Some of the big websites are going black today to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, that has been winding its way through Congress. We’re going to handle things in our own way — by illuminating the matter with a little intelligent media.

Backed by the Motion Picture Association of America, SOPA is designed to debilitate and effectively shut down foreign-based websites that sell pirated movies, music and other goods. That all sounds fine on the face of things. But the legislation, if enacted, would carry with it a series of unexpected consequences that could change the internet as we know it. Among other things, the law could be used to shut down American sites that unwittingly host or link to illegal content — and without giving the sites due process, a real day in court. Big sites like YouTube and Twitter could fall under pressure, and so could countless small sites. Needless to say, that could have a serious chilling effect on the openness of the web and free speech.

To give a quick example: It could conceivably be the case that Stanford might object to my featuring their video above, file a claim, and shut the site down without giving me notice and an opportunity to remove the material (as exists under current law). It’s not likely. But it is possible, and the risk increases with every post we write. If this law passes, the amount of material we could truly safely cover would become ludicrously small, so much so that it wouldn’t be worth running the site and using the web as an educational medium.

The Obama administration has come out against SOPA and PIPA, sidelining the legislation for now. But you can almost guarantee that revisions will be made, and the bills will return soon. So, while other sites go black, we’re going to do what we do best. We’re featuring video of an event held in December by the Stanford Center for Internet and Society (SCIS). What’s Wrong with SOPA brings together a series of informed opponents to SOPA, including Stanford law professors and business leaders within Silicon Valley. (Find their bios below the jump.) Some of the most incisive comments are made by Fred von Lohmann, a Google lawyer, starting at the 19:10 mark.

Note: If you’re looking to understand the debate from the perspective of copyright holders, then we’d recommend you spend time watching, Follow the Money: Who Profits from Piracy?, a video that tracks the theft of one movie, making it a microcosm of a larger problem.

What is Wrong with SOPA? is a post from: Open Culture

Eve Arnold, one of the pioneering women of photojournalism, died Wednesday at the age of 99.

Widely known for her photographs of Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities, Arnold just as often photographed the poor and the unknown. “I don’t see anybody as either ordinary or extraordinary,” she told the BBC in 1990. “I see them simply as people in front of my lens.”

Born Eve Cohen in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, she was one of nine children of Ukrainian immigrant parents. When she was 28 years old she gave up plans to become a doctor after a boyfriend gave her a camera. She studied photography for a brief time under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research before going out on her own and finding her style.

“I didn’t work in a studio, I didn’t light anything,” Arnold would later say. “I found a way of working which pleased me because I didn’t have to frighten people with heavy equipment. It was that little black box and me.”

A series of photographs Arnold took of fashion shows in Harlem attracted the attention of Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the founders of Magnum Photos, and she was invited to contribute to the agency. In 1957 Arnold became the first woman photographer to join Magnum as a full member. She worked often for Life and later, after moving to England in 1961, for The Sunday Times Magazine, traveling to places like Afghanistan, South Africa, Mongolia and Cuba while always maintaining a personal point of view. In her 1976 book, The Unretouched Woman, Arnold wrote:

Themes recur again and again in my work. I have been poor and I wanted to document poverty; I had lost a child and I was obsessed with birth; I was interested in politics and I wanted to know how it affected our lives; I am a woman and I wanted to know about women.

Arnold published 15 books in her lifetime, including the National Book Award-winning In China. In 2003 she was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elisabeth II, whom she had once photographed. In the 2007 book Magnum Magnum, photographer Elliott Erwitt summed things up:

Eve Arnold’s legacy is as varied as it is fascinating. It is hard to fathom how one person’s work can be so diverse. I covers the humblest to the most exalted, the meanest to the kindest, and everything in between. The subjects are all there in Eve Arnold’s photographs and they are treated with intelligence, consideration and sympathy. Most important is Eve’s ability to visually communicate her concerns directly, without fanfare or pretense, in the best humanistic tradition.

Eve Arnold on the set of Beckett, 1963, by Robert Penn.                                       (© Copyright Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos)

Remembering Eve Arnold, Pioneering Photojournalist is a post from: Open Culture

One last Steve Jobs’ remembrance seems completely fitting for our site. You’re probably familiar with Apple’s famous “Think Different” advertising campaign from the late 1990s, and particularly the legendary TV commercial that featured 17 iconic figures: Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Branson, John Lennon, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Muhammad Ali, Ted Turner, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Alfred Hitchcock, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso.

