It all started a while back when Lane Hartwell got frustrated. Friends spoke up on her behalf.

At some point she called a lawyer and enacted the DMCA on the offending party's asses. See Misunderstanding Copyright Law And Ruining Everyone's Fun and/or My statement regarding the Richter Scales "Here comes another bubble" video dispute.

So there was some mainstream media coverage, and of course the bloggers sang along like a gospel choir. Some offered "easy" solutions.

Finally, she just sent an invoice. And the video was remade without her photograph included.

Early on in all this, I bought thisphotobylanehartwell.com. I've been tracking and writing about the situation in a friends-only post, but in the end, less is more.

So go over to lanehartwell.com, er, I mean thisphotobylanehartwell.com. It is customizable so that whenever you need to provide attribution to someone you can do it in really big text.

Today we lay to rest the best musician Dallas had. He was also an amazing human being. I still don't know how to process this loss.

Just wondering: how much and for how long can someone perform premeditated character assassination on me to such a degree? I understand the psychology of it, and will spare you dear reader (that's just part of it). But I do know that it has to be more tiring for the hater than for the receiver of said hate. And man, I'm tired of receiving it! So how do these people feel? Wouldn't they rather be happy?

And I guess there you have it. All I can do is choose to be happy. yay.

You thought you could keep me from loving
You thought you could feed on my soul
But while you were busy destroying my life
What was half in me has become whole

So this is how it feels
To breathe in the summer air
The feel the sand between my toes
And love inside my ear
All those things that you taught me to fear
I've got them in my garden now
And you're not welcome here

from a song i posted in an mp3 mix also a long time ago.

the record is so much better now. i can't wait to get it out so everyone can hear it

{More related to the title was going to go here.}

Of all the changes of language a traveler in distant lands must face, none equals that which awaits him in the city of Hypatia, because the change regards not words, but things. I entered Hypatia one morning, a magnolia garden was reflected in blue lagoons, I walked among the hedges, sure I would discover young and beautiful ladies bathing; but at the bottom of the water, crabs were biting the eyes of the suicides, stones tied around their necks, their hair green with seaweed.

( I felt cheated and I decided to demand justice of the sultan )

I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia.

( Now I have only to hear the neighing of horses and the cracking of whips and I am seized with amorous trepidation )

True, also in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then, but climb the citadel's highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 49-50, emphasis mine

Gary Jules - Falling Awake

Gary Jules - There's a Hole in the Sky

homeboy Jeffrey Gaines - Safety in Self

Now we must find a new safety in self
And implement all that we've learned
Now is the time to find our own wealth
And stand on our own
So much we have grown
From knowing you

I know this loss was intended
To let us all begin
And to give up now would be a sin
We can't fall down
We've got to keep marching

Just One Thing ( Read more... )

כי את אשר יאהב יהוה יוכיח וכאב את־בן ירצה׃

..

..

The reason I don't get SO up in arms (like I did yesterday) about when TV and film industry blowhards do the suing for free publicity thing is because Google feels like the really big alpha dog that's going to protect our tribe from danger. Google needs to get into the online music delivery business. The benevolent dictator thing with Google came up last night. I heart Goog so much.

This video gets better as it goes...



(...like, "If I had known that being a jerk to fans made that kind of money, I would have spit on each and every one of you." and "And although 'drunk falling down the stairs' is normally attributed to Ted Kennedy, he nor Viacom actually own the rights.")

RIAA's new royalty rates will kill online radio

The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) has recently released a revised fee schedule for internet radio. Left unchanged, these rates will end internet radio, period. The RIAA has effectively convinced this federal committee to establish rates that make online radio a non-viable business.

savethestreams.org

Doc Searls article

For most operators, this rate looks as if it would be >150-200% of total revenues

the AOL Radio Network [statistics] suggests that AOL played about 2.1 billion songs that month. At the CRB's royalty rate ($0.0008 per play), I'm guessing that would create a royalty obligation to SoundExchange for the month of November of about $1.65 million. Annualized, that's about $20 million for 2006.

Here at RAIN, we're guessing that Pandora has an audience approaching that size. (Pandora founder Tim Westergren claims that Pandora now accounts for 1.5% of all Internet traffic.) Such a royalty obligation might exceed the total proceeds of all their recent rounds of venture capital plus all their sales revenues to date.

Wall Street Journal article...the subtitle says it all: "Are Labels Undermining Themselves?"

(Pandora, a combination streaming-audio service and recommendation engine, could be particularly hard hit by the new rules: As a multichannel operator, the service would have to pay $500 per channel that has a certain number of listener hours. Pandora has 6 million users, each of whom can have up to 100 channels. You can see why the company is worried.)

I quote that particular part because it highlights just how clueless both the recording industry and politicians are about how "new" technologies work.

This stuff drives me CRAZY. And if Integration Research was still around and viable, it would be scrambling to get some grassroots action going on this issue. As it is, there's just little ol' me sitting here getting all pissed off.

The frustrating part is not that an established, bloated industry is scared of new technology. That is understandable. It's that they do the dumbest thing possible in response to that OVER and OVER. This is the second time this issue has come up in the last decade. It is like they know what they should do but feel like they can't change their mind now that they've argued for so long!