News roundup: Google, festivals, copyright, Music scores, Miro and Moby

Open is the new, erm, closed  as Google figure the only way into two huge markets they currently aren't leader in - mobile phones and social networks -  is through mass collaboration. Android, launched this week, is a consortium of mobile phone companies working to create an open operating system for phones based on Linux, that would be offered freely and be easy to develop for. Playing on the paranoia (paranoid android?) in the industry that Apple's iPod halo may garrote the world's biggest consumer entertainment platform, with some 3bn mobile phones worldwide against 1.5bn TVs and 1bn web connections, Android hope to have a phone ready for the end of next year. Market leaders Symbian and Microsoft have - predictably - sneered in disgust.

Prior to this long awaited news, Google also announced a new consortium of Every Social Network Except Facebook to create a common application programming interface (API - ie building blocks for programmes) for people to develop a single application that will work on Every Social Network Except Facebook pages. This time the criticism came from the far more respected source of Tim O'Reilly (who coined the phrase web 2.0 amongst countless other achievements), who says the system doesn't go far enough, not allowing, for instance, a MySpace user to message someone on Linked-In. Instead he wishes for the open social network operating system, as hinted at by Brad Fitzpatrick, and David Recordon's ruminations on the 'social graph' and how it needs to be free (strongly recommended read if you are interested in this area).

OK. No more geek talk, I promise. Festival submission deadlines on the horizon. There's the 6th Hull International Short Film Festival, the first from Laurence Boyce - with a top prize of £1000. More info from their site. The European Documentary Network - who have just launched a new documentary event calendar, meanwhile, have set December 3rd as the deadline for their next event - DocsBarcelona 2008.

Ever noticed that most film contests these days involve time - either 48 hours or 60 seconds? Well BAFTA's 60 seconds film contest is back - with the winning chance of getting shown during next year's ceremony. Speaking of ceremonies, the 51st London Film Festival rewarded Persepolis, Brick Lane's Sarah Gavron, Andrey Pauonov's The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (right) and Joanna Hogg for Unrelated. The Satyajit Ray award went to Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin'.

London and Edinburgh film festivals meanwhile are to share £1.25m a year from the UK Film Council over the next three years, supposedly Edinburgh's pay-off for obeying the UK Film Council's highly unpopular demands for the festival to move to June. Another eight festivals will get just £250,000 a year to share between them. Other fests on the horizon include Leeds International Film Festival, and the Munich International Festival of Film Schools, running November 17-24. 

Copyright now, and a non-profit Candian site, the International Music Score Library Project - which hosted the biggest free collection of sheet music anywhere - has been forced to go offline after Universal Edition, a German company, argued that while all the scores hosted were in the public domain in Canada, for some European visitors to the site some of them were not. The part-time student running the site, unable to risk major litigation, pulled the site down. Got to love lawyers, hey? On the subject of crazy laws, GMTV has just published a list of the top ten weirdest laws, including the law that in the UK a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman's helmet. But I digress...

Copyright lawyers are also responsible for the shelving of a fan-made film from Germany about the fantasy game Warhammer 40,000. Nottingham-based Games Workshop - who own the rights -  blamed a loophole in German copyright law saying "we must be vigilant, and perhaps sometimes seemingly heartless in our decisions to safeguard the IP for the future success of the business".

For those wishing for an entertainment industry free from the tyranny of lawyers, the battle between Joost and Miro has heated up. (Joost is a Viacom 'we love to sue YouTube' backed web TV system that is essentially closed to only the media companies they decide they like. Miro is run by a non-profit outfit with the sole mission of ensuring that the media doesn't end up in the hands of a single Orwellian technology company.) Miro's spokeman, Nicholas Reville, has published a side-by-side comparison of the two services. With integrated YouTube browsing, no DRM, no user-tracking and 2000+ independent channels, against Joost's 250, Miro seems to be in the lead. A new version of it is out to download too. Of course the impending launch of the film industry backed, DRM-packed Hulu.com, which appears to have a nice interface at least, could change things further.

Also in the world of the free, and Moby has joined Radiohead to offer his music for free, although this time only to filmmakers. If you ever thought  there wasn't enough of Moby's music in adverts, a back-catalogue of works on MobyGratis.com should soon change that. Films picked up for distribution will pay a small fee that Moby will give to charity. Prince, on the other hand, is laughing in the face of his 2006 Webby 'Web Personality of the Year' Award by suing fansites that host pictures or video of him.

In other news, Fortune is claiming that the Indian film industry is a better investment proposition than Facebook, Turkey's filmmakers are finally addressing the subject of honour killings, while David Thomson in the Guardian claims that the Writers Guild of America strike is crazy as writers are already paid too much and aren't very good anyway. Variety, meanwhile has crowned Apple as the WalMart of online video, as iPhones go on sale in Germany and the UK. Warner Bros has purchased British video game developer TT Games, behind the acclaimed Lego Star Wars game. Finally, the best web ad I've seen in a long time, comes from Dutch site Hema.. go see (and wait a few seconds).