Sunday, April 08, 2007
The Last Great Artform
Having recently finished reading Arthur C. Clarks novel Childhood's End, I was struck by one paragraph in particular.
The book opens with enormous alien spaceships appearing one day over all of Earth's major cities. The aliens, who become known as the Overlords announce their benign intentions and desire to help mankind. The Overlords quickly end the arms race and colonialism. Mankind enters a golden age of the greatest peace and prosperity ever known, but at some expense of creativity and freedom.
One such group establishes a new community called New Athens. As much as they tried, the creativity floundered...
"But it was in the art of the cartoon film. with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography -- much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines."
These words ring quite true today. Computer animation is approaching realism that will soon be indistinguishable from live action motion pictures. A bifurcation of animation seems inevitable. One part will be realism with virtual actors; the other part will pursue abstraction. The latter may very likely hold the former in contempt.
The book opens with enormous alien spaceships appearing one day over all of Earth's major cities. The aliens, who become known as the Overlords announce their benign intentions and desire to help mankind. The Overlords quickly end the arms race and colonialism. Mankind enters a golden age of the greatest peace and prosperity ever known, but at some expense of creativity and freedom.
One such group establishes a new community called New Athens. As much as they tried, the creativity floundered...
"But it was in the art of the cartoon film. with its limitless possibilities, that New Athens had made its most successful experiments. The hundred years since the time of Disney had still left much undone in this most flexible of all mediums. On the purely realistic side, results could be produced indistinguishable from actual photography -- much to the contempt of those who were developing the cartoon along abstract lines."
These words ring quite true today. Computer animation is approaching realism that will soon be indistinguishable from live action motion pictures. A bifurcation of animation seems inevitable. One part will be realism with virtual actors; the other part will pursue abstraction. The latter may very likely hold the former in contempt.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
The DCMA knife cuts both ways
Robert Cringley is reporting in his column that "It's easier than you think (or even than it ought to be) to get your video pulled from YouTube". The basic idea at YouTube is to let people post pretty much anything, then count on copyright holders to protest, at which point YouTube automatically brings down the clips. There is problem with this. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has equal penalties for those who infringe and for those who falsely claim copyright holder status. YouTube quickly takes down questionable content, but it does not appear to be quick about putting it back after a counter claim.
I recently had a similar situation where my internet service provider (ISP) notified me about a file that I had downloaded. I am not quite sure how they figured that I had downloaded the file. Nevertheless, my ISP sent me an email stating I had this file and it was notifiying me of a DCMA copyright infringement. The problem with this is that the file is available through the Internet Archive. This is a respected site containing historical digital artifacts and has expanded to public domain media. Their media page states: "This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before."
I am a collector of animation and am a frequent buyer on eBay finding rare out of print (OOP) animation videos. The claimed work was a cartoon from 1941. I am stuck wondering what the intent of the infringement notice was. Is my ISP playing games by monitoring my bandwidth and sending bogus DCMA emails in an attempt to throttle my internet use? Is there someone on eBay selling public domain DVDs who is trying to squash the distribution of public domain works to turn a profit?
Making a false DMCA violation claim and making a false counterclaim are equally illegal. I replied to them and ended up deleting the file to avoid any controversy, but the whole idea sent a shiver through me. We are in the digital age where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
Since this incident, I have started a channel on the magnify.net site for Award Winning Animation. This is an interesting concept, since I post no content. All I am doing is finding content available elsewhere on the internet and pointing to it. It will be interesting to see how often those links end up dead due to the DCMA. It's an experiment in social bookmarking. Perhaps copyright holders will use such channels to more easily locate infringing material. It won't bother me. I own most of the stuff I find online anyway. Any serious collect can't really deal with the crappy quality these sites provide.
That being said, it is amazing how many excellent works are out there. Many of these content creators freely distribute their works on the internet. After all, there is not much commercial value in an animated short. It has only been within the last few years that the major studios have jumped back in the field and a testing and training ground for their animators while preparing them for the bigger payoff of feature animated movies.
I recently had a similar situation where my internet service provider (ISP) notified me about a file that I had downloaded. I am not quite sure how they figured that I had downloaded the file. Nevertheless, my ISP sent me an email stating I had this file and it was notifiying me of a DCMA copyright infringement. The problem with this is that the file is available through the Internet Archive. This is a respected site containing historical digital artifacts and has expanded to public domain media. Their media page states: "This collection is free and open for everyone to use. Our goal in digitizing these movies and putting them online is to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films. By providing near-unrestricted access to these films, we hope to encourage widespread use of moving images in new contexts by people who might not have used them before."
I am a collector of animation and am a frequent buyer on eBay finding rare out of print (OOP) animation videos. The claimed work was a cartoon from 1941. I am stuck wondering what the intent of the infringement notice was. Is my ISP playing games by monitoring my bandwidth and sending bogus DCMA emails in an attempt to throttle my internet use? Is there someone on eBay selling public domain DVDs who is trying to squash the distribution of public domain works to turn a profit?
Making a false DMCA violation claim and making a false counterclaim are equally illegal. I replied to them and ended up deleting the file to avoid any controversy, but the whole idea sent a shiver through me. We are in the digital age where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.
Since this incident, I have started a channel on the magnify.net site for Award Winning Animation. This is an interesting concept, since I post no content. All I am doing is finding content available elsewhere on the internet and pointing to it. It will be interesting to see how often those links end up dead due to the DCMA. It's an experiment in social bookmarking. Perhaps copyright holders will use such channels to more easily locate infringing material. It won't bother me. I own most of the stuff I find online anyway. Any serious collect can't really deal with the crappy quality these sites provide.
That being said, it is amazing how many excellent works are out there. Many of these content creators freely distribute their works on the internet. After all, there is not much commercial value in an animated short. It has only been within the last few years that the major studios have jumped back in the field and a testing and training ground for their animators while preparing them for the bigger payoff of feature animated movies.
