thesis 1
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Muxtape founder Justin Ouelette says the bureaucracy of the music industry was just too much for him to deal with. That's why he took down the playlist creation Web site, which became a hipster craze earlier this year, after spreading largely via word of mouth. It'll be relaunching soon, he says, but strictly as a service for independent bands to share their own music. "I walked away from the licensing deals," Ouelette wrote in a transparent, albeit navel-gazing letter on Muxtape's home page. He'd hired a lawyer and tried negotiating, with varied reactions from the major labels.
Muxtape founder 'walked away from licensing deals'
Neurophilosophy : Musical training enhances integration of the s
Learning to play a musical instrument is known to involve both structural and functional changes in the brain. Studies published in recent years have established, for example, that professional keyboard players have increased gray matter volume in motor, auditory and visual parts of the brain, and that violinists have a larger somatosensory cortical representation of the left hand than do non-musicians. Musical training is a complex process involving simultaneously perceiving the inputs from the senses of hearing, sight and touch, as well as co-ordinating these with the outputs of the motor system. It therefore provides neuroscientists with a good model to study the effects of neural plasticity in different sensory systems.
Efter endnu en sejr til piraterne i slaget om ulovlig fildeling kræver sejrherrerne, at deres modstandere lægger våbnene Står det til Piratgruppen, skal Antipiratgruppen, der netop har tabt en sag i landsretten, opgive deres trusselsbreve til folk, som de beskylder for pirateri. »Retten har tydeligt bestemt, at der skal mere til end en ip-adresse. Det er ikke bevis nok. Alligevel sender Antipiratgruppen hundredvis af trusselbreve ud, hvor de kræver 100.000 i erstatning, men det må med rettens afgørelse stoppe nu«, siger talsmand for Piratgruppen, Sebastian Gjerding, til politiken.dk. Slap for sekscifret erstatningskrav
Pirater: hejs det hvide flag, antipirater - Politiken.dk
Further to John’s post (on which this should have been a comment, but it growed), I have a real bee in my bonnet about the claim made by Richard Posner that ” The managers of corporations have a fiduciary duty to maximize corporate profits”. It raises a whole load of topics relevant to plenty of my favourite economic hobby-horses as soon as you start to look remotely critically at what the seemingly simple phrase “maximise corporate profits” actually means anyway. Pretending not to understand the meanings of common English phrases is a stock tactic for creating the impression of profundity (cf philosophers, who are always pretending not to understand the meaning of words like “is”, “would” and “must”). But sometimes you have to do it – my view is that in any view of the world more complicated than a very elementary blackboard model, the phrase “maximise profits” can’t be unpacked into a coherent decision rule which rules out any of the things which Posner talks as if it does.
What obligation? Maximise what? — Crooked Timber
Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filter
The Access series represents three edited volumes published by the OpenNet Initiative and MIT Press that document nearly a decade of extensive technical and in-field research on the trends and patterns shaping information controls around the world. The practice and policy of global Internet filtering (2008) draws on results from the ONI’s first global survey of Internet censorship, documenting and analyzing Internet filtering practices in over three dozen countries. It stands as the first rigorously conducted study of state-based Internet censorship policies and practices. The shaping of power, rights, and rule in cyberspace (2010) updates and expands on Access Denied by presenting information controls that go beyond mere denial of information and aim to normalize (or even legalize) a climate of control.
There is a counter-reformation movement afoot in the world of copyright. The purpose of the movement is to chill the willingness of countries to enact fair use or liberal fair dealing provisions designed to genuinely further innovation and creativity, rather than, as is currently the case, merely to give lip service to those concepts as the scope of copyright is expanded to were-rabbit size. The counter-reformation movement is presently at the stage of a whispering campaign, in which ministries in countries are told that fair use (and by extension possible liberal fair dealing provisions) violate the "three-step" test. And who wants to violate the three-step after all? The appeal by counter-reformation forces to external and abstract concepts like the three-step test is a time-worn tactic: when you can't win on the merits, shift the debate elsewhere to grounds on which you think you can win.
Fair Use, the Three-Step Test, and the Counter-Reformation
A few days ago I came across an Op-Ed submission that called for file sharing to be decriminalized. The editors here decided not to run it, but it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, the author, Karl Sigfrid , is a member of the Swedish Parliament from the Moderate party — a pro-business party that's akin to this country's Libertarians (except in Sweden they're more than just a fringe group ). Second, although he covered much of the same ground earlier this year in a Swedish paper, Sigfrid's new piece added another provocative contention: that unauthorized downloading isn't actually theft.
