Blackmoor Vituperative

I loved tonight’s Fantasmo. It was simply awesome to see The Abominable Dr. Phibes on the big screen.

I was looking for information on the music used in Dr. Phibes when I stumbled across this excellent article about it; check it out.

Interesting note: Somewhere Over The Rainbow was not the only anachronistic song in the movie (The Abominable Dr. Phibes is set in 1929). The song One For My Baby (And One More For The Road) was not released until 1947. I did not know that.

Ah, and here is another Dr. Phibes article worth reading.

I stumbled across this video on YouTube earlier today. I loved this song, and I loved this video, and I was really happy to find it again. It is from back in the 20th century, when MTV used to play music videos.

It’s too bad that some of the really great music videos from that era are, as far as I know, lost to history. For example, I’d pay a tidy sum to have a DVD-quality copy of this music video, not to mention the Kate Bush oeuvre. Ah, well. At least someone recorded this on VHS and uploaded it to YouTube. I just think it’s sad that we have lost some of our cultural history from before the advent of universal digitization and file-sharing.

Do not let the propaganda from the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons fool you: digitization and file-sharing will preserve our cultural heritage for future generations. Our great-grand-children will lament the fact that much of the 20th century multimedia will be lost to them — if they are even aware of the loss. If the media robber barons have their way, the works of the 21st century will be lost, as well.

Anyway, enjoy the video. According to Ms. Martin’s husband, the video was inspired by The Hunger. I believe it.

A study by the Australian Institute of Criminology revealed that software and music industries couldn’t explain how they calculated piracy losses, even though this data was used for lobbying efforts and in court cases (The Australian reports).

According to The Australian, the Music Industry Piracy Investigations (MIPI) – a body responsible for “investigative and intellectual property rights enforcement related services to the Australian music industry” did not know how piracy estimates were calculated as data it collected was processed by the IFPI in London. The MIPI manager commented that: “The reason … [she] wasn’t personally aware of how they are prepared is because they are compiled by the IFPI… They have a group that has been doing this for some time.”

Also the report noted that often the following misleading assumption is used to estimate piracy losses: a person who acquired pirate goods would otherwise have paid full price for the legal product. Moreover, unverified extrapolations were used by lobbyists to present the problem to the government.

Finally the report suggests that if these statistics are not thoroughly explained by the purveyors they should be withdrawn.

This study is a draft so far and the institute plans to check it further (after the criticism voiced by the industry) before it is handed over to the Australian government as “senior researchers disagreed with its conclusions”.

Piracy stats don’t add up, The Australian
New music ‘piracy’ statistics, p2pnet
Piracy losses fabricated – Aussie study, The Register
Australian Agency Questions Piracy Damage Valuations, Digital Music News

There’s a good reason the music industry can’t explain how they are calculating piracy losses. To my knowledge, there’s only ever been one serious large-scale research project conducted to try to calculate the direct effects of “illegal” downloading. The researchers’ conclusion was that peer-to-peer downloading’s effect on CD sales was so minimal that it was indistinguishible from zero.

This is yet another indication that the entertainment industry’s global push to expand their stranglehold on intellectual property rights is not about protecting creativity; it’s about the desire of a handful of global oligarchs to claim ownership of all forms of human creativity.

You can download a copy of the full study at: www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf

(from AllOfMP3.com, Music industry fails to explain how the piracy losses are calculated)

I have been saying for years that the whole “losses from piracy” argument is based on fallacies and that it’s just smoke and mirrors so that the media robber barons can seize and retain control of our cultural future. In my opinion, this observation falls into the “water is wet and teen-agers are horny” category. But some people are so damned gullible that they’ll believe anything the Digital Rights Mafia says unless there’s an egghead study that tells them what anyone with eyes could see for themselves.

Monitor outside
for the people inside
a prevention of crime
a passing of time

The come and they go
it’s a passing of time
they come and they go
Whilst we sit in our homes

Sit back and enjoy
the real McCoy
our new air of authority
our sentinel of misery

His face was full of intent
and we shook excitement
then the victim stared up
looked strangely at the screen
as if her pain was our fault
but that’s entertainment
what we crave for inside
no more second rate movies
from those people outside

(from Siouxsie & The Banshees, Monitor (1981)

That song was released in 1981 on Siouxsie & The Banshees’ Juju album — before news crews carried mini-cams, before home video cameras, before reality TV, before the PATRIOT act, before our President told the NSA to spy on American citizens.

