Last night I linked to Charlie Stross’s outrage over the Science Fiction Writers of America putting the guy responsible for their last “piracy” PR debacle in charge of their new anti-piracy committee.

Cory Doctorow’s written his opinion of the matter at BoingBoing. And, yeah, he doesn’t sound too impressed by SFWA’s decision, either.

“Burt’s copyright projects for SFWA have been controversial and divisive. He created a push-poll that attempted to convince the membership to stop Amazon from indexing their books; he created a non-working system for poisoning ebooks and ruining the download experience and then patented it, in his name, at the organization’s expense (he has promised to return the money); he helped create a loyalty oath in which members were told to swear to “respect patents and trademarks” and so on.”

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While the Celtx team were at Creative Screenwriting Expo 6, they put on a seminar about their software, and how its unique approach to script-to-screen makes it the best tool for screenwriting.

We’ve discussed Celtx before. Beyond it being free and open-source, it really is an incredible tool. The mere fact that it makes collaboration between team members of a project incredibly simple and useful puts it ahead of its competitors.

And its eschewing of WYSIWYG for a style that embraces digital makes it far more powerful than any piece of software that tries to emulate writing on a piece of paper.

It’s simply full of countless tools to make writing, not only easier, but far more productive. And I use that word, not just in the sense that you’ll complete a lot of work, but you’re also always working towards real, actual production with Celtx.

Listen to the seminar and you’ll hear what I mean.

Part 1

Part 2

This is not an ad. I’ve just used Celtx for a long time now, and it really is a great product.

Canada’s planned changes to copyright law will include lots of rules that will make it the worst, most restrictive in the developed world, according to Cory on BoingBoing:

If this law passes, it will render all of the made-in-Canada exceptions to copyright for education, archiving, free speech and personal use will be irrelevant: if a technology has a lock that prohibits a use, your right to make that use falls by the wayside. Nevermind that you’ve got the right to record a show to watch later — or to record a politician’s speech so you can hold him to account later — the policeman in the device can take that right away with no appeal.

via Michael Geist

Howard Knopf’s article in The Hill Times outlines what proposed changes to Canada’s copyright law will do to Canadians (screw them over), and why, despite Canada already having stronger copyright law than America, it’s going to happen.

This is happening mostly because of a lot of spin and propaganda from the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, as well as the considerable efforts of Canadian lobbyists such as Graham Henderson, president of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, which is the Canadian arm of the RIAA. Important Canadian “indies” such as Nettwerk have left CRIA, and disagree with its desire to sue fans and families. Nettwerk is a leading label that produces the Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, and Sarah McLachlan.

The ambassador was quoted by Deirdre McMurdy on Nov. 16 in The Ottawa Citizen as saying that Canada is known for having the weakest copyright protection in the G8.” That is not only ridiculous. It is false and misleading.

First, the G8 includes Russia. Enough said.

Studio Daily has pointed out an awesome resource: Canadian director Bruce McDonald is making all the footage from his latest feature, The Tracey Fragments, available for free online for re-editing as part of a cool contest. The contest is for Canadians only, but anyone can download the footage and play with the footage under the terms of the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.5 license.

Adding to the cool factor is that the film features rising star Ellen Page, who is starring in the critically lauded upcoming film Juno. Now, my footage admittedly has not finished downloading yet. However from what I hear (and you can check out the trailer for an example) the film uses some complex Mondrian frame layouts throughout the entire thing. I’m curious to see how this is handled in the included Final Cut Pro files.

All the files are Torrents, except the script which is just a simple downloadable PDF.

You can read more about the initiative, called “Re-fragmented” by visiting either the official movie website or the official movie blog.

Hey all– it’s Chris, your always absent author.

Joel’s been doing a kick-ass job with the site, putting up some great links (did you check this out?) and some great posts (sorry Canada). But while he’s been here keeping things clean, I’ve been out in the field playing with toys. One toy in particular took up the past few weeks, and today I’ll be sharing a few pics with you.

Warning: this post is largely a post that relates to theatre tech. I know this blog is about digital media, but who doesn’t love seeing neat gadgets? I’ll try to keep it really simple.

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