I borrowed a DVD of the 1940 Howard Hawks film His Girl Friday from the Confederation Centre Public Library earlier in the week.

I was curious to find that the library’s version came from a company called “Digiview Productions,” and I was prompted to wonder where this company got the rights to the film (if indeed it did), and what the copyright status of the film is.

Looking Amazon.com reveals 12 versions of a DVD of the movie, from companies like:

• Ventura Distribution
• Marengo Films
• Good Times Home Video
• UAV Corporation
• Westlake Entertainment Group

All of these companies, from the look of their websites, appear to deal exclusively in old movies. It looks like there’s also an “official” version on DVD from Sony Pictures, the corporate ancestor of Columbia Pictures, which produced the film originally (the Sony version of the DVD has a lot of material that the Digiview version doesn’t have, including commentary, trailers, and subtitles; the Digiview version just contains the film itself and promotions for other Digiview products).

A search of the U.S. Copyright Office doesn’t show a copyright registration for the film. The Duration of Copyright page from the Copyright Office appears to say that copyright for works created before 1978 for which copyright hasn’t been renewed lasts for 28 years, which would mean that His Girl Friday had a copyright that expired in 1968.

All of which leads me to think that His Girl Friday is “in the public domain,” something that is also suggested here and here. Which, of course, prompts me to some additional questions:

• Where do the DVD distributors (like the ones above) get the print they use to make the DVD? (it says here that “virtually all DVD editions simply are sourced from previous videotapes” — is that true?)
• If this film, and apparently many others, are in the public domain, is there a public library initiative to make them available on DVD? It would seem to make sense for libraries to do this cooperatively rather than buying DVDs from companies like Digiview; with enough volume if would be both cheaper and afford the possibility of higher quality and enhanced features.
• If the film is in the public domain, can I rip it off the DVD and make it available for download on my website?

I’m also wondering about this notice at the beginning of the DVD:

How can the distributor claim copyright on something they don’t own?

Air Canada ‘upgraded’ their aircanada.com website today, and in doing so they appear to have left Firefox (and Safari) on the Mac behind:

The “Viewing Tips” section of their site says, in part:

aircanada.com is designed to be compatible with most browsers on the Windows platform, but we recommend specific configurations. Many older versions of these browsers do not support the latest Internet technology (such as style sheets, JavaScript, SSL security or frames).

Their “Recommended Macintosh Configuration” is “Macintosh OS 9 or later / Internet Explorer 5.0 and above.”

Has anyone at Air Canada actually ever used Internet Explorer on a Mac?

I am not versed in the difference between the PAL and NTSC video standards, but I was operating under the assumption that to play on a North American television, video had to be in the NTSC format. While this might be true for other applications (videotapes?), it appears that if I have a PAL-format MPEG movie, and I use Toast to burn a VCD of it, I can still watch it on my (cheap, recently purchased, no-name) DVD player. Curious.

Our two-year-old 10GB iPod has died. After refusing to accept a charge for a week, it will now no longer start, and isn’t recognized by my iMac when I connect it by Firewire. Here’s what Apple wants to repair it, out of warranty:

A brand new 20GB iPod (they don’t make the 10GB ones any more) costs $299 $429 (I had originally looked up the U.S. price — sorry for the confusion!).

Ring ring.

“Hello, Indigo.”

“Hi there. How late are you open tonight?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Great, thanks.”

“You gonna drop on in?”

“Sure.”

And I did.

I normally avoid Java applications, mostly because, at least in the early days of Java, such applications tended to be clunky, slow, and easily breakable. A lot has changed, and without speaking directly to the “is Java still evil?” question, I point to Azureus as a very positive example of a non-clunky, non-slow, and, at least so far, non-easily-breakable Java application.

Azureus is much more capable BitTorrent client than the ‘official’ Mac client: it gives you a lot more information about what’s flowing up and what’s flowing down, and it allows you to throttle bandwidth used in both directions.

I’ve been taking it for a ride this afternoon, and so far I’m quite impressed. Thanks to Ben Hammersley for the pointer.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, the song in opening of Closer trailer is a version of The Blower’s Daughter found on the Damien Rice album O. More details here and video of the song here.

