joe posts

I didn’t get Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! right away – The first few times I thought it sounded completely off. Then I remembered I felt that way about pretty much every Bad Seeds album. It was “Moonland,” “Night of the Lotus Eaters,” and then “We Call Upon The Author” that quickly turned me around – the lyrics in the latter are hilarious and awesome:

——-

We Call Upon The Author

What we once thought we had
We didn’t
And what we have now
Will never be that way again
So we call upon the author to explain

Our myxomatoid kids spraddle the streets
We’ve shunned them from the greasy-grind
The poor little things, they look so sad and old
As they mount us from behind
I ask them to desist and to refrain
And then we call upon the author to explain

Rosary clutched in his hand
He died with tubes up his nose
And a cabal of angels with finger cymbals
Chanted his name in code
We shook our fists at the punishing rain
And we call upon the author to explain

He said everything is messed up ’round here
Everything is banal and jejune
There is a planetary conspiracy
Against the likes of you and me
In this idiot constituency of the moon
Well he knew exactly who to blame
And we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

Well, I go guru-ing down the street
Young people gather ’round my feet
And they ask me things
But I don’t know where to start
They ignite the powder-trails
Straight to my father’s heart
And once again I call upon the author to explain

Who is this great burdensome slavering dog-thing
That mediocres my every thought?
I feel like a vacuum cleaner; a complete sucker
It’s fucked up and he is a fucker
But what an enormous and encyclopaedic brain
I call upon the author to explain

Well rampant discrimination
Mass poverty
Third world debt
Infectious disease
Global inequality
And deepening socio-economic divisions
Well, it does in your brain
And we call upon the author to explain

Now hang on, my friend Doug is tapping on the window
“Hey Doug, how you been?”
[...]
Brings me back a book on Holocaust poetry
Complete with pictures
Then tells me to get ready for the rain
And we call upon the author to explain

I say prolix! Prolix!

Something a pair of scissors can fix!

Bukowski was a jerk
Berryman was best
He wrote like wet papier mache
Ah but he went the Hemingway
Weirdly on wings
And with maximum pain
We call upon the author to explain

Down in my bolthole I see they’ve published another volume of unreconstructed rubbish
“Well the waves, the waves, were soldiers moving.”
Well, thank you. Thank you! Thank you!
And again I call upon the author to explain
Yeah, we call upon the author to explain

Prolix! Prolix!

There’s nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!

————-

Poor Steven Page. He’s looking at five years in a US prison. We’ll see if Canadian Celebrity Status carries any weight in NY. The National Post had the most tasteful headline:

‘Yeah, it’s cocaine,’ Page told police

Innocent until proven guilty, I say. And if guilty… well, it’s just a bit of cocaine. Is it worse than drinking ten Red Bull and a bottle of Jägermeister? From what I’ve seen at the hotel/nightclub where I work, no. Cokeheads don’t vomit on the bar while ordering another shot. They just rent rooms, paint various surfaces with their drug residue, and do anything but sleep.

At least he looked good in his mugshot.

Journalist, author and blogger Cory Doctorow recently published an interesting column detailing his thoughts on the concept of “Intellectual property.” He argues that it’s a loaded term – knowledge can’t be the same thing as physical property. It’s merely a way for a copyright holder to frame the issue in a way that’s favourable to their interests. After all, any kind of copyright infringement sounds scarier if the infringer is accused of “theft of property.” But can we steal knowledge? Can we put a monetary value on non-physical works, especially in the Internet age when digitally transmitted movies, music and books are nothing but 1s and 0s?

“Intellectual property” is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency.

WIPO’s case for using the term is easy to understand: people who’ve “had their property stolen” are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than “industrial entities who’ve had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated”, the latter being the more common way of talking about infringement until the ascendancy of “intellectual property” as a term of art.

Does it matter what we call it? Property, after all, is a useful, well-understood concept in law and custom, the kind of thing that a punter can get his head around without too much thinking.

