Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Katie’s long goodbye

Regular readers know I’m a Katie fan; unfortunately I was en route home from Prague so I missed it:

Throughout her record 15-year tenure, Ms. Couric was easy to love and at times fun to hate, but she was always the most vibrant personality on network television. Her popularity helped keep NBC’s “Today” the top-rated morning program for more than a decade, and it is still the most profitable show on television. NBC, a network that has no shame when it comes to milking finales and farewells, pulled out all the stops yesterday. The three-hour Katiefest, which even she described as a “celebration of moi, ad nauseam,” was by turns maudlin, mocking, touching and over the top.

I hold out hope that she’ll do something great at CBS.

Lessig on Free Use again

I’m listening to a podcast of the Princeton University - Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference panel on Creativity and I.P. Law: How Intellectual Property Law Fosters or Hinders Creative Work. In it Larry Lessig discusses, again, the demise of Free Use. 

The freedom to read - in a library; from a borrowed book or from a book you bought - is a “free use.” In the digital realm, he explains, because every use requires a copy, every time we engage in any use it must be justified as either a “licensed use” or a “fair use.”

Once there were three kinds of uses: “free use,” “licensed use,” and “fair use.” If the content industry’s view prevails, in the world they’d like to construct, one day soon there will no longer be “free use.” There will only be “licensed use” or “fair use.”

This, I agree, is a serious, significant and culturally tragic loss. I urge you to hear his message too.

Batwoman comes out

I’m at a T-Mobil Hotspot in the Frankfurt airport; I’ll be home later today. Here I happened upon an International Herald Tribune
article reporting that the new Batwoman ain’t what she used to be:

Batwoman was introduced in 1956, but she was one of several, often silly additions to the Bat family, including Ace the Bat-Hound (1955), Bat-Mite (1959) and Bat-Girl (1961). In her latest incarnation, Batwoman is a wealthy, buxom lipstick lesbian who has a history with Renee Montoya, an ex-police detective who has a starring role in “52.”

Could Batman and Robin be far behind?

LATER: More from the BBC.