The trailer for the new movie Closer is so finely targetted at my demographic it’s painful: I will have no choice but to see the film.

What’s interesting is that the trailer shown in theatres (this one with Damien Rice/Suzanne Vega music) is running in parallel with another one (this one with music by Jem) on television; the TV trailer doesn’t draw me in at all, and is obviously meant for a group of people with completely different tastes. I wonder which group will actually enjoy the movie?

The trailer for Spanglish, on the other hand, appears to try to appeal to all demographics in three minutes and five seconds, running through a dizzying variety of musical genres and takes on the plot in that short space. Having seen it perhaps a dozen times now, I still have no idea what the film is about, or even whether it’s a comedy or a drama. And rather than being left hungry to find out by actually going to see the it, I’ll avoid it, if only due to the risk that the confusing trailer is simply a reflection of a confusing film.

Finally, the trailer for the ABC special Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven is so horrifyingly bad that I’m tempted to actually avoid the living room at our house on Sunday night on the off chance that I might accidentally click over ABC and see part of it. What the hell is that beard that Jeff Daniel’s is wearing?

Back about 25 years ago, I worked part-time at my local Canadian Tire store in Burlington, Ontario. I started off “on the floor,” selling Commodore 64s and autobody fiberglass, and later moved upstairs to work in the comptroller’s office making Lotus 1-2-3, then a novelty, do nifty things with wage and sales analysis.

The owner of that Canadian Tire store was a man named G.W. Line. We called him “Mr. Line.” He was a smart guy, who ran a tight ship. He gave good Christmas bonuses, and was generally well-liked by his employees. And he didn’t shy from coming “out on the floor” to talk to the people who worked for him.

Tonight, looking over a donation solicitation from the QEH Foundation here in Charlottetown, I remembered a story that Mr. Line told me once.

He was on the Board of the Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital Foundation (two of my brothers were born there), and part of this meant going “door to door” to larger businesses to seek donations. Starting out that day, he’d hit a couple of places that he was sure would give generously, only to find himself walking away with small cheques of $100, or $500 — this from businesses doing millions of dollars worth of business each year selling cars or building houses. Towards the end of the day, somewhat dispirited, he dropped by Voortman’s, a cookie maker up the road and across the highway from the store.

He was shown into the Mr. Voortman’s office and he made his sales pitch. Given the day he’d been having, he didn’t expect a lot.

After hearing what he had to say, Mr. Voortman took out his cheque book, made out a cheque for $50,000, and handed it to him. “Obviously the hospital is important to my community: you look after my employees, my customers, and my family. It only makes sense that I contribute.” And that was that.

Needless to say, Mr. Line’s day was made.

When I think about all that my small family has been through at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital here in Charlottetown over the past 10 years — everything from gallbladder surgery to knee surgery to having a baby — it’s hard not to feel like Mr. Voortman. We don’t have $50,000 to donate, of course, but every year we try to make a donation. It only makes sense.

Our regular little Formosa Tea House lunch group shared a table today with Jim Lea, President & Chief Executive Officer of Maritime Electric. We’d been talking a lot about energy lately, and we invited Jim to lunch to help fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge.

One of the interesting things I learned is that Maritime Electric can, without a lot of difficulty, provide information about the current Island-wide demand for electricity at any given time. I call this “the big VU meter,” and we encouraged Jim to look into adding a “live” reading on their website.

Thinking about this more this afternoon, it occured to me that in addition to this, it might make sense to provide the same information in machine-readable form, perhaps as an RSS feed, or in an alternative XML format.

Why?

Because then others could build energy-saving applications built on this information.

If I could always grab the current electricity demand number over the web from Maritime Electric, I could, for example, write an application that would turn my clothes dryer on or off depending on current conditions. Or I could automaticaly turn the air conditioner down in the server room. Or automatically turn off my Christmas lights.

Not everyone is going to do this, and there’s probably more “neato” potential than practical energy savings to be derived, at least right now. But the general principle — a utility freely sharing information, in an open format, using the Internet — has a lot of potential because it moves us from a model where we’re all working in isolation to a model where we’re working as an interdependent, symbiotic system.