From stay.free at verizon.net Mon Dec 6 19:56:31 2004 From: stay.free at verizon.net (Carrie McLaren) Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 19:56:31 -0500 Subject: Stay F---! | December 6 Message-ID: NEW ON THE STAY F---! SITE Free for download: Irwin Chusid - "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" (lo-fi mp3) I've added an mp3 of one of the songs on The Best & Worst of Xmas, our mix CD -- a crowd-pleasing (and terribly funny) recording by WFMU dj and bon vivant Irwin Chusid. Music geeks know Mr. Chusid as the man to credit (or blame) with helping revive interest in lounge music and popularizing audio's "outsider artists" (though he might kill me for saying so): http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/holiday_offer.html :::::::: "PR Machine: Robot Marketer Robert Doornick uses hi-tech wizardry to warm consumers to his Fortune 500 clients" by John Aboud Should you ever need a spectacle sure to stop trade-show attendees in their tracks, Robert Doornick is your man. As the president of International Robotics, Inc. (IRI), Doornick provides an array of high-priced high-tech marketing solutions to corporate clients. Among the showstoppers advertised on IRI's web site are computer-controlled "dancing" banners, holographic signs, and music-playing water sculptures. But IRI's key product, and Doornick's passion, is a line of interactive robots. Several models resemble gleaming "spacemen" like the kind you'd see roaming alien landscapes on a 1950s lunchbox. Others appear to be close cousins of C-3P0. And Doornick recently created a massive animatronic killer whale for an aquarium in Japan. We spoke to Doornick about his new-fangled pitchmen and the old-fashioned sales techniques that guide their design. continued at: http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/22/robot-robert-doornick.html :::::::: "Popsong Piracy, or, Napster in the 1930s" In April 1930, in a raid on bootleg song-sheet peddlers on Broadway between 42nd and 43rd, Traffic Patrolman Broger made the first arrest: Mrs. Sarah Yagoda, age 80. After a Music Publishers Protective Association representative and the district attorney interrogated Mrs. Yagoda in a failed attempt to identify the sheet's printer and distributors, she was allowed to go home. Nine years later, nothing much had changed in Times Square. The New York Times noted that "on any afternoon or evening, if the magistrate sitting in West Side Court is known to be lenient, the area north of Forty-second Street is a beehive for the street sale of song sheets," as well as watches, French pictures, neckties, jewelry, flowers, and suspenders. continued at: http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/22/piracy-fakebooks.html :::::::: BUGMENOT.COM If you hate when websites require you to register just read a short article, you'll love this site. Bugmenot.com allows users to bypass compulsory web registration by providing functioning logins and passwords for over 40,000 sites: http://www.bugmenot.com/ :::::::: UPCOMING NYC EVENT Wed. Dec. 8: Wal-Mart expert Liza Featherstone, who I interviewed in the current Stay F---!, will be speaking about her new book, _Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle For Workers' Rights At Wal-Mart_. I'll probably be there selling Stay F---! back issues so be sure to say hi if you come by. Info: Brecht Forum 122 West 27th Street, NYC Suggested donation: $6/$10/$15 7:30 PM From stay.free at verizon.net Mon Dec 13 15:32:59 2004 From: stay.free at verizon.net (Carrie McLaren) Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 15:32:59 -0500 Subject: Stay F---! | December 13 Message-ID: ARTICLE OF THE WEEK "The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders" From the New York Times Magazine, 12/5/04 http://www.nytimes.com/ http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/public/nyt-rob-walker.html Excellent cover story by Rob Walker about agencies that enlist everyday joes to buzz products. By now most Stay F---! readers know about viral marketing, but what makes this piece so good is Walker's attention to the social relationships involved. The agencies Walker profiles have been able to get people to work essentially for free, with only product samples and the promise of bolstered egos as payment. The one thing missing from this piece is an acknowledgment that the companies' claims are no doubt exaggerated. Marketers routinely inflate their numbers, and these guys are already on record as encouraging their charges to lie (asking agents to call book stores pretending to be customers searching for a desired book, etc.). Besides, anyone who has worked with volunteers before (especially volunteers operating independently from a distance) knows that 95 percent of them aren't doing much of anything; thus, you can forget BzzAgent's claims of 60,000 and Tremor's 240,000 -- my guess is that they each have a few hundred active agents. Still, the success of their business model is no less terrifying; and this quibble shouldn't detract from an otherwise solid article. (Thanks to Salim Virji) NEW WAL-MART PLANNED FOR QUEENS (NEW YORK) This week's announcement that Wal-Mart plans on opening a store in Queens brought mixed response from local residents, including aches, pains, and vomiting. Yeah, yeah we realize that Queens already has its share of retail giants, but when it comes to driving down local wages and gutting local businesses, no one beats Wal-Mart. We'll keep you posted as the opposition gains steam. http://www.nypost.com/business/21141.htm http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13524654&BRD=1864&PAG=461&dept_id=152800&rfi=6 CONSUMER REPORTS' BEST BUY DRUGS