The are few things as joyus as the excitement of discovery, so it was a great pleasure to learn that Stay Free! Magazine has a new blog: Stay Free! Daily. The blog has a number of stories about intellectual freedom and copyright oppression that resonated with me. Take a look at Silent Disobedience, Christo’s policy of photographing The Gates, and Wizard People screening in NYC. Anybody following discussion of the FCC’s broadcast flag mandate will be amused by an old movie studio and broadcaster PSA arguing against subscription TV services.
Like TiVo, But More Prurient, however, points out the irony of how so-called “decency” groups seem to collect more indecent material than the rest of us. Back in the day, J. Edgar Hoover would have his FBI G Men confiscate porn and other “indecent” materials for his private collection. Raise your hand if you think all this fuss is just a beard for those who don’t want to admit they’re interested in the stuff.
But we’ve known Republicans have been sexually repressed since long before Jeff Gannon/James Guckert became a household name.
Shifting back to the intellectual property discussion, however: It also turns out that Stay Free! is a founder of the Illegal Art Museum, a collection of works that got hit by the copyright bus at the intersection of art and commerce. The heading to the list of video works notes:
The films and videos below appropriate intellectual property, whether through the use of found footage, unauthorized music, or shots of copyrighted or trademarked material. (Filmmakers and videographers now have to get permission for just about every concert t-shirt, store sign, or other piece of intellectual property that happens to appear onscreen).
Illegal Art’s collection of related articles is a good place to start if this is the first time you’ve considered the wrongs of copyright. And there’s more of my own thinking on this in the Copyrights & Intellectual Property thread here at MaisonBisson.
[update:] This wasn’t the real point of this post, but Cliff is begging me to link to his roundup of the Gannon/Guckert affair at Spiralbound.net. It seems like the White House wouldn’t be what it is without some sex scandal, but I think we’d all be better off with more open gays there. My concern, however, is the repression that conservatives must live with. It’s unhealthy for them, and bad for us when they’re leading our country. Funny thing: the redder the state, the greater the consumption of liquor, beer, cigarettes, and porn, and the higher the divorce rate.