Adventure Machine is an online music-remixing widget by Madeon, whose album Adventure came out earlier this year. Similar to Novation's Launchpad gadget, you click different buttons in the grid to turn different loops on and off, thereby creating your own remix of the tracks. (more…)
The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 is set to kick in, and with it will come an extended term of copyright for designer objects, such as furniture, which will endure for 70 years after the creator's death -- meaning that you'll need a license to post photographs of your own belongings. (more…)
Justin Kozisek, a staffer for the Star Wars Action News podcast, bought a $6.94 Rey toy at Walmart and posted a photo of it to Facebook, and he and his SWAN colleagues were surprised to get a DMCA notice from Disney/Lucasfilm claiming that they had infringed copyright by posting a photo of their toy. (more…)
September's court ruling that Warner Chapell Music didn't hold the copyright to "Happy Birthday" was swiftly followed by a claim from the Association for Childhood Education International, a nonprofit established to administer the money that Warner Chapell extorted through its fraudulent claims. (more…)
All over the world, laws promulgated by the US Trade Representative ban breaking digital locks -- the "Digital Rights Management" technologies that lock up our TVs, tablets, phones, games consoles, cars, insulin pumps, tractors, coffee makers, etc -- even if you're breaking them to do something legal, for example, making "fair use" (like parodies, critiques, and new, transformative works like mashups). (more…)
Denmark's Antipiratgruppen was formed in the early 2000s to fight the Internet over copyright infringement, with members including the MPA and umbrella groups representing record labels, publishers and other media companies. They hired Johan Schlüter, a law firm, to represent them. (more…)
To beat a Dec. 1 change in rules that limit their shenanigans, patent trolls filed more than 200 cases in a single day. (more…)
Sarah Jeong had me standing up and cheering with her comparison of kudurrus -- the ancient Mesopotamian boundary stones used to mark out territorial land-grants -- and the way that laws like the US DMCA protect digital rights management systems. (more…)
Mélanie Joly is the newly appointed Canadian Heritage Minister, and she's been given a briefing book by her ministerial staffers laying out the ministry's view of what's going on in the Heritage brief. The book's copyright section is a disaster. (more…)
What if Marvel made a romantic comedy? It could star the cast of The Avengers, since there are plenty of them! And more importantly, there are plenty of Avengers movies to take clips from in order to assemble such a movie.
The most important question is: Will Thor be there? This is the latest from the Vulture Remix series. -via Tastefully Offensive
If you're a woman on the Internet, harassment comes with the territory. There have been jerky dudes since time immemorial, after all. But with the advent of America's militarized cops, sociopathic misogynists have a new, deadly force-multiplier in their war on women. (more…)
Pixar's Inside Out had it all- a colorful cast of characters, an emotionally engaging storyline about how our emotions work, and a perfect 90 minute length that kept audiences from losing interest.
One thing it didn't have, however, were any thrills or chills, since psychologically disturbing elements don't belong in family friendly, PG rated movies.
But funny enough the film actually works quite well as a dark psychological thriller, at least according to this clever recut by CineMash.
There must be something sinister lurking around in the minds of Pixar's writers and animators, because it's way too easy to recut their family friendly features into horror movies!
-Via GeekTyrant
After years of missteps, blunders and disasters in which Youtube users have been censored through spurious copyright claims or had their accounts deleted altogether, Google has announced an amazing, user-friendly new initiative though which it will fund the legal defense of Youtube creators who are censored by bad-faith copyright infringement claims. (more…)
Metaratr serves up the unlistened-to work of amateur and prospective musicians on Soundcloud. Who knows—maybe you'll be the one to discover the next Justin Bieber!
M E T A R A T R is a site where you find songs you've probably never listened or wanted to listen to. pick a name and password and click one of the five buttons below over and over again! there's even a leaderboard, maybe.
You can ask it to give you only terrible music, if you like. You may also assign favor, as the name suggests. The first item served up for me was Stop Bringing Me Waffles by caj formal, which seems exactly the sort of thing the internet was invented for. https://soundcloud.com/ilooklikehim/whats-breakfast-produced-by-madlib
Top o' the Metaratr chart, though, is a lovely bloopy synth track, SC009 Maxo - Eddy Vancouver by Activia Benz. https://soundcloud.com/activia-benz/sc009-maxo-eddy-vancouver
Metaratr doesn't seem to work in Chrome, but maybe it's just having some trouble today with all the hits. Firefox worked fine for me.
