The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Yup, I’ve been delinquent with the postings, but that’s because I’ve been taking care of a few things that I’ve been letting slide for far too long. More stuff this weekend, I promise — a whole mess of New Year’s stories, and some New Year’s Resolutions to boot!

In the meantime, may I recommend:

Small Stories. Derek Kirk (a.k.a. Gim Ji-Hoon) makes such wonderfully woe-filled cartoons. Taste the Korean Gen-X angst. Ai-goo! Ai-goo!*

* Ai-goo is a Korean cry of lamentation.

What I’ve been up to. I’ll do the writeup later, but in the meantime, enjoy these photos that my housemate Paul took. Crazed co-workers looking for loose women, Japanese exchange students hanging out at the house all night, accordion gigs, and celebrating Christmas when you don’t celebrate Christmas — all photographed and put online for your pleasure.

Other Asians’ weblogs. I’m now part of The Ricebowl Journals. Your tiger blogging style is no match for my dragon blogging style!

Sitting one row ahead of the shoe-bomber. The December 24th entry in acme’s blog on the use perl site is a first-hand account of what happened with the shoe-bomber on American Airlines flight 66.

Logrolling. Claire Berlinski knows how to write. The first line in the body of her e-mail to me reads:

I’m a big fan of yours. Really, I am.

Hey, Claire, Merci beaucoup!

She’s asked me, as a loyal reader of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, to check out her roman à clef (I think that’s the correct term — it’s not a roman policier since it’s really about spies, not detectives), Loose Lips. It’s a novel about a young CIA recruit, her experiences at “The Farm” (their training facility) and sexual intrigue at “The Company”. Loose Lips has already been published in France — en Français, of course — and Claire’s publishing the English version as an e-book to test the response. She’s made the first chapter available for free online; the rest of the book is available for a mere $5.95. I found the first chapter intriguing, but then again, I’m a sucker for a good espionage yarn.

Speaking of France, here’s my most favourite 24-hour restaurant in the world. I also like this place, even though it’s touristy as hell.

Special message to Paul: foie gras is pronounced “fwah grah”, not “foy grass”. It’s French for goose-liver pate, and you missed out by not trying it. (Our neighbours gave us some aas a Christmas present. If only they’d given us some sauternes to go with it.) Paul, check out this little guide to French cuisine.

I’ll continue talking about copyright and the entertainment industry in my next update. Promise.

The Randroid Who Stole Christmas

It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.

That’s the closing line of Leonard Peikoff’s essay, Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial, courtesy of the Ayn Rand site.

Phrase of the Day

“Grated Umbrella Handle”: this is what my co-worker Mike Skeet’s wife calls Kraft Parmesan Cheese.

The site that goes up to eleven

Guitar Geek. No, I’m not a guitar player, but I’ve always had a little bit of guitar envy. This site documents the equipment setups of various rock guitarists and bassists with beautiful diagrams. See what monster rocker Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath, baby!) used in 1971 and see what’s he’s using today. See the rig of the man who died Rock’s silliest death and the rig of the man who died Rock’s most Hemingway-like death (What? Hemingway was killed by his wife?).

The site’s collection is far from complete — for example, there’s no coverage of any members of my favourite cock-rock archetype band AC/DC (members…cock-rock…heh) — but it’s growing by the day, and you can suggest guitarists and bassists for inclusion in the list.

Did I mention how lovely the diagrams were? Pictured below is an example — the charmingly Zen-like rig of Joey Santiago, the other Filipino rock and roller named Joey, formerly of The Pixies…

Choose Your Own Adventure

Alter Ego. A very intriguing game where you start as a baby and make choices throughout your life that affect it until you’ve lived out your allotted span. Why does that sound so familiar?

If you like “choose your own adventure” games but find Alter Ego too existential crisis-inducing, may I suggest Choose Your Own Hemingway Adventure by the Ernest Hemingway Denigration Society or the really twisted game called Brad, the Game?

WELCOM 2 DUMPSVIL, POPULATN: U

The popular belief is that Muslim Law decrees that all you need to do to divorce your wife is to say “I divorce you” three times (Question 4 on this page says it’s not true and that you only have to say it once, as long as you’re doing so in a rational frame of mind). Singapore authorities have reversed their decision allowing men to send their wives divorce messages using SMS (text messaging on cell phones).

Here’s the sound file for the Homer Simpson quote from which I got the title for this story.

They hijacked my smelly old couch and flew it straight into the Kremlin!

