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Tom Thomson

Thomas John Thomson (August 5, 1877 – July 8, 1917) was a Canadian artist active in the early 20th century. During his short career, he produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas. His works consist almost entirely of landscapes, depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. He used broad brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson's accidental death by drowning at 39 shortly before the founding of the Group of Seven is seen as a tragedy for Canadian art.

Raised in rural Ontario, Thomson was born into a large family of farmers and displayed no immediate artistic talent. He worked several jobs before attending a business college, eventually developing skills in penmanship and copperplate writing. At the turn of the 20th century, he was employed in Seattle and Toronto as a pen artist at several different photoengraving firms, including Grip Ltd. There he met those who eventually formed the Group of Seven, including J. E. H. MacDonald, Lawren Harris, Frederick Varley, Franklin Carmichael and Arthur Lismer. In May 1912, he visited Algonquin Park—a major public park and forest reservation in Central Ontario—for the first time. It was there that he acquired his first sketching equipment and, following MacDonald's advice, began to capture nature scenes. He became enraptured with the area and repeatedly returned, typically spending his winters in Toronto and the rest of the year in the Park. His earliest paintings were not outstanding technically, but showed a good grasp of composition and colour handling. His later paintings vary in composition and contain vivid colours and thickly applied paint. His later work has had a great influence on Canadian art—paintings such as The Jack Pine and The West Wind have taken a prominent place in the culture of Canada and are some of the country's most iconic works.

Thomson developed a reputation during his lifetime as a veritable outdoorsman, talented in both fishing and canoeing, although his skills in the latter have been contested. The circumstances of his drowning on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park, linked with his image as a master canoeist, led to unsubstantiated but persistent rumours that he had been murdered or committed suicide.

Although he died before the formal establishment of the Group of Seven, Thomson is often considered an unofficial member. His art is typically exhibited with the rest of the Group's, nearly all of which remains in Canada—mainly at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound.

Early years
Thomas John "Tom" Thomson was born on August 5, 1877, in Claremont, Ontario, the sixth of John and Margaret Thomson's ten children. He was raised in Leith, Ontario, near Owen Sound, in the municipality of Meaford. Thomson and his siblings enjoyed both drawing and painting, although he did not immediately display any major talents. He was eventually taken out of school for a year because of ill health, including a respiratory problem variously described as "weak lungs" or "inflammatory rheumatism". This gave him free time to explore the woods near his home and develop an appreciation of nature.

The family were unsuccessful as farmers; both Thomson and his father often abandoned their chores to go hiking, hunting and fishing. Thomson regularly went on walks in Toronto with Dr. William Brodie (1831–1909), his grandmother's first cousin. Brodie was a well-known entomologist, ornithologist and botanist, and Thomson's sister Margaret later recounted that they collected specimens on long walks together.

Thomson was also enthusiastic about sports, once breaking his toe while playing football. He was an excellent swimmer and fisherman, inheriting his passion for the latter from his grandfather and father. Like most of those in his community, he regularly attended church. Some stories say that he sketched in the hymn books during services and entertained his sisters with caricatures of their neighbours. His sisters later said that they had fun "guessing who they were", indicating that he was not necessarily adept at capturing people's likeness.

Each of Thomson's nine siblings received an inheritance from their paternal grandfather. Thomson received $2000 in 1898 but seems to have spent it quickly. A year later, he entered a machine shop apprenticeship at an iron foundry owned by William Kennedy, a close friend of his father, but left only eight months later. Also in 1899, he volunteered to fight in the Second Boer War, but was turned down because of a medical condition. He tried to enlist for the Boer War three times in all, but was denied each time.

In 1901, Thomson enrolled at Canada Business College in Chatham, Ontario. The school advertised instruction in stenography, bookkeeping, business correspondence and "plain and ornamental penmanship". There, he developed abilities in penmanship and copperplate—necessary skills for a clerk. After graduating at the end of 1901, he travelled briefly to Winnipeg before leaving for Seattle in January 1902, joining his older brother, George Thomson. George and cousin F. R. McLaren had established the Acme Business School in Seattle, listed as the 11th largest business school in the United States. Thomson worked briefly as an elevator operator at The Diller Hotel. By 1902, two more of his brothers, Ralph and Henry, had moved west to join the family's new school.

Seattle (1901–04)
After studying at the business school for six months, Thomson was hired at Maring & Ladd as a pen artist, draftsman and etcher. He mainly produced business cards, brochures and posters, as well as three-colour printing. Having previously learned calligraphy, he specialized in lettering, drawing and painting. While working at Maring & Ladd, he was known to be stubbornly independent; his brother Fraser wrote that, instead of completing his work according to the direction provided, he would use his own design ideas, which angered his boss. Thomson may have also worked as a freelance commercial designer, but there are no extant examples of such work.

He eventually moved on to a local engraving company. Despite a good salary he left by the end of 1904. He quickly returned to Leith, possibly prompted by a rejected marriage proposal after his brief summer romance with Alice Elinor Lambert. Lambert, who never married, later became a writer; in one of her stories, she describes a young girl who refuses an artist's proposal and later regrets her decision.

Toronto (1905–12)

Thomson moved to Toronto in the summer of 1905. His first job upon his return to Canada was at the photo-engraving firm Legg Brothers, earning $11 a week. He spent his free time reading poetry and going to concerts, the theatre and sporting events. In a letter to an aunt, he wrote, "I love poetry best." Friends described him during this time as "periodically erratic and sensitive, with fits of unreasonable despondency". Apart from buying art supplies, he spent his money on expensive clothes, fine dining and tobacco. Around this time, he may have studied briefly with William Cruikshank, a British artist who taught at the Ontario College of Art. Cruikshank was likely Thomson's only formal art instructor.

In 1908 or 1909, Thomson joined Grip Ltd., a firm in Toronto that specialized in design and lettering work. Grip was the leading graphic-design company in the country and introduced Art Nouveau, metal engraving and the four-colour process to Canada. Albert Robson, then the art director at Grip, recalled that Thomson's early work at the firm was mostly in lettering and decorative designs for booklets and labels. He wrote that Thomson made friends slowly but eventually found similar interests to his coworkers. Several of the employees at Grip had been members of the Toronto Art Students' League, a group of newspaper artists, illustrators and commercial artists active between 1886 and 1904. The members sketched in parts of eastern Canada and published an annual calendar with illustrations depicting Canadian history and rural life.

The senior artist at Grip, J. E. H. MacDonald, encouraged his staff to paint outside in their spare time to better hone their skills. It was at Grip that many of the eventual members of the Group of Seven would meet. In December 1910, artist William Smithson Broadhead was hired, joined by Arthur Lismer in February 1911. Robson eventually hired Frederick Varley, followed by Franklin Carmichael in April 1911. Although Thomson was not himself a member, it was at the Arts and Letters Club that MacDonald introduced Thomson to Lawren Harris. The club was considered the "centre of living culture in Toronto", providing an informal environment for the artistic community. Every member of what would become the original Group of Seven had now met. MacDonald left Grip in November 1911 to do freelance work and spend more time painting, after the Ontario government purchased his canvas By the River (Early Spring) (1911).

Exploring Algonquin Park (1912–13)

Algonquin Park was established in 1893 by Oliver Mowat and the Ontario Legislature. Covering eighteen rectangular townships in Central Ontario, the Park was created to provide a space dedicated to recreation, wildlife and watershed protection, though logging operations continued to be permitted. Thomson learned of the Park from fellow artist Tom McLean. In May 1912, aged 34, he first visited the Park, venturing through the area on a canoe trip with his Grip colleague H. B. (Ben) Jackson. Together, they took the Grand Trunk Railway from Toronto to Scotia Junction, then transferred to the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, arriving at Canoe Lake Station. McLean introduced Thomson to the Park superintendent, G. W. Barlett. Thomson and Jackson later met ranger Harry (Bud) Callighen while they camped nearby on Smoke Lake.

It was also at this time that Thomson acquired his first sketching equipment. He did not yet take painting seriously. According to Jackson, Thomson did not think "his work would ever be taken seriously; in fact, he used to chuckle over the idea". Instead, they spent most of their time fishing, except for "a few notes, skylines and colour effects".

During the same trip, Thomson read Izaak Walton's 1653 fishing guide The Compleat Angler. Primarily a fisherman's bible, the book also provided a philosophy of how to live, similar to the one described in Henry David Thoreau's 1854 book Walden, or Life in the Woods, a reflection on simple living in natural surroundings. His time in Algonquin Park gave him an ideal setting to imitate Walton's "contemplative" life. Ben Jackson wrote:

"Tom was never understood by lots of people, was very quiet, modest and, as a friend of mine spoke of him, a gentle soul. He cared nothing for social life, but with one or two companions on a sketching and fishing trip with his pipe and Hudson Bay tobacco going, he was a delightful companion. If a party or the boys got a little loud or rough Tom would get his sketching kit and wander off alone. At times he liked to be that way, wanted to be by himself commune [sic] with nature."

Upon returning to Toronto, Jackson published an article about his and Thomson's experience in the Park in the Toronto Sunday World, included in which were several illustrations. After this initial experience, Thomson and another colleague, William Broadhead, went on a two-month expedition, going up the Spanish River and into Mississagi Forest Reserve (today Mississagi Provincial Park). Thomson's transition from commercial art towards his own original style of painting became apparent around this time. Much of his artwork from this trip, mainly oil sketches and photographs, was lost during two canoe spills; the first was on Green Lake in a rain squall and the second in a series of rapids.

In fall 1912, Albert Robson, Grip's art director, moved to the design firm Rous & Mann. A month after returning to Toronto, Thomson followed Robson and left Grip to join Rous & Mann too. They were soon joined by Varley, Carmichael and Lismer. Robson later spoke favourably of Thomson's loyalty, calling him "a most diligent, reliable and capable craftsman". Robson's success in attracting great talent was well understood. Employee Leonard Rossell believed that the key to Robson's success "was that the artists felt that he was interested in them personally and did all he could to further their progress. Those who worked there were all allowed time off to pursue their studies ... Tom Thomson, so far as I know, never took definite lessons from anyone, yet he progressed quicker than any of us. But what he did was probably of more advantage to him. He took several months off in the summer and spent them in Algonquin Park."

