|
o-blog an i.p. blog
< previous items >
08-12
<ip>
A call to arms
in today’s SiliconValley.com asks for greater consumer
involvement in the copyright debate. “If you can set the rules, you can win the contest.”
And the entertainment cartel seems to be setting the rules right now.
<art>
Cute gimmick. London’s Tate is running a Warholiser, so you
can collect on that promised
fifteen minutes of fame deal.
zeldman
<ip, radio>
The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the
plight of webcasters, who are
now obliged to pay a rather high mechanical royalty to the RIAA for each song that
they play. Talk about killing the baby in the cradle.
pho
<www>
Jesse Hirsh argues that
bandwidth should be free,
justifying it as a human right,
and advocating subsidies. It’s at openflows.org.
nettime
08-13
<ip>
Boing boing’s Cory Doctorow lays out the issues that Apple’s “digital
hub” strategy raises for consumers, and the movie and music industries, in his article
for TidBits entitled “Can the Digital Hub Survive Hollywood?”
<www>
Blogcritics is “a sinister cabal of the web’s best writers on music, books
and popular culture miscellenea — updated continuously.” More links than you can
shake a stick at.
pho
<ip>
In “Hollywood’s private war for social control”,
The Register’s Richard Forno says
“Both the RIAA and MPAA act like drug addicts in deep denial, desperately begging for something — anything
— to ease their craving for their addictive substances…”, as well as a lot of other things.
<art>
In spite of the
stark austerity of its home page,
This is a Magazine offers downloadable issues that will appeal to designers, if
you know what I mean.
zeldman
<sound, ip>
You may never listen to The Rolling Stones the same way again gives a decent overview
of some of what the new
SACD audio format
has to offer, in the context of audiophile-appealing
remasterings of the albums the Stones recorded in the 60s. [reg.req]
… [update] Apparently “SACD is … mostly hinged to … an impressive security scheme, since [it] lets
you vary the length and width of the bumps on the CD track, you can actually design pictures in the play-side surface, i.e.,
a watermark.”
pho
08-14
<ip>
The RIAA is apparently changing tactics. Instead of going after companies (like Napster,
for example), it is going to start going after individuals.
This in spite of some
fairly clear evidence
that file sharing is doing them no significant harm.
<ip>
Lawrence Lessig, everyone’s favorite fair-use defender, has posted the content of one of
his presentations on the web. [flash.req]
slashdot
<ip>
Financial Times profiles RIAA chief Hilary Rosen, focusing on her
struggle to kill
peer-to-peer file sharing. At the same time, Billboard reports on Sen. Kevin Murray (D-CA) and
his lashing out at the RIAA for its
apparent unwillingness
to deal fairly with recording artists.
pho
08-15
<sound>
Competing head-to-head with Sony’s SACD format, DVD-A (the ‘A’ is for ‘audio’) is
an emerging format which, as
Stereophile reports, has an uphill row to hoe. (The
same site also reports on the Recording Academy’s
Producers and Engineers Wing.)
pho
|
| | |
<tech>
Robert X. Cringely has some
good news about wireless networking
in the not-too distant future.
pho
<idea>
As a devoted walker myself, I had to point out the article
Radical Walking
by Donna Landry. The rest of the site looks interesting, as well.
nettime
<art>
Photos, prose, artwork, and poetry in Jack Magazine.
th
08-19
<flash>
Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries is a pretty great flash site. Its
sense of timing, use of appropriated music, and down-your-throat narrative style, make this
a satisfying and even demanding attraction.
metafilter
<art>
If you’re interested in looking at people you don’t know, then
Look at Me
is for you. It is a collection of found snapshots that include the poignant, the
surreal, the strange, and the simply banal.
metafilter
<music>
The Actions
listing for experimental music events that occur worldwide, compiled by David Cotner,
has just been updated.
<music>
Thought you might want to know about
The Future of Music coalition.
08-20
<ip>
Lengthy paper at First Monday called
“Rip, Mix, Burn: The Politics of Peer to peer
and Copyright Law” makes a significant contribution to the discussion of how content-consumer and
-provider relationships have changed forever.
nettime
<radio>
Fax Congress Now!
