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From today’s Guardian:

What does a heart attack feel like?

… The “Hollywood heart attack” is dangerously misleading and because of it, many of us ignore the real symptoms until it is too late. … The Hollywood heart attack … involves dramatic chest clutching and collapse. But in reality, symptoms vary. They can be woolly, ambiguous and easy to ignore. It is very common to have a central chest pain that can spread to the arms, neck and jaw. You may feel sweaty, light-headed, sick or short of breath. You may simply feel a dull ache, mild discomfort or heavy sensation in your chest that makes you feel ill. Or there may be a chest pain that spreads to your back or stomach. Some people say the pain was like bad indigestion. …

The Case of the Mistaken Flights

18 April, 200820 August, 2019

| 8 Comments

| advertising, Contract, Mistaken offers

Look up, it’s Aer Lingus
Aer Lingus used to know how to do public relations – in my youth a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, it had three very powerful advertising campaigns which had a profound effect on me. One used the Gallagher & Lyle song “Breakaway” (YouTube) featuring the lyric “breakaway, fly across your ocean / breakaway, time has come for you”. The second featured the musical tag line “Look up, it’s Aer Lingus, there’s a little piece of Ireland flyin’ by”, with a little girl playing in a field looking up at an Aer Lingus Boeing flying overhead – it gave rise to Aer Lingus’s most enduring slogan, which I have used at the head of this paragraph. And the third was called “You’re Home” (YouTube) and featured Gabriel’s Oboe; it never failed to induce a catch in the voice, a lump in the throat, and a tear in the eye. Judging by a controversy that has flared over the last day or two, however, they seem long since to have lost this knack for connecting with the Irish zeitgeist. Instead, they have flown into a tempest of controversy which they moved to abate only after two days of pressure amounting to a public relations debacle for the airline.…

Incitement to Anorexia

16 April, 200811 May, 2010

| 5 Comments

| advertising, Censorship, Freedom of Expression, US Supreme Court

L’Assemblée nationale francaise (the lower house of the French parliament) yesterday passed a “Draft law aimed at fighting incitement to seek extreme thinness or anorexia” providing for fines of to €30,000 and terms of imprisonment of up to two years for inciting to “excessive thinness” and more if the incitement results in death (see Associated Press | Daily Telegraph | Guardian | International Herald Tribune here and here | Irish Independent | Irish Times | Media Law Prof Blog here and here | New York Times; update Volokh, including the French text of the Bill). The Bill will go before le Sénat (the upper house) next month. According to the Guardian, the Bill:

would bar any form of media, including websites, magazines and advertisers, from promoting extreme thinness, encouraging severe weight-loss or methods for self-starvation … [and] is specifically aimed at what French MPs called pro-anorexia “propaganda” websites … [which] support anorexia as a lifestyle choice rather than a medical disorder … The blogs and forums, which have developed in the US since 2000 and grown in France over the past two years, often include talk-boards frequented mainly by teenage girls and young women with advice on how to get through the pain of extreme hunger after eating a yoghurt a day, or how to hide extreme weight-loss from parents or doctors.

…

Fox might report, but they won’t let us decide

27 October, 200719 November, 2010

| No Comments

| advertising, Copyright, Fair use, Media and Communications

Over on Lex Ferenda, DaithÃ has highlighted that, in the US, Fox News has written to US Republican Presidential candidate John McCain asking him to stop using a clip of his own words from a debate in a political advertisement. In fact, not content with taking on one presidential candidate, DaithÃ points out that they have decided to take on all of them, writing to them all in similar terms.

Fox are playing a dangerous game here (well, dangerous for them, at any rate). There is a very strong argument that First Amendment political speech concerns make this advertisment a non-commercial fair use (don’t just take my word for it; Michael Geist thought so too during a similar Canadian flap last January). And an express Federal Circuit Court holding to that effect would certainly set the cat amongst the pigeons for those broadcasters like Fox who continue to insist on restricting copyright in political debates which they host / broadcast. In fact, Fox seem to be the main holdout against Lessig‘s petition to the US political parties and broadcast networks to license Presidential debates freely after they are initially broadcast – either by putting the debates into the public domain, or by permitting anyone to use or remix the contents of those debates, for any reason whatsoever, so long as there is attribution back to any purported copyright holder.…

Watching Your Every Move

14 June, 200723 November, 2010

| 5 Comments

| advertising, Digital Rights, Privacy

I don’t usually do this, but an Editorial in yesterday’s New York Times (13 June 2007; sub req’d) is so important, and so perfectly reflects my views, that it’s worth reproducing in full (in fact, I wish I’d written it). The headline is the title to this post: “Watching Your Every Move”, and the strapline on the electronic front page makes the point perfectly:

Privacy is too important to leave up to the companies that benefit financially from collecting and retaining data.

The Editorial itself ran as follows:

Watching Your Every Move

Internet users are abuzz over Googleâ€™s new Street View feature, which displays ground-level photos of urban blocks that in some cases even look through the windows of homes. If that feels like Big Brother, consider the reams of private information that Google collects on its users every day through the search terms they enter on its site.

…

Here we go again

13 May, 200714 September, 2020

| 9 Comments

| advertising, Freedom of Expression, Irish Society, Media and Communications

The headline in today’s Sunday Independent says it all: Shock as ad on autistic children banned. Niamh Horan reports:

A new advertisement highlighting the urgent needs of autistic children in Ireland has been banned from radio stations on the grounds that it is too political.

Now Irish Autism Action [IAA], which champions the rights of Irish children suffering from autism, has said they are surprised that the ad was banned by both the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) and the national State broadcaster, RTÉ.

We have been here before. …

BCI News

16 April, 200711 June, 2018

| 4 Comments

| advertising, Digital Rights, Freedom of Expression, Media and Communications, Tobacco Control

My, but the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) is being busy. Two important developments deserve comment: this week’s new codes and today’s announcement of a new christian radio channel. And they are linked.

First, the Codes. …