Animator Nina Paley's brilliant film, "Sita Sings The Blues," has been wowing the festival circuit but you're probably not going to see it anytime soon. That's because the company that controls the synch rights to the 80+ year old music in the film want so much money for licensing that Paley can't afford to distribute her movie, despite all the critical acclaim.
Question Copyright has a 42-minute interview with Paley on the heartbreak of having to strangle her acclaimed art.
After pouring three years of her life into making the film, and having great success with audiences at festival screenings, she now can't distribute it, because of music licensing issues: the film uses songs recorded in the late 1920's by singer Annette Hanshaw, and although the recordings are out of copyright, the compositions themselves are still restricted. That means if you want to make a film using these songs from the 1920s, you have to pay money — a lot of money.
It's a classic example of how today's copyright system suppresses art, effectively forcing artists to make creative choices based on licensing concerns rather than on their artistic vision.
The music in Sita Sings The Blues is integral to the film: entire animation sequences were done around particular songs. As Nina says in the interview, incorporating those particular recordings was part of her inspiration. To tell her — as many people did — to simply use different music would have been like telling her not to do the film at all. And that's part of her point: artists "internalize the permission culture", which in turn affects the kinds of art they make.
Animator Nina Paley's brilliant film, "Sita Sings The Blues," has been wowing the festival circuit but you're probably not going to see it anytime soon. That's because the company that controls the synch rights to the 80+ year old music in the film want so much money for licensing that Paley can't afford to distribute her movie, despite all the critical acclaim. Question Copyright has a 42-minute interview with Paley on the heartbreak of having to strangle her acclaimed art. After pouring three years of her life into making the film, and having great success with audiences at festival screenings, she now can't distribute it, because of music licensing issues: the film uses songs recorded in the late 1920's by singer Annette Hanshaw, and although the recordings are out of copyright, the compositions themselves are still restricted. That means if you want to make a film using these songs from the 1920s, you have to pay money — a lot of money. It's a classic example of how today's copyright system suppresses art, effectively forcing artists to make creative choices based on licensing concerns rather than on their artistic vision. The music in Sita Sings The Blues is integral to the film: entire animation sequences were done around particular songs. As Nina says in the interview, incorporating those particular recordings was part of her inspiration. To tell her — as many people did — to simply use different music would have been like telling her not to do the film at all. And that's part of her point: artists "internalize the permission culture", which in turn affects the kinds of art they make. How Copyright Restrictions Suppress Art: An Interview With Nina Paley About "Sita Sings The Blues" (Thanks, Karl!)...br clear="both" style="clear: both;"/
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MacWorld begins, CES awaits. Hacker messes up MacWorld keynote. Twitter hacker found out. Copy protection removed from iTunes? PS3 sales up in North America. Motorola to offer phone made from recycled plastic bottles. BestBuy selling refurbished phone. HP new Netbook runs 8-hours. MSFT names new President. Athlon Neo to be released. Cisco doing home networking? [...]
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
While we properly view this as satire today, I would bet my 1940s rollerskates key that down the decades there will be an internet connective device like this. The world does go around and around, don’t you know.
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
While we properly view this as satire today, I would bet my 1940s rollerskates key that down the decades there will be an internet connective device like this. The world does go around and around, don’t you know.
As always, we try to bring you the best and latest in honor-payment commerce schemes. Here's one from a town called Settle in North Yorkshire, England:
A shopkeeper in North Yorkshire who wanted a day off on Boxing Day decided to leave his store open and let his customers help themselves.
Tom Algie, who runs the Practically [...]
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Patrons at Cecil's Jazz Club in West Orange, N.J., savored one of the last nights for smoking in bars and restaurants. (Photo: Marko Georgiev/The New York Times)
A journalist writing for the Financial Times complains that Britain's indoor smoking ban has resulted in more pubs closing and a decline in beer sales of 10 percent.
I [...]
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Eric A. Morris is a researcher at U.C.L.A.'s Institute of Transportation Studies, concentrating on a variety of transportation issues including history, economics, and management. He weighed in here earlier on the gas tax. Here is his first of two posts on road tolls.
Why You're Going to Love Paying to Drive on Roads That Used [...]
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PureSolo.com is a site and free downloadable software that enables musicians to play along to a wide variety of professional, original and well-known music tracks, then record and share the music.
