Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 10th 2009
Links for March 10th 2009:
- Failed Negotiations – YouTube Will Block Music Videos in the UK [NYTimes.com] – “YouTube just announced that it wasn’t able to reach a new deal with the UK’s Performing Rights Society (PRS for Music), which collects licensing fees for musicians and labels in the UK. Because of this, YouTube will now block access to all premium music videos for users in the UK. According to YouTube, the licensing fees that PRS was looking for were “simply prohibitive” and Google would lose a “significant amount of money with every playback.” YouTube also bemoans that PRS was unwilling to provide it with a comprehensive list of songs that were actually included in the license. … YouTube goes out of its way to state that this move has nothing to do with the record labels. Patrick Walker, YouTube’s Director of Video Partnerships, Europe, Middle East and Africa, lays the full blame on PRS for Music – and PRS, of course, blames Google for being too greedy.”
- THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube – Remix culture hard at work – music videos created entirely out of YouTube videos – lots of samples – nicely done.
- Australians refused insurance because of poor genes [WA Today] – “Australians have been refused insurance protection because of their genetic make-up, researchers have shown in the first study in the world to provide proof of genetic discrimination. Most cases were found to relate to life insurance. In one instance, a man with a faulty gene linked to a greater risk of breast and prostate cancer was denied income protection and trauma insurance that would have let him claim if he developed other forms of cancer. The findings have led to renewed calls by experts for policies to ensure the appropriate use of genetic test results by the insurance industry.” (Gattaca!)
- Baby swinging video case warning [The Age] – “The lawyer representing an Australian charged for republishing, on a video-sharing site, a video of a man swinging a baby around like a rag doll says that if the case proceeds every Australian who surfs the net could be vulnerable to police prosecution. Chelsea Emery, of Ryan and Bosscher Lawyers in Maroochydore, represents Chris Illingworth, who was charged with accessing and uploading child abuse material. Illingworth, 61, published the three-minute clip on Liveleak, a site similar to YouTube but focused on news and current events. Illingworth has uploaded hundreds of videos to the website. The one he was charged over, thought to have been created by a Russian circus performer, had already been published widely across the internet and shown on US TV news shows. The clip can still be found online and has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.” (I’m staggered that this case is still moving forward!)
Celebrity Twittering
I have been meaning to write a very long, complex and cerebral post about the seemingly exponential growth of Twitter in the last few months, but as my list of related bookmarks grows, the time to read them runs screaming, so I thought I’d try and capture a few thoughts in the next week or two in shortform (not 140 characters short, of course). Today’s topic: celebrity twittering (and, yes, just to get it out of your system, go and watch the Felicia Day Twittering Gaff … okay, moving on …). Now, if I were to write this properly, I’d have to start looking at Stephen Fry and his more than 250,000 followers … in 140 characters, the witty observer is king, but you can find plenty to read about Fry elsewhere. I could talk about disintermediation and who needs gossip magazines – or who really does need an agent filtering everything – when Ashton Kutcher is willing to tweet photos like this. But I just can’t bring myself to read anything else about the Moore clan. Instead, I want to talk about telepathic ex-policemen. Or, more specifically, Greg Grunberg, who plays Matt Parkman on Heroes.
Grunberg is now a Twitter regular, with some 27,000 followers, many of whom only know him for his Heroes role. He is, however, cleverly using Twitter to promote his other projects and establish his own celebrity presence as ‘Grunny’. However, what really caught my attention was Grunberg’s tweet about the end wrap-up of the current season of Heroes and how that tweet, out of context, fired off a rumour that the show had been cancelled. As Zap 2 It reported:
On Sunday morning, Grunberg tweeted the following: "Winding down shooting season 3 #Heroes. Tough to say goodbye to crew not knowing if any or all of us will return next year. Hope all." Over the next couple of days that one message set off a flood of "OMG!! Is Heroes cancelled!?!" musings on the web. … The posts all mention that Grunberg "later" or "eventually" clarified his first remark with another tweet, that reads, "Don’t get me wrong, #Heroes IS coming back next next year, but some crew take other jobs, so it’s tough… we have the Best. Crew. Ever." But they make it sound like he was responding to all the supposed controversy he created with his remarks. Here’s the thing: Grunberg’s second tweet came all of three minutes after the first one. That doesn’t sound so much like backtracking or butt-covering so much as a guy reading what he just wrote, deciding the thought wasn’t complete and then completing it. I know things move fast on the Internet, but three minutes on a Sunday morning isn’t enough time to create a controversy and then try to respond to it. The incident doesn’t seem to have soured Grunberg on Twitter, although he did comment on a "long day of rain on set and being misquoted" on Monday.
