bob tarantino

Entertainment, Media and IP Law 03.15.09

New techniques: A couple of interesting stories this past week about emerging Canadian talent - David and Ian Purchase used YouTube to get noticed by Hollywood, and one-eyed Toronto filmmaker Rob Spence is planning on using a camera embedded in a fake eye to film a documentary about "the rise of global surveillance" (also here).

Flashpoint opens the door: One of the funny things about Hollywood is the herd mentality - if something works once for one guy, everybody's got to follow suit.  Thankfully, this time the trend is working in favour of Canadian film and television producers.

Defamed today, defamed forever: An interesting discussion over at slaw about whether the time period for launching a defamation action over an online publication should begin running from the first time it was placed online or whether it should start afresh every time the online publication is accessed regardless of how long that is after initial publication (in England, the answer is evidently the latter; in the US, the former).

New Media Fund? Meh: Concerns are expressed about the newly constituted Canada Media Fund and conflicts of interest.

Backstage blogging: Gordon P. Firemark muses on the dangers of letting talent talk about their work experiences while still on the job.

Fairey Use?  More discussion on the AP/Richard Fairey copyright dispute here (Knopf) and here (Wired).

ImageStamper: Plagiarism Today provides some in-depth coverage on an interesting new service which "stamps" a Creative Commons license onto digital images.

Inaccurate sales figures? Surely you jest: Clive Cussler ordered to pay nearly US$14 million to production company over misrepresentation of the number of copies his novels had sold.

The children are our future: Fascinating interview with Terry McBride of Nettwerk Music Group here.

Since There's Nothing Quite Like Talking About a Show Before It Airs...

here are my two cents on the imminent debut of Little Mosque on the Prairie, which has been drawing attention from a number of my confreres.  I quote from page 13 of the January 4, 2007 edition of Toronto's eye weekly, being the review of the show by eye's TV critic, Joshua Ostroff (review not available online):

[Zaib] Shaikh's delivery is underplayed and the other two leads, Yasir ... and his biracial daughter Rayyan ... also keep things realistic.  Yet the supporting cast overacts and the white folk come off a little too racist to be believed.  There's humour to be found in the school-of-fish-out-of-water story ... but it'd be easier to comically dismantle stereotypes if the characters were a little less, y'know, stereotypical. [emphasis added]

Allow me some understatement: if even the folks at eye are remarking negatively on how the white yokels are portrayed, this probably isn't a show which will count subtlety among its charms.