TeledyN

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.

Because waves of repression continue to come: lawsuits are still levied against innocent people; arrests are still made on flimsy pretexts, in order to terrify and confuse; harsh laws are still enacted against filesharing, taking their place in the gradual erosion of our privacy and the bolstering of the surveillance state. All of this is intended to destroy or delay inexorable changes in what it means to create and exchange our creations. If STEAL THIS FILM II proves at all useful in bringing new people into the leagues of those now prepared to think 'after intellectual property', think creatively about the future of distribution, production and creativity, we have achieved our main goal.

This is the Future - And it has nothing to do with your bank balance.

via uglyrug.blogspot.com

"We wrote about Music-Rules! and similar industry propaganda efforts in May, outlining some of their falsehoods and biases. For instance, the RIAA tells kids, "Never copy someone else's creative work without permission from the copyright holder" — omitting the important right to make creative fair use of existing content. It also coins a misleading term, "songlifting," (which the curriculum says is "just as bad as shoplifting"). Perhaps most disturbing of all given that the curriculum is supposed to be adopted by schools, it teaches kids bad math as part of its lessons on peer to peer file-sharing."

The updated curriculum goes a step further and asks kids to contact their local media and act as the RIAA's own unpaid public relations staff:

Imagine that you are in the music industry... With your team of fellow music industry employees, plan an information campaign that lets others know why it’s important to get their music the right way... You'll want to convince your classmates that your teams' plan is the one that will become the class project!

Challenge: Take your campaign a step further by contacting the editor of your community newspaper or the director of your community cable television station to see if you can submit an article or video about your campaign.

In other words, after spending countless dollars on failed advertising campaigns against peer-to-peer file-sharing, the RIAA has created a classroom activity to outsource the campaign to schoolchildren. Next up: A classroom activity where kids police peer-to-peer networks in search of potential infringers!

Oh goodie. First our kids became unpaid shills for the Reader's Digest family of uninformative magazines, and now the board thumbscrews are clamping down to enlist the children as myrmidons of music-machine marketing, likely yet another case where the teachers will tell us privately they think it bunk but, hey, you gotta keep your job, right? and in it goes, folded into the mountains of other gotta keep your job edujunkation. sigh.

For those few out there, you know who you are, the brave teachers, the ones the kids look back on later with awe and respect and thanks for their humanity and their integrity, even if they did get fired for their principles, for those few, here is the Teledyn Educational Strategy Alternative, brought to you by the ever vigilant folks at EFF.org:

Fortunately, teachers looking to educate their students about legal copyright have an alternative: Teaching Copyright, Electronic Freedom Foundation's unbiased, informative and fact-centered copyright curriculum.

Rather than bombarding kids with the message that using new technology is illegal, Teaching Copyright helps kids to understand their digital rights, giving them the information they need to responsibly create, critique and participate in the Internet's participatory mash-up culture.

To sign up as a member of the Pirate Party of Canada, go to this page to use our automated system.

For us to register a political party, we need a form from 250 members. If you would like to be one of these 250, print off this form, fill it out and mail it to:

Rob Britton
8457 boul. Newman Suite #102
Lasalle, QC
H8N 0A2

There is no cost in sending this form, except any postage fees. You must be an eligible voter to send this form in.

The full name of our party is:
English: The Pirate Party of Canada
French: Le Parti Pirate du Canada

Hmmm ... y'know, I may yet get re-interested in politics in this country! I'm filling out that form, that much I know.

There are so many things to say about this. There's the idea that the punishment is excessive (Steve Lawson was one of the first to point out that $22K per MP3 is a complete joke). There's the idea that the record industry continues to fight against inevitable change, instead of working hard and in good faith to develop a viable business model that takes into account new technology, the livelihood of musicians, and the needs of audiences. And there's the idea that none of this will do what the RIAA appears to believe it will do -- specifically, intimidate other music fans into giving up "filesharing" altogether.

That last bit is key. Let me say it again, in a slightly different way: this case is not going to have much (or any) effect on the day-to-day lives of music fans -- except perhaps to galvanize them against the industry a bit more. So it's basically a very damaging exercise in futility, a lashing-out, a naked and spiteful display of power by an already-doomed giant.

Here's hoping this registers,here's hoping this draws a line in the sand, here's hoping this divides between those who are with me in preserving the last shreds of our culture and those who say eh? what? but I like all those artists! which is fine, if you want to play that game. Those who step across that line, however, I have a job for you, a dangerous mission of utmost importance, a charge to carry a precious cargo through a dangerous land, a call to preserve a gift from your ancestors.

"Men and women wanted for hazardous journey, no small wages,
self-funding, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness,
constant danger, safe return doubtful.
Honour and recognition in case of success"

"Why does the music industry persist in saying that every download is a lost sale? If you even think about it, it can't be true. People - even downloaders - only have a finite amount of money. In times gone by, sure, they would have been buying vinyl albums. But if you stopped them downloading, would they troop out to the shops and buy those songs?

I don't think so. I suspect they're doing something different. I think they're spending the money on something else.

What else, I mused, might they be buying? Hmm... young.. like the entertainment industry... ah, how about computer games and DVDs? Thus began a hunt for the figures for UK sales of games and of DVDs and of music to see if there was any consistent relationship between them."

While there are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics and in this chart no distinction is made between new-release (which may dominate the technology-driven game sales) and back-catalog (which may dominate DVD and music sales) the figure I would most like to see charted is the relationship between the post-Napster rise of file trading and the sales in the long tail of the back-catalog, the older releases and especially the older, really obscure and forgotten releases such as Martin Denny or Pentangle.

However that might pan out, what is really salient in the Guardian story is the simple observation that downloads logically cannot equate to "lost sales" -- as the absurd fines levied out clearly prove -- those charged downloaders are each exceeding their personal budgets by many orders of magnitude, several times over!  When you consider how the $40,000 required to fill an average iPod is simply not in the reach of any but the most exclusive club of elite teenagers, isn't it inescapable to reject equating their collections to a $40,000 corporate profit loss?

Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems is the world's leading provider of airplay tracking for the entertainment industry. Employing a patented digital pattern recognition technology, Nielsen BDS captures in excess of 100 million song detections annually on more than 1,600 radio stations, satellite radio and cable music channels in over 140 markets in the U.S. (including Puerto Rico) and 30 Canadian markets.

On a tip from songwriter Paul Stewart (about to leave on his cross-Canada tour and wanting to track the airplay in his wake, Paul called from SoCan HQ with the URL) - Neilsons BDS is simple, and it is free: You send them your CD (or upload MP3s), they fingerprint the waveform and then ping your tally every time that fingerprint appears on any of the 1600 radio stations they monitor.