Category: Life

There’s one part of the documentary where the reporter travels to Toronto to do interviews (see last blog entry). Well, to introduce Toronto as a city, I decided to do a 10 second montage to the sound of 50s rocks. Overeall, I have about an hour’s worth of city sights and busy intersections.

All of the shots were taken from public locations, with the exception of two places: the CN Tower (took shots of Toronto skyline), and the TTC (shots of a subway car arriving). When I was at the CN Tower, I filled out some forms that let me take footage under the condition that the company that operates the tower was named in the credits.

Well, I just got an email today from the CN Tower’s company. Upon review, they do not want to let me use what would end up being 3 seconds worth of skyline footage. It would seem that they would refuse all shots that do not explicitly promote the CN Tower as a tourist spot.

I’m dissapointed at this turn of events. It’s no big hurdle really – again I have tons of other footage of the city; but it would have been nice to have had that high-altitude perspective. However, I fail to see their logic in refusing for me to use footage of the city I shot from their premises. Common sense these days. Well, it’ll give me more stuff to talk about in the director’s commentary 😀

Well the first interviews are done (CRIA, Cineplex Odeon). I needed to do the CRIA first since its standpoint really defined what topics would be touched when interviewing the rest of the folks on this documentary.

The CRIA’s president is a Graham Henderson, a former lawyer for music artists. He was a very charismatic and well-informed bloke. You could mention any issue pertaining to music these days, and he was right on top of it.

It was quite refreshing to see someone that genuinely cared so much about the topic at hand.

Cineplex Odeon’s VP of Communications was also an interesting character. That interview went quite well, despite the fact that one of the microphones failed to work correctly when I was testing it during set up. I switched mics, and all went well.

This trip to Toronto all told cost me about $240. I have to buy another lapelle mic, which is another $60. Financially, this documentary will be the end of me. I can’t approach external funding because of the lack of a solid schedule. That said, I’ll see what I can do afterwards.

The movie should be released early-mid-April. I have another interview today (Ottawa Anime), one on Thursday (CHUO Radio), one on Friday (CMPDA in Montreal). I have more next week. Good Times.

The title of this piece is undeniably alarmist. It’s also in need of clarification.

The Internet, as most people know it, consists of surfing the web using aptly named web browsers. People typically enter “www”, which followed by a period, and then finally name of the domain they wish to visit (ie. google.com, ameritrade.com, etc.) But this system is under attack.

There are only so many domain names out there. Once someone buys “seal.com” for a year for instance, no one else can take it. That is to say until that year is up and domain expires, at which point its a free-for-all as to who wants to buy it next. To avoid having their domain bought out by unwanted others, owners of these addresses typically re-buy them before the expiry date.

That said, there’s a new breed of companies out there. The type that automatically buy these domains as soon as they expire, and replace the homepage with pure advertisements. Sometimes the address can be bought out again, but at a price substantially higher than its original value (up to a hundred times so, if not more).

The problem with what these companies are doing is that once they buy these domains, they don’t let go. And so, as irresponsible webadmins let their domains expire, these addresses are gobbled up by these chain advertising firms. Now, there’s one less address available for legitimate people to use on the Internet.

Multiply that by a million, and we have a serious problem here. There are, and always will be, people that let their domains expire. But once that happens, these firms come up, and the addresss become unavailable forever. With time, there are less and less legitimate addresses for people to use, and more and more of these pages of 100% advertisements.

This is a serious problem, and so far there’s been very little to curb it. If it continues, the Internet, as we know it, will go down the drain. Sure IP addresses will always work – but that’s not the Internet. Not to the average non-technical folk.

Nothing raises more bad PR in an industry than launching lawsuits against people that are clearly in the right.

In a lapse of judgement, Starforce threatened BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow because of comments he made on his blog. The comments, very benign in their nature, outlined the serious programming issues that were being placed on user’s machines when StarForce was used.

StarForce, for those who are not aware, is one of the popular anti-copying technologies used in PC video game products. What’s important to note here is that Cory’s comments are supported with undeniable evidence on his site. Just as the Sony BMG “rootkit” was an idea-gone-bad, so was the implementation behind StarForce.

But to threaten a lawsuit for someone to raise these issues is clearly not a good idea. So there’s a few bugs – you iron them out and move on. You come out with a better version. What you don’t do is sue the person that spoke of these issues to begin with. It’s not just a case of bad PR: it’s simply plain stupidity.

From: “Dennis Zhidkov”
Date: January 31, 2006 9:55:40 AM BST
To: “doctorow@craphound.com”
Subject: StarForce Response to Cory Doctorow

StarForce Inc. response to Mr. Cory Doctorow

Dear Sir, calling StarForce “Anti-copying malware” is a good enough cause to press charges and that is what our corporate lawyer is busy doing right now. I urge you to remove your post from http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/30/anticopying_malware_.html because it is full of insults, lies, false accusations and rumors. Your article violates approximately 11 international laws. Our USlawyer will contact you shortly. I have also contacted the FBI , because what you are doing is harassment.

Sincerely,
Dennis Zhidkov
PR-manager
StarForce Inc.

My honest opinion is that this is more of a scare tactic than anything. I can’t fathom of a single law that was violated here. It is not libel, because the information is both true and this is a declared personal opinion. It is not a violation of the DMCA. StarForce is based in Moscow, which complicates matters. Finally, this was not written by a lawyer, but by a PR Exec.

A PR Exec that should have known better than this.

Google recently unveiled its new pay-for Google video offerings. It is my belief that it will fail.

Now let’s define failure for a little bit. When I say “fail”, I don’t mean that Google will face financial troubles and shut down its troubled Google Video. No, quite the contrary, I think it will be a financial success. Bandwidth, after all, is nearly free.

I believe it will be a failure because Google will have ignored 95% of avid internet surfers out there. Instead, it will focus on that 5% that throws money on shirts with silly monikers and expensive gadgets that are never used.

How is Google ignoring its market? Well it goes down to what Google Video is, fundamentally: TV on the Internet. On Google Video, you pay to watch TV shows. And that, in itself, is part of the core of the problem.

People are used to TV being free. Most people, including myself, don’t want to pay to watch something that’s been free and advertisement supported since they were tots. Google, and iTunes before them, have defied this sense however by ditching ads alltogether and charging people $2 to watch shows.

But despite the price, there are issues. When you pay that $2 premium, you’re still quite constraint. The CSI episode that Google Video is featuring, for example, can only be watched for one day. That’s kind of crap, esp. since I could buy the season DVD for the same price per episode. It’s also kind of crap because there’s no reason for that limitation to be there, other than greed. Absolutely no reason.

Furthermore, they’re charging a ripoff rate for crap shows. No parent will ever accept to pay $2 to watch a Rocky and Bullwinkle episode, or some dated black and white Western TV show from the 50s. Then there’s the selection, which right now is quite limited. There’s only one random episode of CSI available, and four episodes of Season 2 of Voyager. What nonsense is this?

Google Video also sports some restrictive DRM, which prevents people from watching the shows on their video iPods or PSP. It’s sort of hypocricy – spouting this to be cutting edge technology when in fact you ignore all other advances made in home entertainment and the way people watch their media over the last few years.

I will never buy from Google Video. Ever. Nor will anyone else from my generation. Essentially, we do not have money to waste on semi-functional video clips. PT Barnum once said that a sucker is born ever minute. Unfortunately, Google is counting on it.