Retro Yakking

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of plasticine stop motion stars Wallace and Gromit, an event brought to my attention by today’s Google doodle (pictured above).

In celebration, Aardman have posted a twenty-minute feature with animator Nick Park at the W&G Official site. In it, the Academy Award-winning creator is asked twenty specially selected questions posed to him by members of the fan club. Or at least, the website.

In fact, I think I’ll be so generous as to just leave it here for you so you don’t have to go to all that hassle of clicking around. How rather thoughtful of us, eh? Video is on the other side of the break, though thankfully not a commercial one.

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Copyright dodgers and advocates of free content media were left cowering under their beds today as news that a Wikimedia Commons user was threatened with legal action over the use of copyrighted images.

The user in question, DCoetzee, uploaded over a hundred images from the National Portrait Gallery, London over the past year. The images were tagged as ‘Public Domain’ works because the creator of the paintings has been dead for more than one hundred years.

The essential problem, though, is the difference between interpretations of the law in the UK and the US. Mr. Coetzee is a US citizen, but because the NPG is based in Great Britain, the legal proceedings would be brought against him in a UK court of law. There is no real precedent of cases of this kind on our side of the pond, though.

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