In October, MacDonald introduced Thomson to James MacCallum. A frequent visitor to the Ontario Society of Artists' (OSA) exhibitions, MacCallum was admitted to the Arts and Letters Club in January 1912. There, he met artists such as John William Beatty, Arthur Heming, MacDonald and Harris. MacCallum eventually persuaded Thomson to leave Rous and Mann and start a painting career. In October 1913, MacCallum introduced Thomson to A. Y. Jackson, later a founder of the Group of Seven. MacCallum recognized Thomson's and Jackson's talents and offered to cover their expenses for one year if they committed themselves to painting full time. MacCallum and Jackson both encouraged Thomson to "take up painting seriously, [but] he showed no enthusiasm. The chances of earning a livelihood by it did not appear to him promising. He was sensitive and independent, and feared he might become an object of patronage." MacCallum wrote that when he first saw Thomson's sketches, he recognized their "truthfulness, their feeling and their sympathy with the grim fascinating northland ... they made me feel that the North had gripped Thomson as it had gripped me since I was eleven when I first sailed and paddled through its silent places." He described Thomson's paintings as "dark, muddy in colour, tight and not wanting in technical defects". After Thomson's death, MacCallum helped preserve and advocated for his work.

Thomson accepted MacCallum's offer under the same terms offered to Jackson. He travelled around Ontario with his colleagues, especially to the wilderness of Ontario, which was to become a major source of inspiration. Regarding Algonquin Park, he wrote in a letter to MacCallum: "The best I can do does not do the place much justice in the way of beauty." He ventured to rural areas near Toronto and tried to capture the surrounding nature. He may have worked as a fire ranger on the Mattagami reserve. Addison and Little suggest that he guided fishing tours, although Hill finds this unlikely since Thomson had only spent a few weeks in the Park the previous year. Thomson became as familiar with logging scenes as with nature in the Park and painted them both.

While returning to Toronto in November 1912, Thomson stopped in Huntsville. The visit was possibly to meet with Winifred Trainor, a woman whose family owned a cottage on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park. Trainor was later rumoured to have been engaged to Thomson with a wedding planned for the late 1917, although little is known about their relationship.

Thomson first exhibited with the OSA in March 1913, selling his painting Northern Lake (1912–13) to the Ontario Government for $250. The sale afforded him time to paint and sketch through the summer and fall of 1913.

Early recognition (1914–15)

Thomson often experienced self-doubt. A. Y. Jackson recalled that in the fall of 1914, Thomson threw his sketch box into the woods out of frustration, and was "so shy he could hardly be induced to show his sketches". Harris expressed similar sentiments, writing that Thomson "had no opinion of his own work", and would even throw burnt matches at his paintings. Several of the canvases he sent to exhibitions remained unsigned. If someone praised one of his sketches, he immediately gave it to them as a gift. A turning point in his career came in 1914, when the National Gallery of Canada, under the directorship of Eric Brown, began to acquire his paintings. Although the money was not enough to live on, the recognition was unheard of for an unknown artist.

For several years he shared a studio and living quarters with fellow artists, initially living in the Studio Building with Jackson in January 1914. Jackson described the Studio Building as "a lively centre for new ideas, experiments, discussions, plans for the future and visions of an art inspired by the Canadian countryside". It was there that Thomson, "after much self-deprecation, finally submitted to becoming a full-time artist". They split the rent—$22 a month—on the ground floor while construction on the rest of the building was finished. After Jackson moved out in December to go to Montreal, Carmichael took his place. Thomson and Carmichael shared a studio space through the winter. On March 3, 1914, Thomson was nominated as a member of the OSA by Lismer and T. G. Greene. He was elected on the 17th. He did not participate in any of their activities beyond sending paintings for annual exhibitions. Harris described Thomson's strange working hours years later:

"When he was in Toronto, Tom rarely left the shack in the daytime and then only when it was absolutely necessary. He took his exercise at night. He would put on his snowshoes and tramp the length of the Rosedale ravine and out into the country, and return before dawn."

In late April 1914, Thomson arrived in Algonquin Park, where he was joined by Lismer on May 9. They camped on Molly's Island in Smoke Lake, travelling to Canoe, Smoke, Ragged, Crown and Wolf Lakes. He spent his spring and summer divided between Georgian Bay and Algonquin Park, visiting James MacCallum by canoe. His travels during this time have proved difficult to discern, with such a large amount of ground covered in such a short time, painting the French River, Byng Inlet, Parry Sound and Go-Home Bay from May 24 through August 10. H. A. Callighen, a park ranger, wrote in his journal that Thomson and Lismer left Algonquin Park on May 24. By May 30, Thomson was at Parry Sound and on June 1 was camped at the French River with MacCallum.

Art historian Joan Murray noted that Thomson was at Go-Home Bay for the next two months, or at least until August 10 when he was seen again in Algonquin Park by Callighan. According to Wadland, if this timeline is correct, it would require "an extraordinary canoeist ... The difficulty is augmented by the fact of stopping to sketch at intervals along the way." Wadland suggested that Thomson may have travelled by train at some point and by steamship thereafter. Addison and Harwood instead said that Thomson had found much of the inland "monotonously flat" and the rapids "ordinary". Wadland found this characterization unhelpful, pointing out that the rapids Thomson had faced were hardly "ordinary".

MacCallum provided specific dates for two of Thomson's paintings—May 30 and June 1 for Parry Sound Harbour and Spring, French River, respectively. These are some of the only instances of precise dating for his work. Cottage on a Rocky Shore is a depiction of MacCallum's cottage contrasted with the vast expanse of sky and water. Evening, Pine Island is of a nearby island MacCallum took Thomson to visit. He continued to paint around the islands until he departed, probably because he found MacCallum's cottage too demanding socially, writing to Varley that it was "too much like north Rosedale".

Thomson continued canoeing alone until he met with A. Y. Jackson at Canoe Lake in mid-September. Though World War I had erupted that year, he and Jackson went on a canoe trip, in October meeting up with Varley and his wife Maud, as well as Lismer and his wife Esther, and daughter Marjorie. This marked the first time three Group of Seven members painted together, and the only time they worked with Thomson. In his 1958 autobiography, A Painter's Country, A. Y. Jackson wrote that, "Had it not been for the war, the Group [of Seven] would have formed several years earlier and it would have included Thomson."

Why Thomson did not serve in the war has been debated. Mark Robinson and Thomson's family said that he was turned down after multiple attempts to enlist, likely due to his poor health and age but also possibly because he had flat feet. Blodwen Davies wrote that Thomson's artist friends tried to convince him to not risk his life, but he decided to secretly volunteer anyway. Andrew Hunter has found this scenario to be improbable, especially given that other artist friends volunteer for the war, such as A. Y. Jackson. Thomson's sister suggested that he was a pacifist and that "he hated war and said simply in 1914 that he never would kill anyone but would like to help in a hospital, if accepted". William Colgate wrote that Thomson "brooded much upon" the war and that "he himself did not enlist. Rumour has it that he tried, and failed to pass the doctor. This is doubtful." Edward Godin, a companion, said "We had many discussions on the war. As I remember it he did not think that Canada should be involved. He was very outspoken in his opposition to Government patronage. Especially in the Militia. I do not think that he would offer himself for service. I know up until that time he had not tried to enlist." There is only one verifiable example of Thomson's opinion on the war, taken from a letter he wrote to J. E. H. MacDonald in 1915:

"As with yourself, I can't get used to the idea of [A. Y.] Jackson being in the machine and it is rotten that in this so-called civilized age that such things can exist, but since this war has started it will have to go on until one side wins out, and of course there is no doubt which side it will be, and we will see Jackson back on the job once more."

With MacCallum's year of financial support over, Thomson's financial future became uncertain. He briefly looked into applying for a position as a park ranger, but balked after seeing that it could take months for the application to go through. Instead, he considered working in an engraving shop over the winter. He made little effort to sell his paintings, preferring to give them away, though he brought in some money from the paintings he sold. In mid-November, he donated In Algonquin Park to an exhibition organized to raise money for the Canadian Patriotic Fund. It was sold to Marion Long for $50.

In the spring of 1915, Thomson returned to Algonquin Park earlier than he had in any previous year and had already painted twenty-eight sketches by April 22. From April through July, he spent much of his time fishing, assisting groups on several different lakes, and sketching when he had time. In July, he was invited to send paintings to the Nova Scotia Provincial Exhibition in September. Because he was in Algonquin Park, his friends selected three works to send—two unidentified works from 1914 and the sketch Canadian Wildflowers. From the end of September to mid-October, he spent his time at Mowat, a village on the north end of Canoe Lake. By November, he was at Round Lake with Tom Wattie and Robert McComb. In late November, he returned to Toronto and moved into a shack behind the Studio Building that Harris and MacCallum fixed up for him, renting it for $1 a month.

In 1915, MacCallum commissioned MacDonald, Lismer and Thomson to paint decorative panels for his cottage on Go-Home Bay. In October of that year, MacDonald went up to take dimensions. Thomson produced four panels which were probably meant to go over the windows. In April 1916, when MacDonald and Lismer went to install them, they found that MacDonald's measurements were incorrect and the panels did not fit.

