Category: Uncategorized

The Holy Grail of Forensic Recording – Nixon’s 18 1/2 minute gap

It’s Watergate anniversary week this week and the old myths, legends, and “where are they now” stories are picked off the shelf and dusted off. The two big mysteries of Watergate are, of course, the identity of Woodward and Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” and Nixon’s 18 1/2 minute tape gap.

The latest theory has it that “Deep Throat” is Pat Buchanan, but the mystery of the 18 1/2 minute gap is going to be a heck of a lot tougher to figure out. The Wired story goes into the nitty gritty about the tape and the efforts to figure out what’s on it. ABC News summarizes also.

[via Slashdot]

Woody Guthrie on copyright

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.

Record execs call for tax on used CDs:

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.

What the heck is going on in Colombia?

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]