let freedom reign!

let freedom reign!

Achtung!

I was bored at work the other day, and playing with my laptop, so I figured I'd give GarageBand a go. It's pretty cool. Basically, you have a library of sampled loops, and MIDI files to choose from, and you construct a song from there. You can record yourself using Sound Studio, and import that recording into a loop in GarageBand. All of the loops that come with GarageBand are royalty-free, meaning anyone can use them free of charge, and new sets of loops pop up online all the time.

Anyways, I created my first song using GarageBand, titled "Achtung!". It uses a sample from Irdial's The Conet Project (which they recently sued Wilco over for using an unauthorised sample of.)

To download my creation, "Achtung!", click here. (.zip file, 2.46 Mb)

http://www.electricschwa.com/

Bold and Beautiful...

Orbit insertion tomorrow; there is a great animation of Titan to look at. Hopefully there isnt a golden bb waiting in the ring plane to.... I wish they would set up an rss feed so we can keep up with the new pictures!

Knock Knock!

Someone wants in: "Copyright law is broken. The interpretation of it favours the extremely rich corporations over the artist and small business. This is more true for copyright law than it is of other law, because copyright deals with prima facie evidence and absolutes in the case of, and yet, the corporations prevail over the small business almost every time, whilst systematically trampling over the rights of the public." I am not a lawyer. I never wanted to be one. The law and I have on a number of occasions nuzzled in a dark corner, as well as had screaming, dish throwing fights. What is a Law? Laws are an artificial construct created by men of a certain social class to protect property and preserve "order" as the prevailing opinion of their class deems proper. Laws are, with the few exceptions of major consequence i.e. Murder, Rape, about property and it's control. Laws are about income and it's collection. Number plates on cars, taxes, tariffs, birth certificates, all deal with Newtonian objects and their movements both in life and the ebb and flow of commerce. Laws have trickled down from European based society to less fortunate civilizations. The most simple and basic laws, as those listed above are everywhere. The more arcane laws, like copyright, only apply if the society has an existing framework for following the word of law. If a society has a tradition of obedience, even the most absurd laws will stand. In Hong Kong it is against the law to have or use chewing gum. In Jakarta, it is against the law to eat a Durian Fruit on a public bus. In Munich one can run buck naked through the Englishergarden, but try that on the street, and off you go to the clink. The copyright law is broken because of two things: Current 21st Century society has outgrown the original concept of controlling intellectual property for income gain, by usually, a broker of such properties. Most laws deal with objects. The copyright laws were written when books, sheet music, disks, and piano rolls, held sway. Today, the world has moved on. Music, or any other audio, can be transmitted via the internet. No more object. No more physical distribution of objects. A one to one transaction between artist and consumer can take place, cutting out the broker. It is an honor to pay an artist for their creative efforts. If an artist would rather concentrate on production rather than distribution, collectives of a number of like minded artists can be formed, a gathering place where one can go to hear new work and download. Huge media groups are swelling and merging like they are going out of style, which is exactly what is happening. The future is small. As small as the screen this is written on. The second reason that copyright law is crumbling is for a law to work it must have a locale within which the population follows that rule of law. In cyberspace there are no borders. It is a universe of intellects who communicate amazingly well across the crusty notions of city, state, and continent. A simple set of rules must be adopted and enforced by a sort of cyber United Nations, that sets basic fees, how many times a work can be duplicated, the ability to go after those who would, say, take a photographic image and publish it in a for profit magazine, and have the clout to collect due fees. All of this would protect the artist and their collectives on an individual basis. Visual and recording artists must realize that the landscape has changed. Literally. The giant media groups are extinct. Artists must form a union in cyberspace to represent themselves. The sum of many individuals could be quite powerful, not only financially, but politically, but that's another story...

EBS authenticator sheets: file under "Duck and Cover Cool"

The EBS Authenticator Word List If the alert message was received on the teletype, and the Authentication Word matched, the announcer was to supposed to send the attention signal (the old attention signal, which involved turning the transmitter off and on a couple of times), then begin reading the alert message scripts and stand by for further instructions. [...] http://www.akdart.com/ebs.html It all seems so familiar!

