Hail to the thief: a tribute to Kazaa

THIS PAPER CONSIDERS THE ONGOING LITIGATION against the peer-to-peer network KaZaA. Record companies and Hollywood studios have faced jurisdictional and legal problems in suing this network for copyright infringement. As Wired Magazine observes: “The servers are in Denmark. The software is in Estonia. The domain is registered Down Under, the corporation on a tiny island in the South Pacific. The users—60 million of them—are everywhere around the world.” In frustration, copyright owners have launched copyright actions against intermediaries—like against Internet Service Providers such as Verizon. They have also embarked on filing suits against individual users of file-sharing programs. In addition, copyright owners have called for domestic- and international-law reform with respect to digital copyright. The Senate Committee on Government Affairs of the United States Congress has reviewed the controversial use of subpoenas in suits against users of file-sharing peer-to-peer networks. The United States has encouraged other countries to adopt provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998 in bilateral and regional free-trade agreements

Elsewhere and elsewhen : parallel universes and the dangers of interdimensional travel in Land of the Lost

While the 1974-76 American television series Land of the Lost is often derided in popular culture circles as having been nothing more than an example of the poorly acted and executed children’s television series of its time, a closer reading demonstrates that there is far more of substance to the show than its legendarily campy stop-motion dinosaurs would suggest. Guest writers for the series included such well-known science and science fiction authors as Ben Bova, Larry Niven, Walter Koenig, and Theodore Sturgeon, who penned hard science fiction plotlines that dealt with cutting-edge topics such as the paradoxes of time travel, antimatter, parallel universes, and the geometry of space-time. This essay investigates numerous instances in which Land of the Lost both accurately portrays the scientific knowledge of its day, and presages more recent developments in the field of time travel. It is argued that Land of the Lost therefore deserves to be reconsidered by academics and science educators interested in popular culture depictions of time travel and related fields of theoretical physics, alongside more often explored works such as Lost and Doctor Who.peer-reviewe

Learning from the Professionals: Film Tourists' "Authentic" Experiences on a Film Studio Tour

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers perceive, experience and engage with the art of filmmaking and the industrial film production process that the film studios present to them during their guided film studio tours. Drawing on the author’s own film tourist experiences, observations and participatory interactions with fellow visitors at a major Hollywood film studio, this paper takes an autoethnographic “I’m-the-camera”-perspective and a hermeneutic data analysis approach. The findings reveal that visitors experience the ‘authentic’ representation of the working studio’s industrial film production process as an opportunity and ‘invitation to join’ a broader filmmaker community and to share their own amateur filmmaking experiences with fellow visitors and professionals – just to discover eventually that the perceived community is actually the real ‘simulacrum’. Although using an autoethnographic approach means that the breadth of collected data is limited, the gain in depth of insights allows for a deeper understanding of the actual visitor experience. The findings encourage film studio executives, managers and talent agents to reconsider current practices and motivations in delivering film studio tours and to explore avenues for harnessing their strategic potential. Contrary to previous studies that have conceptualised film studio tours as simulacra that deny consumers a genuine access to the backstage, the findings of this study suggest that the real simulacrum is actually the film tourists’ ‘experienced feeling’ of having joined and being part of a filmmaker community, which raises questions regarding the study of virtual communities

Redefining the Competitive Dance Indsutry: A Plan for the Dance Competitions of Tomorrow

There is an absence of direct focus in the development of a dancer’s education within today’s competitive dance world, as current dance competitions have many holes in providing the proper training and education a young dancer needs. It is clear that dance competitions are for-profit businesses with a focus on making money, but it is time to turn these businesses into opportunities for growth, success, and a place where pure talent can be discovered and then launched into the next generation of professional dancers. I am a strong believer in education. Therefore, I believe competitive dance should be another form of education. Unfortunately, in today’s society, the focus has shifted from education to gratification, which is why I believe the time is now to address this issue. I conducted a series of surveys to send out to competition directors, studio owners, convention teachers, professional dancers, parents of competitive dancers, and current dance majors in college pursuing a professional dance career. The survey asked various background questions about their involvement in competitive dance to where they would like to see the dance industry move in the future. The surveys help in the fact that now I do know it is not the industry as a whole that needs a major uplift, but the small details that all affect and go into a dance competition. There are many things that could easily change to help protect and promote the dance industry, and after many hours spent going over responses and rereading what all the dance articles say, I will now present my ideas for a new type of dance competition. As you can see, the undertaking of a new type of competition is large, but the benefits are crucial. Reshaping the competitive dance industry will take time, but it starts with a brave individual to stand up and be the change for what the dancers of tomorrow need. Overall, the main purpose of my findings and ideas is to preserve the integrity and artistry of the competitive dance culture

The Industry and the Unions: An Overview

[Excerpt] This overview chapter provides a framework for the chapters that follow by broadly describing the arts, entertainment, and electronic media (AEEM) industry and the problems confronting it. The overview is presented in four sections focused on: first, the economic structure of the industry; second, unions and bargaining structure; third, the impact of technological changes; and fourth, historical responses on the part of unions and the labor relations system to technological change