Detritus

Warner Bros Gets Smart

Warner Brothersdecides it can't beat pirates, so join them.

Bob Ostertag Launches New Site

Long-time sample-based composer Bob Ostertag, who was the first artist ever to be hosted by Detritus.net, has launched his very own website at bobostertag.com. The beautifully laid-out pages provide easy access to information, news, photos, and most importantly, Bob's music, which he has just announced will all be now available free under the Creative Commons 'Atrribution Non-Commercial' license. Bob writes about his reasons as to why this is a good idea for artists such as himself, including:

I have made money selling these recordings in the past. It may be my income suffers from giving away these recordings for free. Conversely, it may turn out that my former royalty income will be replaced and perhaps even surpassed by increased income from concert fees due to wider circulation of my music. Who knows? What is known is the cost the corporate "intellectual property rights" battering ram is imposing on culture.

Saying goodbye to record royalties is in any event no great sacrifice for a musician such as myself, whose music has always been too adventurous to be valued by the mass market anyway. Strangely, many musicians I know whose work lies outside the mainstream remain much more invested in the idea of selling their recordings than their actual experience in the market would seem to justify.

Congratulations to Bob on his new site - Detritus.net is proud to have hosted his first one from 1997 to 2006.

Scrambled? Hackz! Roxx!!

Sven Konig, a european uber-geek/artist, brings us his amazing electronic audio/video instrument Scrambled Hacks. It's basically some very advanced software that analyzes music videos and stores chunks of the material in a database, categorized in various ways. Then he sings, raps, and beatboxes into a mic and the software analyzes every utterance and matches it up with the best sample fragment, and plays it back.

Because of my interests in artistic strategies and social practises of appropriation � collage, montage, sampling and remix in general and plunderphonics, bastardpop and mashups in particular � the idea of a hypothetical mind music machine has evolved which, as a metaphor, helped the concept and the design of sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! to take shape.

In short, the results are fucking fantastic. Be sure to check out his video in which he explains how the program works in a very entertaining, cool/dorky way.

The Passion of Superman

A nice little video that is a great example of detournement in its classic sense. A simple pairing of 2 disparate sources to create a potent resonance. Jesus and Superman.

Copyright Comic

Three law profs from the Center for the Public Domain release a new comic book about copyright, fair use, and implications for documentary filmmakers. If you've been following this stuff none of what it covers will be new information to you, but it's an entertaining format. The illustrations are a great mix of collaged elements and drawings.

It's really nice work, but the curious thing about the comic is that it contains a wealth of visual allusions and in-jokes that are not explained (like the sudden appearance of the Linux penguin), so that only those already "in the know" about these issues will "get" them. And yet the humor style is mostly pretty corny and "un-hip", as if the authors were aiming for a soccer-mom, Joe 6-Pack, kind of audience, despite the fact that the message is obviously directed toward filmmakers and other artists. The content pretty much follows the report by the Center for Social Media issued last year about copyright culture implications for documentary filmmakers.

Parody of Famous Chinese Film Is a Big Hit

The Christian Science Monitor reports on an underground spoof of a big-budget Chinese film, The Promise, by a famous director. The film flopped and many Chinese were very disappointed in it. The parody, A Murder Caused By A Mantou, is a collage of material from the film along with other sources like rap music and a Chinese legal news tv program, and became hugely popular on the internet.

Using satiric elements similar to Monty Python and the Simpsons, the spoof has flooded cyberspace in unanticipated and unstoppable waves. And in a culture where there is scant public lampooning, the video has brought intense debates, smiles - and serious threats of legal action.

download the video from Detritus.net

(thanx josé)

Problems With Creative Commons

Alex Bosworth writes about how Creative Commons is broken. He makes many good points.

My second question was towards the provision in many Creative Commons licenses that indicates content may not be used for 'Commercial Use'. I asked, what is Commercial Use? Does reposting to a blog that has ads violate the copyright license? Larry Lessig's answer was basically, "I don't know". The reason why is that these things are vague and untested. There are no definitive answers to this question of what is a commercial use.

Property Rights Historically Good For Agriculture

Nick Szabo, a doctoral law student at George Washington University, writes on his blog about the historical relationship between security, property rights, and the success of agriculture. He argues pretty persuasively that the real transition from hunter-gatherer tribal societies to successful feudal-style agricultural ones depended on protecting crops at a certain scale, by force and/or legal rights.

So the very idea, turning into a paradigm, that "I own this piece of land and only I can take food from it," could have been an important key to the turn from neolithic life to "civilization" - for better or for worse.

