this), and then it gets pulled down, because copyright.

In many ways, this is the antithesis of how music worked for ages. Music was always about people sharing and building on the works of others. Someone would create a song, and others would take it, resing it, adapt it, change it, mix it up with other things. That's how culture works. But not so much in an era with strict copyright laws and automated takedown systems. What a shame.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, mashups, shake it off, taylor swift, youtube
Companies: google, universal music, youtube

Chris Hadfield's Outer Space Version Of Space Oddity Is Back... But It Still Never Should Have Gone Away

from the copyright-law-is-ridiculous dept

A year and a half ago, we wrote about the copyright questions related to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recording an astounding cover version of the David Bowie classic "Space Oddity" while actually in space on the International Space Station. We noted the specific copyright issues were mostly unimportant, since Bowie had signed off on the project. Then, back in May of this year, we were taken by surprise when we found out that the video was coming down because the agreement with Bowie was only for a one-year license (Bowie, by the way, in 2002 predicted that copyright would "no longer exist" by 2012).

Today, Hadfield announced that Bowie has once again agreed to allow the video to return to its official YouTube spot (unofficial copies were all over the place). Hadfield actually discusses some of the copyright issues, and notes that getting the rights to put it back took quite a bit of time.

Thus it was with some regret that we took the Space Oddity video off YouTube last May. David Bowie and his publisher had been very gracious. They had allowed his work, his intellectual property, to be made freely available to everyone for a year, and had in fact worked with us and the Canadian Space Agency to make it happen. There was no rancour, and we removed it from YouTube to honour that agreement.

This sequence wasn’t anyone’s fault. The day we took the video down we started to work again to get permission to get it re-posted. But the legal process is careful and exacting, and thus takes time. Despite countless on-line expressions of frustration and desire, it wasn’t anyone’s ill-will or jealousy that kept this version of Oddity off YouTube. It was merely the natural consequence of due process.

This time around, Bowie and his publishers have agreed to a two-year license, meaning we may be going through this ridiculous process again in 2016:

And now, we are so happy to be able to announce that my on-orbit cover of Space Oddity is back up on YouTube. This time we have a new 2-year agreement, and it is there, for free, for everyone. We’re proud to have helped bring Bowie’s genius from 1969 into space itself in 2013, and now ever-forward. Special thanks to Onward Music Ltd, to the Canadian Space Agency and NASA, to musicians Emm Gryner and Joe Corcoran, to videographer Andrew Tidby, to my son Evan, and mostly to Mr. David Bowie himself.

Once again, this process seems silly and unnecessary. If everyone is so happy about this -- and it's reinvigorated the song and attracted plenty of new interest in it -- why not grant a perpetual license? What possible harm is done in granting a perpetual license so that this process doesn't have to be replicated every few years -- other than to the billable hours of the various lawyers who have to negotiate such a silly thing? Copyright defenders often point to the need for copyright to enable agreements like this, but it seems to be enabling a ridiculously inefficient process, rather than making things easier.

In the meantime, here you go... for at least two more years:

Filed Under: chris hadfield, copyright, culture, david bowie, space oddity

Metal Gear Solid Fan-Film Sequel Nixed By Game Maker, Even Though They Didn't Threaten The Original Film

from the grinds-my-metal-gears dept

Not so long ago, we wrote about Konami shutting down a fan-remake of the original Metal Gear, the much-beloved initial entry into the vaunted franchise. In that case, Konami did something of a flip-flop, with a company rep telling the development team initially that they had the go-ahead, only for the company's lawyers to pull the rug out from under the remake at the last moment. Well, flip-flopping seems to be becoming a thing when it comes to Metal Gear fan projects, now that the sequel to a previously released Metal Gear Solid fan-film has been nixed by the lawyers.

The original fan-film was called Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy, and Part 1 was released several years ago. It was generally regarded as mega-awesome. The indie team behind the project received no contact from anyone at Konami or from the Metal Gear Solid team until they met creator Hideo Kojima in person, who told the filmmakers how much he appreciated the film. The team began to work on Part 2. Then, apparently because they just couldn't freaking help themselves, the Konami brass shut the project down. You can hear from the director himself, in a "Farewell to Philanthropy" video put out.

It takes a better person than I for him to say these words.

"We knew this might've happened. And we have nothing against the creators of Metal Gear, the saga that we all love and will continue to love."

