Almost a month ago, I asked you guys to email me your movies to demo@vemobile.com and let me know the ID number the Type Pad/Video Egg service emailed back to you, so I could use it within my Type Pad blog and do some kind of collaborative video thing.
Not one person emailed me about this, and I find that kind of hard to believe. Now I would appreciate it if those of you who almost did it didn’t, for one reason or another. Do you just now have video cell phones? (I sure don’t, so I can understand that 🙂
I’m wondering what will happen if I email a non-cell phone video to the same address, so I’m going to try that, and just make it a small enough file so it won’t upset any file size limitations.
I’m also wondering what people think about these flash-only solutions for video hosting that seem to be popping up everywhere. Does it bother anybody but me that the video can’t be reused once it’s compressed and locked up in this way?
I’ll let you know how it goes. But please, if you have a second, give me some feedback on one or both of these issues at lisa@lisarein.com
thanks!
Songs From The Commons #7 – Why Grokster Shouldn’t Be Any More Responsible For When It Is Misused Than Smith And Wesson
This show just went up today:
Why Grokster Shouldn’t Be Any More Responsible For When It Is Misused Than Smith And Wesson
As always there is a vocal and music only version available…
Update 12/5/05 3:16pm – I had a link to my old show until now. so sorry about that!
Here’s the w/vocals version and the music only version.
New Songs From The Commons Up – A Better Introduction to Grokster – A Modern Day Sony Betamax Case
This show takes a shot at explaining the similarities between the landmark Universal vs. Sony (Betamax) case of 1984 and the current MGM vs. Grokster case that went in front of the Supreme Court last summer.
I only touch upon it briefly in my show. There’s a more complete explanation on the website.
Songs From The Commons #6
The point then, and now, is that, historically, in this country, we choose to criminalize the misuse of a technology, rather than criminalizing the technology itself. Guns, for example, are only made for killing. Killing and maybe target practice. It’s what they do. Depending on the circumstances surrounding when the killing takes place, such killing is legal or not. But do we hold gun manufacturers responsible for when gun technology is misused? Of course not. The concept is comical. In fact, legislation was recently passed to protect gun manufacturers from such liability. According to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, even President Bush “believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others.”
Unfortunately, when the Supreme’s had a chance to decide MGM vs. Grokster on these grounds, it chose to do something else – to avoid these issues entirely, and create a new kind of indirect infringement: active inducement. Active Inducement takes place if someone intends to make another person infringe and then takes active steps to encourage it.
The court basically said there were two types before (contributory and vicarious) and now there’s a new, third kind, called “inducement.” That’s what the court sent back to the Central District of California Court (9th Circuit) to determine if the defendants were actively inducing infringement.
So there used to be just two kinds of “indirect” infringement, vicarious and contributory.
“Vicarious” is when you’re supervising people and making money from it, like at the Flea Market, if the owners of the Flea Market knew that stolen goods were being sold there. (A CA court ruled that Napster did this.)
“Contributory” infringement is where you’re supplying the means with knowledge that it will be used illegally. Like if I rented a bunch of CD burners to a bootleger and knew what he was going to do with them. Now, after Grokster, there’s a third, where I intend to make you infringe and take active steps to encourage it. That’s the test laid out by the decision…
Note: Although there was a development last week in MGM vs. Grokster, where Grokster settled, agreed to shut down, and agreed to pay $59 million in damages, Grokster was not the only named defendant in the case. StreamCast, Sharman Networks (distributor of Kazaa), and the founders of Kazaa are still in litigation.
All Your Google Base Are Belong To Us
Google has a new feature now that will let you add metadata about your content to its search engine. (I think 🙂
Stephen Hawking At The Oakland Paramount
I saw Stephen Hawking last night at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California.
It was my birthday, and I couldn’t think of any place I’d rather be — hanging out with one of my heroes thinking about the birth of the Universe.
His talk was really cool. He postulated upon the question of “when the universe began,” and likened it to trying to go “further south than the south pole.” He also joked about being imprisoned by the Inquisition for daring to ponder the question — an act one pope or another likened to questioning God.
The Q and A portion of the lecture was particularly neat. Here are some of the questions and answers that I could remember. (I wrote down some notes right after the show while they were fresh in my mind — so two of these are not exactly word for word – but damn close – and the other two quoted answers are exact.)
Q: What do you think of President Bush’s plan to send a man to the moon?
