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Day July 19, 2005

Entries 2 Total

Sorkin and Lowe, Together Again

Jul 19, ’05 6:08 PM

I’m a HUGE West Wing fan, and was sad to see Rob Lowe’s character written out due to contract and creative differences a few seasons ago.

Along with being a WW fan, I’m an Aaron Sorkin fan in general, so I’ve been looking forward to his next project, a film called The Farnsworth Invention. However, according to this article, the project is no longer a film:

The Farnsworth Invention, will be staged later this year. It recounts the story of Philio Farnsworth, the man who reportedly invented the television before John Logie Baird, but did not share any credit for the invention…

Sorkin had originally intended to make The Farnsworth Invention as a feature film, and US-producers New Line Cinema had taken an option on the screenplay. However, Sorkin subsequently decided to rewrite it as a play.

Hopefully the play will come to the states, or (like A Few Good Men) they’ll make it into a movie after it runs on Broadway.

I had a point… Oh yeah: Rob Lowe will be starring in the play. Good to see fences weren’t burned.

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Dvorak Disses Creative Commons

Jul 19, ’05 5:08 PM

John Dvorak doesn’t understand Creative Commons, which makes it bad, right?

Whatever.

Dvorak has a piece in PC Magazine in which he tries to discuss Creative Commons, but he can’t because he just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that copyright laws are black and white, and CC was created to provide some grey. As a Slashdot user put it, CC is about giving up some rights to your work, without giving up all rights.

To give one (of many) practical examples: Say I have a photo of a squirrel on Flickr and I have released it under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. Someone’s daughter likes squirrels, so her dad wants to print the photo and make a card out of it (or put it on a birthday cake). Under the traditional copyright scheme, he couldn’t legally do that without hunting me down and getting my permission, which might not be too bad, but what if you don’t know who the copyright owner is? What if I’m not checking email? The search could quickly become more trouble than it’s worth.

Applying the CC license allows me to say “Hey, don’t bother tracking me down, as long as you’re not selling it, do whatever you want with the photo.”

All I see here is making the very easy and simple U.S. copyright laws more complex for no apparent reason, except maybe as a protest.

It’s not that complicated, John, and the problem is that the US copyright laws are too simple.

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