Presenting the Anti-Ulrich

I'm tempted to go buy a t-shirt to support OK Go and Damian Kulash, Jr. While Kulash is overstating things a bit by describing his band as among the first to find real success on the Internet (I'll grant "via YouTube"), he did do the body politic an immense service by testifying before Congress in a way that can help our elected representatives understand the culture of the Internet. This is Kulash's description of the band's experience with the "Dancing in the Backyard" video:

With the help of my sister, we choreographed a parodic dance routine and shot a single- take home video of us performing it in my back yard. If you include the Starbucks run, the total budget for the video was about $20. We posted the clip online, and it caught on like wildfire. We watched, astonished, as the video racked up hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions of hits at online video sites. Before long, we were getting offers to play to thousands in countries where our record had never even been released.

And something even wilder started happening: fans started posting their own versions of the video. Thrilled by the direct connection with our fans, we launched a dance contest, and received homemade remakes of our video from all over the world. We got hundreds of entries, videos of the dance at weddings, in churches, at high school talent shows, in firehouses, and even a version performed by animated legos. This is a whole new phenomenon, a feedback loop of creativity that allows us to be more than just a commercial product to our fans – we are the center of an active, creative community.

It is this last point that makes me so grateful for Kulash's testimony. While the fate of the world doesn't hinge on the presence or absence of the next OK-Go-wedding-reception-parody video, this is a form of creativity, and our public policies should, wherever possible, err on the side of promoting and encouraging creativity.

Kulash's follow-up to the video offers his attempt to offer a metaphor that has the potential to counter Lars' Ulrich's infamous assertions that peer-to-peer file transfers are the equivalent of shoplifting, and that the Internet is analogous to a handgun. (My critique of Ulrich's testimony can be found in several spots within my freely downloadable book). In his
NYT editorial today, Kulash offers metaphors that extract the Internet from the criminal context that Ulrich mined, and repositions it as an engine for both creativity and free speech:

We can’t allow a system of gatekeepers to get built into the network. The Internet shouldn’t be harnessed for the profit of a few, rather than the good of the many; value should come from the quality of information, not the control of access to it.

For some parallel examples: there are only two guitar companies who make most of the guitars sold in America, but they don’t control what we play on those guitars. Whether we use a Mac or a PC doesn’t govern what we can make with our computers. The telephone company doesn’t get to decide what we discuss over our phone lines. It would be absurd to let the handful of companies who connect us to the Internet determine what we can do online. Congress needs to establish basic ground rules for an open Internet, just as common carriage laws did for the phone system.

A better Congress would have long ago figured out how to address the concerns of both the "aggrieved artists" represented by Ulrich, who reasonably fear that an unfettered Internet will diminish their pecuniary rewards, and the "concerned creatives" like Kulash, who recognize all too clearly that the default impulses of Congress will lead to an Internet that pursues compensation for copyright holders, and defers to corporate impulses (like the non-neutral 'Net) at the price of promoting creativity (dare I say "progress") in the Useful Arts.

The FCC pursuing something worthwhile?

After spending an inordinate amount of time and energy on a putatively accidental exposure of nipple jewelry and determining how and whether to gradate uses of the F-word, the FCC is now, apparently, poised to actually, serve citizens' interests, by enforcing principles of Net neutrality. Comcast has pretty clearly been "throttling" speeds for users of P2P networks like BitTorrent. While it is not clear whether the FCC's actions will have any legal teeth, it is a relief to see somebody in Washington paying attention to the "shaping" of the Web by one of the largest ISPs in the country. Obviously, this is one of many reasons to weigh your choices carefully when selecting an ISP.

THINK FAST!

Will you have:

"Be Dental Alveoli Quick to Salad Bangkok Hot Paddle Fish"

OR



Barbecued guinea pig?

Personally, I'm leaning toward B.D.A.Q.t.S.B.H.P.F..

Mmmmmmm, Be-Dental-Alveoli-Quick-to-Salad-Bangkok-Hot-Paddle-Fish-y.

The Pre-School Demographic

My four year-old weighs in with her endorsement.

Looking at a picture of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

S: Who's that?

ME: Hillary Clinton. She wants to be President.

S: Who's that?

ME: Barack Obama. He wants to be President, too.

