Brian McNeil wrote:
On Mon, 2009-12-21 at 19:23 +0000, Charles Matthews wrote:
WMUK list CC Steve Virgin
Charles Matthews wrote:
Brian McNeil wrote:
Stephen Fry reading his favourite Yeats poem anyone?
Have you seen the recent Doonesbury strand about celeb voices for satnav? This one actually might have some legs.
So Stephen Fry is represented by Hamilton Hodell: http://www.hamiltonhodell.co.uk/page.asp?partid=3
And is so pro-Web it hurts: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7926509.stm
So this is to follow up, surely. Who would like to contact the agency, explain that a smallish gesture of recording a poem on own machine and posting it to Commons is something Stephen could do to back up his comment on the BBC page: "The past co-exists"? Which is very Yeatsian. And doing it on New Year's Day would be symbolic timing.
I would be more than happy to draft something and have a few people pick it over before sending. I would like to actually be cheeky enough to capitalise on the WikiVoices session Mike Peel and I are doing on Wednesday with Jimmy Wales. That is, if a good appeal for a "far more valuable than money" donation can be drawn up by Wednesday, why not ask Jimmy to send it to Stephen Fry's agent?
I'm going to put some technical issues up on the Talk page of the draft press release. As has been pointed out on this list, and as was clear from the reaction I had on Wikisource to the 1939 deaths I listed, the difference between the UK and US public domain positions is something serious here. We need to steer round that. Also the audio recording issue brings up a file format problem (should be .spx from the point of view of Commons) and this can't just be waved away. Whoever deals with this needs to be on top of the format issue (from research last night it looks to me like a MIDI file could be converted, but that needs more work). So right now I'm not sure about elaborating the plan any further.
Charles