In all of the fantastic fanfare that occurred yesterday with the SOPA and PIPA blackouts, a fairly important decision from the Supreme Court slipped out with little or no attention and its potential impacts could be just as damaging to the art and music community as the SOPA and PIPA legislation.
In a 6-2 ruling yesterday the court ruled that works put into the public domain are not placed into a "territory that they cannot exit". This grants Congress the opportunity to re-grant copyright to works. What isn't made entirely clear though is how the copyright gets reapplied. Is it restricted to the original owner of the copyright, their estate, their family? Can the copyright be transferred by the will of Congress to another party? None of these questions are fully laid out in the decision and probably won't be fully fleshed out until a challenge comes in the future to iron out the wrinkles.
The fear here though also stems from the issue of creative license for the remixing and copying of work. One of the foundations of creative expression comes from the reuse, recycling and past works. There is also a potentially huge impact that this could put upon the classical musical world as well. With so much of the history of many of these works being hundreds of years olds in some cases, many orchestras or bands often times rely on access to these works for instruction and performance.
I am more and more finding the attack on the creative and arts field from corporate and personal interests depressing and actually frightening for our county. We are now set in a world where the dissemination of free information should be easier than ever. History has continually shown that the societies in which the arts and sciences flourish freely are the ones that are the most successful. Ancient Egypt, Greeks, Romans, Renaissance Italy, etc. We should be celebrating a epoch of cultural enlightenment, but we instead are finding ourselves caught in a world of fear, isolation, monetary greed and control.
For the past couple of months I have been constantly talking about cross country skiing. Of course our winter went from being forecasted as one of the snowiest in history to the third mildest in history. Chicago finally received some snow this past week and true to form I went out and purchased some cross country skis at REI. They had a pretty nice package deal setup for about $275. I surprised my wife and purchased her a pair as well.
Since it was a holiday weekend we had an opportunity to go out twice. The first time we went out to Morton Arboretum where they had a nice groomed trail. This was just two days after the snow too so the overall experience was excellent. Weather was very cold, around eighteen degrees. Megan had never gone skiing before so this experience was all new to her. Overall she did pretty well, but there were some pretty hilarious moments with her falling and attempting to get back up. The funniest of those moments actually came Friday night when she wanted to ski around the backyard to test out her new skis.
Our second outing was this morning at a local forest preserve prairie. This was not quite as much fun. The weather was warn, in the low 40's and the trails by this point have had numerous people, dogs and joggers on them. I think the trails would have been nicer had we hit them up a couple of days earlier, but that is just something I will have ti keep in mind for the future.
I will have to remember to bring my GPS in the future as well. It didn't even occur to me to track where we skied until the end of the day today.
Winter NAMM is coming up next week and normally I am pretty stoked to see what the world has to offer for musicians. The past couple years of NAMM's have been pretty boring though with not a lot on the horizon to get exicted for. Unfortunately, the trend seems to be following suit as the build up thus far seems to be pretty boring. Nothing really exciting is looming in the pipelines, at least not yet.
I have seen two pretty cool new DAW's though that have popped up lately that seem pretty interesting. The first i heard about the other day is a new DAW called Bitwig. It looks to be an Ableton Live clone in many respects, but has some interesting fatures and Linux support. Not sure what to make of it yet as it still seems a bit too Livey to me, but it is nice to see another player in the live performance market.
The next DAW (and I slightly hesitate to call this a DAW) isa product called AGL. IT is completely pre-Beta at this point, but the visual and audio demo below blew me away. At first it seems likea standard modular audio environment, no big deal right? As you see later in the video though the author has expanded the system to a three dimensional automation layout. It looks to not only be incredibly cool, but also incredibly powerful.
Let hope these lead to some better innovation from the "big boys" showing up at NAMM next week.
Taken at The Morton Arboretum
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the dangers new legislation out there about SOPA and PIPA. I went the full gamut of writing lettes to my congressmen to signing a petition on Whitehouse.gov's website. It seems that the petition has at least attained enough signatures to garner the attention of the Whitehouse web staff. This morning I recieved the following response in my email. It is a bit tepid and doesn't clearly outline that the administration would veto PIPA and SOPA in its current form, but it does at the very least acknowledge that there are some serious problems with the current forms of the bills. Personally I don't think we should have any legislation like this, but if this is the first step to get these bills re-written with at least some due process in them, then I support that. I understand that in the end we will probably have to meet half way with other content holders.
Wow,
I finally got all of my blogs from different sites imported into Posterous. I was having the worst trouble trying to get Posterous to import my Tumblr blog. I instead had to have it exported to a Wordpress xml file and then upload that xml file for the import. Everything seems to have worked though with only minor editing needed.
I do have to say though that Posterous' help was pretty poor throughout this whole process. Let's hope that is not a hint of things to come for the future use of Posterous. I migrated away from Tumblr because of its downtime and issues I had with the site loading.