Moscow is trying to expel the Salvation Army, claiming that they are a paramilitary group out to destroy the Russian state.

“Hey, Accordion Boy,” you might say at this point, “in your last posting, you were trying to drive home a point about fair use and just went on about copyright instead!”

To which I would reply, “For starters, that’s Accordion Man, bucko, and you can’t talk about fair use without first defining copyright.”

In my last posting, I said that the idea behind copyright was to promote creativity by granting creators exclusive rights over their work. This control would grant creators the right to control the distribution of their work and to earn fair profit for their creativity by giving them a mechanism for charging a fee (called a royalty) for its use.

The problem with absolute copyright is that it’s too restrictive to be practical. You’d have to ask for the creator’s permission every time you wanted to use his or her work, no matter what (and if they did grant you permission, it would be their right to charge you a royalty fee). If you were writing a book report and wanted to quote passages from that book, you’d have to get permission from the author (and perhaps pay the author a fee). If you wanted to tape a television show that you’d otherwise miss, you would have to contact the studio that owned the show to see if it was okay with them (and perhaps pay them a fee). If you wanted to hum a tune by your favourite recording artist, you’d have to get the permission of the record company (and knowing record companies, you most certainly would have to pay them a fee).

Fair Use

The antitode to this ridiculous restrictiveness is the doctrine of fair use. Fair use is one of the exceptions to copyright, granting the public limited rights to the use of works without the permission of the copyright holder under certain circumstances. The idea behind fair use is to provide people the freedom to use and enjoy the works of creators while still honouring the intent of copyright.

The Legal Definition

Fair use is a fuzzy area of copyright law that’s open to interpretation. Rather than providing some hard-and-fast rules by which one can determine whether the use of a copyrighted work is fair use or not, section 107 of U.S. Copyright law defines four factors that determine when the use of copyrighted work can be considered fair use (the boldface stuff in quotes is from the actual legal doc itself, the indented stuff is mine):

“The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes”

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• it is being used for educational or non-profit purposes rather than for-profit purposes.
• it is more than a just a copy of the original — say, an alteration or enhancement.
• it is being used for a pupose different from the original
• it is being used for a different audience

“The nature of the copyrighted work”“

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• it is already published. A unpublished work has not yet been seen by the public, and may be considered private property — using it may be interpreted as theft.
• it is out of print
• if the work is factual rather than artistic (since facts belong to no one)

“The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• you use a small fraction of work rather than a significant portion of it
• the portion of the work you use is not the “meat” or “essence” — that is, its use does not adversely affect the creator’s ability to earn fair profit for his/her effort

“The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• your work differs from the original
• your work is aimed at a different audience
• your work contains some of your own original material

The Real World

As I mentioned earlier, the four factors in determining what is fair use are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules and regulations. They are open to legal interpretation. Here are some cases of the fair use of copyrighted works:

• Quoting passages from a work for criticism or review
• Teachers photocopying sections or chapters of books as handouts for their students
• Making a personal copy of a CD, making a “mixed tape” or “mixed CD” of tunes from my library of CDs or converting my CD-based music into MP3 files for playback on my computer or portable MP3 player. You can even make mixed tape/CDs for friends, accordiong to the Audio Home Recording Act
• “Time shifting” — videotaping a television show so that I can view it later (I can’t stay at home to catch SNL, I have a life, dammit!). This was established in a landmark trial often called the “Betamax Case”.
• Parody – the classic case where fair use doctrine protected a parodist is the 2 Live Crew case (yup, the Me So Horny guys) when they did a parody of Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman.
• Editorial artwork. Here’s an example of fair use of Mickey Mouse.

Take a good look at these examples. Some of them may not apply in the future, if certain industry groups have their way.

Hillary, You Ignorant Slut

No, not Hillary Clinton. I’m referring to Hillary Rosen, president of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). According to their site, the RIAA is “the trade group that represents the companies and people making creative works in the recording industry”. In my none-too-humble opinion, this is a half-truth.

In July 2000, the U.S. Government held a Senate Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on downloading and file trading chaired by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. Mr. Hatch is both angel and devil, being a man who understands technology, music industry and fair use as well as being the principal architect behind the odious Digital Millenium Copyright Act (a subject for another essay). Hatch is also a recording artist whose songs have broken the top 10 on the Christian charts (not that it would take much, but that’s beside the point). At the hearing, he participated in a most telling exchange about fair use with Ms. Rosen. I hereby invoke fair use by quoting the following passage from Leflaw.net’s story on the hearing:

”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.”

