You might have noticed the little Electronic Frontier Foundation and Open Rights Group banners that have been at the bottom right of this blog for years…why do I support them? Well for one, although I’m not in the States I support the EFF because currently they are fighting for you and I to be able to do video mashups and post them legally to sites like YouTube without getting those infantile (as Lessig pointed out in my last post they do treat you like you’re in school, the Myspace ‘copyright quiz’ is even more offensive) DMCAs.

Also I support them because they are fighting the likes of Apple and co. who are creating anti-competitive closed systems and thus being usually bad for the consumer (AppleVangelists and ‘Geniuses’ should read their rather damning revelation of the AppStore legals that Apple doesn’t want you to see – All Your Appz Belong To Uzz indeed) and fighting DMCA and ACTA which is probably behind the evil Digital Economy Bill, and fighting for free speech and net neutrality online.

Open Rights Group does a similar job but with a UK/European stance – there are things EFF can’t/won’t touch that are specifically UK (the aforementioned DEBill for example, ORG has been campaigning about that). It’s a double handed attack, because what may go down in the US could pop up here, and vice versa. They also cover CCTV and ID card and other security worries where technology is possibly going to infringe on civil liberties and privacy – things that are more specific to the UK.

Pirate Party is also getting bigger here in the UK, I’m a member there too, although not been as involved as I’d like.

So whether you’re a mashup DJ, video remixer, developer, interactive artist, musician, web designer or just concerned about security and the (mis)use of technology and laws around it, I strongly recommend punting some money and support over to EFF and ORG, amongst many others…because they really are fighting for the digital freedoms you currently enjoy.

/soapbox out.

(created with FAT’s great Google Tag script – love the ZEVS style one too)

Apparently Google has deleted entirely several music blogs entirely for infringement of copyright – even the ones that posted tracks with permission from the record label, artists or management.

I commented on this Guardian article, thought it bore repeating (and extending) here – shame the comments devolved into the sad ‘HANG EM COS THEY IS PIRATES’ rantage and many didn’t bother to actually READ the article.

Thing is, very few blogs nowadays post ‘illegal’ tracks. They get sent to them by pluggers and managers and even the artists themselves. If you have an email from the PR company saying ‘can you post this track?’ then why is it suddenly a) illegal and b) killing the music industry when the very industry is asking for blogs for free promotion?

This blog gets these ALL the time…I rarely ever post single tracks here, not ‘legal’ ones (mashups yes, but they almost never can be legal) but I still get deluged by these people. So I’ve expected to get hassle, never have in over 5 years (one polite request for a takedown from management – not a DMCA cos I’d just laugh), but I do self-host and use Wordpress, which to be honest if you’re running a blog on Blogspot or Blogger you are a fool, and should at very least have daily backups for when a post get pulled, or crosspost to another backup blog. Also only 3 of the 100 top blogs run on Blogger – note that more than a 3rd use self-hosted blog software such as Wordpress or Movable Type. No-one trusts free hosted blogs such as Blogger or Blogspot (or even Wordpress.com) for precisely this reason…it’s not like we haven’t been here before (but a few posts is different to an entire blog).

I do feel like Tangina in Poltergeist saying to the poor spirits still using Google and other free hosted blogs – come into the light! Come into the light! Really self-hosting is the only way to go if you are serious about blogging, also it makes the DMCA process less automatic and harder – hosting companies won’t be able to pull individual posts – you’re a paying customer who they don’t want to lose so will usually ask you first unless it’s something criminally illegal (child porn, wares etc), you can backup easily, and can separate your domain from your host so you can setup elsewhere easily if you do get the site pulled – but that is rare because to be brutally honest record labels aren’t going to expend that sort of lawyer time and energy. especially when at the click of a button some untrained oik can file a DMCA request on a hosted site.

I DO think there should be more transparency in blogging…far too many veiled PR and re-cooked press releases and dodgy dealing behind those script fonts and pictures of zero-size models. I’d rather people said ‘yes this was officially sent to me’ than pretend to be guerilla and underground and oh-so-radical (and ironically get burned for it). It would reveal the double-standard of the industry so clearly – they WANT DJ whitelabels, they WANT mashups, they WANT podcasts to play their music, they WANT blogs to blog it…but then when the official spotlight comes on then they pretend they didn’t. It’s bullshit. I’ve had industry A&R peeps tell me they court unofficial remixes – why do you think they release acapellas and instrumentals?

Blogging is exactly the same…they want the underground niche cred and free promo…but don’t want to officially admit that, or blame their online/viral PR company. Hypocrites indeed.

With all of that said – Google shouldn’t get off the hook…they are being evil again (such a surprise). The bloggers were unwise but putting out DMCAs for people posting THEIR OWN music? Same thing happened with the YouTube debacle – Warners and other companies putting out DMCAs to their own acts who wanted to post the videos. Google does need to sort out some way of checking if the bloggers have permission, or at least act within their OWN guidelines and give the bloggers warning. Until then, I strongly advise anyone to avoid Blogger and Blogspot and boycott them.