Artistic peak (1916–17)
In March 1916, Thomson exhibited four canvases with the OSA: In the Northland (at that time titled The Birches), Spring Ice, Moonlight and October (then titled The Hardwoods), all of which were painted over the winter of 1915–16. Sir Edmund Walker and Eric Brown of the National Gallery of Canada wanted to purchase In the Northland, but Montreal trustee Francis Shepherd convinced them to purchase Spring Ice instead. The reception of Thomson's paintings at this time was mixed. Margaret Fairbairn of the Toronto Daily Star wrote, "Mr. Tom Thomson's 'The Birches' and 'The Hardwoods' show a fondness for intense yellows and orange and strong blue, altogether a fearless use of violent colour which can scarcely be called pleasing, and yet which seems an exaggeration of a truthful feeling that time will temper." A more favourable take came from artist Wyly Grier in The Christian Science Monitor:

"Tom Thomson again reveals his capacity to be modern and remain individual. His early pictures—in which the quality of naivete had all the genuineness of the effort of the tyro and was not the counterfeit of it which is so much in evidence in the intensely rejuvenated works of the highly sophisticated—showed the faculty for affectionate and truthful record by a receptive eye and faithful hand; but his work today has reached higher levels of technical accomplishment. His Moonlight, Spring Ice and The Birches are among his best." In The Canadian Courier, painter Estelle Kerr also spoke positively, describing Thomson as "one of the most promising of Canadian painters who follows the impressionist movement and his work reveals himself to be a fine colourist, a clever technician, and a truthful interpreter of the north land in its various aspects".

In 1916, Thomson left for Algonquin Park earlier than any previous year, evidenced by the many snow studies he produced at this time. In April or early May, MacCallum, Harris and his cousin Chester Harris joined Thomson at Cauchon Lake for a canoe trip. After MacCallum and Chester left, Harris and Thomson paddled together to Aura Lee Lake. Thomson produced many sketches which varied in composition, although they all had vivid colour and thickly-applied paint. MacCallum was present when he painted his Sketch for "The Jack Pine", writing that the tree fell over onto Thomson before the sketch was completed. He added that Harris thought the tree killed Thomson, "but he sprang up and continued painting".

At the end of May, Thomson took a job as a fire ranger stationed at Achray on Grand Lake with Ed Godin. He followed the Booth Lumber Company's log drive down the Petawawa River to the north end of the park. He found that fire ranging and painting did not mix well together, writing, "[I] have done very little sketching this summer as the two jobs don't fit in... When we are travelling two go together, one for canoe and the other the pack. And there's no place for a sketch outfit when your fire ranging. We are not fired yet but I am hoping to get put off right away." He likely returned to Toronto in late October or early November.

Over the following winter, encouragement from Harris, MacDonald and MacCallum saw Thomson move into the most productive portion of his career, with Thomson writing in a letter that he "got quite a lot done". Despite this, he did not submit any paintings to the OSA exhibition in the spring of 1917. It was during this time that he produced many of his most famous works, including The Jack Pine and The West Wind. MacCallum suggested that several canvas works were unfinished, including Woodland Waterfall, The Pointers and The Drive. Barker Fairley similarly described The West Wind as unfinished. Charles Hill has written that there are no reasons to believe Woodland Waterfall was unfinished. Similarly, while it has sometimes been suggested that The Drive was modified after Thomson's death, a reproduction from 1918 displays no discernible differences.

Thomson returned to Canoe Lake at the beginning of April, arriving early enough to paint the remaining snow and the ice breaking up on the surrounding lakes. He had little money but wrote that he could manage for about a year. On April 28, 1917, he received a guide's licence. Unlike previous years, he remained at Mowat with Lieutenant Crombine and his wife, Daphne. Thomson invited Daphne Crombie to select something from his spring sketches as a gift, and she selected Path Behind Mowat Lodge.

Besides the deep love he had come to develop for Algonquin Park, Thomson was beginning to show an eagerness to depict areas beyond the park and explore other northern subjects. In an April 1917 letter to his brother-in-law, he wrote that he was considering taking the Canadian Northern Railway west so he could paint the Canadian Rockies in July and August. A. Y. Jackson suggested Thomson would have travelled even further north, just as the other members of the Group of Seven eventually did.

Death

On July 8, 1917, Thomson disappeared during a canoeing trip on Canoe Lake. His upturned canoe was spotted later in the afternoon, and his body was discovered in the lake eight days later. It was noted that he had a four-inch cut on his right temple and had bled from his right ear. The cause of death was officially determined to be "accidental drowning". The day after the body was discovered, it was interred in Mowat Cemetery near Canoe Lake. Under the direction of Thomson's older brother George, the body was exhumed two days later, and re-interred on July 21 in the family plot beside the Leith Presbyterian Church in what is now the Municipality of Meaford, Ontario.

In September 1917, J. E. H. MacDonald and John William Beatty erected a memorial cairn at Hayhurst Point on Canoe Lake, to honour Thomson where he died.

There has been much speculation about the circumstances of Thomson's death, including that he was murdered or committed suicide. Though these ideas lack substance, they have continued to persist in the popular culture. Andrew Hunter has pointed to Park ranger Mark Robinson as being largely responsible for the suggestion that there was more to his death than accidental drowning. Hunter expands on this thought, writing, "I am convinced that people's desire to believe the Thomson murder mystery/soap opera is rooted in the firmly fixed idea that he was an expert woodsman, intimate with nature. Such figures aren't supposed to die by 'accident.' If they do, it is like Grey Owl's being exposed as an Englishman."

Artistic development
Thomson was largely self-taught. His experiences as a graphic designer with Toronto's Grip Ltd. honed his draughtsmanship. Although he began painting and drawing at an early age, it was only in 1912, when he was well into his thirties, that he began to paint seriously. His first trips to Algonquin Park inspired him to follow the lead of fellow artists in producing oil sketches of natural scenes on small, rectangular panels for easy portability while travelling. Between 1912 and his death in 1917, Thomson produced hundreds of these small sketches, many of which are now considered works in their own right, and are mostly found in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg and the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound.

Thomson produced nearly all of his works between 1912 and 1917. Most of his large canvases were completed in his most productive period, from late 1916 to early 1917. The patronage of James MacCallum enabled Thomson's transition from graphic designer to professional painter. Although the Group of Seven was not founded until after his death, his work was sympathetic to that of group members A. Y. Jackson, Frederick Varley, and Arthur Lismer. These artists shared an appreciation for rugged, unkempt natural scenery, and all used broad brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson's art also bears some stylistic resemblance to the work of European post-impressionists such as Vincent van Gogh. Other key influences were the Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, styles with which he became familiar while working in the graphic arts.

Thomson's artwork is typically divided into two bodies: the first are the small oil sketches on wood panels, of which there are around 400, and the second is of around 50 larger works on canvas. The smaller sketches were typically done en plein air in "the North", primarily Algonquin Park, in the spring, summer and fall. Mark Robinson later recounted that Thomson usually had a particular motif he wanted to depict before going into nature to find a comparison. The larger canvases were instead completed over the winter in Thomson's studio—an old utility shack with a wood-burning stove on the grounds of the Studio Building, an artist's enclave in Rosedale, Toronto. About a dozen of the major canvases were derived directly from smaller sketches. Paintings like Northern River, Spring Ice, The Jack Pine and The West Wind were only later expanded into larger oil paintings.

Sketches from 1913 and earlier use a variety of supports, including canvas laid down on paperboard, canvas laid down on wood and commercial canvas-board. In 1914, he began to favour the larger birch wood panels used by A. Y. Jackson, typically measuring around 21.6 × 26.7 cm (8½ × 10½ in.). From late 1914 on, Thomson alternated between painting on these inexpensive pieces of wood—some from crates, bookbinder's board, and other assorted sources—and composite wood-pulp boards.

Although the sketches were produced quickly, the canvases were developed over weeks or even months. Compared to the panels, they display an "inherent formality", and lack much of the "energy, spontaneity, and immediacy" of the original sketches. The transition from small to large required a reinvention or elaboration of the original details; by comparing sketches with their respective canvases, one can see the changes Thomson made in colour, detail and background textural patterns. Although few of the larger paintings were sold during his lifetime, they formed the basis of posthumous exhibitions, including one at Wembley in London in 1924, that eventually brought his work to international attention.

Described as having an "idiosyncratic palette", Thomson had exceptional control of colour. He often mixed available pigments to create new, unusual colours that, along with his brushwork, made his art instantly recognizable regardless of its subject. His painting style and the atmosphere, colours and forms of his work influenced the work of his colleagues and friends, especially Jackson, Lismer, MacDonald, Harris and Carmichael.

Trees

Thomson's most famous paintings are his depictions of pine trees, particularly The Jack Pine and The West Wind. David Silcox has described these paintings as "the visual equivalent of a national anthem, for they have come to represent the spirit of the whole country, notwithstanding the fact that vast tracts of Canada have no pine trees", and as "so majestic and memorable that nearly everyone knows them". Arthur Lismer described them similarly, saying that the tree in The West Wind was a symbol of the Canadian character, unyielding to the wind and emblematic of steadfastness and resolution.

Thomson had a great enthusiasm for trees and worked to capture their forms, their surrounding locations, and the effect of the seasons on them. He normally depicted trees as amalgamated masses, giving "form structure and colour by dragging paint in bold strokes over an underlying tone". His favourite motif was of a slight hill next to a body of water. His enthusiasm is especially apparent in an anecdote from Ernest Freure, who invited Thomson to camp on an island on Georgian Bay:

"One day while we were together on my island, I was talking to Tom about my plans for cleaning up the dead wood and trees and I said I was going to cut down all the trees but he said, 'No, don't do that, they are beautiful.'"

The theme of the single tree is common in Art Nouveau, while the motif of the lone, heroic tree goes back even further to at least Caspar David Friedrich and early German Romanticism. Thomson may also have been influenced by the work of MacDonald while working at Grip Limited. MacDonald in turn was influenced by the landscape art of John Constable, whose work he likely saw while in England from 1903 to 1906. Constable's art influenced Thomson's as well, something apparent when Constable's Stoke-by-Nayland (c. 1810–11) is compared with Thomson's Poplars by a Lake.

Thomson's earlier paintings were closer to literal renderings of the trees in front of him, and as he progressed the trees became more expressive as Thomson amplified their individual qualities. Byng Inlet, Georgian Bay shows the broken, high-keyed colour that Thomson and his colleagues experimented with later in his career, and is similar to Lismer's Sunglow. While Lismer only applied the technique to the water, Thomson applied it throughout the composition. According to MacCallum, Thomson worked on Pine Island, Georgian Bay over an extended period. He wrote that this painting had "more emotion and feeling than any other of [Thomson's] canvases". In contrast, MacDonald found it "rather commonplace in color & composition & not representative of Thomson at his best".