That’s entirely true – and it’s exactly why the phrase “intellectual property” is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge. Faulty ideas about knowledge are troublesome at the best of times, but they’re deadly to any country trying to make a transition to a “knowledge economy”.

Fundamentally, the stuff we call “intellectual property” is just knowledge – ideas, words, tunes, blueprints, identifiers, secrets, databases. This stuff is similar to property in some ways: it can be valuable, and sometimes you need to invest a lot of money and labour into its development to realise that value.

Read it at The Guardian

Boingboing discussion

Two copyright-related stories caught my eye this week. First up is a National Post piece on a plan by the Songwriters Association of Canada to push a $5/month levy on Internet use, with the money going to subsidize the recording industry. CRIA (the Canadian equivalent of the USA’s lawyer-happy RIAA) is not happy. Surprising, really.

“The more pressing concern is that the industry itself will become distracted by this and precious time and resources will be devoted to either promoting or combating an idea which has a snowball’s chance in hell,” said CRIA president Graham Henderson.

He contended that if implemented, the songwriters’ plan would ruin the viability of online music sellers such as iTunes and PureTracks.ca and seriously threaten Canada’s bricks-and-mortar music retailers.

“The primary marketplace for records completely collapses, to be replaced by a levy system,” he said. “What you are basically saying is, ‘OK, we are going to let the government run this.’” – National Post

I’m not really in favour of the $5 levy plan, but it’s a better solution than anything I’ve heard the recording industry propose. They’ve basically been sitting around for 10 years waiting for the government to come along and protect them – now they’re whining that songwriters want the government to come along and protect the industry. ‘Brick-and-mortar’ retailers were already screwed, thanks to big box discount stores like Wal-Mart and Futureshop that can afford to lose money on music sales. Puretracks and iTunes offer an inferior product – digital files with DRM – for about the same price as a CD with better quality sound, liner notes and no DRM infections. That’s why I’ve spent very little money on online music. On top of the industry’s inability to embrace new distribution technologies, in the last ten years about eight major video game consoles were released, and I’m sure that has just a little bit to do with slowing music sales. We consumers only have so much money to spend on the products sold by huge multinational corporations. A $60 video game is about four CDs… maybe the recording industry should sue the video game industry for “lost opportunities.”

UPDATE (Mar 6th, 2008): Just stumbledupon this article by musician Janis Ian. It’s from 2002, but it’s still relevant in that she explains how even well-established, mature musicians profit from Internet downloads; and she takes the industry and it’s trade associations to task for having done nothing for the artists they’re supposedly looking out for. 

Then there’s this gem. It looks like the Tories “STOLE” music to use in a campaign ad… oh wait, it wasn’t a campaign ad… it was just an “attack video” directed against the Liberal party. No… not an advertisement at all:

 

The video was presented to support the Tories’ claim that the Liberal leader would run up $62.5 billion in new debt if elected. It splices together video clips of Mr. Dion citing financial figures, accompanied by a segment of the 1974 hit song, For the Love of Money.

The press conference was led by Industry Minister Jim Prentice, who is also responsible for overseeing reforms intended to strengthen Canada’s copyright laws. Copies of the video were broadcast by media organizations on national television, but have not been broadcast by the Tories.

Canadian rights to the song in the video are owned by Warner/Chappell Music Canada Ltd. A spokeswoman with Warner head office in New York confirmed that the company contacted the party to discuss its use of the song in the video.

“Warner/Chappell recently sent a letter to the Conservative Party of Canada confirming its unauthorized use of a song written by Warner/Chappell writers,” wrote Amanda Collins in an e-mailed statement. “As a regular course of business, we contact parties that use our musical compositions without permission. We look forward to working with the party to resolve this matter quickly.” – Ottawa Citizen (emphasis mine)

Tsk tsk tsk… Prentice’s office clearly has some learning to do, considering he’s in charge of “fixing” our copyright laws.

This is an update to my previous blog entry on the RIAA’s assertion that copying music off a CD is not legal. The Washington Post has issued a correction to the story I quoted.