According to the press release, PureSolo.com was founded by a mixture of entrepreneurs who included ex-Goldman Sachs financiers, and a professional trumpeter who has played [...]
PureSolo.com is a site and free downloadable software that enables musicians to play along to a wide variety of professional, original and well-known music tracks, then record and share the music.
According to the press release, PureSolo.com was founded by a mixture of entrepreneurs who included ex-Goldman Sachs financiers, and a professional trumpeter who has played with everyone from Ray Charles, to Kylie, and albums like Pet Shop Boys ‘Very’ and Tina Turner’s ‘Simply The Best’.
What do you think? Are these the backing tracks you’ve been looking for? Go to the site, download the software, mess about with it - and come back and report!
After seeing the post on Palm’s official blog about the airing of a new episode of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels featuring the Treo line of smartphones, I promptly scheduled a recording on my DVR at 4:00PM and 9:00PM (redundancy is to ensure that I would get it!).
It’s nice to see Palm products being featured [...]
Modern Marvels
After seeing the post on Palm’s official blog about the airing of a new episode of the History Channel’s Modern Marvels featuring the Treo line of smartphones, I promptly scheduled a recording on my DVR at 4:00PM and 9:00PM (redundancy is to ensure that I would get it!).
It’s nice to see Palm products being featured on TV, right? Click on the YouTube link to watch the clip!
In our first two installments of 2008 law school stories, we looked back at our favorite law school students of the year and important trends. For our third post in the series of four, we're indulging in one of our favorite topics: law school listservs.
When tightly-wound law students use the e-mail list as their forum for airing grievances, the back-and-forth can get rather catty. A mixture of Type A personalities, the desire to procrastinate, and extreme law school stress has resulted in some explosive exchanges in 2008.
Whether you call them list servs, list serves, listservs, listserves, list-servs, or list-serves, we call them extremely amusing. Find out which three law schools made the "Best of" listserv list, after the jump.
Tales from these three schools may make you think twice, thrice, four times before sending out your next listserv e-mail. In ascending order of audacity, we give you the best law school listservs of 2008.
3. Yale Law School: Yale may top the US News law school rankings, but it barely made the bottom of our listserv listing with its "Prissy Chicks of YLS" exchange. One alliterative YLS student, tired of having her bottom "dampened by prissy potty puddles," blasted the listserv with a plea for other women to either sit their asses down on the toilet seat whilst peeing or to wipe the seat of droplets sent flying after squatting.
We loved that this was sent out on the listserv, rather than written on a note inside the offending stalls. Ah, the inefficient beauty of the modern electronic age. The responses ranged from sympathy, to "this is inappropriate for The Wall," to passing the blame--undergrads have access to the bathroom too, one respondent claimed, while another said the droplets were sprayed by the "force of the vacuum" when those particular toilets are flushed.
Revisit the exchange here. If it makes you laugh until you pee, please make sure to wipe up any droplets.
2. American University Washington College of Law WCL's listserv makes our list for the rejection it suffered. A WCL student who transferred to Harvard Law School decided to rub the noses of the entire listserv in the good news, while asking how to get off the now irrelevant listserv. Said student wrote:
How do I get off this listserv? I transferred to Harvard, and have no need to continue receiving emails from WCL.
In that instant message exchange, inadvertently left on a public computer, two rambunctious WCL students discussed their plans for a blow job appointment. Very romantic. The chat made the rounds around school, and eventually found a home here at ATL.
1. University of Michigan Law School: The University of Michigan listserv was a gift that kept on giving this year. Many an exchange found its way to the ATL inbox in 2008:
'How To Handle This?': How to sum up? One law school student wrongs another by not returning a borrowed cell phone. Profanity ensues. Wronged law school student sends exchange out to the listserv, and asks "how to handle this." Lots of responses later, the answer is clearly, by not sending it out over the listserv.
Stolen Sandwich: Another indignant Michigan student used the listserv to air grievances. After half a Subway sandwich disappeared from the communal fridge, the victim sent a mass e-mail addressed to "the SLEAZE who likes taking people's lunches" with a list of three reasons not to steal. One kind student asked that the listserv not be used for such things, and suggested that the student instead "notify our deans of the problem" if it should happen again.
"Stop Sending Listserv E-mails to ATL!": One Michigan student sent out an e-mail to the listserv that began: "I have one question to ask the ATL e-mail forwarder: Why would you want to make a laughingstock out of *the school you attend?" Appropriately, the e-mail was promptly forwarded to us.
