A Student Commentary on Big Media's Attack on Fan Websites
The fight between legal departments at major movie and TV studios and producers of fan websites has reached a fever pitch. The legal department of Fox TV sent out notices to cease and desist to two webmasters of fan "King Of The Hill" websites. Fox Primetime has cracked down on fan sites before, most notably those saluting "The X-Files."
It boggles the mind why fan sites pose such a threat to the studios. It would seem that for a fan to take the time and spend the money to build a website without any hope of financial reward would be the supreme compliment to a given show. I know of no fan site which makes money. Usually, unless the webmaster has a free account through their College or University, their Internet access and web space costs money. And if not always a money sink, sites like these are always a time sink. These fans are taking time out of their busy educational and/or work schedules to give these shows free publicity.
Still photographs from movies and TV shows used for reviews and/or given away, with or without autographs, to fans has been a traditional means of promoting a studio's wares. When fans offer stills for other fans to collect on the Internet, they are conducting a type of trade which has for decades existed via the mail and in face to face memorabilia swaps.
There is more controversy about audio and video clips, but the fact remains that 10% of a copyrighted work of art can be duplicated for "fair use" purposes according to the Berne Convention, the current standard of law on copyrights for most of the world. Current audio techniques for the Internet like .AU, .AIFF, and .WAV get very, very large unless the audio snippet is only a matter of seconds long. And Real Audio .RAM files and Shockwave Streaming Audio files both play as they pass by and are not stored on a person's computer. We are not talking about piracy here. We are talking about a sample that's only a few seconds long, which the people who painstakingly make the sample slave over without any hope of recompense, and which takes up frightfully large chunks of server space.
This goes double for the most controversial element of fan sites -- video clips. AVI Video For Windows and QuickTime video files are extremely largely sized.
The mind is a wonderful thing. It allows us to think on three very different levels. One we choose to express, one we don’t choose to express, and one we do not even know exists. All these stages of thinking are clouded over in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. Three menacing forces occur that completely take over the white man to act inappropriately. They accuse others of acting savage, when they violently act against people of other cultures. They conform to specific beliefs, and push aside their subconscious thoughts. These men also have an abundance of ignorance that makes them feel false superiority. The Heart of Darkness reaches into the minds of readers, to prove that all of civilization is surrounded by an abundance of forces that can fog our mind, and darken our hearts.
I choose to discuss the topic of the internet as a new medium for pay-per-view movies because I feel it is a very fresh and new topic that has not been discussed, nor received much attention. The onset of this new medium comes from an attempt to deter online movie pirates from stealing the movies to actually purchasing them for a low price. I feel this is especially important for me to be writing this on a college campus because that is where a great deal of movie pirating occurs due to the fast online connections that the universities provide. File sharing programs like Kazaa and Limewire run ramped on college campuses making this an interesting alternative to explore. With this subject hitting close to home, I choose to research it and find out why it would be a good alternative to the free downloads that we receive from online people to people file-sharing programs. While there are a few sites out there that offer this kind of pay-per-view service, I choose to specifically focus on the site Movielink.com because it is backed by five major Media Corporations comprised of Universal, Sony, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Paramount, and Warner Brothers. For this reason, it was the ideal internet site to explore to show the recent trend towards getting new movies online, even if only for a short time.
The Human Rights Act of 1998 was co-founded upon the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of 1950. Developed following the ending of the Second World War, European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was constructed to further the idealistic principles and endeavours of equality among all human beings, as well as a devout declaration of preventing the reoccurrence of the holocaust and massacres which have occurred as a casus belli . ECHR comprises civil privileges and liberties fundamental to all human beings irrespective of race, gender, age, sexual orientation exclusive of discrimination. The UK government have promptly endorsed the ECHR, recognising the need of ...
Bang! Bang! Little children running and screaming; terrified that they are going to die. The shooter walks into the room heavily armed, with a crazed look in his eye. There’s a women near a closet and small group of 1st graders behind her. He starts to go toward the little room to finish what he started. Then the young woman steps in front of the unstable gunman to shield the students from harm. A fatal shot is fired and the young teacher lies dead. That woman was Victoria Soto, a hero in the Sandy Hook Shooting, who risked her life to save her students from that delusional man, Adam Lanza. The horrific incident that took place on December 14, 2012 took the innocent lives of 26 students and teachers. Lanza did have a mental illness, but that isn’t all to blame. The shooter was known to play and watch violent movie and games (Aliprandini and Finley). This shows that media violence can be linked to aggressive behavior and that violent media can affect the minds of some young children and teens. Studies in the past decade have helped prove that sometimes the media can be bad for kids. The outcome of playing first-person shooter games could end up in innocent lives dying like in Newtown.
