Hot "Live" Moms meet Bizarre Intellectual Property Policy

The surreal reality of our LA-lives becomes more obvious, the more I am become aware of Set-Top Issues. The LA Times (the very good Gina Piccalo) reports on how reality "stars" are trademarking ideas like "hot mom." I guess it makes sense that reality TV would be good for IP lawyers.

It's great to hear of such wackiness. But enjoy for yourself:

Nearly two years ago, Denay said, she had applied to trademark the terms "hot mom" and "hot mom's club" but had not applied for the rights to those terms in TV. So, Denay said, in August she applied to expand her trademark to include use of "hot moms" in all media. A week later, Medicis and the "Hottest Mom" producers filed their own application to trademark the term "Hottest Mom in America." Both applications are pending approval. Medicis attorneys wouldn't comment on details of the dispute but in a company statement said Medicis with Buzznation "created and developed the concept for this program entirely independently, and this individual's unfounded allegation to the contrary is false. As substantial momentum builds for this program, it is unfortunate, though hardly surprising, that this sort of opportunism would occur."

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VIDEO: 'Hacking Democracy'

The HBO special comes to Google Video. Isn't that nice of them :-)

Sure, Diebold tried to get HBO to cancel it, actually calling bullshit on them despite never having actually bothered to screen it. i think we know who the real hacks are here.

Leaked WIPO memo shows rich countries plans at WIPO

Karsten sez, "IP Watch has obtained a confidential report from a WIPO meeting of developed countries. It took place just before WIPO's general assembly in September. In this meeting they decided, among other things, to sink the much-criticized Broadcast Treaty. The report also describes how these countries (US, EU, Japan and others) are honing their strategy to minimise the effect of the proposal for a development agenda."

WIPO is the UN agency that creates copyright treaties -- it has the same relationship to bad copyright law that Mordor has to evil. The Broadcast Treaty is a sleazy attempt to create new rights for broadcasters and webcasters that trump the rights of the public and of actual creators. It's been a flashpoint for activist groups, who have started to show up in force, questioning the treaty's legitimacy.

The Development Agenda is the plan to reform WIPO as a real humanitarian UN agency, something it promised to do when it was chartered. The idea is to force every WIPO treaty to justify itself in terms of international development for poor countries, instead of just creating windfall profits for multinational copyright companies. It's a global scandal that developed nations are planning to sabotage it.

On the proposed broadcasting treaty, the report said that several members, as well as others not in the room, "will be making sure the diplomatic conference does not go ahead smoothly this week." In the end, it was agreed to schedule the diplomatic conference, or high-level treaty negotiation, for late 2007, after more meetings and another General Assembly.

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RSS Feeds and Copyright

I've always been under the impression that the contents of an RSS feeds are open to republishing, with attribution. For a while, I've done just that in the sidebar of my blog, embedding a great auto-updating newsfeed tool with the help of a plugin from CHAITGear.

More and more people are now accustomed to / hooked on RSS Newsreaders, thanks to great advancements in Google Reader, among other apps, and new browsers (Flock) and extensions (Hyperwords) lifting and reappropriating content from Web sites and RSS feeds (with attribution) is easier than ever.

"Does RSS Imply Permission To Reuse Content?," a recent article by Jason Lee Miller of WebProNews ponders the Q:

A content provider distributes his or her content through the use of an RSS feed. This feed is open to any who would subscribe. The first question is: Is there an implied consent to repurpose that material by republishing it (with proper credit) on a blog or Website? The act of syndicating (distributing) content may imply that permission.

The second question is: How are splogs (spam blogs) that are set up as aggregators of content to attract keyword-driven traffic, that publish only the headline and snippet of text, that link out to the original source, and that make money from AdSense different from Google and other search engines? Doesn't Google do, essentially, the same thing?

The short answer is that the legal system hasn't really decided for certain.

As Matthew Ingram details in this post, some bigger-name bloggers are uppity-in-arms and fanning flames over so-called "RSS-stealers."

RSS is also called "syndication." As with any sitcom in syndication, it is open for anyone to pick up, a sort of implied license. At least I'm sticking to that opinion, although while this should be easily inferred by the concept, I think it's also implied that syndicated material can only be used with original attribution.

All that said, there's not much on either side of the debate in the Wikipedia RSS entry and I can't seem to locate any address to this matter by RSS visionary Dave Winer, but considering the guy never thought once about patenting XML, etc -- I'm betting he's a believer in the implied consent to share RSS'd content.

DRM Poll on torrent tracker site

Interesting results - I would have thought the answers would be more one-sided on what is ostensibly an "illegal download" site...

I was lucky to attend most of Sunday Remixing the Archives Events @ USC Annenberg center. More free events and lectures - Upcoming later in the Year

The final day of TransFormations I, Remixing the Archive, was a wonderful affair.

I missed the first event, the winner of USC's Free Culture NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD remix competition. I did check the winners out, Sami Kriegstein - Night of the Living Advertisements (YouTube) (Internet Archive)and Michael Rossmassler - Sugar on My Tongue (YouTube) (Internet Archive). Rock on!!!!

