The INDUCE Act makes it a crime to induce copyright infringement in very broad terms. Most of the commentary on the Act and what technologies, creativity and innovation it threatens have focused on two types of infringement, those of the right of reproduction (the right to make copies) and the right of public distribution. We should remember, however, that there are other exclusive rights that can be infringed. The intersection of the INDUCE Act with these other exclusive rights will create an even broader swath of technology and acts that Hollywood will have an effective veto over. Let's consider one of these other rights and the technologies that might be affected.
According to 17 USC 106, the second exclusive right is the right "to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work."
Hmmm, I would imagine that it will be much easier for Hollywood to go after websites that promote fan fiction. Computer game companies that do not like modding can go after websites that teach people how to mod computer games. Websites that encourage or promote Machinima are in deep trouble. Things like remix "construction sets" would probably also be under legal threat, even if they didn't contain any unauthorized material. Certain editing technologies like the ClearPlay DVD player, which allows parents to skip offensive portions of a DVD, would certainly be more threatened than they are now. See, Liberals, Conservatives Favor Different Kinds of Censorship. Third-party annotations? Well, those are right out. Heck, it might be that a parody would be illegal because it encourages the creation of derivative satires. Anything that encourages you to change, edit, or manipulate copyrighted content would likely be forced to incorporate DRM else the technology provider be sued.
Just imagine if SCO, the company that wants to stop open source, had INDUCE in its arsenal. Linux, which never had much of a process (until recently) to ensure that submitted code was clean of adverse copyrights, would be toast. And how long before SourceForge and O'Reilly get C&D letters?
Now Hollywood might not win all these potential lawsuits, assuming the defense can afford to go all the way through trial and risk having a jury look askance at what they're doing, but how heavy will the threat of litigation weigh on those who encourage creation?
Slate publishes an article on one of the most interesting aspects of Apple's iTunes and goes for the easy celebrity story instead of something really interesting (Beyoncé, Your Mix Tape Sucks).
One of the most innovative, creative and significant aspects of the transition to digital downloadable music that the music industry seems to have ignored is the critical importance of the playlist. Playlists are key to organizing, listening to and discovering new music in the digital age. They are a tool that many people can use much more efficiently to publicize their music interests, turn people on to new music and assist in providing a musical education, among other things. Apple has begun to design tools that recognize the importance of playlists. They aren't nearly as cool as Webjay, but they are trying.
So does Slate write about any of these fascinating aspects of the playlist community? Nah, they go for the easy celebrity piece and rag on the mostly weak and uninteresting celebrity playlists Apple uses as a marketing tool. Mainstream journalism is sooo impressive.
Slate has an interesting piece on the increasing speed of zombies in recent movies such as 28 Days Later and the recent remake Dawn of the Dead (Dead Run - How Did Movie Zombies Get So Fast?). The author traces at least some of the inspiration to fast-paced first-person zombie shooter (aka "Survival/Horror") videogames such as Resident Evil, and not just the fact that some bad movies were adaptations of the games. Games having a cultural effect on movies. Cool.
For more traditional, slow-moving walking dead, you can download for free (and legitimately) George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead, which is in the public domain (George Romero's Night of the Living Dead in PD; on Archive.org).
The BBC reports that Microsoft is adding support for the Welsh language to MS Windows (Microsoft works on native tongues). It is great that Microsoft is supporting language diversity. However, this diversity is being supported at Microsoft's sufferance. Should MS decide not to support a particular language, too bad, MS won't let you have access to Windows source to make the necessary changes yourself. There is no such problem with open source. If native speakers truly want to guarantee the continued existence of their minority languages, they would do well to embrace open source and commission a translated version of Linux.
Speaking of which, when will we have a Klingon Linux of Elvish Linux?
Lucas Gonze, who has added client-side remixing to his RSS+SMIL format (Analysis of RSS+Time as a playlist format) discusses the strengths and weaknesses of such client-side remixing here: Client-side remixing is sloppy. His post is in response to a couple of posts I've done on the idea of remixing "recipes": A History Palette for Music and The Grey Album - No Copying Necessary. Gonze argues, rightfully, that RSS+Time and similar such formats are not well-suited to client-side remixes:
Geeks around these parts have done many experiments with client-side remixing in SMIL, and what we found was that it works reasonably well as long as you don't need precise synchronization. If you do need precise synchronization, you'll just make yourself unhappy.
