Bifurcate legal advice , one part for the west, other part for BRICS
Divergent technologies are increasingly being used by countries in the west and those within the rapidly expanding BRICS group of nation-states. This results in bifurcation of policies and laws and hence legal advice. This post lists areas of legal advice that are increasingly affected.
Posters for the films of Sergei Parajanov
This post is a collection of 31 posters of films directed or co-directed by Sergei Parajanov (1924-1990). He is seen working at his home in Tbilisi in the above black and white photo. In the background is a poster for his 1969 film, Sayat Nova, more commonly titled as...
Editing is central to the creative process, including Bob Dylan’s
Useful lawyers are not just lawyers. That started to be recognised openly decades ago with the expression that lawyers need to be “commercially-minded”. Yet that’s an inadequate underplaying of what’s required. Commerciality is not just about money. In the context of non-litigation intellectual property and entertainment law, the better lawyers know their clients and their work. They engage with the client’s creative process, even shape it in part.
Fast track commercialisation – I’m inspired by China!
Since 2016 I’ve been inspired by and measuring technological progress in China in one niche sector – manufacture of photography and videography gear. This post is a case study in technology commercialisation. It’s about finding inspiration for your own ventures while looking at China’s growing supply of sophisticated hardware and software for making photos and videos. This was a market once dominated by Germany, then Japan and the United States, and now China is catching up, fast.
Cult of personality and human rights in Azerbaijan
Lapshin is a journalist, born in Russia and holds a Russian passport. He lives in and became a citizen of Israel in the 1990s. As an citizen of Israel, in 2011 he visited the mountainous region in the south Caucasus known as Artsakh (also known as Karabagh). The region has two millennia of Armenian cultural history. He wrote a few pieces about his travel there, nothing of special significance. What followed is a case study in his bravery in bringing truth to power and using truth to protect himself.
Beware of standardisation trends, buyouts and the war economy
Commercialisation and business strategy decision making can learn from the lesson here. As Brian Potter states it in his conclusion “Between 1982 and 1987, half of US machine tool firms closed their doors. The US fell from the largest machine tool builder in the world to third behind Japan and Germany, and continued to decline: by 2002, it had dropped to 5th behind Italy and China, where it remains today.”
Measuring the number of genre films released from 1910 to 2020
This graphic is a measure of released genre films made in each year from 1910 to 2020 on the IMDB database. It categorises moving image works (eg films) from 1910 to 2020 by their genre discriptor in the IMDB database. Each year in each graphic represents the number of films made, not the population size that saw them, their revenue or impact.
Learn to fight back against Big Tech and Big Content
This is a short review of two highly recommended books on understanding the financial viability today of producers of entertainment and informational intellectual property (“IP”). The first book is by political economy specialist Yanis Vaouroufakis is the 2023 book Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. London: The Bodley Head. The second is of greater practical use for owners and producers of IP as it covers many IP and business law topics. It is the 2022 book by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Dotorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back. Melbourne: Scribe.
Re-reading “Future Shock”, 53 years after its 1970 publication
“The Tofflers get a lot right, viewing developments through their post-war boom, warnings of dislocations ahead, spectacles. … Ultimately the book is about US culture and what technology and late capitalism after the Second World War was doing to culture, and the need to not have change unrestrained and unmanaged and be dominated by “econocentricism” (p. 428). The same debate is present in 2023 as regards generative AI. About generative AI, as well as the Tofflers’ core concerns, this sentence from the book resonate: “Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions.”