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July, 2008:

Pictures of You – Anti-Speeding Campaign

Jul 8th, 2008
by CannibalRabbit.
2 comments

The Transport Accident Commission (TAC) has hit the airwaves again with another thought-provoking ad for TV and Radio.  It feature Angie Hart [^], from the early-90’s band Frente!, singing The Cure’s classic ‘Picture of You’:

I’ve been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they’re real
I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are
All I can feel

Followed by the Voice Over:

Speeding drivers are the biggest killers on our roads
This is why you’re photographed when you speed
Slow down

The TAC has a history of shocking and thought-provoking advertising campaigns.  This three minute ad features Victorian families who have lost members to speeding related accidents.  They volunteered in the hope that they may save other families suffering the same loss as them.  There is a supporting website at http://picturesofyou.com.au telling some of the stories behind the add.  You can check the ad out for yourself on YouTube [^]. 

Source: http://www.ihartangie.net/ [^], http://www.splendad.com/ [^] & http://www.duncans.tv/ [^]

Wall-E – Copyright Criminal?

Jul 5th, 2008
by CannibalRabbit.
1 comment

There is some interesting discussion about whether or not the ‘loveable’ Wall-E robot is a copyright criminal over at SFFaudio [^].  The link does have mild spoilers, but probably nothing that you wouldn’t have guessed at from seeing the trailer. 

The case that Jesse Willis at SFFaudio make centres around the robot’s “jailbreaking” of a copy of the film “Hello Dolly”.  As they point out, in the year 2805 the film would be almost 800 years out of copyright protection and in the public domain.  But under the USA’s DMCA [^] and Canada’s about to be enacted copyright law circumventing copy protection is a crime.  So even though the 1969 film would be in the public domain, if the original media was protected by some form of Digital Rights Management [^], which video tapes and DVDs are, copying it onto another device would be a crime.  Another case of hypocrisy in this film?  Consumerism is bad, but buy our toys [BrizBunny Comments]; and don’t copy our robot, buy an original DVD of this movie. 

Despite this we here in the CannibalRabbit household are still looking forward to the movie.

Archiving email to Paper

Jul 2nd, 2008
by CannibalRabbit.
No comments yet

The Powerhouse Museum [^] in Sydney and NineMSN have set-up an archive to store some of the nation’s emails.  In the interests of preserving the emails they will be stored electronically, and printed out onto archival quality paper.  Matthew McConnell, the Museum’s curator for computing and mathematics said:

“We imagine that computers solve all our problems – and who would give up email – but it’s funny having to go backwards in order to be certain that we can preserve these things.” The Age Technology

The decision to archive the emails onto paper is due to the speed that various digital media become obsolete.  The hardware and software required to make the data human-readable are rapidly discarded – just think of the once ubiquitous Floppy Disk Drives, and Commodore and Spectrum Data Cassettes.  Paper on the other hand has a useful life in the hundreds of years, and it’s always readable. 

It is hoped that the archive will be used as an indication of contemporary life, in much the same way that handwritten letters have been used by historians in the past.  Emails can be sent through emailaustralia.com.au [^].

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