Mark Cuban on why Youtube is not a hosting company (and therefore deserving of DMCA protection):
It may suprise you that I dont have a problem with what Rapidshare is doing. I see them as legit, while you know how I feel about Gootube. Why ? Because Rapdishare is really a hosting service. They have customers who pay for the service. They dont create an index of the videos they host. They don’t try to create traffic for the infringing videos they host. . They do what a hosting service does. They host.
If by chance someone uploads pirated content to them, they truly don’t see it. They didn’t create a napster/youtube like environment where you can search for any video. The video is only available when the uploader publishes the link.
Rapidshare deserves every bit of the protection the DMCA Safe Harbors offer. If we see our content with a rapidshare link published, as it is in this case. We will send the takedown notice and move on.
Contrast that with Gootube that flaunts their position that when pirated content is hosted on Youtube or Google Video, they are legally safe. Think that might send a message that encourages their users to upload pirated content ? Think maybe people who ignore the copyright warnings prior to uploaded pirated content might feel safe doing so because of Google’s public position ? Or the fact that they see pirated content all over Youtube and Google Video, so it must be ok to ignore the warnings ?
I know a hosting company when I see one. Google Video and Youtube are not hosting companies.
Michael Blowhard on why women are not flocking to film directing:
Brief musing: There may well be ways of directing films that suit the general female temperament well. I suspect, though, that they’ll seldom result in the director-driven, ambitious narrative thing, which will likely always demand tons of dick-commitment. But filmmaking as an activity is opening up in ways analogous to the way writing and publishing opened up five and ten years ago. DV videocams, home computers, YouTube … No longer do films have to be 90 minutes long; no longer do they have to tell fictional, enacted-and-staged stories. They never did have to, of course. But today’s technology and distribution possibilites mean that you can make your oddball film and actually put it out there in public.
Which means that filmmaking no longer has to be a let-it-consume- your-life-or-forget-about-it, dick-energy kind of thing. Filmmaking can be more modest, more casual, more personal. Filmmaking can be more like painting, acting, writing, or poetry. Note how many of the videobloggers on YouTube are female, for instance. Note how easy it is for them to put their concerns, their fizz, their beauty, and their emotions onscreen. Five minutes? Yakking at the camera? Dancing for it? Slamming it all together on your iMac? Say hello to an activity that allows for both self-expression and life-balance.
Random digg poster on why twitter will never take off:
Seriously, who has so much spare time that they can sit around and read what their “friends” are doing at the moment… suddenly it occurs to me why it will ultimately fail: circular reference.
Everybody will be so busy reading what everyone else is doing that they won’t have time to do anything but read what everyone else is doing and then the only thing anyone will be doing is writing about how they are reading about what everyone else is doing and then people will be reading about how other people are reading about other people and other people and other people and ….other….peop…. *EXPLODES
(at sxsw 2007, they had random twitter feeds on the big screens in the hallways; hey guys, did you realize that your comment that “Dan Rather was a #$#%#$#$ dorkwad” would be visible to the other conference attendees).
Last but not least, I give you wired for books (mp3), a collection of CBS radio interviews with authors from the 1980s. This, for those into literary stuff, is my best find of the year. I’ve been listening to them nonstop. Will give a more detailed report later.
To download the mp3s, use downloadthemall extension for firefox and then uncheck the boxes for the other random mp3s on the page (shakespeare, etc). Or you can download these as well.
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