Me: There is no way this week can possibly get dumber
Directors Guild of America: (clears throat) THE FCC IS ACTUALLY A COPYRIGHT AGENCY! STOP BAD COPYRIGHT LADY FROM TOUCHING THE SPECTRUMS! deadline.com/2022/02/gigi-s…
Look, Gigi is a mentor of mine (and, perhaps more critically, a friend). The fact that bad faith shit is completely expected doesn’t make it any less frustratingly stupid.
It’s another layer of infuriating when you watch someone you know, who is both personally and professionally important to you, get dragged through the mud like this.
There’s a reason I can’t watch these hearings live and it’s because I will tweet something I will later regret.
Gigi impressed upon me a cornerstone of my work: that you can know your shit, and have your opinions, while still having a respectful, productive conversation with people you disagree with. She’s a serious rarity in this town. We need more of her in positions of power, not less.
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A few things to keep in mind as we head into this:
1. Funding journalism is an incredibly complex problem, and it's not a new one. Journalism has *always* struggled with funding. This is a huge problem that needs to be addressed, but it's also not unique to the current moment.
2. Media consolidation is a HUGE part of the crisis of local journalism.
3. This is ultimately about asserting that news outlets should be able to control what third parties link to them. Self-help options exist; they claim those aren't enough. They want a copyright extension.
What can Taylor Swift's ongoing project to re-record her albums teach us about music copyright, licensing, and the state of the industry? Quite a lot, actually!
1. The underlying composition and the actual recorded track are two different things. Taylor's plan to re-record songs that she had already recorded and released has everything to do with how the rights to the original recordings (also known as "masters") were handled.
1.1: "Masters" is an old term in the industry. In the pre-digital era, the "master" referred to the high-quality physical tape (or vinyl record) from which all later versions of a track were reproduced. Whoever controlled the master controlled its later reproduction.
Stories about my paternal grandmother, a ridiculous human being: a thread.
Prompted by LRT: Joss Whedon is navigating the self-made problem of using his nickname on official documents and creating a paperwork conflict.
My grandmother did this too!
She regularly switched between her nickname (Nettie) and birth name (Anastasia) on documents. Of course, she was born long before agencies cross-checks with any kind of rigor, that kind of stuff passed under the radar.
What didn’t fly as well was her ever-shifting birth year.