Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
have blog :: will travel
Only last night on Twitter, Batt revealed that the whole thing was a joke to stir debate about copyright issues.
The Planets album had spent three months at number one in the classical charts when Batt received a claim for royalties from the MCPS on behalf of Cage’s publisher. However, well aware of how copyright works, Batt had cannily registered the writing pseudonym Clint Cage with the PRS, so was able to assert that the Batt/Cage credit just meant he had written this particular sixty seconds of silence himself.
Batt claims they then agreed to disagree publicly, in order to educate people about copyright. The subsequent debate involved a musical duel between The Planets and a clarinettist from Cage’s publishers, with simultaneous performances of the Batt and Cage silences. “Mine is a much better silent piece,” asserted Batt. “I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds.”
The story was brought to a close when Batt made a £1,000 donation to the John Cage Trust, which supports young artists. Batt proposed that it should be an undisclosed amount paid in a sealed envelope on the steps of the high court, giving the impression it was a settlement. Batt claims journalists were shouting out sums, and when they reached six figures, Riddle nodded, either out of mischief or nervousness. Thus a music industry myth was born.
Brilliant, brilliant, brill score Mr Womble (I've always loved Wombles) and might I add it worked beautifully to the intent and purpose, and now we can get on with today's 5pm EST performance of the Global Silent Orchestra.
Some say the real miracle of Christmas is not that we fail to observe Goodwill Towards Man on all the other days, but in how, as wild animals ourselves, it is miraculous that we can even just somewhat tone down preying upon each other for a few hours each year -- I am sitting here now, downloading Christmas carols in free public domain arrangments, thoughtfully typeset and even transposed for band instruments, and they are good 4-part arrangements. Just imagine ...
No other web site offers all of these features:
- All of it is free! No hidden costs, no teasers, no bait-and-switch.
- Sheet music for every carol, in standard PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format. No need to purchase or download special software!
- Sheet music in 4 parts (SATB) for most carols. Just the thing for caroling!
- Lead sheets (melody, chords & lyrics) for most carols.
- Additional guitar lead sheets in easy keys, when the piano lead sheet is in a horrible key for novice guitarists.
- Instrumental parts for C, F, Bb, and Eb instruments. Play in 4 parts with any combination of instruments!
- MIDI files for every carol (so you can hear what they sound like), with both 4-part (SATB) and melody-only versions.
- New! A list of CD's where you can hear each carol, with easy links to buy them from Amazon.com, and (in most cases) a sound clip of a sample of the carol from the CD.
- Background music only when you ask for it, instead of playing automatically whether you want it or not!
- Lyric sheets for every carol. (Okay, so this is no big deal, but this site wouldn't be complete without them.)
- Credits (author, composer, translator, arranger) for every carol.
- No obnoxious animations or pop-up ads.
- And did we mention that all of it is free?
absolutely mindbogglingly amazing - can you imagine? I could call you up, I could post to my site an open call to say, "Grab your instruments and download the following and meet me at the town square and we'll fill the air with music!" and we'd all just meet there and pick our parts and we're ready to go, no lawyers, no rights organizations to notify, just music to be made for everyone.
Truly this is Christmas.
The uncapturable
in one fell stroke of a stripe of red midst the deep blues, Barnett Newman defeated the entire reprint industry. They can copy his stripe all they wish, duplicate every non-variance of his pigment tone and brushwork, even blow their copies up just as high and mighty, but they cannot usurp his work's position as the Voice of Fire.[...] Only this ephemerial state of being the uncapturable, the marker of a place in time and space, the now of being here, this is the only option in a digital rebroadcast future, an inevitable convergence path for all art in a digital age.
And that future is here.
I was reminded of this post today in the whole Cory Doctorow vs Nina Paley discussion, which is an excellent read, true, but they still seem to miss the hard fact point how if what you can do can be copied by machines, then look out for your job because the machines will do it! That's true if you fold towels for a living too.
ok, now this has gone beyond hilarious: not only were Marcell's The Fountain urinals not found but meticulously recreated, it now surfaces that the Duchamp estate is pissed about some stray 'copies' magically turning up with a cool $2.5M pricetag.
So now, copyright-fans, do tell: if some unauthorized someone replicates a slyly successful forgery, is it intellectual property theft? Or just hilarious.