It would seem that the bad record industry execs are going unpunished.

Next: The technological angle.

Of course, Walt himself is already dead. I’m referring to Disney, the corporation.

I was reading a story in Wired News today, sent there by a link on bOING bOING, a particularly good news blog to which I sometimes provide information and which sometimes links to this ‘umble accordionist’s blog. Being a programmer in the peer-to-peer software world, where issues of copyright and fair use are always close by, this one particular quote jumped out at me. Forgive the extra-large type, but I really want to drive a point home.

“There is no right to fair use…Fair use is a defense against infringement.”

This outright lie was spoken by Preston Padden, who holds the position of Head of Government Relations for the Disney Corporation. I had to make sure I read it right because what he said sounded like insane ranting. He’s declared that the right to fair use — a right that we as people who enjoy creations such as books, music and movies most certainly have — does not exist. Almost as shocking is the fact that an entertainment company needs a deparment devoted solely to maintaining relations witht the government. Goofy (I’m referring to the character named Goofy, not Bush 43) probably has more pull with Congress than Canada, Mexico and the entire European Union combined.

Time for the accordion player to drop a little science…

©

Copyright is the set of exclusive legal rights that creators are given over their works for a limited period of time. The idea behind copyright is to “promote science and the useful arts”. By protecting the works of people who create original works, copyright is supposed to provide a legal mechanism for them to be compensated for their efforts — after all, it stands to reason that creators who can make a living by creating would create more.

The rights of someone who holds the copyright on a work are:

• the right to reproduce the work
• the right to prepare derivative works based upon the work
• the right to distribute copies of the work to the public by selling, renting or lending it
• the right to perform the work in public
• the right to display the work in public
• the right to perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission

Copyright law applies to virtually every form of expression that can be “fixed” (as the lawyers like to put it) in a tangible medium that can contain that expression: paper, film, magnetic tape or disks, optical storage such as CDs or DVDs, or even merely in RAM. You see copyrighted works every day: they’re songs, books, software, and movies, to name a few. The copyright on a work lasts from the moment the work is finished and ends 70 years after the death of the creator of the work.

Copyright ideally belongs to the creator of the work, but it isn’t necessarily that way. A creator may hand copyright over to someone else in exchange for some kind of benefit. One example is my friend, Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author (and a good one, to boot). He owns the copyright to his stories, but he licenses that copyright to his publisher for the duration for as long as they publish his book. If he severs the relationship with his publisher, copyright reverts to him. By getting copyright on the book, the publisher collects the compensation (that is, the moolah, the filthy lucre, tha benjamins) that they are legally entitled to as the holder of the copyright, and they toss Cory his “vig” — that’s publisher talk for his slice of the pie. In return, Cory gets the resources of the publisher: editors, printing presses, distribution and publicity. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Some publishers do well by their authors, some don’t.

The publishers whom I believe do worst by their authors are the record companies. The music industry — an oligarchy since there are few enough “big players” to count on a single hand — are opportunistic profiteers who have turned copyright law into a means of fattening themselves. When an artist or band signs on with a record company, the company owns the copyright on their songs forever. It wasn’t always this way; it used to be that record companies could hold onto the copyright for their artists’ songs for 35 years, after which the artists could reclaim it. However, thanks to a change in copyright law in November 1999, the copyright a song published by a record company belongs to the company forever. Initiated by a congressional aide and scumbag Mitch Glazier and backed by the Record Industry Association of America, this bit of legal sophistry was conceald inside the rather innocuous-sounding Satellite Home Viewing Act of 1999. It redefined recorded music as “works for hire,” and as such, the legal creators of the works were the record companies. The artists, as far as the law was concerned, were reduced to hired hands.

This bit of legal trickery is, as we street accordion players like to say, complete horseshit. A plumber coming to fix your pipes is work for hire. An architect who builds a building for your company is doing work for hire. A photographer who works for a newspaper or magazine as part of reportage is doing work for hire. A composer who is commissioned to write a song or symphony for some event is doing work for hire.

However, an author who comes up with an idea for a book and then writes that book is not doing work for hire, nor was Ansel Adams when he was taking his black-and-white portraits, nor was the Godfather of Soul when he felt like a sex machine and set it to music.

Next time: I’ll cover fair use, and why they want to take this right away from you.

Recommended Reading

The U.S. Copyright Office’s Copyright Basics page. A good place to start.

