#Copyright robs the masses of shared culture and history

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

Tomorrow (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

#15yrsago Berlin hacker con will use RFID badges to simulate life in a totalitarian panopticon https://events.ccc.de/congress/2008/wiki/OpenBeacon_with_OpenAMD/

#15yrsago RIP, Forrest J Ackerman https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ackerman6-2008dec06-story.html

#15yrsago Googling Security: book that opens your eyes to how much you disclose to Google https://memex.craphound.com/2008/12/05/googling-security-book-that-opens-your-eyes-to-how-much-you-disclose-to-google/

#10yrsago 75% of American silent feature films lost https://variety.com/2013/film/news/library-of-congress-only-14-of-u-s-silent-films-survive-1200915020/

#10yrsago NSA collecting unimaginable quantities of mobile phone location data for guilt-by-association data-mining https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-tracking-cellphone-locations-worldwide-snowden-documents-show/2013/12/04/5492873a-5cf2-11e3-bc56-c6ca94801fac_story.html

#10yrsago Democratic lawmakers share a squalorous house in DC https://edition.cnn.com/2013/12/04/politics/real-alpha-house/index.html

#10yrsago Rob Ford police document: allegations of heroin use and more https://torontolife.com/category/city/toronto-politics/2013/12/04/new-bombshells-from-police-documents-suggest-rob-ford-may-have-tried-heroin-been-blackmailed/

#10yrsago NYPD shoot at unarmed man, hit bystanders, charge man for making them shoot https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/nyregion/unarmed-man-is-charged-with-wounding-bystanders-shot-by-police-near-times-square.html?smid=pl-share

#10yrsago Orange UK plumbs the depths of insulting, stupid marketing, finds a new low https://memex.craphound.com/2013/12/05/orange-uk-plumbs-the-depths-of-insulting-stupid-marketing-finds-a-new-low/

#5yrsago What it’s like to be a woman reporter on a cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers https://web.archive.org/web/20181205144647/https://breakermag.com/trapped-at-sea-with-cryptos-nouveau-riche/

#5yrsago See you in court: amid protests, shameless Wisconsin GOP neuters the incoming governor in an all-night, lame-duck session https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2018/1205/Wisconsin-GOP-pass-slew-of-measures-during-lameduck-session

#5yrsago British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court https://www.parliament.uk/globalassets/documents/commons-committees/culture-media-and-sport/Note-by-Chair-and-selected-documents-ordered-from-Six4Three.pdf

#5yrsago The longest-serving Congressman in US history proposes a four fixes for American democracy https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/john-dingell-how-restore-faith-government/577222/

#5yrsago RIP, George HW Bush: a mass-murderer and war-criminal https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/george-h-w-bush-1924-2018-american-war-criminal/

#5yrsago Trump cybersecurity advisor Rudy Giuliani has no idea how the internet works https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/rudy-giuliani-doesnt-seem-to-know-how-the-internet-works.html

#5yrsago Not just breaches: Never, ever use Quora https://waxy.org/2018/12/why-you-should-never-ever-use-quora/

#5yrsago Obamacare study: 25% decline in home delinquencies among newly insured poor people https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-04/how-access-to-obamacare-cuts-late-housing-payments

#5yrsago Poland rejects the EU’s copyright censorship plans, calls it #ACTA2 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/poland-saved-europe-acta-can-they-save-us-acta2

#1yrago Monopoly's event-horizon: The true capitalist singularity https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/05/eldritch-physics/#wouldnt-start-from-here Banning surveillance ads and banning drm as good politics

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

[radwolf76]

FLASHBack: Week 88 - Viking Kittens

On FLASHBack this week, we're going to be examining the work of one of the shapers of early internet culture, Joel Veitch, or as he was known on the B3TA Forums, Crab Bloke. Although it wasn't mentioned at the time, FLASHBack previously touched upon some of Veitch's work -- he collaborated with Weebl to write the first two episodes of Mr. Stabby. Today, however, I'd like to highlight what had to be the best use of Led Zeppelin's Immigrant Song, until that one scene from Thor: Ragnarok, anyway. On 27 September 2002, Joel posted Viking Kittens to his site RatherGood.com. Now you may notice that I haven't linked to the creator's own video conversion of the original Flash. That's because the audio has been copyright claimed, and rather than monetize it the audio has been muted out instead. It took some searching to find a YouTube source that hadn't been copyright mangled like this. While this may seem to be a case of a Transformative Use, Veitch would be operating under UK copyright law, where he would likely fail a minimal-maximal test under the 'Substantial Part' Doctrine by using the entire song. This would also not be the first animation of his to have legal issues: on one hand he's had to pull a Flash about Thomas the Tank Engine under threat of legal action from the show's creators, and on the other, he successfully settled a lawsuit with Coca-Cola over an advert that copied the content of one of his Flashes too closely. So if Veitch thought he could win a copyright fight over the use of the song he may just have made the attempt. As is, we'll have to be content with the copy of the Flash on Albino Blacksheep until the end of 2020, and whatever YouTube copies can stay off the copyright radar afterwards.   Veitch's Viking kittens would not be his only early foray into musical kittens animated in Flash, he also had Punk Kittens, Chilled Kittens, and Kittens singing Destiny's Child. He would later make a song observing that The Internet Is Made Of Cats, which while true, fails to make mention of the effect that his own singing kittens had as a cat-alyst for the rise of cat net domination. Two of his early Singing Kitten Flashes in particular though, would eventually lead to a phenomenon that Joel would become infamous for. Both Angry Kitten and Sweary Kittens would feature a kitten that was mostly bugged eyes and a lipless mouth of disturbing pointy teeth. Joel would reuse these design elements in the creation of his original characters, the spongmonkeys. These abominations would later go on to be used in one of the most WTF advertising campaigns of all time. While not primarily responsible for the decline of the franchise advertised, it certainly didn't help.   That wraps it up for now. Next time on FLASHBack, bring your blue hair dye, because it's about to get all Anime up in here.