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You just don’t mess with Hobbits. You don’t take their rings, and you definitely don’t trifle with their IP.
The trustees of The Tolkien Trust, a British charity, have filed an action against New Line Cinema for its failure to pay a contractually required gross profit participation in the three films based on the world-famous Lord of the Rings trilogy. The trustees of the estate of JRR Tolkien and HarperCollins Publishers are co-plaintiffs in the lawsuit. The suit was filed today in Los Angeles Superior Court.
The Lord of the Rings films produced by New Line are among the most financially successful films ever created by Hollywood and were released in 2001, 2002 and 2003 respectively. The cumulative worldwide gross receipts to date total nearly $6 billion. Notwithstanding the overwhelming financial success of the films, and the fact that the plaintiffs have a gross participation in each of the films, New Line has failed to pay the plaintiffs any portion of the gross profit participation at all.
Will fans pay? Reznor opens books on ‘Net music experiment
Radiohead isn’t talking numbers, but Trent Reznor is. After producing Saul Williams’ The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust and offering it to fans online, Reznor yesterday laid out the numbers from his experiment. Saying that it’s easy for artists to know “what NOT to do these days, but less obvious to know what’s right,” Reznor found that 18.3 percent of users who grabbed the album paid $5 for it; the rest paid nothing. Is this what success looks like?
Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music has posted both a great presentation and a great promise:
If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
Go read this great summary of the last eight years of digital music and Rogers’ vision for the music industry’s future.
Just as the DRM-filled, iTunes competitor wannabes Virgin Digital and Sony’s Connect drown quiet deaths in the pool of online music, web giant Amazon jumps right in.
The Silicon Valley Insider weighs in on its pros and cons:
The downsides: The store doesn’t work nearly as quickly or smoothly as iTunes, almost certainly because it is browser-based. Navigation is clumsy, and getting a good sense of what’s in the store is pretty tough — it’s a hunt-and-peck operation. Amazon wants you to install its own MP3 downloader, which you’ll need if you’re buying an entire album. And its catalog isn’t as robust as iTunes’, even when comparing offerings from the same labels: EMI, for instance, sells the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed via iTunes, but Amazon only seems to have the Stone’s later-era music.
The upside: The songs Amazon does sell are usually priced at 89 cents to 99 cents a piece (though some cost more), they download reasonably quickly — and they work on iTunes. You haven’t been able to say that about any other digital music store up till now, and it’s potentially a huge deal: Amazon can now offer music as an impulse purchase to its customers — and provide the labels with their first realistic Apple alternative.
From reading the reviews out so far, media fans appear to have forgiven Amazon for the messiness of Unbox and in general are pretty pleased with the new music offering. How’s it working out for you?
SpiralFrog debuts with free, ad-supported music downloads
The good: SpiralFrog spent a year overcoming music licensing issues and finally launched with over 700,000 songs and 3,500 music videos, all for free.
The bad: The service requires you to live in the U.S. or Canada and to use Windows Media Player 10 or 11 under Windows XP or Vista. Why?
The ugly: DRM. If you don’t log in and look at ads at least once a month, all the music you’ve downloaded will be disabled. You can’t burn the music to a CD or put it on your iPod or Zune. SpiralFrog songs will play only on Windows Digital Rights Management players with the Windows “PlaysForSure” logo.
So the music is free, in exchange for your email address, age, gender, and your ZIP code or province/territory code, plus your monthly return to the site and limited usage options. If it keeps getting used like this, “free” is going to need another entry in the dictionary so we know what it means.
The band Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, was already known for using the Internet to market music in creative ways and encouraging fans to download songs rather than buy pirated CDs. Then the RIAA tried to get them to stop being so gosh-darn friendly. Now their fans have released a band-sanctioned free remix album. Reznor put out the multitrack files they needed, and the community responded.
Nine Inch Nails’ Open Source Remix Album Available as Free Torrent
Over the past few months, “multiple judges” at 9inchnails.com listened to over 200 submissions to the Nine Inch Nails open source remix contest and the 21 best remixes are now free to download via torrent or stream via the website.