Skies

Thomson was preoccupied with capturing the sky, especially near the end of his career from 1915 onward. Paintings like Sunset—which was painted at water level in a canoe—illustrate his excited brushstrokes in capturing the lake's reflection. The painting was done over a grey-green ground, adding depth to both the light of the sky and the reflecting water. Paintings from 1913 and on consistently utilize the perspective of the canoe, with a narrow foreground of water, a distant shoreline and a dominating sky.

The 1915 volcanic eruption of Lassen Peak in California provided dramatic sunrises and sunsets in the northern hemisphere for the year. These skies provided artistic inspiration for Thomson and other artists in the same way that the eruption of Krakatoa in the previous century had inspired Edvard Munch. Sky effects were one of Thomson's main interests for the entire year, indicated by his heightened use of colour.

Harold Town has compared Sky (The Light That Never Was) to the works of J. M. W. Turner. In particular, he notes the way that the sky "[creeps] into the landscape, big rhythms supplanting small movement". The horizon disappears and pure movement is left behind.

Nocturnes

Thomson produced more nocturnes than the rest of the Group of Seven combined—roughly two dozen. MacCallum recalled that Thomson often spent his nights lying in his canoe in the middle of the lake, stargazing and avoiding mosquitoes. Besides capturing the nighttime sky, he also captured silhouettes of spruce and birch trees, lumber camps, two moose emerging from water and the northern lights, painting five different sketches of the aurora.

Mark Robinson recounted that Thomson stood and contemplated the aurora for an extended period of time before going back into his cabin to paint by lamplight. He sometimes completed nocturnes this way, going back and forth between painting indoors and looking at the subject outside until he completed the sketch. Other times, given the difficulty of painting by moonlight, many of the nocturnes were painted entirely from memory. MacCallum confirmed that the sketch Moose at Night was completed in this way, writing on the back "Winter 1916—at studio", implying it was probably painted in Toronto. His moonlight paintings use a "dreamy, pale-toned style", applying the techniques of Impressionism in his observations of light, reflection and atmosphere.

Flowers

As was typical for painters of the early twentieth century, Thomson produced still lifes of flowers, all of which appear in the form of sketches. His love of flowers may have developed from his father who, as a neighbour noted, had "a permanent half acre of a really good garden which was always worth going to see". Thomson's time spent as a child collecting samples with his naturalist relative William Brodie may have similarly influenced him, though his interest in painting flowers seems to have been more focused on patterning and decoration than on the horticultural specifics of the subject.

These paintings, especially Marguerites, Wood Lilies and Vetch and Wildflowers, are particularly powerful examples of the genre. J. E. H. MacDonald—himself deeply invested in floral imagery—was so captured by Marguerites, Wood Lilies and Vetch that he kept it for himself, writing "Not For Sale" on the back. Thomson's work is contrasted from MacDonald's by what Joan Murray calls, "its elegant, slightly funky form and throwaway spontaneity." Lawren Harris instead noted Wildflowers as a favourite, writing "1st class" on the verso. The colour of the sketch is less brilliant, but has superb brushwork and is well coordinated, setting blues against yellows and reds against whites.

Responding to his subject with improvisation, every painting is different in its colour scheme and arrangement. In all the sketches, he redirected emphasis from the delicacy of the flowers towards simple broad strokes of colour, something Harold Town thought "[imparted] a toughness of design sometimes missing in his harder themes of rock and bracken". In Water Flowers particularly, the shapes are handled so summarily that the focus moves entirely to the colour of the flowers. This, combined with the black background, produces a more abstract effect. The black backdrop also causes the colours of the flowers to appear more vivid.

Industry in nature

During Thomson's time in Algonquin Park, logging and the lumber industry were a constant presence. He often painted the machinery left behind by lumber companies; Lismer, MacDonald and he were especially drawn to the subject. A. Y. Jackson wrote, "It was a ragged country; a lumber company had slashed it up, and fire had run through it... Thomson was much indebted to the lumber companies. They had built dams and log chutes, and had made clearings for camps. But for them, the landscape would have been just bush, difficult to travel in and with nothing to paint."

Around 1916, Thomson followed the drive of logs down the Madawaska River, painting the subject in The Drive. MacDonald similarly expressed the drive in his 1915 painting Logs on the Gatineau. Besides the dams, pointer and alligator boats and log drives that appear in Thomson's work, other less obvious depictions of the lumber industry are evident. For example, areas cleared out due to logging appear in early sketches, such as Canoe Lake (1913) and Red Forest. The painting Drowned Land similarly displays the damage caused by logging operations and flooding due to damming. As well, the white birches present in many paintings only thrive in "sunny, open areas whose previous tree cover had been removed", meaning that logging was in some way necessary for them to flourish.

Thomson's and the Group of Seven's work reflects the typical Canadian attitudes of the time, namely that the available natural resources were meant to be exploited. Harold Town has argued that, while Thomson was not directly critical of industry, mining and logging, he "did not glorify industry in the bush." Paul Walton of McMaster University noted that Thomson occasionally referenced both the lumbering and tourism practices of Algonquin Park and "did not entirely ignore the damaging effects of logging on the environment... but for the most part he concentrated on newly opened vista of sky and water or on finding decorative patterns of colour, form, and texture in the tangle of underbrush, smaller trees, and bared rock, the 'bush' that was often the remnant of the original forest." Jackson first noted these distinctions in Thomson's works, from those "showing a low shore line and a big sky" and those "finding happy color motives amid [the] tangle and confusion" of "his waste of rock and swamp."

People

Thomson, like most of the members of the Group of Seven, rarely painted people. When he did, the human subject was usually someone close to him personally, such as the depiction of Shannon Fraser In the Sugar Bush. Harold Town observed that both Thomson and Canadian artist David Milne "shared in common a similar inability to draw the human figure", something professor John Wadland thought was "embarrassingly evident" in several of Thomson's portraits. Thomson's most successful attempts at capturing people typically feature figures far off in the distance, allowing them to blend in to the scene. This is apparent in paintings like Little Cauchon Lake, Bateaux, The Drive, The Pointers and Tea Lake Dam.

Town described paintings like Man with Axe (Lowery Dixon) Splitting Wood as stiff, yet still held together in a cohesive crudity. He described Figure of a Lady, Laura differently, interpreting it as a tender work, "well-designed and plainly expressed, this loving picture is so secure in intention that it survives, indeed triumphs, over the severe cracking of the paint". The figure in The Poacher is recorded deliberately, including his hat, hunting vest and blue shirt. The hot coal grill in front of him is drying his poach—likely venison.

Legacy and influence

Since his death, Thomson's work has grown in value and popularity. Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer wrote that he "is the manifestation of the Canadian character". Another contemporaneous Canadian painter, David Milne, wrote to National Gallery of Canada Director H. O. McCurry in 1930, "Your Canadian art apparently, for now at least, went down in Canoe Lake. Tom Thomson still stands as Canadian painter, harsh, brilliant, brittle, uncouth, not only most Canadian but most creative. How the few things of his stick in one's mind." Murray notes that Thomson's influence can be seen in the work of later Canadian artists, including Rae Johnson, Joyce Wieland, Gordon Rayner and Michael Snow. Sherrill Grace wrote that for Roy Kiyooka and Dennis Lee, he "is a haunting presence" and "embodies the Canadian artistic identity".

As of 2015, the highest price achieved by a Thomson sketch was Early Spring, Canoe Lake, which sold in 2009 for CAD$2,749,500. Few major canvases remain in private collections, making the record unlikely to be broken. One example of the demand his work has achieved is the previously lost Sketch for Lake in Algonquin Park; discovered in an Edmonton basement in 2018, it sold for nearly half a million dollars at a Toronto auction. The increased value of his work has led to the discovery of numerous forgeries on the market, such as those produced by convicted forger William Firth MacGregor. Art historian Joan Murray assembled a catalogue raisonné of Thomson works until her retirement in 2016.

In 1967, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery opened in Owen Sound. In 1968, Thomson's shack from behind the Studio Building was moved to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg. Many of his works are also on display at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. In 2004, another historical marker honouring Thomson was moved from its previous location near the centre of Leith to the graveyard in which he is now buried. The gravesite has become a popular spot for visitors to the area with many fans of his work leaving pennies or art supplies behind as tribute.

Though best known for his painting, Thomson is often mythologized as a veritable outdoorsman. James MacCallum contributed stories to this image. He has often been remembered as an expert canoeist, though David Silcox has argued that this image is romanticized. In the case of fishing, he was no doubt proficient. He had a deep love of fishing for his entire life, so much so that his reputation through Algonquin Park was equally divided between art and angling. Most who visited the Park were led by hired guides, but he travelled through the park on his own. Many of his fishing locations appear in his work.

