Getting Around Copyright

http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081120/GJLIFESTYLES/811209906

In light of last week's Copyright lecture, I give you the following article.

Article Date: Thursday, November 20, 2008

"DOVER — Although our movie license restricts us from publicizing the title, the Dover Public Library will have a free showing of the recently-released Disney/Pixar animated film about a small waste-collecting robot who has an adventure in outer space. "

There's another paragraph including time and place, but that's the bulk of the article right there. Too funny - they can get the public performance rights to the movie, but they are still not allowed to say its name. I guess that's one way of getting around copyright, although one could argue that they gave so much of the plot away that there's no other movie that it could possibly be. It makes me wonder just how legal that is.

Obviously, somebody told the library that they weren't allowed to name the movie that would be shown, but I would think that giving that much information would pretty much void that. The copyright guidelines I have state that the rights purchased with the public performance rights vary depending on who is selling them and how much the purchasers are willing to pay, so it's not a cut-and-dried issue, but by my thinking, I'd say that saying all but the name would be violating something, even if you did have the rights to the movie.

5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History

http://mashable.com/2008/11/18/consequences-of-social-media/

An interesting concept. The author here states that because of things like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all sorts of this-is-what-i'm-doing-right-now technology, history will be recorded more accurately than before, and it will be easier then to reminisce with friends about what they were all doing on a certain day in the past.
I'm not sure this is as good of a thing as the author makes it out to be. For one thing, there is no need for me to remember what I was doing on every specific day in the past. And what if it was a bad thing, a fight that happened on that day? Does that need to be dragged out years later and re-aired? Even if the memories are good, the point of a memory is that something memorable happened. What's the point in saying "remember that day last July when we didn't do anything specific at all? Wasn't that awesome?"

The blogger here also states that, like the government using Google maps to track flu outbreaks, we'll be able to get so adept at tracking things like the spread of disease that they won't happen at all. I'm not sure about that. I think things are going to happen anyway, but we may be better able to track and/or contain them. Although I'm not sure what Google has to do with it. Now that coordinates are readily available from any mapping agency, we could do just as well with pushpins on the wall. It's just more convenient to do it online.

Besides - this isn't really changing recorded history. It's changing the way that our current time will be seen by future generations, or how we see ourselves now, but not how we see the past. If that were the point, I'd suggest the author head over to look at Europeana, the new EU-wide free online library that's housing video, audio, written record, and images from national libraries across the continent. That's going to help with recorded history; no more will we simply have to hear "the battle took place there," but we can see video footage (depending on the age of the battle; sources at the moment have video back to 1914 in this database), see digital reproductions of photos and paintings from various time periods, and communicate with people from where such events took place. In my opinion, that trumps the meager arguments of the above blogger any day.

Gadgets To Be Thankful For

In the spirit of the current holiday season (next holiday being Thanksgiving, of course), I give you the following article/slideshow:
http://news.cnet.com/2300-17938_105-87.html?tag=rtcol;newsNow

This article showcases a variety of gadgets that consumers are thankful to have. I appreciate the kudos that the submitters give to the products, but I even more appreciate the title. I've been getting tired of hearing, "I can't live without my ___", when obviously, yea, you could. You just don't want to.

The other thing I liked about this article was the appropriate use of the word "gadget," meaning "something that's fun to play with but that I could probably do without, even though I don't really want to." Although I'm not sure that a laptop counts necessarily as a gadget, I can throw caution to the wind just this one time and call it that.

I especially appreciated post #2, which is a car stereo. The author here has gotten a rather snazzy stereo system, but it is one that she says she "can grow into," so she doesn't feel the need to continually go out and buy new stuff, and she got it because her old system was broken, and not because it was the wrong color or something like that. Honestly, I appreciate that she wrote plenty of candid thoughts on the product and why she likes it instead of just saying, "this is cool, so I bought one."

I also liked post #3, where the author stated that he was at first reluctant to use the product that he, in the end, liked best of all. It's almost a Cinderella story of gadgets. I appreciated that the writer here gave both positives and negatives for the thing as well as saying why he's thankful for it in the end. It makes things less like a product endorsement.