Now, as I was thinking about Grunberg’s tweets and the largely unfiltered access his followers get (albeit in tiny little parcels), I read this:
Sure, he didn’t reveal ending of the season, but this throwaway comment about an episode of Heroes which had just finished screening in the US did tell a lot of people how it ended. I’m guessing that some of his 27,000 followers didn’t watch the episode live … I wonder if anyone was annoyed by an actor giving away spoilers for a just-aired show? Certainly for me, in Australia, this episode won’t be aired for weeks so I was a little annoyed. (If the show was better scripted at the moment, I’d be even more annoyed.) Perhaps Grunberg and actors who follow suit need to start a few more tweets with #spoilerwarning hashtag. Either way, I suspect as more and more celebrities of various flavours tweet their fans directly, some new social norms will need to emerge about what is and isn’t revealed. And I wonder if this immediacy will drive more of Grunberg’s followers outside of the US to download Heroes rather than accept delays in being able to reply or (if they want to be unspoilt) read his twitter stream?
(Oh, and he’s not a celebrity, but as Boing Boing pointed out, the funniest person on Twitter is The Mime. Really.)
Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 6th 2009
Links for February 26th 2009 through March 6th 2009:
- Australians spend much more time online | Australian IT – “The Nielsen Online Internet and Technology Report surveyed more than 2000 Australians and found the average Aussie spent 89.2 hours a week consuming media last year or almost 80 per cent of their waking hours. … this was an increase of almost five hours on 2007 and an extra 17.8 hours from 2006. “Given the average Australian is only awake for around 112 hours per week, it’s surprisingly just how many of those waking hours are dedicated to media consumption… We’ve seen some pretty extraordinary increases in the past few years, however we would anticipate a levelling out in consumption hours of the next few years as Australians simply run out of hours in the day.” … people aged over 16 spent an average of 16.1 hours on the internet each week, 12.9 hours watching TV, 8.8 hours listening to the radio, 3.7 hours on a mobile phone and 2.8 hours reading newspapers. Some users also used more than one form of media at once, with more than three in five internet surfers [also]watching TV”
- RED MARS For Free [Warren Ellis] – “Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant sf novel RED MARS is now available as a free PDF download from its US publisher. [Direct link to PDF], and their Free Library page listing it and other available free downloads. Be warned: RED MARS is first of a trilogy, and there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself craving the others (GREEN MARS and BLUE MARS).” (If you”ve not read Red Mars, you’ve missed out on the best hard SF in years, go read it. As Ellis says, once you’ve gone Red, you won’t be able to stop yourself rushing to buy Green and Blue, too!)
- Virtual Worlds – Detailed timeline of the emergence of Virtual Worlds – encompasses many recognisable and a few more abstract elements (do virtual worlds really start in the 1700s?) (Thanks, Jill)
- Web censorship plan heads towards a dead end [The Age] – “The Government’s plan to introduce mandatory internet censorship has effectively been scuttled, following an independent senator’s decision to join the Greens and Opposition in blocking any legislation required to get the scheme started. The Opposition’s communications spokesman Nick Minchin has this week obtained independent legal advice saying that if the Government is to pursue a mandatory filtering regime “legislation of some sort will almost certainly be required”. Senator Nick Xenophon previously indicated he may support a filter that blocks online gambling websites but in a phone interview today he withdrew all support, saying “the more evidence that’s come out, the more questions there are on this”. The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has consistently ignored advice from a host of technical experts saying the filters would slow the internet, block legitimate sites, be easily bypassed and fall short of capturing all of the nasty content available online.”
Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children for the Apocalypse?
The Onion have outdone themselves in this parody of the stock standard videogame moral panic piece:
Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?
The Death (and resurrection) of Scans_Daily
Until very recently Scans_Daily was a livejournal fan community dedicated to comic books. Their main activity was to post scans from comics, ranging from a page though to a significant portion of a comic book – mainly recent releases but also back issues – and to summarise, critique and, at times, satirise these comic books. Posting scans of a page or two is generally acknowledged to be covered under Fair Dealing (yes, we’re dealing with US law) but more than that gets into the ‘probably not legal’ territory, and a whole book is obviously in the not legal at all category. Despite that Scans_Daily operated for years, until last week. As Comics Worth Reading explains:
The popular site Scans_Daily has been suspended by its host LiveJournal. Here’s what appears to be an official mod team statement that includes links to new locations for the material.