title: Tom Thomson


text:
User talk:Skillet19

US Copyright Law                                    By: Josh Miller Intellectual property as we know it is always changing. In order to protect the creators of intellectual works, such as literary pieces, musical arrangements, and inventions, our country has set up a balance of rules and regulations. These statutes help to keep order and uniformity in dealing with problems that might arise regarding intellectual property. This system is composed of various elements that maintain a standard of intellectual justice. One of the components of this system is the copyright. In order to obtain a copyright, one must first obtain a copyright registration form. The copyright registration forms are different for each type of works but the process is generally the same. First, one must compile the work that they wish to copyright. Second, they must obtain a form pertaining to the type of work they have created. Then, they must send the form, a fee, and a copy of the work and all related material to the United States Copyright Office (USCO). The USCO will then review the work and determine whether or not a copyright can be granted. They will then notify the person or organization regarding the status of their work. If the request is granted a copyright is issued. The first United States Copyright Act went into effect in 1790. “It granted American authors the right to print, re-print, or publish their work for a period of fourteen years and to renew for another fourteen.” (1) This law was was intended to encourage writers and inventors to construct original works by giving them the sole ownership to their achievements. It was also designed to allow public domain to promote science and art thru public access. The Copyright Act of 1790 was adequate when it was first enacted, but as time went on it needed several revisions to maintain its adequacy to the modern society. It was first revised in 1831. Changes were made to the term of protection of copyrighted works to twenty-eight years and a renewal of fourteen years. In 1870, the copyright registrations were relocated to the Library of Congress Copyright Office. In 1886, through the Berne Convention, an treaty was established to allow authors international copyright protection in participating countries. In 1909, the renewal term was increased to twenty-eight years. In the 1976 Act, to adjust to recent technological developments, the term of copyright was extended to the author’s life plus fifty years while works for hire were covered for seventy-five years. Up until the last decade, copyright law was limited to protecting traditional mediums of copyrighted material such as books, cassette tapes, paintings, etc. With the invention of the personal computer, and later on the internet, a whole new medium for transporting intellectual property was created. This posed a potential problem for authors with the possibility of unauthorized reproduction and distribution of copyrighted material by those who did not own the rights to that property. It wasn’t until 1998 that intellectual property was protected on this new medium know as the PC (personal computer) and the internet. It was then that President Bill Clinton singed into law the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA “was the foundation of an effort by Congress to implement United States treaty obligations and to move the nation's copyright law into the digital age.” (2) It helped to curb piracy of copyrighted material by placing limits on how digital intellectual property could be handled. At the same time, though, the DMCA also tried to keep the information flowing freely as to allow the public domain to stay alive. While the DMCA was considered to be a major breakthrough to recording artists in 1998, like everything else in this modern age it became obsolete. New problems arose that could not be handled with the DMCA. These problems stem from both sides of the table. Some leaders in the music industry have been doing everything they can to stop online sharing of copyrighted music. In doing so, they are infringing on the rights of the purchaser of the music to make personal copies of music that they own for themselves by recording their music onto copy-protected CDs. “The anti-circumvention provisions [of the DMCA] have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright piracy.” (3) On the other hand, recording artists such as Metallica say that their music is being pirated despite efforts of the DMCA. They claim, “The trading of such information -- whether it's music, videos, photos, or whatever - is, in effect, trafficking in stolen goods.” (4) Digital media is distributed a number of different ways via the internet. One of the most popular ways is by using a peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing client. Probably the most famous digital media sharing system is a P2P client known as Napster. Napster deals mostly with music files (mp3’s) but it also allows the sharing of other types of media. The way it works is a person would go to Napster’s website (www.napster.com) and download a free copy of the client and become a member. Membership is also free. Then that person would type the name of an mp3 that they want to download. The client sends the information to Napster’s servers. The servers then find matches for that mp3 listed on other member’s computers who were running the client. The servers would then send the information back to that person’s client and would give them a list that they could choose who’s computer they wanted to download the mp3 from. Napster rapidly became an essential tool to audiophiles all across the world. This was the first time in history that the public could have access to so much copyrighted intellectual property with the ability to instantly use it. This appeared to be a humongous leap for the advancement of public domain, however, a good percentage of the music industry was up in arms. Since Napster allowed people to freely trade copyrighted music, some musicians and record labels claimed that they were being cheated out of royalties rightfully owed them. Some of them even took the company to court. “Hard rock band Metallica and rapper Dr. Dre have sued MP3-swapping company Napster, charging that it contributes to widespread piracy of their work online.” (5) Not all musicians are against Napster though. “Rapper Chuck D, a longtime supporter of independent artists' MP3 distribution, has weighed in as Napster's most vociferous backer in the music community.” (5) P2P clients such as Napster have become a powerful solution for independent artists who are not backed by the major labels. It helps them to gain an audience where their music might not have been heard via traditional means. P2P clients are not the only way that digital media is being potentially shared illegally. Personal Compact Disc (CD) duplication is becoming more popular than ever before. Most of the reason behind this is because of the fact that CD copying machines (CD burners) are cheaper, faster, and more efficient than a few years ago. A lot of people use CD burners in conjunction with P2P clients to make hard copies of music that they do not legally own. Most people that do copy CD’s do not sell them. They usually make copies for themselves. This is where the main debate regarding copyright protection of music comes into play. According to current copyright laws, “...[people] have the right to make backup copies of their content.” (6) Most people legitimately burn mixed CD’s of music that they already legally own in order to listen to their favorite songs from different artists. This way they have a CD with a bunch of songs that they want to listen to without having to skip over ones that they don’t like. This is a legal right that is given to the person when he or she purchases music. But the music industry is trying to take away this right by “...deploying “copy-protected CDs” that promise to curtail consumers’ ability to make legitimate, personal copies of music they have purchased.” (3) It is understandable that musicians and record labels are trying to protect themselves by inventing new types of encryption technology that stifle attempted acts of piracy of their copyrighted works, but it is not okay when they begin to infringe on the rights of others. Just because music is a multibillion dollar industry does not mean that these corporate giants should be allowed to freely step all over the general public in their attempt to control their profits. This cannot be tolerated. Some people are taking action against these “encrypted CD’s”. They do this by writing computer programs that break down the security codes that protect the CD’s from being copied. This action is know as circumvention. It is done in mostly by writing programs but it can be done other ways also. One way is to simply import the music in a different file format on one’s computer (such as .aiff) and then just translate it into a format that can be read by most CD burning software (such as .mp3). Probably the most simple non-technological solution can be done on CD’s produced by Sony Entertainment. Sony leaves a blank space on the outer rim of the CD that confuses computer CD-ROM (Compact Disc - Read Only Memory) drives into thinking that the CD is blank and therefore the drive labels the CD as unreadable. The way to get around this is to take a black marker and just draw a line around the outer rim of the CD. The music industry became sly to the fact that people were and would be decrypting their security techniques. They made sure that when the DMCA was drafted that it would contain a section regarding anti-circumvention. “Section 1201 contains two distinct prohibitions: a ban on acts of circumvention, as well as a ban on the distribution of tools and technologies used for circumvention.” (3) This pretty much allowed the industry to use whatever techniques they wanted to use to digitally protect their art. Anti-circumvention law do not only apply to music, they also apply to every type of digital media. The entertainment industry has been using section 1201 of the DMCA heavily. Sometimes they even abuse it by using it for what it was not intended. For example, when you purchase a Digital Video Disc (DVD) you usually have the ability to skip the movie previews that show before the feature presentation if you so desire. So, if you were to purchase a “...Disney DVD [that] prevents you from fast-forwarding through the commercials that preface the feature presentation, efforts to circumvent this restriction would be unlawful...” according to section 1201. (3) 	Another type of digital media is becoming very popular as more and more people are switching from “dial-up” to broadband internet connections. This type of digital media is known as streaming media. Streaming media is different from regular digital media (such as mp3’s and movies) in that it is not downloaded as a file. Media that is streamed is like listening to the radio without a tape player and watching television without a VCR. It is only viewable or audible instantaneously. This means that the media being transmitted cannot b copied. Most of the entertainment industry favors streaming media versus mp3’s. Streaming media usually requires a high-bandwidth connection to the internet in order to access it which is why it is now becoming a wider used media transport method as broadband connections to the internet are more prevalent each day. Streaming media is not completely “copyright safe” however. Some computer programmers have designed programs known as “stream rippers”. These “rippers” take the streamed media and transform it into other media file formats such as .mp3. These files are then able to be imported into CD burning software and copied onto a CD. Some people believe that stream rippers should be legal because it is the equivalent of taping a song off of the radio. Some in the music industry say that it should be illegal because it is just another form of copyright piracy. While the music industry is having such a tough time with piracy, the movie industry is also getting hit pretty hard too. With the invention of the internet and the DVD, countless ways of pirating copyrighted movies have been created. One can now search the internet for just about any movie and be able to download it with the click of a mouse. Programmers are even building faster ways of doing this with compression software such as DivX. With Divx, “You can download a full-length, full-motion, full-screen, DVD-quality feature film using a standard broadband connection in about the time it takes to have a pizza delivered.” (7) DivX was originally intended to allow people to rent movies online. One would be able to go to an online movie store, rent a movie with a credit card, download it, and watch it for a limited amount of rented time (usually five days). This system was great when it was used for what it was made for. Once hackers got a hold of DivX software, though, things changed. The came out with new versions of the software that allowed regular DVD’s to be encoded into DivX format. They then came out with new DivX players that would allow people to download and watch the movies completely free. Manufacturers of DVD’s have tried to combat this with copyright protection devices encoded into the discs. It seems that every time a new copyright technology is created, it is broken by hackers. This falls under the anti-circumvention laws but the area surrounding public domain and copyright infringement is so clouded that usually nothing gets done about it. Also, there are so many people out there that are decoding copyright technology that it is impossible to catch every one. The new age of the internet has also opened up a whole new world of opportunities for authors of copyrighted literary works. Authors are now able to transform to transform books and articles into electronic form (e-book). They can then sell their e-books on sites such as www.ebook.com. A person who wants a particular e-book can look on one of these sites, purchase the e-book, and download it for viewing. They can either view them on their desktop or laptop computer or transfer them onto their personal digital assistant (PDA). A PDA is a lightweight, hand-held, usually pen-based computer used as a personal organizer. Transferring an e-book onto a PDA is very convenient because they can be taken and viewed just about anywhere. This is practical for someone who likes to read who travels a lot. PDA’s can store more than one book at a time making it possible to have your entire personal digital library with you wherever you go. Unfortunately, e-books are prone to piracy too. Hackers have now found a way to crack encryption devices on Adobe’s e-book software. This makes it possible to download free copies of e-books with out the author’s consent. "The publishing industry stands to lose $1.5 billion through e-book piracy by 2005..." (8) 	This is not the end of the digital world for authors though. Companies “...such as Gemstar-TV Guide International and digital-rights management (DRM) firms such as ContentGuard...” have developed new technology to combat this type of piracy. (8) They are introducing security and copyright protection devices to publisher across the globe. These devices guarantee authors that they can protect their works from online piracy. So far, the long term effectiveness of these devices is inconclusive. To bring everything into perspective, copyright law is ever changing to adapt with the times. New bills and amendments are being introduced all the time by both sides of the table. Whether it be musicians, publishers, producers, free music activists or whoever, they all what their voice to be heard on these issues. They want to have an influence on what is done and what changes are made to copyright law. Copyright law was made to protect the creators of intellectual property from being taken advantage of. Some say that today it has crossed its boundaries while others persist that it is not doing enough. In any case, there is a long road ahead on this issue. All sides have valid points and it will take decades of legislature and debate till it all gets straightened out. No one person can figure this out alone. Constant molding of the law is how copyright protection has advanced as far as it has. In order to ensure a sturdy future of copyrights, we just have to make sure that they can still protect their owners while allowing science and the arts to progress through public domain.

