Archive for December, 2006
Blu-ray player is a “piece of shit” but gets a good review anyway
Idiot Toys have cut the fat from a Blu-Ray player review to point out a few fairly major flaws:
“Pushing the power button, the BDP-S1 requires 12 seconds to display ‘Power On’”
“Another 35 seconds elapsed for the player’s alphanumeric display to read ‘no disc’ allowing the drawer to be opened and a movie BD ROM disc inserted”
“After the drawer closes, wait another 36 seconds for the movie studio’s logo to appear on-screen”
An early Xmas present for Flickr users
Photo sharing site Flickr has upped its storage limits, so pro users now have unlimited storage and unlimited transfers while free users get a storage boost from 20MB to 100MB. Nice.
I’m in ur blog, killing ur tragic attempt at viral marketing. D00dz.
[Alternative title: "We don't work for Sony," say people working for Sony]
This is brilliant: a marketing firm sets up a PSP blog to do the viral thing for Sony’s PSP, and promptly gets pwn3d (as I believe internet kids say). But the creators won’t admit it:
YO stop SPammin my BLOG… da psp is pwn, if u cant feel da flow then step off hatas
And all because the marketing firm forgot to disguise its domain registration.
The full, amusing story - along with highlights - is at the rarely-safe-for-work UKResistance.
Apple’s unhappy with iBuzz ads
Apple’s upset with UK adult novelty site Lovehoney, which comes from the frankly terrifying brain of .net launch editor turned pornmonger (and friend of mine) Rich Longhurst. Lovehoney’s iBuzz site [not safe for work] parodies the iconic iPod silhouettes to flog vibrating iPod attachments, and Apple’s lawyers are on the case. This bit amused me:
I don’t think they’ve only just noticed the site. When Love Labs launched iBuzz in America in February 2006, we sent an iBuzz to Steve Jobs as a birthday present. It was returned to us with “Product not ordered!” scrawled in large letters across the receipt.
Yikes!
I’m always amused by tribute bands’ names - take a bow, Gwen Ste-phoney! - but I’m even more amused by their promo pics. This particularly scary one is from the same site as Ste-phoney, and it’s the cleverly named Girls R Aloud:
[photopress:girls_aloud.jpg,full,pp_image]
I mean, bloody hell, if you put me in waders, flippers and pulled a bin bag over my head I’d look more like Girls Aloud than that lot does.
[Comments now closed due to what looked awfully like spamming]
Bono and Cliff: turkeys voting for Christmas
In today’s Guardian Marina Hyde does a nifty skewering of rich rock stars’ attempts to increase the lifespan of copyright:
The four record giants - Warners, EMI, Sony-BMG and Universal - own the vast majority of the recording copyrights in question, and it is they who will reap almost all the royalties.
It’s really important to note that this current spat is only about the copyright in sound recordings, which are usually owned by the record companies. The copyright in the actual compositions - ie, the rights that apply to the actual creators of music rather than multinational corporations - are already protected for a period of the composer’s life plus 70 years. So while the recordings themselves may fall out of copyright, the composers will still get paid if those recordings are played on the radio.
As Andrew Gowers, author of the copyright report that’s currently being looked at by the government, puts it: extending the term of copyright for sound recordings would only benefit “an exceptional few stars, who are already fabulously rich.” The names on the FT advert are, generally speaking, an exceptional few stars, who are already fabulously rich: U2, Eric Clapton, Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, Robbie Williams, etc etc etc.
U2 et al are in a very unusual position. It’s not that they’re so rich they have to move their business affairs abroad to avoid tax, although they are and they have; it’s that they’re such a big concern and worth so much money that they can more or less write their own record company contracts - so I’ll be amazed if U2’s current record deal doesn’t give U2 the copyright to the recordings as well as the songwriting.
However, that is not the way the record business usually works. When a band signs a record deal, the record company owns the sound recordings - which is why there are countless tales of artists being told that their record won’t be released because the record company doesn’t like it. It’s only when you become as big as U2 - which, I suspect, is something we’re unlikely to see many of today’s bands doing - that you’ve got the necessary muscle to get the copyrights back.
