Oblique Saturdays
1 hour ago
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Butterflies feat. John Malkovich
Design/VFX - Gentleman Scholar
Creative Directors - Will Johnson & William Campbell
Producer - Tyler Locke
Executive Producer - Rob Sanborn
Editor - Josh Bodnar/The Whitehouse
Designers/Compositors - William Campbell, Will Johnson, Tommy Wooh, Daniel Blank, Paul Yeh, Heather Aquino, Claudia Yi Leon, Joseph Chan
Director - Sandro Miller
Music Composer - Matt Hutchinson
via
Iran protester's death 'hijacked by regime'
The Iranian regime has been accused of hijacking the death of a young pro-democracy protester killed during rallies in Tehran on Monday.
A family member of Saane Zhaleh, a 26-year-old theatre student at Tehran University of Arts, told the Guardian that the Iranian authorities had launched a campaign to depict the pro-opposition protester as a member of the government-sponsored basiji militia who had been killed by what they described as terrorists.
"They [security forces] have killed him and now they want to hijack his dead body and exploit his funeral for their own purposes. His family is totally devastated and inundated in sorrow," said the family member, who asked not to be identified.
Opposition websites reported that two protesters were killed in clashes between security forces and thousands of defiant protesters who marched in a banned rally organised by the leaders of the green movement on Monday.
Iranian state news agencies later identified them as Zhaleh, a member of Iran's Kurd and Sunni minority, and 22-year-old Mohammad Mokhtari, but blamed the opposition for their death.
Iran's semi-official FARS news agency published a basiji identity card that it said belonged to Zhaleh, but the opposition immediately questioned its authenticity. In response, activists sympathetic to the green movement published a photo of Zhaleh on social networking websites that showed him in a meeting with grand Ayatollah Montazeri, a leading opposition figure who died in 2009.
Authorities staged a funeral at the Tehran University of Arts but did not permit Zhaleh's family to attend. Witnesses told opposition websites that the hundreds of basiji members who were bussed in to the university to participate in the funeral outnumbered the students and clashed with them.
According to the family member, Zhaleh's parents and siblings – who live in the western city of Paveh in Kermanshah province – were asked not to attend the funeral in Tehran and were threatened that Zhaleh's body would not be handed to them if they spoke to foreign media.
"Zhaleh's family are under pressure not to deny the way the officials have portrayed him. His father was forced to give a short interview to the state television. The authorities are depicting him completely upside down, they have silenced the family by threatening not to hand over his body," the family member said.
At the same time, Sajad Rezaee, a member of the Islamic Society student group at Tehran University of Arts, told Kaleme.org, the official website of Mir Hossein Mousavi, that the dead protester was not a member of the basij but was a pro-Mousavi activist during the 2009 election campaign.
Shahabaddin Sheikhi, a Kurdish journalist based in Germany, said: "The authorities' handling of Zhaleh's death reminds me of that of Neda Agha Soltan, the girl whose story took the world's attention. In Neda's case, they also tried to portray her as pro-regime demonstrator and they lied several times to impose their own version of the story but that finally did not prevail. Same thing is happening with Zhaleh because they are afraid of the world's reaction and also the reaction of the people inside the country. They can not get rid of this disgrace and taint easily."
Monday's protest, inspired by the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, marked the Iranian opposition's first attempt in more than a year to hold anti-government demonstrations.
On Tuesday, the majority of the Iranian parliament called on the Iranian judiciary to put opposition leaders Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi on trial and sentence them to death. Both leaders of the green movement have been placed under house arrest for the past couple of days.
Saeed Kamali Dehghan @'The Guardian'
Glenn Greenwald Discusses Wikileaks Smear Campaign with Matt Miller
"Given my involvement in this story, I’m going to defer to others in terms of the reporting. But — given the players involved and the facts that continue to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to lack of attention. Many of the named targets are actively considering commencing civil proceedings (which would entail compulsory discovery) as well as ethical grievances with the relevant Bar associations. As the episode with Palantir demonstrates, simply relying on the voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted. The DOJ ought to investigate this as well, but for reasons I detailed on Friday, that is unlikely in the extreme. Entities of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized to impose some accountability. That this was discovered through a random email hack — and that these firms felt so free to propose these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this behavior is."
Via
More facts emerge about the leaked smear campaigns
jilliancyork Jillian C. York
Re-read #netfreedom speech. Incredibly disappointed that she mentioned circumvention but not the US-made tools that need circumventing.
Meet the International Music Registry
“All deep things are song”, said Thomas Carlyle. “It seems somehow the very central essence of us, song; as if all the rest were but wrappages and hulls!”
“Music is what feelings sound like”, said an unknown author.
“If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music”, said Sydney Smith. “It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth.”
All wrong. Especially Sydney Smith. Because these days, music is neither cheap, nor unpunished rapture.
It’s a hard-core corporate commodity to be sold for maximum profit.
And punishment is an absolutely integral part of it.
While you hold that thought, a quote more appropriate to the 21st digital century comes from Francis Gurry, director general of WIPO, .
It’s on the creation of the International Music Registry which, “would need to be a global public asset, based on voluntary participation and available to all as a basis for operating or building business models for the management or exploitation of rights”, he says.