Hilarious as this is, and so true too, I don't think this is nearly why bootlegging works (to keep our terms straight) -- just as with its namesake in the booze world, bootlegging works mostly because the price is reasonable and the product is available, and I'll add a third in that the product actually fits what the consumer wants it to do. By comparison, what we get from the studios via the retail chain (yes, even from Amazon) is a clipped minority subset collection of overpriced goods that, when played on modest equipment, fails to play due to being optimized to the latest greatest most expensive HD gear.
The solution is, not surprisingly, staring them in the face on every bit-torrent site:
and there, done deal. Now what was so hard about that?
People were asking about what business models are working for musicians, and I started listing out some examples, and a loud gentleman in the front row yelled out that the business model that had to be at the center was selling music. I responded with what I thought was an important question: "Why?" and again people started yelling. Of course, no one answered the question, and then the panel shifted gears to another topic. But, the reaction from the crowd on that question cemented for me one of the biggest reasons why some in the industry have struggled to grasp new business models. As I discussed in my NARM presentation a few months ago, selling music is just not a good business model, but it doesn't mean there aren't good, very profitable, music business models. It's just that selling music isn't a very good one. Instead, you need to learn to use the music (which still needs to be good, and is still the central reason why these other business models work) to sell something else -- something scarce, which can't easily be copied.
Some of you long-time TeledyN readers will remember all those many posts about the One-Track Universe where music was your vector, your broadcast channel communications wave connector straight to the heart of your fans and how it made no sense whatsoever to charge people to pick up the phone because you wanted to tell them about something important, or because you wanted to heal them, or lead them to dance together in joyeous celebration of their community of inter-life as humans. The vast majority, of course, thought me crazy, a handful did support the idea, some more tentatively than others.
Today the idea is mainstream Rock-Press fodder, the bread and butter of more artists than I can track. More and more have caught on to what I said about Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire and the sure fire way to totally obliterate the DRM issue by stepping beyond the copyright of the copy-able. Today we are on the edge of a world where live music generates more actual in their pocket revenue for artists than does the dead shadow of sound etched in billions of non-recyclable plastic disks.
So while I didn't get to be a direct part of the new music economy, I am delighted to see it playing out precisely to my plan, and delighted to see not only the new young and nothing to lose artists embracing a free-share mp3 business model, but also now among some name acts, even one or two household names, the idea doesn't just make sense, it is simply and factually the way it is.
While the major record labels were dragging file-sharers and BitTorrent sites to court for copyright infringement, they were themselves being sued by a conglomerate of artists for exactly the same offenses. Warner, Sony BMG, EMI and Universal face up to $60 billion in damages for pirating a massive 300,000 tracks. It is no secret that the major record labels have a double standard when it comes to copyright. On the one hand they try to put operators of BitTorrent sites in jail and ruin the lives of single mothers and students by demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines, and on the other they sell CDs containing music for which they haven’t obtained copyright permission.In the past we’ve covered many disputes between artists and labels, where the latter is being accused or even sued for using songs without permission. Just a few months ago Latin America’s biggest artist, Alejandro Fernández, sent the police to a Sony Music office to confiscate over 6,000 CDs that the label refused to return, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.The labels have made a habit of using songs from a wide variety of artists for compilation CDs without securing the rights. They simply use the recording and make note of it on “pending list” so they can deal with it later. This has been going on since the 1980s and since then the list of unpaid tracks (or copyright infringements) has grown to 300,000.Growing tired of the label’s piracy, a group of artists have filed a class-action lawsuit in Canada against four major labels connected to the CRIA, the local equivalent of the RIAA. In October last year Warner Music, Sony BMG Music, EMI Music and Universal Music were sued for illegal use of thousands of tracks and at present the case is still underway. How and why this blatant copyright infringement could go on for years is a mystery, but the label’s double standard has been picked up by the plaintiffs as well. “The conduct of the defendant record companies is aggravated by their strict and unremitting approach to the enforcement of their copyright interests against consumers,” the artists argue in their claim for damages. The suit is still ongoing but already the labels have admitted to owing at least $50 million for infringing the rights of artists, and this figure could grow as high as 60 billion. So who are the real pirates here?
(torrentfreak)
I mean, y'know, now and then, in moments of weakness, I do really try to see their point of view in these matters and show a little sympathy to their cause and all they've done to for us over the years, and then along comes something like this.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.
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