Let's Make This Simpler: 1 Thing You Can Do About DRM
Posted on 10.10.06 by Widge @ 4:15 pm

This is the silliest goddamn thing I have read all week.

Check out the list. Where do they go first? Legislation. That's right. They want you to go to Parliament. And for my fellow Americans who have no clue, I'd like to point out that this has nothing to do with George Clinton.

Think about this for a second: they want you to get government to tell the people who own these properties that they can only provide these properties to you in a certain way. Why is this bad? Because this is government. Any power you can give them can be perverted and twisted for their own benefit. Don't believe me? Here in the States we just got rid of a phone tax that was implemented to pay for the Spanish-American War. There actually had to be a fight to get rid of it. It's not like the government was going to go, "Whoops! Guess what? I'll be damned. We missed that one. Our bad. Here, let's take care of this for you." No, they were willing to keep taxing and taxing away.

Look at it another way: here in the States, they think the Net is made of tubes. And not the band from the 80s, I mean actual tubes. Do you really want people who are that technologically backward passing laws about technology?

And finally: it's not the government's job to protect you from DRM. They can barely protect you from [insert name of actual threat here].

You want to know how to deal with DRM? Here's Widgett Walls' handy guide for how to deal with DRM:

1. Stop fucking buying stuff with fucking DRM on it.

That's it. One step. If you want to convince an industry to do something, hurt them at their wallet.

They have the right to provide this stuff in any form they want. And you have the right to tell them to go fuck themselves.

Show them how you're buying nothing but non-DRM shit from now on, and they will come around. Or they'll die. If you're willing to do that, great. If not, then you're showboating and you're wasting everybody's time. Sorry, but that's the way of it.

Found via Boing Boing. And it's probably posts like this that keep me from getting linked on there, he said, smiling.

Filed under: General BS
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Can We Please Leave Mickey Alone?
Posted on 10.03.06 by Widge @ 2:43 am

Cory over at Boing Boing complains that Disney wants infinite copyright.

So? Give them infinite copyright over their shit.

Lessig's already got a solution for this. Let those that want to keep their copyright pay to extend it. Let those things that are orphaned fall into the public domain. Everybody's happy. I've talked about this before.

I realize it's Disney pushing for these extensions…has anyone bothered to offer them this alternative idea? I think they'd be happy to pay a little bit every five years or so and save all the money they're currently using to lobby Washington to fuck up copyright law for everybody.

Seriously: can anyone show me where somebody offered this alternative and they turned it down?

Filed under: General BS
Comments: 1 Comment


I Want the Music Industry in the Games Until They Die Playing
Posted on 02.16.06 by Widge @ 9:52 am

Here's the latest from the EFF. Apparently making a backup of a CD, just for your own use, is a no-no. Oh, and ripping your CD for your own personal use to an iPod is also infringement.

I will be so glad when this industry and paradigm dies. Keep on suing the elderly and telling your customers they're criminals, guys. Good job. Keep it up.

Found via Slashdot.

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Every Time You Run a Search, A Kitten Dies!
Posted on 12.18.05 by Widge @ 11:40 am

Can you hear Warner Music's teeth grinding as they look at this?

Google might help them sell some music! Or generate some interest in their dying industry! It links to lyrics sites AND online music stores! Oh Christ, the humanity of it all…

Found via MetaFilter.

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Someone in the Music Industry Grew Half a Brain (but it's not enough)
Posted on 12.17.05 by Widge @ 1:51 pm

This is what I look like when I'm stunned. Warner Music has apparently apologized to the guy who was trying to make music lyrics available to folks who, you know, like to listen to music, where they had previously told the guy to go pound sand.

But if you check out this article from Wired, you see…the rest of the story:

One of Ritter's recent brainstorms — an application that queries lyrics data online to help music fans choose tracks based on themes, like "love" or "breakup" — may now remain only an idea, he says.

"I'm concerned with how I should go on with software development, because this will be a potential issue — every time I come up with something that people like, someone might say 'you can't do that, it's illegal and it infringes copyright," Ritter told Wired News. "It's getting really difficult to be innovative as a small developer."

(Bowler tip to Boing Boing for the linky to Wired)

Now, let's cogitate on this for a second, because a couple of things spring to mind.