Works Cited

1. Masciola, Amy. “Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States.”. November 22, 2002.

2. Executive Summary. Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Section 104 Report. . March 2003.

3. EFF Whitepaper: Unintended Consequences. Three Years Under the DMCA. . May 2002.

4. Jones, Christopher. “Metallica Rips Napster.” . April 13, 2000.

5. Borland, John. “Musicians launch national anti-Napster campaign.” . July 11, 2000.

6. The Consumer Technology Bill of Rights . May 2003.

7. What is DivX? May 2003.

8. Jacobs, Farrin and Allbritton, Chris. “E-book publishers face piracy panic.” . January 1, 2001.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:Skillet19


text:
LOC

LOC, L.O.C., Loc, LoC, or locs may refer to:

Places

 * Lóc, a village in Sângeorgiu de Pădure, Mureș County, Romania
 * Lócs, a village in Vas county, Hungary
 * Line of Contact, meeting place of Western and Eastern Allied forces at the end of World War II in Europe (1945)
 * Line of Control, a ceasefire line between Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts of Kashmir (1972–present)
 * Locwood stop, Hong Kong, MTR station code
 * Line of Contact (Nagorno-Karabakh) between Armenian and Azerbaijani forces (1994–present)

People with the name

 * L.O.C. (rapper) (born 1979), Danish rapper
 * Goldie Loc (born 1980), American rapper
 * Spider Loc (born 1979), American rapper
 * Tone Lōc (born 1966), American hip-hop artist and director
 * Laughlin Phillips or Loc (1924–2010), American museum director

Arts, entertainment, and media

 * LOC: Kargil, a 2003 Indian war film.
 * OG Loc, fictional character in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
 * Steel Battalion: Line of Contact or LoC, a 2004 videogame
 * Level of Concern, a 2020 single from Twenty One Pilots

Medicine

 * LOC, a medical acronym for Level of consciousness, a medical assessment of a patient's presence or degree of altered level of consciousness
 * Laryngo-onycho-cutaneous syndrome

Organizations

 * LeMoyne–Owen College, a historically black college in Memphis, Tennessee
 * Library of Congress, the de facto national library of the United States
 * Liga Obrera Comunista or Communist Workers League, a Trotskyist group in Spain active from 1976 to 1990
 * Loc Publishing, an imprint of VDM Publishing

Other uses

 * Lab-on-a-chip, a device that integrates multiple laboratory functions on a single chip
 * Letter of Credit LoC or L/C, is a letter from a bank or insurance company guaranteeing that a buyer's payment to a seller will be received on time and for the correct amount
 * Limit of convection or equilibrium level, the height at which a rising parcel of air is at the same temperature as its environment
 * Limiting oxygen concentration, the limiting concentration of oxygen below which combustion is not possible
 * Lines of code, a software metric used to measure the size of a software program
 * Liquid Organic Cleaner, a product of Amway from 1959
 * LOC record, geolocation information resource record in Domain Name System
 * Locs, a synonym for dreadlocks
 * Look out circular, a message used by Interpol in India to stop wanted people from leaving the country
 * Loss of control (aeronautics), one of the causes to aircraft accidents.
 * Localizer (aviation)
 * Local organizing committee

title: LOC


text:
IPhoto

iPhoto is a discontinued digital photograph manipulation software application developed by Apple Inc. It was included with every Mac computer from 2002 to 2015, when it was replaced with Apple's Photos application. Originally sold as part of the iLife suite of digital media management applications, iPhoto is able to import, organize, edit, print and share digital photos.

History
iPhoto was announced at Macworld 2002, during which Steve Jobs (then-CEO of Apple) also announced that macOS would be the default operating system on new Macs, and revealed new iMac and iBook models.

On March 7, 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced an iOS-native version of iPhoto alongside the third-generation iPad.

On June 27, 2014, Apple announced that they would cease development of iPhoto and work on a transition to their new Photos app. On February 5, 2015 Apple included a preview of Photos with a beta release of OS X Yosemite.

On April 8, 2015, Apple released OS X Yosemite 10.10.3, which included the new Photos app. iPhoto and Aperture were discontinued and removed from the Mac App Store, but can still be downloaded by users who previously purchased them.

macOS Mojave 10.14 was the last version of macOS to officially support iPhoto. A free, open-source application called Retroactive can modify iPhoto to enable it to continue running on macOS Catalina and later macOS releases.

macOS version
iPhoto is designed to allow the importing of pictures from digital cameras, local storage devices such as USB flash drives, CDs, DVDs and hardrives to a user's iPhoto Library. Almost all digital cameras are recognized without additional software. iPhoto supports most common image file formats, including several Raw image formats. iPhoto also supports videos from cameras, but editing is limited to trimming clips.

After photos are imported, they can be titled, labeled, sorted and organized into groups (known as "events"). Individual photos can be edited with basic image manipulation tools, such as a red-eye filter, contrast and brightness adjustments, cropping and resizing tools, and other basic functions. iPhoto did not, however, provide the comprehensive editing functionality of programs such as Apple's own Aperture, Adobe's Photoshop, Album) or GIMP.

iPhoto offers numerous options for sharing photos. Photo albums can be made into dynamic slideshows, with the option to add music imported from iTunes. Photos can be shared via iMessage, Mail, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Creating and sharing iCloud Photostreams is possible as well. iPhoto is also able to sync photo albums to any iPod with a color display. These iPods might also have an audio/video output to allow photos to be played back, along with music, on any modern television. Additionally, photos can be printed to a local printer, or, in certain markets, be sent over the internet to Kodak for professional printing. iPhoto users can order a range of products, including standard prints, posters, cards, calendars, and 100-page hardcover or softcover volumes, although such services are available only to users in certain markets.

iOS version
At an Apple media event on March 7, 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a new version of iPhoto for iOS. iPhoto for iOS was made available that day on the App Store for US$4.99, alongside the already-released iMovie and GarageBand for iOS. It officially supports the iPhone 4 and later, iPod Touch (4th and 5th generations), iPad 2 and later and iPad Mini (1st and 2nd generations), but users discovered that it could be installed manually on older devices using Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility.

iPhoto for iOS offers a feature set fairly comparable to that of its Mac counterpart. It can organize photos that are synced to the device or taken with its camera. Editing features include color correction tools and photo effects, as well as cropping and straightening tools. iPhoto for iOS lacks tools for creating books, calendars, cards and ordering prints. It can, however, create "Photo Journals": digital photo collages that can be uploaded to iCloud and shared.

iPhoto for iOS was highly praised for its professional tools, good performance and compatibility.

iPhoto for iOS was discontinued in 2014 and removed from the App Store in favor of the Photos app, which shipped with iOS 8.

title: IPhoto


text:
New Republic

New Republic may refer to:

Places

 * New Republic, California, former name of Santa Rita, Monterey County, California
 * New Republic (Santarem), district in the city of Santarém, Pará

Countries

 * New Republic (Brazil), the restored civilian government of Brazil since 1985
 * New Republic (Portugal), 1917-1918, an era within the First Portuguese Republic
 * New Republic (South Africa) (Afrikaans: Nieuwe Republiek, 1884–1888), a short-lived country in 1880s South Africa

Fictional locations

 * New Republic (Star Wars), a fictional government from Star Wars
 * New Republic (Singularity Sky), a fictional polity in the 2004 novel Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Politics

 * New Republic Party (Costa Rica)
 * New Republic (Romania), a political party in Romania
 * New Republic Party (South Africa), a defunct political party in South Africa
 * Union for the New Republic (France), a political party
 * Union for the New Republic (Gabon), a political party
 * Union for the New Republic (Guinea), a political party
 * Democratic Union for the New Republic (Italy), a political party

Literature

 * The New Republic, an American politics and culture magazine
 * The New Republic (novel), an 1878 satirical novel by William Hurrell Mallock
 * The New Republic (newspaper), defunct Chinese-language newspaper in Canada (~1912-1984)

title: New Republic


text:
Irene Pepperberg

Irene Maxine Pepperberg (born April 1, 1949) is an American scientist noted for her studies in animal cognition, particularly in relation to parrots. She has been a professor, researcher and/or lecturer at multiple universities, and she is currently an Adjunct Research Professor at Boston University. Pepperberg also serves on the Advisory Council of METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). She is well known for her comparative studies into the cognitive fundamentals of language and communication, and she was one of the first to work on language learning in animals other than primate species (exemplified by the Washoe project), by extension to a bird species. Pepperberg is also active in wildlife conservation, especially in relation to parrots.

Early life, family and education
Born in 1949 as Irene Platzblatt in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, she was an only child. Her father, Robert Platzblatt, was a biochemist and middle school teacher. Her parents were both first-generation American Jews. Her mother's parents were from Romania, and her father's from Lithuania. In the 1950s, the family resided in Brooklyn in an apartment above a store, and beginning at a very young age, Irene would own and train a series of budgies.

She earned her bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969, and brought one of her budgies there with her. She subsequently earned a master's degree in Chemistry in 1971 at Harvard University, followed by a doctorate in Chemical Physics in 1976 at Harvard. During her doctoral program, she saw an episode of the PBS TV series Nova about animals and language, which influenced her to focus on that instead of chemistry.

