Tag: culture

What happened to Escape Magazine?

Escape Mag issue 9

From Magazine Forum,

Dennis Publishing, 1996-?

Short-lived title from Maxim publisher Dennis aiming to explore the World-Wide Web. The first issue was withdrawn for legal reasons. Jennifer Aniston was on the cover.

It was T3 crossed with Loaded, and maybe a too ahead of its time. Now you could do a whole video podcast in the style of Escape magazine, specially with the youtube and Facebook always a place for somekind of monthly excitement. Heck if you throw in the maturity in gaming and you got something quite cutting. There’s no doubt it was a lads mag but I always felt there was more to it than just the pretty lady on the front cover. It at the time was talking about the culture of electronics and culture of the internet, when dot net was still trying to hook people up using AOL cds.

Well I’m weirdly happy to say I found all the issues at my parents house recently, and going by the lack of any details online, I’m sure they will sell for a good amount to some collector. Of course if you’d like to get in on the action a head of time, drop me a email. I’d also like to scan every page one day in the future, so there is a digital copy online somewhere, because right now there seems to be nothing at all. Not even enough details to be clear that it does actually exist (remind me to add a entry to wikipedia one day).

Replacing Copyright, is it time?

Ars Technica, has a nice piece about a couple of efforts to replace the current copyright law with something much more enlightened.

Suggesting something new to replace it can be a harder job, and Litman turns her attention to that task in an unpublished new paper called “Real Copyright Reform” (PDF). Part of a spate of recent reform proposals (Public Knowledge is heading another high-profile effort, for example), Litman’s quest to reform the 1976 Copyright Act is, as she acknowledges, quixotic.

“None of these proposals is likely to attract serious attention from Congress or copyright lobbyists,” she writes. “Right now the copyright legislation playing field is completely controlled by its beneficiaries. They have persuaded Congress that it is pointless to try to enact copyright laws without their assent.”

Still, academics have never limited themselves to something as tawdry as “reality,” and Litman’s theoretical work here is no exception. Her entire reform proposal is based on a few key principles: returning power to both creators and consumers, radically simplifying the law so that people can understand it without a lawyer, and beating the record companies, publishers, and movie studios about the head with a shovel.

Who might object to that? The big distributors, for one, would probably not be pleased with any plan devoted to ousting “the current vested intermediaries from their control of pieces of copyright, and return that power to the creators.”

I had a read through the PDF of Jessica Litman’s and although I found it hard to follow at first, it started making a lot of sense. The arguments and references seem to be up to scratch but as the whole piece concludes on, the fact that Copyright was never written to cover the millions of ordinary people who want to share there culture with one another. The last few extensions to Copyright have had such a massive chilling effect, maybe it is time to relook the whole damm thing from scratch, even if its going to take a lifetime it will be worth it for our children and there children.

Reading the Cluetrain by our PR lady

Our PR lady started reading the Cluetrain Manfesto after I gave her a copy to read. She seems to be reading through it slowly but at the same time its brought up more questions that I'd expected. So I suggested to her that she should blog internally or even externally about reading through the book. So I was kinda of shocked when she agreed… And now reading the cluetrain is born.

I think its really good to see our PR lady blogging, shes quite strange in a nice way. Kind of person who would forgive you at that moment but would never forget what you did. Anyway, shes been willing to learn about the changes online markets make to PR and thats a really good thing. Please check out her blog, as she really wants comments and constructive ideas around what she reads and blogs.

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