Remix: the Movie...

Nashville Film Festival brought some very interesting films to the Music City...  Opening night brought about appearances from the likes of William Shatner, Vincent D'On0frio, Sheryl Crow,William Lee Golden from the Oakridge boys, Mayor Karl Dean, and many others.  Although many great films were involved, I must say that one film had a real impact on me.

4-29-2009-10-49-14-pm

RiP: a Remix Manifesto is the story of Girl Talk, Lawrence Lessig and the changing culture of shared music, copyright law, fair use and usage of music that benefits artists...  In short the gray copyright law is taken to task with this great cinematic piece... best of all IT IS AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE VIEWING, REMIXING, ETC!

I urge anyone interested in this subjectmatter to take a look at this film... it is both entertaining and informative... I am so glad it is available for online viewing...

Viva la Girl Talk

Yo Ho, Yo Ho a Pirate's Life for me (not really)

AAARGH! So just in case you have been under a rock for the last 5 days, the ruling is in... the founders of Pirate Bay have been found guilty in a Swedish court of law.  They have all been sentenced to one year in prison and will have to pay approximately $3 Million in damages (after the appeals process- if the ruling stands).

So what now?

The facilitators have been stopped, but what does that mean for all of the users (Pirates) populating Pirate Bay?  What does this mean for the bay?  Will it suddenly dry up?  No.  In a word... No.  This really means nothing.  The Swedish courts have placed their finger in the dyke... they have stopped the spillage for a moment, but the flood waters will remain.  The Pirate Bay remains active... servers housed safely outside of Sweden... and the pirates sail on.

There is a lot of debate going on over whether the founders of TPB were injustly convicted... whether the ISPs should be held responsible as well.  I think there are a lot of people at fault here including all named previously and in some way, I would love to see them held responsible.  However, I am a realist.  I understand that the times are changing and our industry needs to find better ways of making a living (outside of suing).  Ultimately,  the results of the pending appeals will leave a legacy of rulings that will affect the way our courts view file sharing for years to come.  The next few years will no doubt be an interesting lot...  time will tell.

As a sideline to this story, there has been a recent study stating that "pirates" are 10 times more likely to buy online music than law-abiding non-pirates.  The number of participants in the study was rather small (less than2000), but I find it quite interesting and wonder if this is in fact the way it is... according to the comments below the story- the pirates doubt it as well.

stealing intellectual property has never been so easy

[caption id="attachment_190" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Music Pirate"]Music Pirate[/caption] Last week i was introduced to a couple of websites that are disturbingly good at what they do. Someone innocently emailed them to an industry email list i am on asking for people's thoughts on their legality. I commented first and was the recipient of a hellstorm of comments from people defending these website's existence.

The websites: TuneNabber.com and ClipNabber.com are just what they sound like. Tune Nabber allows a user to enter the URL of any streaming audio/video content and "nabbs" it by making a MP3 copy of the audio and making it available for download on your computer. Clip Nabber does the same thing except it actually copies the entire video clip and makes it availablefor download to your computer.

All of my conventional wisdom tells me that both of these are taking content placed in a fixed broadcast format and changing the formatof that content, thus violating the rights of the content owner. Well, my esteemed brethren simply blew up on me when I made the statement "To me, they are clearly facilitating copyright infringement." Stating that these sites were no different from Tivo, tabbed browsing or even a browser's "save image as" function in that they simply "time-shifted" the video and/or audio making it possible for a user to watch it at a later date.

I would be fascinated to hear what anyone else has to say on this subject. To me, although it seems like a black and white matter- I do realize that all of copyright land tends to stay in the gray.