“Copyleft” (Used 12 times)

I'm moderating a panel on The Code of the Blogosphere at SXSW this Saturday, March 17th at 2pm (info).

Description:

How did MP3 blogging become such an integral part of the music community, despite its unresolved legality? The blogosphere has found a makeshift balance between the web's massive communal archive; the on-demand, curated experience that music listeners crave; and the degree of rule-bending that the music industry will allow (or, in many cases, solicit) in the name of promotion. While artists and publicists fight for blog coverage, the industry's legal arm usually turns a blind eye. However, those who break The Code (i.e. posting a pre-release album in its entirety) will pay the price. And there still remains a disconnect where misunderstandings lead to DMCA takedowns, blog deletions, and even domain seizures. Do these scenarios call for an official "Blogger's Code?" Or will music in the cloud forever change the role of the blogger?

Panelists:

* David Greenwald (Freelance Journalist / MP3 Blogger since 2005 @ Rawkblog)
* Leslie Madill (Head of Marketing and PR/ North America @ Ninja Tune)
* Christopher Bavitz (Clinical Instructor & Asst Dir, Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School/Berkman Center)
* Anthony Volodkin (CEO/Founder, Hype Machine)
* Todd Goldstein (Musician: ARMS)

Of course the idea was inspired by my work here at the FMA, where we share music legally and often under Creative Commons licenses which let people know that they can share, too. Meanwhile, the blogosphere has developed its own code which doesn't care as much about copyright because it's not only influenced by the law, but also by the architecture of the web, by social norms, and by the promotional value of blog coverage. This framework (and the diagram above) comes from Lawrence Lessig's book, Free Culture. It's interesting to watch these forces interact across the blogosphere like tectonic plates, and sometimes erupt in a one-sided volcano as in 2010's "Music Blogocide," the Dajaz1 seizure, and the aftermath of Megaupload's shutdown.

The goal of this panel is to determine what makes for a "healthy" music blogosphere, and how to sustain it through code. There's no live stream so if SXSW doesn't make a recording available afterwards, hopefully a blogger will post a bootleg.

The day after last week's inspiring protest against overreaching anti-piracy laws, the US Department of Justice demonstrated that they don't need those laws, anyway.  They just went ahead and unilaterally shut down Megaupload, the world's most popular cyberlocker.  Rumor has it that similar sites like MediaFire and 4shared are under investigation and have been deleting files, while FileSonic preemptively disabled all sharing features.

As a result, much of the history of recorded sound has been made inaccessible to the public.  I'm talking, of course, about the music blogosphere.  The best music blogs aren't pirates.  They are libraries, sound archivists and music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be available.  And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds, and Holy Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they'd salvaged from obscurity.

Fortunately not all of the music on Mutant Sounds has been lost. They didn't use Megaupload exclusively.  This Karen Cooper Complex album comes out of the vibrant Richmond VA experimental scene from the late 70s/early 80s, and it was never even released until it appeared on the Free Music Archive (previously featured here, and on Mutant Sounds here).  These are the types of genuine "Artyfacts" I would love to host more of, but since we do things by the book here at the FMA, it's often difficult to track down rightsholders to get official permission.

It always bothered me to discover artists sharing their own original work via an untrustworthy website like Megaupload.  I never liked their approach of charging for quicker access to files, and their advertisements (including the Mega Song) always felt kinda icky.  The Mega Conspiracy alleges that Megaupload was actually designed to profit from media piracy through tactics like a reward for users who pirated films before their release date.  Paramount Pictures claimed that Mega sites made as much as $300 million a year in large part by selling ads and charging for access to copyrighted work.  That figure is from a great SSRC article titled "Meganomics."  Author Joe Karaganis describes how most cyberlockers and torrent sites don't profit nearly that much if at all, and he proposes that we factor this in to a clearer definition of what it means to infringe on a "commercial scale."

Back to the site that tipped that scale: even if they were just the new sleazy middleman in the distribution chain, millions of users had come to rely on Megaupload for very legitimate uses.  Now their files are gone.  But they are not lost, thanks to the nature of online sharing which necessitates the creation of new copies.  It is inspiring to see the Mutant Sounds community come together along these lines, re-upping files from their personal collections to restore the communal archive (link).

Long live the blogosphere!

Take a listen to UpitUp Records co-proprietor Tracky Birthday's fantastic New Album (yes, that's the title), and -- oh no! -- you are in violation of CopyrightPlus™.

