spriteleigh

The National Party was instrumental in passing the harsh "strict liability" NZ copyright laws that offer no relief from liability, even for people who buy licenses that turn out to have been offered in error -- as appears to be the case in the National Party campaign ad that used Lose Yourself for bed music. Read the rest

Image Credit: JoeRogan.net

It may have been easy for some people to write off comedian Joe Rogan as a meat head when they first saw him. A ripped guy who seems very manly, and is usually talking with glee about people's bones being broken in the UFC. Truth is, beneath his gruff exterior is a man who knows much, about some very intense and varying subjects. From the positive potential of psychedelics to the idea that we exist within and across multiple dimensions of reality, his Joe Rogan Experience podcast is quite a trippy ride that will open even the most cynical and clouded eyes.

But for those who have never listened before and have no idea just how deep the waters run, Adjust Your Perspective put together this awesome list of then ten best moment from the Joe Rogan Experience. All I ask is if you look at him as some characterization, take a moment to check the list out. Dude really is a genius, and has  gift for shifting the way other people think as well. Do your brain a favor and give it a shot. You might just be surprised at how "third eye" opening it really is.

Personal Audio LLC owns patents related to podcasting—"episodic content transmitted over the internet"—and a jury in Marshall, Texas has let CBS know it.

Rightscorp -- a firm that asks ISPs to disconnect you from the Internet unless you pay it money for alleged, unproven copyright infringements -- was finally challenged in court by an ISP, Texas's Grande Communications; as soon as it looked like it would have the legal basis for its business-model examined by a judge, the company cut and ran, withdrawing its threats. Read the rest

Evan from Fight for the Future writes, "Fight for the Future and Namecheap just parked a truck directly across the street from the FCC with a huge video billboard mounted on top facing the agency's main entrance; we're playing net neutrality videos all day today and tomorrow." Read the rest

Iconic movies and movie scenes recreated using stock footage. My favorite is The Shining, at 22 seconds in. (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

Dotcom claims he has emails between New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Warner exec Kevin Tsujihara in which Tsujihara explains that Dotcom was followed by private security in Hong Kong and that Key had made the extradition promise to Warner as part of the deal to shoot The Hobbit in NZ (the MPAA, Warner and Key's office all dispute the email's authenticity). Read the rest

We may all want to pretend we don't like repetition in pop music, but obviously, it works and has worked for decades for a reason. Believe it or not, like many things, there is a science to why music affects us the way it does. Our brains react to repetition by memorizing and retaining, even if we don't want them to. So even if you hate a certain song, notice how after some radio exposure, you still somehow know every word? Guess what? That is repetition winning. Almost like classical conditioning, but with music as a variable.

As in most cases, there are people who can explain this to you far more delicately and accurately than I can, thankfully for both of us.

So even those pop songs that you rally against, too bad. Seems your brain is going to take them in and learn them anyway. It's nice to finally understand the science behind that a little better.

Ted Talks 

YouTuber Pastek pasted Super Mario into a bunch of FAIL videos. Video above, GIF below. (more…)

Image Via AwkwardSilenceGames

One Chance is a game quite unlike any you have ever played online. It is about a scientist who created a pathogen that is inadvertantly wiping out all mankind on Earth. You then have six in-game days to decided how you will spend the rest of your life. Will you stay at the office and do all you can to find a cure? Will you finally step away from the office and spend some time with the family you have been neglecting? Or will the madness and impending doom jusr cause you to lose your mind?

What really sets One Chance apart is that you really only have One Chance to play it. The game picks up on your I.P and unless you have multiple computers with multiple I.P's, you really only do get one chance in One Chance, which is part of what makes it so spectacular.

Quick warning, though. It is also quite bleak, so make those choices carefully. Games like this prove why you don't need sixty dollar video games and next-gen machines to be blown away by the medium.