What that means for Danger Mouse and other dance-type remixers is that they will not be doable on the client side. That kind of thing requires a really tight set of operations. You have to clip out segments of a few seconds at most, then line them up with a lot of other clips. Marking a beat is a picky process with no room for sloppiness, which is exactly what HTML is not.
Mike Linksvayer agrees and provides more analysis (Client-side remixing isn’t so loopy).
Their both right. However, my vision of client-side remixing is not of the RSS+Time type, which "is to precise syncrhonization as HTML is to precise layout. If you don’t need precision, enjoy." Actually, I imagine a rather robust client that can achieve the level of precision that the remixer used to create the remixing "recipe." As I noted, my comparison is to Photoshop's History Palette:
Imagine if someone edits a photo [with Photoshop] and sends me the history palette but not the original photo (for copyright reasons). If I already have the original photo the editor worked with, I could recreate the new version from the history palette.
In the case of music, I imagine the client having something like a copy of Apple's GarageBand software. If you save the "history palette" for GarageBand and send me both the history and the original sound files used, I should be able to recreate the exact same finished product you have.
Such a thing is not yet available, but I don't see why it couldn't be. See, Dangermouse, the Jay-Z Construction Set and the Videogame Content Creation Model.
The New York Times (reg. req.) reports on an amazing research finding - those who buy highly partisan books are likely to buy more highly partisan books! At least that is all I was able to get out of the article which hypes a rather pedestrian study (Study Finds a Nation of Polarized Readers). The article reports on a recent study by social networking guru Valdis Krebs. The study can be found here: Divided We Stand... Still. Would it kill the NY Times to include a link or URL? This study is a followup on an earlier report (Divided We Stand???) as well as a white paper on book networks (The Social Life of Books). From the study the NY Times is referring to:
From the New York Times Bestseller List, I selected political books as starting points for 'snowball sampling'. Two books are linked in the network if they were purchased by the same person -- "Customers who bought this book also bought: ". Many of the books have changed from last year but the overall pattern is the same. The pattern reveals two distinct clusters with dense internal ties. These political books are preaching to the converted. The extreme book titles on both sides reveal a focus on hate, instead of debate.
While interesting, just how surprising is this finding? First, the political books are selected from the New York Times Bestseller List. Not to knock bestseller lists, but what sort of books make it to the top? I doubt that audience-challenging, even-handed books of any complexity are likely to compete with simple-minded polemics that cater to existing prejudices.
Of course, if you are in market for buying partisan polemics, are you really interested in even-handed books? I would think it is sort of a self-selecting sample. That isn't the way Krebs looks at it though:
(Of course, it is always possible, he [Krebs] concedes, that undecided voters aren't reading political books at all, that they simply "can't stomach either side.")
My centrist political views may not be the norm, but I'm certainly not unique. I'm interested in real debate about issues, not simply confirmation of my own point of view. Consequently, I will no more spend money on Dude, Where's My Country? then on Deliver Us From Evil. Let's face it, most of these books are crap. All the rhetorical fallacies are there: straw man arguments, ad hominem attacks, and the ever-popular argumentum ad odium (argument directed to hatred), among others. Why would someone who is interested in honest debate be interested in these books? Maybe undecided voters are reading political books that, while less popular, are not partisan polemics.
Speaking of rhetorical fallacies ...
Mr. Krebs, who got similar results when he conducted the same experiment last year, calls this pattern the "echo chamber" effect: for the most part, he found, buyers of liberal books buy only other liberal books, while buyers of conservative books buy only other conservative books. This finding appears to buttress the argument made by Cass Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, in his influential study "Republic.com" (Princeton University Press, 2001) that contemporary media and the Internet have abetted a culture of polarization, in which people primarily seek out points of view to which they already subscribe.
Does this study really buttress the argument of Cass Sunstein in Republic.com? I don't think so. Sunstein was complaining about the potential of too much personalizing of sources of information through the internet, such as a "daily me" newspaper. His concern was with new technologies, in particular, their potential for individual customization. I don't really recall Sunstein concerned about dead tree media. Now, it may be that internet polarization (even assuming such a thing) is increasing polarization in other media, but this study provides absolutely no evidence of this fact. Call me crazy, but I rather suspect that partisan political polemics through the ages have mostly appealed to partisans and were seldom purchased by the partisans on the other side of the argument. For example, I don't think that many copies of the abolitionist The Liberator sold in the antebellum South.
Unfortunately, we don't have Amazon's databases for much of our history. If similar databases do exist it would be interesting to see if they show a similar pattern. I, for one, would be most surprised if they showed that McGovernites were frequent purchasers of Nixonian apologias.
Of course, if the study does support Sunstein's argument, perhaps we should extend his call to have links to dissenting viewpoints not only the internet, but in books. Perhaps Michael Moore's publisher could include blurbs for Bill O'Reilly's books in Moore's latest. Or perhaps Sunstein's publisher's page of reviews for Republic.com could include some reviews that might have disagreed with Sunstein's conclusions? Now that would be an unplanned encounter.
via Furdlog (but don't read him, because he and I agree frequently)
Riffing off the Grey Album controversy, Pop Matters columnist Devon Powers writes a lyrical column that implicitly makes the argument for much shorter copyright terms without delving into legalities and economic arguments (Life Goes On). She may even have come up with a new rallying cry to go along with "Free the Mouse":
Something's gotta be done about the Beatles.
Her argument is that too-extensive copyright kills and mummifies culture, our culture, turning cultural touchstones into mere nostalgia:
[T]here's also a deafening cultural silence around the Beatles. Despite being one of the most influential recording acts in history, the Beatles do not allow their music to be sampled... And the Beatles aren't the only act; the collusion of exorbinant fees and copyright censure has made many of the musicians with the loudest cultural resonance into those whose music is only heard today as an echo from the past.
....But to me, it is beyond question that it is certainly time to free ourselves of the cultural nostalgia and legal stagnation that have allowed their music to fossilize. Music journalists must -- and important writing in Rolling Stone, New York Times, and other prominent publications already has -- applaud Danger Mouse's astounding artistic accomplishment, and let their critical praise become part of the discussion about what's at stake as copyright goes awry. And for all of us who hold music dear, we owe it to ourselves to not only let our musical past footnote our musical present, but also allow that past to live and breathe, change and reform, disappear and reappear in unexpected ways.
Indeed. Reading this column I can't help but think, "why not return to the original copyright term of 28 years?" That is approximately a single generation, which would mean that every new generation would be permitted to work with and reimagine the past, introducing older works to a newer audience. As Paul wrote and Devon reiterates: "La, la, la, la, life goes on."
via Sivacracy
PS See also, Powers' review of The King of France, a band I had the pleasure of hearing for the first time in New Haven (The Band That Will Be King).
DJ Dangermouse's release of the controversial Grey Album has brought the question of reusing and remixing content to the forefront. Now, another group has taken the next logical step and released the Jay-Z Construction Set:
The Jay-Z Construction Set is a toolkit with all of the necessary software and raw material to create a new remix of Jay-Z's Black Album. It includes nine different variations on the Black Album, over 1200 clip art images, and a couple hundred meg of classic samples and breaks. The Jay-Z Construction Set is available on-line through filesharing networks and protocols such as BitTorrent.
This collection of material is certainly a violation of copyright, yet it points the way to a much richer vision for culture. I would hope that, in the near future, artists and publishers will see the value of releasing not only polished works, but the bits and parts used to create a work, including those parts that were rejected.
This is good not only for fanboy obsessives, but could serve to train people's musical ears, helping them hear the difference between different mixes of music. It would obviously be a boon to unexperienced musicians who could learn much from the choices other musicians and producers make. DJs would certainly have more opportunity to creatively add to the originals with this sort of access. And, likely, such efforts would help identify new talent.
Combine this with a system that permits "recipe" mixes as I've written about before (A History Palette for Music and The Grey Album - No Copying Necessary) and there is no danger of the artists and producers losing money. Indeed, such a model has already been quite successful in another media - videogames.
Many videogames permit players to create new content for the game engine, such as levels, maps and mods. This new content is freely distributable (at least for noncommercial purposes) and frequently incorporates content created by the original game designer along with new user-created content. This has been incredibly successful for videogame companies. The more content there is, the more popular the game becomes. The ability to create and add content creates feverish and committed communities of fans for a game. Imagine if musicians had such communities working for them.