We hate to tell you, but it's not just one e-mail forwarder. We have a whole cadre of Michigan listserv tipsters, and we hope they keep them coming in 2009.
As always, please send hilarious law school listserv e-mails to tips@abovethelaw.com.
Evan Chesler, presiding partner at Cravath, is the latest to raise his voice against the billable hour. In an op-ed piece he penned for Forbes magazine, Chesler says:
I'm a trial lawyer. I bill by the hour. So do the associates who work for me. I have lots of clients, so I can pretty much work, and bill, as much as I want. This needs to be fixed. Yes, you read that correctly.
Of course, partners and clients and even journalists have been calling for or predicting the death of the billable hour for years. As Chesler himself contends in his piece, nobody really likes the billable hour:
The billable hour makes no sense, not even for lawyers. If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.
Of course, there is a reason that the billable hour won't die. More on that after the jump.
Chesler indirectly makes the point for the billable hour, though he almost certainly doesn't intend to:
How much do I bill per hour? We don't make numbers public at Cravath, but you can assume I'm not cheap.
He then goes into an elaborate analogy about expensive contractors, expensive kitchens, and other expenses that I cannot afford.
But the fundamental beauty of the billable hour isn't really addressed.
"I'm not cheap." The billable hour still provides an excellent way for lawyer A to whip it out over lawyer B. "My firm is not cheap," or "the negotiated price point for high end litigation services accurately reflects my added intellectual value, and it's not cheap" doesn't have quite the right ring to it does it?
The legal profession is an adversarial system ... and -- to quote Herm Edwards -- "you play, to win, the game!" The billable hour is an easy "mini-game" to calculate.
Regardless of the efficacy of Chesler's article, it's still pretty interesting that he made the argument in the first place. AmLaw Daily offers this interesting information:
Client fees have been an issue for Cravath recently. In December, when the firm announced it was cutting its associate bonuses to roughly half of the 2007 payments, Cravath made a point of announcing that its fees would be frozen in 2009. This was not completely helpful to corporate customers as the firm refused to publish its fee schedule. The only publicly available fee information from the firm was filed in mid-2008 as part of a long-running employment discrimination case. In that matter, a mid-career litigation partner posted his billable rate at $875 an hour, a $205 an hour increase since 2004.
The billable hour probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But it is nice to dream.
What a day! While Apple was busy announcing, relatively speaking, nothing at MacWorld, 4Chan, the bad boys of the Internet, went ahead and hacked MacRumors' live coverage of the show; Twitter freaked out, which is to be expected. Hardly confusing wrechedness.
What a day! While Apple was busy announcing, relatively speaking, nothing at MacWorld, 4Chan, the bad boys of the Internet, went ahead and hacked MacRumors’ live coverage of the show; Twitter freaked out, which is to be expected. Hardly confusing wrechedness.
It is, however, another high profile “hack,” following Facebook’s and Twitter’s own problems with phishing in recent days. (How people still fall for phishing, I don’t know.) That said, I can’t help but think that many of my fellow Apple watchers went overboard with their reaction to the hack.
Shortly after the keynote began, vandalism started to appear in MacRumors’ commentary. It was mainly childish nonsense—I can understand how people might think the Steve Jobs lines were insensitive, though—that, while annoying, isn’t worth losing any sleep over. (This comment on MacRumor’s message board made me laugh: “The folks who hacked in are straight up losers who have nothing better to do with their pathetic lives.” Casting stones, I see! What is so noble, then, about reading a live stream of a series of product announcements?)
The only people that should be upset is the MacRumors crew, primarily because MacWorld, one would think, is their biggest day of the year; Lord knows their advertisers won’t be too thrilled to learn that the site was so terribly insecure, and have subsequently been associated with this tomfoolery. But for everyone else, the people who reacted as if the sun suddenly ran out of helium, chill out. You were briefly, marginally inconvenienced; you had to wait a few more minutes, or visit another site, to learn that iWork now lets you share documents, for a fee.
If you're in the middle of converting your DVD library to the next big good-for-a-few-years TOTALLY FUTURE PROOF medium, this may take a bit of the sting off. From today until January 16th, Amazon is giving away one Blu-ray disc for every two that you buy.