S.H.: “Stupid. Robots are cheaper to send, and you don’t have to bring them back.”
Q: What do you think of the United States’ position on Stem Cell Research?
S.H.: England and most of the developed world has the view that there are many opportunities in Stem Cell Research. The U.S. will fall behind.
Q: If you had a chance to meet Issac Newton or Marilyn Monroe, which would you pick?
S.H.: Marilyn. I heard Issac was a disagreeable sort.
Q: What’s your IQ?
S.H.: “I have no idea.” People that care about IQ’s are losers.
Updated 11-12 – I almost forgot my favorite question:
Q: You were depicted on the Simpsons. How did you like that?
S.H.: “I think the Simpsons is the best thing on American Television.”
He’s got a new book out I can’t wait to read, A Briefer History of Time.
Help Me Test Out Type Pad’s New Video Egged Mobile Upload Feature
Update – 11-11-05 – OK I haven’t received one email from you guys – is it that you don’t have time? That you can’t email movies from your phone? That you think your movies aren’t good enough? 🙂
No seriously, just shoot some video and email it to “demo@vemobile.com” and then wait to get the SMS message back, retrieve it, and email me at “lisa@lisarein.com” with the Video ID number. — thanks!
I’ve been messing around with Type Pad’s new video upload feature, courtesy of Video Egg, but my friends close by with camera phones are having trouble emailing their videos to me…
So I’m just going to put out a general call to my readers to please email their camera phone video to demo@vemobile.com, and then email me the “Video ID” they will SMS back to you. Then I can enter it into my test blog interface. (See my test blog here to bring up the clip.)
So far, I’m both excited and discouraged by this video upload implementation. It’s definitely exciting for Type Pad to offer this kind of service — a packaged blogging and video upload service.
It’s the right idea, for sure. But there are a few annoying details of the implementation.
For instance, only clips of two minutes or less are permitted (which greatly reduces the probability of my using the service, to be honest), but that’s not my main concern, which is this; I have a problem with the use of Flash as the delivery format, because it effectively kills any hope for reuse of the video footage.
In addition, Video Egg is compressing the video before it wraps it up in Flash, and the effect it has on the video is quite significant.
Check out the original version of this clip (Wendy Seltzer from Foo Camp 2003). Then compare it to the VideoEgged version on my typepad blog.
Nevertheless, this development is quite significant, and I’m looking forward to testing out the Mobile upload feature. I had to borrow a PC from a friend, since Type Pad’s Video Egg plug-in doesn’t work on the Macintosh platform yet. There are some features I haven’t tested yet, like the Digital Camera upload, or the Mobile Phone upload, which I hope you’re going to help me sort out today and tomorrow (while I’ve got my friend’s PC laptop close by).
Thanks in advance for sending me some great videos!
lisa
My Interview With The All Camera Phone Music Video Director Grant Marshall
It’s my first new post for O’Reilly’s Digital Media website:
How To Shoot Broadcast Quality Music Videos On A Camera Phone
This is a pretty neat story from beginning to end — a lesson in what can be accomplished when someone sticks to a vision and sees it through to the end. Right on to Blast Records and The Presidents of the United States of America (P.U.S.A.) for taking a chance too!
Check out the Making Of video that Grant let me host, too.
This development is more than a novelty. It’s a working demonstration of the natural artistic progression towards the integration of new mobile video technology within existing art forms.
I predict that it will soon be commonplace for bands to shoot mobile phone-based video of interviews, practices, performances, songs-in-progress, or whatever, and post it to their websites…
Mobile phone cameras can only record at 1/3000 of standard broadcast quality, and don’t capture movement very well. In addition these phones only recorded at 10 frames per second, even though the manufacturer had promised that they’d record at 15 fps.
During the shoot, the phones were so temperamental that they’d just turn off at any point without warning, so Grant had the band play the song 24 times at half speed in order to provide enough footage to edit together one good take of the song.
Former Spam King Jerry Reynolds (of Fargo, ND) Files Slapp Suits Trying to Squash The Free Speech of People Exposing His Spammy Ways
In the “No way, this can’t be happening in America” department, we have good citizens David Ritz and Ed Falk being sued for saying the truth about Jerry Reynolds being a spammer on a usenet group over 6 years ago.
You can download a zip of all the legal docs here.