(pause)

ME: Who do you think should be President.

S: Both of them!

Chanting. "I want both of them! I want both of them!"

Kindergarten Political Acumen

Actual conversation between me, my six-year-old daughter, and her four-year-old sister as we watched the early coverage of the Iowa Caucuses.

N: (looking at Republican contenders) Is that George Bush?

ME: No.

N: Is that?

ME: No.

N: Is that?

ME: No. None of them are. George Bush can't run in this election.

N: Why not?

ME: It's a rule. You can only be President for eight years. He's been President for seven years. It's going to be somebody else's turn soon.

N: So he won't be President anymore?

ME: No next year we will have a new President.

BOTH GIRLS: YAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

Talking Radio Heads

If'n you think you might enjoy hearing my latest thoughts on online music including Radiohead's innovative release and the Thomas verdict (along with engaging and pithy comments from Chicago music critic Jim Derogatis, and the usual from RIAA P.R. person Cara Duckworth) streamed at you in glorious stereophonic sound, go to MPR's page and hit the little audio icon.

The Rainbow Connection

Well, I'm now listening to the most dramatic intervention in the debates over online music since Wilco put Yankee Hotel Foxtrot online while waiting for its record company to quit dithering and release the band's best record. Radiohead's In Rainbows will inevitably be remembered at least as much for its distribution as for its content. The delivery this morning was amazingly easy, in sharp contrast to the purchasing process. One element that I have not seen addressed s forcefully as it should be in the various discussions of Radiohead's innovative approach to distributing this record is that whether one paid or not, the registration system for the record required joining Radiohead's mailing list. (Or didn't you read the sentence buried at the bottom of the Terms and Conditions which read: "Mailing list : By registering with the shop, w.a.s.t.e. products may use your e-mail address to send you Radiohead news, updates, ticket info etc." Oh, you say you didn't read it? Hmmmm. Go figure.)

For those who opted to pay nothing, this is arguably a fair deal. For those who paid even a nominal sum, this was not so fair. Sure, I can set up a spam filter to purge my impending Radiohead spam (however artful it may be, spam is spam). More to the point, Radiohead's approach is not scalable. While I might be willing to type in all of my vitals for the new Radiohead record, I am not willing to do this artist by artist for all the music I purchase, nor would I be willing to be on all of those mailing lists. Still, kudos to Radiohead for being both big enough and smart enough to generate such a huge publicity splash for this approach.

And, as a practical matter, Radiohead will probably see more cash from me on this release than they have ever seen before. While I like the band, I've previously been content to wait around for their records to hit the CD Clubs or used bins. Neither of these types of purchases do much for the band's bottom line (indeed, the latter does nothing for it). My payment of a few pounds — paid directly to the band — will certainly dramatically exceed all of my previous net compensation to the band. And while I'm old enough to be mildly mournful about the lack of a physical something to hold on to and scratch, some fan somewhere is probably developing her own JPEGs that she'll then upload as the unofficial cover for the record.


And physical copies are so 20th Century! while Prince also deserves credit for giving away physical copies of his most recent CD with a UK newspaper, that doesn't do much for those of us who weren't able to get our hands on a copy of The Daily Mail.

For the price of name, rank, and serial number + whatever one's conscience dictates, Radiohead's latest album is available to anyone with an Internet connection. No matter how you slice it, that's progress.

And the record sounds great.

The Most Danceable Internet Research Tool Ever . . .

I am astonished by this.



As you can see, what we have here is a remarkably comprehensive rundown of the first decade of Internet celebrity -- including an up-to-the summer inclusion of Minneapolis' own, and mighty Tay Zonday -- all set to a peppy, hyper-caffeinated pop beat.

I will teach this the next chance I get.

35-W

Carol and I drove across this bridge about seven hours before it stopped being a bridge. It is about a mile from our home, and in the Twin Cities proper I would guess that it is second only to I-94 in terms of traffic. The human costs will be terrible, but given the traffic that routinely over the bridge, I expected the numbers of casualties to be significantly higher than they are now believed to be.

My thoughts are with the families of those lost.

Department of Stating the Obvious

This is war.

This is not.



The latter is merely a bitter dispute over proper compensation for copyright holders. Important, yes.

But not war.

