Public Address - Hard News (Home)

Dancing the DMCA | Apr 20, 2007 11:42

Well, you can't watch the Air New Zealand parody ad any more. YouTube has responded to what I presume was an appropriately-formulated DMCA takedown request, and yanked the clip, sending this message to Dan, its creator:

This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by Air New Zealand Limited claiming that this material is infringing:
Parody: Air New Zealand Commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5EyE5q4fmE

Air New Zealand didn't move against this clip because its copyright was being infringed -- there are tons of Air New Zealand ads on YouTube, and at least one other amusing mash-up of the present campaign.

It did so because it was anxious about the parody alluding to headlines earlier in the week about fears its 2007 campaign (in which a man jumps out a window to fly to his dear old nana, or a young fella leaps off a wharf to fly to his girlfriend) could be seen as encouraging suicide.

When a corporation asserts copyright in this way to quell a message it perceives as damaging to its brand, it is highly likely to have the better of the law, which doesn't mean the process of asserting its rights should be painless.

Anyway, I got my official cease-and-desist letter yesterday, in which Air New Zealand kindly offered to take no further action against me if I immediately "cease and desist from publishing the Advertisement" and "undertake not to infringe intellectual property rights of Air New Zealand in the future." I told them I'd reply today.

The funny thing is that Dan, who created the video, published it on YouTube and posted the link to our site, never heard a word from Air New Zealand's lawyers, even though his contact details were prominently available. How odd.

Meanwhile, the winger commentariat gets progressively more crazed in the aftermath of the VTech shootings: Wouldn't it be great if we could make the VTech killer a Muslim? No, really, one of the more prominent winger blogs, Atlas Shrugs, has a post headed Ismail Ax: America's Beslan, which in a frenzy of misdirected speculation (including yet another wrong-Asian-guy episode), attempts to link Virgina Tech to the global jihad.

Meanwhile the appalling Mark Steyn writes a commentary on the shootings in which he endorses claims of student cowardice in failing to tackle the killer and - because there has to be a Muslim angle, right? - blathers on about a massacre that took place 28 years ago in Canada. The perpetrator in that case wasn't technically a Muslim, but he was, as Steyn "puts it the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you'd never know that from the press coverage." (And, of course, you'd never know from Steyn's column that the killer had lived solely with his French-Canadian mother from the age of seven and even officially changed his Algerian surname.) Can we stop calling Mark Steyn a journalist already?

Right out there on the fringe, they know who's really to blame for the massacre: Darwin.

I made the Best Comments column on SARugby.com. Who knew?

Rob O'Neill at NZBC crunches some numbers on online readership and points out that, far from disappearing, the best MSM brands (notably The Guardian and the New York Times) are reaching far more readers now than they did before the internet went mainstream.

The interesting thing is that that The Guardian, easily the most successful paper in terms of online readership, enjoys the status of being owned by a trust rather than a hungry proprietor. The next two big brands, the New York Times and the Washington Post, have also avoided being hawked and traded, and maintain family links to their respective founders.

You know what was cool? Being able sit in front of my computer in Auckland and watch Alberto Gonzales get a very extend grilling in front of a US Senate committee, live via the official video stream.

Book your seats: Richard Dawkins is to be interviewed by Bill O'Reilly next week. One wouldn't think Dawkins would have much trouble on the intellectual front.

Bill Maher on Religion is bad, drugs are good.

And - hey! - up pops video of Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan debating in 1968. Cool.

Righto. Public Address Radio, 2pm tomorrow on Radio Live, features an extensive report by David Slack and Nigel McCulloch on WOMAD with a live Gotan Project recording, plus an interview with Steven Price about the Coalition for Open Government, and new contributions from David Haywood and Craig Ranapia.

And I'm on The Panel on National Radio today, with Jeremy Elwood.

Have a nice weekend.

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On receipt of a not-so-nastygram | Apr 19, 2007 10:27

In this gig - that is, trying to earn at least part of my income blogging - I do sometimes sit at my desk about 5pm and wonder what I'll lead with tomorrow. As it was yesterday, until Andrea Haggit, Legal Counsel for Air New Zealand, came through for me.

At 4.48pm, she sent me the following message via the reply button on the blog:

Hi,

I am Legal Counsel for Air New Zealand. I would be grateful if you could provide me with a contact email address so that we can formally request the removal of Air NZ's copyrighted material from your website, namely the parody of the Air NZ commercial located at

http://publicaddress.net/system/topic,356,air_new_
zealand_suicide_commercial_parody.sm.

