Bull in the Heather

Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists

Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.

The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID

The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.

The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate

The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.

New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.

Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:

this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.

For a one time (?) event

I like planning these movie quartets to fill a month with, but have gotten myself into the pickle of planning out too much and not having a lot of time to cover. So decisions need to be made! And what better way than to solve them via poll.

We have four contenders competing to be the basement of July.

Here are your candidates!

B(asement) movie!

It's not the cream of the crob, but it sure is entertaining! Movies without a serious focus, intentional or not. I have only seen Spice World of these before, but am very curious about Snakes on a Plane.

My friend might tag a "B-Sides" onto these screenings with short films!

De Kelder

It's all Dutch! But okay, these are good films. Depending on availability Oeroeg might be swapped for De Aanslag. I've seen two of these in full and if there is one that you definitely have to seen, it's Spoorloos (The Vanishing).

Oops! All Sequels!

Second time's the charm! Sequels that are at least on par and sometimes even better than the first installment. Knowledge of the first film isn't a requirement per se to enjoy these.