Author: Chris Barrus

Pete Seeger describes his predecessor, Woody Guthrie’s view on copyright:

Pete Seeger, June 1967:

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following: “This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.” W.G.

Like a drunken, insane Joseph McCarthy, a paranoid music industry sees piracy and revenue loss (communism!) everywhere it looks. Now they’re proposing a six percent royalty on all used CD sales – to be paid out by used CD stores.

Of course, now you have the following screw: Promo CDs, which are all charged against the artist’s royalties, are sent out as quasi-cash/payola to store buyers, radio stations, and reviewers, who turn around and resell them to used CD shops. So now you paying royalties on something that was given away for free (with a negative royalty against the artist)

Let me repeat for the record… Once I’ve bought a CD, it belongs to me. I’m then free to do whatever I want with it afterwards.

And let me again repeat for the record… CD sales would probably go up if the industry released stuff that wasn’t shit.

Kuro5hin posts a detailed summary of the current situation in Columbia which has been misreported and undereported in the American press.

Colombia is no insignificant country. It’s the third most populous country in South America, and covers more land than Texas and California combined. It’s the worlds leading producer of emeralds, and has a huge coffee and coca industry. It’s also embroiled in a massive civil war.

[via kuro5hin.org]

Friend Fred now has a ‘blog up – completely custom programmed himself.

Episode 2 of Lots Of Robots is now online. Pretty nifty CG stuff that even the jaded might like.

Bloop!

Researchers have nicknamed the strange unidentified sound picked up by undersea microphones “Bloop.”

While it bears the varying frequency hallmark of marine animals, it is far more powerful than the calls made by any creature known on Earth, Britain’s New Scientist reported on Thursday.

It is too big for a whale and one theory is that it is a deep sea monster, possibly a many-tentacled giant squid.

Let the Cthulhu jokes begin!

The Internet Pinball Database has shots of backglasses, playing tables, and promotional flyers for just about every pinball machine ever created, including my favorites: Fireball, Fan-tas-tic, Space Station, and Twilight Zone

Can’t find any more pinball arcades? Go here.

ClearChannelSucks.org has come online today “to be the premier source for information about Clear Channel, its corporate mentality, and its practices, on the Internet.” About time too!

“Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright” is a terrific 1999 essay on the rise of the Free Software movement, written by a legal historian. Stirring stuff that will get the geeks marching in the streets and give Microsoft, et. al. migraines. At least I would like to think so…

We need to begin by considering the technical essence of the familiar devices that surround us in the era of “cultural software.” A CD player is a good example. Its primary input is a bitstream read from an optical storage disk. The bitstream describes music in terms of measurements, taken 44,000 times per second, of frequency and amplitude in each of two audio channels. The player’s primary output is analog audio signals. Like everything else in the digital world, music as seen by a CD player is mere numeric information; a particular recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony recorded by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorale is (to drop a few insignificant digits) 1276749873424, while Glenn Gould’s peculiarly perverse last recording of the Goldberg Variations is (similarly rather truncated) 767459083268.

Oddly enough, these two numbers are “copyrighted.” This means, supposedly, that you can’t possess another copy of these numbers, once fixed in any physical form, unless you have licensed them. And you can’t turn 767459083268 into 2347895697 for your friends (thus correcting Gould’s ridiculous judgment about tempi) without making a “derivative work,” for which a license is necessary.

At the same time, a similar optical storage disk contains another number, let us call it 7537489532. This one is an algorithm for linear programming of large systems with multiple constraints, useful for example if you want to make optimal use of your rolling stock in running a freight railroad. This number (in the U.S.) is “patented,” which means you cannot derive 7537489532 for yourself, or otherwise “practice the art” of the patent with respect to solving linear programming problems no matter how you came by the idea, including finding it out for yourself, unless you have a license from the number’s owner.

Then there’s 9892454959483. This one is the source code for Microsoft Word. In addition to being “copyrighted,” this one is a trade secret. That means if you take this number from Microsoft and give it to anyone else you can be punished.

Lastly, there’s 588832161316. It doesn’t do anything, it’s just the square of 767354. As far as I know, it isn’t owned by anybody under any of these rubrics. Yet.