I have only had my motorcycle license for five months and I am already grinding my teeth, thinking about another bike. Not that I need one of course. The motorcycle I have now (and my first motorcycle) is a 2000 Kawsaki ZR-7. It is a nice bike and I have to say I am really drawn to the streetfighter look. Apart from some minor work that I needed to do on it this fall it runs perfectly and only has about 7,500 miles on it. Now that I have had some time to ride though I am getting a better sense of what type of motorcycling I want to do. The streetfigher is excellent as a commuter bike and for riding on the weekends, but it isn't really something that was designed for longer trips or touring. My butt is certainly hurting pretty bad after a couple of hours just on a saturday ride.
Initially I caught some of the dual sporting bug and even went and test road a BMW F 800 GS earlier this fall. I'm only 5'8" though and that bike was a bit tall for me. I liked it, but I wasn't in love with it and after some more research I found that dual sporting is pretty difficult in the midwest.
So here I am left thinking what I want to do. Do I keep my current bike and take it as an opportunity to learn more about motorocycles? It is carbureted so the possibility of me doing some work on it myself is totally there. As soon as I get into a fuel injected bike that has a computer, you can forget about me doing any tinkering. The Kawi certainly has decent power at ~75 bhp and although it only has a 5 speed gear, I never had a problem with power on it. Possible upgrades include the installation of an H4 relay kit for the front headlight, upgrading the running lights and taillights to LED, upgrading the seat, and getting new tires.
Of course my research has still been going into the purchase of a new motorcycle. My top runners I think right now appear to be the Tiger 800 (not XC) or the BMW F 800 R. Both have the naked look that I like and both have the ability to get some panniers on the side to do some longer riding. There is of course some potential trade offs here for both. The BMW of course is a straight up streetfighter and doesn't offer much more more power (84 bhp) than my current ride. It does offer removal panniers from Givi in which the rack can quick release, making for a clean bike when just cruising around town.
The Tiger 800 on the other hand is a bit bigger with more horsepower. It also can have a clean look without the panniers, but does it lose some of the fun zippy-ness of the streetfighter? I would say 95% of my riding will be weekend rides.
Not sure, but would love to hear thoughts from people if they have them. Then again, I could always buy a new motorcyle and keep the Kawai. Question is what do I go with then. Something big and cruisery? A BMW ST series which got a top ranking for touring this year?
Not sure how many of you have followed the news as it relates to this, but on the internet there is a huge outcry about a new bill going before the house called the Stop Online Piracy Act (S.O.P.A) and before the Senate called Protect IP Act (P.I.P.A.). The crux of these acts is to allow the government to block domain names (website address) if they are accused of infringining upon intellectual property. On the outset that seems like it is a fairly decent cause, after all artists should be allowed to protect their IP. The problem with this law however is the inherent lack of transparency and due process that it lays out for the infringement process. A disportional amount of power is provided to the accuser and the law sets out a standard that assumes the accused party is guilty until proven innocent. What it gives private corpartions the power to do is accused a website of breaking intellectual property, accused it in a closed system and have the website immediately taken down. This could have potentially catastrophic ramifications on the internet as it pertains to freedom of speech, fair use, content creation and more. Perhaps more importantly is that this law becomes transnational in its affect, potentially preventing someone in France for example accessing a website because the U.S.D.O.J identified it as being infringing.
The bill has been criticized by Abigail Phillips of Electronic Frontier Foundation for not being specific about what constitutes an infringing web site. For example, if WikiLeaks were accused of distributing copyrighted content, U.S. search engines could be served a court order to block search results pointing to Wikileaks. Requiring search engines to remove links to an entire website altogether due to an infringing page would raise free speech concerns regarding lawful content hosted elsewhere on the site.
Overall I think this presents a tremendous constriction of civil liberties and unfortunately it appears to represent to the interests of corporations. Artistically speaking if you look back at history, the greatest achievements in the arts are often found, observed and created through the copying, remixing and reimagining of works. Part of the initial intent of copyright is that it would have an expiration date on it to allow the content to be freely avalible and accessible to the world for use and growth. There is no doubt that copyright has some issues. The debate of piracy actually causing harm in an online sense is a seperate debate entirely (I do not think it does), but to remove due process and create a system that assumes guilt is a terribly wrong step for the United States to take.
A couple of weeks ago my wife metioned that we should outline our goals for 2012. She got this post idea from one of her favorite blogs, a Beautiful Mess. So here we go, here are my goals for 2012.
- One Song a Month
- Learn about Buddhism
- Skydive
- Finish furnishing house
- Personalize office
- Donate at least $100 a month to charity
- Learn to rock climb
- Cross country ski
- Be a better husband
- Zen
- Go on a date once a month with wife
- Go see a musical
- Pickup model building again
- Goto a concert
- U of I football game
- Ride more motorcycle
- Don't look back in anger
- Replace valves in other 2 toilets
- Build a workbench
- Take more quiet time
- Expand my musical repitoire
- Be patient