Imagine a brand new cinema: one that goes back in time and follow the road not taken when those Hollywood Pirates left the East Coast and committed themselves to a passive theatrical experience. The panel discussion,THE ROOTS AND FUTURE OF REMIX with Barbara Lattanzi, Anne McGuire, Sean Deyoe and Aram Sinnreich took us back in time to the early 20th Century when film - believe it, we saw the examples - was an active medium with Karaoke features embedded in the viewing experience.

Is remixing really new? Hasn't it been around for centuries both as an artistic practice and maybe since the beginning of this century? Aram jump-started things with an interesting opening. He's been focusing on the organization patterns in culture, with a focus on music creation, to develop a workable theory of network culture. Basically, he's looking at the radical changes in music and what that presages about our uncertain cultural moment, one where Gnarls Barkley/Danger Mouse CRAZY, a remix, is the top summer hit. His point is that it's never been easier to de-fragment, re-fragment the piece of content to make something new. There's a litany of other remix examples....

Next Barbara Lattanzi gave an amazing presentation. She traced back to early, early 20th Century film and showed how, at the beginning, there was a fork, the road not taken. This road gave audiences a hilarious degree of agency. We watched shorts from I think 1920's where audiences would sing back and follow songs, almost karaoke-like, before a feature. It's a radical thought: one would have happened in film became an active, agent experience where the audiences was mobilized?

She gave numerous examples in her work where she's breaking down the passivity model using idiomorphic software. My favorite was her work on the Zapruder-Kennedy assassination reworking and examples of her C-SPAN Karaoke, my favorite being the Alberto Gonzalez karaoke. I can't recommend enough that people check out her website and follow her work.

Why start the Titantic leaving the East Coast? I'd prefer to see the film start with Kate as an old woman. Anne McGuire showed how to do this. Anne presented her remixing, deconstructing, remaking of class films, renamed ADVENTUR POSEIDEN, THE [get the joke Warner Brothers] (The Unsinking of my Ship). We watched how she had the perfect content to remix so that the film starts with the helicopter dropping our lucky group INTO the Poseiden and the ship then unsinks itself. All the content, all day, was great and you should check out her films where possible. What a happy ending!!!!!! The ship rights itself!

Finally and perhaps most interestingly to me given my Online Community focus, there was Sean Deyoe from Betalevel. Betalevel creates and offers remix parties/events/salon - literally creates community where it did not exist employing remix tools. I'm most attracted to the "Swap Meet
Piracy - Karaoke - Conviviality." These are events where people come together to share musical files, but more importantly to gather and sing karaoke. What's so fascinating, what Sean himself finds remarkable about the events is simple: People are far less interested in "stealing"/"sharing" each other music, although they do share music. But the focus always is on the singing/enjoying each other's company.

This gets back to BIG MEDIAS' need for Psych 101 re-education. You don't make honest people dishonest and you don't scare dishonest people into being honest by stupid intimidation tricks. Put another way: human nature did not change with the invention of Napster. If you're the music business, you simply alienate and lose a whole generation of users.

Betalevel shows a third day: you build trust, create a connection between fans, allow them to come together (off AND online) and share, and boomm, you'll make a boatload of money and your fans will be happy.

One theme that emerged in the panel discussions was the sense of "something" emergent or ambient. That is, all the panelists spoke of something "special," almost a magical fusion generated between fans/users and artistic forms. New remix technologies strives to share this content and empower this connection. This sharing, this radical digital transformation of content and space is something new. I found the language to be spiritual in the native-american spiritual ecology sense of connecting to something larger when you share yourself within or with a larger entity.

This is a unique, strange time.

The grand finale was a bravura performance by TV Sheriff and the Trailbuddies. The crowd loved it. So did I. During the performance, a little girl, one of the TV Sheriff's guys' daughter, danced by the stage, roaming around the front.

I couldn't resist the feeling walking to my car that "that something" is already being lost amidst all this "connecting". At the very least, it is becoming more and more concealed, harder to imagine, to see amidst the clutter (no mas Web 2.0 hype) of our mediated society. Children don't understand organizational forms of culture, boingboinging, axis of evil and such. They simply like to dance while their dad plays in a band.

Linux Hits the Big-Time: Microsoft in Bed with Novell

The more Web 2.0 gains steam, the more interesting it is to examine the media's coverage of the major players. It's encouraging that the message is become a stronger and stronger green-light, a push for the investment/financial/advertising community that "OK boys, time to get back in the game."

In counter-point to Forbes' Daniel Lyons' hysteria over Richard Stallman and the tensions in negotiating the new Open Source/GNU license, the New York Times runs an interesting article (headline: "2 Giants in a Deal Over Linux") noting the partnership between Microsoft and Open Source company, Novell, and how this is a logical, development. Linux software, improved by its open source foundation, has a symbiotic relationship with the Free Software movement.

What's most striking is the contrast in tone. Reading the Times, the development actually makes sense. Over at Forbes, folks are getting a wee bit hysterical, Daniel Lyons' (headline: "Microsoft Linux!") seems shocked that the Open Source movement can ACTUALLY GET ALONG with the big, bad Microsoft. But, this is a natural, healthy development.

It's becoming clear that the old poles are dissolving. Those media outlets wedded to the black and white binaries will have a hard time adjusting. Those wedded to the old ways of thinking won't have any choice but change. And they not like it (who does?). But here's for the open-source, free software, and proprietary business models all mixing and matching.