Good for Giacomo Talamini. He's much stronger with the jedi routine than I am, because I can assure you that if I were in his shoes I would be going full on dark-side. Mind-choking, sand-people killing, the whole bit. It's one thing to have Konami needlessly shut down a fan project instead of simply working out a zero-sum or cheap licensing arrangement, since the production of this film does absolutely nothing to harm the MGS franchise, and may indeed help spur it on further. But for the filmmakers to have received no negative feedback from Konami on their first film, and for the creator of the damned franchise to express his support, only to have the lawyers lose their lunch partway through the filming of the second film would be too much for me to bear.

Hell, it's too much for me to bear as a gamer and a fan.

Filed Under: culture, fan films, metal gear solid, ownership, trademark
Companies: konami

When Even The New Yorker Is Doing Long Features On The Ridiculous State Of Copyright Law...

from the time-to-fix-things dept

This article has been out for a few weeks now, but I've finally had a chance to read through the whole thing. Louis Menard, over at the New Yorker, has a long piece on just how messed up copyright laws are today, going over many of the same grounds we have (for nearly two decades). The piece itself is a sort of book review of Peter Baldwin's new The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle, but basically repeats the main point: copyright law as it is today really doesn't make much sense. The first half of the article is a great look at the problems of copyright law, but unfortunately, the second half of the article goes off the rails by leaping on familiar and misleading tropes about why people feel the way they do about copyright. Still, the first half covers a number of copyright's problems quite well.

Among other things, it takes on the massive orphan works problem:

As it is, few creations outlive their creators. Of the 187,280 books published between 1927 and 1946, only 2.3 per cent were still in print in 2002. But, since there is no “use it or lose it” provision in copyright law, they are all still under copyright today. Patry, in his recent book, “How to Fix Copyright,” notes that ninety-five per cent of Motown recordings are no longer available. Nevertheless, you can’t cover or imitate or even sample them without paying a licensing fee—despite the fact that your work is not competing in the marketplace with the original, since the original is no longer for sale....

In the case of Motown, at least you know whom to call. In the case of many books and photographs, the rights holders are unknown; in other cases, it’s expensive to track down the heirs or the legatees or the firms, possibly no longer in existence, to whom the copyright belongs. And so, for fear of being sued and having their work pulped or otherwise erased from the universe, people avoid the risk. Patry says that the BBC has a million hours of broadcasts in its archives that cannot be used, because no one knows who holds the rights.

But much of the article talks about how, even if many of these debates have gone on for decades, the internet has really brought the problems into stark contrast:

Before the Internet, the social cost of this obstacle was minimal. Only a few people had the time and the inclination to travel to where they could see or listen to archived broadcasts. But today, when everything can be made available to the entire world at minimal expense, it seems absurd to hold enormous amounts of content hostage to the threat of legal action from the odd descendant. “That a vast existing cultural patrimony, already paid for and amortized, sits locked behind legal walls, hostage to outmoded notions of property, when at the flick of a switch it could belong to all humanity—that is little short of grotesque, ” Baldwin concludes. Yet the odd descendant has the law on her side. She has the power to pulp.

The article makes some really great points, but also dips into some unfortunate claims. It's particularly disappointing that Menard trots out the whole "Hollywood v. Silicon Valley" trope in simplified caricatures:

Let’s call the first type of business Hollywood and the second type Silicon Valley. Hollywood, along with the music industry and the publishing industry, which are the other major analog-era corporate interests, makes money by producing and distributing content. Silicon Valley makes money by aggregating other people’s content. Hollywood fears pirates; Silicon Valley fears paywalls. Silicon Valley accuses Hollywood of “monopoly” and “artificial scarcity,” and talks about the democracy of the Internet. Hollywood accuses Silicon Valley of “free riding” and “contributory infringement, ” and talks about protecting the dignity of the artist. But each side is only trying to defend its business model.

But that's not even close to accurate. Because, as we've discussed at length, "Silicon Valley" has also built all sorts of new innovations and tools that have helped "Hollywood" make a hell of a lot more money -- often in ways that have little to do with copyright protection.

From there, Menard pulls in a few more misleading (to sometimes wrong) tropes about the copyright fights -- including that only academics care about the length of copyright terms, and that they really don't like copyright just because it makes it harder for them to access other academic research. It also suggests (falsely) that the DMCA's "notice and takedown" process means "you can post almost anything as long as you take it down when the rights holder complains." It doesn't. At all.