More good Points over at Metafilter

A Metafilterer said, in the same thread: It's an interesting situation, but maybe not astonishing. In the publishing industry the same rules apply. Authors promise their publishers that they haven't copied someone else's book. If there is legal trouble down the road, the author is the responsible party, not the publisher who accepted the book in good faith. I think this is the only reasonable way to go, as it's very hard for a publisher to make absolutely sure that they don't accept material that has been printed somewhere before. posted by Triplanetary at 10:40 AM PST on June 28 This is reasonable, but what is NOT reasonable is that these clauses insulate the publisher from paying a royalty on infringing works that they continue to sell. By being insulated in this way, a Monopoly label can make a profit off of infringing works and pay nothing; this is what is wrong with the clause, not the fact that they require indemnity as a safety measure. If they find that they are manufacturing an infringing work, they need to pay a royalty on all copies manufactured, and then pass the bill on to their artist. That is the true function of an indemnity clause. They can either then decide to stop manufacturing the infringing discs, or pay a royalty on each new disc manufactured. What should not be an option is that the artist pays only a proportion of her royalty as full compensation for the infringment of the larger parties share of the royalty split.

Classical Music; the obvious example.

From Metafilter That's why recordings of classical pieces long out of copyright can themselves be copyrighted. Exactly. If Wilco had hired a voice actress to repeat the words "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", and then processed them to sound like they were coming over a shortwave transmission, the Conet people wouldn't be able to do much about that, since they do not own copyright on the phrase. Since, however, the band apparently used the actual recordings made by this project, and the project owns the copyright on them, and did *not* give permission for their use, I'd say it's case closed. The monopoly record labels use clauses in their contracts to immunize themselves against legal attacks if copyright infringement takes place. Does anyone who knows more about contract law know how this can be enforceable? As the article states, it seems kind of odd that a third party who is not a signatory on a contract can still somehow be bound by it. And, to balance out those who seem to think that those who produced the Conet Project CD should be punished for being uppity enough to go after Wilco, I'm gonna look for this disc and buy it. Maybe two or three copies. posted by deadcowdan at 10:03 AM PST on June 28 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/33989 This intelligent poster is of course, 100% correct. A classical music recording of say, a Sarabande from J S Bach's "Clavier Ubung", is protectred by copyright even though the music itself is in the public domain. No one would argue that you can take a piece of one of Gustav Leonhardt's performances and then incorporate it into your own work, and then sell one million copies of that work, without paying a royalty.

Here come the shell dwellers!

Wireless Devices Help Police Fight Crime Fri Jun 25,10:12 AM ET By MARTIN FINUCANE, Associated Press Writer BOSTON - A police officer stops you on the street, then taps something into a device in the palm of his hand. The next minute, he knows who your relatives are, who lives in your house, who your neighbors are, the kind of car you drive or boat you own, whether you've been sued and various other tidbits about your life. Science fiction? Hardly. A growing number of police departments now have instant access via handheld wireless devices to vast commercial databases that contain details on just about anyone officers encounter on the beat. In a time of terrorism worries, the information could theoretically save lives, or produce clues that an eagle-eyed cop could use to solve a case. But placing a commercial database full of personal details at an officer's fingertips also raises troubling questions for electronic privacy activists. "If the police went around keeping files on who you lived with and who your roommates were, I think people would be outraged," said Jay Stanley, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites), "And yet in this case, they're not doing it, but they're plugging into a company that is able to do it easily." In recent years, police departments have been testing different handheld wireless devices. Typically, they've used the devices to gain access to law enforcement databases meant only for police that, for example, alert them when someone is wanted for arrest. At the same time, many police departments have been using desktop computers to search commercial databases to help them learn more detailed information about people they are investigating. These databases can hold billions of public records from a variety of sources. Thousands of law enforcement bodies now use them; five states have linked their own records with a huge commercial database in a federally funded program known as Matrix. Now, in a convergence of the two trends, police are beginning to access the commercial databases using handheld wireless devices. [...] Yahoo News All those anonymity services that have gone to the wall will one day come back in force as millions try and disengage their identities from this pervasive net. Children will appear to dissapear as they adopt shell identities upon coming of age. What responsible parent would let their child use their "real" identity for anything?