And in other news, we can +5 Warners in the ‘Suckiest Stupidest Copywhore Record Company OF ALL TIME’ stakes (head and head with EMI, folks!) cos they just decided there’s no future in streaming music services like Spotify.

Either a) trying hard to not be in the charts later this year b) thus wanting to go bust due to more head-in-the-sand policies c) want to win the much envied Radio Clash SUCKAR award (it’s a standing golden statue of Gary Glitter and Lars from Metallica in a ***CENSORED*** position). Who knows.

EDIT: Brilliant video by Dan Bull responding to Lily.

OK the land of Twitter (I twittered about the whole affair on the 16th – keep up at the back there ) and now blogs has been entertained by the latest shite to fall out of Lily Allen’s mouth – this time her hypocrisy regarding file sharing.

You see It’s Alright for her to share mixtapes of full songs (not 30 seconds!) of other’s music, her Myspace demos or even copy articles without attribution, but apparently she supports the governmental ‘3 strikes’ law to cut off file sharers.

She turned up to support a meeting of ‘minds’ in music at Air Studios, organised by Ed O’Brien of Radiohead and the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) – where they agreed that rather being cut off as per the people’s bandwidth should be throttled to 56k-level speeds for file sharing,. Oh that’s alright then

The buck doesn’t just pass to Lily, surprisingly the likes of Billy Bragg (sorry Billy but your beloved Woody Guthrie must be spinning in his grave, he understood more about the concept of public ‘commons’ than you ever will) supported such a measure as did such intellectual alumni and thinkers:

Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason
George Michael
Annie Lennox
Patrick Wolf
Tim Rice-Oxley
Ed O’Brien
David Arnold
Guy Chambers
Sandie Shaw

I eagerly await the full list so I can make sure I can sanction all the fuckers and never pay them a penny…definitely a case of ‘I’m alright jack’ and bloated irrelevant rock stars not really understanding the real issues behind downloading and file sharing…as several people have pointed out, the problem of widely downloaded tracks ‘by the kids’ will not be bothering most of these acts anyway, being either bland corporate mulch or being severely over the hill.

They don’t seem to understand that the whole issue was created by an industry that refused techological and legal change, screwed consumers repeatedly, expected special copyright laws, special treatment and arcane kickbacks that other industries do not have, and that there’s very little proof that like home taping before it that downloading really affects sales – in fact my experience with blogs, podcasts, torrents and P2P et al is it actually creates sales.

And it does tend to support the idea that musicians should keep well away from things they don’t understand…and if said acts pretend to be radical or daring in future I will laugh in their faces. Sorry, you are corporate cock-sucking bloated whores shilling for an industry whose death (or at the very least radical change) is necessary for some semblance or creativity and sanity to return.

As Techdirt later pointed out, as did Boing Boing that pointing a finger at Lily’s hypocrisy, or her using ‘rare’ ska samples on her records (her first LP is full of them, I do hope they were all cleared?) isn’t helpful, even if she did moan “i made those mixtapes 5 years ago, i didn’t have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry back then… “ Baroness Scotland-style. It’s harder and harder to work as an artist in the modern copyright sphere, things such as free mixtapes and mashups and sharing files (transformed or otherwise) for free SHOULD be possible for a 21st century artist to do. And like Lily, they DO, but you would hope they then have the sense not to cut the strings for anyone else coming up who would like to do the same. The current position of copyright is untenable…rather than slapping Lily’s wrists (oh OK, go on for a bit, it’s fun!) it shouldn’t be an issue for people to share content of all types, and the laws against that will have a freezing effect from the bloated rock stars to the kids just starting their music careers. It’s bad, and will affect everyone.

And reading Lily’s Myspace post about EMI, the company whose Cease and Desisted creativity in the mashup world and mismanaged by Guy Hands, are apparently losing jobs, well I cry for them, I really do.

At least it isn’t all bad, Lily is apparently leaving the music industry. Can I hold you to that, Lil? Maybe she’ll go into politics And she also deleted the blog posts that started all this – toys, meet outside of pram, pram, exit toys.

EDIT: Best response ever to this whole thing (via Bush No. 10)

As David Jack so succintly points out in I bought a CD, not a licensing agreement the music industry wants it both ways (but not in a porn way – fnar) – to license music but then not uphold those licenses on physical media. Works even better with MPAA and co. and scratched DVDs – you ‘license’ the content but if the DVD gets scratched somehow magically that ‘license’ gets revoked, without Bond or M ever getting involved.

Fine – let’s suppose I now have a licence for personal use applying to all the CDs I own. I should be able to take advantage of that. A CD I bought 10 years ago now has a scratch down the middle so that five of the 10 songs refuse to play. Luckily for me, this problem is solely with the physical medium. After all, my licence for personal use should allow me to reacquire ”my” content, especially since it is digital data and can be reproduced an unlimited number of times at virtually no cost.

