It’ll be very interesting to see the result of a lawsuit currently brewing in federal court that is trying to shut down ReDigi (a judge backed the service, but an appeal seems likely), a service that will let you resell music you purchased from iTunes after taking quite comprehensive efforts to keep owners from having access to the music they want to divest of:

ReDigi says the plaintiff has a “profound misunderstanding of how ReDigi works,” pointing to systems in place to forensically analyze song files to make sure they came from iTunes, to delete files from devices, to upload files for streaming onto RAM, to control access to songs, to limit storage merely for personal use, and to allow users to downloads these files. If it all sounds complicated, yes, that’s the point. The semantic parsing of what’s happening in the transfer of music is at issue in this case, and it gets to the core copyright question, “What is a copy?” That’s an issue that the 2nd Circuit struggled with answering in the 2008 “Cablevision” case, where Hollywood studios attempted to shut down a DVR service that allowed users to store TV programming remotely. In that decision, the justices examined the transitory duration of data buffering and whether works are “fixed” in a tangible medium, and expressed some skepticism with studio arguments about copies being made along the way. But the 2nd Circuit handed Cablevision a win mostly on grounds that its remote DVR was merely acting at the behest of its users.

To be a bit clearer, what’s at issue is whether the doctrine of first sale, which gives content owners the right to sell their copy of content, but not copies of their copy, applies to digital content as well as to physical content. As the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard explains: “Currently, U.S. and European Union law have denied that the first sale doctrine applies to digital works distributed over the Internet, despite good arguments to the contrary. And the principle has yet to emerge in Asian-Pacific jurisdictions. The WIPO treaties currently stipulate application of the first-sale doctrine to tangible goods like books and CDs and not to intangible content distributed over the Internet.” It’s not surprising that this issue is coming to a head. Some outlets, like Amazon, already stipulate that customers can’t resell the files. But it’s not like the move to digital means that consumers will only want to be able to do different things with their content—it just means they’ll want to do more things, and have the ability to do all the old things as well.

But I do think that this mindset gets at two competing strains of thought when it comes to digital content. The folks I’ve talked to who download content outside of legal channels often come down to arguing that because they aren’t taking a physical object from its owner that could be sold for profit, they aren’t doing any harm. But extending first sale doctrine to digital content certainly means treating that content as if individual copies have value. I tend to think it’s in the interests of both content producers and content consumers, in terms of supporting the creation of new content and providing consumers with content of the highest quality, for content to be treated as if it has a value higher than free all the way through the process, and for content producers to focus aggressively on developing new licit ways to get content to consumers in a timely manner. But we’re a long way from reaching that consensus. Hopefully, this case can help establish some positive new norms.

After Gisele got— I think understandably—upset about the Patriots’ inability to catch some key passes during the Super Bowl, the Giants Brandon Jacobs, who would you think would gleefully agree with her, wants her to know that ““She just needs to continue to stay cute and shut up.” Because ladies couldn’t possibly have a valid opinion about sports, or investment in the game of football other than to be totally supportive arm candy for their dream quarterback husbands, amirite? But it’s all part of a larger culture that sends hugely confusing messages about how women are supposed to talk—or not talk—about sports.

Take the role of the sideline reporter. I don’t think it’s a problem for sideline reporters to be attractive—being physically attractive doesn’t inherently mean you can’t be intelligent, and television reporting of all kinds is one of the few professions where men have to meet at least some of the same physical beauty standards as women. But I think that sports networks and teams have created an environment where even intelligent female sideline reporters are treated as if they’re merely eye candy because there are enough cases where it’s impossible to imagine what other criteria a reporter was hired for other than her looks. And hiring in a way that suggests that appearance is the most important criteria gives the impression that either there aren’t qualified and attractive women available who can do things other than take rides on outfield trains and ask soft questions, or that even if said women exist, it doesn’t make sense to hire them to deliver the character fluff that is the designated role for women in sports commentary. If you’re hired (or expected) to be entertaining first and substantive as a bonus, people may react badly when you turn out to have ideas, or feel weirdly entitled to prioritize your role as an object of desire.

That kind of structural message means that within the context of sports, it’s apparently perfectly appropriate for men to behave in ways that women would be excoriated for. In a recent interview, Erin Andrews talked about dealing with harrassment from “fans” and detractors alike. When the Cleveland Plain Dealer asked her “On the college campuses, in particular, how do you handle the goofus—or 10—who yells, ‘Erin, will you marry me?’” She said, “Unfortunately, it gets a lot nastier than that. It’s why I would never bring my father or a boyfriend to the game. I’ve had security guards who followed me and said, “It’s bad that you have to listen to this.” I tell them, “I don’t. I have earpieces.’” If a female fan got all gushy over an announcer or player, it would be taken as a sign of their unseriousness—there’s even Baseball Boyfriend , an app that lets women store picks in a “Little Black Book,” and instead of trades and pickups, treats players you shed as your “exes.” But apparently you can sexually harass Erin Andrews and still retain the impression that you’re totally focused on the substance of the game.

And this is how we get to Gisele. She couldn’t possibly be upset about the game because she’s come to care about football, in addition to caring that her husband is upset. She’s just a dumb broad who’s ventured out of the spot that’s designated for her: looking cute in the owners’ box. I wish I could say that Brandon Jacobs was an isolated sexist and a weirdly sore winner. But his comments about Gisele are in line with the primary role designated for women in sports commentary: look good, and don’t have inconvenient opinions.

Roland Martin has been suspended from CNN after tweeting that, “If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham’s H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him! #superbowl.” He then insisted that, rather than making a joke about violence against men who are attracted to men, he really just hates soccer: “@DrMChatelain @notjustsexuality well that shows how ignorant you are. I rip on soccer all of the time. Learn to pay attention!”

It’s the second time in a month that CNN commentators have come under fire for controversial comments: Dana Loesch recently cheered reports of members of the United States Marine Corps urinating on the bodies of dead Afghans and suggested that had she been present, she would have joined in. But while Martin apologized and will experience an indefinite suspension, CNN and Loesch refused to apologize for her remarks, and she’s remained on the air.

The clear difference between the two cases? A sense that CNN’s audience was offended. GLAAD, which keeps a careful eye on defamation against gays and lesbians in the media, moved quickly to call for Martin’s dismissal and to track the network’s response to the incident. CNN got the message that its own constituents were upset, and that it would suffer consequences — or at least a lot of annoyance — if it failed to act.

Loesch’s comments on the other hand, offended human rights advocates and decent people everywhere. But that’s not the same as running afoul of an organization with a well-established plan to respond to these kinds of events and a well-worn path to media outlets who would cover and amplify their response. While Loesch’s comments were reprehensible, there was also no organized group who was likely or able to hold CNN accountable for her words, and for continuing to let her appear on-air without penalty.

Taken together, the way CNN handled Martin’s and Loesch’s comments makes it look like CNN has no consistent internal values, and no internal standard for how to respond when it commenters express sentiments that are an anathema to those values. I’m glad to know, per CNN’s statement, that “Language that demeans is inconsistent with the values and culture of our organization, and is not tolerated.” But why should it take several days of consideration for CNN to arrive at that conclusion? If the network’s truly committed to the proposition that violence against gay people is no joking matter, that’s something it should know in advance, and CNN should have a personnel policy in place to determine what the appropriate penalty is when someone violates their standards. Similarly, whether Loesch’s comments violate CNN’s internal values shouldn’t be something that’s determined by the level of outrage outside the network’s headquarters.

I’m glad to see a conservative group agrees with me that by a broad definition, Hollywood is a pretty patriotic place, comfortable making movies that embrace American values and seeing them do well at the box office. That said, the idea that it’s conservative to want “good to conquer evil, truth to triumph over falsehood, justice to prevail over injustice and true beauty to overcome ugliness,” as Movieguide says this year strikes me as a bit of an overreach. In case there was a question about it, just because I’m a professional progressive doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see Walter White end up dead or in the pokey; that I sit around in cahoots with that schemer Satan thinking about how to get inaccurate information about everything from the demographics of the United States to clean energy into popular entertainment; or that I’m dedicated to seeing brutalist architecture dominate movie sets or something.

More to the point, Dr. Ted Baehr, who founded Movieguide, says that “Moviegoers and TV viewers prefer movies and television programs that celebrate traditional American values like liberty, private property, the free market, patriotism, and limited government.” But is that actually what’s reflected in their nominees for top movies? Captain America: The First Avenger is about a wildly expanded federal government that, among other things, performs dodgy experiments on the troops. Thor is part of a larger story that sees entrepreneurial superheroes brought together and brought to heel but government bureaucracy. You could maaaaybe stretch and say that Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is about an enterprising small businessman, but mostly, I think it’s about the boats that shoot things at each other and the zombies and the mermaids and Johnny Depp playing pretty gay. Thor is all about how unmarried lady scientists should fall for dreamy pagan gods and how science validates a non-Christian view of the world. And yes, I’m totally glad to see someone say that the Twilight movies represent“fringe worldviews,” but you know what? Americans love those fringe worldviews if they involve who want to have premarital sex with vampires but who wait because those vampires are just so darn oriented towards family values.

Look, I totally understand the desire to believe that America is secretly hankering after movies and television that reflect a certain set of values and if that darn Hollywood machine would only cooperate, the market would reap rewards and the right priorities would spread throughout the land. But I don’t think there’s conclusive evidence, in either direct, that that’s the case. And if conservatives really want to sell the idea that their values make for better storytelling, they’re going to need more coherent ideas than these, and a more compelling spokesman than, say, Dean Cain. This is a conversation worth having and hashing out—I think someone should do a big, comprehensive study of the ideas and values audiences report taking away from their favorite entertainment. But trying to claim American movies for conservativism, box office evidence to the contrary, isn’t the place to start it.

If you’re going to pick someone to go missing and be need of rescue, can you do better than Bruce Greenwood? The veteran actor was a trouper while facing torture by mind control slug in the last Star Trek movie, and as vanished Amazonian explorer Dr. Emmet Cole in The River it’s easy to sympathize with the family that doesn’t want to give up on him. I generally liked the rest of The River, ABC’s new horror show about Cole’s disappearance and the team of reality television producers and scientists who teams up to return to the Amazon to find him, that premiered last night, too. Horror isn’t necessarily my favorite genre, but considerations of environmentalism and the ethics of reality television definitely are.

I appreciate that the show isn’t shy about about connecting Cole’s affection to the wild to a political worldview. “He was a passionate environmentalist,” one of the people eulogizing him says in news reports of his disappearance. But the show isn’t entirely clear on its relationship to that worldview. Cole’s explorations got him killed, or at least disappeared, and it’s clear that the time he sacrificed to his explorations that he could have spent with his family has left his son Lincoln with mixed feelings about the wilderness his father loved. “He missed my life to inspire a billion people I could give a shit about. There’s no magic out there,” he tells his mother. And later, he tells Lena, the daughter of another explorer who’s gone missing with Emmet, that “Science isn’t a great big wonder anymore. Discoveries are made in the lab, not the jungle.” It’s a perspective that downplays preserving the wild and focuses instead on the importance of human ingenuity and industry. But rather than just letting that statement sit, Lincoln gets pulled back into the jungle as his father sees it. Flooded by dragonflies, he admits to Lena, “Okay, that was pretty cool.”

That same canniness is present in the show’s examination of the ethics of reality television. Tess, Emmet’s wife and Lincoln’s mother, first shows up as the love of Emmet’s life. When we next see her, she’s meeting Lincoln in a bar, bringing cameras in to film her conversation with her grieving son who believes he’s just buried his father, telling him “They won’t pay if you won’t go.” Her behavior’s repulsive, but it’s also driven by need rather than pure greed: this is the way she can finance the search for her missing husband. Lincoln is surly around the crew once they’re on the river. “So Lincoln, tell us about your relationship with your father,” a producer asks him, only to get the entirely appropriate response of “Go fuck yourself.” (A side note, I appreciate that the characters are swearing like they would if they were real humans under stressful situations.) But by the end of the show, Lincoln’s playing along. After a touching, and theoretically private, moment between Tess and Lincoln, she points out that there’s a camera watching them—but he knows. She may be using him to get back to the river, but Lincoln has an agenda of his own.

There’s been a lot of conversation about reality television as horror show, especially in the wake of Russell Armstrong’s suicide. But things like The River and The Hunger Games are upping the stakes and trying to find a limit to what we’d let ourselves be entertained by—and what people will do to entertain us.

The bridge is yours.

-There is no place that Star Wars can’t penetrate, even Pintrest.

-Why is it so hard to get people to adopt new musical intstruments?

-Go inside John Waters’ house in Baltimore.

-NBC: still not taking my suggestions.

-I would totally watch a show where Justice Sonia Sotomayor solves fairy-tale disputes. Someone call the USA Network!

Pop culture has a real tendency to oversell the idea that one dynamic teacher can change a child’s entire life. But if it’s supposed to be correcting for that tendency, Glee‘s gone from being a realistic show about low teacher pay and school budget cuts to a fairly naked expression of contempt for educators.

Take last night’s episode. First, we learn that far from being the dedicated Spanish teacher we were lead to believe Will Schuester was, he’s actually an incompetent racist. He’s so bad at the language he’s supposed to be teaching that it’s embarrassing, and he only signs up for remedial classes when he has a shot at getting tenure that would make him feel more secure about marrying Emma. Will’s understanding of the culture he’s supposed to be contextualizing limited to mariachi hats, ponchos, and bullfighters—Santana’s ethering of his lack of interest and commitment unless he has a chance for self-aggrandizement was eminently deserved, even if Will had to stick around long past when he should have been fired, if these skills are any indication. It’s been clear for a long time that Will isn’t particularly interested in teaching, whether he’s spending all his time auditioning for a musical or enlisting the glee club to spend a huge amount of time to choreograph his proposal rather than working on anything relevant to their education or after-school activities. But there’s something really gross about how terrible he is at his job and how little he’s cared about that for three years. Blowing off your primary responsibilities to your students in favor of after school activities isn’t cute or evidence of passion.

And Will’s not alone. Emma spends most of the episode passing out flyers with taglines that should get her fired: even in the cause of getting kids to pay important issues, there is never a situation where it’s okay to call kids as two-timing hos or use words like “taint” with them. And yet, she’s rewarded with tenure by the end of the episode. Not that I believe Glee is governed by logic or anything, but the only way to interpret that in any coherent way is that McKinley High rewards incompetence and the tenure system is hopelessly rigged to protect teachers who would otherwise be fired. It’s like Michelle Rhee wrote this episode or something.

There are a few bright spots. Crazy Sue Sylvester, bless her, actually takes feedback seriously (and the show would be smart to pair her with NeNe Leakes, giving Sue some space to be less of a cartoon villain) when she knows it comes from a place of genuine investment in the Cheerios’ excellence. Ricky Martin single-handedly made the case for immigration reform, bilingual education, and passion in teaching, which I’d be stirred by if I didn’t think those excellent points and the hunk of handsome delivering them were going to sink below a tidal wave of dreadful. But Glee’s reached a truly impressive point: it hates its characters, it appears to hate us, and it’s coasting along believing it can convince us not its contempt for everything from coherence to public educators.

I’ve been very pleased about Demian Bichir’s Best Actor Academy Award nomination because he’s amazing in A Better Life, both one of the best issue movies and one of the best all-around movies of 2011. But I hadn’t realized that he was only the fourth Latino actor to ever be nominated for Best Actor — and the first since 1988 when Edward James Olmos was nominated for Stand and Deliver.

Only one Latino’s ever won the top prize, José Ferrer, who won in 1950 for playing Cyrano de Bergerac. Ferrer was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 for playing the Dauphin, Charles VII in Joan of Arc, and for Best Actor again in 1952 for playing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the original Moulin Rouge (a role that would be played by a Latino actor again when John Leguizamo took it on in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation). Anthony Quinn was nominated in 1957 for playing an Italian rancher in Wild Is the Wind. But even as the Latino population of the United State’s exploded, the Academy’s top acting awards have failed to recognize not just Latino actors, but Latino actors playing Latino character. Bichir is the second Latino actor to get a Best Actor nod for playing a character who is supposed to be Latino, and for telling a story about a specifically Latino issue. That’s kind of astonishing — and it says a lot about Hollywood’s relationship to one of the fastest-growing sectors of the American population.