File ‘sharing’ or ‘stealing’? - Los Angeles Times
The award for Fatuous Statement of the Month goes to Geoffrey Taylor, chief executive of BPI, formerly the quaintly named British Phonographic Industry. (Note for readers under under 65: a 'phonograph' is an instrument that reproduces sound recorded on a grooved disk.) The winning statement reads: 'For years, ISPs have built a business on other people's music.' The context is that Taylor was commenting on reports that the forthcoming green paper on the so-called 'creative industries' will contain an explicit commitment to enact legislation compelling internet service providers (ISPs) to clamp down on illegal file-sharing. The BPI has lobbied politicians for years about this, and its chief executive is understandably cock-a-hoop about the government's apparent conversion to the cause.
A clampdown is music to the record industry's ears | Media
Artists' best interests? RIAA presses for lower royalties
How much money will songwriters make? That's the question before the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) here in the US as the judges have launched a rate setting procedure that will determine—for the first time—what songwriters get for digital downloads and streaming music. Not surprisingly, the issue has become contentious. On the one side are the music labels (represented by the RIAA) and the digital media companies (represented by DiMA) that stream and sell music over the Internet. Both groups have to pay "mechanical royalties" whenever a physical copy of the song is sold or a digital version is downloaded, and they'd obviously prefer to pay less. The groups think that the current mechanical rate of about 9 cents, used to calculate how much songwriters get from CD sales, is too high.
It's time to overhaul copyright law | Technology | guardian
In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other kids. Regardless of who wants to make a new Spider-Man comic, movie or other derivative work, that person has to hire a lawyer, have that lawyer call up Marvel Comics, set up a call or a face-to-face, negotiate a contract, sign it, pay a fee, and report on their ongoing uses, opening their books for auditing and inspection. Sony Pictures can do this.The heads of several Canadian content trade groups (including the CRIA, which represents the four major labels) recently sat down with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen for an hour of conversation about the copyright reform bill soon coming to Canada and what content owners want to see changed. Despite the poor recording quality, the bad questions, and the general "I'm just going to talk over you" approach of the content owners, the conversation is worth a listen to anyone (not just Canadians) who wants to understand where content owners are coming from. Or you could just let me sum it up for you in two words: they're coming from Frustration Junction.
Canadian labels: We get "absolutely zero credit" for n
BBC NEWS | Technology | France unveils anti-piracy plan | Beyond
(((I know that the shareware/FLOSS crowd is gonna freak out about this adventure, but I suspect that France may be doing the rest of the world a favor by turning themselves into the lab rat for harsh nationalist DRM. I’d say the chances are ninety percent that this turns into a bitter debacle for all concerned — but just maybe, the MPAA/RIAA contingency are right, and everybody else’s cultural enterprises will collapse entirely in a welter of p2p piracy!!! And then, maybe, ten years from now, while the rest of us are stuck watching crap YouTube snippets and bad long-tail freeware sci-fi novels, FRANCE will pwn all the movie directors, novelists and musicians who matter!))) (((Can you name even one French creative-artist who globally matters right now?Les accords[1] signés sous la houlette de Sarkozy entre les FAI et les industries culturelles à la suite de la mission FNAC-Olivennes confirment une véritable dérive stalinienne. The agreements signed [1] led by Sarkozy between the FAI and the cultural industries as a result of the mission FNAC-Olivennes confirm a true Stalinist drift. These agreements provide to terminate the internet access Internet downloaders by the Regulatory Authority Technical Measures. We denounce this privatization of justice. Moreover, the State alleges French create a database of Internet terminated, which is outrageous, but not surprising from a power plug ever more citizens and their DNA. [2] (((Boy, I couldn’t agree more if I could understand that. As Tech Crunch suavely puts it, “pas d’Internet pour vous.”)))
The French Pirate Party | Beyond the Beyond from Wired.com
(((It took some looking, but thanks to Mimie here, we have a chance to (more or less) determine what President Sarkozy actually declared about his government’s new Internet policies.))) “La protection du droit d’auteur, la préservation de la création, la reconnaissance du droit de chaque artiste, de chaque interprète, de chaque producteur de voir son travail normalement rémunéré, c’était un engagement important de ma campagne présidentielle. (The copyright protection, the preservation of creativity, the recognition of the right of every artist, every actor, every producer to see his work normally paid, was a major commitment of my presidential campaign.) “Depuis trois ans, j’ai répondu présent chaque fois qu’il a fallu faire prévaloir le droit légitime des auteurs et de ceux qui contribuent à leur expression, sur l’illusion et même sur le mensonge de la gratuité.