Friday, June 24, 2011

Rainbow encircles Chinese plane

An unusual sight appeared in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region where a circular shaped rainbow appears to encircle the shadow of a plane.

Update: The video has been removed. You can see it here.

5 comments:

Mark said...

Can't see the video as it's been removed by the user, but I suspect what he was looking at was a Brocken Spectre

arbroath said...

Yes, that's what it looks like.

Why do people upload videos then remove them a day later?

It's a growing trend.

cath said...

I wonder if once CBS or Telegraph or whoever gets permission to use the footage in their own video, they also get copyright privileges, and the original has to be taken down?

arbroath said...

I don't know, Cath.

Sometimes they say they've been removed because of a copyright claim, then others are just 'removed'.

There's an interesting article here ...

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/0616/breaking39.html

cath said...

I used to volunteer on the editorial board of a small academic publication. Basically, we published papers and theses online that had been submitted to us by people in our discipline. Anyways, if someone's paper -- or a revised version thereof -- was accepted for publication by a "real" journal or publishing house, as a condition of it being published, the author to have us remove the paper from our website.

In our case, it made sense -- the publisher doesn't want to compete with someone distributing the same work for free, and the author receives more cred for having a refereed publication which gets properly advertised, distributed to libraries, etc. And this is kind of what I think might have happened with the two videos you posted this week -- some news agency got hold of the footage and purchased the right to use it on the condition that the person who shot the video take their version down. After all, they want people to view the video on their site, not on yours (or on the person's YouTube channel, or whatever).

But in the story you linked to, the one being protected is the distributor that "discovered" the video and shopped it out. There's a kind of "finders keepers" ethic there that seems wrong to me. I hope the guy who filmed it ends up getting a share (or maybe all) of the royalties.