The music industry, who never misses an opportunity to piss off their customers, is beginning to attack sites that offer lyrics. In typical music industry fashion, they are striking out blindly. Sure, you could make a case for going after sites that run ads and make money off of publishing online lyrics that the sites themselves don't own. But I don't personally see the point in this, because if you're looking for lyrics to a song, chances are you already have a copy of the song. Whether it's illegally obtained, legally obtained, you've got the song. Does it really make any difference to anybody if somebody who has a copy of the song wants to know what's being said in the song? When was the last time you thought about driving to a music store (as in, one that sells sheet music, if you can find one) and thought, "Oh, to hell with that. Hal Leonard can kiss my ass. I'm going to STEAL THE LYRICS FROM THE NET! MOOHOOHAHAHA."

No, you've never thought that. I doubt seriously that a single sale of sheet music has been lost to the internet over lyrics. Ever.

Tablatures are mentioned as well, and for those of you like me who are about as musically proficient as a dead armadillo, you might not know that the tabs are what help you play a song on the guitar. That's another kettle of worms, frankly, although honestly, having been in a band, it's not like removing tabs from the Net is going to keep anybody from covering someone else's music. I've seen songs go from the stereo to being covered live in the next room in less than an hour. So.

But let's go back to lyrics, because they're a glaring example of everything I've been complaining about with this copyright nonsense. We've established that lyrics are generally only consulted by people who already have a copy of the music. And it's obvious that the music industry's War on Downloading is about as effective as America's War on Drugs. Both Wars have achieved two things: a lot of money thrown in the crapper and a lot of people pissed off and inconvenienced.

Here would be my advice to Walter Ritter, he of pearWorks who caused this shitstorm in the first place by daring to like music enough to want to make the experience more pleasurable to other music lovers: stop. Why are you rewarding the music industry with your time and effort when their reaction is to shoot you down and waste your time with angry letters of legalese? They don't want your help. They apparently don't need your help.

If you really want to do something to help yourself and other music lovers, take your idea of making an app that finds music based on your mood, and make an app that finds music by musicians who want people to hear their stuff. You know, those folks who are the Anti-Warner Music. The artist who understand that if they are found via pearMusicMood (or whatever you're going to call it), they will be found by a new listener and thus, might sell some copies of their album.

It might be helpful if there was a one-stop shop where you could find artists who actually want to be shared, which I've offered to compile, but no one seems to be really taking me seriously.

Honestly, people: the music companies, the movie companies, a large number of artists and so forth…they don't love you. You're like people caught in an abusive relationship, you know that? You keep thinking "Maybe if I do this, they'll love me again." But they won't. They're just going to keep hitting you with cease and desist letters and lawsuits and other such signs of their "affection" until you finally break up with them and leave them. You want to remake "Steamboat Willie" or write your own Superman story, and instead of making your own characters or cartoons or shacking up with creators who will actually treat you nicely, you stay with the big abusive SOBs who want you to enjoy their art but Their Way or not at all. The only way these assholes will ever stop is if you stop giving them your time and money. There are so many bands and writers and artists of all shapes and sizes who deserve your money more and will love you the way you want to be loved.

Just let it go, okay? Seriously.

Filed under: General BS
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Free Idea
Posted on 12.15.05 by Widge @ 4:25 pm

Very interesting article over on Concurring Opinions about a potential backlash (of sorts) against bloggers from the mainstream media. Can the MSM use copyright to put the smackdown on folks who are criticizing the living hell out of MSM articles? Can they use copyright, in other words, to keep bloggers from using their own words against them?

There's a comment from a gentleman by the name of Bruce that I think puts the kibosh on that, or at least throws up enough legal chaff that might protect bloggers. ("Well spoken, Bruce!") Daniel Solove, the original article's author, does pose another interesting question, though: what about the use of copyrighted images in blogs?

First up, I thought about our basic policy on using images, particularly on Needcoffee. If we're featuring a product, we've obviously been sent that product to promote it and pictures are a part of that promotional effort. So that's covered. There's only one studio who's very particular about their photos and screen grabs and stuff, so we just don't use pictures for their featured items to spare ourselves the hassle of complying to those terms. Everybody else seems grateful for the coverage.