Work history
Pepperberg has been a researcher, lecturer and adjunct or visiting professor at multiple universities. She was a research associate and lecturer at Purdue University (1979–1984) and Harvard University (in the 1970s and since 2005). At the MIT Media Lab, she has been a visiting associate professor (1999–2000) and researcher (2001–02). While at Purdue, she was involved in the biological sciences and psychological sciences departments. At University of Arizona, she was an associate professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with joint appointment in the psychology department and in the neuroscience program (1991–2000). She has been a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2004–2005) and an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University (2002 –2013), where its bird laboratory was named for her.

Research work
Although parrots have long been known for their capacities in vocal mimicry, Pepperberg set out to show that their vocal behavior could have the characteristics of human language. She worked intensively with a single grey parrot, Alex, and reported that he acquired a large vocabulary and used it in a sophisticated way, which is often described as similar to that of a four-year-old child. Alex could understand labels to describe objects, colors, shapes, and materials. Pepperberg and her colleagues sought to show that Alex could differentiate meaning and syntax, so that his use of vocal communication was unlike the relatively inflexible forms of "instinctive" communication that are widespread in the animal kingdom. Although such results are always likely to be controversial, and working intensively with a single animal always incurs the risk of Clever Hans effects, Pepperberg's work has strengthened the argument that humans do not hold the monopoly on the complex or semi-complex use of abstract communication. With interspecies communication, Pepperberg speculated that grey parrots are comparable to primates, having similar social systems.

Some researchers believe that the training method that Pepperberg used with Alex, (called the model/rival technique) holds promise for teaching autistic and other learning-disabled children who have difficulty learning language and communication skills, numerical concepts and empathy. When some autistic children were taught using the same methods Pepperberg devised to teach parrots, their response exceeded expectations.

From work with the single subject Alex, Pepperberg and her colleagues have gone on to study additional grey parrots, and also parrots of other species. Other notable parrot subjects of her research have been Griffin, Arthur, and Athena. Alex was found dead on the morning of September 6, 2007, and was seemingly healthy the previous day. On September 10, 2007, Alex's necropsy revealed no discernible cause of death.

Model/rival technique
The model/rival technique involves two trainers, one to give instructions, and one to model correct and incorrect responses and to act as the student's rival for the trainer's attention; the model and trainer also exchange roles so that the student sees that the process is fully interactive. The parrot, in the role of student, tries to reproduce the correct behavior.

The use of this model/rival technique resulted in Alex identifying objects by color, shape, number and material at about the level of chimpanzees and dolphins. His language abilities were equivalent to those of a 2-year-old child and he had the problem solving skills of a 5-year-old. Alex was learning the alphabet, had a vocabulary of 150 words, knew the names of 50 objects and could count up to eight when he died. He could also answer questions about objects.

Pepperberg countered critics' claims that Alex had been taught a script by explaining that the controls and tests she used made it impossible for him simply to recite words when she asked questions. The Clever Hans effect did not apply, she argued, as Alex would talk to anyone, not just to her. Building on Pepperberg's research, cognitive scientist Michael Trestman has argued that scaffolding and modeling, both approaches that the model/rival technique utilizes, can account for the cognitive evolution in humans, including "language, advanced social cognition, and elaborate forms of tool craft."

Pepperberg's implementation of the model rival technique has been used to successfully train several other parrots, such as Apollo.

The Alex Foundation
Pepperberg is president of The Alex Foundation, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization, which she started. The foundation supports Pepperberg and her team's research. In a 2006 interview, Pepperberg said that the foundation was her only funding source, having lost her paid research position due to a funding crunch at MIT's Media Lab, although the reporter of that interview does not mention her research associate position at Harvard University since 2005. The Alex Foundation raises money through donations, from direct sale of parrot-related gifts, and indirectly from sales through sponsoring businesses.

AI research
Some researchers have suggested that studying avian cognition might allow a useful artificial intelligence to be built without requiring as much resources, as for some applications a parrot or corvid level complexity brain would be adequate such as for image sorting. In recent years it was found that pigeons could sort CT scan data as well as microscope slides with equal or better accuracy than a human expert with only weeks of behavioral training needed.

Personal life
Pepperberg was married for more than twenty years to David Pepperberg, a neuroscientist. They divorced in 1997.

Awards and honors

 * 2009, Christopher Award, for Alex & Me

Works

 * The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots by Irene Maxine Pepperberg. ISBN 0-674-00806-5.
 * Animal Cognition in Nature: The Convergence of Psychology and Biology in Laboratory and Field by Russell P. Balda, Irene M. Pepperberg, A. C. Kamil. ISBN 0-12-077030-X.
 * Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process, by Irene M. Pepperberg ISBN 978-0061673986
 * Beyond Words, by Laura Maria Censabella. Drama inspired by the life story of Irene Pepperberg and Alex. World premiere directed by Cassie Chapados at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in March 2024.

title: Irene Pepperberg


text:
Old Republic

Old Republic may refer to

Star Wars

 * Galactic Republic, also known as the Old Republic, interplanetary state in the Star Wars universe
 * Star Wars: The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game based in the Star Wars universe
 * Star Wars: The Old Republic (comics), a comic book

Places

 * First Brazilian Republic (1889–1930), Old Republic or República Velha, a period in Brazilian history
 * Old Republic (Portugal), 1918–1926, an era within the First Portuguese Republic

Facilities and structures

 * Old Republic Building, Chicago, Illinois, U.S., an office building

Other uses

 * Old Republic International, U.S. insurance company

title: Old Republic


text:
Version 7 Unix

Version 7 Unix, also called Seventh Edition Unix, Version 7 or just V7, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. V7, released in 1979, was the last Bell Laboratories release to see widespread distribution before the commercialization of Unix by AT&T Corporation in the early 1980s. V7 was originally developed for Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputers and was later ported to other platforms.

Overview
Unix versions from Bell Labs were designated by the edition of the user's manual with which they were accompanied. Released in 1979, the Seventh Edition was preceded by Sixth Edition, which was the first version licensed to commercial users. Development of the Research Unix line continued with the Eighth Edition, which incorporated development from 4.1BSD, through the Tenth Edition, after which the Bell Labs researchers concentrated on developing Plan 9.

V7 was the first readily portable version of Unix. As this was the era of minicomputers, with their many architectural variations, and also the beginning of the market for 16-bit microprocessors, many ports were completed within the first few years of its release. The first Sun workstations (then based on the Motorola 68000) ran a V7 port by UniSoft; the first version of Xenix for the Intel 8086 was derived from V7 and Onyx Systems soon produced a Zilog Z8000 computer running V7. The VAX port of V7, called UNIX/32V, was the direct ancestor of the popular 4BSD family of Unix systems.

The group at the University of Wollongong that had ported V6 to the Interdata 7/32 ported V7 to that machine as well. Interdata sold the port as Edition VII, making it the first commercial UNIX offering.

DEC distributed their own PDP-11 version of V7, called V7M (for modified). V7M, developed by DEC's original Unix Engineering Group (UEG), contained many enhancements to the kernel for the PDP-11 line of computers including significantly improved hardware error recovery and many additional device drivers. UEG evolved into the group that later developed Ultrix.

Reception
Due to its power yet elegant simplicity, many old-time Unix users remember V7 as the pinnacle of Unix development and have dubbed it "the last true Unix", an improvement over all preceding and following Unices. At the time of its release, though, its greatly extended feature set came at the expense of a decrease in performance compared to V6, which was to be corrected largely by the user community.

The number of system calls in Version 7 was only around 50, while later Unix and Unix-like systems continued to add many more:

"Version 7 of the Research UNIX System provided about 50 system calls, 4.4BSD provided about 110, and SVR4 had around 120. The exact number of system calls varies depending on the operating system version. More recent systems have seen incredible growth in the number of supported system calls. Linux 5.15.0 has 449 system calls and FreeBSD 8.0 has over 450."

Released as free software
In 2002, Caldera International released V7 as FOSS under a permissive BSD-like software license.

Bootable images for V7 can still be downloaded today, and can be run on modern hosts using PDP-11 emulators such as SIMH.

An x86 port has been developed by Nordier & Associates.

Paul Allen maintained several publicly accessible historic computer systems, including a PDP-11/70 running Unix Version 7.

New features in Version 7
Many new features were introduced in Version 7.
 * Programming tools: lex, lint, and make.

The Portable C Compiler (pcc) was provided along with the earlier, PDP-11-specific, C compiler by Ritchie.

These first appeared in the Research Unix lineage in Version 7, although early versions of some of them had already been picked up by PWB/UNIX.

 * New commands: the Bourne shell, at, awk, calendar, f77, fortune, tar (replacing the tp command), touch
 * Networking support, in the form of uucp and Datakit
 * New system calls: access, acct, alarm, chroot (originally used to test the V7 distribution during preparation), exece, ioctl, lseek (previously only 24-bit offsets were available), umask, utime
 * New library calls: The new stdio routines, malloc, getenv, popen/system
 * Environment variables
 * A maximum file size of just over one gigabyte, through a system of indirect addressing

Multiplexed files
A feature that did not survive long was a second way (besides pipes) to do inter-process communication: multiplexed files. A process could create a special type of file with the  system call; other processes could then open this file to get a "channel", denoted by a file descriptor, which could be used to communicate with the process that created the multiplexed file. Mpx files were considered experimental, not enabled in the default kernel, and disappeared from later versions, which offered sockets (BSD) or CB UNIX's IPC facilities (System V) instead (although mpx files were still present in 4.1BSD ).

title: Version 7 Unix


text:
Computers and Typesetting

Computers and Typesetting is a 5-volume set of books by Donald Knuth published in 1986 describing the TeX and Metafont systems for digital typography. Knuth's computers and typesetting project was the result of his frustration with the lack of decent software for the typesetting of mathematical and technical documents. The results of this project include TeX for typesetting, Metafont for font construction and the Computer Modern typefaces that are the default fonts used by TeX. In the series of five books Knuth not only describes the TeX and Metafont languages (volumes A and C), he also describes and documents the source code (in the WEB programming language) of the TeX and Metafont interpreters (volumes B and D), and the source code for the Computer Modern fonts used by TeX (volume E). The book set stands as a tour de force demonstration of literate programming.

