Update

I made an update (a lot of spelling corrections, some addenda to the “Recommended Reading” section) to yesterday’s posting about Michael Greene’s evil Grammy Speech. You might want to give it a look.

Happy 3rd Anniversary, Superosity!

I’d just like to congratulate Chris Crosby on the third anniversary of Superosity, his great on-line comic! And double-congrats on finally coming up with that perfect catch phrase (the storyline for the catch phrase starts here)..

I can’t explain why, but I love this this particular one.

Long live the misfit instruments!

This posting just appeared in MetaFilter:

The Hendrix of The Accordion, the Stevie Ray of the banjo, and even Tubas are producing some rockin’ stuff. I see something of a small trend here an I think it’s a good one. These artists take the insturments you hated to be stuck with in the high school band and turn them into something astounding. If anyone knows of other examples, I’d love to hear about ’em.

If you’re a MetaFilter member, feel free to mention a certain accordion player who plays a pretty mean Nine Inch Nails…

Michael Greene, NARAS President and CEO

During last night’s Grammy awards, Michael Greene, President and CEO of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) delivered an anti-file sharing speech entitled The Insidious Virus of Illegal Music Downloading. Some excerpts:

No question the most insidious virus in our midst is the illegal downloading of music on the Net. It goes by many names and its apologists offer a myriad of excuses. This illegal file-sharing and ripping of music files is pervasive, out of control and oh so criminal. Many of the nominees here tonight, especially the new, less-established artists, are in immediate danger of being marginalized out of our business. Ripping is stealing their livelihood one digital file at a time, leaving their musical dreams haplessly snared in this World Wide Web of theft and indifference.

…

This problem won’t be solved in short order. It’s going to require education, leadership from Washington and true diligence to help our fans – that would be you – to embrace this life and death issue and support our artistic community by only downloading your music from legal Web sites. That will ensure that our artists reach even higher and, deservedly, get paid for their inspired work.

Life and death issue? I think NARAS should get over themselves.

It’s fandom, not theft

Greene squarely puts the blame for the music industry’s woes — woes most industries would kill for — on the customer. This, in spite of the fact that music sales were up during the peak of Napster. What he doesn’t realize — or more likely, what he realizes but chooses not to say — is that nobody “rips” (that is, converts CD music to MP3 format) music they hate. It’s a waste of time. Rather, they rip the tracks they love, and those are the files they share. No money changes hands in the file sharing process; no one — not even the Napster corporation — made money from the transfer of MP3 files. This isn’t piracy; it’s fandom. And unlike piracy, fandom is free advertising. They don’t like nor understand this, which is why they also consider making mixed tapes and CDs for your friends illegal.

They’re not too keen on the doctrine of fair use. If you have a favourite CD that you want to keep at home, they’d rather you bought another one for your car and another one for work instead of making copies for car and office use, even though that’s considered to be fair use in the eyes of the law. Here’s RIAA president Hillary Rosen and Utah Senator Orrin Hatch at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on MP3 downloading, courtesy of Leflaw.net:

”Can I make a copy of a CD that I buy and put it into a car?” asked Hatch. When Rosen hemmed and hawed, Hatch muttered, ”The answer is yes.”

”Is it fair use to give the copy to my wife for her car?” Hatch continued. ”Is it fair use for me to rip a CD? Is it fair use if (a computer network) decides for efficiency reasons that one copy is sufficient to serve for storage, instead of keeping 200 separate copies, is that fair use?”

”None of these is fair use,” Rosen eventually replied. She argued that musicians’ willingness to ”tolerate” people making copies was an instance of ”no good deed goes unpunished.”

They’re taking intellectual property protection to ridiculous new heights. The music industry would love nothing better than for you to shell out extra ducats in order for you to know what the lyrics and chords to your favourite songs are. That’s why the Harry Fox Agency tried to shut down or neuter OLGA — the On-Line Guitar Archive — and several other sites providing lyrics, tablature and chord charts. Listening to your favourite piece of music over and over again so that you can transcribe its lyrics and chords and then sharing that information isn’t a crime — once again, it’s fandom.