This post contains spoilers through the February 7 episode of Justified.

It may just be that my personal taste in baroque redneck feuds is low, but since Justified introduced Limehouse (and, as Matt Zoller Seitz astutely points out, took a huge step towards remedying the odd exclusion of African-American characters from its particular Kentucky cartography), I find myself much more interested in what’s going on in Noble’s Holler than in whatever antics the Crowder gang is up to this particular week: the drama there is drawn from a deep and particular wellspring rather than manufactured for maximum baroqueness and squick. I’d much rather plumb race relations in Harlan than an organ-smuggling ring.

We learn about Noble’s Holler and Raylan in the same breath, every time he speaks of it. “Noble’s Holler. Nice community,” he tells Brooks as they drive out to meet with Limehouse. “Carved out for emancipated slaves after the Civil War. Good white folks of the county trying to dig them out going on 150 years now.” Brooks is amused, but she’s also intrigued, telling him “You’re all up on your race relations.” But she’s only willing to give Raylan so much credit. When he tells her “I pay attention during Black History Month,” she wants to know “So you’re bringing me along on a mission to African America to smooth your path?” But I like that he’s done the same for her: maybe the whiteness of the Harlan that we’ve seen is a testament to the depth and persistence of segregation. There are places each of them can’t walk comfortably, or at all, if they go alone.

And we find out later, that used to be literally true. As Raylan explains to Boyd, Noble’s Holler, and Limehouse himself, served that role in Raylan’s life. When he was a child and his father, both drunk and sober, got violent with his mother, she fled a familiar route, a kind of reverse underground railroad. “Oh, I’d heard the stories,” Raylan muses. “White women seeking shelter there, white men not daring to follow them in. Not Arlo, though. He wasn’t scared of black folks.” It’s a fascinating reversal of the white supremacist stereotypes of black men ravaging white women, and a piece of information I’d imagine has repercussions throughout Harlan, whether they’re acknowledged—or seen—or tacitly ignored. I’d have to imagine that acting as a sanctuary is one reason white men in particular would want to uproot Noble’s Holler: if white women have an interest in acting in at least some solidarity with black communities, that’s a risky proposition for the men at the top.* But all of this fascinating speculation is, and I fear will remain, largely for naught as long as white men are, for once, trying to get in Limehouse’s stronghold in pursuit of Mags’ money.

I quite like the revelation that what’s left of that mythical pile is “$46,313, and receipts for everything your mama spent buying every piece of land for that mine deal.” There’s something nice about announcing in that the bloodbath to follow will be over a deeply diminished share of ill-gotten gains, that Harlan’s crooks are tearing themselves to pieces over small cash. Everything, it seems, is like Mags’ rotten and bug-infested marijuana, not even good enough to send up in a glorious burst of smoke. But that means we’re going to have to care something about these criminals. And I’m not sure I’m much invested in an organ-snatching orderly, or even much in Boyd’s effort to become a small-time white-supremacist-tinged Stringer Bell, especially since he doesn’t seem good enough at it to be worth the effort.

And while Quarles is nutty enough to watch, his race-tinged sermon to Devil that “Chasing money through a black holler? Cozying up with people you’d just as soon see swinging?…Can I get an amen?…I have the resources to turn your shitty little project or whatever you call it into a money-making machine,” feels weirdly false, especially given that Quarles comes from a heavily black industrial city and it’s hard to imagine the syndicate he represents is all-white. When the concept of Noble’s Holler touches on something weird, and specific, and emotionally true, Quarles’ rant feels like a put-on to me. We haven’t seen enough below the surface for me to see him as a truly worthy opponent yet, in organizational or metaphorical terms.

*With this proposition out there, I was a big disappointed that Brooks, as it turns out, seems to be the daughter or granddaughter of one of the women in The Help, and that Raylan’s conversation with her about her heritage extends about as far as noting that Ole Miss girls are pretty.