I Love Teh Internets

You know, no matter what can or can't be said about the web, there's one thing for sure.

Ten years ago or so, the only way you got a good laugh was either:
A) Someone told you a joke
B) You randomly happened across something that made you chuckle

Situation B, above, has exponentially expanded with the advent of the web, and it makes me happy to have things come across my RSS feeds almost daily that give my wife and I a good laugh.

This is a good example.

And even better:

Beggin Strips meets the BennyHilifier.

'Cmon people, the web is a wonderful place.

Thanks Techdirt - and Thomas Jefferson

I sent in a post a few days ago from Daily Variety about directors freely admitting "stealing ideas" as a topic for discussion over at Techdirt, and Mike Masnick picked it up. Cool, and thanks!

But what's really really cool is a quote from Thomas Jefferson someone posted in the comments that I'd not heard before, and I want to highlight a few bits of it (emphasis is mine).

It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.

Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea.

We've come a long, long way from that standpoint. I'm not yet convinced that where we stand in the US on copyright law is the place that our founding fathers had envisioned us standing when they created copyright.

New Media, Old Process

I've been doing a lot of work cross media in the last year, from $10,000 new media pilots to $5m reality tv shows, and one thing that really has become clear. That is that while we are constantly being asked to "do it better, faster, cheaper," we have little means of achieving this in many instances.

First, we're told "you have no budget, but call this agent, because we want this on camera talent." OK, as soon as your engaged in speaking with agents, and you're most likely now in talent union waters, you are not doing things cheaper. And that's ok. It's a fine choice to make, you just have to be aware of what it means when you get asked

Second, and more important to me personally, we have no toolsets that can help us do things better fast cheaper. All of our process management (production management) tools are really clunky, old, and pretty much suck.

The budgeting programs don't talk to the scheduling programs, and vice versa (except for one-time, "get your show started" imports - but there's no way for budgeting and scheduling programs to monitor each other and auto-update or auto-flag changes in one that affect the other). The budgeting and accounting softwares, well, there's really only one, and it's terrible, oh, and if you don't have internet access, your accountant is dead in the water and can't do anything at all.

We do not have any tools that make the production process (or the creative process for that matter) more intuitive and easier to manage, and easier to share information across the departments that exist within a media project.

Someday soon, we will - it's just going to take some work. For now, we're stuck with the same old processes, and 20th century communication models - where things are honestly, still done in triplicate in some parts of the process.

Crazy.