I got a call today from a reporter in Kentucky asking my thoughts about whether it was wise for a pair of breweries — one local, one part of a large conglomerate — to be duking out their legal fight over trademarks via social media.
It was an interesting question, and not one that I had not given much thought to in the past. After all, attorneys generally tell their clients not to talk to the press and to stay quiet about their case on social media.
The best analysis I’ve seen of the case comes from the blog Drink With The Wench that focuses on issues surrounding craft beer – beer brewed by small independent breweries, as opposed to mass market beer brewed by big conglomerates.
If you need justice, then by all means go and get it. But do it in a courtroom, NOT on Facebook and Twitter. Besides, I’m pretty sure that the judge making the final ruling over the case won’t be swayed by internet petitions or “how many followers and fans” you got to post on your behalf….
Because I refuse to get involved, I’m intentionally leaving the details of this particular “War of the Roses” out of this post. If you wish to learn more about the brewery vs. brewery conflict I’m referring to, you can read the House of Lancaster arguments here and the House of York arguments here.
(As a side note, I absolutely love Beer Wench’s “War of the Roses” imagery.)
I can think of one case where social media helped a man argue his case against an insurance company who he felt had wronged his sister who was killed in a car accident. With his Tumblr, Matt Fisher was was trying to shame the company into doing the right thing rather than influence a court proceeding. Eventually Fisher got Progressive to settle with his family.
What do you think? Should people involved in lawsuits go public about their cases on social media?
There’s been a lot of controversy surrounding copyright law as of late that charges that it is hopelessly biased toward the rights of large, corporate media (i.e. Disney and the like).
Under current copyright law, it is apparently legal for you to make backup copies of movies and music on your computer, or for you to move the material from the original distribution disk onto a device like an iPod. But… according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act it is illegal to bypass or crack any copy protection put on the disk by the original distributor. So it is legal for me to make a digital copy of a movie I’ve bought to put it on my computer but illegal to break the copy protection that keeps me from making a copy.
Allow consumers to bypass copy protection as long as the user does not do so to “facilitate the infringement of a copyright.” So for example, as long as you are ripping a disk you bought for personal use, you are ok.
Allow consumers to unlock cell phones to move it to a different network after its contract is over. That means that if you have a Verizon iPhone that you bought under contract and you complete your contract, you could use software to reprogram the phone to work on another service provider’s network.
Blind consumers would be allowed to bypass copy protection on e-books to make them work with screen readers
Remix artists who are legally creating transformative art using copyright material would not be able to be sued for breaking the copy protection on the original work. (Girl Talk’s Gregg Gillis, we’re talking about you.)
Great reporting from Mother Jones’ Dana Liebelson.
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has just finished up his five-month tour as commander of the International Space Station (ISS), and he’s done a great job of showing how social media can be used as a great educational and public relations tool. Even before going up to the ISS, he had an active presence on Twitter and YouTube, but following his tweets and videos from low-Earth orbit, he’s now a social media superstar with close to a million followers on Twitter.
But it’s his closing video from space, a cover of David Bowie’s 1969 hit “Space Oddity” that has truly brought him to the forefront of popular culture with more than 12 million views, as of today:
Space Oddity by Chris Hadfield
(UPDATE September 2014: The video that acquired all the views had to get taken down one year after it was posted when the purchased rights expired. That problem has since been corrected and the video has now been re-posted. Attention Conspiracy Theorists – It was never David Bowie who insisted that the video be taken down.)
Hadfield had previously recorded an Earth/space music video with the Canadian band the Barenaked Ladies:
Prepping before launch
To produce this:
And he’s done music with another astronaut as well:
“Ride On” Tribute to Sally Ride by astronauts Chris Hadfield and Catherine Coleman
But all this is not just about drawing attention to Hadfield, it’s Hadfield trying to draw a whole new generation into being interested in space travel. So along with all of his space demonstration videos, he’s tweeted images of Earth, life in space, and of the station itself.
As a child of the space age, I have to say I have been totally geeking out on how Hadfield has done such a great job of bringing our world’s space programs to life. I’m also so impressed with what a renaissance man he is, being an astronaut, and educator, and a pretty credible musician.