Apple-Intel vs. The Postal Service

This is kind of an intresting IP case.
the recent Apple Intel tv ad is apparently an almost shot-for-shot remake (or it uses outtakes from) the video for the Postal Service (the band not the USPS) song "Such Great Heights". here's a nice a-b comparison video someone put together:
http://live.watchmactv.com/flash/100/

now, some people blow it off when they find out it's by the same ad agency and director. but
here's a note from ben gibbard of the Postal Service on their site postalservicemusic.net:

A Note from Ben

It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers' new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for 'Such Great Heights' made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent. -Ben Gibbard, The Postal Service

it would be interesting to know what the legality of this is. if the band or their label owns the copyright on the video, then there's a legal problem. if it's the ad agency or the filmmaker, then there's probably no infringement. But either way it's ethically suspect, imho...

Interestingly enough, Apple has rencently placed the Postal Service video on the front page of the Apple iTunes Music Store. Coincidence?

(And may I add that reading song reviews on the music store is a really irritating experience. If I see one more case of someone trying to dicate what "emo" means I'm going to scream.)

Heavway to Stairwen

Thomas Dimuzio does a little revers-o-rama of a novel type with some classic Zeppelin. (via wfmu blog via rumori)

Copy Control

An example of a tray card of a CD with copy protection:

as reported by Noway on his Flickr photostream:

The diagonal repeating text reads "sin restricciones" which is spanish for "no restrictions."

That's the name of this album by the great Argentinian band "Miranda!"

"No Restrictions" is their second album. It's pretty good. Or so we think. We haven't been able to hear it yet.

That's because we have a broken copy of this album. Why is it broken? The answer to that question is in the words COPY CONTROLLED.

Your Own Private Plexure

About 13 years ago John Oswald gave us his masterwork of audio collage, Plexure, which wove together minute fragments of the greatest hits of the previous 10 years into a brilliant sound tapestry. Now you almost get to do the same thing in a few moment with your own music collection, at least whatever portion of it you keep in iTunes, thanx to Jason Freeman's iTunes Signature Maker. The Java program asks you a few configuration questions like how many songs you want to include and how big the fragments should be, and then crunches away for a few minutes to give you a little clip that is a brief collage of the songs you've been listening to.

Here's an example: http://detritus.net/steev/mp3s/steev-audio-sig.mp3
One really nice feature of the program is that after it builds the signature, you can look at the "structure" of it. for the example above, we have:

Title
Artist
Album
Starting At
Ending At

Modest Mouse - 3rd planet
0:06.4
0:08.0

Human (Calexico Vocal Mix)
Goldfrapp
Felt Mountain
0:38.0
0:39.2

Senhor F
Os Mutantes
Os Mutantes
2:07.4
2:08.6

Peligro
Mano Negra
Best Of Mano Negra
2:40.4
2:41.5

Woe
Tom Waits
Blood Money
1:15.9
1:17.3

Modest Mouse - gravity rides everything
0:15.6
0:17.3

Pez
Cafe Tacuba
Re
0:02.6
0:04.0

Modest Mouse - I Came As A Rat
1:37.7
1:39.4

Galang
M.I.A.
Arular
0:11.7
0:13.2

Himno Zapatista
Flor Del Fango
Flor Del Fango
2:45.7
2:47.7

Calexico - The Black Light
Calexico
1:37.0
1:38.9

Modest Mouse - Alone Down There
0:48.0
0:49.0

Modest Mouse - Paper Thin Walls
2:45.7
2:47.5

Lima
Entre Rios
Completo
2:15.6
2:17.7

La Faraona
P�rez Prado
Havana 3 A.M.
0:42.9
0:44.8

Lagrimas de Oro
Manu Chao
Clandestino: Esperando La Ultima Ola...
1:20.2
1:23.2

(thanx rabble)

Modern Copyright Law Is Destroying our Cultural Heritage

Paul of Mediageek has some interesting commentary on a report by the Council on Information and Library Resources about how over-restrictive copyright laws are making very difficult efforts to preserve and archive old sound recordings.

The Grateful Dead Make An Intellectual Property Grab

Paul of Media Geek reports on the recent move by the Grateful Dead to stop free downloads of recordings of Dead shows. He discusses how the Dead became so successful largely because of an open policy toward taping and sharing of their shows, but now that the band basically doesn't exist anymore and there's a way to sell their huge archive of live recordings easily (the Internet), they are starting to clamp down.

The Bubble Project Jams Outdoor Ads

Three years ago I was in Manhattan and a friend pointed out the white word-bubble stickers that someone was putting on lots of posters and other outdoor advertising. Then random people would fill in the bubbles with text. I thought it was a really great idea, a sort of empowerment and encouragement of anyone with a pen to talk back to ads and detourn them. Now there's a website about the project, explaining how artist Ji Lee had 50,000 of these stickers printed up. The site also features dozens of photos of examples of the uses the bubbles have been put to. Some of them are banal, some really creative and insightful.

Unfortunately Ji Lee also employs himself designing actual advertisements, including for such big clients as Coke and Tylenol.