Fly like an eagle

Fly like and eagle, even if you feel like a chicken. Strange title, I know, but well worth the read.

This is exactly what I am talking about.

Use a camcorder in a US cinema, go to your local Abu Ghraib franchise operation for 3 years. WASHINGTON (Reuters) - People who secretly videotape movies when they are shown in theaters could go to prison for up to three years under a bill approved unanimously by the U.S. Senate on Friday. [...] Copies of hit movies frequently show up on the Internet while they're still in theaters, allowing skinflint fans to see new releases like "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" without coughing up the price of a ticket. [...] The Justice Department would get an extra $5 million per year through 2009 for enforcement. [...] Reuters Now. The US taxpayer has to pay for the security of cinemas in the USA, at the behest of the MPAA. Its completely absurd. Each cinema should be responsible for its own security. It is not the job of the state to police cinemas. If they were really serious about stopping camcorders in cinemas, the MPAA would compell all cinemas that want to show their member's films to install metal detectors at the doors to filter out all camcorders berore the showing begins; no need for legislation that will brutalize people for doing something harmless. The cost of protecting cinemas falls to the people who should be paying for this "security" (and of course, retrofitting cinemas is a one off cost, not a recurring amount that has to be coughed up year on year). Now imagine this. Someone clever organizes a boycott of cinemas to show that people will not put up with this sort of legislation being bought up and put on the books. It works. millions stay away from the movie houses. The MPAA will blame "piracy" as the cause of the massive slump in ticket sales, and furthermore, they will say that this proves their point; that draconian legislation is needed to control the "pirates"! Interesting (and innapropriate) use of the word "Skinflint" ay?

Fish tank Feeding Frenzy

The piece at Wired has been silently updated.

But here's where a strange story turns even odder:

Stranger and stranger indeed. I have answered all the points contained in this update here, attached to my original announcement.

Wendy Carlos in her studio

Can you feel the purity?! http://www.wendycarlos.com/photos.html

Yould you ever try to tie a fly?

Fly tye. "Ive got 96 tears and 96 eyes"

Archives: News - Northwest Explorer

fascinating! Archives: News - Northwest Explorer [via mefi]

A great time for great posters!

