Coming Soon

OK. Imagine you're in a movie theater, sometime between one and five years from now. You're munching your popcorn, sipping your humongo-sized Sierra Mist. Lights go down, a string of ads play, then the trailers come on. The screen is filled with a clear blue sky. Cut to office workers doing their morning routine. A cop directing traffic. Mundane it-was-like-any-other-morning stuff. Movie trailer voice over guy intones, "In a world..." Now. Cut to a passenger jet coming in slow over New York City. Cut to the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, pristine, perfect, filling the screen, glinting in that perfect September morning sun. Then the money shot. Not the TV footage we've all seen a hundred times, but a slick Bruckheimer CGI special, a zooming we-are-the-nose-of-the-plane shot like the we-are-the-bomb shot in the Pearl Harbor trailer that takes us right through the glass in the side of the building. Then the mother of all Hollywood fireballs. Bigger, louder, better than the real thing.

Yes, I know, it's a horrible, reprehensible idea. It doesn't matter what the movie that follows is. But I have this idea that someone, somewhere, is pitching it. Right now. Coming soon to a theatre near you. I'll be happy to be proven wrong. But I don't think I will.

Ub Iwerks, Thou Art (Not) Avenged!

To me, yesterday's truce between the computer industry and the RIAA is more disturbing than today's Supreme Court decision against copyright reform. Mainly because the RIAA/computer industry truce seems expressly designed to avoid or preempt any government involvement: "We in industry must act now or risk letting the representatives of the people actually have a say!" While the Eldred decision, while certainly not the one I wanted to see (Free Mickey!), is at least an example of how the process is sorta kinda supposed to work.

OK, OK, so I'm jumping on the blogging about IP law bandwagon. All this ferment about communication technology and intellectual property is actually very reminiscent of the dissertation chapter I'm currently writing. Maybe I'll tell you about it when my ideas are a little better articulated.