An ad for Edison's Phonograph. He's trying to get Moms to let them into the home.
Sopa and Pipa. Can't say I'd heard about them, until last week.
I know that similar laws are being passed in Canada.
I'm sitting in my living room, surrounded by my DVDs and some VHS's I'm reluctant to toss.
My husband and I have some titles on VHS, DVD, AND Blue Ray.
I can't feel sorry for Hollywood somehow.
So my husband and I tend to buy our DVD's, since we have no idea how to download them. Sure, I sometimes watch old British TV programs on YouTube. I just watched the first episode of the Duchess of Duke Street.
If I decided I want to watch it all, I'll probably buy the DVD.
Anyway, Sopa and Pipa are slowed for the moment. Wikipedia's efforts played a large part. I never realized how much I used Wikipedia until last week. I kept falling on the site, looking up this, looking put that.
Ironic. My story Threshold Girl is based on letters from the 1910 era. To write this ebook (which I offer free online, although it is copyrighted)I did a lot of research. This was the Nickelodeon Era, the birth of the film medium.
It's Ironic that Hollywood is behind these Sopa and Pipa bills, because the reason Hollywood exists is because certain creative types "escaped" far away to the desert Los Angeles to avoid patent issues with the ALL POWERFUL Edison. He had a patent monopoly, back then. He also wanted to focus on Educational Films.
As least that is how I understand it.
But Hollywood style movie making is what people wanted. Sex, Violence, underdogs winning, bad people losing. Prat falls. LOVE LOVE LOVE.
Here's a bit from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica about the Cinematograph.
An apparatus in which a series of views representing closely successive phases of a moving object are exhibited in rapid sequence, giving a picture which, owing to persistence of vision, appears to the observer to be continuous motion. It is a development of the zoetrope or 'wheel of life' described by W. G. Horner about 1833, a cylinder rotating on a vertical axis with slots through which one sees a succession of pictures. E. Muybridge about 1877 obtained successive pictures of a running horse by employing a row of cameras, the shutters of which were opened and closed electrically by the passage of the horse in front of them.
The modern cinematograph was rendered possible by the invention of celluloid film on which the serial pictures are impressed by instantaneous photography, a long sensitized film being moved across the focal plane of a camera and exposed intermittently. 16 to fifty pictures may be taken per second. The films are developed on large drums, within which a ruby electric light may be fixed to enable the process to be watched. A positive is made from the negative and is passed through an optical lantern , the images being thus successively projected over a distance onto a screen. The Cinematograph enables living or animated pictures of such subjects as armies at march or an express train at full speed to be presented with marvelous distinctness and detail. Machines of this kind have been devised in enormous numbers for the purposes of amusement under the names of bioscope, biograph, kinetoscope, mutograph,etc, formed chiefly from the Latin words for light and movement.
