{% blockquote -Victoria Espinel, Aneesh Chopra & Howard Schmidt http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/14/obama-administration-responds-we-people-petitions-sopa-and-online-piracy The White House Blog %} While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response. We should never let criminals hide behind a hollow embrace of legitimate American values.

This is not just a matter for legislation. We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy. {% endblockquote %}

The clarity of this statement from the Obama administration is a huge step forward for those opposed to the House’s SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the Senate’s PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) bills. It reflects a real understanding of what’s at stake, the freedom of expression that the Internet enables, while recognizing the core issues that have lead to the need for this kind of legislation, piracy.

I love this one line, so I’ll re-quote it again. “We expect and encourage all private parties, including both content creators and Internet platform providers working together, to adopt voluntary measures and best practices to reduce online piracy.” That really should extend to consumers. The names of these bills are incredibly misleading, built to evoke sympathy and votes from those who don’t understand technology, but if in fact the underlying goal is to “stop online piracy,” then maybe we should each look around our own house and see what we can do before the government does it for us.

This language from the White House is encouraging, but I get a sinking feeling that there’s something we don’t know happening in the background. Yesterday, Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas), SOPA’s sponsor, agreed to remove DNS-blocking from the bill, which today’s statement asks for explicitly. I have trouble believing the timing of these two events is a coincidence. I don’t mean to get too tin-foil-hat on you, but my guess is that another shoe is going to drop soon, but it’d be better if we all had a nice weekend first.

{% blockquote http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/youtube-the-future-of-entertainment-is-on-the-web/2012/01/12/gIQADpdBuP_story.html The Washington Post %} YouTube announced in December that it logged 1 trillion hits in 2011 and is anticipating an even bigger year ahead as more politicians and newsmakers turn to the site to distribute Web ads, speeches and weekly video casts. On Thursday, Kyncl said all of the entertainment industry should be paying attention to Web video, predicting that soon 90 percent of Web traffic will be video. {% endblockquote %}

If the Internet were a pizza, there’d only be half of a half of a slice with the oil dabbed off reserved for people who don’t watch video.

We should probably take this video thing seriously.

Bad Fever was one of my favorite films of 2011 and one of the best undistributed works of the year. Very happy to hear director Dustin Guy Defa announce that it has been picked up by Factory 25. NYC theatrical run starts February 3rd. Here’s the trailer:

{::nomarkdown}

I’m just now catching up with the excellent and gorgeous Contents Magazine. I love their publishing model. Each “issue” comes out over the course of a few weeks, basically a string of feature-length blog posts released on a sparing schedule. Smart.

I highly recommend all writers take a look at Mandy Brown’s article in the inaugural issue, Babies and the Bathwater. She lays out in plain English the way that the publishing landscape has changed for the better and how we, as writers, publishers, editors and readers, should be adapting.

One of my favorite parts of Mandy’s article involves something I just dealt with when switching from Wordpress to Octopress.

{% blockquote %} Content people are fond of leaving the code to the geeks while we debate the merits of the Oxford comma, but there is a difference between programming and markup. HTML, whose own name comes from the editor’s act of “marking up” a text, is an element of the text itself—a machine- and human-readable expression of the text’s underlying semantic structure. This is a language that we can and must speak, because it not only determines how the text looks but what it means.

Which brings us to more bathwater: WYSIWYG-style document editors that ignore the principles of semantic markup or prevent us from engaging with the text completely deserve a path down the drain. We need to adopt the mindset that markup—HTML, in particular—is part of our job, and we need to demand tools that let us do it. {% endblockquote %}

I moved to a plain text workflow a while ago, but I always have trouble telling other people why I did, or why they should. The above quote pretty much says it all. Text is what I do.

It’s not that everyone should move to plain text, but people who write in public should have some understanding about what markup is. It’s possible to be vigilant and aware of markup in a WYSIWYG editor, but odds are you won’t notice if, for example, you’ve let a space fall into a block of bolded text or if you leave a letter or two unlinked.

Not every writer needs to learn code or Markdown or something, but at the very least they should have a passing understanding of what HTML is actually doing to their text. These are our words; they don’t come out of our heads by chance and we shouldn’t leave it up to the “nerds” to format it. The markup is part of our language whether we like it or not. If you haven’t yet, it’s time to learn it.