Recently, Pete Abrams, in his great online comic Sluggy Freelance, used the lyrics to James Taylor’s Fire and Rain to underline his storyline. He credited the creator and copyright holder, but still he was told to takes the lyrics out of the comic strip. The songs wasn’t central to the storyline; as Abrams himself puts it, “…the lyrics were just icing on the cake of this story…Actually it’s the little decorative flowers that go on the frosting of the cake.” It was merely a nice detail, and an act of fandom, not theft.

They’ve gone so far as to try and make money off cell phone ring tones that sound like your favourite tunes. Once again, that’s fandom, not theft. How much longer before your keyboard, guitar or accordion is embedded with a device that pays royalties whenever you cover a recording artist’s song, even for family and friends?

In all these cases, we’re not talking about acts of taking someone else’s work and making a profit of it. We’re not even talking about people who are taking credit for someone else’s work. We’re talking about fans who love the work so much that they use it, which in turn further propagates that work. This is advertising that is not only free, it’s done by people who truly love the work, not some disinterested ad exec who’s only promoting the work because s/he’s paid to do so. It’s honest and from the heart. It is not piracy.

The patsies

The patsies who participated in the downloading experiment-cum-publcity stunt. The filename of this picture is “hackers.jpg”.

During the Grammys, the cameras would occasionally cut to a scene where three college-age students, Numair, Stephanie and Ed, were downloading MP3s. It was part of a demonstration of the evils of downloading. Greene announced that they were showing just how many files could be downloaded by only three people in two days. These three patsies — or perhaps they’re doing this as part of some community service in exchange for time in juvie — managed to download almost 6,000 songs.

“That’s three kids, folks,” said Greene “The RIAA estimates that – now listen to this – an astounding 3.6 billion songs are illegally downloaded every month.”

In an attempt to paint computer programmers as part of the problem, the on-line photo of the three patsies is called “hackers.jpg”. The term hacker refers to a obsessively dedicated programmer, and even the correct term — cracker — refers to someone who breaks into computer systems, not someone who is downloading files.

By the way, if any you happen to know Numair, Stephanie or Ed, by all means feel free to give them a good pimp-slapping in my name.

Do you suppose they have any friends left after last night’s Grammy awards?

Forgive the ad hominem cheap shot, but I can’t resist

Mr. Greene, I respectfully suggest that you stop harassing the customers, and while you’re at it, stop harassing your own executives too.

Recommended Reading

The RIAA sucks donkey balls. Here’s proof. Want more proof? Here’s an article on how they’d love to look inside your computer.

George at blogaritaville reports that “the government, two gigantic content distributors, two consumer electronics manufacturers (one of whom owns a substantial MPEG/MP3 patent portfolio), a router company, and a chip company are getting together to debate your rights as a content consumer.” Hmmm. Around the same time as Greene’s speech at the Grammys. Funny, that.

Memo to George: Please use capital letters at the start of your sentences. It makes ’em easier to read. The e.e. cummings / archy-and-mehithabel thing is pretty old.

Support the good guys in this battle against industries who are deciding what you rights are. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is on the side of the consumer in the current imbroglio over copyright and fair use. They’re the good guys, and really stand-up people whom I know personally and for whom I would take a bullet. (Cory, Fred, Cindy, Brad, and Biella: please don’t put this to the test.)

Update, Friday March 1.

Welcome BoingBoing readers!

George at blogaritaville points out in this posting that “unless the artist had recouped for the record label, the band that made the music on the CD wasn’t going to make any money off their purchase, anyway.” He also points to a Steve Albini (producer for Nirvana’s Bleach and In Utero albums) essay, The Problem With Music. Oftentimes artists end up losing money when they make an album because the record industry middleswine have taken their inordinately large slice of the pie.

You might want to check my earlier postings on copyright and fair use, Death to Disney, Part One and Death to Disney, Part Two. Read about the influential Disney guy who says that there is no right to fair use, learn about copyright and how it’s been stolen away from recording artists, find out what this fair use thing is and what the RIAA really thinks about it. Then write your government representative!

Nick Mark of Naked Pope: The Movie fame reminded me of this funny Onion piece called Kid Rock Starves to Death: MP3 Piracy Blamed.

Local Woman Translates Peekabooty Article in Der Spiegel to English

This is not the local woman to whom I am referring.

