On July 20, 2009, Industry Minister Tony Clement and Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore launched the first Canadian public consultation on copyright policy since 2001. The consultation, which runs until September 13, 2009, provides Canadians with an exceptional opportunity to have their voice heard on the future of copyright law in Canada. I launched SpeakOutOnCopyright.ca as a platform to give people information and tools to participate in the consultation. The site includes my short response to the consultation, dozens of posts and videos on Canadian copyright law, and a Take Action page that "highlights the ways individual Canadians can speak out on copyright.

[- Michael Geist.] LINK     UPDATE

Finally, we have an Irish voice in this debate. We will be watching how this develops very closely...http://piratepartyireland.com/    UPDATE

Citing copyright concerns, YouTube has deleted the audio from a hosted video that depicts the Internet meme "Keyboard Cat" showing up in a vintage TV after-school special and then embedded in the foreground of the '80s-era music video for the song "You Make My Dreams" by pop duo Daryl Hall and John Oates. It was an extremely awesome match, because the musical feline fit into the minimalist Hall & Oates video a little too well.

The audio appears to have been deleted on behalf of music label Warner Music Group. "This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG," a message adjacent to the video read. "The audio has been disabled."

The Keyboard Cat-Hall & Oates video was getting popular, with over 375,000 views on YouTube in fewer than two months and press from blogs like the AOL-owned Urlesque, so it's not quite clear whether WMG was alerted to the video directly or if the sound was pulled because an audio fingerprinting technology trawled through it.[by Caroline McCarthy, CNET News]

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Image search on Google has just become a bit easier and a little less scary: Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain. [boingboing.net]    UPDATE

After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party's next port of call may be Canada, where a so-far small band of buccaneers are hoping to send copyright restrictions to Davy Jones's locker. Right now, they're a handful of loosely-organized individuals spread across the country. But they want to become an official federal political party within the next few years and get enough support to persuade Parliament to relax proposed copyright laws they say are heavy-handed and a violation of personal privacy. "I think one of the roles a party like The Pirate Party can play is to more or less stiffen up the spines of people who might be in the NDP or the Liberals who want to get this stuff done," said Rob Sutherland, a freelance computer programmer in Regina who is one of the organizers of the Canadian group. The Pirate Party was little-known anywhere in the world until earlier this year, when the four founders of The Pirate Bay, a Swedish torrent tracker site that helped people find and download movies, music and software, were fined millions of dollars and sentenced to jail. The verdict created a public backlash and, almost overnight, membership in the Swedish Pirate Party more than doubled. In June's European Parliament elections, the party took 7.1 per cent of the vote in Sweden - enough for its first seat. There has been a similar surge of support in Germany, where lawmaker Joerg Tauss recently quit the Social Democrats, one of the country's governing parties, and offered to join the fledgling Pirate Party of Germany. The party's goals are fairly simple. It says people should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit. (Canadian Press)    UPDATE

Bob Blankenheim has only posted a single remix to the internet, but man…

Over 9 million youtube views so far. What was it about this remix that excited so many viewers? There were lots of other trailer mashes hitting the internet thanks to Robert Ryang’s Shining. But most trailer mashes focus on modifying the moods and premises of Hollywood advertisements--- Blankenheim’s remixed Titanic trailer goes way beyond this.

Probably you’ve already seen this remix. If you haven’t, go watch it now. Anyway I’ll try not to spoil it.

The remix trailer has more than a premise; it has a plot in which nearly every Hollywood trope converges against the protagonist. It’s a brilliantly insightful and hilarious parody of not only Titanic, but the whole supercharged drama business of Hollywood production and promotion (it uses clips from 23 different films).

Blakenheim has put a “director’s commentary” version of the video on his website– click here to go watch it if you feel like being blown away a 2nd time. You’ll get details on the CG and editing tricks he used in the remix. They’re seamless and lots of them are quite elaborate, but the creativity with which Blankenheim applies the simpler effects is equally impressive. I’m thinking in particular of two different effects he applies to a single closeup – one of them is during the “warm liquid goo phase….”

It’s been a few years since the Titanic sequel, but Bob Blankenheim’s involvement in the Open Video Conference tells us that he hasn’t lost interest in remixing. If/When he releases another video, I expect you’ll be hearing about it.