...n the legal realm is not enough. To truly make a difference, we must change the status quo; we must shift our own attitudes to become more accepting of alternative ways of conducting intimate relationships. Considering that it does not harm love, it does not harm children, and it does not harm the moral fibre of society, there is no reason why polyamory should not be viewed as a perfectly legitimate lifestyle choice. And in the end, that is what it comes down to: choice. Polyamory represents the ability to choose who to involve yourself with, and who to entrust with your emotional, intellectual, and sexual needs. This is a freedom that can lead to happier, more fulfilling lives, and thus is a freedom that no one has the right to bar. As Trudeau once famously said: “the state has no place in the bedrooms of the people”, and neither do other people – unless invited in.
Fanfiction has been regarded in the past by theorists like Henry Jenkins as a scribbling in the margins, a form of textual poaching. This often created an antagonistic relationship between the owners of the text and the fans that consumed them. Rather than simply reading the text and producing meanings in the way that the author had intended, fans not only scribble their ideas in the margin, they rewrite large slabs of the original to articulate their own meanings. These practices either resulted in the outrage of Lucasfilm or the tolerance of other shows. Buffy has reversed this process, turning the fans into authors and allowing them to not only play with any aspect of the show, but also to influence the direction of the narrative itself.
...Entertainment Group. (2003). Who enforces the ratings? Movie Ratings Q&A. Retrieved February 10, 2004, http://www.regalcinemas. com/movies/ratings.html
For the uninitiated, the existence of this fandom does appear as a community of effeminate or homosexual men trying to escape into a pretty fantasy world. However, the majority of fans identifies as heterosexual and are media consumers who discovered a text they enjoy that just so happens to appear
Polygamy is considered illegal in the United States, which would make it a deviant practice. That fact is on the bottom burner for me when considering this situation. Forcing someone to theoretically spend the rest of their life with someone not of their choosing is definitely out of the norm in my opinion. On to...
Copyright materials involve everything like songs, movies, TV shows, photographs, magazines, books, software, plays and websites that should have a copyright protection. The copyright law is the exclusive right to make copies of another individual’s work. The law states that files cannot be shared, copied and performed without the individual permission, as a reason of ethical issues and it is illegal to share files that have copyright protection (TopTenREVIEWS, 2014).
The most obvious contrast found in Heart of Darkness is between that of light and dark. In the beginning of the novel when the sun set upon London, the city began to light up yet the narrator describes the light as a "lurid glare under the stars" (Conrad 6). The lights from the city illuminated the Thames River. Because London is described as being light, the light then symbolizes civilization, or at least Conrad's view of civilization. Conrad's view of civilization is one of great despise. Civilization is a place where evil is ever present but ignored and people believe they know everything. The light is the knowledge that we have gained through exploration and the civilizing of places that have not yet been civilized. In contrast there is the darkness. Represented in the novel by Africa and the Congo River, the darkness is the evil that lurks in the unknown. The darkness is full of savages and cannibals. It is the uncivilized and uninhabited part of the world where people eat people and the savages lurk in the trees and in the darkness. Africa is the "heart of darkness," the place where man's inner evil is brought out in the open and is displayed through their thoughts and actions, such as those on Marlow's boat, letting the bullets fly into the jungle without reason or need.
"SparkNotes: Heart of Darkness: Themes, Motifs & Symbols." SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides. Web. 23 Mar. 2011. .
“Polygamy is defined as a marriage in which a spouse of either gender has more than one mate at the same time. Polygamy is considered a valid form of marriage in many countries and communities around the globe” (Al-Krenawi). However, polygamy is illegal in the United States. Those who practice polygamy in America can only be “legally” married to one spouse; therefore, the subsequent spouses in a polygamist relationship hold a “singl...
The "Heart of Darkness," written by Joseph Conrad in 1899 as a short story, is about two men who face their own identities as what they consider to be civilized Europeans and the struggle to not to abandon their themselves and their morality once they venture into the "darkness." The use of "darkness" is in the book's title and in throughout the story and takes on a number of meanings that are not easily understood until the story progresses. As you read the story you realize that the meaning of "darkness" is not something that is constant but changes depending on the context it used.
In today’s society the assumption asserts that there must be only two adults integrated in a relationship, however in polygamous environments, having more than one spouse is traditional. Some may argue that Polygamy is simply just an alternate lifestyle. This, however, ceases to be true. Young girls are being forced to marry older men and sometimes relatives. Little boys are often abandoned because it appears to be competition for older men. Children are victims of sexual and physical abuse. Whereas, for women, they generally become stripped of their money and experience competition against the multiple wives a husband. Although Polygamy is viewed as immoral by society, the main focus point should be saving young children and women because