The RIAA is now saying that they never meant to give that impression. Lawyers ‘misspoke’ and didn’t mean to assert that copying a CD you own for personal use is theft. When RIAA prosecutor Richard Gabriel asked Sony’s head litigator Jennifer Pariser during Jammie Thomas’ trial if copying a track of music for personal use from a CD is legal and she replied “when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song”, it was all just a big misunderstanding:

“The Sony person who (Fisher) relies on actually misspoke in that trial,” [RIAA president] Sherman said. “I know because I asked her after stories started appearing. It turns out that she had misheard the question. She thought that this was a question about illegal downloading when it was actually a question about ripping CDs. That is not the position of Sony BMG. That is not the position of that spokesperson. That is not the position of the industry.”

President Sherman also took issue with the WaPo article, saying that the RIAA only went after him because he copied that music into a “Shared” folder where others could possibly download it. The lawyers never meant to call copying CD’s an illegal act.. all they said was:

“Virtually all of the sound recordings on Exhibit B are in the ‘.mp3′ format. … Defendant admitted that he converted these sound recordings from their original format to the .mp3 format for his and his wife’s use. … Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs’ recording into the compressed .mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.”

According to the RIAA’s latest statements on this matter, it wasn’t the CD ripping that was illegal, it was the fact that he could have shared them via file-trading networks.

Apologies to the RIAA – they’re more reasonable than I thought… uh.. wait a minute..

The fact that the RIAA’s own website says copying music to a computer is not a legal right muddies the water a bit, wouldn’t you say?

“there’s no legal ‘right’ to copy the copyrighted music on a CD onto a CD-R.”

But:

“However, burning a copy of CD onto a CD-R, or transferring a copy onto your computer hard drive or your portable music player, won’t usually raise concerns so long as:

• The copy is made from an authorized original CD that you legitimately own
• The copy is just for your personal use. It’s not a personal use – in fact, it’s illegal – to give away the copy or lend it to others for copying.”

I can only take so much doublespeak – Wired has a good summary of the confusion. Their verdict?

“So, to sum up, the RIAA does believe that a majority of American music buyers are thieving criminals, but it’s not going to sue anyone over ripping MP3s because) a) it’s not really a big deal to them anymore b) there’s no real way to find out and/or c) it would be terrible publicity to sue someone for using an iPod.”

Which leads me back to the point of my previous blog entry – you practically need a legal team to figure out what you’re allowed to do with the music you’ve purchased. Can anyone say with any clarity whether backing up CDs for personal use is allowed in the USA? It seems not – not when the RIAA president says “Yes,” RIAA’s antipiracy division says “No, but we won’t hunt you down” and the representatives of big media companies that support the RIAA say “No, and you will be punished if you’re in court for infringement” but only when it supports their legal position in a trial they desperately wanted the RIAA to win.

I honestly don’t know, and am growing increasingly disinterested with the question.

So. What to do? Screw the industry. Screw CDs.. I’m tossing them in the pile with my DAT tapes..

At least when you download something illegally you know you’re a criminal. Making it next to impossible for people to know what’s legal and what’s not legal when it comes to copyright law is just frustrating and stupid and it’s going to drive more customers away.

…

In other news, England is legalizing CD backups!

Though Canada’s new copyright law is still shrouded in mystery – no doubt because it will cater to the average music & movie-loving Canadian with it’s consumer-friendliness (/sarcasm) – we don’t have to look too far to see what happens when copyright holders are given a big stick and use it to prod their customers back into place.

Now that they’ve run out of modern technologies to attack, the recording industry is going after technology developed over a decade ago by arguing that consumers don’t have the right to rip legally purchased CDs and store the mp3’s on their computer. From the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

“Now, in an unusual case in which an Arizona recipient of an RIAA letter has fought back in court rather than write a check to avoid hefty legal fees, the industry is taking its argument against music sharing one step further: In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.

The industry’s lawyer in the case, Ira Schwartz, argues in a brief filed earlier this month that the MP3 files Howell made on his computer from legally bought CDs are ‘unauthorized copies’ of copyrighted recordings.”

So if the industry has it’s way, copying a legally-bought copy of a recording for personal use won’t be allowed. This came up in the Jammie Thomas trial as well, where an industry exec said that copying a single song from a CD to your hard drive constituted theft of a single song:

“‘When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.’ Making ‘a copy’ of a purchased song is just ‘a nice way of saying “steals just one copy”,’ she said.”

It’s pretty obvious what the industry is after here – they want you to buy additional copies of any work they own the copyright to any time you want to use a different kind of playback device. It’s not enough that I plunk down $25 for a CD – I have to spend another $20 to get it to play on my mp3 player. I may even have to spend another $20 to listen to it on a different computer if the files are protected by DRM. And you have to be able to prove that you got the copies of the songs this way, just in case you end up in court. Be sure to keep your receipt for that track you bought from that website that one time, eh!

Even though I don’t live in the USA and our upcoming copyright law isn’t being discussed out in the open (so much for Harper’s ‘transparent’ New Government [TM]) I still find myself taking action to prevent trouble with the industry. I spent a bit of money on a nice phonograph pre-amp. Instead of buying CDs and ripping them, I now buy used and new vinyl records and record them onto my computer via the analog input. Since I’m not depending on mp3-related technology or digital copies, I’m probably safe. And, to my ears, it actually sounds better than downloaded or ripped media. Much nicer dynamics.

I don’t get it. Does the recording industry even want people to buy CDs? If music fans risk legal troubles every time we stick a CD in our computer, how will that help sell CDs? Personally, I’m not going to participate in a hobby that requires a legal defense fund! Music-loving is getting much too complicated and expensive, imho.

I’m pretty much done with buying new CDs – vinyl might be making a bit of a comeback, even cracked records sound just fine to me, and there’s plenty of used records laying around. There’s also plenty of legit free music online. Heck, why even feel guilty about downloading since we pay for it through the blank media levy?

I’ve heard calls for a boycott of major labels. Even if that were a practical idea I’m starting to think it’s redundant. Every time the industry tries to ’save’ itself it finds yet another foot to shoot.

When mp3s are outlawed.. only outlaws will have mp3s.

Canada’s New Government (TM) is set to update our ‘lax’ copyright laws. Minister of Industry Jim Prentice is playing is cards close to his chest (I wonder why?) and torturing geeks everywhere with his cute games of you-can’t-see-the-bill-so-don’t-comment-on-it and I’m-tabling-the-bill-oh-no-I’m-not-oh-yes-I-am-oh-no-I’m-not.

But people have to comment on it because there’s really no way that Canadian consumers can benefit from any tightening of copyright restrictions. And since our oh-so transparent government is keeping consumers in the dark about this legislation – they tried to introduce the bill smack in the middle of the holiday season when people were looking the other way – it looks like the law will favour Big Media corporations over music and movie fans.

If the new legislation borrows from the USA’s DMCA, we may be looking at a situation where file-trading is essentially criminalised; where playback devices and media files are locked with Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and circumvention of these locks is made illegal; where Linux users can’t play DVDs (because Linux distros don’t often buy the license to decode DVDs, instead bypassing the weak encryption); where backing up, space-shifting, or recording media for personal use is made illegal. Basically it’ll give content producers and distributors (usually big foreign companies/corporations) the right to control what you do with the things that you buy with your hard-earned money. This cheeses me off – I rarely engage in piracy but I do all kinds of home-recording and space-shifting (ie moving music from a CD to a hard drive or to an mp3 player), and have spent thousands of dollars on CDs, cassette tapes, DVDs, VHS tapes and records. I’d like to be able to play them!

If you haven’t already, read all about this issue at blogs like Michael Geist’s, and then send some mail to your MP and to minister of Industry Jim Prentice. Already The Nerds have flooded his office with email, letters and phone calls. The even confronted him at his annual Christmas party. The more people who complain, the more likely changes will be made – already he’s withdrawn the bill twice and now it won’t be introduced until 2008.