This isn’t surprising. The purpose of the community was to post comic pages and stories, which made it a good way to read a wide range of comic content online without the participation of the copyright holders, who tend not to like that kind of open sharing. The site originally started with a focus on slash (male/male fanfic-based pairings) but then widened its focus. While you could find pages from the latest DC and Marvel comics there, they also posted unusual manga and much older stories. It was a great way to check out what people were talking about, if there was a particular panel or scene that got attention.
Brian Cronin speculates that a report by Peter David to Marvel about X-Factor pages being posted may have had something to do with the shutdown. Based on David’s comment, he has the mistaken assumption that if he can remove free copies, all interested readers will buy the comic instead. Many companies assume similarly, that any free taste is a lost sale. That’s rarely true.
Responses to the shutdown from users frequently include statements like “I started buying comics again because of what I was reading.” It’s a shame that IP owners fear the free sample so much, because in some cases, at least, it does work to convert customers. The carrot — “like it? consider buying the next issue” — works much better than the stick — “you’re all thieves who must be forced into spending money with us”.
Now, I’ll return to Peter David in a minute (noting, incidentally, that I think he’s an excellent writer) but I think that dichotomy – fan communities are pirates vs fan communities promote and thus encourage people to buy comics – is a really important one to tease out; Brigid at Digital Strips does a pretty good job of suggesting why the latter makes more sense:
Now, there are two schools of thought on this whole affair. The first, expressed to its fullest extent by Kevin Church, is that the scans_daily folks are pirates with an inflated sense of entitlement, who are stealing copyrighted content and costing the creators legitimate sales.
The other point of view, which seems to be much more widespread, is that scans_daily is a site where people find out about comics and end up buying them. Johanna Draper Carlson and Merlin Missy express it rather eloquently on their sites, without some of the entitlement drama that was displayed in the comments to Mr. David’s post. If nothing else, all these comments and accounts (as well as this comments thread) provide anecdotal backup to the notion that free samples do indeed sell comics.
I’d like to express solidarity with that second point of view. There is a section of comics culture that is all caught up with comics stores and Wednesdays and pull lists and stuff, and if you’re inside that culture you may not realize this, but the vast majority of people have absolutely no idea that this subculture even exists. And you can’t sell something that no one knows is there.
The internet, on the other hand, is everywhere, and from what goes on in my own home, I can tell you with certainty that young people troll LiveJournal looking for stuff to do all the time. And when they find a place like scans_daily, they don’t say “Oh great, now I can find the latest plot twists in the Horned Ant saga without going to the comics store and paying $4,” because they don’t know what a comics store is. Instead, they look at it, and it’s cool, and then they realize that you can buy these things in stores and they seek them out. This is sort of like marketing, except that marketing is done by big companies and scans_daily is pretty grass roots.
And in case you are wondering, this is indeed different from Marvel or DC putting previews on their sites, because no one goes to those sites except people who are already Marvel and DC readers.
My own experience lines up here. I used to read a lot of comics, many years ago, but have neither the time nor the budget to read a lot today (and exactly how many X-Men related titles are there today??). I don’t claim to be an expert on the sharing of comics online, but I will admit I’ve downloaded a copy here and there, usually on the back of particular media hype – and anything I’ve really enjoyed, I’ve purchased. Similarly, I really don’t want to spend the time going to buy every new issue of Joss Whedon’s Buffy Season 8 but I have purchased every collected edition thus far, and will continue to do so, and thus I feel no guilt in downloading some of the individual issues as they are released. Dark Horse will get my money, as long as Buffy continues to be a good comic book. I’m not buying the same thing twice, but I think the number of trade paperbacks, and the speed at which they come out, tends to reflect the fact that these collected editions are preferred by many older readers (yes, I am now an ‘older reader’!). More to the point, of those comics I have downloaded, I’ve noticed something which I’ve never come across before (which is not to say it doesn’t happen, I’m just not aware of it happening): at the end of each comic book I’ve downloaded, not only does the person or group who scanned the comic ‘sign’ it with their own image, they also leave a clear message: “Like It? Buy It!”. An example:
This “Like It? Buy It!” strikes me as fans explicitly stating that they’re wanting people to join the comic book reading and buying communities; I’ve never heard of a Battlestar Galactica or Lost episode, or the latest Hollywood film that’s available online via Bittorrent ending with a ‘Please Buy the DVD’. So, the way I see it, comic fans scanning, discussing and sharing their fandom and some of the product that they love is, for the most part, good for comic book sales. Also, many people who legitimately own the physical comic book may actually read scanned versions; one of the annoying facts for comic collectors is that the very act of reading a comic book tends to decrease its value (and tiny fold or tear decreases a comic’s resale value) so I can imagine a lot of people buying, storing and treasuring their hardcopy and reading the digital version. There is, of course, the downside that if a comic is rubbish, the ability to see commentary and previews would pretty much guarantee low sales. But, as a rule, I would imagine that good comics = good word of mouth online + free copies online = more interest = more future sales.
