I’ve posted about them before (their excellent and funny Canary Wharf video I think as part of their ‘Everything is OK’ series) but I love how Charlie and co. deal with the Fake Bacon (aka Hobby Bobbies, aka PCSOs). They really do seem to be a menace, as they pop up a lot in Section 44 mistakes. Love the comment about the Louis 14th beard, and it seems that even at the end the PCSO is smiling…

And here as posted on Boing Boing and other places how they deal with a Section 44 stop and search – politely, firmly, funnily and also with love…but also with all their rights intact. Shame the police haven’t been so respectful in recent shocking cases of art-school students being arrested,  forcefully detained and fined for taking pictures of buildings for their work, journalists being stopped for taking pictures of the Gherkin, filmmakers getting detained for filming their partner’s questioning on a mobile and a man getting arrested for filming Christmas.

More about The Love Police, and the disturbing State of the Nation in Britain which is getting more and more like V for Vendetta and 1984 for my liking. Sadly the ending cuts out but you get the drift.

Chasing Shadows from Charles Veitch on Vimeo.

And remember: don’t be afraid, humour is the best Weapon of Mass Destruction And resist. Nicely.

Well those in the UK are – and should be concerned because Orwell’s predictions (and even Alan Moore’s in V for Vendetta) are seemingly comng true. With The Fear this time being terrorism – despite a terrorist attack happening last nearly 4 years ago – they are clamping down on a variety of things. They might seem small, even trivial – but the right to photograph protests, or anything you like in a street – have already been eroded, and if they think you might be a terrorist however spurious they can lock you up for a long time – stop me if you can see the way this can be politically used to oppress people?

And if they take any DNA off you, they can store it in their beloved police database against EU law:

And now with the new Coroners and Justice Bill the State want the right to use that information, or any other information they collect however spuriously for anything they like and use it for something else – as Boing Boing put it:

Clause 152 allows any Minister to take any information gathered for any purpose and use it for any other purpose

So now councils can spy on you to see if you’re emptying the bins correctly (ooh you terrorist) you can guarantee this clause WILL be misused, whatever they say – they said that about the anti-terrorism laws and there is a mounting pile of abuses that go FAR against the intention of that law and with all this CCTV, DNA databases and soon to be ID cards, we have become the most snooped country in Europe, if not the whole world.

What can you do? Well those in the UK can write to your MP – no don’t yawn and switch off it’s REALLY PISS EASY, I mean a muppet like me could do it, so can you – I did it and got results and a shiny letter from Glenda Jackson AND a big warm feeling that I had actually DONE SOMETHING – so can you. You can do it by email via WriteToThem and takes a few minutes. And you can join this Facebook group. – publicise, Twitter about this, bother friends, talk, phone – get the word out.

That’s not hard is it? Or are you going to be the kind of stupid person that Pastor Niemoeller wrote about? These are YOUR laws, if you just sit there eating your grub and shrugging then don’t moan at me when they come through your door.

Also word to my pirate radio bruvs (and gals out there – they’ve just raided about 30 of them in the UK and shut them down, heard via John. Keep going, keep the faith, don’t let em win. And that bullshit about emergency frequencies – they still using that as an excuse? As a former frequency scanner and radio geek, I can tell you the ambulance and other systems moved to higher frequencies from publically accessible radio waves (ie. on your dial) back in the 80’s – they use special frequencies with digital encoded systems for the ambulances, and obviously the police realised being listenable on a normal radio wasn’t really a good idea, so they did too. So I don’t see how the pirates could affect this unless some faulty transmitter is sidebanding. I call bullshit on that until I hear otherwise.

You see what I mean? It’s easy to shout fire in a crowded theatre, but since before Gordon Brown and that Weapon of Mass Distraction called a war where they ignored us, politically things have been shifted to make a whole bunch of people seem they are a potential threat, rather than the necessary watchguard (and yes the watchers?) to try and keep an increasingly distant and corrupt set of politicians accountable…ignorance and apathy just gives them the power to eventually really fuck up your day (or life).

This current state of affairs is really bugging me, there is a real danger we are going down the path of 1984 – you may scoff but do some research about what laws have been passed recently – and it will chill your blood.

