My world on the web
Grace Kim-Shin (thefulcrum.ca)Piracy is theft, but the gatekeeping of knowledge should be seen as a crime of its own.
via Stephen Downes
Cory Doctorow (pluralistic.net)The music industry got exactly what it wished for: a world in which the customary borrowing and trading between musicians and their songs was prohibited, with incredibly stiff penalties. To the extent that they’d even considered that this would interfere with normal musical activity, they’d assumed that it wouldn’t interfere with their activities, since the three labels would be able to cross-license to one another, and between them, they’d own everything.
But they didn’t think it through. They failed to realize that the legal liability regimes they’d created would cut both ways, and that the peripheral acts and businesses – obscure Christian hiphop artists, say – would see the giant labels and their stars as irresistibly juicy targets.
Riehl and his pal Noah Rubin designed and wrote a program to record every possible 8-note, 12-beat melody and released the results — all 68+ billion melodies, 2.6 terabytes of data — into the public domain.
One of the biggest problems with copyright in the digital era is that we expect people who aren’t in the entertainment industry to understand and abide by its rules: it’s no more realistic to expect a casual reader to understand and abide by a long, technical copyright license in order to enjoy a novel than it is to expect a parent to understand securities law before they pay their kid’s allowance.
Vintage recordings may have been published in attempt to extend copyright protection
According to Variety magazine, which first reported the brief publication, the explanation could lie in the European Union’s copyright directive. Under EU law, sound recordings are covered by copyright for the first 50 calendar years after they were made – unless they have been “lawfully communicated to the public”, in which case the copyright term extends a further 20 years.
Swift is not the first to threaten to re-record her works. Prince and Def Leppard did so after arguing they were being unfairly compensated by their original labels. But it is unheard of move for an artists at her zenith. “You are essentially splitting dollars,” said Sammataro. “You don’t know how the streaming service, the radio station or even your fans are going to consume it. Will they listen to the master or the re-recorded version?”
In the past artists might not have taken this route because marketing and distributing the new versions themselves would have been prohibitively expensive. In the digital age, and with her fanbase, no such issues will hold Swift back. Re-recording a couple of hits might once have satisfied Swift but with relations so strained she may feel like dealing Big Machine a bigger blow.
There’s a name for societies where a small elite own property and everyone else rents that propÂerty from them: it’s called feudalism. DRM never delivered a world of flexible consumer choice, but it was never supposed to. Instead, twenty years on, DRM is revealed to be exactly what we feared: an oligarchic gambit to end property ownership for the people, who become tenants in the fields of greedy, confiscatory tech and media companies, whose inÂventiveness is not devoted to marvelous new market propositions, but, rather, to new ways to coerce us into spending more for less.
With her open letter and the high-profile back-and-forth, Swift is bringing visibility to one of the music industry’s longest standing issues. And while it’s not a new problem, Swift’s discussion of it was enough to encourage artists including Sky Ferreira and Halsey to come forward about their own difficulties with label deals and ownership.
The way we regulated social media platforms didn’t end harassment, extremism or disinformation. It only gave them more power and made the problem worse.
Beware the legal-industrial copyright complex
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.