Hey, even David Bowie likes him…
(The class that I teach using Living in a Media World is called Global Media Literacy. Guess this is a blog post that is truly global.)
And by the way, did anyone else notice the shout out to Brad Bird’s Iron Giant in IM3?
I definitely noticed it. So did Jeffery Overstreet. Really enjoyed the movie.
National Advertisers Still Not Showing Rush Much Love
Listeners still love Rush Limbaugh’s political talk show. But advertisers? Not so much. Calling a law student a “slut” for wanting insurance to pay for birth control is not a successful business strategy.
If you’ve never heard of Felicia the Goat, you’ll know about her soon. Felicia the Goat is the main character in a recent Mountain Dew commercial, created in part by Tyler the Creator. The video shows Felicia in a line up of criminal suspects, all of whom may be charged with a crime….
On the other side of the one-way glass is an innocent, feeble, trαumatized white woman, standing next to a detective telling her to “nail this little sucker.”
Throughout the video, the woman is trying to decide whether to identify the suspect, and is being threatened by the goat who is telling her that you “betta not snitch on a playa.” The goat also starts out by saying, in a scruffy voice, “You shoulda gave me some more….I’m nasty….”
As the woman is shaking, crying and trying to decide what to do, the goat says, “Snitches get stitches fool.” After that, he says, “Keep ya mouth shut. When I get outta here, I’m gonna do you up…
This ad for Mountain Dew was so awful, I can’t imagine who thought this was a good idea.
A Pepsi rep told Adweek: “We understand how this video could be perceived by some as offensive, and we apologize to those who were offended. We have removed the video from all Mountain Dew channels…”
Could be perceived?
Yeah.
At least Mountain Dew had the good sense to pull the ad once the criticism started coming in.
F-bombing anchor A.J. Clemente lost his job at NBC’s Bismarck, North Dakota affiliate last week for his ill-advised comments on an open microphone. But then his flub went viral on the Internet. So now he’s getting interviewed on NBC’s Today show, with an appearance on Letterman to come Wednesday. It will be interesting to see how this story plays out.
So by now just about everyone has seen the video of A.J. Clemente having a really bad first night on the air at KFYR-TV in Bismarck, North Dakota. The newly minted West Virginia broadcasting grad was reportedly practicing pronouncing the Tsegaye Kebede when he cut loose with a “f#$in s%&t” over a live microphone. You can see the video here:
To those of you getting started in broadcasting, those are not likely to to be the first words you utter on the air. A.J. was promptly suspended from the station and very shortly after that fired.
And then… the sports blog Deadspin picked up on the story, and it went viral. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about the story. The famous F-bomb clip even showed up in bleeped form on Letterman this week.
You’ll always be “that guy” who lost his first anchor gig on the first day he anchored by muttering two very bad words right off the bat. You’ll always be the guy who lost his job over it. You don’t have to be the guy who sinks his career over it.”
I should note that I was on the journalism faculty at WVU for 15 years before moving to Nebraska, and both A.J. and WVU (and Bismark’s NBC affiliate for that matter) all have my sympathy. But I thought the most interesting comment I saw on this case came from my old buddy “Doc” Ivan Pinnell, public relations professor and retired Army lieutenant colonel. He wrote on Facebook:
“Deep in the bottomless pit of every broadcaster’s stomach there was a twitch of relief when they heard A.J.’s story. Emotions? Sympathy? Empathy? Sorrow for A.J.? A desire to reach out to A.J.? Thank God it was A.J. and not me! Some station somewhere will snap him up in a heart-beat, and out of sheer curiosity some potential broadcast student and/or his/her parents who did not know WVU had a School of Journalism will pull us up on the internet just to check us out. In the long-run A.J.’s mishap may be a positive for A.J. and the Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism. Every cloud, even the darker ones, has a silver lining. We just have to look for it.”
My Blogging and Commentary students are hard at work right now on their video blogging assignments, so I thought I would put up some links to work by former students from this class and also just some fun examples I’ve collected over the years:
