"It's a perfectly fine Thursday afternoon. I'm going about my business, happily editing a blog post, when I get an email from the head of HubSpot's legal department. Oh boy. Apparently, he'd received a letter from a popular stock photography website claiming we had wrongfully used two of their images on our blog. My first thought was, "What? This must be a mistake."We're very good about only using photos and images we have permission to use on the blog. As a result, we usually either purchase stock photos or use images sourced from sites like Flickr licensed under Creative Commons, which is a nonprofit offering easy-to-use copyright licenses that make it easy for people to give permission for others to share and use their creative work. In fact, we've even written about how not to steal people's content on the web, and what to do if you're a victim of stolen content. So ... what gives?"
"Released more than a decade before Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece 'Blood Meridian,' 'Ulzana’s Raid' nevertheless feels closer to that book’s spirit than any Western made since. In sharp contrast to the “hippie-fication” of Indians with movies like 'Little Big Man,' Robert Aldrich’s late Western depicts its white characters as brutal—one Cavalry soldier 'rescues' a white woman from Apache by shooting her in the head, and in his terror he kills himself rather than be taken—but its Apache no less so. Ulzana (Joaquín Martinez) and his men rape and slaughter, albeit with a head for strategy that counters stereotypes of mindless savagery. Their actions are not those of Godless brutes who simply act out their nature, but of cunning warriors who know how to demoralize the enemy. In the film’s estimation, the war between whites and natives is completely removed from those fighting it, but that only makes the possibility of peace less likely. No one among the groups of soldiers and Apache started this war, but none has the agency to do anything but try and kill as many on the other side as possible."
"It’s not wrong to say that Pixar’s films are typically well-liked by critics. It’s not wrong to say that Pixar’s films are all, to varying degrees, financially successful. Even Cars 2, the closest thing Pixar has had recently to a flop, grossed more than most animated films at rival studios like Blue Sky or DreamWorks Animation. The issue is that trying to create a connection between critical praise and box office only works if you ignore, as Zeitchik did, the examples that fall in between the extremes. Yes,Cars 2 is Pixar’s least successful and well-liked film. And yes, pretty much everyone loves the Toy Story movies. But that’s the point: everyone (for the most part) loves the trilogy. Would people have avoided seeing Toy Story 3 on its opening weekend if it didn’t get bathed in critical praise? No, though perhaps the film’s overall take would’ve been lower. Or maybe people would’ve seen it in droves either way. This is the vexing part about hypothetical arguments: we can wonder all we like, but we’ll never know for sure, and when your argument revolves around factual statistics, you need to be sure."
"One Month Later: Catching Up With RogerEbert.com Editor-in-Chief Matt Zoller Seitz." By Kurt Oselund, for The House Next Door.
Russian police attack gay protesters. For a story about the wave of personal and state-sanctioned violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people in Russia, see John Aravosis' story on AmericaBlog: "Russia's Putin signs draconian anti-gay law banning gay everything."
The trailer for "Siding with the Victim," a video essay series by Jed Mayer and Ken Cancelosi for Press Play.