The books themselves were typeset in the Computer Modern Roman typeface using TeX; thus, in Knuth's words, they "belong to the class of sets of books that describe precisely their own appearance".

Volumes
The five volumes are published by Addison-Wesley. The set is also available as a hardcover boxed set with the latest editions as of the year 2000, ISBN 0-201-73416-8.
 * 1) Volume A: The TeXbook. Describes the TeX typesetting language. It is by far the most common and available of the set, as the TeX interpreter is widely used for typesetting.  It is available in softcover ISBN 0-201-13448-9 (blue spiral-bound with a built-in flap for a bookmark) and hardcover ISBN 0-201-13447-0.
 * 2) Volume B: TeX: The program. A documented listing of the source code of the TeX interpreter. The 1986 edition in hardcover is ISBN 0-201-13437-3.
 * 3) Volume C: The METAFONTbook. Describes the METAFONT font description language. Hardcover ISBN 0-201-13445-4, softcover ISBN 0-201-13444-6.
 * 4) Volume D: Metafont: The program. A documented listing of the source code of the Metafont interpreter. Hardcover ISBN 0-201-13438-1, paperback ISBN 0-201-60658-5.
 * 5) Volume E: Computer Modern Typefaces. A character-by-character listing (in the Metafont language) of the source code for the Computer Modern typefaces (cmr, cmbx, cmti, etc.) used by TeX. Hardcover ISBN 0-201-13446-2, softcover ISBN 0-201-60660-7.

A jubilee edition of the Volumes A to D was published by Addison-Wesley in February 2021, incorporating all the changes made during the TeX tune-up of 2021. (Volume E remained unchanged from the 2017 edition.)

title: Computers and Typesetting


text:
IDVD

iDVD is a discontinued Mac application made by Apple, which can be used to create DVDs.

iDVD lets users design DVD menus (like a main menu and chapter selection menu) and burn movies, slideshows, and music onto a DVD that can be played on a commercial DVD player. It was created as part of Apple's "digital hub" strategy, as a companion tool to iMovie. Early versions were received positively, but later versions languished as internet video overtook DVDs, and iDVD was abandoned in 2011.

Features
iDVD includes over 150 Apple-designed themes. Themes set the layout, background art, typography, and soundtrack for DVD menus and submenus, and each theme includes a main DVD menu, a chapter navigation menu, and an Extras screen. Users can customize the fonts, add freeform text boxes, and change the position and style of buttons. (In iDVD, the term button refers to thumbnails like "Play" and "Scene Selection" in DVD menus, that can take viewers to different parts of the movie; these buttons can be selected with the TV remote when playing a burned disc.)

Most themes include "drop zones," decorative placeholders for movies, slideshows, or individual photos. On the burned disc, these "drop zone" movies and slideshows play on a loop while viewers are in a menu. Depending on the selected theme, each menu screen can have between 6 and 12 buttons. If users add more movies than can fit on one screen, iDVD adds submenus to fit those new movies. Users can also manually create submenus. Each menu can have its own theme.

iDVD integrated tightly with the rest of the iLife suite. iMovie projects and iPhoto slideshows can be exported from those applications to iDVD. In the case of iMovie projects, scene selection menus are automatically created in accordance with chapter markers that were set within iMovie. iDVD's Media panel can be used to import media from the user's iTunes library, iPhoto library, and Movies folder. iDVD also has a Map view, which shows a flow chart of the project's menu hierarchy. The Map view includes an Autoplay tile, and any video dragged onto that tile will automatically play when the DVD is inserted into a player, before the menu appears; the DVD may consist of nothing but Autoplay material, and hence contain no menus. A menu bar button lets users enable gridlines showing the TV-safe area (as old televisions often cut off some of a video's outer areas). iDVD also incorporates a "OneStep DVD" function, which automatically rewinds the connected miniDV-tape camcorder, imports its footage, and directly burns it to a DVD.

Background
iDVD was part of Apple's push into digital video in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Apple had already released iMovie, and Steve Jobs thought users would want to burn their iMovie projects onto a DVD to show their movies to friends and family. Apple executives decided to add DVD-R drives to Macintoshes and make a simple tool to burn these movies. In April 2000, Apple bought Astarte's DVD department and used their software as the basis for DVD Studio Pro, while also creating a simpler version for consumers, iDVD. One of the acquired Astarte employees was Mike Evangelist, responsible for iDVD's product marketing and design. Jobs rejected Evangelist's early design proposal in favor of a simpler single-window interface.

Announcement
Steve Jobs introduced iDVD at Macworld Expo SF in January 2001, as a companion tool to iMovie. The intended workflow was for users to be able to record footage with a digital camcorder, import it and edit it in iMovie, and then use iDVD to add DVD menus and burn their movie to a writable DVD. iDVD was bundled with Power Mac G4 models with a SuperDrive, and Apple also began selling writable DVDs for $10 each. Simultaneously with iDVD, Apple announced DVD Studio Pro, a DVD authoring tool for professional users sold separately from Final Cut Pro.

iDVD 1 had a brushed-metal, single-window interface, and includes pre-made themes, as well as the ability to create custom themes. It encoded movies to the MPEG2 format required by DVD players, using the PowerPC G4's AltiVec SIMD execution unit (called the "Velocity Engine" by Apple). According to Apple, encoding an hour-long DVD with the Velocity Engine would take 2 hours, as opposed to 25 hours with software encoders. During the keynote where he introduced iDVD, Jobs criticized competitors' predictions that the personal computer was "yesterday's platform" and would be supplanted by internet-connected mobile devices. Instead, Jobs said the PC would become the "digital hub" linking these peripherals, including camcorders and DVD players. iDVD 1 could not burn movies longer than an hour.

Updates
iDVD 2 increased the maximum movie length to 90 minutes. iDVD 3 gained support for movie chapters, and "drop zones" where users can replace a theme's default photos and video clips by dragging and dropping their own. iDVD 4 extended the maximum movie length from 90 minutes to 2 hours, by adopting the same MPEG encoding techniques as Apple's DVD Studio Pro and Final Cut Pro. It also added the Autoplay tile and the Map view showing a hierarchy of all menus. iDVD 5 added support for DVD±RW, and gained the "OneStep DVD" feature, which could automatically rewind the tape of a connected camcorder, import its footage, and burn it to a DVD. iDVD 5.0.1 added support for burning double-layer (DVD+R DL) discs with compatible SuperDrives; French Mac news site MacBidouille found a way to enable double-layer mode with third-party drives, and described the restriction as arbitrary. iDVD 6 added widescreen support, and a "Magic iDVD" feature that automatically chose a theme and arranged clips and photos. iDVD '08 gained new themes and a "Professional Quality" setting, which does a 2-pass variable bitrate encoding. The Professional Quality setting improves colors and sharpness, and can fit a two-hour long movie onto a single-layer DVD.

iDVD received no new features or themes after version '08.

Reception
After the announcement, Andrew Gore described iDVD as "the most easily misunderstood new product" Apple announced in January but predicted that iDVD "will be to DVD-R what iTunes is to CD-RW". In the following years, several news outlets described the reaction to iDVD as positive. Macworld and EMedia magazine said that iDVD would help popularize DVD authoring among the masses.

In a three-part review of the first version, Jason Snell said it was easy to use but buggy. CNET rated iDVD 2 a 7/10, criticizing the need to switch to iMovie to edit footage and the inability to burn DVDs with third-party DVD drives. CNET reported several bugs with iDVD 4,  and iDVD 5. Reviewing iDVD 5, PCMag gave it 4.5 stars, and said its burning speed was superior to most competing apps. In a 2006 review of iDVD 6, reporter Jeff Carlson described iDVD's preview as choppy, even on a fast Mac, but said that this didn't affect playback of the burned disc on a DVD player. Ars Technica criticized iDVD 6's performance and menu customization features.

In 2007, Macworld Jeff Carlson called iDVD an "afterthought" and framed its future as an open question, after Steve Jobs unenthusiastically referred to "people who still want to make DVDs" in a media event. Apple executives and Gartner researcher Mike McGuire said that the neglect of iDVD and DVD Studio Pro was caused by reduced customer interest following the rise of internet video. In 2009, Ars Technica described iDVD as a "quaint anachronism as more and more video is shared and streamed online". Several outlets noted that iDVD was not mentioned during the iLife '09 keynote presentation, and was not mentioned on the iLife '09 retail box despite being included in the bundle.

Limitations
Until version 3.0.1, iDVD could only run on Macs with a built-in SuperDrive. In July 2002, Apple-certified vendor Other World Computing, which sold third-party external DVD drives, released a "DVD Enabler" patch that allowed iDVD to work with their Mercury Pro drive and presented iDVD compatibility as a selling point. In response, Apple threatened a DMCA lawsuit, and OWC backed down, withdrawing DVD Enabler. Journalists criticized the SuperDrive restriction, with Ars Technica editor-in-chief calling it a "scheme to promote hardware sales".

iDVD 3.0.1 gained the ability to run on Macs without a SuperDrive, though on these machines, it could only create and save projects, not burn them to a disc. iDVD 5 remained unable to burn DVDs with third-party drives, though it gained the ability to save finished projects as a disk image, which could be burned with third-party drives using other applications like Roxio Toast. iDVD 6 added the ability to burn DVDs with third-party drives.

Availability
iDVD 1 only worked on Mac OS 9, while later versions only ran on Mac OS X.

Until 2011, iDVD was bundled with all new Macs that had a SuperDrive. iDVD was no longer preinstalled on Macs shipping with OS X 10.7 Lion, and was not available on the Mac App Store unlike other iLife apps. It was, however, still available in the boxed copy of iLife '11. Since iDVD is a 32-bit application, it is not compatible with macOS 10.15 Catalina. Alternatives include Toast Titanium, and a free and open-source application called Burn.

title: IDVD