Kind regards,
Andrea Haggitt

To save you the bother of cutting and pasting, that's a posting in OurTube, here.

Anyway, fair enough, she's just doing her job, and the "Hi" salutation was a friendlier touch than "Dear Mr Brown" or "To whom it may concern". I replied promptly:

Hello Andrea,

This is my email address.

I would first like to state that I don't believe this to be copyright infringement. Your imagery is clearly being employed for satirical purposes and there is no suggestion of passing off.

Secondly, you don't appeared to have noticed that the allegedly infringing material isn't on our website. I have simply linked to a YouTube video.

Do feel free to communicate further with me on this.

Regards,

Russell Brown

It seems they haven't grasped the difference between me hosting content and me linking to content (or, rather, a reader linking to content via a part of the site that allows users to post links). Anyone with a legal insight on this kind of copyright dispute should feel free to chip in with an opinion.

I'd also appreciate a little help for a query from a Listener reader: "why are some websites .com and .co?" I know a bit about the domain name system, TLDs and ccTLDs, but it would be nice to offer a detailed answer (it'll appear in the Listener's Any Questions column). Specifically, what was the process around the creation of .nz? I recall that we followed the British convention (with a .co 2LD) while the Australians went for .com, and that we plumped for .govt rather than .gov, and .ac rather than .edu. But why and when?

Something I forgot to do yesterday was direct you to a bunch of podcast items from Saturday's Public Address Radio programme on Radio Live (we're back atcha 2pm this Saturday), including reports on the Wellington Flickr Group and a night with the Wellingtonista, as well as a further 180 Seconds With Craig Ranapia and a report from Keith Ng. If you want to subscribe to the podcast, the feed is here.

And, finally, the second half of this excellent video rant from Bill Maher, and this column by Paul Krugman go together. When you're choosing US administration officials on the basis of their professed godliness rather than their competence, you really are asking for trouble.

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Awful in more than one way | Apr 18, 2007 10:47

You just knew that Instapundit and Michelle Malkin would respond to the Virginia Tech massacre by implying that it wouldn't have happened if VTech hadn't been a gun-free campus, but you'd think they might have been able to wait more than a couple of hours after the deaths to start the politicking.

The gun-control argument in the US is impenetrable and pretty much pointless for outsiders to engage with - although John Howard slated US "gun culture" yesterday - and the fact that the shooting coincided with a National Rifle Association convention that drew a staggering 60,000 delegates underlines the fact that what I think hardly matters anyway.

But I did like this counterblast to Glenn Reynolds and the there-just-weren't-enough-guns-on-campus argument from a local resident:

And maybe, if you'd thought for two seconds, you would have figured out that even the most fervent gun owner probably wouldn't think to take their gun to their morning ENGINEERING CLASS.

And maybe, Glenn, if you'd thought any longer than that, you would have realized that we don't live in a video game or a Clint Eastwood movie and that even a skilled and responsible gun owner who just happened to think, "Wow, maybe I'll take my gun to class just in case some crazy guy bursts in and unloads two clips into the crowd," who just happened to have that gun sitting in their lap and not packed in their bag, and who just happened to be staring directly at the door and not taking notes or listening to the lecture when some crazy guy did, in fact, burst in with both barrels blazing would still probably have been too busy hiding behind his or her desk and/or bleeding to death to do any good.

But you didn't stop to think, did you Glenn, because you don't give a rat's ass for Blacksburg and you don't give even half a rat's ass for the dead and wounded. You just wanted to score a cheap point. You saw the news that upwards of twenty young students had been killed and thought, "What a PERFECT time to say something stupid!"

I know we on the left get a lot of flak for bad language here on the left. And I know we've got a reputation for being angry, but there's only one thing to say here.

Fuck you Glenn Reynolds. Fuck you.

And stay the fuck out of my town.

Anyway, if you'd like a Glock 19 of your own, these guys are happy to sell you one in any flavour you like. Although the consumer reviews ("Never has a gun made such a fashion statement as the Glock did when it made its debut in the eighties") are average.

Elsewhere on the internets, some news organisations got the wrong armed-to-the-teeth Asian guy, the Chicago Tribune couldn't tell the difference between Chinse and Korean, people flocked to GoDaddy to register VTech massacre-related domain names, and Newsvine was adjudged to have beaten Digg and Reddit to the news, the Washington Post continues to round up blog and social network site responses. And dozens and dozens of people were killed on another day in Iraq.

