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September 1999

Holiday Special: John Heck Returns To Prague; Results In Text

6.09.1999 / This labor day, we honor foodservers everywhere with a new text. Tape-beatle member John Heck has returned to Prague, a move which has triggered for him the impulse to pick up a thread on the burdens of employment he began writing in 1994. Long employed as a waiter in a French café, John writes with a keen eye critical toward the boss and compassionate toward his fellow workers. The text, really an intertext, creates its own little web from among John’s other writings, which include ‘Popular Culture is the Walrus of the Avant-Garde,’ ‘The True Story of the Demise of the Tape-beatles’* and ‘Making the Money Which One Merely Looks At’*.

• Read ‘Great Escape: Food Server Tunnels Way to Freedom.’

Click on the sumo wrestlers. Keep clicking.

Dutch Site Caters to the Plagiarist MP3 Fan

3.09.1999 / Here’s interesting multi-featured site that is a must-visit for those among ye who have a taste for the pilfered (and other things, of course). The project of Jos Smolders, the Earlabs site comprises a comprehensive collection of resources ranging from a place to download mp3s; links to mp3 psychoacoustic theory; (anti-)copyright issues; etc., as well as provision for adding your own material to the collection. Jos says:

‘Electroacoustic and electronic music have always had an air of technology around them. The knowledge gathered from these experiments has always remained rather in the dark. The institutions where the researching was done traditionally (sic) were state supported studios, crowded with academic folk, who circled their own scenes. When i started EAR (Electro Acoustic Research) this information was rather difficult to obtain for non-academics such as myself. I then started a quest for information about music, structure, psycho acoustics, electronics, etc. What i learned i implemented into the sound constructions that i designed. Next to that i tried to start a discourse between academic and non-academic composers because i saw that both groups had a lot in common. … We will set up a sound lab where you can fish for interesting sounds to add to your compositions. Take part in the definitive funeral march for copyrights. You can drop sounds for others to download, pick up the droppings of others. … Electro Acoustic because it’s the music of the 20th century. Electronic art breaks with all that has ever been. Because it makes use of means that are of this century and the times to come. It is truly the music of the future.’

• Let’s look and listen in Earlabs’ direction.

Plagiarist Programming for Web Radio

1.09.1999 / New Weekly Webcast Seeks Submissions. Submitted by Mr. Otis F. Odder, Seattle WA, regarding his RealAudio radio show, available now on the web:

‘Friendly Persuasion plays an eclectic blend of appropriated music collage, incredibly strange and atrocious music, found-sounds, esoteric recorded material, and oh, so much more. Every week a new one hour show is brought to you, available to listen to for that entire week, in streaming RealAudio. Found sounds, appropriations, and incredibly strange music. Tune in every week and catch some of the splicing and dicing!’

• Listen to the Friendly Persuasion show on Antenna Internet Radio.

• Find out how to submit material to the Friendly Persuasion show.

Tape-beatles Announce Participation in GrayDay.org

29.09.1999 / In support of the action undertaken by GrayDay.org, this web site will be unavailable the day of October 1, 1999. It will be replaced by a standard GrayDay.org page.

• What’s it all about?

Spiffy Spoof: Grayday Parody Web Site Lambasts Copyright Issues

29.09.1999 / A Call To Defend The internet. On October 1, an organization called the Digital Divas hopes to celebrate the second annual GreyDay, an event promoting increased copyright security on the internet. Touting their ominous ‘grayed-out’ web site, the Digital Divas expect a greater turnout than last year’s pro-copyright event which received hundreds of thousands of visits and earned coverage from the New York Times, Wired News and the Village Voice. Not everyone on the web, however, will be at the right event.

Earlier this week, a team of Silicon Valley software programmers and graphic designers revealed their own send-up of the official GreyDay page: www.grayday.org. The disgruntled code warriors are calling their alternative ‘GrayDay’ and have painstakingly created a counterfeit version of the original GreyDay site.

But whereas GreyDay.org urges netizens to imagine ‘what if’ copyright infringement leads to a lack of creativity on the web, the spoof site GrayDay.org implores visitors to imagine ‘what if there was no WWW … no internet.’ According to the authors of GrayDay, the call for more copyright laws to cover the internet is antithetical to the very purpose and history of the internet and the web.

‘The web has made possible by the free exchange of not just ideas but elaborate creations like the first web browser [Mosaic] or the most popular web server software [Apache],’ says Cecil Parc, a spokesperson for the creators of GrayDay.org.

‘It’s ironic,‘ adds Parc, ’that the minority of graphic designers and major corporations who are now trying to take over the web with absurd copyright demands are acting like greedy johnny-come-latelies trying to forcibly get a slice of a pie that’s been free for years.’

Although the half-dozen computer types behind GrayDay.org call themselves ‘Tell-all Computer Programmers & internet Professionals’ or ‘TCP/IP’ for short, they will not reveal their real names because they claim to ‘represent the millions of people on Earth who have benefited and will continue to benefit from the free exchange of ideas which is the hallmark of the internet.’

For industry insiders, even their name is a geeky rebuke to heightened copyright sensitivity as TCP/IP also stands for the ‘Transmission Control Protocol and internet Protocol,’ a complicated piece of code at the heart of the internet which was literally given away, without copyright, in 1981 by programmers at the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

GrayDay.org’s organizers hope that their elaborate hoax will encourage people who enjoy or rely upon the web to learn more about the ‘non-copyrighted’ history of the medium. They also encourage the public to take an active role in protecting the internet and the World Wide Web — ‘neither of which would exist today,’ the group points out, ‘if they had been developed by persons who were fixated by copyrights.’

• Visit GrayDay.org.

• Visit Greyday.org, too.