Anytime we use an image that's obviously from somewhere and not just floating out in the etrick, I try to put an "Image taken from" and a link to the source. I wouldn't think somebody would be upset because they just got a free out-of-nowhere product feature with a link of where to buy (if the thing's for sale) or if nothing else traffic from our link. So that's covered. I would hope.

He mentions a shot of, say, Tom Cruise taken from elsewhere. If it's from a magazine, well, those show up all over the Net, and not just on blogs. Celebrity pic sites, fan sites, the whole nine–they all use those things. People, for example, trying to take on that kind of mountain seems, to be anyway, to be pissing in the ocean. Serving cease and desist letters on that would be fighting the hydra. I suppose you could try it but once you unleash that beast, I can just see, if we follow the RIAA's lead, some widowed grandmother having to pay a $5000 fine because her orphaned twelve-year-old granddaughter (who lives with her) used a computer to create a [insert celebrity name] fansite on a free hosting service and used five copyrighted photos. That approach has worked so well for the music industry, ayup.

I've never considered taking stock photos from sites like the article suggests, though. That seems like asking for trouble. Now…you're probably wondering where the whole "free idea" aspect of this comes in. Let's say that places do get a little antsy about you using, hell, I don't know, a stock photo of a terrier. Somebody could create a service that does nothing but take photos of things and provide a license to a site to use them. $50 for the rights to use any photo from this new service on your site for a full year.

Then, of course, I can see it being taken even further than that. If it really gets bad, I can see an organized movement among net photographers. I mean, if we can have Grey Tuesday, certainly we can have a day where net photographers release ten photos into the public domain each. They could be anything: a picture of a hummingbird, a tree, a lion, whatever. Take a picture, upload it to a service, and bang, stock photos are reduced in value further. And I've seen some photographers who post their stuff to the net. These aren't, well, me with a digital camera. They know what the hell they're doing.

Even better, photographers could post this stuff to their blogs with a "free-photos" tag so they can be easily found (via Technorati or whatever rises to take its place). You need a picture of a hummingbird for an article. Search "free-photos + hummingbird" and you're done. Maybe people are already doing this. I'm a webmaster hermit. I know very little. But I do know the more people try to hold onto things, the better off we'll be if we just all work around them.

Good news is it's not an issue. Not yet, anyway.

Stapler tip to Boing Boing. I'm not currently wearing a hat and the stapler's the first thing I could grab.

Update: I just like the way the minds at Emergent Chaos work.

Filed under: General BS
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We Need to Know Who Our Friends Are
Posted on 12.06.05 by Widge @ 1:09 pm

Philip just wrote a comment to my latest copyright rant that got me thinking:

Protecting users from overzealous right holders, and eliminating the giant middle man of an industry that formed to take advantage of many copyrighted works…

I think we need to protect users from overzealous rights holders to an extent, just like I think we need to protect rights holders from overzealous users.

But more than protecting users, I think we need to educate users. Don't like what Sony's doing to restrict your ability to play with their stuff? The answer is not laws. The answer is not bitching and moaning. The answer is not copyright reform. It's simple: stop buying Sony products. If you are pissed at Sony that much and yet you still buy their stuff, then you are their bitch, basically.

The only way the companies like Sony (and even Hasbro) learn is if it costs them money. If we reward those who play like we want them to, and punish those that don't…well, guess which behavior you'll see more of.

Users need to gravitate away from control freaks and move towards the folks who actually want to see the creativity of their customers.

So here's my question: who are our friends?

There's the obvious people who spring to mind like Cory Doctorow, but who are the Cory Doctorows of the music world? Of the film world? They must exist, surely. We've seen some bands throwing their stuff online for free download. And I'm not just talking Creative Commons-users like myself. I'm talking anybody who's willing to give up some control of their stuff in order to engage their readership/listenership/viewership…or at least not piss them off. Is there a list somewhere that people can point to and say, "I need to give these people my money"?

And I'm not talking a website here, a website there, I want a big ginormous one-stop shop of folks so next time you or I hear somebody complaining that they can't remake Steamboat Willie, we can throw them a URL and tell them to go play with these folks instead.

Surely there must be one. Somewhere. If not, I'll start one. Help me out here.

Filed under: General BS
Comments: None


The End of Copyright My Ass
Posted on 11.29.05 by Widge @ 5:24 am

What is it about people that they can only seem to think in extremes? Is it a lack of imagination? Of vision? I don't know.