Newgrounds

IBM, Cisco, Intel, and Sandvine make huge bank selling ISPs the networking gear needed to discriminate against online services that haven't paid bribes for access to the "fast lane" -- but it's totally a coincidence that they've told the US government to make sure that the FCC doesn't ban the corrupt practice. Read the rest

BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the UK public broadcaster, has told an Australian government proceeding that people who use VPNs a lot should be assumed to be engaged in piracy, that ISPs should surveil their users, that websites should be censored by Chinese-style national firewalls, and that the families of people accused of watching TV the wrong way should be disconnected from the Internet. Read the rest

In my latest Locus column, Audible, Comixology, Amazon, and Doctorow’s First Law, I unpick the technological forces at work in the fight between Amazon and Hachette, one of the "big five" publishers, whose books have not been normally available through Amazon for months now, as the publisher and the bookseller go to war over the terms on which Amazon will sell books in the future. Read the rest

Teddy from Namecheap domain registrar sez, "Net Neutrality is a super complex issue and we wanted to create a video that makes it a bit more accessible. Don't Flush Our Rights Away is a stop-motion music video with a pretty chill catchy beat. We hope that we can get people to take action and tell their friends how important it is to have a free and open Internet." Read the rest

This summer has certainly seen its share of big movies, from Guardians of the Galaxy to Godzilla. Right about now is when movies start to release a little slower and tend to be a little smaller in scope and have its sights set on awards season. But undeniably, summer is the greatest time to see "fun" films. Movies that take us out of our lives for a moment and transport us somewhere fantastic (and sometimes wonderfully absurd).

The Movie Clips Trailer page on YouTube put together a nice little mashup of some of this summer's biggest movies, and squashed it all down to two minutes for easy viewing satisfaction. Keep in mind, if you haven't seen these due to a busy summer, it is like seeing a dozen films in two minutes. Not too shabby. Also, dancing baby Groot for the win.

(YouTube Link)

So what was your favorite movie of the summer? Hit up our comments section and let us know!

Michael Geist writes, "Last year, the Canadian government trumpeted anti-counterfeiting legislation as a key priority. The bill raced through the legislative process in the winter and following some minor modifications after committee hearings, seemed set to pass through the House of Commons. Yet after committee approval, the bill suddenly stalled with little movement throughout the spring. Why did a legislative priority with all-party approval seemingly grind to a halt?" Read the rest

The upcoming 2-CD set, the band's first studio album in six years, deals with "monotheism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, neuroscience, suicide bombers, 9/11, colas, war, and shaved chimps," and is packaged as CD inserts glued to the inside covers of a "found" copy of the King James Bible. Read the rest

James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, eminent copyright scholars at the Duke Center for the Public Domain, have released their 788-page Open Intellectual Property Casebook as a free, open, CC-licensed download, replacing textbooks that normally sell for $160 (you can get a hardcopy is $24); it's not just a cheaper alternative, either -- it's a better one, enlivened with sprightly writing, excellent illustrations (including comics in the vein of Boyle and Jenkins's Bound By Law). Read the rest

Frank Wu writes, "Brianna Wu is a game developer and a frequent writer about gender issues in tech. As such, she frequently receives harassing, unpleasant emails. She got pissed off and wrote an awesome response to one here."

I got a harassing email today, and decided to respond with this letter. (Thanks, Frank!)

They say they have so much correspondence with the industry, and are apparently so incompetent at searching their own records, that they can't fulfil the request without being unduly burdened, and thus they are not required to comply with the Freedom of Information request. Read the rest

DC attorney Mike Meier once worked with EFF to fight copyright trolls, whom he called "bill collectors for the movie industry...extorting money" -- now he's joined the trolls as a professional "bill collector," and now he wants evidence of his past life censored and is prepared to send outrageously bogus copyright threats to get his way. Read the rest

Google's Image Search has apparently been hacked. All queries return a line or two of normal images, followed by thousands of differently-sized versions of the image above, depicting a grisly car-crash ganked from a Ukrainian news site's coverage of the wreck. Read the rest

American Commitment, a Koch-brothers-associated fake grassroots group whose previous campaigns include support for Keystone XL and the coal industry, has been circulating an alarmist petition against FCC action to preserve net neutrality, calling it "a Federal Internet takeover," that "sounds more like a story coming out of China or Russia." Read the rest

In his most famous painting, Sandro Botticelli showed Angelina Jolie rising from the sea on a half shell. That at least is this interpretation by Eisen Bernard Bernardo, an artist in Los Baños, the Philippines. For his series Mag + Art, he takes photos of celebrities from magazine covers and places them neatly over the images of people in famous works of Western art.

-via Visual News