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The Che Guevara T-Shirt Revolution and Its Discontents
June 30, 2008 at 11:54 am · Filed under Capitalism, Intellectual Property, Media, Music
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Boing Boing recently noted that seminal new wave band Devo has filed suit against McDonalds for copywright infringement regarding “New Wave Nigel,” a Happy Meal toy created as part of a joint McDonalds-American Idol marketing campaign. As you can see in the image to the left, Nigel’s outfit - in particular the hat - bears a striking resemblance to the classic Devo uniform, which is apparently “copyrighted and trademarked.” |
This lawsuit produces some conflicting feelings for me. On the one hand, I’m generally opposed to intellectual property litigation. It’s absurd that Devo has copyrighted a silly hat and is now seeking to control how and where that silly hat can be replicated. Devo created a set of visual and musical aesthetics and then released those aesthetics into the public sphere, making a fair amount of money in the process, I’d imagine. Now that these ideas have released into the culture at large, the idea that Devo should be able to determine when, how, and by whom they are used is neither ethically sound or logistically tenable.
But then this particular case provides something of a worst-case scenario for copyfighters. In the name of free-flowing art and information, should Devo have no recourse against such heinous corporate entities as McDonalds and American Idol when they attempt to co-opt Devo’s work for the purpose of pushing lowest-common-denominator, profit-driven pap or - probably worse, but who can tell - fuel for the intertwining destruction of small-scale agriculture, local consumer economies, union labor, and healthy metabolisms worldwide?
This is the kind of case that intellectual property proponents cite when they attempt to frame the increased control of creative work as an effort on behalf of struggling artists rather than the Disneys and Viacoms of the world. Devo, while clearly not a group of struggling artists at this point, is undeniably the little guy when stacked up next to McDonalds and American Idol. What’s more, Devo’s Jerry Casale particularly cites the band’s opposition to these corporate/cultural institutions as their motivation for pressing the suit.
What’s a pirate-friendly, vegetarian, corporate-media-hating, I.P. insurgent to do? Accept this unsavory use of the Devo hat as an unfortunate side effect of an open system of culture production (while combating the likes of American Idol and McDonalds by other means)? Cheer on Devo for turning the big boys’ weapon of content control against them?
It’s hard to feel good about either option.
June 19, 2008 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Music
Let’s say a word for Man in Gray.
After eight years of slugging it out in a city unfriendly to bands, they make their final appearance tonight at the Delancey.
In their wake, they leave a puddle of kicked-over whiskey, a tangle of broken strings, and a whole catalogue of big, noisy, deceptively taut rock and roll songs. Their hands have been gnawed by dogs in Brooklyn. They’ve been chased through the streets of Dallas by psychopathic junkies. They’ve driven across the country in a giant van with questionable steering capacity, fending off weird sexual advances and weirder home security systems. They’ve put up with as many crappy sound systems, dubious bookings, and personal injuries as any other band, and more than some.
But then they also dished it out as well as they took it. They’ve never been shy about playing the better part of a set with their backs to the crowd, periodically laying down on the stage, or clearing a room with an unwarranted and seemingly unstructured noise outro. They persistently ignored song requests (though generally granted requests for Jared to disrobe) and from time to time they flipped over drums, threw microphones, hemmed and hawed.
But if they weren’t always the most audience-friendly band, they more than made up for in the quality of their songwriting. Man in Gray’s musical sensibilities never relied on silly gimmicks, facile references, or labored attitudes and airs. To paraphrase Mr. Business, Man in Gray was a five-piece band where no two pieces were ever playing the same thing at the same time. For me, that was always a part of their charm, but it certainly meant that their music was never easy for the listener. And maybe that’s one of the big reasons they never became the darlings of LES tastemakers or the blogosphere’s MP3 dilettantes. They never tried to inspire some new and precious multi-hyphenated sub-genre, so reviewers tended to deal with them by tossing off a thoughtless Pixies comparison and moving on to something in the electroclash vein.
In fact, the Pixies-est thing about Man in Gray was the ten million pounds of sludge that they dumped over most of their recognizable hooks. Their songs, especially heard live, require some excavation on the part of the listener. Sure, there are tracks like Incommunicado or the inexplicably-disappeared Hoboken that come out swinging, but so many of the band’s best songs are the slow burners. Pay enough attention to tracks like Crawl, Sleeping, the bipolar Green, even their behemoth eponymous track, and you can uncover the truly sharp and clever phrases that lurk beneath the messy surface. It’s these songs, I think, that give you the biggest reward on repeated listenings.
Looking back you can say for sure that Man in Gray held their own. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if one day they achieve the scene’s ultimate retroactive reward: to become one of those bands that tomorrow’s hipsters pretend to have been into at the time.
Man in Gray’s Farewell Performance
w/ Gold Streets, Mancino, and Zero Spanish
TONIGHT, 8pm, $6
@ The Delancey (198 Delancey St.)
See Also: D’s farewell to MiG
June 17, 2008 at 7:50 pm · Filed under Capitalism, Film, Internets, Journalism, Media, Technology
Boing Boing calls attention to the Associated Press’ recent attempt to implement fees onto publications, including blogs of course, that want the privilege of quoting their articles.