I'm fascinated by Ernest Adams' "The End of Copyright" over on Gama Sutra. Because he makes some good points, most of which I agree with.

The business model that the movie and music industries are clinging to is most certainly out of date. Instead of flinging themselves headlong into the 21st Century and trying to make money off of it, they're going to be sucked under by market forces. People have the tools now to remix, to mashup, to rip. They want to. And they will. And there ain't shit anybody can do about it. People will buy the stuff that lets them do what they want to do, and shun those who try and restrict them. Look at all the artists who are panicky about the Sony Rootkit "taint" hurting their sales. So the choice is simple, to anyone with any sense–and sadly, a lot of business executives are so far removed from reality that they have a running deficit of it–evolve or die.

He states that the file-sharing model is going to get more and more decentralized so that there's no one left to sue. I've been saying that for forever. The last chance the industries had to put the genie back into some semblance of a bottle was Napster. Napster was, to my knowledge, the last major centralized file-sharing service. Instead of embracing what their fans wanted, Metallica attacked. And the fans scattered. And the rest is history.

The time to have gotten in front of this and tried to stop it or slow it down is long past. In fact, I came to respect Hilary Rosen, head of the RIAA, because she understood this. I remember reading an interview with her where she said that all of her machinations were simply to try and buy time for her industry to catch on so they could survive. She knew the inevitable was coming, she was just trying to get as many women and children off the boat before it sank as she could. So I can deal with that.

But a couple of problems with Adams' article and then we'll get to the bigger picture. Adams says:

There’s no intrinsic reason why someone should continue to get paid for something long, long after the labor they expended on it is complete. Architects don’t get paid every time someone steps into one of their buildings. They’re paid to design the building, and that’s that.

This is a really bad comparison. For the most part, as I understand it, architects are paid to design the building, true enough. They work for hire. But they're paid by somebody else, and that somebody else then owns the building once it's erected. That someone else can then pay for admission or use of the building. Been to a museum recently? A cinema? A gym? You could, in theory, have an architect who designs a building for himself, builds it, and then charges for anybody who wants to go inside. It's not the designer of the thing, it's the owner of the thing that gets paid. Now, obviously, if you don't have anything inside anybody feels like paying for, no one will pay you to go inside. But there's nothing saying an architect can't get a cut of the door. Comparing an architect to a musician or a writer isn't a good idea, because I didn't need anybody's help or money to publish the screenplay I just did. No one paid me to write it, so I still own it. An architect probably isn't going to be able to pull off a skyscraper single-handedly. And if I wanted to get paid before people looked at the screenplay, that's my business. And if twenty, fifty, seventy years from now, I wanted to get paid for you to read it…that's my business too. It might be an impractical business, but that's still my business.

The other problem is that Adams seems to equate "copyright" with "getting paid." I've often said that there's no money in writing. You don't do it to make money. If making money is your aim, you should go do something else, because there's lots of stuff that's easier and has a better return on investment. So as long as you're not worried about nickling and diming everyone to death, and we can agree that copyright is ownership…what's wrong with actually having a copyright and owning what's yours? And having some say in how it's treated?

Anyway, here's the bit where he really pissed me off:


Part of the issue is related to the question of how much money it took to create a copyrighted work in the first place. With books and music, the answer is simply, “not that much.” Forget notions of what their rights may be in law; the idea that a band or an author should be paid millions upon millions over the next several decades for something that it cost them at most a few thousand dollars to make, just feels silly to most people.

Wow. Why not just call my mother a bitch and slap her across the face next time? Not that much? Spoken like somebody who's never created a book or some music. Yes, if you only count the amount of dollars that go into creating a piece of writing, sure, that makes sense. With Mystics, I needed the use of a computer to type on, whatever costs went into the hard copies I printed for review, the postage I spent sending it around places, then what I paid to get it typeset, the money spent on the ISBN, the use of the digital camera for the cover art, and then the costs of publication itself. Throw some miscellaneous expenses in there was well that I've forgotten. So considering I didn't buy the computer or the camera strictly to make the book–note I said "the use of," so whatever portion of the total cost you could figure up and assign to that particular book–yeah, if you look at just out of pocket expense, it's probably not that much.

