Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, March 05, 2005 The Pitch: It's Like Farenheit 451 meets Scrooged! I like to share my stuff. If there's something I like, I want people to know about it. I'm a proselytizer, as Edi pointed out the other night. When Joel pointed me to Ong-Bak, I grabbed a copy and lent it to Rob. When James came in to the store yesterday for the first Friday in maybe six months, I said to him, "Ooo! Have you read Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life? I totally thought of you while reading it." Or when Skip handed in his sub form, I said, "You're not reading Walking Dead? You would think that book is awesome!"So Annalee Newitz's cover story in the S.F. Bay Guardian this week kinda struck a chord with me. It's all about the upcoming "Broadcast Flag" regulation the F.C.C. passed that will make it, to quote the article, "illegal for anyone in the United States to manufacture a device that records high-definition television unless it's built to obey a special signal – the flag – emitted by stations broadcasting HD shows. The flag will tell PVRs and other equipment whether they're allowed to copy a show onto some other medium, like a DVD. In short, broadcasters and content owners will actually be able to control your recording habits." Newitz is very, very savvy and casts the role of those opposing such a law in the most accessible terms possible. The opening line of the article is a quote--"All I want is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, save it on a DVD, and loan it to my friend."--that any of us lender types could totally agree with. I mean, crap, now that Edi and I have watched Spaced, I'm frustrated because I can't really loan it to anyone--Rob's the only other person I know with an all-region DVD player. And there's tons of stuff I would have paid to rent already if it had been available--I hit up Tim for help on stuff like edonkey because Edi and I want to watch the third and fourth seasons of Six Feet Under, which HBO has limited interest in releasing on DVD if it can get us to sign up for HBO Premium (or HBO On Demand, or some other fucking spin-off channel). And yet, you know, I also feel a bit creepy about all this, too. Part of Newitz's opening line, "All I want is to make a high-definition copy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer..." kind of sticks with me a little bit. What's wrong with a low-definition copy? Newitz posits a perfectly legal situation: Let's say, for example, that it's a couple of years from now, and your TiVothat, again, seems dingenuous to me. I absolutely and completely think big media corporations are a bunch of greedy assbutts, but on the other hand, they pay the creative talent. In many cases, they pay the creative talent quite badly; on the other hand, the creative talent can make a good living off it, and do. I'm a big believer in exposure to a work--I bought a lot more albums in the days of Napster and Audiogalaxy than I do now--and, admittedly, at some point in the future, there aren't going to be analog TV's anymore--all HD, all the time. But I got squirrelly reading this article--in no small part because I felt uncomfortable siding siding with either the protesters or the corporations. I see a whole lot more cultural wars in our future, and choosing sides is going to suck in a mighty big way. posted by Jeff Lester | 3:32 PM | |
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