In addition to this blog, I also run a Tumblr at http://ralphehanson.tumblr.com. I use that to post quotes, photos, videos and the like with little comment or context.
Here are a few videos I’ve posted there lately that would make great pre-class entertainment (that’s what I use them for). Students, you may just find them fun.
The Princeton Review has continued to release its list of university “honors” this week in an effort to promote its annual college guide. Most notorious of these is the “Top Party School” list which no university wants to find itself on.
The ranking is based on non-scientific surveys of students who often take delight in trying to make their school come out high in the party rankings.
WVU has long experience in dealing with the publicity about its party reputation. Its basic strategy is making sure the school has good relations with the press at all times and engaging in search engine optimization to make sure that other, more positive stories show up high in the searches about the university.
If anyone has tried to comment in the last month, chances are your words got lost in the sea of comment spam that has been inundating the blog.
As of today I have added new anti-spam tools, including the ever annoying CAPTCHA codes (where you have to type in the the hard to read string of letters and numbers). I’m hoping this will help tame the tide of spam so I can actually see the real comments!
In the summer of 2012, News Corporation announced that it was planning to split the company in two. One company would be devoted to publishing, the other to film and television. Watch this space for updates.
Among my Seven Truths They Don’t Want You To Know About the Media is Truth #2 -There are no mainstream media (MSM). Of course we have big and small media; however, we use all kinds of media and our old legacy media hold no special status.
And everyone in the news media knew that this story would be breaking at 10 a.m. on Thursday, June 28th. The decision coming down was definitely not a surprise.
And yet…
Both CNN and Fox News initially got the story wrong. As the brilliant satirical news commentator Stephen Colbert put it to the networks, “You suck at news!”
In their effort to be the first to report it, both cable news networks initially reported that the court had overturned the individual mandate requirement that everyone purchase health insurance or pay a fine/tax because the court rejected the argument that this was justified by the commerce clause of the constitution. Except that that that Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion went on to say that the mandate could be justified under congress’s authority to levy taxes.
Niche, speciality news sites can often do a better job of reporting narrowly focused news as can big legacy news organizations.
In our modern media world, there’s no such thing as mainstream media. We have lots and lots of media choices, big and small, that are all capable of being influential in different ways.
And Fox News and CNN are really not all that different. Both are apparently more concerned with being first and drawing an audience than with getting a story right.
Eight years ago, singer Janet Jackson exposed her breast for 9/16ths of a second. As a result, broadcast network CBS was fined more than half a million dollars and a near-decade long battle over what could or could not be broadcast on network television was launched.
Today, The Hill reports that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the lower court ruling that threw out the fine on the basis that the punishment for showing “indecent content” was “arbitrary and capricious.”
According to Chief Justice John Roberts the case does not give a clear path to indecent content on broadcast channels today because broadcasters now know that such content is not allowed.
Although it was a unanimous 8-0 ruling (Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not vote because she had been involved with the case at a lower level), the judgment tells us very little about the court’s true feelings.
All the court did was rule that the FCC can’t throw big fines at broadcasters without warning them in advance. The court did not rule based on First Amendment issues, nor did it indicate that it was likely to tell the FCC to lighten up on regulation. This is the second time the court has heard the case. The first time the court ruled 5-4 in favor of the FCC on procedural grounds.
Video from The New Yorker featuring video from C-SPAN and George Carlin. Lots of bad language and limited nudity. (Yeah, that says C-SPAN to ya, doesn’t it!)
If you read this blog at all, (or even go on the Internet at all) you have to be familiar with the “Hitler Finds Out About…” meme. People take the excellent German film Downfall in which Hitler gets angry and frustrated, and they add their own creative subtitles to it.
The Real Downfall Clip
Clearly the creators of these sometimes hilarious videos are making use of copyright materials. But are they legally within their rights? (NOTE: As you go through this post, please note that most of the Hitler Finds Out About videos have NSFW language in the subtitles.)
In an interview with New York Magazine, Downfall director Oliver Herschbiegel said that the parodies are a compliment to his work. But the film’s distributor, Constantin Film, issued a takedown order last week for the videos for violating copyright.
According to the Ars Technica blog, Constantin Film did not obtain a takedown order under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; instead, the studio used YouTube’s Content ID filter that lets copyright holders directly blog content using digital audio and video fingerprints. In short, Constantin can automatically block many of the videos without any intervention by the courts or YouTube.
But, you say, aren’t these videos protected as parody? Yes, in fact, they most likely are. And according to the social media blog Mashable, the people who have created the parody videos can click on a check box that says the creator of the parody is disputing the takedown. That forces Constantin to go through the formal process of actually following the procedures outlined in the DMCA.
Perhaps the best explanations of the whole case are outlined in …. what else …. Hitler Finds Out About videos.
and
To me, the most interesting question is not how Constantin Film has fought this battle, but rather why? As I said before, the director doesn’t object and the publicity of the videos would not seem to be hurting the value of the movie. It appears to me that the biggest issue surrounding the meme is that it trivializes who Hitler was and what the Nazis did. (There is reportedly a version of it subtitled in Hebrew about the lack of parking in Tel Aviv.)
Of course, offensiveness is not a legal reason to ban parody.
