"As I've said before, a good sign of a dying industry that investors might want to avoid is when it would rather litigate than innovate, signaling a potential destroyer of value."

That sounds like a good point, but it would be nice if it came supported with a couple good examples of where there were increases in litigation during the waning years of a moribund industry.

A short video of the group here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=O6GdWgTqXv0.

FYI, that's not semacode, that's QR code. Semacode looks like
this.

Just to point out a couple examples of "arguing past one another":

"Judgments should not be derived from isolated incidents, and we shouldn't overuse isolated incidents too sensationally to ply political agendas no matter how important they are to us."

Right, because anyone who objects to this sort of thing is using it as agitprop for their political agendas.

This has nothing to do with objecting to what happened, or with objecting to police brutality in general. This has to do with two things: (1) inferring the widespreadness of police brutality from this incident and (2) using this incident as an emotional appeal to convince others of the widespreadness of police brutality as a serious problem.

I suspect that police brutality is too widespread, but in the scheme of that argument this video is only a small piece of evidence.

. . .

To the poster above who smells bias in the negative reactions: do you really want to live in a world where people's first reaction to the death of another person is positive? The man was alone, and unarmed. He was throwing a tantrum, but was he acting like he was going to kill people? It takes an interesting worldview to see a tantrum as a capital offense.

? Who's arguing that we should have a world where people's first reaction to the death of another person is positive? Who's arguing that a tantrum is a capital offense? What exactly is your point?

Again I am all for making sure people get what they deserve, but its funny to see people so blindly side with the WGA as if they have been working for cookies up until this point.

It is kind of funny, but it's also understandable. Most of us don't know the WGA at all, so we give them the benefit of the doubt. We do, however, know enough about the people they're up against to not give them the benefit of the doubt.

That said, I would welcome some reasoned discussion on the actual terms of the contract proposals under dispute, but I haven't seen that anywhere (and certainly not here).

While I stand by my point about this being an isolated incident and sensationalism being a very serious problem, I won't go so far as @Garrett. I do think that the release of this video, while bound to bring out the worst in sensationalism, is important. Information like this should generally be made available for public consumption unless there's a very good reason not to, which I don't see in this case. Transparency should be the default mode of operations.

At a very minimum it gives us an opportunity to compare what we read about to the event as captured on camera, which gives us some insight into our journalists and the 'official stories' of these kind of events. It also gives us some insight into the event itself, and if that's not worth having, then why report the event at all?

@NONESUCH

It looks to me like he's just hitting his baton against the ground to collapse it.

I think a lot of people are grasping at straws here to determine the larger reason for this man's death, but it does look like a pretty serious case of overreaction. As one person said, it almost looks like a training video on what not to do when handling a situation like this, and I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up being used as such.

In the end, though, this is an isolated incident that people are drawing all sorts of conclusions from. It's easy to become emotionally charged when watching a video of the event, but we shouldn't let that cloud are judgment or cause us to be overly swayed in our priorities and our determinations of what needs to be fixed. After all, that would be overreacting politically, and that in my mind is an even greater problem than police overreacting with tasers. It's just too easy to react viscerally to a graphic representation of something and see it as symptomatic of the severity of a greater problem.

Judgments should not be derived from isolated incidents, and we shouldn't overuse isolated incidents too sensationally to ply political agendas no matter how important they are to us. This is why we as a public are always tempted to bring back the death penalty when someone commits an unimaginably horrid crime, and tempted to abolish it when someone is executed that shouldn't have been.

I love how much the media companies use the creators to justify their stance and behavior towards piracy and at the same time resist so strongly any attempts by the creators to expand their share of the monetary value of the content. They are in a tough spot trying to defend their large portion of the revenue for what is a decreasingly important role in the distribution of content, and I think at this point they are using whatever tactics possible to slow down the inevitable.

Or to put it another way: if these creators don't get any share of the revenue from Internet and DVD, why should I respect the corporations' right to earn revenue from me?

Man, I can only imagine what goes through that mother's heart when she sees that video. Poor woman.

@SCOUTMASTER

Books are not interactive - you can only learn what they tell you; laptops on the other hand require figuring out, and that is it's principal educational value in this case.

Good teachers are more important than laptops, but they are in short supply, expensive, and getting them to children and providing them with adequate materials is no small task. In any case, this won't stop people from trying to improve education in traditional ways, and in terms of expense it's a comparatively minor effort.

Thankfully they have managed to put forth their vision without the rather over-the-top and unnecessary judgements of the Dogme 95 manifesto. Instead, it simply presents an idea of what video blogging could be.

These artificial limits on the techniques available isn't just a way to create unlikely art or an exercise for the artist, it's also (1) a way to filter and collect videos with a very different goal from what one normally sees around the Internet, (2) a way to focus videobloggers' energies into a sort of "submedium" so that they can build upon each others efforts to develop that "submedium" into something that wouldn't otherwise exist, and (3) an exercise for the audience.

Rather than being a revolution in self-promotion, I see this as an inevitable and slightly overdue development in the new medium of short, low-rez, Internet video. I expect we'll see more of these over time, along with things like one-minute-of-your-life-each-day contests. Each of these, which will likely range from the banal to the über-pretentious, will push the evolution of the medium a little. This to me seems less a revolution and more a logical first step.

I've never cared much for the video-blogging side of YouTube, but I've always sensed that it represented something that will evolve into something that I will one day care about.

The oldest reference to the problem I can find online is here:

http://lilsabub.livejournal.com/46814.html

I'm not sure if the problem has really been around for 18 months and has just taken this long to explode, or if it's been on and off. In any case, the bulk of blog complaints seem to be within the last month.