Michael Geist sez,"One year after launching the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, I've just released a new film that explores why copyright emerged as such a high profile issue. Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law, which I produced together with Daniel Albahary, features a wide range of Canadian voices - artists like Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art; writers like award winning science fiction author Karl Schroeder; musicians like Wide Mouth Mason's Safwan Javed; business people like Nettwerk Record's Terry McBride, Lulu.com's Bob Young, and Skylink Technologies' Philip Tsui; government appointees like Privacy Commissioner of Canada Jennifer Stoddart and Ian E. Wilson, the Chief Librarian of Canada; and many, many more. Given the emphasis on the benefits of the Internet as a distribution channel for creators, the film is available in multiple ways online at newly designed page."

Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law (Thanks, Michael!)

Here's the final installment in this year's Boing Boing holiday gift guide: a compendium of the top sellers from the last year's reviews. Today we wrap up with DVDs and one CD.

Don't miss the previous installments: kids' stuff, fiction, gadgets, comics and nonfiction.

Freakazoid - The Complete First Season

The best TV cartoon since the Max Fleischer era, on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Tekkon Kinkreet

Absolutely extraordinary comic fuses manga and French comics in a story of violence and lost boys in a surreal Japanese cityscape
Original Boing Boing post

DAVE MCKEAN'S KEANOSHOW

Surreal gorgeous short videos on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Masters of Science Fiction: The Complete Series

Stephen Hawking hosts a science fiction TV show
Original Boing Boing post

Alphabutt
(Kimya Dawson)
Weird, jangly, hilarious awesome music for kids
Original Boing Boing post

Master archivist Rick Prelinger sez,

It's 1951, and America fears Communism and the Bomb. Since the Johnsons, a working-class Midwestern family, can't afford a Thanksgiving turkey, they decide to spend an evening writing up what they're thankful for, and share their thoughts around the dinner table.

Unlike almost every other Cold War educational and industrial film, this film doesn't equate freedom and happiness with material things. Made by Centron, the same visionary company that spawned Herk Harvey and his "Carnival of Souls," and written by Margaret "Trudy" Travis, one of the few women creating ephemeral films at the time, it's deeply patriotic, yes, and anti-Communist as well, but it runs counter to many of the Fifties clichés we hold dear.

Download a high-quality version from the Internet Archive and watch it with your family!

A Day of Thanksgiving (1951)

Well, it's coming up to the holidays and I've started to make my list and fill it in. As a starting point, I went through all the books and DVDs and gadgets I'd reviewed on Boing Boing since last November and looked at what had been the best-sellers among BB's readership, figuring you folks have pretty good taste! As I was taking a walk down old review lane, I realized that many of you would probably be interested in seeing these lists too, so I've turned them into a series of blog-posts that I'll be sticking up, one per day, for the next week or so. Today I'm starting with kids' media and media about kids and child-rearing. Later this week, I'll do fiction, nonfiction, comics and graphic novels, CDs and DVDs and gadgets and everything else, one a day. Hope this helps you with your holiday shopping as much as it's helped me with mine!

Baby's First Mythos
(C.J. Henderson)
Cthluhoid picture book
Original Boing Boing post

Invention of Hugo Cabret
(Brian Selznik)
Award-winning steampunk graphic novel for kids
Original Boing Boing post

Good as Lily
(Derek Kirk Kim)
Ass-kicking girl-positive graphic novel for young readers
Original Boing Boing post

The Plain Janes
(Cecil Castellucci, Jim Rugg)
Funny, spirited little story about a gang of girls named Jane at a strait-laced high-school, rejected by the mainstream, and their art adventures.
Original Boing Boing post

Little Brother
(Cory Doctorow)
My bestselling young adult novel about kids who hack for freedom
Original Boing Boing post

The Starry Rift
(Jonathan Strahan)
Science fiction anthology for teens
Original Boing Boing post

St. Trinian's: The Entire Appalling Business
(Ronald Searle)
Ronald Searle's original dark, weird and hilarious St Trinian's comics
Original Boing Boing post

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need
(Daniel H. Pink)
Optimistic and iconoclastic career guide in manga form
Original Boing Boing post

Alice in Wonderland Tattoos

Alice in Wonderland temporary tatts
Original Boing Boing post

Freakazoid - The Complete First Season

The best TV cartoon since the Max Fleischer era, on DVD
Original Boing Boing post

