Stanford University, a leader in trying to get Congress and the public to understand the importance of the Public Domain have done what I’ve been dreaming of doing for a few months now. They decided to test the doctrine of Fair Use in copyrights by creating the following video. Any Disney fan should be sure to watch. Don’t know what fair use is? Don’t worry, they’ll explain it below.

In the case that the above video should be removed from youtube, download it from their page. If that page should happen to be down, then you can download it from me here.

This show is not very good, at least not based on the pilot. I’ll be shocked if people get into the show. Basically, it looks like the creators said, “How can we make a Tv show about race relations and not make it about race?” “I know, let’s make the non-whites be cavemen.” It’s so uncreative. So the show starts off with the cavemen watching the news and a caveman robs a liquor store. The others comment that it only makes the news when it’s a caveman. One of the main cavemen is dating a rich white girl. She invites him to a country club and they have a hard time getting in. People ask them if they should be catering or cutting the grass. It all seems pretty lame and unoriginal. If it were any other minority than cavemen, people would be saying, “do we really need this in 2007?” Sounds like something from the 1960s or 70s. But maybe I’m just being too harsh.

Let’s pretend I’m Joe College-Grad Consumer and I’m trying to evaluate how I should obtain my video content. I’m interested in watching shows as they come out - not later when they’re on box sets. Let’s see, I could buy my content on iTunes, Amazon Unbox, or some other such service. If I buy my content on iTunes I can watch it via iTunes or via my iPod. So if I have Linux, Haiku OS, or some other uncommon operating system I can’t watch it. Amazon does them one better and not even Mac users can watch it. If I have some other video jukebox than an iPod, I can’t watch my videos on the go. If I buy it via Amazon, I can’t even put it on my iPod. Both are riddled with DRM so if they decided to stop providing the service, I’m stuck with videos I can’t convert over to some new device. If I want to burn it to DVD to watch on my DVD player, I can’t. Oh yeah, and for some stupid reason, if I don’t live in the USA I can’t watch it until months or even years later.

It’s something I need to keep reminding myself as I work on getting myself more and more competent with Blender and 3D animation in general. For example, check out the complex rigging I did for Nick’s hand for “Sugar”:

It’s not complex in the sense of having a ton of bones, but complex in the sense that it has a few pointless bones. I tried to come somewhat close to “reality” by making sure that the bones of the fingers are connected to the bones of the hand. These bones don’t really do anything as I don’t want a hand to be able to bend there. Afterall, I don’t need to duplicate anatomy. I don’t have hips or anything like that. The body will move just as well with less bones and will be less complicated for moving if I simplify it as below:

I had a crazy sense of Deja Vu today as I first read this Penny Arcade Comic. Then I popped on over to Ctrl-Alt-Del and read this comic. It was pretty strange to see them both focusing on the exact same subject. However, I too am starting to get annoyed at the Halo 3 Mt Dew commercials, however fun they may have been to watch the first dozen times.

Kudos to Tycho for today’s quote as he spoke of Mountain Dew:

xkcd has this one for you:

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