MPAA - SFist - San Francisco News, Restaurants, Events, & Sports

Mystery Shelters Soon to be Glimpsed

Matt Baume — Mon, 07 May 2007 13:09:51 GMT

Muni's giving us the chance of a lifetime: come see the proposed new transit shelter designs! Y'see, we're going to be getting a revamp of our familiar domed-roof shelters, and Muni's in the process of deciding how exactly the shelters of the future should look. They've got a couple designs picked out -- but no peeking! Like the MPAA jealously guards its movies from cyber-pirates, Muni has declined to make pictures of the designs available online.

So you're going to have to journey downtown in person to sneak a peek. Here's the location and viewing hours:

City Hall, 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place
* Van Ness Lobby Thursday, May 10, 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.
* South Light Court Friday, May 11, 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Elusive devils, these proposed designs. Catch 'em while you can!

Lung Cancer!

Matt Baume — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:10:36 GMT

We meet that idea with skepticism; it is with vivid detail that we recall the extensive anti-smoking education of our youth, and our impression of smokers (both juvenile and adult) is that they've always been plenty aware of the disadvantages and simply don't care. Until your teeth start bronzing and the doctors have to perforate your throat, it's an awfully appealing nervous habit for those of us who simply must be orally fixated throughout the day.

But we're not a fraction as smart as the folks at UCSF, so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Currently, an R-rating for tobacco is being stalled by the MPAA, an advocacy group for the six major studios that's awfully good at manipulating opinion. The UCSF group, on the other hand, could stand to take a few lessons from the Made to Stick guys, as their website is just about the least compelling thing we've ever seen. In fact, we weren't even going to post about it, because there's no easy way to sum things up -- but we just couldn't resist a table that equates Disney with tens of thousands of deaths.

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To: Trouble in Paradise at the Pacific Film Archive

jake — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 11:00:14 GMT

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.
2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

The "General Principles" of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, Inc.

In 1930, the MPPDA authored the Production Code (better known as the Hays Code, for MPPDA President Will Hays), which famously put married couples in separate beds and feet on the floor during (not-) sex scenes, and required David O. Selznick to request special dispensation and pay a fine for the AFI's #1 movie line, ever. In 1934, following a nasty "won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-children" letter and boycott threat from the Catholic League of Decency, Hollywood studios actually started adhering to the Hays Code. That continued until 1968, when the MPAA Ratings we have now replaced the Hays Code.

Let's Go Out To The Court-Room...

jackson — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 11:44:13 GMT

Spring is in the air -- can you smell it? It's that intoxicating mix of grass, red clay, pine tar and chaw. That's right -- pitchers and catchers report in just a few hours, and no, we're not talking about a party in Key West.

Of course, one of the joys of baseball for the rabid fan is signing up with your friends for a fantasy baseball league. Right now, people are poring over rosters, scouting reports, fantasy stat publications and the like. Disciples of Bill James, AKA the "SABERmetricians," are plugging college and minor league numbers into their PECOTA prediction engines like they were Billy Beane. If all the statistical analysis going into baseball was going into social security policy, we probably wouldn't be staring down the barrel of a plan to privatize it a la Chile. Major League Baseball opened the doors to their vault of stats just today!

But a little problem has come up. Seems Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the web-arm of MLB's licensing juggernaut, has claimed that the player names on the team rosters are intellectual property that they, alone, have the right to license. And they've sold that license to CBS Sportsline, ESPN.com and Yahoo and a few others. Dozens of other fantasy league engines are being told to limit their enrollment to 5,000 users, forward their users to one of the affiliated services for a 10% royalty, or face legal action.

MLBAM admits that the actual statistics are part of the public domain, and that the players names are theirs to license because of the marketing agreement with the Major League Baseball Player's Association. And it's not like they're taking a "subpoena first, ask questions later" approach like the MPAA and RIAA. Still, all the controversy makes us want to go out and buy the latest Strat-o-Matic.

TiVo-Lution

jackson — Wed, 04 Aug 2004 15:16:27 GMT

Three thumbs up! Alviso based TiVo has gotten approval to allow subscribers to email recorded shows. Various entities in the television industry objected, as usual - you know, blah blah blah, proprietary rights, blah blah blah, piracy hurts everyone, blah blah, corporate profits down, etc. The FCC, though, found there were enough privacy protections already encoded in TiVo programming that it was unlikely that anyone would be able to, say, mass-mail copies of Amish in the City in violation of the UPN's copyrights.

Like the Motion Picture Association keeps telling us in the commercials before the movies previews, piracy really does hurt everyone, and SFist, who's in the copyrightable business itself, finds intellectual property theft intolerable. But it seems right for the FCC to find that, say, emailing encoded clips from the Daily Show to your own computer, or to your other political junkie friends is less like running off with the master tapes of the latest U2 album than, say, making a mix tape off the radio, or linking to things in a blog...? Well, the NFL has pledged to sue, so we'll find out either way.

With great power comes great responsibility: SFist solemnly pledges to use its TiVo email capabilities only to promote high-quality entertainment, like sending video clips of Randall Simon's attack on a defenseless sausage in Milwaukee from last year.

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Ed. Note: SFist got quite the chuckle from former MPAA President Jack Valenti's doomsday predictions of yore.