A few weeks ago I mentioned my fantasy for an independent resource that compared prescription drugs, a la Consumer Reports. Turns out that the Consumers Union (which publishes Consumer Reports) has launched a website for this very purpose. At the moment, it only has reports on three categories of drugs--cholesterol/statins, arthritus & pain/NSAIDs, and heartburn/PPIs--but a new report will be appearing every month. http://www.crbestbuydrugs.org/ Also: Help Consumer Reports make drug trial info public: http://www.prescriptionforchange.org PART-TIME OFFICE HELP NEEDED Stay Free! is looking for a smart, reliable human to help out a few hours a week with some of the day-to-day duties of running an independent, nonprofit magazine. Hours are flexible and will run anywhere from 2 to 10 hours per week. Primary duties will be taking care of mail orders. The ideal candidate will be tech-savvy, familiar with FilemakerPro and Mac OS, and live in or around Park Slope, Brooklyn. Exceptional high school students are encouraged to apply. We can pay $10/hour to start. Send a cover letter and resume to cm at stayfreemagazine.org. From stay.free at verizon.net Mon Dec 20 20:31:47 2004 From: stay.free at verizon.net (Carrie McLaren) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2004 20:31:47 -0500 Subject: Stay F---! | December 21 Message-ID: Posted online at: http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/public/ This week, two important links for fans of documentary films (and "illegal art"): The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University has selected eight short films as finalists in its Moving Image Contest and posted them online. The films aim to show "some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law," focusing either on music or documentary film: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/contest/finalists/ My vote goes to Christopher Sims' "An Army, One by One" for its simplicity and clarity of message. In fact, this short makes the perfect lead-in for "Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers," a report from the Center for Social Media on how our ever-expanding "culture of ownership" is handicapping documentary filmmakers: http://centerforsocialmedia.org/rock/index.htm Authors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi interviewed 45 filmmakers about the problems they've encountered in securing rights to music, historical footage, and other so-called intellectual property. The discussion includes some revealing anecdotes: * Any time people featured in a film start singing a song, documentarians should open their wallets. The makers of THE PERFECT CANDIDATE (a documentary about Oliver North's run for Senate) had to pay $3,000 to include a scene where a woman sang "God Bless America" at a campaign rally. And that's nothing. AOL Time Warner, which owns the rights to "Happy Birthday," charges $15,000-$20,000 for one verse of the song. Filmmakers who can't afford to pay or risk legal conflicts end up cutting out scenes altogether, as Linda Goode Bryant did when the principal subject in FLAG WARS (a documentary about the clash in a gentrifying area between African Americans and newly arrived gays and lesbians) starting singing along with the radio. * Sometimes rights owners require a "most favored nation clause" in the licensing agreements, which guarantees the rights owner the highest price the filmmaker can pay. In other words, if Capitol quotes the filmmaker $3,000 to use an old Johnny Mercer song, and the filmmaker also licenses a Looney Tunes clip from Warner Brothers for $5,000, then the filmmaker will automatically have to pay Capitol $5,000, too. As Jeff Tuchman describes it, "It's like going to go the grocery store and pinching your pennies and using your coupons, and then the last thing you buy is a steak for $20, and then every soda and bag of M&Ms you bought suddenly costs $20." * Directors often avoid shooting in places where background music is playing so that they don't have to worry about clearing the rights. For example: when making her film LITTLE PEOPLE, Jan Krawitz stopped shooting dwarf children exercising in gym class when the instructor played "YMCA." Reading this stuff, you get the idea that producer Katy Chevigny is right when she tells aspiring filmmakers that "the only film you can make for cheap and not have to worry about rights clearance is about your grandma, yourself, or your dog." But then there are people like Jeff Krulik (Heavy Metal Parking Lot series) who aggressively exercise "fair use" and use many short clips in their films without licensing. On the downside, they can't get distribution. Krulik, for example, is limited to posting his film HITLER'S HAT online and screening it at festivals and independent venues. But I can't help rooting for this route, for a number of reasons: it strengthens fair use, results in much better films, and ultimately encourages people to find new ways to get their films out (Keep in mind that there's no law saying it's wrong.)...which reminds me: Though the report includes many fine recommendations for solving some of the documentarians' problems, it could use a positive word about alternative distribution methods. MoveOn's success in distributing Robert Greenwald's UNCOVERED and OUTFOXED through house parties is one example of films finding an audience with the mass media machine. And, of course, there's always the internet. So on that note: http://www.planetkrulik.com/ (Thanks to David Glenn.) * * * In other news, this man has a good idea: DON'T SUE CHRIS REILLY CAMPAIGN ("Defending artist's rights through preemptive litigation prevention") http://www.dontsuechrisreilly.org/index.html