My quick-and-dirty analysis of the Grokster case, its significance and longterm meaning, is up at the Reason Online site.
Here’s an excerpt:
Don’t Stop Grokkin’: Apparent MGM v. Grokster slamdunk is really a mixed bag
… As a technical matter the content companies won MGM v. Grokster; the decision remands the case to a trial court for further […]
The movie industry is desperately worried about the 18-week slump in overall box-office performance. According to the Associated Press:
“Batman Begins” took in $26.8 million to remain the top movie for the second straight weekend, but it could not keep Hollywood from sinking to its longest modern box-office slump.
Overall business tumbled despite a rush of familiar […]
In what seems to me to be a brilliant move, New Yorker Books is offering THE COMPLETE NEW YORKER book and DVD set for 100 dollars. According to the New Yorker Books website, “The Complete New Yorker covers The New Yorker’s entire history, from February 1925 to February 2005, the magazine’s 80th anniversary, providing a […]
Today’s Washington Post has an article by Mark Leibovich that discusses the most recent flurry of Hitler/Nazi comparisons in American political life. It concludes by citing Godwin’s Law and its associated Wikipedia entry.
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After a somewhat skeptically covered beginning last Friday, the “wikitorial” experiment at the Lost Angeles Times has been drawn to an abrupt close.
The reason for the shutdown of the experiment? “Unfortunately, we have had to remove this feature, at least temporarily, because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material,” the LA Times’s […]
I hope I may be excused for being flattered at the June 16 installment of “The Daily Show,” which had a segment on overreaching Hitler comparisons. No reference to Godwin’s Law as such, but Stewart lines like the following still made me feel special:
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to call it — Tuesday afternoon, 2:43 […]
You should be happy, generally, that you don’t see most of the pilot episodes for new TV series — they mostly stink. (I know this largely because of my experience watching the pilot episodes that do occasionally air — primarily when the networks are trying to fill their off-season schedules.)
But every now and then […]
A story in today’s New York Times, titled “Hollywood Hardball,” dwells on how “aggressive” Microsoft was when it pitched a movie property based on the company’s popular Xbox video game Halo to the major studios. Microsoft’s demands, the story strongly implies, were so unreasonable that they drove the studios away. “To many in Hollywood,” writes […]
Here’s an exercise for the lazy-minded. Imagine a science-fiction story in which people are cloned in order to become spare parts for the healthy. The cloned humans who are to become transplant donors will be raised in some idyllic environment, and then, at some point, they will realize that the entire purpose of their existence […]
There’s a weird sort of movie-theater authoritarianism rising up these
days. Some of it has to do with patrolling for video cameras, some of
it has to do with being seen to respond to supposed terrorist threats,
some of it with the longstanding impulse to suppress food and snacks from
outside.
A theater in […]