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An interview with Andrew Montford. Choice quote:
“You can throw away the bits that don’t give you the right answer. It’s an advantage ‘unique to climatalogy’”
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Artist Shepard Fairey is facing a Grand Jury probe for falsifying evidence in a copyright case. Fairey was suing Associated Press over the use of an copyright image Fairey had used as the basis for a popular Obama election poster.
To the dismay of the Boing Boing crowd, Fairey turned out not to be a "copyfighter", but a freetard fraud. Fairey lied about the photograph he’d used, falsely submitting a similar AP photo from the same event, rather than the identical one that truly provided the basis for his derivative works. He maintained the fiction for eight months, before admitting the deception in October.
AP has asked for damages to go to its emergency relief fund.
Other artists have noted Fairey’s tendency to plunder the history of radical and revolutionary art for personal profit – he has a clothing line – without adding anything new along the way; Fairey simply scans or traces the original, usually badly.
"Simply reproducing the work of others robs you of your imagination and form-making abilities. You’re not developing the muscularity you need to invent your own ideas," designer Milton Glaser wrote in Print magazine.
"It largely ransacks leftist history and imagery while the artist laughs all the way to the bank," wrote artist Mark Vallen in a withering essay entitled Obey Plagiarist Shepard Fairey, that you can read here. " It is machine art that any second-rate art student could produce."
But it’s also a case of the biter bit – Fairey uses intellectual property legislation aggressively.
In 2008 year Fairey set his legal team upon a graphic designer Baxter Orr who created a derivative work on Fairey’s ‘Obey’ poster design (originally ‘Andre the Giant Has a Posse’), itself a derivative work of course.
There are many harmless and very entertaining pages on the internet devoted to speculative history, some of which are devoted to Moses’ Ark of the Covenant. It was apparently some kind of electrical apparatus. Possibly involving fusion. It performed magic. It transformed the destiny of people who used it wisely.
Now I doubt if you’ve read anything or seen anything in the last few days about Apple’s next computer that is very much more rational. Only most of this output has been written not by UFOlogists, but by grown-ups – professionals in fact, who are paid not to be stupid. It’s the most interesting thing about any new Apple device: the childish and idiotic inflated expectations that precede it. But you’ll have noticed that even by the standards of idiocy set by Big Media, the professionals have excelled themselves this time with iTablet speculation.
The reason is that they don’t just want one to play with, fanbois or gadget fans. This time, they fully expect Apple to save their jobs. That’s quite a big difference. (The New York Times let slip that Apple had a new platform for publishers last year.) So the result has been awful. Like holding up a highly-reflective idiot in front of an idiot mirror – the result has been infinite recursion of stupidity, as far as the eye can see.
I was again reminded of childish and idiotic expectations of technology yesterday, reading a lecture by the G-Whiz-driving editor of The Guardian newspaper, Alan Rusbridger.
An answer to the music industry’s woes slipped into the IFPI Annual Report last week, but its significance went unnoticed. Before I get to it, though, here’s a poser.
“We screw the struggling artist, and pay the suit,” Nick Carr mused recently. Carr was examining a contradiction: information has never been less free, it’s never had as much as much value attached to it. Once you add up your Sky Sub, mobile broadband bill, and the many other information services, we pay a fortune for information, most of which is entertainment. He continued:
“It’s a strange world we live in. We begrudge the folks who actually create the stuff we enjoy reading, listening to, and watching a few pennies for their labour, and yet at the very same time we casually throw hundreds of hard-earned bucks at the saps who run the stupid networks through which the stuff is delivered,” he wrote.
elsewhere and you’ll find people saying they make a point of principle not to pay for entertainment digitally, because entertainment companies are wicked. The principle is that two wrongs make a right, which makes withholding the payment justified. Maybe even morally superior to paying.
But as Nick points out, we all actually pay a fortune to suits – they’re just different suits. They’re suits at large telcos, advertising middlemen (eg, BT) and service companies. The answer seems simple.