The article on Peekabooty in Der Spiegel that I mentioned a couple of postings ago has been translated into English — for the most part. Those quirky Germans and their quirky writing! Check it out here.

Special thanks to Liz “DenVixen” Phillips for the translation!

And while I’m making references to The Onion…

Check out That Trip to Canada Really Broadened My Horizons and Americans Would Be Outraged If They Understood Enron Collapse.

Blog This

Henry Jenkins from Technology Review (“An MIT Enterprise”) wrote about weblogs in the current his current Digital Renaissance column, entitled Blog This. This very blog gets mentioned:

Bloggers are turning the hunting and gathering, sampling and critiquing the rest of us do online into an extreme sport. We surf the Web; these guys snowboard it. Bloggers are the minutemen of the digital revolution.

…

Most often, bloggers recount everyday experiences, flag interesting stories from online publications and exchange advice on familiar problems. Their sites go by colorful names like Objectionable Content, the Adventures of the [sic] AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, or Eurotrash, which might leave you thinking that these are simply a bunch of obsessed adolescents with too much time and bandwidth.

It may look like a backhanded compliment, and coming from most journalists, it would be. However, Jenkins is the director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT, a place famous for seemingly-frivolous pursuits such as the development of the first video game, SpaceWar, to their legendary model railroad club. Silly and pointless as these endeavours may seem, they “sharpened the saws” of those who are shaped and influenced high tech. It’s this background which allows him to see the potential:

Yet something more important may be afoot. At a time when many dot coms have failed, blogging is on the rise. We’re in a lull between waves of commercialization in digital media, and bloggers are seizing the moment, potentially increasing cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation.

Jenkins notes that there’s a polarization going on in media. At one pole, there’s what Ben Bagdikian’s been warning us about for years: control is held by a small handful of very powerful corporations with great reach. You’ll get your 500 channels, but they’ll all have the same thing. At the other end is the Web, noisier than a thousand Istanbul flea markets, with a billion choices and no simple way to separate the gems from the junk. “Bloggers respond to both extremes,” writes Jenkins, “expanding the range of perspectives and, if they’re clever, creating order from the informational chaos.” In an infomation economy, context is the real currency.

Bloggers are lenses through which the information of the Web is focused. Some, like Jim from Objectionable Content and George from Blogaritaville, are powerful microscopes focusing on current events; others, such as this one, are closer in spirit to those novelty spyglasses that came in Cracker Jack boxes that distorted your perspective or made the world look funny. Both have perspectives that you won’t find easily (or maybe at all) in mainstream media and both often aggregate news from broadcasters, print and the Web and interpret it in their own way.

Jenkins suggests that the future of media:

…could depend on the kind of uneasy truce that gets brokered between commercial media and these grass-roots intermediaries. Imagine a world where there are two kinds of media power: one comes through media concentration, where any message gains authority simply by being broadcast on network television; the other comes through grass-roots intermediaries, where a message gains visibility only if it is deemed relevant to a loose network of diverse publics. Broadcasting will place issues on the national agenda and define core values; bloggers will reframe those issues for different publics and ensure that everyone has a chance to be heard.

I find this interesting, not only in and of itself, but also because it’s along the lines of the kind of work I’ve been doing for the past two years at the company for which I used to work. We were developing software whose purpose was to find things that were of interest to you, based on the the principle that people for whom you have a high affinity will likely point you to things you find interesting. Blogging acheives roughly the same result; the blogs I like often point me to things I love, whether it be some other Web page or simply something of the blogger’s own creation.

I’ll leave it to Jenkins to close this entry:

As the digital revolution enters a new phase, one based on diminished expectations and dwindling corporate investment, grass-roots intermediaries may have a moment to redefine the public perception of new media and to expand their influence.

So blog this, please.

Duly blogged.

Recommended Reading

The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian. Yes, I’ve already linked to it in the posting above, but it bears repeating. The latest revision covers the reach of traditional media corporations into the Internet.

There’s been a recent spate of writeups on blogging. Check out various articles from:

• John Dvorak
• Fortune
• Far Eastern Economic Review
• Business 2.0
• Wired
• Adam Curry

And while I’m on the topic of writing blogs, here’s a great essay called How To Write a Better Weblog.