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Art and the Big Guy | Apr 17, 2007 11:16

It would be nice if gallery owner John Gow could stop referring to the proposed artists' resale royalty as a "tax". It isn't: taxes are rendered to the government. Is it an artificial construct? Of course - as are performance royalty schemes for songwriters, and, indeed, the idea of copyright itself.

The idea that half of receipts from such a scheme would be gobbled up in administration, as further claimed by Gow, is a bit hard to credit. APRA operates a large and highly technical performance rights collection scheme on behalf of its songwriter members, and returns 87 cents in the dollar to those members (who may well include Gow's business partner, former rocker Gary Langsford). A resale royalty scheme would be smaller, and thus have certain fixed costs to cover, but would also be far less complex.

This sort of scheme is not unusual in world terms. It has been near-universal in Europe for years, and, more recently, in Ireland, Britain and California. Altogether, about 50 countries operate such a scheme.

The claim that such a scheme would depress or damage the market in art, or drive sales elsewhere, is very hard to sustain. The British scheme turned a year old in February this year. The result?

London's contemporary art business is stronger than ever. "Sales have been as healthy as they were before the law came into effect," said Glenn Scott-Wright, director of London's Victoria Miro Gallery. "Clients haven't indicated that they were unwilling to buy because of the royalty. In fact, there hasn't really been much discussion of the law at all."

British auctioneers have reported similar results. Pilar Ordovas, head of Christie's contemporary art department in London, stated that 2006 brought "the best sales ever in contemporary art in our history." As far as paying royalties on sales, she said, "Nobody seems to be concerned."

Perhaps the most interesting part of the report quoted above is the swift emergence of competitive pressure on collection costs. The emergence of a rival collecting society in Britain pushed commissions down from 25% to 15% within the year. That should provide a steer.

It is not, of course, straightforward: should royalties accrue for a conventional copyright period - 50 years after the artist's death - or only to living artists? Should they be applied on a sliding scale as resale values increase? These and other questions are posed in the MCH discussion paper. Gow and other dealers would be well advised to just read it and respond before declaring the sky to be falling.

And, lacking for the moment a tidy segue involving Anton Oliver, I'll just push on into the day's other item of business: the Big Guy is leaving. Carl Hayman, the best front-rower in world rugby, and the rock on which the current All Black side is founded, seems certain to leave for a three-year contract with the English club Newcastle after this year's Rugby World Cup.

Some people will presumably be distraught. I'm not too happy myself, but I can understand why relatively young players want to take the OE option. There is, of course, the lure of nearly a million dollars a year. Rugby players' careers are not long, and such an opportunity to provide for the future must be quite compelling.

The other appeal must surely be just to do something different. Most of us don't commit the best years of our lives to just the one thing; still less to the long season, constant physical impact and the sheer immersiveness of being a modern All Black. You can invoke the mana of the jersey, but the All Blacks of a generation ago had jobs and lives outside the game.

If they make the World Cup final, this year's team will play 16 test matches (this after beginning the year with two months' hard conditioning work), and Hayman will likely start more of those matches than any other player. It could have taken you three or four years to rack up that many tests in the 1970s, and you wouldn't have had Super 14 on the side. Whatever the claims of English rugby, turning out for Newcastle will be a breeze by comparison.

It's probable that other players - Luke McAlister? - will follow Hayman into short-term contracts. They may well come back, and we may well see a cycle of top players coming and going between world cups. The obvious problem is the hollowing out of our domestic rugby; the loss not just of stardom but experience. Already, Sky's Super 14 viewing figures are down - how much more might they erode if the public perceives that it is watching a bunch of second-raters?

I can't say I'd do anything different from Hayman in his position. Maybe it'll work out: we discovered that letting coaches head off for a year or two was an absolute boon. But whatever happens, there are interesting times ahead for rugby; both the business and the game so many of us love.

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Biting back at Bill | Apr 16, 2007 10:45

I'm not surprised to see that a number of those who got the axe under Bill Ralston have been keen to express indignation at his doomy pronouncements on TVNZ's latest staff cuts. But the former staffers posed their own ironies.

Mike Hosking presumably enjoyed a chance to have a crack back at the man who showed him the door, describing Ralston's comments as "delusional in the extreme". This is rather a change of tone from Hosking's previous public accounts of his departure, which revolved around being grateful to have been given the opportunity to spend more time with his daughters.

When Ralston arrived, Hosking was the figurehead of a previous era; the steward of the glossy, richly-funded Sunday programme created by the previous news chief, Heaton Dyer. His face didn't fit the new regime, and he had to go. But Hosking was paid a great deal to work at TVNZ (he kept all his salary after being taken off Sunday and confined to Breakfast), and a huge amount to go. He is now not short of work or a dollar. Such are the benefits and risks of being a flagship presenter.

