Arrington’s post about photography and copyright is excellent.

Of of all the media wars: Video; Music and Images - photography is the most important. The reason - everyone is now a photographer with unlimited film and photographs can’t be quoted as a snippet.

1. Zero cost trial and error creates professional looking results. The photography marketplace is decreasing.

The zero cost ubiquity of digital images mean that the sum total quality of amateur output is often better than the sum total of professionals. Search on Flickr for something that you would normally buy from a stock library.

The professional photography market is moving from a craft dominated industry of recording events to an artistic one with room for a minority of top creatives, in the same way that it did for painting in the 19th Century.

The same number of photographers are fighting for less dollars.

2. The Internet creates cheaper publishing costs, more media is produced. The perceived photography marketplace is increasing.

The biggest recent change to online publishing is the ubiquitous inclusion of images and clips in things like blogs posts. Gizmodo launched without images, today every post has an image or video.

Video is sometimes ignored by the copyright owner if it is a clip, but a photograph cannot be clipped. Since there is no real mechanism of cheap pay per view photographic distribution even people who want to pay cannot afford the rates or the time it takes to purchase distribution rights. The whole industry is geared around print production and professional publishers. Gizmodo can afford a Getty subscription but most Tumblr bloggers can’t.

Overall usage of images in media is increasing, because of the internet and zero media distribution costs, meaning that photographers perception is that there should be more dollars.

3. You cannot quote a photograph. There is no Internet compromise with teaser clips, as there is for music and video.

The final problem is that other media have settled on a compromise which benefits professionals in a digital age - distribute a teaser. But there is a problem, you can listen to a clip of a song and a video and you can quote a piece of text.

A shrinking marketplace is perceived to be increasing. The current law is on the side of the photographer but the de facto practice isn’t and there is no available solution for those who want compromise.

This is why there will be war.

Fair Use Vs. Free Speech in the Internet Age: The Lane Hartwell Problem

Adam Curtis’ (The Power of Nightmares) latest documentary is currently being shown in the UK. It traces libertarianism to the Cold War, number theory and the rise of the self.

The title refers to a version of the prisoners’ dilemma developed by John Nash who is interviewed in the documentary and was the inpiration behind Ron Howard’s clawing ‘A Beautiful Mind’.

Part 1 is below, the remainder of the series hasn’t yet aired.

The Trap: What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom? | smashing telly - the best full length free tv programs on the web, updated every day

Exactitudes is a fantastic project, where a Dutch couple take pictures of people from a similar socio economic background and show how similar they are, particularly in their almost identical attempts at individuality.

via emily

Threads, was a drama, about the build up and aftermath of a full scale nuclear war - like ‘The Day After’ but less sanitized. It terrified me when I first saw it in 1984, it still terifies me.

Nuclear War was the anxiety of my generation, as we grew up. Yet today, in part due to the incompetence of the Bush foreign policy, the nuclear threat is possibly greater than ever.

Watch Threads and realize just how pathetic war is.

Britney Spears’ Crotch-A-Thon Inspires London Adverts

The Relativist is an hilarious piss-take of New York Times Magazine’s priggish, pompous ass, ‘The Ethicist’.

Very structured, short-form content like lists or questions and answers work well on the web, so the Agony Aunt format is a great idea for a blog.

“I recently instructed law officers to deport an immigrant to his home country, where he was to be interrogated until he provided information useful to our government. I

You occasionally get Cricket stories on the front page of Google news (because, as Digg has proven - news driven by robots is crap compared to human editorial), but on the New York Times front page!

The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia

Fakes on a plane - was the online buzz faked?

“After months of online buildup and frenzied media attention, Snakes on a Plane turned out to be just another horror flick…The R-rated thriller became an Internet and media darling by catering to bloggers and online fans”

I suspect that Snakes on a Plane went one step further than Subservient Chicken, to try and create buzz from the ground up, by seeding online communities with fake blog postings.

Wherever you looked, all the talk about Snakes on a Plane was smattered with superlatives - ‘best movie title ever’ etc. - it smelled as if those comments were being seeded by flacks.

If I’m right, then there is hope that webloggers are actually less brainwashable than mainstream media, because the excercise looks like it may have failed.

USATODAY.com - ‘Snakes’ rattles Web hype

Is Fox News Anti-Semitic?

Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Christian branch (protestantism) that dominates neo-conservatism was a rabid anti-semite. But it wasn’t always that way, in fact Luther was fluent in Hebrew and a renowned scholar of Hebrew text.

Luther’s anti-semititic volte face came when he realized that his belief that Jews would accept Christ prior to the Last Judgement was hopelessly naiive. And so he turned his energy towards hatred.

Last week I saw a Fox News ‘anchor’ reporting from Northern Israel, as a rocket had just landed injuring a civilian. Around him, everyone was wearing normal clothes, however he was wearing a helmet and full body armour, it would be less worrying if this were cowardice rather than showmanship.

As the injured woman was lead into an ambulance, she desperately tried to wave the camera crew away, she was covered in blood and did not want to be on TV.

Ignoring this single injured woman’s wishes for dignity, to promote a political agenda, which may or may not co-incide with that woman’s political beliefs seemed to be a metaphor for Luther ignoring the beliefs of Jews for his own.

The problem is that this is not a metaphor. Fox news depends on a political slant that is characterized by a political shift towards the same beliefs as Luther.

Number of articles in english language version of Wikipedia: 1,000,000
Total articles in Wikipedia: 3,300,000
Total articles in Encylopedia Britannica: 65,000

Number of articles edited per day on Wikipedia: the same number as the total articles in Britannica.

You don’t get what you pay for.

Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article - Wikimedia Foundation