We are pleased to announce the new issue of Camera Austria with artist's contributions by CALIN DAN, TIMM RAUTERT, SUSAN SILAS and CHRISTINE WÜRMELL. RAINER BELLENBAUM publishes his first essay of the four-part column "Change of Dispositif".
In this series of photos »Helmbrechts walk, 1998 - 2003« SUSAN SILAS
documents the route of a death march of 580 Jewish women, walking from
Helmbrechts in Bavaria to Prachatice in what was then the Sudetenland
at the close of the War in the spring of 1945. Fifty-three years after
this event, SILAS re-traced the path of these women. Author BRETT ASHLEY KAPLAN
describes how SILAS' »Helmbrechts walk« uncovers the frequent veiling
of violence in the traditional representation of landscape. She
elucidates how Silas' work questions the potential of the landscape as
a scene of amnesia and how, at the same time, she works to liberate the
landscape tradition from its aesthetic contamination by Fascist
ideology.
The
contributions in this issue, supplemented by exhibition reviews, book
write-ups and eight FORUM contributions from young photographers and
artists, offer a range of approaches and positions along with different
approaches to reflection and eduction that is, as always,
unconventional but necessary for the medium of photography with its
wide variety of contexts of use.
"Conservative,” of course, isn't the word to describe Helprin's
radical wishes. Never mind the American tradition of limited copyright
terms as a way to promote the arts and the rest. Halperin acknowledges
certain social benefits from this rather Jeffersonian philosophy, but
in the end seems to regard literature as like real estate—something
that the proprietors should be able to own forever. Odd. How many
houses are built partly with timber from the one next door (a metaphor
that if not used before, should have been)? Even the headline of the
Helprin piece is a touch misleading: "A Great Idea Lives Forever.
Shouldn’t Its Copyright?" You don't copyright ideas per se—you
copyright the expression of them, and in fact, Helprin's own
essay notes: "Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same
idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the
difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.'" [read on...]
In a New York Times op-ed article on May 20, 2007 ("A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?"),
Mark Helprin suggests that copyrights, like physical property rights,
should last forever. But in fact, copyrights and physical property
rights are vastly different domains, both inherently and in their
effects on society. A closer look at the consequences of perpetual
copyright shows Helprin's suggestion to be based on faulty arguments.
At the core of Helprin's article is the idea that physical and
intellectual property are morally equivalent — that revoking the rights
enjoyed by copyright owners after a limited (albeit long) term is the
same as revoking the rights enjoyed by owners of physical property.
Physical property, such as real estate, is a finite resource that
operates as a zero-sum game. And the laws regarding physical property
treat it as such. Intellectual works are abstract concepts and do not
naturally operate as zero-sum games. Copyright law converts a work into
a kind of zero-sum game so that the author can make money selling his
work, but once that legal construction expires, the work returns to its
natural state of a non-zero-sum game.
The framers did not believe that copyright was an intrinsic
right, but they recognized that if authors could not recoup the cost of
their labors, they would create fewer works. They considered copyright
to be a government-created incentive to promote the progress of Science
and the Useful Arts. After authors have been given sufficient time to
extract compensation for their labors, the monopoly to the work is
ended, and the work may be reabsorbed into the culture at large, be
remixed into new works, and forever benefit the public: hence the name
"Public Domain".
But why are intellectual and physical property different? How
are the differences between laws related to the differences between
domains? Would it really be so bad for society if they were treated the
same way? This article explores the answers. [...]
Photo: A.J. Mast for The New York Times Amateur
filmmaker Dan Burke recreates a scene where he brushed his teeth with
ketchup for a Heinz ketchup commercial contest at his home in Dayton,
Ohio.
From an advertiser’s perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public
to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best
one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work.
But look at the videos H. J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.
In
one of them, a teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream,
then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight
from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and
shaves his face with Heinz’s product. Often the ketchup looks more like
blood than a condiment.
Heinz has said it will pick five of the
entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself
to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far
it’s safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of,
say, the classic Carly Simon “Anticipation” ad where the ketchup creeps
oh so slowly out of the bottle.
Heinz Top This TV Challenge
Entry #138: Dan's Heinz Commercial
Consumer brand companies have been busy introducing campaigns like
Heinz’s that rely on user-generated content, an approach that combines
the populist appeal of reality television with the old-fashioned
gimmick of a sweepstakes to select a new advertising jingle. Pepsi, Jeep,
Dove and Sprint have all staged promotions of this sort, as has
Doritos, which proudly publicized in February that the consumers who
made one of its Super Bowl ad did so on a $12 budget.
But these
companies have found that inviting consumers to create their
advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than
just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many
entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them
requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often
spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.
