Polaroid is back! This via Futuramb. Wonderful that certain technologies refuse to die. Zoom The Impossible Project, Made Possible: Polaroid Instant Film Is Back on Sale | Dan’s FC Blog | Fast Company A story about when enthusiasts striving for feel and authenticity are recreating what a company recently decided it would drop. Polaroid film [...]

It’s always amusing (and a bit worrying) to read the reactions to claims that fictional characters may be gay. In the beginning of last year articles like Of course Tintin’s gay. Ask Snowy caused an uproar. And now the pressure is on Sherlock Holmes. He has always been a bit suspicious. His relationship to Dr [...]

The European Union spends €55 billion a year on farm subsidies. Until recently the question of where the money goes was a closely-guarded secret. But thanks to a campaign by journalists, researchers and computer programmers, European taxpayers now have the right to know how their tax money is spent. This short film tells the story [...]

Jill/TxT linked to Eric Faden’s A Fair(y) Use Tale? which uses clips from a couple of dozen Disney movies to explain copyright and fair use. Taken together with the teaching resources at TeachingCopyright.org it provides an excellent resource on discussions of fair use and the public domain (naturally from a US perspective).

The documentary Code Rush from 2000 is about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the beginning of the Mozilla project. Here is a comment from IMDB Watch this film and you will get to see the things that a college computer science course could never prepare you for: having to sleep at the [...]

There are two kinds of people in this world: Those that enter a room and turn the television set on, and those that enter a room and turn the television set off. The Manchurian Candidate (1963). More details IMDB.

How’s this for an amazing project? A group of over enthusiastic filmmakers have created a film based on Lord of the Rings. The title is The Hunt for Gollum and it will be released for free online from their website on 3 May. The script is adapted from elements of the appendices of The Lord [...]

This is really cool news and it just makes you wish that all other countries will follow suite. So what’s the news? Well the director general Mark Thompson of the BBC has just announced that the BBC is going to digitalize and put online all paintings in public ownership in the UK and the contents [...]

While browsing around for a starting point on my next project I came across an article I had forgotten. The article “Copying Kill Bill” is written by Laikwan Pang (Social Text 2005) and is an exploration of the connections between copyright and cultural borrowing, or stealing depending on the perspective I suppose. A film is [...]

The venerable blog Blackadder Hall (as an important bearer of pre-Bean culture it deserves the venerable title) has put the documentary The Whole Rotten Saga online. The 1,5 hour documentary has been split into seven parts. They write: This documentary looks back at the hilarious historical saga of Blackadder, the enduring comic creation of Rowan [...]

The film Metropolis was not a success when it was first released and in order to improve it it was cut by almost a quarter by Paramount. The last time anyone saw the full original was in 1927. The new shorter version made less sense and in reality the whole thing should probably just have [...]