The videogame model works for the game companies for a couple of reasons, but could also work for music companies:
1) You need to purchase the game engine for the content to be useful. In my recipe model, the mixing software that recreates the mix from the recipe would serve this role. However, it wouldn't be a significant revenue stream for the artist.
2) Often, the levels, maps and mods created by fans include content originally created by the game creator and shipped as part of the game engine. The shared levels and maps generally don't include copies of this content, since it is assumed that the downloaders already have the content and it saves on file size. In essence, many of these shared levels are what I would call "recipes" that remix the existing content in the game. Of course, there are full mods with entirely new content, but those are relatively rare (though they can be extremely popular and creative). Here is where the music recipe model can compensate the artist. In order to create the remixed version of the music, a downloader of the recipe file is going to have to have access to the original works, which, presumably, would be paid for in some manner through a legal download system.
Of course, the Jay-Z Construction Set points to an advantage for musicians that game companies don't share. Generally, game companies don't really have the luxury of shipping alternate takes on a level or unfinalized content for the game. However, when a musician releases a wide variety of takes and alternates, which were created organically, they create a much richer ore that remixers can mine. The more material you release, the more things people can do with it, which means the more people will want it. Heck, musicians might eventually ship only the construction set along with their favored recipes.
In a related note, Furdlog pointed out a brief Billboard interview with DJ Dangermouse (Danger Mouse Speaks Out On 'Grey Album')
Cardozo Law Professor Susan Crawford gives a wonderful description of a recent performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin in which the famous conductor discussed and demonstrated various re-orchestrations of the masterpiece, particularly Mahler's (Bits, Atoms, and Beethoven). Slatkin is a proponent of the view that classical music is not unchanging and unchangeable, but can be re-imagined with the times.
Being an IP professor, Crawford can't help but apply this insight to the ongoing battles over copyright:
Maybe (here's the tie-in to innovation and intellectual property) we're in an era in which we're beginning numbly to accept that "content" is just provided to us. It's an atom, a thing that floats in space, unchanging. We can hear or see it, as part of a mass content-absorption experience, but we are at a distance from it.
But I think that she has it backwards. We aren't at the beginning of an era where we numbly accept content. The beginning of that era was when Edison first set stylus to wax cylinder, the beginning of the era of mechanical reproduction. It was an era of unchangeable physical format that could only be produced and distributed efficiently en masse. That era is dying.
After less than a century of dominance, I believe that people are waking up from the consumerist coma induced by the era of mechanical reproduction. What we are seeing is the birth of a new era, an era of empowerment, where people are both consumers and producers of content, a wonderful bricolage of both old and new. Blogs are one example (if you are reading this, you aren't reading only what traditional publishers put out), but so is the Grey Album, Phantom Edit, machinima, and the whole modding community (among others).
Of course, the beneficiaries of the old era (e.g., RIAA, MPAA, etc.) are busy trying their best to stop this new era from succeeding. They will ultimately fail, but not without doing damage in the meantime.
Prof. Jack Balkin has made a couple of good posts about freedom of speech, democracy and blogging (What I learned about blogging in a year and Political Organization and Political Discussion on the Internet). The posts are mostly in response to Cass Sunstein's wildly overblown fears of internet-facilitated cultural isolation in Republic.com and a recent article in the New York Times that has a similar thesis (Politics of the Web: Meet, Greet, Segregate, Meet Again).
Frankly, I've never really understood Sunstein's fears. It seems to me that we have far more to fear from the mass media, whether that mass media was the Catholic Church prior to the 95 Thesis or that mass media epitomized in The Triumph of the Will. I think the major conceptual problem with Sunstein's thesis is that he seems to assume that people are mostly passive consumers of information. This is one of the critical elements of the traditional mass media model. In the past, mass media has generally been dependent on top-down control of the means of production and distribution to fill the minds of passive consumers. Today's internet media doesn't eliminate the traditional model directly, but provides a competing means for bottom-up production and distribution that assumes active participation and production by people who aren't merely passive consumers.
In many ways, actually, the top-down and bottom-up means of production and distribution are complimentary, which is why Sunstein's calls for some sort of top-down control over the bottom-up internet strike me as so odd. Sunstein's thesis makes sense only to the extent that the public cannot be trusted (whether for social, technical, economic or legal reasons) to be both consumer and producer, recipient and distributer. If there are problems, the solution seems to be to give more capability to consumers to produce and distribute, rather than attempt to replicate mass media controls.
