We are the music makers tips

Sued by UMG: a toddler listening to Prince

Still unconvinced by measures to clean up the site, by mid-March 2007 Viacom led a lawsuit at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York against YouTube and Google. Citing Section 106 of the US Copyright Act of 1976, Viacom complained that YouTube was directly infringing the companys exclusive rights to reproduce, publicly display and publicly perform its library of copyrighted works. Although users upload videos, clips are converted to YouTubes own software format, creating a copy that may infringe the right to reproduce. Viacom also argued that because searches pull up small thumbnail images of videos, some of which may come from infringing material, YouTube was violating the right to publicly display works. By streaming content in response to requests from users, the plaintiff also complained that YouTube was engaging in unauthorized public performance of copyrighted works. Alongside these charges of direct infringement, Viacom complained that by allowing users to upload unauthorized copies, YouTube was not only liable for inducement but also contributory infringement. Finally, Viacom alleged that as YouTube had the means to supervise and control infringing content but failed to do so for copyright owners who were not licensed partners, the company was vicariously liable.28 Viacom claimed YouTube was fully aware of infringing activity but turned a blind eye in order to build trafc drawn by copyrighted content. Furthermore, although content that is not provided by licensed partners is unlikely to be positioned with paid advertising, Viacom claimed that YouTube still proted from using infringing content to build trafc and thereby enhance the sites market share. Viacom claimed YouTube not only had actual knowledge and clear notice of this massive infringement, but also that the presence of infringing copyrighted material [] is fully intended by Defendants as a critical part of their business plan to drive trafc and increase YouTubes network, market share and enterprise value. Consequently, Viacom argued, YouTube has built an infringement-driven business. In support of these allegations, the plaintiff complained YouTube had the means to identify and remove pornographic videos and so could lter content, yet did not extend the same controls to infringing content.29 YouTube denied the allegations made by Viacom and the case has yet to be decided.30 What lies behind these arguments is a purely economic evaluation of YouTubes communicative status: will the unauthorized posting of video material undermine the rights of the copyright industries to gain 400 401 Industry

McNuggets Rap: viral marketing video

BrandSpace YouTube needs advertising, but to attract advertisers the site also requires inoffensive, non-infringing content. In this respect the content partner program functions as a strategy for legitimizing YouTube as a safe site for advertising. Reciprocally, for producers and owners of content, YouTube can provide a vital means to expand their audience. As the reputation or exposure of videos can rapidly spread through word of mouth, e-mail, blogging, text messages and Instant Messaging, YouTube has become a launch pad for viral video. And it is from this dynamic that YouTube holds the potential to become a platform for viral marketing. If viral video is a statement about the infectious distribution potential of video sharing, viral marketing is a statement about the promotional To consolidate the presence of these sources, the content partner program creates branded channels, mini-sites within the main YouTube site that are built around the content of partners. For example, visiting the channel for Walt Disney Motion Pictures UK opens up to a page entirely dedicated to and exclusively occupied by Disney content. Video content is limited to trailers of currently available lms, which play through the usual watch window. At the top of the page a banner ad acts as a click-through link to the external main website for Disney in the UK. Interactive functions are included to cultivate and nurture their viral potential: visitors can subscribe to a channel for free, and options are provided to share a channel or playlist. Branded channels cover a diverse range of content. On the US site for YouTube, video material uploaded by partners includes content that falls under the categories of how-to (e.g. Expert Village, Make Magazine), music (e.g. Bohemia Visual Music, 392 393 Industry

Took 606 takes to get right: Honda spoof

A third point, worth highlighting because it brings the Honda Cog and Der Lauf der Dinge in line not only with each other, but aligns them with major issues in lm studies and lm theory, is that both are the work of bona de lmmakers. I already highlighted this in my comments on the Honda Cog and its proximity to the Hollywood blockbuster, but it is worth pointing out that Der Lauf der Dinge only exists as a lm/videotape: it is not the lmic record of a performance of machinic self-destruction, but an event staged specically for the camera. The mise-en-scne in each case is that of an auteur director, who decides exactly where to place the camera, when to move it, how to 174 175 Form

The Life of Things

The rough, para-industrial setup, the processes put in motion as well as the materials used inevitably recall many of the key elements of modern sculpture, conceptual art and other avant-garde practices, notably (but not only) from the post-WW II period: the concern for balance and suspension (Suprematism and Constructivism); assemblage art (from the late 1940s); kinetic art (from the 1950s and 60s); trash objects, garbage and recycled materials (from New Realism and Pop); ready-mades and small wasted energies made useful (Marcel Duchamp); and nally, the energies inherent in apparently inert matter from the work of Carl Andre, not to forget the macho-engineering skills of 172 173 Form

Honda Accord Cog

What scripted stories or spatial narratives, then, does YouTube offer, once a user engages with the sites dynamic architecture, sets up a few ground rules (both narratives and games need rules), and then lets him/ herself be taken to different sites, spaces and places: not by the logic of an individual characters aims, obstacles, helpers and opponents, but by the workings of contiguity, combinatory and chance? In other words, what happens when neither the causal chain of action and reaction, nor the temporal succession of locales determines the direction or 166 167 Form

The Memex (from: As We May Think, Life, 1945)

