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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.