Ahhhhhhh. A statement sufficient to warm the cold, black hearts of the people behind the dying Big 4 labels, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US, but controlled by a Canadian).
It’s their unbridled avarice and lust for domination and control which makes such a registry necessary.
“The project is a collaboration of the worldwide music sector, facilitated by WIPO, aimed at facilitating licensing in the digital environment by providing easier access to reliable information about musical works and sound recordings”, says the web site, going on >>>
The amazing growth and development of the Internet as the delivery mechanism for music over the last decade has challenged the music rights management architecture, which was not designed to facilitate use of music in the digital world.
We need to make it faster, easier, and simpler for those who want to use music for legal services to find who owns what rights in music – and not just in the developed world, but throughout the world.
What all this points to is the need to create an international system that ‘ties together’ all the different rights-management systems in use in different countries. An accurate, authoritative, registry of information about musical works, sound recordings and music videos is a fundamental, essential public good that supports a healthy ecosystem for digital music.
The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that promotes balanced international intellectual property (IP) protection as a means of rewarding creativity, stimulating innovation, and contributing to economic development and access to knowledge in the public interest. As an immediate priority, WIPO is facilitating a platform for exchange among the worldwide music sector to look at the challenges facing music in the digital environment. The International Music Registry project is focussed on ensuring that such a registry collaborates with existing efforts around the world to improve access to music rights information. The result will lead to a more transparent, inclusive architecture that operates for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Below are items number 1 and 2 in the FAQ >>>
What is the nature of the problem the dialogue is looking at?
It is widely understood that the way all rights in music are presently managed was designed for territory-by-territory exploitation of physical products and not for the digital environment, where services need to ‘look global’ and allow consumers from multiple countries to easily access as large a collection of copyrighted materials as possible. The manual licensing of music country-by-country for the same content each time though generally from different rightsholders creates massive inefficiencies and a high cost of acquiring legal licenses to commercialize music that is multiplied for every territory that a service wishes to operate in. It has other problems, amongst them:
- It requires each provider to expensively develop complex rights-management systems through custom-developed software to interact with the different rights-management systems of rightsholders in each country. This reduces the flexibility providers have in pricing their services to consumers and also reduces the amount that service providers can offer in licensing revenue.
- A fragmented availability of works, where the same service ends up providing different works and performances from one country to another, with no apparent way for the users to acquire legal access to all the material – even though they can often see it is available to someone, just not to them.
- The manual nature of licensing (and the costs of licensing this way) guarantees that many works which do not have a clear likelihood of commercial success are largely, or entirely, unavailable legally for the consumer – while the nature of the Internet makes global availability of these works from unlicensed services easy – and creates an incentive for the unscrupulous to meet the legally-unmet demand.
- The complexity and cost of the licensing process, due to the large number of entities a service provider must acquire the various rights from, creates a significant barrier to entry for the development of innovative content services.
The worry across the industry is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to ‘compete with free’ and persuade consumers used to easy and convenient access to music from non-legal sites to start paying for it – and that the longer this situation continues the more difficult ‘retraining’ especially younger music lovers to use paid services will become.
What all this points to is the need to create an international system that ‘ties together’ all the different rights-management systems in use in different countries through electronic interfaces, making it much easier and cheaper for services to gain legal access to rights and ultimately to license them.
The first step – getting the stakeholders together to discuss first principles
In order to create such a system, the organizing committee of this dialogue is inviting a key group of stakeholders from music to get together to discuss at a high level:
The proposition that an international registry of rights is an essential prerequisite to healthy, multi-territory licensing of music in the digital world.
What the high-level principles underpinning such a registry would be
What institution could be the ‘home’ and operator of such a system which would be trusted by both licensors, licensees, and governments to administer such a valuable common international resource
What the high-level principles underpinning such a registry would be
What institution could be the ‘home’ and operator of such a system which would be trusted by both licensors, licensees, and governments to administer such a valuable common international resource
How to move forward with the next steps
The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has offered to host this meeting and provide technical services to it, as well as make its experts available to provide information requested by the dialogue as its members may require.
Hear the merry tinkle of cash registers ringing up Big 4 profits.
The new sound of music.
Where do we, the people come into it?
We don’t.
Jon Newton @'p2pnet'
Donald Rumsfeld's revisionism doesn't explain Iraq
We were Defense Department officials through the early phases of the war and worked for the CPA in Baghdad. We have defended many of the difficult decisions Rumsfeld made and respect his service to our country. But his book paints an inaccurate and unfair history of U.S. policymaking concerning Iraq's political transition.
Rumsfeld's basic theme is that the CPA erred by failing to grant Iraqis "the right to govern themselves" early in the U.S.-led occupation. Rumsfeld claims that he favored a "swift transition" of power to an "Iraqi transitional government" and that the Bush administration formally endorsed this strategy when it approved the Pentagon's plan for an Iraqi Interim Authority in March 2003. He writes that the head of the CPA, L. Paul Bremer, unilaterally decided not to implement this plan.
But Rumsfeld's own contemporaneous memos undermine this notion. The 26 "Principles for Iraq - Policy Guidelines" that Rumsfeld gave Bremer in May 2003 said nothing about handing real power to Iraqis...
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