In this way a better as the analogies to the human brain suggest: more natural organization of knowledge should be possible. The problem is of course that trails in the archive produced with microfilmbased technology cannot be erased.26 A user of the MEMEX would have to be very careful to not build useless or nonsensical trails. Bush describes a scenario of usage: The owner of the MEMEX, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. Bush con tinues to state that such a user has dozens of possible books or articles in his MEMEX: 334 33 Storage

Cover of Artforum, December 1995

330 331 Storage

How Le Prince disappeared: Fake biopic trailer

The Lumire brothers captured a maximum of movement through the depth of space by filming an arrival and a departure. These figures also distinguish Le Princes strange fate in pre-cinema. The train is connected to cinema as an emblem of modernity, and linked to Le Princes disappearance. In France to arrange financial matters, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon in September 1890 but he never disembarked in Paris. This famous vanishing act brings together key features of modern time and space in the genres of early cinema. Le Princes disappearance connects the train films of the first years of cinema with the sudden disappearances in the transformation films made famous by Georges Mlis, Segundo de Chomon, Ferdinand Zecca and others, to make his train journey the quintessential phantom ride of cinema. The phantom rides and the Hales Tours (screenings inside train cars to simulate real journeys) draw on the immersive powers of cinema projection. Le Prince was engulfed in the crowd at the train station, swallowed up by the urban space never to reappear. Since Le Prince was never seen on the train and his luggage was not found in Paris, and since his body was never discovered on the route between the two cities, there are good reasons to believe that he never boarded the train. This enigmatic transformation cut of Le Prince in the Dijon station where he was accompanied by his brother to the station platform in Paris, where he never descended, has invited many theories from film historians. Some claim that he committed suicide, with homosexuality, financial difficulties or lack of success with his inventions as chief motivations. His biographer Christopher Rawlence tests many different theories about Le Princes disappearance. Le Princes wife believed he was killed by Edison so he wouldnt pose a threat to the other mans patents. Rawlence finds no evidence to substantiate this theory, however.11 Le Princes cameras still exist, and they inform us that he shifted from a 16-lens camera constructed in Paris in 1887 to a single-lens technique built in Leeds in 1888.12 This shows that Le Prince was one of the first to record an event on a film strip. He did this at the same time as Etienne-Jules Marey, who also shot chronophotographic images on paper film in October 1888. One could even favor Le Princes work over Mareys, in a retrospective view, as a precursor to cinema, since Le Prince shot outdoors, in the everyday surroundings that were later so popular in early cinema. Etienne-Jules Mareys movement studies, just 322 323 Storage

Roundhay Garden Scene mashup

Not only do the images themselves return in a different medium, the screening mode of the loop becomes accessible in the digital format. If the looping format has to a large degree made the return of these frames possible, this also implies a return of the loop. As demonstrated by the techniques of the Praxinoscope, the Zoetrope and the Vitascope, as well as the Kinetoscope, the loop was a dominant screening practice in the pre-cinema years. Even in the first years of cinema, it was not uncommon to edit shots as loops in order to screen them in multiple repetitions.9 Even if the linear temporal mode has been dominant throughout cinema history, there is a vein in experimental cinema, in the films of filmmakers as different as Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs and Michael Snow, that elaborates on the idea of identical repetitions of 320 321 Storage

Roundhay Garden Scene

Roundhay garden with the family of Le Princes wife. The scene from the garden is central to the dating of his films, as the presence of his mother-in-law in the image verifies Le Princes annotation of October 1888, since she died later that month. Thus, in the act of dating the invention, one encounters death and people moving after their disappearance. One important aspect of these films is that they are being seen for the first time on YouTube. They were never shown publicly by Le Prince, as there is no evidence that he had a functioning projector, and there is no record of these films being shown in early film programs. Since only about twenty frames from each film have survived, it would have been difficult to program them in cinema retrospectives.8 In normal film projection, each shot would last about a second too short for a viewer to recognize the image before it disappears. But when streamed or downloaded, these images may be repeated and looped, which gives the viewer a different kind of access to the image through repetition. These ghostly frames of pre-cinema thus, in a way, come to life in a new digital setting. When they are animated, be it on film or digitally, it is a resuscitation of something that has never moved, and by extension never lived. Le Princes films are in many ways ghosts of things that never were. Each of these films have been (as is usual on YouTube) uploaded in several versions. They are to be found as short files of one to two seconds, in variable resolution and with variable speed of movement. But they are also repeated and re-edited with inserted intertitle jokes, such as the epic and coming to a cinema near you in the fall of 1888 in the case of the Roundhay Garden scene. Re-editing a one-second shot as a trailer, with closeups, repetitions and standard contemporary trailer music, seems to be a popular treatment of the images. This second of movement has also been released as a directors cut, and many files also have opening and end titles. The jokes made at the expense of this footage are almost all about how these films fail to meet the expectations of ordinary cinema today, marketed for example by trailers, and with the properties of the film industry stamped upon them. This demonstrates how these images are almost invariably seen from the perspective of analog cinema, with a classical film tradition in mind, and not as isolated digital files without a history or a home in the analog domain. The return of these images on the Internet, and on YouTube in particular, thus cannot be understood solely from a logic of the digital. They must also be seen in an intermedial and intermediary archival situation characteristic of the moving image in digital interfaces.