It's tempting to describe the nip-and-tuck battle for "secure" digital media, for convenience's sake, as an "arms race." But it's not. And succumbing to the all-too-common metaphor is disrespectful to these people. And these people.

Relatively precise language is a needed first step toward 21st century copyright policies (note: on a related point, I will not, from this point forward, write or speak of "intellectual property" policies unless quoting others — the framing of ideas as "property" was the first step in the incremental movement toward the inevitable "war" over this "territory"). 21st copyright would prioritize 1) maximal public access; 2) fair compensation for composers; and 3) minimization of technological impediments to fair use.

But so long as Congress thinks it's dealing with an "arms race" in the midst of a larger "war," instead of mediating a compensation squabble, smart policy will elude us. And, as always, we do well to ask who benefits from the movement toward perpetual warfare.

Reason 1,543,292 that Alberto Gonzalez should not ever have been Attorney General in the first place

My friend Chuck writes:

Holy cow.
I'm a bright guy, into music and online geekery.
A news junkie. I pay attention to stuff.

How could this not be bigger news?
This was almost a month ago, and I just now found a link on the Steinski blog:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is pressing the U.S. Congress to enact a sweeping intellectual-property bill that would increase criminal penalties for copyright infringement, including "attempts" to commit piracy.

"To meet the global challenges of IP crime, our criminal laws must be kept updated," Gonzales said during a speech before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington on Monday.

And yes, Chuck's right. THIS IS INSANE.

I wish I were making up the following passage (also from the above-listed article):

[the proposed law would . . .] Create a new crime of life imprisonment for using pirated software. Anyone using counterfeit products who "recklessly causes or attempts to cause death" can be imprisoned for life. During a conference call, Justice Department officials gave the example of a hospital using pirated software instead of paying for it.

OK, so 21st century I.P. justice could conceivably involve the imprisonment a volunteer nurse at a free clinic who, due to brute economic necessity, uses a bootleg copy of her legitimately purchased copy of Microsoft's OS (if that copy is involved in some sort of unstated hypothetical failure that leads to the hypothetical death of a hypothetical patient). My question is, given that all OSs crash from time to time, should we not also imprison the software engineers if their product is "involved" in the death of a patient? And let's observe that intellectual property pirates are not "attempting to cause death." They are attempting to cause sales. Who, in practical terms, would ever be deservingly prosecuted under this law? In short, who's doing this?

And let's not skip too lightly over the justice department's statement that: "It is a general tenet of the criminal law that those who attempt to commit a crime but do not complete it are as morally culpable as those who succeed in doing so." BUT, that doesn't mean they, too, should go to jail. Let's assume that I am in a foul mood and I fully intend to speed through residential streets tonight, threatening pedestrians, housepets, and a considerable number of squirrels. But when I reach my car, and prepare to rev the engine menacingly, I discover that I have a flat tire. I expend all of my suppressed rage fixing the tire, feel surprisingly good after having done so, and retire for the evening, resolving never to speed on residential streets again.

Am I morally culpable? Sure. To a degree. Definitely not to the same degree as an actual residential speeder, though. Is there a law that could or should ever be used to convict me of my nasty thoughtcrime? Nope. And that's smart public policy.

Gonzalez, true to form, wants to nose around in our households (minds?) weighing our intentions as we wrestle with the daily question of where to secure our next snippet of digital entertainment. This impulse, consistent with his general disrespect for settled notions of individual rights and liberties makes him a very, very, very bad attorney general.

But you knew that already.

Woo-Hoo!

Now THIS is more like it! There are still a few bugs nestled in nooks and crannies, but this is pretty much the new face of blogologie. I've taken some steps that make it easier for me to post, and also (presumably) for you to subscribe to a feed if you are one of the happy few who has dialed in here to see whether anything smart has crept from my synapses into the circuits. I've got a backlog of stuff I've wanted to rant about, but I'm surrendering to the exhaustion brought on by looking at code for hour after hour after hour after hour. I'll play with my shiny new toy later.

Aaaagh!

Retemplating the blog (or attempting to) at long last. Technical difficulties are not the fault of your receiver.

And So It Goes . . .

Kurt Vonnegut dead at 84.

Light Posting While Battling Alien Invaders

Click for details.