I hate laws like this being made by people who just learned how to turn on a computer, and the music/publishing/whatever content companies who are now pissed that they actually have to compete for eyeballs instead of having the lazy profits of the past.

Piracy would be less of a problem if the ridiculous length of . . . → Read More: The Real Issue is Copyright Abuse]]>

I hate laws like this being made by people who just learned how to turn on a computer, and the music/publishing/whatever content companies who are now pissed that they actually have to compete for eyeballs instead of having the lazy profits of the past.

Piracy would be less of a problem if the ridiculous length of copyrights didn’t keep so much out of the public domain. I was born in 1956. If I live until 2066, it wouldn’t be until the 23rd century (2141) that any material I created would be in the public domain. Can you imagine what such a rule would have done to Mozart or much of the Classical Canon ? If Mozart had lived until 1866 (110), his material would not have entered the public domain until the 1930′s. Mozart died in 1791. His material would not have entered the public domain until the 1880′s under current rules. How many works would never have been created without his inspiration?

For years, the music industry has blamed filesharing-or piracy, as they call it-for it’s diminishing returns. But really? ITunes isn’t doing badly, and Amazon Music is doing well. But would SOPA/PIPA really make a difference? I can rip a borrowed CD. I have software that downloads videos off of YouTube for the music. Closing down sites will make no difference to their bottom line-a bottom line that I barely contribute to anymore simply because I don’t really listen that much to terrestrial radio anymore. Terrestrial radio, which the music industry heavily relies on, is no longer the commanding presence it once was, with millions listening to little else but that.

The truth is that the industry has never recovered from the death of its CD based model. When all there was was CD’s the music industry could get a cut all along the line-from store owners who purchased merchandise to resell, from record royalties of one kind or another and licensing, from basically consfiscating the earnings of signed artists. The Internet has killed all of that-or most of that.

So what should be done? My solution:

1. Shorten/rationalize copyright terms. Only a handful of material has any value older than 50 years in any event.
2. Works older than 75 years from the start of the new law would immediately enter the public domain, and any work that has not been commercially/personally published 50 years could have its copyright challenged, and if the challenge fails, enter the public domain.
3. Orphan works of any age, where the owner-rightsholder cannot be found, enter the public domain after a 10-year search for same.
4. An ISP fee, attached to a cable bill, would cover the costs of illegal filesharing. Those affected could apply for their share of the fund
5. A public repository of material be created of these orphan works, out-of-copyright works, etc so that creators can know what’s safe. And such a site would have a list of materials that have expiring copyrights as well so that those materials could be put to use.
6. Define just what “fair use” means, and liberalize it.

So what is out there? You can go to archive.org. use U.S. Government Photos and Images as a start. I also Google “public . . . → Read More: Building A Website Gratis-jThe Images]]>

One of the problems in building a site is finding copyright-free, royalty free, and otherwise unencumbered, graphics. There are plenty of clip art collections and whatnot, but usually you have to pay for them.

So what is out there? You can go to archive.org. use U.S. Government Photos and Images as a start. I also Google “public domain” when I do an image search, or look at www.creativecommons.org for sources of images. Also, look at the age. Anything before 1920 is in the public domain for certain, and can be freely used.

Of course, you can always make your own graphics using GIMP or Irfanview if you have the talent and desire to do so.

Caution: there may be some restrictions on photos and graphics regarding commercial use. That is, you may use the image to illustrate or make a point, but if you want to use an image for t=shirts or mugs, you may need to ask permission. In addition, if there are any commercial products in the illustration, you may need to ask for permission of the company as well.

Not all sharing needs to be gated

Fred Shuttlesworth changed my days, and Steve Jobs my nights. I’m A-A, two years younger than Steve Jobs, born and raised as Northerner from parents who fled the too-hot South. As a small child, even though the signs weren’t in the North, I was raised with an awareness that there were certain barriers beyond which I . . . → Read More: Thank Your For the Freedom, Steve and Fred]]>

Fred Shuttlesworth changed my days, and Steve Jobs my nights. I’m A-A, two years younger than Steve Jobs, born and raised as Northerner from parents who fled the too-hot South. As a small child, even though the signs weren’t in the North, I was raised with an awareness that there were certain barriers beyond which I probably couldn’t go. But times were a-changin’. When I was seven my family took me to a now-integrated Coney Island. When I was ten, I went to the first experimental school for black kids, run by white teachers who believed in us. It was the late 70′s that me and my brother were the first in our family to go to some college, thanks to both the legal rights and the Great Society programs that made college affordable.

Gone are the days when a black lawyer, doctor, engineer was a rarity. Gone are the days when the only ideas worth talking about, reading about, or listening to came from WASPs.   I take for granted that I can pretty much go anywhere in the United States legally. I take for granted that I could go to any school, work for any job in the Federal Government, swim in any pool.

Steve Jobs changed my nights. One has to have grown up in a non-networked world to realize the magnitude of the changes. Before Jobs turned the massive computers of my young adult life into appliances you could take home, going home was like going into a void. Three television channels, a handful of stations, all signing off at midnight .

First, the office: news from your desktop,  checking phone numbers without that massive criss-cross directory or yellow pages (are those listings really current-better Google that), letters written without white out, correction strips, and changing ribbons.  No more playing phone tag days-everybody has either a cell or e-mail, and if both are off….they don’t want to hear from you anyway.

I’m typing this while looking at my mp3 player sitting near my computer screen, listening to music coming from a server thousands of miles away. It’s 4 am. Gone are the days when I had to wait until 6am to find out anything, to listen to anything, to safely express my thoughts through typing.

I think of all of the podcast voices I’ve heard thanks to the I-Pod.   Stephanie Miller.  Shannyn Moore. Ed Schultz. Bob Cesca.   So many different voices, so many different places. It doesn’t matter anymore whether a radio station is out of town or not if I can get it on the internet. It doesn’t matter anymore whether or not I catch it at the time it does air.  Thanks to the podcasts I pay for or they provide for free, I can listen to anything I’ve missed.

So thank you for the freedom , Steve and Fred.

This is another thing that SOPA does not address properly. For all of the talk about portecting artists’s rights, it’s clear that the artists have been screwed royally and prevented from taking back their material . . . → Read More: Another thing SOPA can’t cure]]>

Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights – Readers’ Comments – NYTimes.com

Record Industry Braces for Artists’ Battles Over Song Rights

This is another thing that SOPA does not address properly. For all of the talk about portecting artists’s rights, it’s clear that the artists have been screwed royally and prevented from taking back their material and the profits thereof.