Save Internet Radio!
boingboing
<ip>
Contrarian view at C|net attempts to calm DMCA anxiety. The author doesn’t like the
bill, but says it’s
not as bad
as people think. You decide.
slashdot
08-21
<ip>
Wired.com has an article Bracing for the Digital Crackdown, which discusses
how the US Justice Department might
begin going after individual
file-traders using peer-to-peer networks. Meanwhile, here’s another take on the topic from
C|net.
<ip>
Interesting interview with a Texas economist who says file swapping
just isn’t killing the music
industry, as is so often claimed by the RIAA and others.
<ip>
Lawrence Lessig talks about how the internet community needs to
get more involved in
politics to stem the onslaught from the copyright holders.
08-22
<ip>
Only 10 days left
to add your name to a letter written by Rafael Quezada to Attorney General John Ashcroft
concerning the threatened prosecution of online file swappers (see below).
pho
<ip>
Two articles about a meeting of telecom execs are interesting to read for the nearly hysterical
tone industry leaders take concerning common online practices, calling the internet a “moral-free zone”.
Here’s link 1 and here’s
link 2.
<sound>
An online FAQ will answer most of
your questions
concerning the capabilities and copy protection
features of the new SACD (Super Audio CD) format, championed by Sony.
slashdot
<art>
Graphic Witness: Visual Art and Social Commentary is a site that deserves a long, studied visit.
Take your time. Set aside an afternoon.
|
| | |
08-23
<culture>
Creative Commons has
an interview with Rick Prelinger, whose Prelinger
Archives provide a wealth of what he calls “ephemeral films”, which is to say,
instructional, industrial, advertising, and outright propaganda films. The archives are being acquired by the Library of
Congress.
boing boing
<art>
NEEN continues in the august tradition of art movements throughout recent centuries:
that of providing us with a manifesto.
xeni.jordan
<ip>
Here’s a spirited, and dare I say it, passionate set of accessible arguments in
favor of “exploding the barriers”.
pho
08-26
<ip>
An Israeli company has developed a
new and ingenious method of CD copy-protection that uses a smart card embedded
in the CD itself.
the register
<idea>
The definition of “is” may be ambiguous in certain contexts; however, there is now no longer
a need for the definition
of “the” to be in any doubt.
08-27
<www>
Like many people on the web, we take it nearly for granted that Google returns the best search
results. Maybe we shouldn’t.
nettime
<tech>
Shazam is a new service (UK only) that can identify any song through a mobile phone connection
after only 15 seconds. By accounts available to us, it’s ability to do so even in a noisy room
are remarkable. (Of course, there’s a
business model involved, too.)
pho
08-29
<ip>
Ogg Vorbis, the open source audio compression codec competing in the same space as mp3,
has written an
open thank-you letter
to Thompson Multimedia, the owner of the mp3 spec. In a nutshell,
Ogg’s profile has risen as Thompson attempts to collect royalties from every possible vector.
update: Thompson
now says their policy hasn’t been altered, and the
semantic change noted was trivial.
<sound>
In case you’re interested, here are some guidelines on
how to create your own CD that uses
the AC-3 audio format onto a run-of-the-mill CD-R blank. This is the format that allows for
surround (5.1) sound for better sound staging and fidelity, widely used in home theater applications.
<ip>
Electronics maker JVC announces a new way to copy-protect data CDs.
slashdot
<ip>
Recording star Prince has weighed in the music industry crisis in his article
A Nation of Thieves?.
It’s a fairly cogent anti-industry screed.
pho
08-30
<ip>
Open Democracy has an ongoing Copyright Debate filled with learned insights and
stimulating discussion. To quote from the
current article,
“Quite simply, then, copyright turns
symbolic forms into property, and market conditions ensure it is held and exploited by corporations.
But this is not a reality which sits very easily with public opinion. For while the concept of private
property in tangible goods, or chattels, is deeply ingrained in Western societies, the same cannot be
said about symbolic works. A strong consensus, emerging first in the Enlightenment, has it that culture
should circulate freely.”
nettime
< next items >
|