Here’s how Mary Hodder explains it:
He’s apparently filed (complaint here) SLAPP suits against two people, David Ritz and Ed Falk, who found that in the late 1990’s, he was the largest spammer online (email wasn’t so big then, but he had the largest porn spam operation on UUnet, with Sexzilla and Netzilla which were registered to Jerry Reynolds). And now he’s using C&D’s and these lawsuits to get whatever traces of the information that documents his spam and porn operation off of Google including search results and groups. He denies owning the site, btw, even though he was listed as administrative contact.
Reynolds has even gone so far as to subpoena Ritz’ and Falk’s computers and put a gag order on one, but the other one is out of jurisdiction (the suit is in North Dakota, though Falk lives and does business in CA).
Tomorrow, Ed Falk has to give a copy of all his computer harddrives to lawyers, who are still fighting over the jurisdiction issue. I think though that if this case went before a judge in CA, it would immediately be dismissed. All the evidence shows Reynolds was the SpamKing in 1999. Unfortunately, though, the case won’t be resolved before Reynolds costs these guys thousands of dollars, and not before he has stopped at least Ritz from speaking out about the case.
The most recent lawsuits and C&D’s have been filed by John Doe’s or by Reynold’s company, Sierra Corporate Designs.
The thing that is so despicable about this is not that he was once the biggest spammer and has moved on to other sorts of (legitimate?) business, but rather, that he would use the courts to have a few pieces of information about his old spam work removed, as if he were trying to rewrite history and squash people’s rights to free speech. He was tracked as a spammer early in the 90’s, but hit a peak in 1997 with porn spam, at least as far as UUNet / Usenet was concerned. He actually helped kill that community by turning it into a garbage heap for spam. And now he wants to evade responsibility for it. And in the process, cost Ritz and Falk a lot of money and time, defending the truth. Disgusting!
Read more about the lawsuit here.
Arnold’s Neighborhood – Remember Folks, He’s Still A Republican
This is precious. Arnie tries to separate himself from the other Repubs, but don’t let him fool you.
He conspired with Kenneth Lay on the fake blackouts of 2001, and he’s doing his best to tow the Republican line for Bush.
Remember to vote NO on everything this Tuesday, November 8!
Arnold’s Neighborhood
Andy Rooney Gets Heavy – The Military Industrial Complex Has Taken Over The U.S. – Military-Industrial Complex Speech, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961
This is from the October 2, 2005 program of
60 Minutes.
This contains the “Military-Industrial Complex Speech” by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.
Andy Rooney’s really a stand up guy! One of the few on television these days to have the courage to tell it like it is.
Video – Andy Rooney On The Military Industrial Complex Taking Over The U.S. (6 MB)
Audio – Andy Rooney On The Military Industrial Complex Taking Over The U.S. (MP3 4 MB)
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“We must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disasterous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
Andy: “Well, Ike was right. That’s just what’s happened.”
Complete Transcription:
I’m not really clear about how much a billion dollars is. But the United States, our United States, is spending five billion, six hundred million dollars a month ($5,600,000,000.00) fighting this war in Iraq that we never should have gotten into. We still have 139,000 soldiers in Iraq today. Almost 2,000 Americans have died there. For what?
Now, we have the hurricanes to pay for. One way that our government pays for a lot of things is by borrowing from countries like China. Another way the government is planning on paying for the war and the hurricane damage is by cutting spending for things like medicare perscriptions, highway construction, farm payments, Amtrak, national public radio, loans to graduate students. Do these sound like things you’d like to cut back on to pay for Iraq?
I’ll tell you where we ought to start saving, on our bloated military establishment. We’re paying for weapons we’ll never use. No other country spends the kind of money we spend on our military. Last year, Japan spent $42 billion dollars, Italy spent $28 billion dollars, Russia spent only $19 billion. The United States spent $455 billion. We have 8,000 tanks, for example. One Abrams tank costs 150 times as much as a Ford stationwagon. We have more than 10,000 nuclear weapons. Enough to destroy all of mankind. We’re spending $200 million dollars a year on bullets alone. That’s a lot of target practice.
We have 1,155,000 enlisted men and women, and 225,000 officers. One officer to tell every five enlisted soldiers what to do. We have 40,000 Colen and 870 generals.
We had a great commander in WWII, Dwight Eisenhower. He became President, and on leaving the White House in 1961 he said this:“We must guard against the aquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disasterous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.”
Well, Ike was right. That’s just what’s happened.
The U.S. Spends 455 billion dollars a year on the military.
