The Good, The Bad and the Ugly Films

Good

Back in the early 80’s, when she was on the set of David Lynch’s Dune, Sean Young shot some home movies of the cast and crew. You get to see a young Kyle MacLachlan, Sting, Lynch, and all kinds of other people. It’s narrated by Young and is a fun look back. If there’s more of these, I’d sure like to see them.

Bad

In a bid to try to virally market their new movie, Piranha 3D, the Weinsteins had a decidedly NSFW web site created. I’m going to assume that it’s based on the movie in some way, seeing as Jerry O’Connell and Eli Roth can be found in amongst all the scantily clad/half nude women. Will this kind of campaign work? Should there be an age disclaimer on the website to protect themselves from lawsuits from parents of inadequately supervised children? How does this really promote the movie? I think I picked up a little clue about the movie in the giant ad for the energy drink, but is that it? This doesn’t make me want to go see it any more than I did before I looked at the website, and goodness knows I like looking at boobies. If nothing else, this kind of shows that they’re going for a hard R rating for the movie, which is nice to know.

Ugly

Thanks to Buzz Out Loud, one of the tech podcasts that Allen and I listen to, we learned of something that could potentially kill pretty much all digitally recorded video, as it relates to sharing and viewing. No, it’s not some big scary virus, it’s something far more sinister… a group of corporate patent holders known collectively as the MPEG-LA.  The group contains Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Panasonic, LG, Mitsubishi, and many, many more. The patents they hold affect the majority of the digital camcorders, including cell phones and digital cameras.

They license these patents to the makers of the cameras, as long as the recorded video is only used for non-commercial purposes. This statement is in *all* the user agreements for these products, up to and including PROFESSIONAL VIDEO CAMERAS. Up until now, they’ve pretty much turned a blind eye to film-makers that upload their video to ad supported sites (which infringes the user agreement) and directors using these cameras to make movie, videos, etc.

Recently, MPEG-LA extended their "free internet broadcasting AVC license" until 2015. So until then, users can use a licensed encoder (x264 doesn’t count, in their view this makes both the video producer AND every random viewer of that video *liable*), to stream online royalty-free, as long as that video is free to stream. However, what’s "free to stream"? According to one interpretation of the U.S. law (disclaimer: I’m no lawyer), if you stream your video with ads (e.g. Youtube, Vimeo), then that’s a non-free usage.

-OS news

This could get tricky and financially devastate many people and companies if the MPEG-LA ever decided that they wanted a bit more money and went about legally enforcing their multiple patents. It could effectively kill a lot of innovation and creativity. Or not… Hopefully it’ll all work out for the good and all these big corporations won’t decide to be greedy.

I feel like I should be wearing a tinfoil hat. -Mark

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