©+ is a stricter form of intellectual property protection that builds atop Tracky Birthday's existing copyright to prohibit more than just downloading, copying and sharing his New Album. According to CopyrightPlus™, it is also illegal to "consume or enjoy the content in any form; whistle or hum any excerpts of the music; talk about, listen to or even think about all or any parts of the music." Additionally, the CopyrightPlus™ license deed is itself licensed under CopyrightPlus™, so just by telling you about it I am risking fines of up to €1000.000 and the public immolation of my first born.

Normally we here at the FMA encourage all of our users to abide by the terms of the license for the tracks they discover, but in this case, we'll make an exception.

A few of my favorite jams from New Album below, including "Cheeseburglar" where Tracky raps with his mouth full to great effect, and "Where Are You" with spit-take worthy lyrics. There's a palindrome song that sounds exactly the same both forward and backwards, a track whose waveform that spells out its title (after the jump), a track with 1000 samples, and a real range of styles from rap to surf to a sweet acoustic bonus track. Every track has unique artwork embedded in the mp3, and New Album should really be experienced in all its web-tastic glory at its 15MB Release Page. When you're done scrolling, you may want to consider hitting that Flattr button or purchasing a WuBatman-Tang shirt to support UpitUp's Bandwidth costs. Or maybe you already snagged the leaked copy of New Album off ebay, part of an experiment asking "how much is a digital file worth?"

To get a better sense of where Tracky Birthday is coming from and how he feels about Copyright plus or minus, check out this great interview in what appears to be the NY Times.

Nina Paley, creator of the Ramayana-inspired animated film Sita Sings the Blues and the force behind QuestionCopyright.org, released a great new comic/animation/video/article/song outlining the importance of proper attribution, especially in the digital world where sources are increasingly easy to track (link).

We all know that Attribution is a key component of the Creative Commons licenses which build atop copyright to make what we're doing here at the FMA possible. But Nina Paley doesn't see attribution as a copyright issue at all; it's more of an issue of building a sustainable environment for free culture. In the accompanying article, she explains that the video stars Beethoven (whose work is in the public domain and no longer subject to copyright) to make the case that "copyright has nothing to do with preventing plagiarism." She also attempts to draw a line between when credit is due, and when credit isn't due, because let's face it, attribution can go on forever!

Like much of Nina Paley's work, the video is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (cool use of YouTube's CC licensing tools!).

The music is performed by Evanescent, a new project from Bliss Blood (vocals and ukelele) and Al Street (guitar). Bliss Blood (pictured R) is known for playing in myriad other projects (dating back to the Pain Teens!), many of which can be heard right here on the FMA: from Michael Gira's Angels of Light (though not on that album) to The Moonlighters, Delta Dreambox, and Cantonement Jazz Band. Here's a bundle of Bliss Blood-related FMA Music and I picked out a few of the many gems below. You can check out the world of Bliss Blood at blissblood.com.

I'm spinning off the podsafe portion of my regular ol' WFMU radio show into a Free Culture-themed podcast called Grey Area. Each week I'll deliver "all the hits that fit" straight outta the Free Music Archive, plus conversations with guests about the grey area surrounding music and free culture in digital era.

The first episode features Eric Steuer from Creative Commons (also of Wired Magazine and the electronic/hip-hop group Meanest Man Contest). We talk about the licenses that facilitate sharing, openness and innovation everywhere from The White House to Al Jazeera to the Free Music Archive to this very podcast.  We also talk about CBC Radio's recent decision to stop using Creative Commons music -- once a prominent feature of programs like Spark -- due to the usage restrictions of CC's more popular noncommercial licenses. To gain a better understanding of the situation, we crack open CC's recent Study of How the Online Population Understands “Noncommercial Use” and discuss how this might play into the future of Creative Commons. And speaking of The Future, the nonprofit organization is currently in the midst of their Superhero campaign!

Next week, our guest is Sam Brylawski, the co-author of The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States. It's a new congressionally-mandated study, and it's subtitled "A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age"...but wait, wasn't the digital revolution supposed to solve this problem? The former executive director of the National Recording Preservation Board will outline some of the hurdles that stand in the way of our utopian digital archive.

This podcast is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and features selected sounds from the ~25,000+ high-quality pod-safe mp3's available at http://freemusicarchive.org. The artwork remixes some sweet Greg Harrison designs. I'll be posting playlists here on the FMA Forum, I'd love to hear your feedback and questions/ideas for future shows!

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