Boy Proof
(Cecil Castellucci)
A compassionate young adult novel about a weird, smart, angry girl
Original Boing Boing post

Cycler
(Lauren McLaughlin)
Smart YA novel about sex and sexuality
Original Boing Boing post

My Mother Wears Combat Boots: A Parenting Guide for the Rest of Us
(Jessica Mills)
Kick-ass punk-parenting book
Original Boing Boing post

How to Ditch Your Fairy
(Justine Larbalestier)
Hilarious kids book about the problems with fairies
Original Boing Boing post

Nation
(Terry Pratchett)
Moving and sweet young adult novel about science, superstition and decency
Original Boing Boing post

ABC3D
(Marion Bataille)
The best pop-up book in the world
Original Boing Boing post

The Baby Sleep Solution: A Proven Program to Teach Your Baby to Sleep Twelve Hours a Night
(Suzy Giordano)
The best parenting book I've read
Original Boing Boing post

How Children Learn
(John Holt)
Cllassic of human, kid-centered learning
Original Boing Boing post

The Graveyard Book
(Neil Gaiman)
Spooky, magical retelling of The Jungle Book in a graveyard
Original Boing Boing post

How Children Fail
(John Holt)
Angry lessons from failures to teach
Original Boing Boing post

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A Pop-Up Book
(Sam Ita)
The paper kraken wakes
Original Boing Boing post

Alphabutt
(Kimya Dawson)
Weird, jangly, hilarious awesome music for kids
Original Boing Boing post

Zoe's Tale
(John Scalzi)
Scalzi's smart-ass young-adult sf thriller
Original Boing Boing post

Free to Be...You and Me (The 35th Anniversary Edition, Hardcover)
(Marlo Thomas and Friends)
The book every kid needs
Original Boing Boing post

My friend Elizabeth Stanley writes in to Boing Boing to share the video above, which explores how the digital world "allows many Iranians access to ideas and freedom of expression they haven’t had for close to thirty years." Elizabeth explains:

Kate Tremills wrote a "video essay" script for the Digital Design department at the Vancouver Film School (VFS) several months back. They turned it into this amazing piece – which has received attention from Motionographer. Here's the link on the VFS site and on the Motionographer site.

"Monopoly: The Movie"? Ridley Scott may direct, "with an eye toward giving it a futuristic sheen along the lines of his iconic 'Blade Runner.'" Alex Balk wonders: "Do Top Hats Dream Of Electric Trains?"

PENNYBAGS: [Slowly, deliberately] I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Boots mortgaging property to tiny dogs. Apartments torched on Baltic Avenue just for the insurance money. I watched someone roll triple sixes and land on Free Parking where a Get Out Of Jail Free card had been tossed into the kitty. All those moments will be lost in time, like a bank error in your favor. Time to die. [As the rain continues to fall, he drops his head and silently expires.]

On Dinosaurs and Robots, Mister Jalopy posts and comments on a whole bunch of his favorite videos from MTV's video archive.

Here's a small sample of Jalopy's picks:

MTV was the internet of the 1980s. It was the connection from our mundane suburban lives to the urbane sophisticated world that we imagined joining. Now everybody knows everything and every trend is overexposed to the point of lifelessness, but MTV played an important role as it gave us a window into subcultures that meant the world to us. True, D+R is about inspired objects, but we sometimes diverge to consider the exceptional whatever the form. The MTV offering is not as broad as YouTube, but the quality, searching and metadata quality make it worthwhile. The MTV embedding function is a bit of a stinker. If you embed, strip off all html after the ending embed tag.

Bauhaus - Ziggy Stardust

At the time, Bauhaus was skewered by the British press for doing a light cover of a classic Bowie song to rocket up the charts. Indeed, it was, and remained, their greatest commercial success, but I loved it then and I love it now. Peter Murphy brings a growling, sleazy sneer that is completely successful.



Digital Underground - Humpty Dance

He likes his oatmeal lumpy.



Massive Attack - Teardrop

Amazing work by Gondry. Transcendent song.

Many more videos and commentary here: Ladies and Gentleman, The MTV Music Video Archive

Tracie Egan has assembled the mindboggling: "10 CASTRATION SCENES FROM HORROR MOVIES." Probably, you don't want to click on that NSFW link if you have a penis, but since I don't, I found the whole, incredibly graphic lineup to be pretty fascinating, especially the one with the dog. I guess this is the part where I should say something more, but what do you say after that thing with the Rottweiler? Not much, really.