Menard almost entirely ignores the free speech implications of copyright law and completely skips over how copyright can be, and often is, used as a veto on innovation. The article also ends in an odd way, suggesting that freelancers should assign their copyrights to big companies "who have the muscle to protect" them. Huh? It's a disappointing end to an article that had plenty of promise in its first half. It almost feels like Menard rushed the second half, just repeating silly old stories about "the copyright wars" in trying to find a way to end the article. That's unfortunate. Given the first half, it seems like a more interesting road to have traveled would have been to explore ideas and concepts for copyright reform, and how to bring the law into the modern era, making it more current and reasonable.

Filed Under: copyright, copyright wars, culture, free speech, internet, out of date, peter baldwin

Once Again: The Sky Is Rising When It Comes To Creative Output

from the why-so-much-doom-and-gloom? dept

A few years ago, we released our Sky is Rising report, looking at the state of the global entertainment industry, in which we found that, contrary to the story of gloom and doom that was being spread by some special interests, the real story was quite exciting. What we found when we looked at the actual numbers was that we are in a true renaissance of creativity, with massively more content -- video, movies, books, music and video games -- being produced these days than ever before. Perhaps more importantly, we saw that the amount of money being spent on these things also continued to increase -- though it didn't always flow through the same channels as in the past. This combination of factors -- more content producers, many new channels -- often led some people to insist that the industry was collapsing, rather than the truth, that it was growing rapidly, just in more distributed ways. That represented certain challenges for many people in the creative industries -- but from a public policy standpoint, it certainly suggested that things were pretty good -- not deathly bad, as was often implied. Last year, we came out with a follow up report that focused on Europe -- noting a similar pattern in various European countries, though with some countries facing unique and interesting challenges. However, one interesting aspect of that report was that we saw a stronger pattern of success in those areas where innovation was allowed to thrive and flourish, rather than be held back.

Today we're launching the third report in this series, The Sky is Rising, 2014 Edition, focused on the United States in particular. And, once again, we see the same basic story. Lots of growth. Tons more content being produced. Lots of stories of new business models and artists connecting with their fans in new and unique ways. We're seeing new markets develop, along with new tools to help those markets. But the key story is the same as always: there is more content being produced today than ever before, and it's helped along by innovative technology, as the two often go hand in hand. More content than ever before is being produced, and content creators have more new and powerful ways to create, to distribute, to build a fan base, to connect and to build a business model -- and that's quite exciting.

At the same time, there's a push underway to reform our copyright laws -- something that we agree needs reform. And, yet, strangely, much of the rhetoric around reform has been based on the idea that the content world is suffering, or that there's some sort of "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley" battle going on. The actual evidence suggests no such thing at all. Rather, it suggests that when innovation is allowed to flourish nearly everyone benefits. More content creators are able to do much more and create much more content. More fans are able to experience and consume much more content while supporting content creators in new and unique ways. From a public policy standpoint, it seems like things have been trending in the right way for a long time. If there's to be any sort of public policy change it should be to try to speed up that process, rather than to slow it down.

You can read the full report below. Once again, as with the previous editions of this report, we'd like to thank CCIA for sponsoring and publishing the paper.

Filed Under: books, copyright, copyright reform, culture, film, innovation, movies, music, sky is rising, tv, video, video games

YouTube Has Paid $1 Billion To Copyright Holders Via ContentID; What Happened To Stories About It Destroying Content?

from the curious... dept

Remember those days when YouTube was "killing" the entertainment industry. You don't even have to look back very far. There are artists who still insist that YouTube is killing creativity and is nothing but a den of piracy. Viacom spent years trying to argue that YouTube was the equivalent of Napster, but for video, until that lawsuit finally settled just a few months ago.

However, reality is looking pretty different these days. A couple months ago, Businessweek had a big cover story about how YouTube has become Hollywood's "hit factory", and just this week, YouTube revealed that its ContentID program, which allows copyright holders to monetize unauthorized uses of their works, had paid out over $1 billion since its inception. This isn't to say there aren't problems with ContentID. We've noted in the past the problems with false flagging, revenue diversion and other issues -- but the simple fact is that it appears to be making money for content creators. Actually, quite a lot of money.

And this brings us back to a key point that we've hit on over and over and over again: given a chance to operate, these business models tend to come about without the need to pass draconian copyright laws and without the need to completely takedown and destroy businesses. When allowed to thrive, innovate and experiment, it's only natural that workable business models develop. We've seen it over and over again in the industry. The recording industry insisted radio was going to kill the entire industry -- and then it made the industry into a massive juggernaut. The movie industry insisted that the VCR would be its "Boston Strangler," but four years later home video outpaced the box office in generating revenue for the studios.

