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Oh hell yes! Warners just released season one of Freakazoid, the best TV cartoon since the Max Fleischer era, on DVD. This is the most demented, hilarious, madcap, witty, surreal, fantastic toon of all time, and now you can get it for the home collection. Yes yes yes!
Link
(Thanks, Jeff!)
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Support for DRM in the recording industry is in freefall. On Tuesday, Napster released a new version of its music store offering 6 million DRM-free tracks. Napster is a relative latecomer to this party, joining Apple, Amazon, and Wal-Mart, all of whom have had at least some DRM-free, major-label music available for about a year. One difference, though, is that Napster is coming out of the chute with support from all four major labels and thousands of smaller labels as well. At this point, any music store that doesn't offer DRM-free tracks is going to look like a real laggard. This story wasn't too surprising given the way things have been going over the last year. But even less surprising is the fact that customers who were foolish enough to purchase DRMed content from previous versions of Napster are stuck with their decision. They don't get to update their content to MP3 format, and while Napster has decided to continue running its "license servers" for now, it's only a matter of time before Napster decides running those servers is more trouble than it's worth and shuts them off, cutting customers off from their music libraries entirely.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
For my Internet dollar, no one is funnier than James Lileks, and he's in top form here with his trip report from Disneyworld.
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Dinner was large. The portions are huge. They might as well put the plate down and say “here’s more than you can possibly eat, and here’s nine potatoes on the side. Would you like another gallon of high fructose corn syrup? Okay, well, don’t forget to leave room for six pies.” There’s something a bit sad about seeing childless adult Disney fans, lanyards spattered with pins, eating slabs of prime rib thick as a Tolstoi novel, the chairs about to splinter from their enormous fundaments. On the other hand, what gives them happiness? Food and Disney. This is the happiest place on earth after all -- even though there seems to be a subset of Disney nerds who appear immune to the very thing they've come to experience. But that's another story for later.Off to Downtown Disney, which we hadn’t visited before. Sheer marketing genius: an open-air shopping center designed to extract the last possible penny from every molecule of the Disneyverse. I loved it. As I’m sure I noted last year, you’re either immune to the Mouse or you get it, and if you get it that means the white-gloved hand has closed around something deep in your emotional constitution and squeezed, and squeezed hard. It’s best to get the Mouse and still maintain critical distance, because then you’re not just wallowing in the warm bathos of nostalgia and the murky brew of ersatz Americana, you’re laughing with delight at its innumerable manifestations.
We found the giant World of Disney store, and there (G)Nat was entranced. Me too. Behold the zombie Thumpers, screaming for BRAAAAINS.
Welcome to Wally World says: "The free newspaper Metro (Tuesday 20 May) reports that Paris Metro authorities (RATP) are conducting an inquiry to find out how photographer Jam Abelanet was able to take these arty shots of nekked babes posed in the Metro (for his book, Fantaisies Souterraines - Underground Fantasies). They're worried that people might try to copycat the positions." Link (NSFW)
Adrianna Torres-Flores, 38, will not face prosecution for unauthorized copying or sale of recordings because prosecutors have verified her alibi, 4th Judicial District deputy prosecutor Mark Booher said Monday.Oddly enough, the bailiff responsible for her ordeal has returned to duty. LinkTorres-Flores said that she agreed to watch a booth for someone else for about 20 minutes on Dec. 1 when police raided Pleasant Street Flea Market in Springdale, Booher said. Springdale police arrested five adults and four juveniles, and seized thousands of pirated compact discs and digital video discs.
LinkIn a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal, an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression. This suggests that an entirely new class of depression and anxiety drugs might be right under our noses.
In spite of information stemming from ancient texts, constituents of Bosweilla had not been investigated for psychoactivity," said Raphael Mechoulam, one of the research study's co-authors. "We found that incensole acetate, a Boswellia resin constituent, when tested in mice lowers anxiety and causes antidepressive-like behavior."
One of the interesting people I met at last week's Princeton workshop was Douglas Dixon, who points out that almost all 20th-century media companies are going through the five stages of grief, but different media industries are going through the stages at different rates. Back in 2006, we noted that the music recording industry was still in the denial stage. Now, Dixon says that it seems to be "stuck cycling between Anger, Bargaining, and Depression -- as it still lashes out by suing its own customers, and grabs on to each next new copy protection scheme while simultaneously going DRM-free in other venues." And indeed, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Hollywood is still firmly in the denial phase, insisting that effective DRM is just around the corner.
In contrast, the news business has been responding pretty well of late to the disruptive technologies of the Internet. The newspaper folks at last week's conference seemed to accept that print was a dying business, and many of them declared their committed to making the painful changes necessary to stay competitive. As we've noted before, they've been dropping their paywalls and aggressively experimenting with new media. It remains to be seen if they'll be able to change fast enough to avoid large losses in readership, but at least they've begun moving decisively in the right direction. In contrast, the recording industry has been taking three steps back for every two steps forward, while Hollywood is still doing little more than shooting itself in the foot.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the lowest-bandwidth industry -- news reporting, which is largely text-based -- is showing the most flexibility, while the most bandwidth-intensive industry -- Hollywood -- still has its head in the sand. News organizations have faced serious competition from the Internet since the birth of the Web in the mid-1990s. Internet bandwidth was not sufficient to conveniently transfer music until the late 1990s. And there wasn't enough bandwidth to transmit movie files until recently. Arguably most peoples' connections still aren't fast enough to transmit high-def video. So news organizations have been facing serious competition for almost fifteen years, the recording industry for about a decade, and Hollywood for less than five. Industries that have been facing competition the longest are making the most serious changes.
Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.
Writing on an anti-Scientology website, the teenager facing court said: "I brought a sign to the May 10th protest that said: 'Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.'Link (Thanks, Matt!)"'Within five minutes of arriving I was told by a member of the police that I was not allowed to use that word, and that the final decision would be made by the inspector."
A policewoman later read him section five of the Public Order Act and "strongly advised" him to remove the sign. The section prohibits signs which have representations or words which are threatening, abusive or insulting.
The teenager refused to back down, quoting a 1984 high court ruling from Mr Justice Latey, in which he described the Church of Scientology as a "cult" which was "corrupt, sinister and dangerous".
After the exchange, a policewoman handed him a court summons and removed his sign.
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