If you’ve not tuned into Rise and Shine, so far you’ve missed ladies made of Magma saving Christmas, missing cats, Paris goes to Belgium in a currently very fashionable Italian Euro Disco vocoder stylee and a punk Santa breakin’ the law, well internet tubes – with yours truly on sleighbells!

Quite interesting seeing/hearing the songs develop by the guest songwriters and video & chat contributors, they are moulded (or maybe forged in the heat of battle over 3 hours from 7pm to 10pm until Christmas Eve.

New songs will appear here:

And don’t forget to chip in for charity here:

A lot has been written about Radiohead’s ‘radical’ policy with ‘In Rainbows’ last year, letting the fans pay what they like. It seemed like a bold move at the time , if not original. Trent Reznor and others had done it first – but it was interesting because Radiohead were at the time such a big former major label industry mainstream band, as much as they like to pretend otherwise.

In fact, it turns out according to their record label’s Head of Business Affairs if the fans had paid too little they’d have pulled the plug well before that:

Instead Dyball points to the fact that the band and their management never announced a timeline for the pay-what-you-like experiment and were watching the average price daily with a view to potentially withdrawing it any moment should it drop too low. Dyball points out that the average price went down after the download moved from uberfans to less committed fans, as expected.

Maybe not so radical then? Really if you’re going to make bold artistic statements intending to be a radical shakeup of the music industry and put good faith of your fans to the fore, you don’t keep a hand on the ‘off’ switch. That suggests an insecure strategy, and could have backfired for Radiohead, instead they made more money than before…then signed back to another major label to release the album physically. And then pulled the free copies just before that was released.

One positive thing, like the examples of online books given away bumping sales of present and future hard copies, that the industry will take note and this will happen more often – embracing the ‘free’ and thinking long term about how people are exposed to music and trusting them more, rather than the siege mentality that has gone before.

Yet all this supports an arcane and overblown system that has resisted change by criminalising a victimless crime of downloading and going after 12 year old kids and people who didn’t even have a computer to download with! And with this new ISP law, I can see this getting quite ugly…

So remember: revolution this is not.

(xkcd)

Following on from a Boing Boing post – and this great article by Mark Dery and have been researching this new Orphan Works Act and have been rather disturbed and worried. It reads like a land-grab on Intellectual Property rights that only the rich stock libraries or famous artists could afford to register or submit their works to the online registries. I think the worry is justified given that so much is available online and copyright owners have little control over what gets pirated or published without their consent, and without credit. Just saying ‘I couldn’t find it’ is not enough of a defence IMO, if acceptible for damage mitigation – especially or commercial use of images or music.

People might think this stance is paradoxical given my background and past on these issues – well I am a photographer and designer by trade too – and although this law might be great for mashups (doubtful, since the record companies already register via publishing, and most have the funds to do so) I also do believe in compensation for artists and photographers for the work they do if commercially used – by and large people who remix culture don’t charge because of the legal issues; OWA might change that (for good or bad) but I personally feel a little sick that my photos, designer work or music could be used without permission because I don’t have the $$$s or time to register them with these fictional online registries – it will bias against people who are semi-pro or amateur, or small businesses.

I think a better model might be one that defaults to Creative Commons Non Commercial – kind of like a proper public domain law for orphans, that where there is a question mark non-commercial uses are OK. I think most of the objections to this law are around monetary issues – I think most people already are not bothered by non commercial uses of their works, as it’s fairly unpoliceable on the Net anyway, but usually small scale and doesn’t do any damage – but I can see a lot of objections to commercial uses of ‘orphan’ works, ethically, monetarily or artistically.

And tbh this seems a total corruption of what Orphan works were supposed to cover – it was supposed to be older but uncredited works that have fallen out and now into copyright law and had a grey status, like the musical works that weren’t extended pre 1976, or privately published works by companies long gone.

Not some kids photographs from 2008 that he or she couldn’t afford to register….

Sadly this silly piece of legislation is more likely to put back the whole orphan/fair use debate back many years, since creators are going to take one look at the lack of commercial control and unworkable time and expense registering their portolio of work here and go ‘I don’t like this’ whereas the whole issues of orphans, public domain, fair use and such like are really important and need better laws that allow people to create remixed works but allow some semblance of control for all artists and creators over how their work is used, especially commercially since companies tend to have the better lawyers…and that’s where most of the disparity lies.