The Interested Observer

As most of you know by now, and has been confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. (isn’t that a great name?) The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has asked YouTube to take down all the clips from the Oscar Telecast a few Sundays ago, citing copyright issues.

But not in Spanish, apparently.

The Academy, in its wisdom [sic], scrubbed Jerry Seinfeld’s hilarious introduction to the Best Documentary Film Category which includes a cool riff on movie theatre etiquette. However, a version dubbed in Spanish, survives. But if you’re Spanish isn’t that great you can hear Jerry in English under the voice over.

The Academy may be legally correct in demanding the take-downs, but it’s just so old school. Couldn’t the Academy 1) anticipated this was going to happen ( I mean come on people — Jennifer Hudson and Beyonce singing live, Martin Scorcese finally winning an Oscar, Al Gore — America has TiVo and by gosh they are going to use it); 2) Provided their own clips, which they could have teased for weeks on the site 3) Directed viewers to the ABC or perhaps the Academy Web site to see officially sanctioned highlights. If you can watch Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty on the ABC site, why not some Oscar highlights. And you get to make money from interstitial adversiting, fellas. Oh wait! There are some clips from the Oscars on Oscar.com, but they are you know … lame. And Go Fug Yourself has Oscar fashion complete with the snarky comments we were all saying at home … only you know .. funnier.

Oscar missed a — pardon the expression — golden opportunity– on both its own Web site and on YouTube to provide a second look the actual highlights from the show: the the watercooler clips, like Jerry, Jennifer, Marty and Al. Like it or not, media companies like Viacom and the Motion Picture Academy are going to have to develop media plans that include distributing, relevant clips to the Web, or rent another floor for their soon to be exploding legal department.

Oh, and if you hurry — you can still catch the Scorsese acceptance speech and the Dreamgirls medley. I’m listening to them right this second.

I have a guilty secret. I watch soap operas. Well I TiVo soap operas. Well just one really. “All My Children.” And I lurk like nobody’s business on the very clever AMC message boards. Unlike Aaron Sorkin’s paranoid fantasies of message boards filled with ignorant housewives in mu-mus and a dangerous fondness for Newport Lights, this board starts some interesting conversations include “rate a writer,” “WTF moment of the week” and suggestions for the writers and some of the characters. There are fans on the boards who’ve been watching since the 1970s (back when Susan Lucci was a teenager). This particular group of fans not only love the show, they want to make it better. And they want to keep watching. And sometimes, but not often, the writers actually appear to be listening. The give and take exchanges on these message boards are an interesting example of the new peer to peer media shift.
Now comes the news from both ABC and NBC that they are considering adding a third and fourth hour respectively to their morning news shows “GMA” and “Today.” NBC has already axed one of its soaps to make room for the extra hour and ABC, home of “All My Children,” “One Life to Live” and perennial favorite “General Hospital”could meet the same unpleasant and entirely unecessary fate. Message board fans admit its too soon to tell if ABC is gong ax one of its daytime shows or not. But there’s really no reason to ax anything. Here’s my reason why.

Back in days of yore — perhaps as far back as 1995– if a network’s program schedule was full programs had to be cancelled. There were only so many broadcast hours in a day, what else could you do. Now the networks have choices and they can’t see the new forrest for the old growth trees.

I watch catch up on several shows via my laptop. Most of the major networks including ABC will rebroadcast with very limited commercial breaks (every 15 minutes and there’s one commercial by one sponsor). This comes in quite handy when “The Office” collides with “Ugly Betty” as it does every Thursday night. Apple just announced a new platform that will let you play iTunes video download through your television. So quite frankly, I don’t see the need to cancel anything if there are other platforms available and an audience big enough to follow them. There is also a 24 hour channel called SoapNet. There’s no reason for ABC and NBC to consider cancellation as the only option for popular programming when there’s no question it could find a home and a revenue stream somewhere else. TV networks need to look beyond over the air broadcast. If they don’t think it can work, just ask Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.

In the wake of the Wikimania Festival at Harvard Law School in early August, everyone became obcessed with all things Wiki. Then after a few too many diet cokes, and cheesecake brownies all compliments of Wikimania, we started to get silly. Cold pizza stashed in the kitchen fridge had several tags and a note that its Creative Commons license permitted toasting as a derivative work.

We started thinking about all the collaborative culture and open source works that have been around long before the Internet and Wikipedia. We came up with a short list

• quilting bees
• barn raisings
• Family recipies
• Audience participation at the Rocky Horror Picture Show
• The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (“take a sad song and make it better.”)

But right now, this very minute, the most interesting experiment in collaborative culture is all about Free Beer.

