wither in the light

The source of the trouble has been a rather unfathomable message in 3 foot letters for Smirnoff's Lyriquid perfection campaign, condemned by Gerry Harper, a Leeds councillor, as "sheer vandalism". Moose counters that he should not be prosecuted "for cleaning the walls". But Leeds City Council insists his work is illegal because any advertiser needs a permit. The Crown Prosecution Service says he may have been in breach of last year's Anti-Social Behaviour Act.

...if you like, you may link to us at no cost. This option requires the execution by you and Fastcompany.com of a one-page Web-linking agreement. Please download and sign the agreement and fax it to 617-738-5055, attn: G+J legal, Fastcompany.com. As soon as you receive back the agreement signed on behalf of Fastcompany.com, you may begin linking to our content.

Fast Company has amended its atrocious linking policy, but the one they've put in its place is only slightly better.

Fast Company permits links to the Fastcompany.com Web site. However, Fast Company reserves the right to withdraw permission for any link and requests that you not link for any impermissible purpose or in a manner that suggests that Fast Company promotes or endorses your Web site.

Fastcompany.com does not allow framing of its Web site content.

The Web exists because there is no permission needed to create a link (and that includes a framing link). This is enshrined in the RFCs that defined the Web. It has been the guiding principle of the Web since the first page went online.

That permission-free world made the economy that Fast Company services possible...

This is a step in the right direction, but only a small one. The faxed-permission-form was ridiculous, but the real evil in it wasn't the ridiculousness, it was this damaging lie about permission being required for links.

I really hope that Fast Company acts like the heroes I know they can be here, changing their linking policy to something like:

The Web exists because no one has the right to grant or withhold permission for links. Fast Company exists because of the Web. Accordingly, we neither grant nor deny permission to link to our site, and urge you to do the same.

Holy confusion, Batman

The Holy Sons are something like what would have happened if Jimi Hendrix had been a Mormon. The center of the band is Emil Amos, an intentionally obscure musician whose musical talent is quite impressive, but I found the lyrics to be occasionally trite and he seemed to have an agenda, something he was trying to sell us with his music. The better parts of the show sounded a bit like the Clairvoyants (this is a good thing), while the rest would have made straight-edge emo-core kids blush. Gotta give him credit for sticking to his ideals, but it just didn't move me much.

Arches and Aisles - and Gates

Rebecca Gates, formerly of the Spinanes, was on next, skillfully supported by Amy Domingues on organ and cello. Picture a continuum of all musicians spread out before you, arranged according to 'feel'. Draw a line connecting P.J. Harvey to Billie Holiday. (Work with me here, people.) Draw another connecting Liz Phair to Juliana Hatfield. At the point where those lines cross, move a small amount in just about any direction, and you'll find Rebecca Gates. (WTF he's making us do geometry now? mwahahaaa.) Rebecca was all over the place, from indie-pop to soulfully-sultry, with bitterness and blues and mirth and melody mixed in throughout. She's got an amazing voice, and put on a damn fine show, and I'm going to get her Arches and Aisles and Ruby Series CDs, as well as try to dig up some of the old Spinanes stuff.

scotch & ice; percodans; high on fumes; airplane ride

Califone! w0000t :) The evolution of this band continues to amaze me. I've seen them at the Satyricon, where I felt (pleasantly) like I'd stumbled into an opium den while a gig was going on; at the Blackbird, where they were having so much fun jamming it was more like a livingroom gig than a concert; and now at Berbati's, where they broke the few remaining preconceptions I had about them... they are their own type of music, there is no genre for this stuff, and this live show went beyond anything they've put on CD so far. Start by adding a banjo, a second percussionist, and the Stones to My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain or (sometimes) even Einstürzende Neubauten for the high-energy stuff, or drink a bottle of cough syrup and get a King Crimson 45 and play it at 33rpm for the slower stuff, and it *might* get you far enough out that you can see Califone from there if you look around hard enough. And then the next song will be this simple folk ballad that sounds like it could have been sung around a gypsy campfire or on a Louisiana porch.

Joe Adamik (primarily drums) and Jim Becker (primarily fiddle, banjo, guitar, some voice) laid down the foundation for each of the tunes while Ben Massarella (a percussionist who is just as good at knowing which sounds to leave out as which to put in) and Tim Rutili (voice, guitar, minimalist vintage organ, broken toys) drove the songs from whisper to wall-of-sound and back again. Near the end of the set, Tim had some sort of argument with his guitar that resulted in the guitar's banishment to the back corner of the stage, but luckily this resulted in the most intense version of 'Electric Fence' (with Tim now on organ) that I've ever heard, possibly that they've ever played.

The thing I dug the most about the show was watching the way the band hardly ever looked at their instruments... they were looking at each other, following each other's lead, and if Tim decided to turn a song on a dime the rest of the band didn't even miss a beat. Ben got so into it at one point that he didn't seem to notice that his drumsticks were shattering and flinging splinters into the audience. And when the band invited Rebecca and Amy back onstage for 'Fisherman's Wife' and 'Michigan Girls' (two of the mellower songs), Amy's cello and Rebecca's voice made two already awesome songs even better.

I think you could say this was a good show :)

This event aims to create greater communication and community between many different producers of independent media and artists, as well as help people share skills and information related to zines and zine culture. Through hands-on and discussion-based workshops, the conference will examine the role and effect of all types of zines in and on underground and mainstream culture.

Admission is free. The weekend includes workshops, panel discussions, community meal fixings, film screenings, and several tables for networking, selling and trading zines. There are also a multitude of guerrilla workshops throughout the weekend.

The 2003 symposium drew about 800-1,200 participants, both local and national.

