Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks America about the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM even for legal reasons, and America gets to answer with requests for exemptions to this rule. Read the rest
Wonderful EFF supporters keep on coming up with great new entries for EFF's Catalog of Missing Devices, which lists fictional devices that should exist, but don't, because to achieve their legal, legitimate goals, the manufacturer would have to break some Digital Rights Management and risk retaliation under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Now, EFF supporter Rico Robbins has sent us the "FanFlick Editor," a welcome addition to the Catalog, alongside of Dustin Rodriguez's excellent list of missing devices like the Software Scalpel and MovieMoxie; and Benjamin MacLean's Mashup Maker.
If you have your own great ideas for additions, send them to me and maybe you'll see them on EFF's Deeplinks!
Read the restMeet the FanFlick Editor. With this revolutionary video editor, you can directly rip your favorite movies from DVDs or Blu-rays or even digital copies from iTunes, Google Play, and any other service. Edit the film to your heart's content and then distribute the edit decision list (EDL) -- a file that contains instructions that other people can use to edit their own copies during playback while they watch, so they can experience your vision for the movies you both love (or even the ones you hate!).
Used your own footage, graphics, or audio? No problem! FanFlick Editor keeps track of what you made and what you ripped, and packages up your other content with your FanFlick EDL. That way, you only distribute material whose copyright you control, or that is in the public domain, or that fair use permits.
EFF supporter Benjamin McLean was kind enough to send along his "Mashup Maker" as a new entry to EFF Catalog of Missing Devices, a tour through some of the legitimate, useful and missing gadgets, tools and services that don't exist but should. They're technologies whose chance to exist was snuffed out by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which makes tampering with "Digital Rights Management" into a legal no-go zone, scaring off toolsmiths, entrepreneurs, and tinkerers. Read the rest
When EFF launched its Catalog of Missing Devices, we invited EFF supporters to come up with their own ideas for gadgets that should exist, but don't, because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act bans breaking DRM, even for the most legitimate of purposes. Read the rest
A dear friend slipped me these as an Xmas gift; the provenance is unknown, but there's vector art for all your t-shirt, wallpaper and billboard needs. Read the rest
26-year-old Saudi artist Abdullah "Shaweesh" al-Sheri created a series of images depicting Star Wars characters worked into momentous Saudi historical photos, including one of Yoda sitting with King Faisal, whom he considered to be Yoda-like in his wisdom: "He was wise and was always strong in his speeches. So I found that Yoda was the closest character to the king. And also Yoda and his light saber -- it's all green." Read the rest
Everything is a Remix (previously) is an important, entertaining series of short videos that trace the ways the creation is built on earlier creation -- that "originality" is just mixing existing things in new ways. Read the rest
Leah Rothman was a segment director on the Dr Phil show for 12 years, until (she says) she and her co-workers were locked in a room by Dr Phil and screamed at and threatened by the show's host, who was upset by leaks from the show's staff. Read the rest
In 2016, CBS/Paramount brought a lawsuit against Axanar, a very successful group of fan-film producers who'd crowdfunding more than $1M to make a kick-ass Star Trek video. Read the rest
NHK's children's show Pythagora Switch features fiendishly clever, astoundingly amusing interstitial segments with beautiful little Rube Goldberg machines, possessed of a Miyazakiesque whimsy and a Mujiesque minimalism. These are wonderful -- and at 30 seconds each, you can watch a whole ton of 'em. Read the rest
In Re-Western, painted Felice House reimagines scenes from classic westerns with the likes of James Dean, Clint Eastwood and John Wayne replaced with women in the starring roles. Read the rest
Charles Duan from Public Knowledge sends us "a video we put together for Fair Use Week about copyright and fair use, to the tune of 'Let It Go' from Frozen, and full of clips of other fair use videos." Read the rest
Since March, the unnamed genius behind Paperback Paradise has been remixing the often dreadful covers of vintage paperback novels, refining their base material into golden lewd, hilarious new work. (via Richard Kadrey) Read the rest
Less than a week after an officer from a nearby force shot and killed Philando Castile during a traffic stop, leaving him to die in front of his child and girlfriend (and the world on livestream) the Minneapolis Police Department has perjured itself in issuing a copyright takedown notice to Youtube in order to suppress a controversial recruiting video that depicted the jobs of MPD officers as being a firearms-heavy shoot-em-up. Read the rest
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, they acquired Java, Sun's popular programming language, pitched from its inception as an open standard for the networked computer. Read the rest
This week, Marvel Comics published the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers in which it's revealed that since his earliest days, Captain America has been a double agent for Hydra, the thinly veiled allegory for the Nazis; in an epic Twitter rant, Livejournal alumnus and Dreamwidth cofounder Denise Paolucci explains the way that perpetual copyright and business concentration has neutralized the ancient custom of collective storytelling of epic narratives, magnifying the harm from bad corporate decisions. Read the rest