Juju is a spooky album. 🙂

This is neat: Music publisher/distributor ships Linux PMP.

I have been listening to Concrete Blonde’s Mojave. It’s an odd album. One review I read describes it as “desert gothic”, and that almost fits. I might also call it “gothic blues”. Really, I’m not sure why “gothic” even belongs in there, but I don’t know of a better way to describe something with such an undertone of spookiness. It’s a good album, though. You should buy it. I learned some things about coyotes while listening to it, and that’s not something you can say about most albums.

Just for general grins, here is what’s on my playlist today.

• Concrete Blonde, Mojave, 2004
• Concrete Blonde, Group Therapy, 2002
• Fields of the Nephilim, Elizium, 1990
• Fields of the Nephilim, The Nephilim, 1988
• Fields of the Nephilim, Dawnrazor, 1987
• Hooverphonic, Jackie Cane, 2002
• India Arie, Acoustic Soul, 2001
• India Arie, Voyage To India, 2002
• Queen, Greatest Hits I, II & III (The Platinum Collection), 2001
• Sweeney Todd, 1979 Original Broadway Cast, 1979

Everything but India Arie is an old favorite. She’s new to me, but she performed at Circuit City’s Store Support Center (aka the corporate office) on Friday, and I liked her music, so I am checking it out.

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) – You’d think Steve Jobs would be the hero of the music industry, after a year in which online music sales almost tripled to $1.1 billion. But no. The record labels are again pressuring Apple (Research) to raise prices at the iTunes Music Store from 99 cents a song. Apple and the labels are renegotiating deals struck when its music store launched three years ago, and a key issue is variable pricing — the right to charge more for singles from a hot band, and less for music from lesser-known acts. But charging more could backfire, since pirated music is still widely available to consumers on file-sharing networks, Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf told the Associated Press: “[Customers] have an alternative — they can get it for free.”

(from CNN Money, iTunes faces music price hikes)

Dell Home has the Creative Zen Vision:M 30GB Player (Black) for $290 – $20 off $150 code QGM7T0C1C2TVVD [Exp 4/30] – $10 off code X10DHMT?VL6NBS [Exp 4/21] = $260 with free shipping.

• Plays MP3, WMA, MPEG, WMV 9, DivX, Xvid, Moti, and displays pictures
• 2.5″ LCD (262,144 colors), FM Tuner, Voice Recorder, up to 14 hr battery (audio)

Creative makes the best media players. I have a Creative Zen Touch and it’s great. Here is a tutorial I wrote for people new to creating MP3s.

From the moment I learned about the illegal hacking of customers’ computers by Sony, I have been calling and writing my legislators to urge them to initiate legal action against the company.

Well, it looks like the ball has started rolling.

According to eWeek, Sony’s legal problems have begun, and hopefully they will continue for quite a while.

“The allegation that Sony has incorporated open-source software into its purportedly proprietary software in a manner inconsistent with the Open Source General Public License, if established, would create a nice irony,” said Simon J. Frankel, an IP (intellectual property) attorney and partner with Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin LLP in San Francisco.

“The entire purpose of open-source software is to make broadly useful software available for all to build on. For Sony to take such software and incorporate it into software that it claims as proprietary would be contrary to the entire spirit of open source,” Frankel said.

“The improper use of GPL software by Sony could be the basis of a claim for violation of the GPL, which could prevent Sony from utilizing the rootkit program to the extent that it includes GPL software and, if a proper party were definable, could even subject Sony to damages claims under the license and copyright principles,” said Michael R. Graham, IP attorney and partner with Marshall, Gerstein & Borun LLP, a Chicago-based law firm specializing in IP.

Not long after that, the lawsuits bagan. The first suit came from the EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation), but it was soon followed by a suit from the state of Texas.

“On a very basic level of product liability law, if Sony is distributing a product that causes damage to consumers, then it may well be held liable,” Frankel said.

“There also appears to be a particular Texas statute that may make Sony liable for distributing spyware to consumers’ computers. This potential legal liability only piles on to the tremendous public relations snafu caused by Sony’s media player,” Frankel added.

(from eWeek, Sony’s Rootkit DRM Raises Legal Red Flags)

Way to go, Texas! Time for Virginia to step up to the plate.

Indeed, one way or another, thanks to its use and licensing of XCP DRM, Sony may be in for quite a legal shipwreck.

By all the gods of music and video, let’s hope so.