The German magazine Der Spiegel (“The Mirror”) ran an article on Peekabooty on Wednesday entited Im Zeichen Des Teddies: Vorhang auf für Peek a Booty. In my head, I picture well-dressed Germans in Strellson suits marvelling at our work while flipping through Der Spiegel in a Berlin cafe. Perhaps they’re doing this while enjoying some Mentos (The freshmaker!).

Unfortunately, I know very little German, most of it from hanging out with my friends Liz and Nasreen, a very quick lesson in the language taught to me by my charming date in Prague and from “Nightcrawler“, the German member of the X-Men. I turned to Babelfish for assistance.

Ach! Ist ein long, long way to go

Even when people are doing the translating, the meaning often gets mangled or lost. The title for the Scorsese movie Mean Streets once got translated to Greek as “Bad Roads”. I remember laughing at a magazine advertisement for the German-made CD-burning software called Toast (an excellent piece of Mac software, I might add). The headline read “Not only with bacon do you catch mice.” Later it was explained to me that it was a direct translation of a German colloquialism. What they meant to say was “there’s more than one way to do it”; the closest English equivalent might be “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”.

Computers are much worse, since they pretty much rely on lookup tables and some pre-programmed rules for grammar. However, the results provide for the kind of amusement you can’t get from a human translator.

The headline translates as “In The Character Teddies: Curtain On For Peekabooty”. It’s followed by this paragraph:

That once as “Hackerbrowser” concerned Peek a Booty had its first public appearance. As “Privacy Tool” is to occur to “Booty” censorship in all world. The final phase of the development becomes the balancing act between attention and proscription.

As Babelfish would put it, I become in the state of confusion.

When a human translator runs across a word that doesn’t translate, I imagine s/he tries to express the meaning of the word by using an explanatory phrase. For instance, the German word schadenfreude would have to be expalined as “delight in other people’s misfortunes”. Babelfish doesn’t have this capability and simply leaves the word as it appears in the original document. Combined with its dubious translations, you get gems like this:

No miracle thus that DC stopped being a group of hackers: Cult OF the DEAD Cow understands itself now as a “prominent developer about Internet Sicherheits Tools”. And DC develops naturally no software, which smells after “Hacking”.

I’m guessing from context (something that Babelfish can’t do) that sicherheits means security. And I’ve been in a couple of poorly-ventilated computer rooms that did smell after hacking.

What about my muck?

My favourite line in the translation is this howler:

Those grew on deVillas muck and quite cult-suspiciously

I swear, nothing grows on my muck. I wash it daily.

I think it’s a reference to the bears I drew for the user interface. I think what they really meant to say is that the bears are great mascots and will become popular icons in computer culture. I hope, anyway.

They did their homework

What doesn’t require translation is the research they did in writing the article. Despite the fact that the Peekabooty site doesn’t have any links to Paul’s or my Web sites nor any pictures of the bears (yet), they managed to find some graphics for the story. They got an image of Boodles the bear — his original name, taken from the gin — and added the caption “nice competition for the Linux Tux” . From a photo on Paul’s site, they made a photo of me and Paul with phreaker legend Captain Crunch. They cropped out The Register’s Andrew Orlowski, who appears in the original photo.

I looked around for any mention of my accordion playing, but there wan’t any. Hmmm. You’d think the Germans would be poopin’ their pants with joy over that.

Thanks, Liz!

Luckily, help is on the way. My friend Liz “Bunny” Phillips is going to translate it for me. I can hardly wait to read it in non-mangled English. Thanks, Liz, and I’ll buy you drinks for the favour!

It’s a nice sunny day. I think I’ll go wash my muck and then go outside.

Recommended Reading

If you want to see the article as translated by Babelfish, copy this URL…

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/technologie/0,1518,183280,00.html

…and paste it into the “Web Page” field on the Babelfish site.

Mark Twain’s satirical take on German: The Awful German Language.

In the movie South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut, Cartman manages to say “German scheisse video” without getting electrocuted by his implanted V-chip. Perhaps the V-chip works for English swear words only. I often lie awake at night pondering these things.