Are there any copy rights left?

A while back, I linked to a couple of Youtube clips showcasing cartoonist Nina Paley and her reinterpretation of the Indian epic, Ramayana. Well, according to Question Copyright, the licensing fees demanded by the publishers of the 80-odd year-old blues numbers she's included in the film's soundtrack were so exorbitant as to all but kibosh the project, which has been three years in the making.

Ms. Paley is currently trying to raise money to pay back the loan she took out to cover the licensing fees. She's also given a 42-minute interview about the situation, which you can download from archive.org, or watch below.





In other news, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is seeking public input on the contentious issue of Digital Rights Management, or DRM. For those of you watching in black-and-white, DRM is digital code applied to audio files which can make it difficult or impossible to move them from one device to another or to even simply play files that you've legally bought and paid for. Some content providers, most notably Audible.com, include potentially-troublesome DRM in their proprietary audio files even if the author and publisher object to it.

The FTC's comment form can be found here. If you're going to be in Seattle on March 25th, 2009, you can comment in person at an FTC "town hall".

(Many thanks to BoingBoing.net for bringing these and other crucial issues to our attention, day after day!)

Why There Is No Hope - Go ahead, insult my intelligence! I love it!

The following paragraph was taken from an article in the Southern Poverty Law Center's magazine Intelligence Report. The article concerns an installment of The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News. The story under discussion is one on which Mr. O'Reilly asserted that gangs of homosexuals armed with pink pistols were terrorizing American cities and recruiting children into the gay and lesbian lifestyle. To back up his story, O'Reilly turned to Fox “news analyst” Rod Wheeler, who it seems once worked as a corporate security officer for McDonald's.

”...Wheeler told the Report that he spent seven years in professional law enforcement before going to work as a corporate security officer for McDonald's Corp., a job he has since left. ... Just this spring, he publicly warned that the Big Mac is vulnerable to bioterrorist attacks at "250 points" during production.”

Well heck, I'd have to say that the company itself is a bioterrorist threat, and a mighty successful one at that. Thanks to Mickey-D's and their competitors, obesity-related illnesses are at an all-time high, Americans' idea of what food is supposed to look and taste like has been thoroughly debauched, American retail and service-sector workers have only slightly more rights than a Soviet conscript-laborer and real wages are at their lowest level in 60 years. Try and top that, Osama Bin Laden!

Read the whole business here:

http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=274&site_area=1