”No,” cries the music industry, ”you bought a product, not a licence. You are not entitled to a free replacement, you need to buy it all over again. And when you do, you will be covered by another identical licence. Until something happens to this new physical medium.”

via Nicole Simon

Posting this a few days late since my webhost was having problems, so hence all my sites have been down for the last few days. Really annoying…

Firstly, it’s a bit late but I have to say how shocked I was at the sentencing of the Pirate Bay founders – a year in jail and 30m Kronor (£2.4m) is not something that even a Mafia-connected or Drug-trade connected DVD/CD pirate would get, not that I think they are even in the same league or as culpable as those people. You can kill someone with reckless drunken driving and get less jailtime and certainly less fine….goes to show that of course property (as in the G20 riots) is seen as more important than people.

And the ‘good’ reasons for this action have piled up – cinemas are losing ticket sales, right? (nope). But the music industry is in peril cos of downloading and torrents? (not really and nope it’s just changing). And of course all artists see bittorrent and online sharing of free content as evil that will destroy their career and must be destroyed? (nope, nope and nope)

Fortunate in my lateness of response I’ve had time to gauge the responses of others, and I’ve noticed a worrying trend amongst some, especially those who ‘transform’ copyrighted work (mashups etc) to say something along the lines as ‘Good. They were dirty pirates and not like us cos honour among thieves we transform our works’. WRONG.

Really they are different sides of the same coin, don’t delude yourself about that. It’s divisive and exactly what they want. It does raise an interesting question though: How much do you need to transform a work to change it from piracy to mashups?

Where do you draw the line, say with film. Are redubs transformative? Re-edits? Mashups with other films? Fan vids? Fan reviews? Fan recreations? Artistic comment or review using the original work as examples or ‘quotations’? It all goes back to Korda and that Che Guevara image. What you might not think as creative, others do.

It’s far more muddy unclear area than you think. One man’s transformation is another man’s rip-off. YouTube doesn’t see my video mashups as transformative, it’s fingerprinting technology just spots say Office Space or Depeche Mode and automatically nixes it – regardless of ‘fair use’ – which is a law that only the US has, and is fairly niche -  other places like Sweden and the UK I think do not preserve the right to parody and copy for most uses, apart from very old laws about photocopying and quotation in a print context.

As Shephard Fairey is finding with the Obama poster, how much a work is ‘transformative’ is a problem. AP can and did take pictures of the whole work (without people, a la Sherrie Levine) and present them as their own copyright…which they can. But when Shephard takes one of their images, redraws it totally and changes it subtly they sue him:

It may seem obvious to you the difference between a mashup and a direct copy, but try writing down the differences…in a legal form that everyone understands AND is water tight AND covers all situations without destroying creativity, art or centuries of artistic quotation and appropriation. That’s the problem, coupled with the fact that yes judges don’t understand the technology, that expensive lobbyists and lawyers are paid for by the big 4.

They are still in that (Dean) Gray area.

That’s not to say I’ve not had my qualms with the Pirate Bay guys – the fact their ISP and backer (the ‘4th man’) Carl Lundstrom has links to far-right groups in the past – although as the other people pointed out he owns one of the biggest ISPs in Sweden so the fact they host with him doesn’t imply a relationship. Although he helped them out early on as one of them worked for his ISP, the suggestion that the TPB guys are fascists, or that Lundstrom wanted access to the youth by TPB is ridiculous. If you listen to the ignorant rabble such as The Register, the tabloid red-top of the digital world, well you get what you deserve.

I did write a long post regards this (annoyed by The Register article) then realised this was a shock/scare tactic by the likes of Petter Nilsson  (the questioner in the video) and Expo and the opponents of Piratebay to dirty their reputation. If you look into the background of the people, research around the subject you find that it’s not all clean either, they are opposed to Lundstrom for other reasons than just politics. He’s an unpopular guy in Sweden….and it’s far more complex than what was presented by the likes of The Register. Also I HATE it when people cry Neo-nazi when it’s far from obvious they are (certainly the man is dodgy in this regard, but far from being a Nick Griffin), it’s like crying fire in a crowded theatre. It’s bad journalism and yes I think Godwin’s Law should apply.

So treat The Pirate Bay guys as the first guard of what will happen to the rest of us; not going to repeat Pastor Niemoeller again but certainly grasping to the idea that ‘Hey guys, don’t shoot me, I create mashups and edit the work!’ when it’s as equally illegal will not save you. The fact TPB is a torrent site and not direct linking to the files means that in Sweden at least other sites that link to ‘objectionable’ content are at risk….Google is an unlikely one, but certainly if the precedent like with YouTube that even linking to copyright content is verboten then that leads to all kinds of horrors, including the total fragmentation on the Internet and ‘freezing effect’ on new technologies.