In essence, then, if you’re already a multi-millionaire, extending the term of copyright in sound recordings will make you richer. If you’re not a multi-millionaire, extending the term of copyright will make your record company richer.
It does seem rather strange that musicians are throwing their weight behind record companies - the FT ad Hyde refers to was placed on behalf of “3,500 record companies”, with your Bonos and Cliffs as figureheads - when those companies aren’t exactly nice to composers: in the US, the RIAA is demanding that publishing royalties are cut because, er, publishing firms didn’t stick their heads in the sand about the internet and found various ways to make money.
As the digital music weblog puts it:
Sometimes you just have to ask yourself if the RIAA could display more greed or avarice without actually hiring Satan as its general counsel… “During the period when piracy was devastating the record industry, the RIAA argues, profits for publishers rose as revenue generated from ringtones and other innovative services grew. Record industry executives said there was nothing strange about seeking a rate change that would pay less to the people who write the music.”
Popjustice are flogging t-shirts
[photopress:PJ0116m.jpg,full,pp_image]
That one made me laugh. More here.
Tabloids in “making stuff up” shocker
Whenever you see the phrase “political correctness gone mad” in newspapers, it’s usually a sign that you’re being lied to: a few years ago, tabloid newspapers regularly printed stories about PC madness - replacing black bin bags with green ones, that sort of thing - that they’d simply made up. It seems that the tradition is alive and well, judging by this wonderful piece in today’s Guardian: Oliver Burkeman investigates the supposed War on Christmas and discovers that it’s a load of crap.
Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. “We get this every year,” a press officer sighs, eventually. “It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it’s bollocks, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”
The loneliness of the cow-themed calendar creator
From time to time, journalists encounter a big problem: you pitch a daft idea, the editor loves it, you get commissioned to do it… and you realise with a sinking feeling that it was a really rubbish idea that isn’t anywhere near as funny as it seemed when you first thought of it, but now you’ve persuaded the editor it’s a good idea you have to go through with it. Clearly calendar creators have a similar problem, judging by the promotional calendar my milkman left with the morning’s delivery.
You can see the thought processes: it’s for a milk firm, so cows need to be involved. So far, so good. But the calendar creator’s taken it too far, because he or she has decided that one theme isn’t enough. No, it’s not just a calendar with a cow theme - it’s a calendar with a cow theme *and* a James Bond theme! The idea accepted, the poor calendar creator now has to come up with a dozen cow-and-Bond jokes - but unfortunately there aren’t twelve such jokes.
It starts well enough: I snickered at “Dr. Moo” and laughed out loud at “Mooooooooonraker”. But as the months progress, the jokes get worse and the desperation of the calendar creator becomes apparent. “Licence to milk”? “The man with the golden churn”? By Autumn, it’s clear that the creator has given up, and the best he or she can come up with is “Live and Let Moo”.
Worst of all, though, is December. The supply of genuinely funny cow-and-Bond jokes has long since dried up, but there’s one month still to go. “Milk another day” doesn’t make the grade, nor does “Never Say Udders Again”. Cursing the commission, the calendar creator sighs, writes “Creamo Royale”, and vows never to say cow-themed again.
The UK’s proposed new piracy laws: the good news and the bad news
The good news: changing the format of legal music - eg ripping your CDs to MP3 - will become legal.
The bad news: under existing copyright legislation, it’s illegal to bypass “technical protection measures”, ie. copy protection. I’ve seen nothing suggesting the “go ahead, rip your CDs” changes will address that at all, or that the proposed new laws will also apply to DVDs or digital downloads (which, of course, are copy-protected to the hilt). Can anyone clarify? My gut feeling is that the law saying you can’t bypass copy protection will carry more weight than the one letting you rip CDs to MP3.
The other bad news: beefed-up anti-piracy powers will make deliberate distribution of copyrighted works punishable by up to 10 years in jail. Those powers are aimed at people involved in “distribution (or receipt of)”, which means the penalties apply to downloading as well as uploading.
In happier news, EMI’s experimenting with DRM-free MP3s rather than crippled ones. It’s partly because of the balkanisation of music stores, and partly because even record companies realise that DRM sucks…