Day: December 19, 2004

Show marks Peter Pan centenary

Great Ormond Street Hospital, which treats sick children, gained the rights to the story when Barrie died in 1937.

Since then, the hospital has received royalties every time a production of the play is staged, as well as from the sale of Peter Pan books and other products.

[…] Peter Pan the play was first staged at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 27 December 1904.

See Little Known Fact on Peter Pan’s UK Copyright, In the UK Papers and A Little More on the Peter Pan Prequel

Peer-to-peer goes legitimate

In most countries, the music industry is taking song-swappers to court. But the sheer demand for downloading is forcing record labels, and now movie companies, to work with online retailers to offer legitimate alternatives.

[…] The editor of UK magazine Rip ‘n’ Burn, Tom Dunmore, says the film studios today are in the same situation record labels were four years ago.

“It’s absolutely crucial that the movie industry embraces downloading and provides legal services now, before the number of people using P2P for movies goes through the roof and people get used to getting movies for free.”

Hollywood’s response has been to go after the lawbreakers at a time when there are just a handful of alternative sites sanctioned by the industry.

[…] Carlo, Paul, Terry and Michael, of 3 Miles From, one of the hottest unsigned bands in the UK, do not want to sit around waiting for a record label to tell them they are good.

They want you to download and share their music for free.

Paul Chamberlain, the group’s guitarist, says: “We recognise the internet is going to be one of the ways forward, but it’s just a short cut for us really.

“It’s a way we can reach a phenomenal amount of people straight away. We just want more and more people to hear our stuff.”

[…] BBC director of new media Ashley Highfield, says file-sharing is a great way to control the cost of delivering large files like TV programmes quickly.

He explains: “Every person who comes to us to get a video file of a programme to watch it costs us to distribute it over the internet to them.

“P2P will help us substantially reduce our distribution costs. We send it out once and then people share the programmes among themselves.”

A movie critic looks at bootleg DVDs: Through a Lens, Darkly: Shopping for Bootleg DVD’s

From a purely ethical standpoint, the bootlegging of movies is in no way justifiable. But from a disinterested, purely aesthetic point of view, bootlegged pseudo-movies reframe the art form in interesting ways. In the spring of 2003, the artist Jon Routson installed his own covert recordings of movies at Team Gallery in Chelsea: a classic gesture of postmodern appropriation. Examining the phenomenon in the pages of Film Comment, Edward E. Crouse imagined the contents of a bootleg holy grail, in which “the surreptitious camcordist is recording at the moment that he’s busted by a multiplex security guard and kicked out of the theater – an inept studio movie that abruptly shifts gears to become a first-person surveillance documentary.”

Tantalized by the possibilities for slipped meanings and strange new content, I began my investigation of the bootleg at the Union Square subway station, a major nexus of transportation in downtown New York. […]

[…] Though I never did come across one of those minimalist masterpieces, let alone Mr. Crouse’s hypothetical holy grail, my peek into the bootleg underground was not without its peculiar charms: it’s amusing to watch such obsessively controlled entertainments slip into total aesthetic chaos.