Radical Russ may be a bit strong for some people’s taste but he’s dead on accurate about the cognitive dissonance taking place right now:

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that software companies can be held liable for copyright infringement when individuals use their technology to download songs and movies illegally.

Wait for it…

“The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “We look at it from a standpoint of stopping lawsuit abuse.”

We’d normally make some sort of snarky comment but our heads just exploded from the double-speak.

<smal>Translation: we’re leaving the office to buy guns! Lots of guns!</small>

Wired recently published an article about all the new “internet” tv content that is needed:

But here’s the rub. There’s very little quality short-form video available. Outside of the music industry, movie studios and cable channels aren’t in the habit of producing short videos, so there isn’t much inventory. What’s more, creating short formats popular on the internet isn’t a talent many professional TV and film producers have developed, since it’s enormously difficult to tell a story in three minutes.

“Established media outlets have too much money invested in existing content so they are unable to pioneer new formats,” said Andrew Blau, a strategist with the Global Business Network, a think tank based in Berkeley, California. “The most exciting (content) innovation is produced by people, usually with few financial resources, who have everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

Once again, the silicon valley crowd has missed the boat. “...creating short formats popular on the internet isn’t a talent many professional TV and film producers have developed, since it’s enormously difficult to tell a story in three minutes.” Oh, I’m sorry, did you forget about the commercials that hollywood makes? If anyone knows how to tell a story in 30 seconds, then hollywood certainly knows how. The entire TV industry thrives on these 30 second segments.

I know the narrative they want to sell: “hollywood concentrates on 2 hour features, these are dinosaur movies. In the future we will only watch blipverts!”

Unfortunately, no matter how technology improves, the storytelling will always remain the same. Stupid humans with their stupid biological brains, when will they learn?

Another week, another celebrity sex-tape scandal.

LOS ANGELES, California (AP)—Actor Colin Farrell is suing a woman for allegedly trying to distribute and profit from a sex tape he says the two recorded with the agreement it would never be made public.

Don’t bother reading the CNN article. Why? Because they say nothing about the woman. No picture, no description. Why should we bother wasting our time downloading this off the internet if we don’t even know how hot she is?

There should be a new rule instituted: If you are a celebrity and you decide to record yourself having sex you are absolutely going to see it end up on the Internet. BBB staff would like to point out that this is not necessarily a bad career move (but you have to pretend that you are trying to stop the distribution of the tape as if that were possible).

NEW YORK (Reuters) - CBS News on Tuesday unveiled plans to enlarge its online presence with a 24-hour broadband Internet service providing video clips that consumers can assemble into their own individually tailored newscasts.

If reading that opening paragraph doesn’t make you roll your eyes may we share with you a different article with the latest on Al “Inventor of the Internet” Gore’s non-success?

Al Gore promises that Current TV will be as interactive and democratic as the Internet. But already his restless young audience is wondering whether the network will be another rerun.

What is wrong with you people? The internet is killing TV, because it is not TV. Remember when TV came to households across the U.S. in the late ‘40s? Yeah, Film attendance has never reached the same proportions since 1949. TV changed film forever because (*gasp*) it is not film. We would go on to mention radio and the telegraph but we know you are probably starting to notice a pattern.

TV is an expensive, one-way medium and we live in a weird historical bubble in which mass-media that is one way dominates the landscape. Prior to the 19th century it was pretty much everyone talking amongst themselves (a note to our marketing/pr readers: they didn’t use the word “interactive” back then because there was no such thing as non-interactive).

We just got out of our time machine and can say definitively that no one-way mediums are big in the future so please, Al Gore and CBS, stop wasting your time on TV.

Don’t make us bitchslap you from the future again.

<big>TV is dead. Long live TV.</big>

Reuters nervously twitches its hands as it laments that 90% of DVR owners skip past ads:

TV advertisers are facing a potential disaster as more consumers buy digital video recorders (DVRs), according to a new study, since about 90 percent of current users fast-forward through ads.

