The Italian Indymedia center reports that the Urbani Act has been passed by the Italian Senate. The act is another piece of draconian intellectual property law that is as unrealistic as it is repressive.
The law requires that every "creative work" released on the internet include a virtual license certifying its compliance with copyright laws.
This is obviously an emulation of the DMCA in the U.S., though it looks even more unworkable and insane.
RollingStone reports that the giant media corporation Clear Channel now owns the patent on technology for recording and burning CDs of live shows. As Kembrew McLeod says, it's like Clear Channel is following a script for an evil empire.
(thanx to Kembrew for bringing this to our attention.)
TRACK0 is software (for Windoze only, sadly) that takes sound from a CD in your CD drive and collages it with sound from others who are using the program. Great concept, and the example results file sounds wonderful.
This is a bit off-topic, but important - Steve Kurtz, a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, is being persecuted by the FBI simply for having perfectly legal biomedical equipment in his house, which he uses in the art he does that addresses biotechnology concerns. A
legal defense fund has been set up by Rtmark.
Negativland presents their new collage-video, The Mashin' of the Christ, a pretty great accompaniment to their classic song "Christianity Is Stupid."
The piece is a nice concept. Also, it's great to see Negativland embrace video, and embrace advance peer-to-peer technologies like bittorrent.
Plus, I think it's interesting to see the continuation of their strategy of pretending to have 'lost control' of their piece, so they can claim that they haven't actually released the work which could get them sued otherwise. Not that I think they will ever be sued again, but you never can tell. Anyway, this strategy was successfully employed for the Letter U and Numeral 2 CD and for Oswald's Plunderphonic re-release. It feels a little like ducking the issue, but it's also a great story that metaphorically highlights the way culture works, especially mass culture. You do something and it's out there and it's no longer really yours.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sues the maker of a "bobblehead" doll in his likeness, citing "assault on reputation."
Luckily, the Ohio toy company is being represented pro bono by a San Francisco intellectual property law firm. This will be lots of great bad publicity for Der Gropenfurher...
Gandalf spends much of the film trying to impress others with his in-depth knowledge of Karl Marx, and Frodo is cursed with the filthy tongue of a Russian criminal.
Russian cult video pirate rescripts Lord of the Rings as a gangster film.
(from The Guardian. via BoingBoing. via Peter Lopez)
A great work of website parody that also provides a valuable message and information, Political Friendster is a collaborative site for illustrating the connections between political "players."
An incredible collage music video about George Bush and company, and their connections to Saddam, Bin Laden, etcetera. That link is to the high-bandwidth version - more compact files are linked to from the SubMedia page.
According to this post on We Demand Media, the music is by DJ Dangermouse, of Grey Album fame, and the video edit is by an anonymous corporate news worker.
The MIT school newspaper, The Tech, recently did an interview with Jack Valenti of the MPAA. It's pretty entertaining, especially when he is told how many Linux users there are (who can't legally watch DVDs on their Linux machines) and he gets flustered...
(via Copyfight )