Immersion Blender

  • larisa/ripley's article on the recent rash of dubious takedowns in the mp3blogspotosphere :: written for a youth/general readership, so pretty backgroundy, but a good explanation of the current lay of the land :: bye bye blogspots
  • like many other music blogspotters in recent weeks, gregzinho gets hit with a DMCA takedown notice, served to him by Blogger/Google thx to some bottomfeeder based in irving, TX (who cut his teeth doing "anti-piracy" "work" for his own pr0n sites and has now turned his attn — presumably for a decent paycheck — to music blogspots) :: there are layers and layers of middlemen in this reeking, sinking ship of an industry :: can u see the rats running up the masts?
  • on musical copying, copyright, and chilling effects from ray charles to kanye to the legendary K.O., incl a brief history of sampling litigation in hip-hop :: certain issues (e.g., race & appropriation) call for more nuance, but the focus — a good argument for why copyright/IP doesn't work so well in music — is sharp :: nice generals too — "Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. … [Sampling] is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law?"
  • bravo to james boyle (& yale U press) for making his new book on the public domain & enclosure in the digital age — quite appropriately — downloadable, readable as html (with the ability to comment on individual paragraphs!), and CC licensed!
  • "The internet makes copying cheap. Businesses that see their livelihood as dependent on the restriction of copying – concentrated in the recording, film, publishing and software industries – are understandably upset. Their goal is to have the same ability to control their content as they had in an analog world but to keep all the benefits of pervasiveness, cost saving, and viral marketing that a global digital network brings. To that end, they have moved aggressively to change laws worldwide, to introduce stiffer penalties, expand rights, mandate technological locks, forbid reverse engineering, and increase enforcement. It is not so much a case of wanting to have their cake and eat it, as to have their cake and make your cake illegal. Yet there are hints in each of these industries of a different business model, one that aims to encourage, rather than to forbid copying. …"
  • "These images of kids playing video games were created by Robbie Cooper, a British photographer who employed a Red camera — a very-high-resolution video camera — and then took stills from the footage. Cooper, who says he was inspired by the camera technique that Errol Morris used to interview people in his documentaries, arranged his equipment so that the players were actually looking at a reflection of the game on a small pane of glass. He placed the camera behind the reflection so that it could look directly into their faces as they played." :: write-up & slide show @ http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/11/18/magazine/20081123-games_index.html

videyoga ::