Tell us something we don’t know. It is obvious to us here at BBB that soon product placement will dominate all motion graphic media while we sit back and enjoy a can of classic Coca Cola(TM).

Stop whatever you are doing and watch this clip now:

Video - WMV

Video - QT

Through the magic of the Internet this will be seen by millions more than were watching CSPAN at the time. Imagine if this were available on a service like google video…

Read more about it with a transcript here.

As usual, Wonkette has the best truth-in-humor judgement:

Yup, that video of the WH press corps pelting Scott McClellan with repeated questions about the Plame investigation sure is funny. Funny if you like watching puppies get beaten.

The St. Petersburg Times has a hilariously written article that equates someone using your open access point to being a hacker. In short some guy saw a man “furtively” using his WiFi connection and called police.

Police say Benjamin Smith III, 41, used his Acer brand laptop to hack into Dinon’s wireless Internet network. The April 20 arrest is considered the first of its kind in Tampa Bay and among only a few so far nationwide.

“It’s so new statistics are not kept,” said Special Agent Bob Breeden, head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s computer crime division.

But experts believe there are scores of incidents occurring undetected, sometimes to frightening effect. People have used the cloak of wireless to traffic in child pornography, steal credit card information and send death threats, according to authorities.

For as worrisome as it seems, wireless mooching is easily preventable by turning on encryption or requiring passwords. The problem, security experts say, is many people do not take the time or are unsure how to secure their wireless access from intruders. Dinon knew what to do. “But I never did it because my neighbors are older.”

In any large city you can turn on your laptop and find half a dozen freely available hotspots at any given time and I can also reasonably assume that you are not instantly trading in kiddie porn, stolen credit cards or plotting the destruction of Western civilization. Wireless is everywhere and we constantly use it.

This man knowingly left his access point open and calls police when someone is using it? Between all of us here at BBB, we’d have gotten the death sentence by now for all that “free” wireless we’ve “hacked” into by just turning on our laptop.

“Honestly your honor, my powerbook connects to the first wireless network it sees automatically.”

“Likely story young man,” the judge said just before he threw away the key.

Today is Public Service Announcement* day at BBB. We’d like to explain to those of you who make tech gadgets that there are people out there who will - *gasp* - modify your product after they purchase it. Yes, putting little software locks and disabling features isn’t going to stop them. There are millions of people out there that are smarter than those cut-rate engineers you hired in some godforsaken south-east Asian country.

Sony Computer Entertainment America said in an e-mailed statement that hacking or the operation of “homebrew” software programs may damage the PSP, and void the warranty.

The PSP boasts a high-resolution viewing screen and has been in the sights of technology enthusiasts and software programmers, who want to use it to run copies of everything from games and music to e-books to movies.

No one is convinced that running software on their PSP is going to make it catch on fire. Sony, people are going to hack your pretty little toy and you should just get used to it. You don’t want to get into an arms race with these people. We all know where this inevitably leads. It gets really ugly: they hack past your protection, you issue another update patch and pretty soon you’ll find yourself stumbling out of some crackwhore’s bed at 4am wondering what that strange rash on your software department is.

Please Sony, THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

*<small>This is not actually a PSA but we’re hoping no one reads the fine print.</small>

This cute little (no pun intended) article over at Wired asks whether new small DVD formats like Sony’s UMD for the PSP and Warner Bros. “Mini-DVD” will generate any consumer interest. The article list some intersting info:

However, UMD seems to have clearly upstaged Warner Home Video’s Mini-DVD format with a 2.5-inch screen, which was introduced in the 2004 holiday season.

Warner is the only studio to have committed titles to the Mini-DVD format, which will play on standard DVD players as well as handheld players created for the 3-inch DVD discs (UMDs will only play on PSP units). It’s also the only movie studio that hasn’t announced titles for PSP.

You’d think that studios would be tired of the format wars but they are constantly finding new ground to battle over.