Download the tracks for free. Trent wants you to.
Now you can help us elaborate on “Bird Song: A cartoon requiem for DRM,” our Lighthearted Cartoon Funeral March for Digital Rights Management.
Below you’ll find links to all of the raw audio, video, and image files you need to proceed with your mashup. Let us know if there are any other formats that might be helpful. All of it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license, the terms of which you can find here translated into a jillion languages.
Now it’s your turn to add to the story. Here are the raw music and video files:
As for how it was made, we’ll let the designers speak.
Islam Elsedoudi, art direction and design:
We mainly used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator for the animation and GarageBand for the music.
All the illustrations were drawn in Illustrator using the pen tool for the sleek drawings and the pencil tool for the sketchy drawings. We then brought them into After Effects and built “sets” in a 3D environment with a camera. We put a light source on the background to maintain realism and texture. The solid components of the piece (bird, globe, leaves, chandelier) were treated to look as if they were painted on the background.
The background texture remained consistent and unmoving, while everything else moved as it would in real space. Some of the more crude animations, such as the line rolling into the record and the bird cage falling were conventionally animated, frame by frame, using Illustrator and and a lot of screenshots.
If a new bill becomes law, it may soon be illegal to attempt (even if you fail) to share copyrighted material.
“Attempted infringment” appears in new House intellectual property bill
One of the bill’s controversial features is the fact that people can be charged with criminal copyright infringement even if such infringement has not actually taken place. “Any person who attempts to commit an offense under paragraph (1) shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt,” says the bill.
Read the gory details here. (pdf)
Despite stumbling on the way to winning approval for ISO standardization of its closed-standard ooxml document format, Micro$oft isn’t deviating from trying to position itself as a peacemaker, appearing to offer an olive branch in the ongoing document format wars by offering to support (or at least stop blocking) adoption of the Open Document Format so long as it “doesn’t restrict choice in formats.”
Restricting choice, as it is used here, can be roughly translated to mean something like, “eroding our stanglehold.” The way they spin it, adoption of the Open Document Format, based on open standards and completely free to use by anyone, will somehow limit users’ choice. So Microsoft is totally cool with ODF, so along as their closed-standard OOXML format somehow wins equivalent standing as an International standard, even though it is not an open standard.
Confused? Mission accomplished.
A similar, but better played anvil disguised as an olive branch maneuver was shown to internet radio operators last week as SoundExchange granted a “reprieve” from enforcement of the onerous royalty ruling handed down by the Copyright Royalty Board. It seems that even the music industry didn’t want internet radio to die.
In a dramatic, last-minute reversal Sound Exchange offered to negotiate more favorable royalty rates for webcasters if they agreed to implement Digital Rights Management technology to prevent “streamripping.”
That’s probably not a deal-breaker for most internet radio operators, but it further restricts a presently-held right of fair use (taping off the radio) for most listeners, and consolidates the music industry’s power online.
Bargaining from a position of strength is good PR, it seems, whether that strength is real or artifice.
With GE Vice Chairman Bob Wright claiming that internet piracy is putting America’s “overall economic health at risk,” and NBC/Universal general counsel Rick Cotton saying, “…intellectual property crime runs to hundreds of billions [of dollars] a year,” the shrillness of the anti-sharing camp is now almost beyond the range of human hearing. (However, you can still read Cotton’s position in PDF form.)
But AT&T is listening. James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president, announced this week that the the nation’s largest telephone and Internet service provider would broaden its policing of customers from allegedly cooperating with a domestic spying program to include development of “anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders.”
Will customers revolt? Probably not.
From the LA Times:
AT&T’s decision surprised Gigi B. Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights advocacy group.
“AT&T is going to act like the copyright police, and that is going to make customers angry,” she said. “The good news for AT&T is that there’s so little competition that where else are the customers going to go?”
Also, AT&T will soon enable you to see a roller-skating dog on your phone, so why worry about all this stuff? It’s all good.
Relax.
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