If you’re a copyright business, then to appease the copyright militants, you must pretend that you’re not. You must say you’re in plumbing, or infrastructure. Or anything, actually. For the world’s biggest record company, Vivendi, this will be a case of returning to one’s roots. Universal’s parent Vivendi began life as Paris’s first monopoly water supplier – it only changed its name from CGE and spun off the water and sewage businesses in 2000. And look, we can mention sewage and The X Factor in the same sentence without berating the obvious.
The Lords this week discussed new compensation for copyright holders this week – including a voluntary ‘Hail Mary fine’ payable by file sharers, instead of suspension – but nobody noticed.
It was late on Wednesday night, and the Lords were six hours into their fourth session this month discussing the Digital Economy bill. Lord Lucas moved Amendment 156, giving an infringer a choice:
[It] requires the payment of an additional fee by the subscriber for the maintenance of unrestricted internet access, which is to be remitted to a licensing body established under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Lucas said he anticipated a more progressive licensing regime, similar to the performance right on compositions, which is non-exclusive:
"No one stops a person performing, but if they do perform, they have to pay a fee… Given the fact that someone is having a technical obligation imposed on them, it seems that they might choose to pay a fee to such an agency, which would go to relevant copyright holders. Terminating, suspending or limiting someone’s internet access just does someone harm."
Read more at The Register…
As celebrities met at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro last week to weep for Gaia’s disappearing ice, NASA has quietly scrubbed the claim that the world’s second largest ice mass in the Himalayas will have disappeared in 25 years.
The Google cache still shows the bogus NASA claim:
Delicious news from the United States, where ‘Net Neutrality’ is again being recast for a new political purpose.
The term long since ceased to mean anything – it now means anything you want it to mean. But as a rule of thumb, advocating Neutrality means giving your support to general Goodness on the internets, and opposing general Badness. Therefore, supporting Neutrality means you yourself are a Good Person, by reflection, and people who oppose Neutrality are Bad People.
This is a wonderful thing, and the beauty is, it’s all so simple. It’s like the Good Guys Wearing White – the Bad Guys oppose Neutrality. And because Neutrality is anything you want it to be, you have an all-purpose morality firehose at your disposal. Just point it and shoot at Baddies.
But best of all is that you get to define the Baddies, raise a lynch mob, catch them and hang them – before somebody has had a chance to ask "Where’s the harm, exactly?".
This time the accusation of Neutrality Violations is being turned on copyright holders, minority groups – and anyone who wants a network to run the way they want it to.
Pelted from all sides by amendments, the Digital Economy Bill continues to plough its way through Parliament. This week, the Lords lined up to have their say, but since there are so many (300) Amendments, they’ll be at it again on Monday.
Of course, out of the ten subject areas, the one labelled ‘online copyright infringement’ has attracted the most attention from their Lordships. Lord Mandelson made a number of modifications acknowledging these concerns this week – including some substantial changes to the processes. It’s the procedure rather than the principle that is vexing the Lords.
Nobody – not even those who support the Bill – is entirely happy with the procedures. Yet there is no great grassroots outpouring of opposition. While 500,000 people may have paid 79p in one week to register a protest vote for the Christmas Number One single, fewer than 500 have signed up to the Open Rights Group’s “Message to Mandelson” campaign – and some of those are supportive. We spotted one ‘Go Mandy’ from a major record label staffer and another urging his Lordship to bash the ‘freetards’.
Read more at The Register
Exclusive Record label trade association the BPI wants sweeping changes to UK online copyright practice in 11th hour amendments to the Digital Britain bill.
The amendments would grant copyright holders injunctions against websites and service providers similar to the US DMCA act – but with no ’safe harbour’ provision to verify whether the claim is merited, according to documents seen by The Register.
The BPI amendments would introduce an entirely new Section 97B of the 1988 Copyright Design and Patent Act, and would be granted when an ISP had refused to take down infringing material. The Secretary of State would have the ability to review and amend the provision "by allowing the injunctive relief available to the Court to evolve and to keep pace with technology".
As it stands in draft form, the Digital Britain bill would compel rightsholders to identify and notify infringers, in a "graduated" response, ultimately ending in temporary suspension of Internet access. The revised Section 97B, if passed, would dramatically switch the burden from rights holder to publisher.
Read more at The Register…
An archive of selected stories, talks and notes by Andrew Orlowski