The continuous claims of "Hollywood vs. Silicon Valley" on copyright issues is so clearly bogus. As we've argued for years, it's the innovations of the tech industry that keep saving the entertainment industry over and over and over again. There's no "war" between the two when it appears that Silicon Valley is the one supplying the "weapons" that's making Hollywood very, very wealthy.

But when will those folks in Hollywood learn this? Instead, they keep attacking these new services, demanding more copyright "enforcement" and blocking these forms of innovation. Who knows what other innovations might have occurred had the industry not shut down Veoh. Or Grokster. Before the US government completely shut down Megaupload, it was experimenting with new revenue models were attracting the interest of lots of famous musicians. Imagine if that had been allowed to continue. Who knows what other kinds of cool business models would be in place today making more money for artists.

Attacking innovation seems to be the legacy entertainment industry's default position, no matter how many times that innovation actually opens up new markets, provides new revenue streams and makes pretty much everyone better off. Oh, except some of the gatekeepers. Those guys tend not to be able to keep quite as much of the revenue generated by these new platforms. And maybe, just maybe, that's the real reason they're so angry about innovation.

Filed Under: business models, contentid, copyright, culture, experiments, hollywood, innovation, silicon valley, youtube
Companies: google, youtube

Why A 'Declaration of Digital Human Rights' Gets It Wrong

from the nobody-said-it-would-be-easy dept

Back in November 2013, the French think-tank Forum d’Avignon published a manifesto entitled, "Principles of a universal declaration for Internet users' and creators' rights in a digital era," which tried to define the concept of an individual's "digital cultural data." The same group has now put together what it rather grandly calls a "Preliminary Declaration of the Digital Human Rights". That might sound like a good idea, but as Techdirt has discussed before, thinking in terms of "rights" and "laws" isn't always the best way to proceed in these sort of areas.

That's certainly the view of a heavyweight collection of French civil society organizations, which have issued a statement about what they see as key problems with the declaration (via @maliciarogue.). First of all, they point out that the group behind the declaration is not entirely disinterested here:

It is worth noting that the Forum d’Avignon is a French think tank whose main goal is to deepen the links between culture and economy. We hereby denounce the Forum's use of digital privacy's debate to its own profit, that is in order to reinforce copyright.

One big problem is the absence of any appreciation of the importance of the public domain:

Article 5 of the Declaration poses that « any use of the data as a creative work » is subject to prior consent of the individual. Such a formulation completely ignores the fundamental role of the public domain as well as the exceptions and limitations to copyright, which are all essential in balancing and preserving the system.

The statement also points out that trying to apply copyright law to personal data is unsatisfactory, because it puts the onus on individuals to defend their privacy:

Similarly, the application of copyright law to personal data is a dangerous solution for it is based on the sole individual responsibility and control of the use of data which identify oneself. The French State Council and the National Digital Council rightly warned against such a conceptual framework as it could lead to greater discrimination and therefore inequalities in the protection of privacy. We are not all equal with the exploitation and protection of our data and it is essential that common rules exist.

The statement concludes:

We therefore emphasise that personal data is not a form of creative work and must not be considered as such. Equally, a form of creative work is not personal data and must not be considered as such.

The protection of personal data is a fundamental stake in the digital age. It needs to be balanced with freedom of expression and the right to information.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: copyright, culture, declaration of human rights, france, human rights, public domain
Companies: forum d'avignon

'Piracy' That Creates Amazing New Music

from the here-we-go-again dept

More than five years ago we first wrote about Kutiman, an Israeli musician who created an album of incredible new music simply by editing together a bunch of unrelated YouTube clips. The end result is... astounding. I still listen to it frequently. In some ways this is a "mashup" or a "remix" but it's unlike most that you've heard. Many remixes take a known recorded song and change it around or take a few different recorded songs and mix them all together. Those can be amazing too. I've found that by artists like Girl Talk or D.VELOPED often create music that I, personally, find to be more enjoyable than the originals. But Kutiman is different, and takes it to a new level by taking totally random bits of music -- often amateurs messing around -- on YouTube, and converting them into astoundingly complex and beautiful songs.

