So today is Martin Luther King day in the United States, and I see a link to a video of a modestly famous speech he gave once. Clicking through, I see this:

Seriously?

Funnily enough, the UK has a 50 year broadcast copyright, and the speech was in August 1963 … less than 50 years ago.

But even so, the copyright is owned by the King estate. I would be surprised if CD Baby has been hired by the King estate for copyright enforcement.

So, CD Baby, you are now officially on my shit list. I buy MP3s regularly, but not from you.

Now? Never from you.

Other groups listed? I wish you did something useful or productive, so I could shun you in favour of your competitors. It is a shame that you are nothing more than copyright trolls. Seriously. What’s in this for you?

What a bunch of assholes.

Here’s the speech.

It’s hard to condemn people, these days, for copyright infringement — even blatant copyright infringement.

Why?

Because those people who hold those copyrights do things like try to extort money from libraries for reading to children.

Yep, that’s right. Trying to force libraries to cough up money for reading to children.

It baffles the mind. There are actual people who work for this SABAM – the Belgian rightsholder group in question – writing letters and making phone calls to try to extort this money. There are managers who decided on this course of action. A whole organisation of people who somehow rationalize this behaviour.

You know your legal framework is broken when there exist entire organisations full of people who presumably look at themselves in the mirror each morning, and then go to work and do despicable things. I preferred it when it was only lawyers embarassing themselves with silly cease & desist letters to law schools.

Ah, the halcyon days of youth.

Photo is of Hallstatt, Austria, by Akos Major, found on The Behance Network.
Webcomic is Up Up Down Down, by Khon, Sheflin and Ewington.

Sharing music over the Internet is almost a teenager these days. It’s turning twelve this summer, and a certain pubescent maturity is starting to kick in. There’s hair down there now.

And like all things reaching maturity, it’s suddenly not so easy for the adults to start bossing it around. This can be seen in Amazon’s new Cloud Player. Nilay Patel writes an excellent article explaining why the recording industry’s lawsuit against Amazon is, basically, groundless:

If you’re a Cloud Player customer, you get a defined 5GB or 20GB of storage, and the music that lives in that storage is your copy. Your copy that you’re allowed to make. It’s not “functionally equivalent” to a fair use copy anymore — it is a fair use copy. I’d even bet that additional purchased songs that don’t count against your cap are actually transferred to your storage and given extra space that doesn’t show up on the meter, because that way each user still has their own copy.

This is going to completely fuck the labels, since they can’t argue that Amazon is making unauthorized copies of songs.

For some time now, it has been clear that the traditional media companies have been fighting a losing battle by holding on to their old business models, trying to lobby and sue their way out of the problem rather than learning the new technology and building on it.

Twelve years in, it seems as though we have reached the moment where technology can check all the music industry’s arbitrary boxes, while still giving the end users what they want.

And the music industry? Still no new business model — it’s left clinging to Apple, with its reliance on overpriced devices and a seriously ill CEO.

Uh-oh.

Photo by Matt Sartain. Found at Smashing Picture.
Webcomic is Amazing Super Powers, by Wes and Tony.

Imagine that you are about to become the first person to create synthetic life. You want to put some sort of meaningful marker into that synthetic life, right?

Clearly Craig Venter thought so, and he chose words from James Joyce:

To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.

This being the present day, the estate of James Joyce thought this to be a breach of copyright and sent a cease and desist letter. The Loom wonders, if it were to go to court and Venter were to lose (which it won’t, and he wouldn’t), might Venter be forced to pay out each time the microbes multiplied?

The idea seems completely ridiculous. Like denying people access to a song that they bought last week because they bought a new computer this week.

Oh.

Dead tree painted and photographed by Curtis Killorn. Found at Dark Roasted Blend.
Webcomic is We the Robots, by Chris Harding.