Uncategorized

This story would seem to fit in with thoughts on McDonald’s from the other day: reports of US cultural hegemony throughout the world are greatly exaggerated: “Whereas American TV shows used to occupy prime-time slots, they are now more typically on cable, or airing in late-night or weekend slots,” said …

AP reports: Canadian author Emily Somma has filed suit in San Francisco claiming the characters in “Peter Pan,” including Tinker Bell, Wendy and Captain Hook, are now in the public domain and no longer protected by a copyright awarded in 1929. The suit is a pre-emptive move in anticipation of …

Interesting BusinessWeek story on digital video, which is making it much easier for independents to shoot movies on a low budget, though it notably mischaracterizes the cost of Robert Rodriguez’ El Mariachi. While it may have been shot for only $7,225, post production work pushed to cost into the hundreds …

Perhaps emboldened by the innocent verdict in the ElcomSoft trial, a programmer has made the code available to crack the Microsoft Reader: Frustrated by the tight security and lack of interoperability of Microsoft Reader eBooks, a programmer named Dan Jackson obtained the source code for a command-line program called Convert …

Court grants stay in Pavlovich case: DVD copying has come to the attention of the nation’s highest court as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has agreed to put on hold a California Supreme Court decision restricting the entertainment industry’s ability to sue people posting programs that crack encryption codes embedded in …

E! online reports a new Headmaster Dumbledore has been named to replace Richard Harris, who died in October, in forthcoming Harry Potter movies: Michael Gambon, who picked up Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for his virtuoso performance as Lyndon Johnson in HBO’s Path to War, will be donning the robes …

I have a very weird feeling about this: The Who, meaning Townshend, Daltrey and friends, are attempting to record again for the first time in 20 years (and that one doesn’t really count anyway). I have been very vocal about excoriating the Who (and others) for continuing to tour under …

USA Today lists the five entertainers who they say had the worst 2002: Whitney Houston Defining moment: ”Crack is whack.” Recap: When Whitney Houston said those words to Diane Sawyer on national television, it became one of the next day’s most repeated phrases. Houston was saying she didn’t use crack, …

Master P gets slapped with substantial punitive damages for using woman’s voice without her permission: Rapper and producer Master P was ordered to pay $105,000 in punitive damages to a grandmother whose voice was secretly recorded and used to introduce a cut on artist Magic’s album “Sky’s the Limit.” Superior …

Publishers Weekly daily newsletter lists the consensus best books of 2002 based upon a survey of the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Village Voice: Fiction: Atonement by Ian McEwan (Doubleday/Nan Talese, …