Some
people, meanwhile, have been using the contests as an opportunity to
scrawl digital graffiti on the sponsor and its brand. Rejected Heinz
submissions have been showing up on YouTube anyway, and visitors to
Heinz’s page on the site have written that the ketchup maker is clearly
looking for “cheap labor” and that Heinz is “lazy” to ask consumers to
do its marketing work.
“That’s kind of a popular misnomer that,
somehow, it’s cheaper to do this,” said David Ciesinski, vice president
for Heinz Ketchup. “On the contrary, it’s at least as expensive, if not
more.”
Heinz has hired an outside promotions firm to watch all
the videos and forward questionable ones to Heinz employees in its
Pittsburgh headquarters. So far, they have rejected more than 370
submissions (at least 320 remain posted on YouTube). The gross-out
factor is not among their screening criteria — rather, most of the
failed entries were longer than the 30-second time limit, entirely
irrelevant to the contest or included songs protected by copyright.
Some of the videos displayed brands other than Heinz (a big no-no) or
were rejected because “they wouldn’t be appropriate to show mom,” Mr.
Ciesinski said.
Heinz hopes to show more than five of them, if
there are enough that convey a positive, appealing message about Heinz
ketchup, he said. But advertising executives who have seen some of the
entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud
to run on television in September.
“These are just so bad,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive
of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency in New York that is
not involved with Heinz’s contest.
One of the most viewed Heinz
videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a
close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan
Thaler saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too
much Heinz?”
Heinz Top This TV Challenge
Entry #4: My Entry For The Heinz Commercial Contest
Scott Goodson, chief executive of StrawberryFrog, an advertising
agency based in New York, said the shortcomings of contest entries —
not just those for Heinz — refuted predictions that user-generated
content might siphon work away from agencies. “This Heinz campaign,
much like the same ones done by Doritos, Converse and Dodge, only goes
to show how hard it is to do great advertising,” he said.
In a
traditional ad campaign, a client like Heinz will meet with its
advertising agencies to come up with a central idea, often a tagline
like MasterCard’s
“Priceless.” The creative departments then design the ads while the
media planners figure out where they should run. Except for the
occasional focus group, consumers are largely on the receiving end. [read on...]
Monday May 21 from 8-11pm 300 NEW YORK Chelsea Piers, 23rd Street and West Side Hwy. Tickets Available at the Door!
Tickets: Individual $250 Patron Individual $500 (*includes a limited edition bowling shirt) Limited discount Artist Tickets available for $150 (artist tickets do not guarantee a bowling lane assignment, however extra lanes are expected to be available after 9PM)
Of the three national nightly news
broadcasts, only NBC's Nightly News reported
on former deputy attorney general James B. Comey's May 15 congressional
testimony regarding what
Nightly News anchor Brian
Williams called a "rare glimpse of a high-level, late-night power
struggle" among the Justice Department, the FBI, and the White House over
the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretapping program. As
NBC News justice correspondent Pete Williams reported, Comey told the Senate
Judiciary Committee that current Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who was then
White House counsel, and Andrew Card, then-White House chief of staff, attempted
to pressure then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "at his [hospital]
bedside ... to approve an extension of the secret NSA warrantless
eavesdropping program over strong Justice Department objections even though
Ashcroft was seriously ill," and did not have power as the attorney
general during his recovery from surgery. [...]
I want to put yesterday's incredible Comey testimony
in some context, to demonstrate just how otherworldly this story is --
and what an extraordinary tale it tells about the nature of the
officials who are running our government.
In March 2004, the NSA
surveillance program had been operational for two-and-a-half years.
According to the President and NSA, it had produced extraordinarily
valuable intelligence against potential terrorist actions. (At the very
least, it's fair to assume that the folks in DOJ understood this to be
the case.) The NSA and the phone companies had been going full-steam
ahead on the program, even though on its face it would be a crime to do
so under FISA. See 18 U.S.C. 1809. Presumably they did so only because
OLC had written one or more legal opinions concluding that the
President had Article II authority to disregard the statute in wartime
-- a legal theory not only critical to the operation of the program,
but also at the very heart of the Vice President's passionately held
philosophy of Executive prerogatives.
Jack Goldsmith was
confirmed to be head of OLC in October 2003. He was a loyal Republican
and supporter of the President. And yet almost as soon as he took
office, he began reviewing much of John Yoo's handiwork, and found it
lacking. Barely two months into his new job, for instance, Goldsmith
called the Pentagon and told them that they must immediately cease
relying on the critical Yoo Opinion that formed the basis for the
Department of Defense's absuive interrogation policies in Iraq and
elsewhere. (I've reviewed this fascinating story in detail here.) [...]
