Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

When Hello Magazine posted the following cover on their website earlier this morning, they must have known that they were undercutting an exclusive licensing deal with People magazine:

This image is hotlinked, and not hosted on this site

Hotly sought photographs of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s new baby daughter, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, were sold at a charity auction, according to the Guardian:

“While we celebrate the joy of the birth of our daughter, we recognise that 2 million babies born every year in the developing world die on the first day of their lives,” the couple said in a joint statement. “These children can be saved, but only if governments around the world make it a priority.”

According to SMH, an Australian newspaper, People magazine paid a fortune for the baby pix:

People’s spokeswoman declined comment on a New York Post report that the magazine had outbid its North American rivals by agreeing to pay $5.5 million for rights to the pictures, making it one of the biggest such purchases ever.

Why risk the legal action? Hello Magazine certainly won’t benefit from costing People magazine a $5 million exclusive. Now that the photos are out, though, it’s fair to say they’re public domain. Even China Daily is running a large copy of them. Now, why are celebrity photos so hot?

Update:

The China Daily page now reads “很抱歉，你查看的页面不存在” which is a generic 404 message. Oddly, you can still find the actual picture hosted on their website.

You can also find the photo on a dozen other websites within 5 minutes of searching for “Shiloh” on Google blogsearch:

• Gawker
• Azad Slide
• On Life As I Know It
• Adrikaana
• China Daily
• Sparkly Happy
• Defamer
• Pandeblog
• Igin Online
• Glitzblog
• Bank Locater
• Belch

The photo I have here is not even hosted on this site, because it exists in thousands of other places. I’m personally not interested in dealing with legal action, so I’ve hotlinked it to some copy of the photo somewhere.

Jim Emerson, critic of film, writes that his list of movies forms a basic curriculum of film:

They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.” I remember I tried to represent key examples of all important genres, movie stars, directors, historical movements, and so on — like an overview of the 20th century in 101 movies.

As if that wasn’t snooty enough, eh? Well, here’s the list, which thanks to Jason Kottke is turning into a meme. I’ve bolded the movies I’ve seen:

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2″ (1963) Federico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
“Alien” (1979) Ridley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“Annie Hall” (1977) Woody Allen
“Apocalypse Now” (1979) Francis Ford Coppola
“Bambi” (1942) Disney
“The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“Blade Runner” (1982) Ridley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
“Blue Velvet” (1986) David Lynch
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
“Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“Casablanca” (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
“The Day the Earth Stood Still” (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989 Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
“Dr. Strangelove” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“Duck Soup” (1933) Leo McCarey
“E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“The Empire Strikes Back” (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“Fargo” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“Fight Club” (1999) David Fincher
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
“The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
“Gone With the Wind” (1939) Victor Fleming
“GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
“The Graduate” (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
“Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
“It’s a Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) Frank Capra
“Jaws” (1975) Steven Spielberg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“Mad Max 2″ / “The Road Warrior” (1981) George Miller
“The Maltese Falcon” (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“Modern Times” (1936) Charles Chaplin
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
“On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“Pulp Fiction” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
“The Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
“Schindler’s List” (1993) Steven Spielberg
“The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
“The Seven Samurai” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“Some Like It Hot” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
“Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” (1948) John Huston
“Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“West Side Story” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“The Wild Bunch” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“The Wizard of Oz” (1939) Victor Fleming

I have to question the authority of a list like this, however. Covering movies from 1916 to 1999 ignores the last 7 years of film, which have included such classics as LOTR, City of God, Memento, Sin City, and even Kill Bill. Also, it seems like Jim Emerson is trying to hard for statistical relevance by choosing so many older movies. Statistically, to be fair, he should choose movies with an average production date of 1958; his ends up being 1959, as if for each movie in the 70s he picked one in the 40s.

The web is abuzz about the Tammy NYP Sex Tape. Searches for “Tammy,” “Tammy Download,” and “NYP” dominate the Technorati top searches right now:

It takes a lot of popular interest for a term to dominate the top searches for the last few days. This sex tape is quite old news, and it’s still popular. Who is Tammy? She is a student at Nan Yang Polytechnic in Singapore, whose cell phone was stolen by rival cheerleaders. The contents, containing sexually explicit images and movies, were uploaded onto the internet.

If you’re curious as to what they look like, here’s a photo of Tammy and her boyfriend, not engaging in any kind of sexual activity:

I don’t know when amateur porn became so exciting–perhaps it’s because it’s raw and uncut from Singapore, where sex is a crime punishable by hard jail time? Who knows. Hopefully the media will let this couple live in peace and forget about it soon enough.