Today, former Senator and current head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Chris Dodd spoke at the Center for America Progress about creativity and copyright. While there are a number of points I could push back against in his talk one remark in particular stands out. Shortly after beginning of his conversation with Alyssa Rosenberg, Dodd claims “The entire film industry of Spain, Egypt and Sweden are gone.” At least with respect to Sweden, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Sweden actually produces a number of high quality films. Released in 2008, the vampire flim Let The Right One In received critical acclaim here in the U.S. Additionally, all three best-selling books of the Millennium Trilogy are Swedish films and 2009’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was quite successful. The film made a modest $10 million in the U.S. and a respectable $104 million worldwide.
Considering the budget for the U.S. remake of the film is $100 million - as much as the original film has earned to date - perhaps Dodd meant that the film does not count until Hollywood gets a chance to remake it. Ironically, the U.S. remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was shot in Sweden.
Chris Dodd was correct to say that film is an international industry, but he was wrong to say that the Swedish film industry has disappeared and misleading to imply that all Hollywood jobs are American jobs. At least for this Hollywood production, Sweden has a lot to gain.
Sascha Meinrath and I have a new article Slate on how the Stop Online Piracy Act and the PROTECT IP Act amount to collective punishment against online communities.
More than 300 years later, the U.S. Congress is considering bills that would lead to collective reprisals against online communities. The Senate’s PROTECT IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House are supposed to address copyright infringement and counterfeiting. In reality, they are so technically impractical that they do little to address these problems. They would, however, undermine participatory democracy and human rights, which is why these bills have garnered near-universal condemnation from both human rights groups and technologists.
The interconnected nature of the Internet fostered the growth of online communities such as Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. These sites host our humdrum daily interactions and serve as a public soapbox for our political voice. Both the PROTECT IP Act and SOPA would create a national firewall by censoring the domain names of websites accused of hosting infringing copyrighted materials. This legislation would enable law enforcement to take down the entire tumblr.com domain due to something posted on a single blog. Yes, an entire, largely innocent online community could be punished for the actions of a tiny minority.
“ “may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented”-B. ObamadigiphileOctober 5, 2011“ “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change-agent.” Steve Jobs, 2006, Stanford Commencement. #stevejobsmerelvanbeeren
October 5, 2011
Today Amazon announced three new products: a $199 tablet, a $99 touch screen e-reader, and a $79 e-reader. While I rarely comment on product releases I think Amazon’s trio of new Kindle’s brings up a few themes to watch:
I’m off for a 500 mile bike trip this Saturday around the state of Vermont and Montreal click through for our route and follow updates at Vermontreal.
A new article I wrote with Sascha Meinrath is up on Slate discussing the importance of user control of Internet enabled technologies”
To save the Internet as a platform for innovation, we need to see concerted intervention to protect the rights of users to create. Most importantly, we must fight for the Internet craftsman—the individual who is free to develop networks, services, and applications and who shapes networking technologies better to meet her own needs and those of her community.
Digital Feudalism: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide was recently published in the latest issue of CommLaw Conspectus: Journal of Communications Law and Policy. As Sascha Meinrath, Victor Pickard and I write in Digital Feudalism:
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A Growing Digital Divide: Internet Freedom and the Negative Impact of Command-and-Control Networking.