It’s funny, there’s an awful lot of stuff in the US code that would surprise most folks.

For example, in the world of video production, folks often talk about how there are certain buildings that are copyrighted, thus preventing their incorporation into videos. Or else folks say, “it’s a gray area” …

One gets the feeling that it’s in the best interests of the copyright holder to keep this a “gray area,” because confusion leads to capitulation.

Doesn’t seem very gray to me.

(a) Pictorial Representations Permitted.— The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place.

Title 17, Section 120.

I’m working on a more extensive post dealing with some of these issues.

The Adobe Flash plugin for Quicktime seems to only support movies with a duration of 2^24 milliseconds. That’s about 4 hours and 39 minutes. Funny enough, I had reason to compress a 4 hour and 41 minute movie today. The FLV format is supposed to support up to 2^32, using an extended timestamp attribute, but it sure doesn’t seem like the plugin makes use of it. After 16777216 milliseconds, we roll back to zero.

Interestingly though, the files are still valid and playable, they just can’t be indexed properly by the various FLV metadata injectors. And progressively downloading a four hour movie isn’t such a great choice.

The fix? When you’re injecting metadata, watch for the timestamp to roll and then just tack on an extra 2^24 to all the timestamps from there on out. It’s a bit dirty, but it’ll work, since the truth is you’re matching timestamps to byte offsets – once you’ve built your metadata array, the timestamps in video packets don’t matter.