Apples, Dads, And Boings

A heartfelt thanks to all the dads at Apple (and all the moms, and all the other humans too) for making Father's Day gifts so unique yet easy with iMovie and iDVD. For this particular holiday, it took roughly half an hour to stitch together a couple-dozen video clips that have been accumulating on my phone and still camera, add in some (in hindsight probably much too sappy, but oh well) music from iTunes, some clever titles, and burn baby burn. Knock wood, my original, borderline antediluvian iMac still cranks these out for me just fine. What do all you majority-of-the-market-share Windows users do on such occasions, hmm? I'm reading JD's phenomenal book (he'll be my next guest on Sound Policy; here's an interesting related post), and he writes that in the latest rev(s). of iMovie, Apple "pushed the envelope again, integrating its digital hub to let users add a favorite band's music as a sound track to movies they create—without forcing you to navigate through the record labels' licensing sawmill—under the theory that fair use covers such personal, noncommercial projects." All I can say is it works well and is much appreciated.

Unrelated but fun: went book shopping this morning for Tyler and was thrilled to find Gerald McBoing Boing (complete with accompanying, presumably fully rights-cleared, sound).

Mr. President, We Must Not Allow A Mine Shaft Gap!

In case it didn't immediately ring a bell, the title slug is from General "Buck" Turgidson in Dr. Stangelove. I was reminded of it when reading this article on lawyers "leaping" into the blogosphere (I wonder if that's meant to evoke paratroopers or lemmings?). This quote is just as funny as General Buck's, and shows just as little appreciation for the larger issues at hand: "With new blogs appearing daily, there's obviously a danger that law firms slow to launch will find themselves at the bottom of the blog pack." If law firms are planning to blog so they can be at the "top" of some kind of pack, they're probably in it for the wrong reasons and setting themselves up for disappointment. (There are a few other chuckles in the article, but I'll leave the fun of finding and/or associating movie quotes with them to you.)

That Ices It

Boing Boing has posted one high-calorie discussion on cakes and copyright.

Try-able

The Tribe.net profiles I've mentioned here previously are now publicly available if you feel like going and kicking the tires. (You have to join Tribe.net.) The concept, as I can't seem to stop saying, is way cool. And they've updated the URI scheme, e.g. people.tribe.net/me.

Podcast Progress

John Borland at C|Net/ZDNet:

For six months now, [Coverville's Brian] Ibbott has been talking to the Recording Industry Association of America and individual copyright holders about making this process easier and unambiguously legal. Now he says there are signs that the big labels are listening and are seeking ways to put podcasting DJs on more stable legal footing.