Most of these “crazy ones, misfits, rebels and rule breakers” have been featured on Open Culture throughout the years (click the links above), and what make this ad special is that Steve Jobs narrates it himself. The original TV ad — the one that made it on air — had Richard Dreyfuss doing the voiceover…

Find more Crazy Ones in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons.

Steve Jobs Narrates the First “Think Different” Ad (Never Aired) is a post from: Open Culture

And then from across the very big pond, we have Australian cartoonist Peter Nicholson offering another creative take on Mr. Jobs’ meeting with St. Peter. Find original here, and thanks Geoff for sending…

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Steve Jobs at Heaven’s Gate: The New Yorker Cover is a post from: Open Culture

Well, that was the old-fashioned way. We’ve all heard how the internet has leveled the playing field, allowing anybody to publish work and find an audience. However, this easier path to publication hasn’t necessarily solved an even older writer’s conundrum: How to pay for it.

That is, how to make enough money to sustain yourself as you write (day jobs aside). And so writers must become even wilier. Though you may make money from the sale of a book, how do you fund yourself before the book?

Seth Harwood, the author of three books, is at the front of the movement to find alternate and creative ways of not only reaching audiences, but pursuing the writing life. Since graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 2002, Harwood has built up a loyal fan base—his “Palms Mamas and Palms Daddies” (named for one of his protagonists, Jack Palms)—through social media and free podcasting. Harwood is sustaining a writing life along a path that is likely to be more and more common for writers.

After offering his first novel, Jack Wakes Up, as a free audiobook, Harwood published it in paperback with Breakneck Books in 2008. The Amazon sales, pushed by Palms Mamas and Palms Daddies, landed the book in #1 in Crime/Mystery and #45 overall, bringing the attention of Random House, who re-published the book one year later.

Looking outside mainstream avenues, Harwood secured funding for publication of his next venture, Young Junius, with Tyrus Books by preselling signed copies through Paypal—before the books existed in physical form. And now he is one of the early adopters of using Kickstarter to pay for the gestation and birth of not one book—but five previously-written works in the next six months–as he puts it, “raising the fixed costs of bringing these books to the marketplace.” His Kickstarter campaign based around This Is Life, the sequel to Jack Wakes Up was—impressively—fully funded within 25 hours—and with a few days still left to go, it has exceeded the original goal by over $2000.

What can a writer offer besides an autographed copy of the to-be-written book, or a mention in the acknowledgements? For Harwood’s project, the pledges range from a dollar to $999, with thank-yous spanning from the aforementioned to—at the $999 end—an original novella written according to the donor’s wishes and published as a one-off hardcover.

As more and more writers become cynical about the mainstream publishing industry, and the limits it places on writers, and as the internet breaks down barriers between writers and readers, alternate paths of drawing audiences to the writing/publishing process may become more and more popular. In none other than the New York Times Book Review, Neal Pollack recently declared his intention to self-publish his next book using Kickstarter to generate his fixed costs and “an advance,” and last week bestseller Paulo Coelho discussed his decision to offer his novels for free online. (You can find free ebooks by Coelho here.)

Indeed, now more than ever, it seems essential for authors to meet readers at least half-way. Harwood considers himself an “author-preneur,” developing new business models as he publishes his books. As he sees it, innovation comes much more easily to an author acting alone, than to a large publishing company or big corporation. He aims for the new models as he sees them developing, knowing he’s got to go out and find readers himself. As Coelho declares, “The ivory tower does not exist anymore.”

This post was contributed by Shawna Yang Ryan. Her novel Water Ghosts was a finalist for the 2010 Asian American Literary Award. In 2012, she will be the Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.

Kickstarter: the Future of Self-Publishing? is a post from: Open Culture

The first day was all smoke, debris, organized mayhem, and pure disbelief. The next day, reality hit home. That’s when you walked out in the streets (in my case, Brooklyn), and saw your first missing person sign, one of hundreds you’d see over the coming months in Manhattan and the outer boroughs. The numbers you heard on TV, the body count, became real faces — real people.

In October 2003, StoryCorps, a nonprofit dedicated to recording oral histories of every kind, got underway with a small StoryBooth in Grand Central Terminal. Eight years later, it has recorded and archived more than 35,000 interviews from 70,000 participants. And, more recently, it has turned its focus to 9/11 and the days that followed. The goal: to memorialize in sound every person lost on that day. You can visit the emerging audio archive here.

