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Friday, July 27, 2002
Terra Nova mojo 
| | Speaking of indpendent music... Sara Winge, who runs PR at O'Reilly and who I always give as best example of a truly fine PR pro, handed me a CD several days ago at OSCon. The title is Groundswell, and it's the work of her band, Terra Nova. So a few minutes ago, while I was unpacking and cleaning the office and stuff, I stuck it in the laptop (which is hooked up to best speakers in the house), and got blown away. It's a really good album. And Sara's a helluva singer. On Raven she reminds me of K.D. Lang in When We Collide. Dig it. |
Mild weekend
| | And if I could find the #$&%@ digital camera around here, I'd show you why. |
| | But no. Guess I'll have to go back to cleaning the fucking office. |
The Great Workaround
| | We talked too briefly on the phone this morning, the Lemur and I. We both sense the need to get the whole Independent Thing happening in a major way. Fighting politicians on their own turf is an icky necessity, but a far more enjoyable one will be getting independent artists, venues and media together. Let the MPAA and the RIAA protect the old star maker machinery. We've got better work to do. |
| | I'm looking for people to help connect me to more fans, because I believe fans will leave a tip based on the enjoyment and service I provide. I'm not scared of them getting a preview. It really is going to be a global village where a billion people have access to one artist and a billion people can leave a tip if they want to. |
| | It's a radical democratization. Every artist has access to every fan and every fan has access to every artist, and the people who direct fans to those artists. People that give advice and technical value are the people we need. People crowding the distribution pipe and trying to ignore fans and artists have no value. This is a perfect system. |
| | It's time to get on the stick. |
Don't shoot until you see the whites of their lies
| | If you want to get an sense of how deeply the hand of Hollywood penetrates the skull-socks of their congressional puppets, dig the letter sent to Tom Poe by one of his state's senators. I've emphasized the relevant parts: |
| | Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the intellectual property rights and the public domain. I appreciate hearing from you. |
| | I understand your concerns about ensuring that. This issue is very controversial because Congress must protect intellectual property rights while still allowing ordinary Internet users to have access to public domain content. I appreciate hearing your suggestion for a "tag" system. I am carefully reviewing a number of proposals to address this issue, and as I do so, I will keep your views in mind. |
| | Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. For more information about my work for Nevada, my role in the United States Senate Leadership, or to subscribe to regular e-mail updates on the issues that interest you, please visit my Web site at http://reid.senate.gov. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future. |
| | HARRY REID
United States Senator |
| | On Thursday evening I shared this with Phil Windley, the CIO and blogger-in-chief of the State of Utah, and in the discussion that followed it became clear to us both exactly what kind of plans guys like Reid have in mind for the Net's natives: Indian reservations. |
| | Like Hollywood, these guys see the Net as a distro system for industry-controlled intellectual property, and the public domain as a small preserve off to the side somewhere. Thank you for giving us this fine land with all the free building material. Now go off someplace where you can hunt and gather stuff that has no commercial value. And bury your dead while you're at it. They're starting to stink. |
| | [Later...] I've been told that the very same letter quoted above has been going out from the offices of other elected officials. If that's the case, it's even creepier. Does anybody know? Is this thing just Sen. Reid's boilerplate, or is a much more massive cut & paste job? |
Independencies
| | There was a piece on Marketplace Morning Report this morning about independent music. It said that approximately 100% of what you hear on the commercial music radio is what the 5 major record lables pay the stations to play (violating the spirit but not the letter of once-famous payola laws passed in the early '60s). They also said that independent music is doing very well in spite of that, thanks to word of mouth, music clubs (and, no doubt, Internet Radio and music file sharing over the Net). |
| | Tom is a tireless cultivator of the region in the commons where music and freedom meet. He's also very good at finding devils in details. Here's what he says about the BPDG Report draft: |
| | If we look at the recommendations that are being presented to Congress to use in drafting legislation to protect copyrighted material transmitted over the Internet, we find that severe restrictions will have to be placed on computers and devices used by the general public, as part of a legislated mandate to quell "piracy" in the words of the Entertainment Industry. The RIAA, MPAA, large corporations such as Intel, Microsoft, Sony, and others, are seeking to control how information is distributed. In their opinion, the need to remove legacy computers from the world is paramount to successfully utilizing the Internet as a medium to distribute movies, records, and "quality content", another words game being promulgated by these special interest groups. |
| | And, of course, the computer you're using now is already on its way to being a legacy box. |
| | The year-old Titanium I'm using already has some annoying DRM crap in it. For example, I can take a screen shot of anything I like, as long as it's not a DVD. So if I want to copy a frame from The Matrix, I can't. The Hollywood cop is there in the machine. And if I download a .pdf file such as the Letter to Chairman Powell from Sen. Hollings that Seth Schoen talks about here in Consensus at Lawyerpoint, it opens by default in an Apple program called Preview that doesn't allow me to highlight and copy anything. I can choose to open it with something else, of course, but I gotta ask, Why won't Preview let me highlight and copy any text? I can't believe there would be any reason other than to prevent copying. Why else subtract a value like that? |
| | These are small hammerings against the foundation of freedom on which we built the PC industry and the Net. If Hollywood gets its way, the foundations will be the other way around. The freedom to use a PC any way you like won't be yours. It will belong to Hollywood and the consumer electronics cartel. |
Out with the mice and their running sock dogs
| | It's an election year. He's up. And we need to take him down. |
| | Howie wants to "secretly hack into consumers' computers or knock them off-line entirely if they are caught downloading copyrighted material," says the AP. Help this L.A. Valley whore by writing to his D.C. office. He's an ugly hooker, but that doesn't keep him from taking the money. After all, he knows how to turn a trick. |
| | Here's the e-mail address. Let Howie know how you feel about his lips being wrapped around the Disney/AOL Time-Warner teat. |
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