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Smearballs’ remixes are some of the most artfully arranged bits of trash video on the internet. They usually mine the detritus of television for their source material – soaps, daytime talk, infomercials... But if you watch closely you’ll notice how skillful Smearballs’ choices are. Every fragment has something about it that makes it compelling to watch: bizarre color arrangements, compositions that are perfect for inserting effects, little moments of television that are utterly baffling when they’re isolated.

Smearballs' mixes are funny but they’re also infectiously energetic: choice bits of audio from their clips are matched with music they record themselves; they apply digital effects with a graffiti writer’s instinct for impact and defacement; they insert themselves and their logos into the remixes with an overblown bravado that you can only cheer for. So while they make you laugh they also blow you away.

On their blog, Smearballs recently advanced the following thesis to summarize their position on some of the major stakeholders of online culture: “Smearballs is the future and they're livin' in it.” If you would like to see some supporting evidence for this argument, I invite you to watch some Smearballs videos below.

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D.M. Phoenix (DMP) is an accomplished artist in many regards (See his impressively designed portfolio site at phoenixium.com – drawings, CG, flash, etc…). Sometimes, when he finds the time, he makes a video mashup on youtube. But you can expect a lot more from your mashup when it’s being cut together by someone like DMP, who has dedicated so much of his life to making art, and who has an unmistakable passion for science fiction and for pleasing an audience.

As you might expect there are a number of “Star Trek vs Star Wars” mashes on the Internet, but what distinguishes the “DMP edition” is its persistent showmanship. DMP’s combinations of different video sources are indeed technically accomplished, but they go further than that: he chooses cutaways that give a precise emotional tone to the interactions between characters; he discreetly repeats certain clips to fine-tune the narrative pace and comic timing of his scenes; he always keeps an eye open for opportunities to twist the footage into a good joke.

“Star Wars Vs. Star Trek” is DMP’s most elaborate and popular remix so far, but I hope he can find the time to make some more. We stand to gain a lot whenever artists with solid multidisciplinary backgrounds decide to come play in our sandbox.

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The bulk of Augart’s video remixes are rhythmic collages composed of movie fragments that he organizes by subject matter – car crashes, gunshot blasts, horror movie screams. Augart is often drawn to the loudest of Hollywood movie stimuli, but other subjects can draw his eye: long before Kutiman released his “Thru You” remixes of youtube musicians, Augart had already completed the same experiment in his own style with “Youtube Symphony.”

Augart works in the tradition of rhythmical audiovisual cutups established by veteran video artists like Tasman Richardson. But Augart’s style is very much his own. His remixes make art out of the distortion and digital artifacts of youtube-era video. He delights not only in the deep booming payoffs of Hollywood sound effects, but also in the auxiliary effects that don’t typically win our attention: little clicks of people preparing their firearms, the trebly scrapes of metal in the first nanoseconds of a head-on collision. Augart manipulates not only the sensory impact of his source materials, but also the cultural expectations built up around them (for a great example, watch what he does with the firm cadence of marching soldiers in “The Parade”).

If you’re looking for something to keep your eyes stuck to the monitor and your brains pulsing to the rhythm, Augart’s cutups will make a great evening’s viewing. You can watch higher resolution versions of his videos on his myspace page:
www.myspace.com/augartmedia

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The official Misshapen Features website has gone down, but I was happy discover that they haven’t disappeared altogether. They’re best known for the epic “Starlords” video, which mashes up two of the planet’s biggest corporate fantasy franchises: Star Wars vs Lord of the Rings. The first half of the movie skilfully combines parallels between the two sources in the tradition of other internet trailer mashups, but the payoff in the second half resembles no remix you’ve ever seen before.

Misshapen Features takes special care in choosing which sets of footage they mash together, always searching for novel similarities between sources that play on our imaginations and explore peculiarities of our mass commercial culture. They build a miniature love movie starring two stars of fake reality (Lonley Girl meets Borat). They experiment with mixing two effects-saturated comicbook movies for boys (300 Days of Night). One on their mashups deliberately takes one of the most sampled songs of all time (It's Just Begun by The Jimmy Castor Bunch) and plays it in its entirety alongside remixed video footage (the effect is impressive, but that didn’t stop youtube’s copyright bots from recently stripping the video’s soundtrack).

The videos are entertaining but you can detect their critical edge. You may come away from them feeling there’s lots of things wrong and strange about a culture where a handful of companies show the same content to millions of viewers simultaneously. If you don’t know what to do about it, maybe Misshapefeatures’ work will convince you that part of the solution involves taking this footage and remixing it for yourself.

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