As summer vacations were ending, the movie industry took stock of the season just past and found reasons for concern, Brooks Barnes writes. Ticket sales at North American cinemas in the summer declined an estimated 3 percent, to $4.28 billion, the first decline in seven years; total attendance was the lowest since at least 1993, when independent records first were kept. There were specific reasons that could, perhaps, explain the decline - the Olympics; the shootings in Aurora, Colo. - but still the results were sobering.
- There were signs that social media was creating extreme swings in fortune â€" with some pictures like “The Avengers†(about $620 million in North America; over $1.5 billion world wide) having tremendous results, and others, like “The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure†($448,000 from 2,160 screens), having catastrophic results. It is harder, Mr. Barnes writes, “for studio marketers to put lipstick on pigs.â€
The Advertising Club of New York will begin an initiative to promote diversity within advertising and marketing - fields that are notable for their underrepresentation of blacks, Latinos and Asians, Tanzina Vega writes. For example, an N.A.A.C.P. report using 2008 data found that blacks represented 5.3 percent of managers and professionals at advertising agencies and were paid 80 cents for each dollar earned by white employees. The Advertising Club program, I'mpart, will spend $700,000 to support training programs in high school, college and afterward.
A live video stream of the Hugo Awards, the top prize in science fiction, was abruptly cut off while thousands were watching because an automated “bot†detected co pyrighted material and stopped the stream, the Web site i09 reported. The author Neil Gaiman was in the middle of his acceptance speech (he won for a “Doctor Who†script) at the event in Chicago when uStream stopped streaming. What triggered the action was the streaming of clips from nominated TV scripts shortly beforehand, including Mr. Gaiman's; uStream later apologized and said it would stop using a third-party “automated infringement system†that it apparently couldn't override.
The Associated Press reported that one of the founders of the popular file-sharing Web site Pirate Bay was arrested in Cambodia. The local authorities said they were acting on a request from Sweden, where the co-founder, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, faces a one-year prison term for violating copyright laws. The Pirate Bay Web site has led to a corresponding social movement, with Pirate political parties forming across the globe, including Sweden, on a platform of changing laws concernin g the Internet and copyright. Though there is no extradition treaty between Cambodia and Sweden, Cambodian officials said they would act as quickly as possible.
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