If you’re in the middle of converting your DVD library to the next big good-for-a-few-years TOTALLY FUTURE PROOF medium, this may take a bit of the sting off. From today until January 16th, Amazon is giving away one Blu-ray disc for every two that you buy.
The deal doesn’t appear to include the entirety of Amazon’s 3,000+ deep Blu-ray library, but there are plenty of worthy movies in there to make use of the deal at least a time or two. Pro Tip: Do not pick The Mist as your free movie. That movie sucked something horrible.
Don't expect Tim Geithner to set any records when it comes to doling out the rest of the Treasury's bailout fund.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/magazines_fortune/~4/ULBGK7xOyu0" height="1" width="1"/
So president-elect Barack Obama wants to make the deployment of broadband Internet networks part of a sweeping stimulus package that he hopes would create new jobs, update the nation's hospitals, schools and other facilities, and lift the United States out of recession.img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/magazines_fortune/~4/7l94XHQHhdg" height="1" width="1"/
So I just came across the new video from Swedish band Fever Ray at Discobelle. I watched it, not knowing anything about the band or anything. Let's just say, I may already have a favorite track and video from 2009. The song is super dramatic and moody, the perfect type of track for a gray snowy day.
The video is even darker. The theme lies somewhere in between suspense and horror. A lone boat on a river, a creepy old house that is littered with either people sleeping or dead bodies, a chick whose face is painted to look like a skull? YES PLEASE!
I've been coveting these Nike SB 720° Dunks, fashioned after Atari's vintage skating-themed arcade game 720°, since they dropped this Summer. Thanks to eBayer jcnice08 who put a pair of size 13's up for competitive bid I finally got 'em, and for a sweet price to boot!
I fucking loved the 720° arade game back in the day and sunk many a quarter into it's boombox-bedecked, oddly-angled-joystick-having shell when I was a kid. Its groundbreakingly original subject-matter, sleek polygonal design, refreshing gameplay, killer-bee attacks and signature "skate or die" warning made for one addictive game.
The kicks themselves caught my eye with the combination of muted and bold colors and the checker-board patern interior. Now that I got I 'em I'm happy to report they look really pretty on my feets.
New York-based emcee Bisc1, who is down with the Embedded Records crew and friendly with Imageyenation homies the Nuclear Family, released his debut album 'When Electric Night Falls' early in 2008. Fresh for '09 he's back with a fancy remixed version of the album, called 'The Strange Love Project: WENF Remixtape,' which boasts remixes from Cassettes Won't Listen, Omega One and Nuk Fammers Scott Thorough and Snafu amongst others. It also comes with a collection of complementary artwork by a whole host of artists who were tasked with interpreting Bisc's music in a visual medium.
To download the "freemixtape" you'll need to give Bisc your name and e-mail address. And if your monitor's set to a low screen resolution you might have trouble viewing the download page which requires a lot of screen space and doesn't have any scroll-bars.
New Millennium ATLiens Hollweerd are back with the follow-up to this Summer's 'Edible Phat' project, another "mixtalbum" called 'Electricity Showroom.' Once again it's another 100% free album-length download, and just like their last one it's packed with eccentric Dirty South awesomeness.
German producer/remixer Kimono Kops has graced these pages with remixes of M.I.A. and Bloc Party, but he's ringing in the New Year with an original cut of his own called "The Trade."
It's sweet, catchy, coolly detached, and yet warmly passionate, and reminds me of Depeche Mode, The Blow, Joy Division, Architecture In Helsinki and The Chromatics all at once!
With all the support and encouragement I got to buy the team, I think its appropriate to share the decision making process behind what happened and why. Buying the Cubs was a unique opportunity to own one of the most storied franchises in sports. Its a team that represents so much to so many, with [...]
With all the support and encouragement I got to buy the team, I think its appropriate to share the decision making process behind what happened and why. Buying the Cubs was a unique opportunity to own one of the most storied franchises in sports. Its a team that represents so much to so many, with such a unique legacy, that when the opportunity arose, I decided
Tuesday, 06 January 2009
Home 
What a day! While Apple was busy 
If you're in the middle of converting your DVD library to the next big 
Even though it's sleeveless, we envision wearing two-tone frock by rag & bone year-round.
These fourteen-karat gold letterpress necklaces have a retro charm (and price tag).
Roku's new and improved Netflix Player is one of the most recession-friendly entertainment options around.