But Mystics took me five years to write. Granted, my wide ass wasn't planted in a seat for that whole time, but I should think that my time is fucking worth something. All the hours I spent typing instead of with family or loved ones, all the hours in the middle of the night trying to get another page finished so I could actually sleep…Adams seems to think that wasn't worth a red cent. So to anybody who says that a lot didn't go into making a piece of art, you can all bite my offnut. That's frankly ignorant and insulting.

Now, look at it through that lens. I spent five years writing the book. Granted, I was going to school, going to work, not sleeping and other things during that time, but there were lots and lots and lots of hours devoted to getting that book out of my head. If you had spent that much time on something, would you not have any qualms about throwing it to the public domain? I know a friend of mine who's almost completely restored a 60s Thunderbird. You could fit a football field in the thing, it's huge. You really want to walk up to him after he's spent all that time on that car and tell him that he should just let anybody drive the thing who wants to?

Yes, I know…we're dangerously close to the architect comparison. My friend didn't create the Thunderbird. But a car is something a lot of non-artist types can relate to. Especially a classic car.

And where do the millions and millions come into this, anyway? My understanding is that the musicians and writers who actually do make millions and millions are few and far between. Yes, you've got your Stephen Kings and your Dan Browns and such, but for the most part, nobody's that huge anymore. Unless they're a J.K. Rowling and pull off a once-in-a-lifetime megamultiplatform phenom. And weren't there all of these studies that showed just how much musicians were getting screwed by the industry? Making twelve cents off of each CD sold? Something nuts like that. Yeah, you've got your Metallicas and Madonnas or whoever, but the majority of musicians are definitely not millionaires as I understand it. Books? Last I heard, the standard advance for a genre book was $5000. Unless Adams knows a lot of people who sell enough books to make that back and then sell enough to put another $995,000 into a writer's pocket, that's probably not happening. And if he does know a bunch of people like that I wish to God he would introduce me to them. Hell, most of the writers and musicians I know would just like to be able to quit their day jobs. That would be plenty for me, thanks.

I know Adams didn't try to piss me off. Adams, like everybody but the three people who read this site, has no idea who I am. He probably wasn't thinking about all that. And I'm only pissed because I've written books and I know what it takes to birth one of these troubled creations. I would like to think he just doesn't know any better, which is odd, because he's written two books himself. Granted, they're non-fiction and I don't pretend to know what goes into birthing non-fiction. Maybe he can bang out a 650-page book on game design in a fortnight. If that's the reason why he has no perspective on the time involved in writing a novel, then I suck and should be destroyed. Or I should just learn to type faster. Or both.

But regardless, here's what we all need to understand:

The industries want to control everything. People want everything to be free. Obviously, neither is going to happen. We need a middle ground. Lawrence Lessig's idea to reform copyright is the best one I've seen (and I've written about that earlier here) because the people who want to keep what's theirs can, and the people who want to let their stuff go PD can. I would personally want to keep my copyright and pass it down to my kids. Why? Not because I want to make money off of it…we've established that's not why I write. Hell, you can download two short story collections, my novel, two poetry chapbooks and a screenplay off this website for free. My business model must really suck if I'm expecting to make a lot of coin off of this. The fact is I made them. They're mine. You're welcome to go read them–because that's why I wrote them. I'd love it if you would like them enough to buy a hard copy. Or throw some coin at my head. But just because somebody wants to keep what's theirs doesn't make them a money-grubbing bastard. It just means that they want to hold on to what they built.

So that doesn't mean an end to copyright, it just means an end of copyright as we know it. And it doesn't, as Adams seems to imply, mean that everybody who wants copyright is trying to prevent people from copying their stuff. We've got to quit thinking in extremes and work together to ensure that the old paradigm gets buried. There's plenty of room in the middle to have a big, nice party.

Overall, I think Adams' points are valid, I just think he's looking at something ending when it simply needs to change, and he needs to understand that it's not all about the money. There's a difference between ownership and a paycheck. I mean, I'm not getting the latter, so the least you could do is let me have the former. That's not too much to ask…right?

Filed under: General BS
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John Robinson is a writer of prose, poetry and comics who also writes under the pseudonym of Widgett Walls.

Widgett Walls is the director of Needcoffee.com who also writes under the pseudonym of John Robinson.

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