Photo: Shutterstock
The Anne Frank Foundation -- a Swiss nonprofit that supports children's charities and provides a stipend to gentiles who hid Jews during WWII -- has claimed that Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, is the legal co-author of her diaries, a move that will have the effect of extending copyright on the diaries to at least 2030. (more…)
There's no one else on Earth who's more familiar with the surveillance capabilities of governments, spy agencies and criminals who is also willing to discuss those capabilities. Edward Snowden's wide-ranging conversation with the Freedom of the Press Foundation's Micah Lee on operational security for normal people is a must-read for anyone who wants to be safe from identity thieves, stalkers, corrupt governments, police forces, and spy agencies. (more…)
Coaxed by the Copyright Page: An Erotic Short Story is Leonard Delaney's latest erotic short story, part four in the Digital Desires series, which includes Taken by the Tetris Blocks, Conquered by Clippy and Invaded by the Iwatch -- they're $2.32 each.
(more…)
This week, our partnership with Critical Distance brings us a look inside the cheerful pacifist adventure game Undertale as well as Life is Strange's final chapter.
Kill Screen's Frances Chiem argues that the “gut punch” of futility in Life is Strange’s conclusion is effective because it transcends genre cliches. Protagonist Max doesn’t get to be the hero. As the title of Chiem’s article succinctly argues, "We Need to Stop Letting Everyone Save the World."
Writing for FemHype, the writer known as Nightmare takes on the staggeringly popular Undertale, "the RPG game where you don't have to destroy anyone." The game has become a hit for its charming characters and broad, inclusive representation, as well as its emphasis on pacifist resolutions, which Nightmare argues speaks especially to LGBT+ players.
At Ludus Novus, Gregory Avery-Weir explains how Skyrim’s city of Riften is doomed to perpetual crime and poverty because the thieves and thugs running it are “essential” in the game’s code and therefore can’t be removed:
When games portray fictional worlds, they make implicit statements about the nature of the real world. By placing the Thieves Guild—one of the game’s three major employers—in a corrupt town ruled by a coldhearted mead magnate, Skyrim makes a statement about criminals and morality. Criminals come from bad places, and there’s nothing you can do to improve the situation.
Bianca Batti of Not Your Mama’s Gamer takes a look at women-driven horror games like Among the Sleep and Alien: Isolation and concludes that they, too, often 'hard code' their mother figures as either victims or monsters:
In these two texts, motherhood becomes binaristically constructed between the two poles of good mothering and bad mothering, with no other options for maternal identity made available.
Finally, speaking at a recent Queerness in Games Conference local event, Critical Distance's own Kris Ligman discusses Dark Souls and sex as an extended metaphor on the cultural gatekeeping of playing the 'right' games:
It seems funny to me that even within my own social circles, frequently self-identified as progressive and inclusive, we police each other in this way. ‘What do you mean you haven’t played this critical darling indie game because you work two full-time jobs to keep a roof over your head, and even if you could play a game in your off hours your machine is too outdated to run it? What do you mean a game is too physically demanding for you, and you already can’t afford to go to the doctor? What do you mean you’re just not into that sort of game?’
follow Critical Distance on Twitter and consider pledging your support on Patreon
The US Library of Congress has created an exemption to copyright law to make it legal to preserve abandoned video games, including online server code required to play them. (more…)
There's something a little mysterious about the programs you can find in strange corners of the internet, and doubly so if you happen to find them in the bowels of someone else's computer.
A guy who works by day as a pharmacist in Korea makes these funny video compilations of himself singing Asian pop hits. His supercut is going super viral in Korea and Japan. (more…)
The Orwell estate filed a bogus copyright and publicity right theft against an inactive Cafepress store where no one had ever bought one of the "1984 is already here" shirts or tea-towels on offer from film critic Josh Hadley. (more…)
Alex from Copy-Me writes, "We've just released its fourth episode, called 'Pirates Are The Best Customers' - which talks about piracy and artists." (more…)
Mitch Martinez licensed a stock footage clip to a Sony music label to use in a video; when the company proceeded to file a Youtube copyright complaint against him and refused to take his calls, he filed a copyright claim against them, told them he was cancelling their license to his footage, and threatened to make them re-edit the music video, removing his footage from it. (more…)
The best part of the official trailer for The Force Awakens is the part where Han Solo assures Finn and Rey that the stories they’ve heard are true. What must he be thinking when he says that?
Nick Skywalk remixed the trailer with clips from other films to make “those stories about what happened” real, to Solo and to us, which just makes looking forward to the new movie more exciting. This is really well done. -via Uproxx
"Jimmy was having a rather beautiful day until he bumped into Jack and things got weird." Directed by Adrien Dezalay, Emmanuel Delabaere, and Simon Philippe. (Vimeo)
Tim Harford, the Financial Times's Undercover Economist, writes about the Happy Birthday to You court case, which finally settled the question of whether the familiar birthday song was still in copyright (it isn't) and uses that as a springboard to ask the question: how long should copyright last? (more…)
(
(
