Copyright Office’s online registration hasn’t worked for almost a week — The Copyright Office was created as a department of the Library of Congress in 1897. This latest technical malfunction demonstrates why that arrangement doesn’t best serve the needs of the public.
You can’t make “Game of Thrones†on a YouTube budget: Why “it’s the best of times and the worst of times†for prestige TV — Scott Timberg interviews Rob Levine on the current television renaissance. “All of this sounds abstract, but the ability of networks to fund ambitious shows – most of them with very high production costs – has to do not just with a creative revolution, but an economic one. People pay for television in a way they rarely do for other forms of culture, and when they stop, so will the flow of great programming.”
Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies — A fantastic profile of Skip Lievsay, a master at the craft of sound design for films. “Lievsay is not a household name, but he is famous among people who are. His expertise, fittingly, is what can’t be seen – sound, yes, but also everything else that sound is to the human mind: the way we orient ourselves in relation to spaces, to time, to each other; the way we communicate when language fails; the way our ears know, precognitively, when the dark room has someone lurking in it or when a stranger will be kind. He orchestrates the levels of human perception that most people either fail to examine or lack the ability to notice at all. His job is to make you feel things without ever knowing he was there.”
‘Sample amnesty’ will let artists keep royalties if they declare material lifted from other musicians — “Rather than chase down and sue musicians who have taken its music without permission, EMI is offering an amnesty. From Tuesday, anyone who has sampled the catalogue without getting the sample cleared will be able to come forward, declare it, and agree a legitimate release for the recording. The ‘sample amnesty’, believed to be the first of its kind, will run for 6 months, has been approved by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which owns EMI Music Publishing and is itself co-owned by the Michael Jackson Estate.”
The MovieTube Litigation Part I: Who Needs SOPA? — Devlin Hartline takes a look at Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 65(d)(2) and its application to third party service providers who aid and abet online piracy.
Many new top-level domains have become Internet’s “bad neighborhoods†— “There were many who warned that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’ (ICANN) decision to allow a host of new commercial generic top-level Internet domains was going to create a huge opportunity for Internet scammers and hackers. The approval of top-level domains (TLDs) beyond those assigned to countries and generic ones such as .com, .org, and .net created an opportunity, some in the security industry warned, for criminals to set up “look-alike” domains in the new namespace that aped legitimate sites already registered in .com or elsewhere. Well, the warnings were spot-on.”