Working my way through the rest of Contents now. Also, check out Mandy’s other site, A working library, where she has followed the aforelinked article up with two additions: Represent and Markup.

I’ve titled this article with a question in response to Mike Fleming’s post over at Deadline, “Will Micro-Budget Films Like ‘The Devil Inside’ Change The Economics Of Studio Moviemaking?”

Something is happening here; studios are re-thinking the idea of overspending on risky projects (Warner Bros just unplugged Arthur & Lancelot and Akira) when audiences are turning out for films like The Devil Inside. That no-budget film, acquired by Paramount’s new Insurge division, got about the worst reviews since Plan 9 From Outer Space, and still out-grossed movies made for significantly more money.

We’ve been hearing this since at least The Blair Witch Project, but ever since the Paranormal Activity franchise started perennially minting cash, the rally cries for micro-budget crap have reached a fever pitch. I say crap because the bookkeepers who run movie studios don’t really care whether the work is good, just whether it comes in on time and cheap. That almost everyone with an opinion hated The Devil Inside is irrelevant. It had a 3,373% return on investment in only its first weekend! Who doesn’t want a piece of that action?

People who like movies.

This is what we call a race to the bottom. The studios will pump cash into any small project with a hopeful pitch (usually based on marketability, not, you know, story) until audiences get hip to the fact that these movies suck and stop going.

Meanwhile, the real loser here will be filmmakers with more ambitious projects because $1 million will be the new $10 million (which used to be the new $40 million). “Why would I give you $10 million to make a film when these guys did it for $1 million?” If the answer to that question is, “My film will be better,” studios won’t care. Success, in Hollywood, is measured in dollars.

Now, I’ll admit I’m being a bit cynical about all of this. If studios are emptying their coffers and making more work with emerging filmmakers, that should be a good thing. In fact, it may well be a great thing. That is up to the filmmakers who can land deals to make low-budget work.

I’m wary because, well, the film that we’re talking about proving this business model is The Devil Inside. Fleming puts it best at the end of his article:

While the Paranormal Activity films and Insidious have been highly profitable crowd pleasers, if studios refocus their attention on these down and dirty films, don’t expect the quality of movie making to get any better in 2012 than it was last year.

Oy.

I love Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 network of podcasts, and I try not to miss Merlin Mann’s “Back to Work” or John Gruber’s “The Talk Show.” So was I excited to find that on this week’s “Back to Work” Gruber and Merlin teamed up for an episode? You bet.

In the episode, titled “The Field of Completion,” the two cover everything from parenting to Star Wars to LEGO to commercials…everything. When the issue of bias comes up, Gruber, who runs the equally beloved and reviled Mac-centric site Daring Fireball, shares a bit about how he approaches blogging.

{% blockquote -John Gruber http://5by5.tv/b2w/49 Back to Work #49: The Field of Completion (approx. 46:30) %} I’m never trying to paint a picture of this week in tech, I’m trying to paint the big picture; like a years long tapestry. I have to do it, though, one day at a time based on what’s going on right now.

Maybe parts of the narrative change. Maybe, I’m wrong. You have to look at the story that’s being told over the course of a year. {% endblockquote %}

I read Daring Fireball every day. This is perhaps the best distillation of what it is that makes Gruber’s site so honest, enjoyable and engaging. The idea of painting a big picture, a “years long tapestry,” is actually why I keep reading most of the sites that I love.

So that’s what I’m going to aim to do here. Cinema runs a lot deeper than the weekly churn of receipts and press releases and who’s who lists, and that’s the story I want to tell. I hope I’m up to the task.

There is a lot I could say about how foolish the major movie studios have been when it comes to moving into the digital realm. If I had to distill it all down to a single word, it would be this one: UltraViolet.

What is UltraViolet?

{% blockquote -Jim Taylor http://uvdemystified.com/uvfaq.html#1.1 UltraViolet FAQ %} It’s a branded set of specifications and agreements along with a centralized rights clearinghouse that allows retailers to sell movies that play on UltraViolet-compatible players and services.

Put another way, UltraViolet is DVD for the Internet. {% endblockquote %}

Uh huh.

So it’s not actually a streaming format but a cloud-based licensing service. Other streaming devices can hook into the UltraViolet licenses so you can buy media once and then gain access to it on multiple services. That is if other services choose to play ball. On paper it seems like a win for the studios since they get the licensing fees they need without the burden of technological innovation.