The poignant clip above, which tells the personal story of Richie Pecorella and Karen Juday, appears in a larger series of StoryCorps animated videos, all available here. You can support the StoryCorps project by making a donation, large or small today.

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She Was the One: An Animated 9/11 Remembrance is a post from: Open Culture

The drama of 9/11 unfolded before the world on TV. Even many New Yorkers, myself included, watched the traumatic events on CNN rather than witnessing them firsthand. During the days that followed, we were bombarded with endless replays — the planes hitting the buildings, the towers aflame and collapsing, the piles of smoking debris left behind. Then, mercifully, the coverage disappeared.

Almost a decade later, the Internet Archive has launched a 9/11 Television News Archive, a resource for scholars, journalists, and anyone interested in the historical record created by television. The archive brings together more than 3,000 hours of television coverage from 20 US and international broadcasters, and the coverage can be segmented by day, time and news provider.

Yet one more reason why we consider the Internet Archive one of the most valuable sites on the web.

via BoingBoing

Archive of 9/11 TV Coverage Launches with 3,000+ Hours of Video is a post from: Open Culture

First we have Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892), Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during Queen Victoria’s reign, reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the wax cylinder in 1890. Mass marketed during the 1880s, this early recording device also captured the voice of Walt Whitman.

And then we get to hear echoes of the voice of William Gladstone, the four-time Prime Minister of Great Britain (1809 – 1898). Here, Gladstone’s voice was recorded by Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder (1888), the same device that lets us listen to Tchaikovsky (The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, etc.) chatting with his friends. Some have doubted the authenticity of the Gladstone recording, but it still remains generally accepted.

For more on recordings from the 19th century, we’d recommend spending some time with a five-part BBC series called Gramophones & Grooves. It takes you into the early recording industry and lets you hear countless other voices.

Find audio and video of other great cultural figures in our collection of 275 Cultural Icons.

via Kottke

Voices from the 19th Century: Tennyson, Gladstone, Whitman & Tchaikovsky is a post from: Open Culture

Back in 1948, Britain was making another difficult transition, moving from the trauma of World War II to the chill of the Cold War. Hoping to give radio listeners some clarity on contemporary affairs, the BBC began airing an annual series of lectures — the Reith Lectures — that featured leading thinkers of the day. 60 years later, the tradition continues, and during this long stretch, some legendary figures have graced the BBC’s airwaves: Michael Sandel, Edward Said, John Searle, John Kenneth Galbraith, George Kennan, and Robert Oppenheimer, just to name a few. (And, yes, the list unfortunately skews heavily male.)

Late last month, the BBC put the complete audio archive online, which gives you access to 240 lectures in total. Where’s the best place to start? How about at the beginning, with the inaugural lectures presented by philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1948. His lecture series, Authority and the Individual, delved into an age old question in political philosophy — the individual and his/her relationship with communities and states. The head of the BBC later groused that Russell spoke “too quickly and had a bad voice.” But the real complaints came from the Soviets, who interpreted Russell’s lectures as an attack on Communism. You can find the lectures here; the first lecture appears at the bottom of the page.

Note: Our Twitter friends around the world said that they could almost universally access the lectures. If you experience any geo-restricting, we apologize in advance.

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Bertrand Russell & Other Big Thinkers in BBC Lecture Series (Free) is a post from: Open Culture

A few days ago, we asked you to send us your favorite non-fiction titles. We’ll be posting your many excellent suggestions soon, and, in the meantime, we thought we should offer something in return — more specifically, yet another list of excellent non-fiction compiled by someone other than ourselves.

Kevin Kelly, web-pioneer, co-founder of Wired Magazine, former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, and one of the best all-around living arguments for ditching college and traveling the world instead, has put together a crowdsourced list of the best magazine articles from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s, almost all of them available on the web. He’s also gathered the top 25 of all time (based on the number of votes received) on one thrilling page.

The list includes pieces like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster, and Gay Talese’s legendary 1966 Esquire cover story, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. It’s an invaluable resource, whether you’re an aspiring journalist or novelist, a history buff, or just a person who wants to enjoy the evolution of the past 60 years of the English language.

You may already be familiar with the sites Instapaper, Longreads, and Longform. All three can help you find great reading material on the web, organize it, and download it to your Kindle, iPad, or tablet. Enjoy.

Get more classics from our collection of Free eBooks.

Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.

The Best Magazine Articles Ever, Curated by Kevin Kelly is a post from: Open Culture