Free Beer is a Danish brewery that offers free beer to any and all comers. Not free as in you don’t have to pay for it, but free as in freedom. Freedom to take their recipe and make it your own.
The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product (beer).Here’s the fun part: The recipe and branding elements of Free Beer is published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that anyone can use the recipe to brew their own Free Beer or create their own version of the recipe. Brewers of the new beer can make money from selling their beer, too. All they have to do is publish the recipe under the same Commons License and give credit where it’s due — to the original Free Beer folk. Not creative enough to come up with a label design or brand element for your beverage? No problem. Modify Free Beer’s logos and remember to honor that Commons license.
Can’t wait to get started? The recipe is right here.

And don’t forget to upload your new brew to the Flickr pool of international Free Beer makers.

Now compare this to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, which has had its formula locked up in a vault somewhere since it was first concocted by John Pemberton in 1886. In her article “Have a Cloak and a Smile” Barbara Mikkelson maintains that the urban legend surrounding the top secret formula is just that — a shrewd marketing idea to add a little mystique and allure to the brand. As the article points out, even if you wanted to make your own coke, you couldn’t market it as coke, and you probably couldn’t import many of the ingredience Coke uses.

What would happen if Coke loosened its grip on its forumla. What if it allowed fans and chemists alike to concoct a derivitive version of the soda pop, credit Coke and keep the train moving by using a Commons License to pass the recipe on and on and on. Certainly it couldn’t be any worse than Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke or any of Cokes in-house deriviative works. We think not. And both Free Beer and Coke have arrived at the same ends — a certain brand cache and mystique that makes consumers want to consume and in the case of Free Beer tinker with it, if they so choose.

But the “large red cola concern” (as it’s sometimes referred to in Atlatna) literally has its soda down to a science and unlike Free Beer, the ordinary consumer doesn’t have the money, the products or the machinery to manufacture Coca-Cola.

Enter Open Cola. Well, actually, it entered about five years ago, as a way to explain free culture and open source software. A noble experiment that wound up selling 150,000 cans and making the Toronto based OpenCola more famous than the software it was designed to promote. Like Free Beer, the recipe and the instructions for making OpenCola are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under a GNU General Public License.

OpenCola said its success was due to a “widespread mistrust of big corporations and the proprietary nature of almost everything.”

If you have the time and th inclination, you, too can make your own cola. Kate and Kayle took a shot at it in England,(see their step by step process on The Guardian Web site.) And remember, this isn’t really a new idea. After all, John Pemberton was making his own cola in 1886.

Sometimes Japanese copyright law can b like like traffic signals in Boston — just a suggestion.

Wired’s Jennifer Granick heads off to Toyko and visits the Mandarake comic book store in search of Japanese fan-fiction about the untold love affair between R2-D2 and C-3PO. She came up empty handed, but did find some fan fiction about the untold love affair between Harry Potter and (ewww gross) Draco Malfoy.

Granick gives a brief and fascinating tour of the Managa industry and culture, with attention to the mountains of fan-fiction both commerically and self-published harmoniously lining the shelves of Japan’s largest comic retailers without a lawsuit in sight.

These works are called doujinshi, or self-published fan fiction, and it’s a popular genre based on the appropriation and reuse of commercial characters.The secret love affairs mentioned above are part of a a Doujinshi subculture calld yaoi (pronounced “yowie!”). Yaoi features stories about the homoerotic relationships between two popular male characters in anime, manga and even Western films.

Japan’s easy-going copyright laws make it possible for these derivative genres to flourish. Manga stores not only sell fan-fiction based on original works, but how-to manuals featuring everything from drawing characters to dolls you can modify yourself to create whatever your heart desires.

Intentional or not, the Japanese government has provided manga fans with a way to kick start their own creative endeavors and allows them to draw inspiration and skill from commercial works.As Granick points out, In Japan, it’s no problem for your inspiration to be something cool somebody else thought of first.

This is not to say Japan doesn’t care about copyright. Copyright holders can and have prosecuted those who don’t follow fair use standards similar to those in the United States. However, when it comes to the highly popular and profitable world of comics and manga and derivitive works, everybody seems to look the other way.

Wired sublty suggests that the U.S. needs a new way to look at creativity that borrows and builds on the work of others and create a more collaborative culture that many copyright reformers  (watch the videos) argue for. Instead of just reading a manga and putting it on a shelf with the rest of your collection, you can build on your favorite series and your favorite characters and create something new. That is what the Fair Use Project is working toward. Their article “Will Fair Use Survive?”Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control” addresses some of the issues surrounding the strict fair use rules currently applied in the United States and argues for a more open application of US fair use laws.

The highly profitable Japanese manga/comic industry takes a “free expression” approach and continues to thrive. It seems there could be a lesson here for US corporate copyright holders who hold on to their copyright with an iron fist.