Rod Vaughan climbed in too:

Veteran TV journalist Rod Vaughan wrote to the Herald angry about what he called Ralston's "breathtaking" hypocrisy.

"Isn't this the same person whose very first action at TVNZ was to axe charter-driven investigative programmes like Assignment and send some of the country's most experienced television journalists, myself included, down the road?"

Vaughan - who now works on rival TV3's 60 Minutes - said the "rot set in" during Ralston's "calamitous and chaotic mismanagement" of TVNZ news and current affairs. "The writing was on the wall for him a long time ago and it would have been more honest of him to say he jumped before he was pushed."

The yanking of Assignment was an unhappy event, but a story written by Philip Matthews early in Ralston's reign provides some context:

Hosking isn't Sunday's only problem. The show is the legacy of Ralston's predecessor, Heaton Dyer, who had to quickly invent an all-New Zealand current-affairs show after losing 60 Minutes to TV3 and finding that other international stories were unsuitable for the format. He did this by collapsing Assignment into Sunday and creating an unwieldy monster with a team of 32 reporters, producers and directors – more than 10 percent of TVNZ's total news and current-affairs staff – who were expected to work for both shows. The concept was a failure, Ralston believes, and an expensive one, with a "budget that was extraordinarily flush". That budget was on-screen, certainly – in the form of serious, if not sometimes gratuitous, air miles for its reporters. To unsentimentally axe Assignment altogether is one way of solving that problem, even if it means losing some of the channel's most senior journalists. "There are people who have been here an awfully long time," Ralston says. "Today is the 35th anniversary of [Assignment/Sunday reporter] Rod Vaughan entering television!"

Some long-stayers are on a nice wicket, others are just institutionalised. On paper, losing salaries such as Long's and some of the senior journalists on Sunday/Assignment is an easy solution to the budget cuts that Ralston must make – the figure is even larger than the $4 million that has appeared in the media, he says. It's hard to get a straight answer from anyone at TVNZ over why this cut and those to come in other departments are necessary, especially as news and current affairs took $12 million from the government not long ago to meet charter obligations. Curiously, given that investment, Ralston notes that at both government and management level it has been recognised that TV3 produces "a relatively similar news and current affairs product for much less".

There was indeed a period when TVNZ current affairs journalists seemed to have an almost limitless budget. If they needed to fly to Los Angeles to do a piece to camera in front of a building, it seemed, they just did it. As we noted in a 2004 Mediawatch programme, Ralston's public view was that "TVNZ's news and current affairs can do what it does better and for less."

Rod Vaughan isn't exactly begging in the streets now. In his new gig he was responsible for one of the worst - as in emotionally manipulative and uninformative - current affairs reports I can recall in recent years, on the Herceptin issue. If that was the Vaughan style - and it is - then you can keep it. It was the very opposite of investigative journalism.

I guess my perspective on TV news - from either channel - is influenced by the fact that when I get involved, it's usually with a junior generalist who wants a soundbite and, if possible, me to do his or her research. When the internet can now drive the news agenda to the extent that "the Timaru lady" and her questionable YouTube video led 3 National News on Friday night, you'd think both channels would hire reporters who didn't have to have the story explained to them every time.

On a previous thread here on these issues, a reader suggested TVNZ should "get rid of the desks, give people like Keith Ng a digi-cam and a credit card and let them loose." I'd turn the telly on for that - and, I suspect, the digital era may demand it. (BTW, TVNZ is going all-digital and tapeless and has just bought some cool-sounding kit)

TV news has become a prisoner of TV's cost structure. The bulk of the dizzying cost of TV news does not lie in allowing experienced reporters a long investigative leash, but in the sheer expensiveness of television. Some of that simply will change.

My guess - and it is only a guess - is that while there are firings now, there will be hirings later, especially as TVNZ's Freeview factual channel takes shape, and that there is the potential to do something new and improved with news television (although the grandiose sentiment of the new promotional video doesn't seem to be a particuarly good sign -- the metaphor of making the whole nation gather outside with our torches is simply wrong for an era of niches). The status quo clearly doesn't seem to be working for One News anyway.

But, again, maybe that's just a print freelancer talking. My standard rates have hardly budged in more than a decade, and I'm concerned about APN's latest strategy: to remove experienced sub-editors from regional papers, centralise that work in Auckland and outsource other editing work to a sausage factory in Australia. If quality and experience are your concerns, you've got more to be worried about there than at TVNZ.

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