Now, let’s return to the curious point that Peter David is accused of ‘killing’ Scans_Daily. To give a little context (under fair use / fair dealing), here’s a notice that appears on the inside cover of X-Factor 39:
In the internet era, someone explicitly asking fans to avoid discussing details of their chosen media goes against the grain a fair bit, but it seems most reviewers did try and respect Peter David’s wishes. That said, I did manage to find the entire plot for this issues, and the next, online very easily – I’ll say it’s a very gritty and harsh story dealing with some of those downsides of mutant powers – although the last of this 3-issue arc would need to be very impressive to live into the hype. However, it seems Peter David was actively patrolling the web, and after following a link back to Scans_Daily who ignored his request, Peter David asked Marvel to look into the copyright violation he saw. The rest of the story is a bit fuzzy as LiveJournal didn’t say who complained or why they suspended Scans_Daily. However, Peter David did write about the situation on his website (his position is, yes, he complained, but it wasn’t that complaint which got scans_daily taken down) and, as you might imagine, the comments have turned into something of a flame war with a few useful points made about copyright and fan activities as promotion (or otherwise). I don’t seek to judge who complained to whom, but I do think Peter David went a step further than necessary in complaining to Marvel – I suspect a link from his website asking for that post to be removed would have worked far better – but comic book fans are a fairly small community and I doubt this exchange will have helped the sales of X-Factor – more people might read it now to see if Peter David’s plea was justified, but I suspect a lot more of them will be reading online versions via Bittorrent or the like, just to prove their point. I still like Peter David’s writing, but I do wonder how this exchange has impacted his reputation amongst fans.
And at the end of the day, Scans_Daily is back, just with a new host who seem less likely to be as responsive to the requests of copyright holders to suspect their account.
Update: I was reading the comments on Peter David’s website and I thought this one summed up the fan position perfectly:
Hi. I’m another s_d member, and I’d like to add my voice to the rest of the people who say that if it wasn’t for that community, they wouldn’t have spent money on comics. s_d started me off into buying comics, issue by issue, because from s_d I could see what was good and what I liked and what I’d pay money for.
I don’t doubt that it’s easy to argue that s_d violated the letter of copyright law, no matter how mods tried to keep down the number of pages posted; I would however argue that it tried its damndest not to violate the spirit. The heart of this kerfuffle is not law but perspective: Mr David clearly feels that s_d intended piracy and damaged his livelihood; s_d members feel that its purpose rather was to build a community of like-minded people who could discuss a shared love and help each other decide what best to spend their money on–e.g. YJ. (I for one have chased down back issues from a decade ago because I saw’em on s_d and thought they were worth it.) Yes, Mr David was well within his legal rights to call foul play, and I accept that he was not directly responsible for nuking the site, but he clearly agrees that it could and should’ve been done, and that hurt a lot of fans. Many fans, paying fans, feel that it wasn’t necessary, or even warranted, because harm was never intended. We intended it in good faith, which has not been reciprocated. You can of course say that fans’ feelings have jackshit to do with it, and legally speaking, you’d be right. But it would be so much better for all parties involved if there was a friendly relationship between fans and creator that involved a free exchange of ideas instead of this antagonistic bullshit. This is not a zero-sum game. You could turn it into one–you could even turn it negative-sum–but why would you want to?
tl;dr fans are not always out to sucker the creator and get a free ride, and said fans would be happier (and presumably more inclined to buy things) if creators didn’t kick them inna teeth, even if creators have a perfect legal right to do so. If at all possible–I would humbly beg Mr David to please have some faith in his fans: we’re not out to rob you.
The Credit Crisis Explained
People who’ve been taught by me in the past know I’m a huge fan of using icons and graphical representations in video and animation to try and find new ways to make fairly complex things simple enough to be accessible. Thus it would be irresponsible of me not to post this wonderful video from Jonathan Jarvis which explains the reasons behind the current Crisis of Credit. Sure, Jarvis has had to simplify a bit (and perhaps rely a little too much on stereotypes to show a ‘sub-prime family’!) but overall I thought this was really impressive. I also understand a few things about the current Credit Crisis more than I did before! 🙂
Tama Leaver dot Net by Tama Leaver is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.