But it’s a loss for consumers. UltraViolet can only engender confusion and fragmentation. Try explaining the what, the how and the why to even an informed technophile and I’ll bet you get a blank stare. Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Vudu, LoveFilm and many more companies have already found ways to sell digital content to consumers. The studios are asking that they undo years of innovation and start over with their interests in mind.

This is all on my mind because of a piece in Variety on UltraViolet by Debra Kaufman. It covers how the studios can’t all agree on how digital distribution should work. Disney is the biggest dissenter to UltraViolet; instead they are building their own system called Keychest. Here’s the language that gets on my nerves:

In an environment of brands competing to build out their platforms, competition is likely to win out over cooperation in the near term. As [Screen Digest analyst Tom] Adams puts it, “You’re seeing the wrinkles that new technology is bringing to the industry.”

Wrong. We’re seeing the bullshit from old technology stifling innovation. We’re past the point we can fairly call digital content “new.” Apple has been selling movies since 2006, which is also when YouTube opened its doors. Netflix started streaming in 2008. The writing isn’t just on the wall anymore, it’s plastered all over every street.

Variety has ongoing coverage from CES all week and the refrains and tropes sound the same as they did years ago. Following the above quoted bit, Kaufman’s piece moves onto this:

It’s simply too early to tell what that will mean for the future of UltraViolet or any other digital rights system.

No, it’s not. The technology exists and consumers are ready to pay for a solution that makes sense. UltraViolet is only a way to get between viewers and the films they want to see. Next idea.

{% blockquote -Dan Frakes http://www.macworld.com/article/164744/2012/01/marked_excels_at_previewing_markdown_and_html_documents.html Macworld %} As noted above, Marked also supports MultiMarkdown (including math syntax), and screenplay writers may be interested in Screenplay Markdown and using that syntax in Marked.{% endblockquote %}

I love Screenplay Markdown and couldn’t be happier to see it mentioned in Macworld. And they even gave Brett Terpstra’s awesome Marked app 4.5 mice. I’d give it 6.

(via David Sparks.)

{% blockquote David Bordwell http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/01/11/pandoras-digital-box-from-the-periphery-to-the-center-or-the-one-of-many-centers/ Pandora’s digital box: From the periphery to the center, or the one of many centers %} It seems to me that Western firms’ concentration on the DVD and the sidelining of the VCD exemplifies what management analysts have come to call “overshoot.” In the theory of disruptive technologies pioneered by Clayton Christensen, established firms aim to sustain an existing technology, either through incremental improvements or radical innovations. As the technology improves, these sustaining firms target the upper end of the market. Thus Eastman Kodak strove to improve its film stocks to satisfy and win the approval of the world’s top cinematographers. Likewise, Sony and other firms collaborated to create the DVD as an improvement on broadcast video, VHS, and laserdisc.

But in the process they left lower-end markets behind. Entrenched sustaining technology tends to be complicated, inconvenient, and expensive. Christensen posits that the big firms’ overshoot often leave space for firms that develop technology that is cheap, convenient, and “good enough” for what might be a very big segment of purchasers. To the professional eye, VHS was inferior to Beta tape and laserdisc, but for most consumers that tape format was good enough. Then DVD proved more convenient—smaller, more portable, easier to use—and of noticeably better quality. Experts knew that the DVD was still a compromise format, especially compared to 35mm, but for consumers it was good enough. {% endblockquote %}

Crack a beer, (or tea, or whatever) sit in a comfy chair and read every word of David’s post. It’s worth it.

This just doesn’t make any sense:

{% blockquote -Richard Corliss http://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/11/mary-and-moma-the-case-of-the-still-missing-film-stills/?iid=ent-main-lede TIME.com %} On the morning of Jan. 11, 2002, Mary Lea Bandy, chief curator of the MoMA Department of Film and Video, told the two Stills Archive staff members that at the end of the business day two things would happen: the facility would be shuttered and the staffers would be laid off—until, and unless, the Museum found space for the Stills Archive when MoMA returned from its temporary home in Queens to an enlarged Manhattan premises in 2005. The collection was mothballed in the Film Department’s vault in Hamlin, Pa., where it remains today, inaccessible to scholars and journalists, and to the head of the Archive, Mary Corliss. {% endblockquote %}

(via Roger Ebert)