social production

Archive for the ‘social production’ Category

Content laundering: Technotise, Green Lantern, and user-generated marketing

Wednesday, January 27th, 2010

I’m a regular reader of Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily. I think her blog is a pretty decent way of keeping tabs on all things business of Hollywood. Sure, she has some detractors, and “TOLDJA” (which she is trying to trademark) gets pretty annoying, but she tends to have really great items on a daily basis.

So, this little item from yesterday about how she’s been getting bombarded by folks with links to YouTube user Jaron Pitts‘s superbly fan-made Green Lantern and Technotise movie trailers caught my eye for a particularly noteworthy reason, in terms of copyright and infringement issues. Before I dive in to that, though, first, the Technotise trailer he cut so you know what I’m talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPu-PRHtCWE

Basically, Pitts has assembled a trailer almost entirely out of infringing content from all kinds of sources (just as he did for the Green Lantern fake). Sure, he’s doing it as a fan and we could get in to issues of participatory culture and the work of Henry Jenkins and why this isn’t necessarily a bad thing (and we all know I’d be a hypocrite to call him out for it myself… ahem) but what is REALLY interesting isn’t so much that Pitts is doing the infringing, but rather for WHOM Pitts is doing it. More after the jump.

(more…)

Tags: copyright, Deadline Hollywood Daily, fan video, fanfic, Gawker, Green Lantern, infringement, Jaron Pitts, movie trailers, Nikki Finke, Technotise, TOLDJA, trailers, user-generated content, Warner Bros
Posted in copyright, entertainment, film, social production | View Comments

The Wealth in Networks

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Yochai Benkler’s”The Wealth of Networks” is the Old Testament of social media. It’s long, a bit dry, and nobody ever gets through it – despite the fact we all talk about how important it is anyways. It’s not nearly as exciting as some newer books, those metaphorical New Testaments of social media – books that preach pleasant gospels of untold riches to be had by those businesses who get involved in the groundswells of crowd wisdom, where everything will someday be free. Nevertheless, the Genesis (pun intended) of just such newer gospels is to be found in Benkler’s seminal 2006 achievement.

Moreover, a closer examination will reveal that The Wealth of Networks has a vengeful deity, too, one akin to the god found in the first thousand-odd pages of that most famous of Books. Benkler’s jealous Being is seen in the fundamental message of, at least as I read it, Benkler’s text – that the social production of an information commons and the existence of an alternative to the industrial models of the twentieth century, a networked information economy, does not always have to be about the bottom line. That, it would appear, is a scary message for some, indeed. But for those small few of us who have joined with the covenant people and followed Benkler as our Moses in to the World Wide Wilderness of Sinai, there’s a message of freedom and a better world to be had in networks, the kind of wealth in networks that I feel inspires the greatest economic motivation: sharing knowledge, and lifting others thereby. (more…)

Tags: book reviews, democratic web, Internet, mass media, social media, social production, Yochai Benkler
Posted in book reviews, mass media, net economics, new media, social production | View Comments