For quoting as few as five words, the AP now expects you to cough up a liscencing fee ($12.50 for 5 -25 words, more cash for bigger quotes). What’s more, if they don’t like the way you use the quote (if you criticize AP coverage, for example?) they reserve the right to revoke that liscence.
Coverage of this new policy in the New York Times’ business section calls this an “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.” Of course, the AP has no need (nor indeed any right) to establish such a standard for itself, as a legal precedent already exists in the form of Fair Use doctrine. According to the Copyright Act of 1976:
the fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The logic that excludes a 2-25 word quote from an article within a blog post from such a definition must be tortured indeed.
Boing Boing quotes extensively (and presumably without having paid) from the salient analysis that appears on Making Light.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.
Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.
The people pushing for this stuff are not well-meaning, and they are not interested in making life better for artists, writers, or any other kind of individual creators. They are would-be aristocrats who fully intend to return us to a society of orders and classes, and they’re using so-called “intellectual property” law as a tool with which to do it. Whether or not you have ever personally taped a TV show or written a blog post, if you think you’re going to wind up on top in the sort of world these people are working to build, you are out of your mind.
While I don’t think the Associated Press is actively looking to implement social Darwinism though control of media content, there can be little doubt that they are engaged, intentionally or not, with the full-scale elimination of the public sphere in favor of a giant system of end user license agreements. Such a process assumes that journalistic institutions not only have the right to enforce where and when their reportage is referenced, but that this right supersedes the public’s right to exchange information on matters of public importance. It becomes the duty of the public to fit public debate into considerations of the AP’s profitability and to stay on message (i.e. support the AP’s editorial decisions) if it wishes to generate an active discussion of public information as it is filtered by the AP.
These structures are symptomatic of a corporate media system that wants to ride the wave of new media technologies in order to penetrate more and more markets, and in many cases to include their audience in the production of branded content, but nevertheless to deny the challenges to content ownership that come along with those media. In any case, if there is a more sisyphian task than attempting to secure than text on the internet, I can’t say I know what it is.
This contradictory stance is perhaps most evident in the AP’s stupefying attempt to crowdsource the enforcement of its fee structure. iCopyright (the company that the AP has employed to handle it’s quotation liscencing) advertises an Operation-TIPS-style snitch program, offering up to $1 million for reporting instances of “piracy”. So watch yourself, because “it is remarkably easy for digital rights bounty hunters to catch and prosecute pirates.”
Ultimately these quotation licenses will probably end up a passing error in judgment. It would seem that the AP has already backed off of its very first high-profile attempt at enforcement. According to the New York Times:
Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.
On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.
The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.
Luckily for the public sphere, the internet knows how to bite back.
June 14, 2008 at 11:18 am · Filed under Books, Journalism, Politics
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This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features perhaps the most uncomfortable 20 Questions interview to date. Gore Vidal, as you might expect, displayed zero patience with Deborah Solomon’s typically insipid line of questions.
Beyond repeatedly calling out both Solomon and the Times for their lack of rigor, Vidal manages to toss out an epitaph for William F. Buckley that may surpass even Hitchens’ remembrances of Jerry Fallwell, at least in terms of cutting succinctness:
Solomon: How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?
Vidal: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.
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May 21, 2008 at 11:31 am · Filed under Bikes, Music
New York Peoples:
Please be so kind on Tuesday, June 3rd, to come to the first Rims benefit show at the Delancey. For the altruists, you will be glad to know that all proceeds from the event will go to support HIV/AIDS services in NYC via Braking the Cycle. For the hedonists, know that this will be a night of hot bands, hot burlesque, and double-hot bootyshakin’ dance dance action. See here:
And if you really really can’t make it (really?), remember that you can always make an online donation.
May 19, 2008 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Art, Green, Media, Music, Technology
I was very excited to see that the topic from my last post (on the issues of peak oil and the future of recorded music) has been picked up and expaded upon in a couple of posts over at Bearded Miracles.
In entries entitled “u-topias, dys-topias, and questioning the future” and “Living in the Junkyard: Bricolage as the Human Condition?“, Mr. Bandwidth begins to pry open the question of how people in a truly post-industrial (i.e. post-fossil-fuel) world might understand the products of industrial and cultural production (and the nexus between the two) that permeate late capitalism.
An excerpt:
Imagine a future in which the wreckage of our civilization lies all around, waiting to be used or disposed of. How will people in the future use the junk we leave behind? In Medieval Europe, it was not uncommon to construct buildings of stones recovered from the ruins of Roman buildings, hence the architectural and archaeological “stratification” of a city like Rome, where you can see centuries-old buildings whose foundations reflect a totally different kind of construction than their superstructures do. These buildings reveal deep historical time, legible from the outside like the strata of the earth’s crust. They also remind us that recycling was not invented by environmentalists in the post-1945 era. Recycling has been the normal modus operandi of human civilization since time immemorial. Anthropologists and Cultural Theorists have also called this modus operandi “bricolage”. Bricolage specifically evokes the recombinant, a messy patchwork of stratagems woven together to form the tissue of everyday life - routines, tools, social connections, prestige, money, schedules, etc. But it also suggests an ethical orientation, a preference for using already produced materials to create new things rather than producing new things from scratch again.
I think this is a really interesting topic, not only for historical/political reasons, but in terms of culture and aesthetics as well. Head on over and read this stuff!
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