We've highlighted some of the examples in the past, but here are two examples from that first album, of taking a random video that most wouldn't consider to be anything all that special and turning into a part of an amazing project. We'll start with taking a simple kid playing a scale on a trumpet which becomes integral to an entire (great) funk song. Here's the trumpet bit: And here's the full song: Or how about this basic trombone solo becoming such a haunting and compelling part of this dub reggae song (trombone comes in at 42 seconds). Here's the trombone: And here's the full song: Kutiman is back again with a new track from a follow up album of songs clipped together from YouTube (the full album is expected to be released soon), and once again, it's quite amazing: And yet, some might argue that this is all nothing more than "piracy" or "infringement." Others may argue that this is not "real" music because it's just "remixing." I have a hard time taking any of those arguments seriously. Here is someone using those pieces as instruments to create a beautiful new work. It takes nothing away from the old work.

Unfortunately, however, there's already been some (now resolved) controversy with this new work. One of the cello players, Deryn Cullen, featured in this work apparently complained to Kutiman. It's this video in which she plays Bach's Prelude from Cello Suite no 2 in d minor. She apparently was initially upset and felt that Kutiman should have first asked permission to use her performance. After they talked it over, and she understood the nature of the project (and, perhaps, because she saw how much positive attention it was getting), she agreed that she was happy to be a part of it. It's good that they were able to have a discussion on this and come to a mutual appreciation -- but it's yet another unfortunate situation that one comes to when we live in a world of "permission culture," where some people feel that you should always get permission first. And to sort of prove how silly this is, one need only ask whether or not Cullen received permission from the estate of Johann Sebastian Bach before performing his piece.

I'm happy it worked out in the end, but imagine if every time someone wanted to create new music they had to get permission from everyone up and down the chain whose work played a part? What's happening here, with Kutiman, is so blatantly obviously brilliantly creative, new and original -- and yet, under our broken copyright laws it might be deemed "infringing" by some, "derivative" by others, and illegal by many. Isn't that a problem? Isn't the idea behind copyright law to encourage new and beautiful works like these? Adding the friction and tollbooth of "permission culture" to the process would make this kind of artwork impossible, and that would be a loss to everyone.

Filed Under: creation, creativity, culture, kutiman, mashup, music, piracy, remix, youtube

Only Surviving Recording Of The Very First Superbowl Is Because A Fan Recorded It, But You Can't See It, Because Copyright

from the dirty-pirates dept

We've written a few times in the past about how the entertainment industry's woeful job of preserving and archiving old works has resulted in culture being lost -- but also how unauthorized copies (the proverbial "damn dirty pirates") have at least saved a few such treasures from complete destruction. There was, for example, the "lost" ending to one of the movie versions of Little Shop of Horrors that was saved thanks to someone uploading it to YouTube. Over in the UK, a lost episode of Dad's Army was saved due to a private recording. However, Sherwin Siy points out that the very first Super Bowl -- Super Bowl I, as they put it -- was basically completely lost until a tape that a fan made showed up in someone's attic in 2005. Except, that footage still hasn't been made available, perhaps because of the NFL's standard "we own everything" policy. From Cracked:

It sounds crazy nowadays, but during the '60s, NBC and CBS, who broadcast Super Bowl I, essentially had no archiving policy for anything other than primetime shows, so neither one kept a copy of the historic game beyond a few random clips. And seeing as home video technology was still a few years away, the broadcast footage was considered lost forever until a mostly-complete recording turned up in a Pennsylvania attic in 2005, made by a fan at a video production company.

And we have to emphasize "mostly" here -- the copy is missing much of the third quarter, the entire halftime show, and several smaller bits. The Paley Center for Media tried reconstructing these parts using official sideline footage and fan-made audio recordings, but the last we heard about the project was way back in 2011, right around the time the NFL started claiming sole copyright ownership of the footage. Probably a coincidence.

Other reports explain in more detail that, indeed, the NFL stepped in to "protect" the work it had failed to originally protect:

The NFL has claimed ownership of the broadcast itself and while the Paley Center was allowed to keep a copy of the game, it cannot show it without permission from the owner of the videotapes, who reportedly would like to sell the tapes.

The original WSJ article about all of this details the NFL's claim to the man who found the tape, who has remained nameless.

Mr. Harwood, the attorney, says he contacted the NFL in 2005 about the tape. He says the league sent him a letter on Dec. 16, 2005 claiming the NFL was the exclusive owner of the copyright. Mr. Harwood says the NFL offered his client $30,000 for the tape and his client declined. Mr. Harwood said his client would like to sell the tapes and make them available to the public if the legal issues can be resolved.

So the NFL failed to save it. A fan did. And now no one can see it because the NFL is claiming copyright over the footage it failed to protect. Great to see copyright "protecting" culture once again, huh?

Filed Under: copyright, culture, football, history, recording, superbowl, superbowl i
Companies: nfl