(Image from "Ilsa, She Woolf of the SS.")

Duke University's Jennifer Jenkins sez,

Duke University Press has just released an expanded edition of “Bound By Law”, the comic book by three law profs about copyright, fair use, and documentary film. It includes a wonderful new Introduction by BoingBoing’s own Cory Doctorow and Foreword by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, and is freely available under a Creative Commons license.

From Cory’s Introduction: "This is a sensible book about a ridiculous subject. It’s an example of the principle it illustrates: that taking from the culture around us to make new things is what culture is all about, it's what culture is for. Culture is that which we use to communicate.

"The comic form makes this issue into something less abstract, more concrete, and the Duke Public Domain folks who produced this have not just written a treatise on copyright, they’ve produced a loving tribute to the form of comics.

"It’s a book whose time has come. Read it, share it. Get angry. Do something. Document your world."

Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, New Expanded Edition, Buy on Amazon

* Downloads: High-rez, Low-rez (Thanks, Jennifer!)

See also:
* Copyright comic is now on sale - "Understanding Comics" for copyright
* Comic book brilliantly explains copyright for documentary filmmakers

Robbo sez,

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

The film’s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.

RiP: A remix manifesto (Thanks, Robbo!)

Ridley Scott has acquired the film-rights to Joe Haldeman's magnificent, Hugo-award-winning classic science fiction novel, The Forever War. This is one of the great anti-war novels of all time. As I wrote about it in 2003, "I picked up a copy of Joe Haldeman's classic novel The Forever War last night as a gift for a friend, but I'm going to keep it. I got to re-reading it last night (for the first time in nearly 20 years) and couldn't put it down. Haldeman wrote this novel after returning from his tour of duty in Vietnam, and the book made the rounds, getting turned down by publisher after publisher, by editors who recognized the book's merit but questioned the political savvy of publishing a war-novel. Eventually, Joe rewrote one section of the book, softening it, and finally, the book saw print, becoming an instant classic. The new, author's preferred edition restores the original text, and is absolutely timely and engrossing."

Fox 2000 has acquired rights to Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel "The Forever War," and Ridley Scott is planning to make it into his first science fiction film since he delivered back-to-back classics with "Blade Runner" and "Alien."

Scott intended to follow those films with "The Forever War," but rights complications delayed his plans for more than two decades.

The film will be produced by Scott Free. Vince Gerardis and Ralph Vicinanza will exec produce. Their company, Created By, reps Haldeman and spent the last decade trying to get back the rights.

"I first pursued ‘Forever War’ 25 years ago, and the book has only grown more timely and relevant since," Scott told Daily Variety. "It’s a science-fiction epic, a bit of ‘The Odyssey’ by way of ‘Blade Runner,’ built upon a brilliant, disorienting premise."

Ridley Scott takes on 'Forever War', The Forever War on Amazon (Thanks, Mitch!)

Today on Boing Boing tv: Toots and the Maytals are true reggae legends (more: Wikipedia, MySpace). Founder Toots Hibbert is credited with coining the word "reggae" in the band's 1968 single, "Do the Raggay." They've had more number one hit songs in Jamaica than any recording artist ever, and received a Grammy for Best Reggae Album of the Year in 2005.

He was a contemporary of Bob Marley and Jimmy Cliff, and was featured in Director-producer Perry Henzel's all-Jamaican-made 1973 movie classic The Harder They Come (Amazon link).

I joined BBtv's London-based music correspondent Russell Porter for a visit on the venerable Mister Toots' tour bus after an amazing set at Outside Lands, and we sat down with him for a conversation about the history of reggae, and what Toots thinks about contemporary hip-hop and dancehall -- and where his legacy leads. The generous vanity intro he did for BBtv is a thing of beauty, we can all die happy now.

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Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with downloadable video and daily podcast subscription instructions.

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Sponsor Note: This episode, and other BBtv music features this month, are sponsored by the Crowdfire live music social media project. You can find images, video, and audio about the band featured in today's show at Crowdfire -- here's the search link for fan-uploads related to Toots and the Maytals.