Terra Nova has an interesting little article on so-called "rogue servers" that host MMORPGs (Free Rogue Server Achieves Significant Population). Most, if not all (any P2P MMORPGs out there?), MMORPG are based on the client/server model, where each user has a client that talks to a centralized server. The client programs are either sold for a one-time fee or given away. The business model is based on charging subscriptions for the client programs to have access to the server. The issue of rouge servers arises when hackers reverse-engineer or obtain by other means the server software and begin running their own servers.
From a free speech and copyright overreach point of view there are serious legal and policy issues in any attempt to thwart many of these "rogue servers." See, EFF's work on the Blizzard v. BNETD case for some details on some of them.
The discussion on Terra Nova is quite interesting and there is the suggestion of franchising the running of servers. But why not go farther? Compete with these rogue servers by creating server subscriptions. That is, you can have a client and subscribe to the main server farms, or you can run your own server (for you and your friends/clan, perhaps). As a server manager, you subscribe to a service that keeps your server up-to-date with patches and new content (which you use to keep your friends happy).
The Shifted Librarian is trying to bring more attention to library policy in Illinois, particularly a new plan from the governor to give one book a month free to every child from birth to five years old (Giving a Child a Book Versus Giving a Child an Entire Support Institution). At the same time, however, the governor is cutting funding for existing libraries. I agree with Jenny that the state certainly shouldn't be cutting library funding at the same time it is giving books to children not yet old enough to read. However, I really like the giving books away part.
Why not split the difference?
What if Illinois spent at least part of the $26 million for the book give away program to install book publishing equipment in every library in Illinois? Then, just like the Internet Bookmobile, children would be able to walk into a library and walk out with a book they could keep. Frankly, I think every school and library should have book publishing equipment. Given enough scale it is probably cheaper to print out most public domain books and give them away then deal with the costs of checking them out and restocking. Heck, you could have an option: check the book out and be subject to possible late fees, or pay $1 or so and keep the book. Might work out pretty well.
Thanks to the new Second Life license, discussed here (New IP Rules for Second Life), there has been a request by a director of machinima to "film" in the world of Second Life. Permission has, of course, been granted.
Cool.
The San Diego Union-Tribune runs a Reuters wirestory on the difficulties some have taking time off from their TiVo (PluggedIn: TV viewers find TiVo addictive). A long list of recorded shows on TiVo apparently makes some feel guilty not watching them. While in the past, if you missed a show, you simply missed it. Now the show sits on TiVo's hard drive waiting for you to watch it. I can imagine this can be a problem for some, but most people have experienced similar feelings at one time or another. Have you ever felt guilty about not keeping up with a newspaper subscription, for example? Do you have a stack of magazines waiting to be read, eventually?
Though I don't think this phenomena particularly compelling, I do think that the social ramifications of TiVo are going to be quite interesting, as we increasingly switch from traditional broadcast to new hybrid models.
Side note ... who else thinks that the TiVo trademark is in danger of becoming genericized?
via Techdirt, see also BoingBoing
If you are not familiar with it, you should definitely check out America's Army, the videogame produced for and about the US Army. The videogame itself is excellent and the concept, videogames that stress realism as a recruiting tool, is not exactly revolutionary, but not far from it. The game itself has been out for a year now, with a major update released just this past week. For a good overview of the game and some of the issues being raised, see this Chicago Tribune (reg. req.) article (Army targets recruits with new game). Once you've read the article ... give the game a try. It's free and if you don't want to hassle the 500MB download, get a copy on CD from your local Army recruiter.
via En Banc
UPDATE 0915 PT
MIT's Technology Review has an interesting article regarding some of the issues surrounding realistic war-based videogames (War Games). The article discusses America's Army, of course, but also September 12th. There is also quite a provocative quote from one game company:
In a world being torn apart by international conflict, one thing is on everyone’s mind as they finish watching the nightly news: 'Man, this would make a great game.'
It'll be interesting to see where Kuma Reality Games goes with their news-based game Kuma War ("From the Headlines to your PC").
Gonzalo Frasca, a game theorist and author of September 12th, thinks his ideas were somewhat misinterpreted by the article (Henry Jenkins on War Games).