The FCC’s page for the Satellite Home Viewing Act. See how recording artists lost their right to their own music.

The RIAA’s not done yet. True to form, they tried to sneak in more self-serving changes to copyright through some post 9/11 anti-terrorism bills. There’s nothing like profiting from the deaths of 6,000 innocent people, isn’t there?

Courtney Love Does the Math. The real pirates, she says, are the record companies. A piece so right-on that I could almost forgive her for killing Kurt (just kidding, Courtney).

Just a little busy right now. An update will appear tonight. In the meantime, for your reading pleasure, may I suggest this is your goldfish, speaking?

I’ve been working pretty long hours every day for the past two weeks, what with the company gearing up to get a test version of our software ready for the investors to try. We finished in the wee hours of Friday morning, and I haven’t touched a computer until now. I thought I’d make a quick posting in the blog, and saw this on the Blogger front page:

Woo-hoo!

Thanks, Ev (the guy behind Blogger)!

I just got the strangest mass-mailing I’ve ever seen:

Time Travelers PLEASE HELP !

message: If you are a time traveler or alien disguised as human and or have the technology to travel physically through time I need your help!

My life has been severely tampered with and cursed!!

I have suffered tremendously and am now dying!

I need to be able to:

Travel back in time.

Rewind my life including my age.

Be able to remember what I know now so that I can prevent my life from being tampered with again after I go back.

I am in very great danger and need this immediately!

I am aware that there are many types of time travel and that humans do not do well through certain types.

I need as close to temporal reversion as possible, as safely as possible. To be able to rewind the hands of time in such a way that the universe of now will cease to exist. I know that there are some very powerful people out there with alien or government equipment capable of doing just that.

If you can help me I will pay for your teleport or trip down here, Along with hotel stay, food and all expenses. I will pay top dollar for the equipment. Proof must be provided.

Only if you have this technology and can help me please send me a (SEPARATE) email to:

Robby0809@aol.com

Thanks

I’m thinking about using this as a reply:

Well, here were are again. You have no idea who I am, don’t you?

Not only am I capable of helping you, but I’ve done so twice already.

I can meet all your requirements except one — the one where you retain your memories of everything’s that happened to you up until now. Normally, it would be possible for you to remember the present (and all events leading up to it) when you go back into the past, but you kept insisting that you also want your aging to be reversed. I can only do that by reverting you to your past state, which means that events leading up to what you call “the present” wouldn’t have happened. Which means you’d have nothing to remember. See the problem?

I was willing to let things slide when things went horribly wrong the first time. Initially, it looked as though you were going to live a long and happy life: you had a successful business, you were in the best shape of your life, and you had just married one of the supporting actresses from American Pie. However, you blew it big time when during your honeymoon in Honduras, you caught a butterfly. That butterfly’s wings were supposed to trigger a hurricane that would have devastated the coastline of El Salvador, including the coastal village of La Libertad. Instead, the village was never destroyed, and as a result, a troubled and overindulged little boy grew up to become the Hitler of the 21st century. He managed to turn the eastern seaboard and much of Europe into the world’s largest smouldering graveyards before he was finally stopped. I managed to retrieve you from that timeline — you were under a pile of rubble and half-mad. I decided to try and send you back in time again.

While the course of your life has not been so catastrophic for the rest of the world this time around, you have still managed to make a mess of it for yourself. And this time, you’re resorting to spamming in order to find a time traveller like me. That’s really low.

The biggest shame of it all (and more so because you don’t remember) is that your life wasn’t as bad as you thought when you first came to me for help. You said you wanted to undo your so-called “terrible, terrible mistake“. In retrospect, I should never have honoured your request. Yes, it was an embarassing situation, but “the incident”, as you liked to call it, would have been forgotten soon enough. It’s nothing that a public apology and a little plastic surgery couldn’t have fixed. Besides, while that kind of thing was taboo once, it would have become socially acceptable a few short years later.

I am truly sorry, but I feel that you’re one of those people who will do the same kind of thing over and over, no matter what kind of circumstances they find themselves in. Please do not contact me anymore. If you see me on the street, please do not approach me or speak to me. I will claim not to know you. I cannot be bribed; you will not be able to buy your way into the past again.

In closing, all I can do is offer you some advice:

1. Please try to think before you act.

2. If you don’t do something about that haircut, you and many innocent people will regret it. It may seem trivial, but believe me, I know better.

— Joey