Feynman immensely enjoyed the challenge of reducing complex ideas so that they could be presented to students, and used that as a measure to determine whether something was really understood. Feynman was once asked by a fellow faculty member to explain why spin ½ particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. He set off to prepare a freshman lecture on the subject. However, a few days later, he returned and said, "You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don’t understand it."

It can't be done.

Encryption, trust-boundary/friend-of-a-friend networking, and almost total connectivity saturation ensure that, in some form or another, file trading will always exist. The only attempts that have come close to stopping file trading have been the draconian efforts of the Chinese government, and even they are losing the battle due to technologies like Freenet. The internet is the closest we've ever come to a truly democratic technology, and throughout history there have been concerted efforts on the part of the vested interests to fight such things: popes and politicians, kings and capitalists, they've always agreed that The People need to be prevented from communicating. If 'freedom of the press is for those who own one', it's just easier for them to smash the presses. This current legislation is a hamfisted attempt to do just that with today's technology.

Current copyright laws are ludicrous.

The RIAA/MPAA have bought a lot of politicians in their efforts to 'protect their copyrights'. As a result, some seriously defective copyright legislation is in place, including an indefinite extension of copyright that is preventing any work produced after 1923 from entering the public domain, which is the same as saying that it prevents those works from becoming a part of our culture. Most media companies have a huge backlog of currently-unpublished materials that they are just keeping to make sure no one else makes money off of it, even when they themselves have no intention of rereleasing any of it. This is a huge cultural loss... years from now, the only record of these days will be the one the marketers have decided on.

The idea that congress can legislate such things is unconstitutional, and they know it.

The constitution grants congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". They've already weaseled their way around the 'limited Times' part of that clause, granting themselves power to extend copyright indefinitely. Now, on that shaky legal ground, they are trying to build additional layers of legislation that will shore up their newfound unconstitutional powers. Once they have a body of laws in place that are predicated on the assumed legality of the tweaked copyright laws, the house of cards will be too fragile to disturb, and their campaign contributors will buy them all houses in Hawaii.

The punishment doesn't fit the crime.

The RIAA has managed to convince congress that anyone caught downloading a few songs caused them to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most of the 3,429 people against whom the RIAA has filed lawsuits have settled out of court for a few thousand dollars and a promise to never fileshare again, but this is mostly because not a single case has actually gone to trial. When they come at you with a lawsuit that says you are responsible for a quarter of a million dollars in damages, you'll settle fast... but the whole thing reeks of corporate hooliganism.

The profit margin for the media companies (*not* for the artists themselves, who are being more fucked by the media companies than they are by the file-sharing) is so large that file-sharing hardly dents it.

Every single study that has been done by non-industry researchers has shown that the overall effect file-sharing has on CD sales ranges from zero to positive. The media industry studies show the exact opposite, but their yearly profit reports put the lie to their own press releases.

Personally i just can't see any good in coming from punishing people for being music fans and making the effort to hear new music. I'm almost tempted to go onto kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the RIAA would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive.

Here's a true story about a user I know who was stopped by DRM. She's smart, college educated, and knows nothing about electronics. She has three kids. She has a DVD in the living room and an old VHS deck in the kids' playroom. One day, she brought home the Toy Story DVD for the kids. That's a substantial investment, and given the generally jam-smeared character of everything the kids get their paws on, she decided to tape the DVD off to VHS and give that to the kids -- that way she could make a fresh VHS copy when the first one went south. She cabled her DVD into her VHS and pressed play on the DVD and record on the VCR and waited.

Before I go farther, I want us all to stop a moment and marvel at this. Here is someone who is practically technophobic, but who was able to construct a mental model of sufficient accuracy that she figured out that she could connect her cables in the right order and dub her digital disc off to analog tape. I imagine that everyone in this room is the front-line tech support for someone in her or his family: would it be great if all our non-geek friends and relatives were this clever and imaginative?

I also want to point out that this is the proverbial honest user. She's not making a copy for the next door neighbors. She's not making a copy and selling it on a blanket on Canal Street. She's not ripping it to her hard-drive, DivX encoding it and putting it in her Kazaa sharepoint. She's doing something *honest* -- moving it from one format to another. She's home taping.

Except she fails. There's a DRM system called Macrovision embedded -- by law -- in every DVD player and VHS that messes with the vertical blanking interval in the signal and causes any tape made in this fashion to fail. Macrovision can be defeated for about $10 with a gadget readily available on eBay. But our infringer doesn't know that. She's "honest." Technically unsophisticated. Not stupid, mind you -- just naive.

The Darknet paper addresses this possibility: it even predicts what this person will do in the long run: she'll find out about Kazaa and the next time she wants to get a movie for the kids, she'll download it from the net and burn it for them.

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"I was really freaked out when I turned on my phone and found this convoluted narrative mess crawling across my screen," said Jack Clemson, a University of Washington student who owns one of the first known infected phones. "'Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed'... I was pretty sure that wasn't my girlfriend texting me about lunch."

"Ulysses may be the zenith of modernist writing in the novel form, but it's barely recognizable as a novel or as any other kind of writing," said Francis Harrod, of the anti-virus software developer F-Secure. "Of course the same can be said of text messaging; but nonetheless I sincerely doubt America's youth is equal to the task of sudden, unanticipated confrontation with this book. It could be extremely damaging to their minds."

If only George W. Bush had read Lawrence of Arabia, rather than Wolfowitz of Mesopotamia, he would have known that Lawrence recruited many a man to fight against the Turks, all of whom eventually turned against the Brits once the hated Johnny Turk had been sent packing back to Istanbul. That history repeats itself is a cliché, but a hell of a good one.

"instead of that chop suey you're writing, you might not try sensible books that people can understand."