For all of its silliness, Mad actually set legal precedent in the intellectual property arena, making song lyrics, for the most part, fair game for satirists. In 1961, music publishers representing songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Richard Rogers, and Cole Porter filed a $25 million lawsuit against Mad for copyright infringement after Mad published a collection of parody lyrics to some of their songs. Two years later, the U.S. District Court upheld Mad’s right to print 23 of the 25 song parodies under dispute. “That is the lawsuit that pretty much established the right to parody song lyrics,” says Ficarra. … [Read more...] about The Ascent Of “Mad”: See 60 Years Of Comic Subversion
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Giving Us Space: What You Can Learn From NASA About Content and Social Media
A few years ago, he started to get questions about the apocalypse, specifically about the Nibiru cataclysm, which is the notion that a rogue planet is going to crash into the earth in December 2012. Morrison was so troubled by these questions, many of which were from school-age kids, that he worked with the web team to put together a video and an FAQ about doomsday (The website the Awl has a wonderful interview with Morrison here). … [Read more...] about Giving Us Space: What You Can Learn From NASA About Content and Social Media
19 Photos Of BuzzFeed’s Offices And 4 Things That Drive BuzzFeed’s Culture Of Win
The Fellows program isn’t the site’s only engine for expansion. BuzzFeed just hired a food editor, and they’re starting a Los Angeles office with longtime entertainment journalists Kate Aurthur and Richard Rushfield. The California outpost will be “a new exciting cultural experiment,” says Peretti. Aurthur and Rushfield will be able to create their own workplace environment that’s not necessarily a carbon copy of BuzzFeed’s New York HQ, because it will feed off the particular energy of L.A. “We’re not in a bubble in an office park, we didn’t invent [our workplace culture] out of whole cloth,” Peretti explains. “We’re a part of what’s out there in the world, and that gives us energy and feeds us.” As long as that culture keeps providing the audience with unintentionally obscene GIFs of Jill Biden, BuzzFeed’s web dominance should continue apace. … [Read more...] about 19 Photos Of BuzzFeed’s Offices And 4 Things That Drive BuzzFeed’s Culture Of Win
The “dozen-bagel” secret to preserving startup spirit as your company grows
When Evan, John, and I needed to make a decision, we could usually do it pretty quickly. We were all deep every day in customer conversations, the architecture of our software, and how all the pieces fit together. We could imagine how our decisions today would play out over time. Even though we each had our areas of expertise (Evan wrote a lot of the infrastructure, John wrote a lot of the core product services, I wrote a lot of the API, web, and billing layers) we all knew enough to act as one brain. When you hold the whole picture in your heads and you work together every day, you can make progress incredibly fast. That’s the power of a small team—there are no proxies; you’re just directly solving customer problems with your code.That’s the magic that makes startups so special and so productive. There’s so little overhead to manage, the coordination energy is negligible, and people tend to have a tremendous intrinsic drive because they’re so close … [Read more...] about The “dozen-bagel” secret to preserving startup spirit as your company grows
These were the top 10 fastest growing websites in 2020
Discord.com: The digital communities platform saw a staggering 700,702.5% growth in 2020. It went from 443,387 visits in 2019 to 3,107,267,589 in 2020. HBOmax.com: 71,655.0% growth. Thanks, Wonder Woman. Ebssw.kr: The Korean-based software learning platform saw 48,212.8% growth. Redgifs.com: The NSFW porn gif site saw 18,350.8% growth. Worldometers.info: The site continuously tracks various metrics including world population, deaths, births, government spending, emails sent, and more. It grew 13,657.7% as people grew more curious about the world in 2020. Newsbreak.com: The popular news aggregation site grew 6,463.9%. Thepirate-bay.org: The 17-year-old torrent sharing site saw 5,074.2% growth in 2020. Lockdown peeps searching for more content to pass the time, perhaps? Rrys2019.com: A Chinese media site grew by 4,729.7%. Picuki.com: The Instagram-editing site saw a 2,904.5% growth in 2020. Note.com: The Japanese media platform that allows users to post texts, images, and videos grew … [Read more...] about These were the top 10 fastest growing websites in 2020