Ernie the Attorney points to a neat little program called the iTunes Catalog that lets iTunes users (Mac only) create a professional-looking catalog (including album cover art) of all your iTunes music in HTML of PDF formats (What's in your iTunes music catalogue?). You can check out a sample catalog taken from Ernie's collection here (Ernest's Library). I think this very cool (though I don't have an iPod).
However, a few questions/points:
First, why do you have to pay ($10) for this software? The HTML catalogs can easily be linked into the iTunes store, thus providing lots of free advertisement for iTunes and their licensed artists. I rather expect Apple and its now numerous rivals to provide this functionality in upcoming releases for free. Heck, I would imagine that they would host the catalogs free-of-charge.
Second, where is the easy ability to publish playlists and the associated software that will let me automatically download all the music to go along with someone's playlist that I trust? I have eclectic tastes in music, but generally I don't want to indiscriminately mix genres (discriminately mixing genres for a playlist is something else). Playlist functionality would be a useful addition to all these online systems.
Third, people always talk about the social benefits of Original Napster-like collection browsing. Doesn't software like this provide almost the same social benefits (and in some ways, more), while being fully legitimate?
Tonight, while the trick-or-treaters visit, I will be screening Nosferatu in my driveway on an 80" HDTV projection screen.
Released in silent black and white in 1922, Nosferatu is an unauthorized adaptation of the novel "Dracula" by Bram Stoker and is widely considered one of the classics of cinema. Certainly, many think it is the best adaptation of Dracula in film, one of the most influential horror movies of all time and a masterpiece of Expressionist filmmaking. Thanks to copyright law, however, this film was very nearly lost to us (The Saga of Nosferatu).
Florence Stoker, widow of Bram Stoker (who had died in 1912), sued the producers of Nosferatu for infringement and won. As part of the 1925 decision, all copies of Nosferatu were to be destroyed. Most were. Over the next few years, any copies that became public were also destroyed. This may have meant the end of the film, except that a few isolated copies managed to survive Florence Stoker's death in 1937.
Thank goodness for "pirates."
Jenny Levine, aka The Shifted Librarian, has a great line in her short post on this blog and the DMCA exemptions (Chipping Away at Fair Use). If I had a "quote of the week", this would definitely be it:
If public libraries didn't already exist, would we be able to start them in this day and age? My guess is no.
According to the Iraqi blog Healing Iraq, "videogames are a huge part of [Iraqi] society" (Gamers of the world...UNITE):
Almost everyone I know, regardless of their socioeconomic status, either owns a console or has regular access to one. Almost every neighbourhood in Baghdad has what you might call a 'videogame cafe' with several consoles where people can play for about a dollar an hour.
LAN parties are also quite popular. Interesting.
via Due Diligence
The Shifted Librarian reminds us how fragile modern data storage devices are by pointing to a librarian and archivists guide to preserving CDs and DVDs (Please Do Not Feed the DVDs). The HTML guide can be found here (Care and Handling of CDs and DVDs: A Guide for Librarians and Archivists) or in ([PDF]). Jenny reports from a recent librarian's conference A/V panel:
One person in the audience said his library gets only a dozen or so circs out of their DVDs because they are used so heavily and they don't hold up well. Judy from Schaumburg said her library gets a much higher circ rate, with some lasting as long as 120 circs.
VentureBlog has a good report the recent conference at Dartmouth, Unleashed: The Summit on Wireless and Mobile Computing, and what the future may hold for digital connectivity (Ubiquity Breeds Utility). The article notes how Dartmouth has led the way in being one of the most wired of college campuses, and their experience with the cutting edge may provide insight for the mass market future. The author of the piece, Naval Ravikant suggests, among other things, that:
Read the article for explanations and many more interesting points.
via Due Diligence
The Independent has an interesting story about an advertising technique known as "memory morphing" (Selling you a new past). Even if you didn't particularly like using a product, this advertising technique will help to mold your memories so that you "remember" liking the product. Experiments have shown people "remembering" meeting Bugs Bunny at Disneyland (highly unlikely - and unfortunate - I have to ask, where is the "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" sequel?), and recalling an orange drink spiked with vinegar and salt as "refreshing." One example of this technique in the wild would be the "Remember the Magic" campaign run by Disney.