Related Boing Boing tv episodes from Outside Lands:
* Broken Social Scene: interview and live performance (music)
* Galactic's "Modern New Orleans Funk" with Xeni and Russell (music)
* Interview with Cold War Kids frontman Nathan Willett (music)
* Andy Gould, rock band manager, dances on the labels' graves.
* Primus: Xeni interviews Les and Ler (music)
* Kaki King, guitar hero: performance, interview with Xeni (music)
* BB Gadgets' Joel at Outside Lands: Crowdfire deconstructed
* Carney at Outside Lands - a "Boing Boing tv Bus Session." (music)
* Steel Pulse founder David Hinds at Outside Lands (music)
* Boing Boing tv backstage at Outside Lands: (Xeni + Russell Porter)

(Special thanks to Wayneco for the magic bus, to Michael Cacia, and to Virgin America for air travel.)

For Love of Water, the amazing documentary about water-rights and bottled water companies, is opening tonight in DC and up and down California. Here's some of my review from last April:

Global water profiteering is at the center of a global healthcare crisis that kills more people than AIDS or malaria. The film shows the grim reality of water in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and the USA. The mortality is awful, and not just from bad water or no water -- also from police forces in states like Bolivia who go to war against people whose water supply has been sold to foreign multinationals who are reaping windfall profits while they die.

In the US and Europe, the bottled water industry pulls in billions to sell products that are more contaminated and toxic than what comes out of the tap. The result is a gigantic mountain of empty plastic bottles that toxify the environment -- and three times more money spent on bottled water than it would take to solve the world's real water crisis. The companies like Nestle that pump out our aquifers use private investigators to harass people who sign petitions to stop them from pumping.

But it's not all doom and gloom -- low-cost, sustainable purification technologies like ultraviolet water-health run by village cooperatives can make dramatic development differences for the poorest, most vulnerable people in the world, who are able to maintain their own systems without foreign involvement. Local activists all over the world and fighting back and winning public, non-profit ownership of their waterworks.

Flow See also: For Love of Water: infuriating and incredible documentary about world's water-crisis

Here's a fantastically horrible 1946 Disney film about menstruation, "The Story of Menstruation." Your period, according to Disney

Katie sez, "After being told by the MPAA that the poster for his new movie, 'Zach and Miri Make a Porno' was too obscene, Kevin Smith came back with a hilarious hand-drawn version." MPAA causes ‘Zack and Miri’ Poster to become BETTER (Thanks, Katie!)

Steve sez,

This is really lovely... just bumped into it while looking for Dr Who clips on youtube with my recently-Dr-Who-obsessed-6-yr-old son who is filling in the essential history/backstory of the doctor!

Homebrew movie (6:43) a family made while on holiday.
- Gets the tone just right.
- Re-uses themes/scenes from the recent end of series 2-parter with Davros/Daleks/many-companions.
- Wonderful low-fi special-FX (flying daleks, sound FX, EXPLOSIONS!)
- watch for the credits at the end.

Fave part: 3 yr old Davros wearing a "Mr Happy" t-shirt!

Dalek Invaders 2008ad (Thanks, Steve!)

The 1982 cyberpunk cinema classic Blade Runner remains one of the most influential science fiction movies of all time, and tops many a nerd's favorite films list.

Today on Boing Boing tv, Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson visits the studio of artist and futurist Syd Mead, who designed the film's dystopian look and feel. We learn about the "erotic machine" he dreamed for the replicant Zhora (this breast-shaped dreampod was cut from the script when director Ridley Scott ran out of dough), the 1 2 3 *4* alternate opening scenes designed by Syd (one of them, which involved shoveling dead bodies, was deemed "too Holocaust"), what really lights up those building facades, and many more secrets.

Syd explains he envisioned the world of Blade Runner as a place "you wouldn't want to be for too long," and describes the challenges of designing for "a love story with moralistic underpinnings... if we could actually make people, would we treat them like dishwashers? Just use them up and throw them away?"

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Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and how to subscribe to the BBtv video podcast.

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If you like this BBtv episode, you might want to pick up:

BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT [Amazon]

VISUAL FUTURIST: The Art & Life of Syd Mead DVD [sydmead.com]

And more Syd Mead books on Amazon.

Previous episodes in BBtv's Syd Mead trilogy:

Joel Johnson interviews Syd Mead: part 1.

Joel Johnson interviews Syd Mead: part 2.

(Footage from the movie Blade Runner courtesy Warner Bros. Entertainment / Warner Home Video; Artwork courtesy of Syd Mead Inc.)