Google Search: drug tax stamp

This is TOTALLY GOING TO WORK

No one can stay asleep forever

In April 2003, John Ashcroft's Justice Department disrupted what appears to have been a horrifying terrorist plot. In the small town of Noonday, Tex., F.B.I. agents discovered a weapons cache containing fully automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices disguised as briefcases, 60 pipe bombs and a chemical weapon ? a cyanide bomb ? big enough to kill everyone in a 30,000-square-foot building. Strangely, though, the attorney general didn't call a press conference to announce the discovery of the weapons cache, or the arrest of William Krar, its owner. He didn't even issue a press release. This was, to say the least, out of character. Jose Padilla, the accused "dirty bomber," didn't have any bomb-making material or even a plausible way to acquire such material, yet Mr. Ashcroft put him on front pages around the world. Mr. Krar was caught with an actual chemical bomb, yet Mr. Ashcroft acted as if nothing had happened. Incidentally, if Mr. Ashcroft's intention was to keep the case low-profile, the media have been highly cooperative. To this day, the Noonday conspiracy has received little national coverage. At this point, I have the usual problem. Writing about John Ashcroft poses the same difficulties as writing about the Bush administration in general, only more so: the truth about his malfeasance is so extreme that it's hard to avoid sounding shrill. In this case, it sounds over the top to accuse Mr. Ashcroft of trying to bury news about terrorists who don't fit his preferred story line. Yet it's hard to believe that William Krar wouldn't have become a household name if he had been a Muslim, or even a leftist. Was Mr. Ashcroft, who once gave an interview with Southern Partisan magazine in which he praised "Southern patriots" like Jefferson Davis, reluctant to publicize the case of a terrorist who happened to be a white supremacist? More important, is Mr. Ashcroft neglecting real threats to the public because of his ideological biases? [...] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/22/opinion/22KRUG.html The last sentence is the sub-eureka moment. The real eureka moment will be the one where this man and all of his peers finally understand that indeed, this rogue government is the threat to their security and bountiful way of life, and that indeed, the rest of the world has been right all along. These glaring omissions and astounding double-standards throw light upon the true nature of this rogue government; now all the sub-eurekoids have to do is extrapolate in reverse to find out that the cause of all these foreign policy problems and the mortal danger america has been artificailly put in are the fault of the us government itself. All of these journalists need to be given a budget so that they can live in other countries three months of the year, amongst the ordinary people in different cultures. It would create a sort of immunity preventing the tripe that has been published over this whole sad and sorry affair. Or maybe not. Maybe Congressmen (50% of which do not even have passports) should be made to live for two years in another (non European) country before they are allowed to take their seats in the house. Either way, the world cannot be plunged again and again into chaos at the whim of a load of hicks from the sticks. People in Europe say "surely there cant be anyone left who cannot see what this is all about? Clearly and sadly its obvious that is the case, and these peole write for newspapers of record, and they are believed, and we all have to suffer for it.

Paul's Boutique Samples and References List (Beastie Boys Dust Brothers)

this seems pretty relevant at the moment: Paul's Boutique Samples and References List (Beastie Boys Dust Brothers) on a disgustingly related tip: ch-ch-check it out! [all via memepool.com; who also just posted info about the irdial/wilco confrontation]

The hatemail arrives...predictable in is dullness!

From: "Byrnes, Benjamin" <Benjamin.Byrnes@Homestore.com>
To: "'irdial@irdial.com'" 
Subject: Wilco
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 15:08:17 -0700
MIME-Version: 1.0
X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2657.72)
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Status:   

You have a catalog called the music philosophy.  Yet you sue Wilco?

I will be badmouthing you that any chance possible.

Thank a cases
Ben

A hate mail! We have arrived!

Kansas Department of Revenue - Personal Tax Types - Drug Tax Stamp

This is TOTALLY GOING TO WORK. Kansas Department of Revenue - Personal Tax Types - Drug Tax Stamp

Natural Sciences Faculty

wow. really immature, but really funny. Natural Sciences Faculty update: this guy's an organist, to boot!

The lies of Michael Moore

If Michael Moore had had his way, Slobodan Milosevic would still be the big man in a starved and tyrannical Serbia. Bosnia and Kosovo would have been cleansed and annexed. If Michael Moore had been listened to, Afghanistan would still be under Taliban rule, and Kuwait would have remained part of Iraq. And Iraq itself would still be the personal property of a psychopathic crime family, bargaining covertly with the slave state of North Korea for WMD. You might hope that a retrospective awareness of this kind would induce a little modesty. To the contrary, it is employed to pump air into one of the great sagging blimps of our sorry, mediocre, celeb-rotten culture. Rock the vote, indeed.

Subsystence: Submission Deadline

Dear Fellow Blogdialians: Just a reminder that this weekend is the submission deadline for the next issue of Subsystence. I know it is late notice, but I would love it if those of you who have music, photos, writing, etc., laying around and unloved (I know you are out there), would consider passing them along for public consumption. Volume 2: Foundation is coming together nicely and will be released as planned on July 1st, but we could always use more interesting and diverse submissions. Our sincere thanks go to all those who have already sent their work in for review! We look forward to seeing new submissions arrive throughout the week. Feel free to email me at [jkmeier at uchicago dot edu] with any questions, or links to work. Attachments are OK. Thank you!

album covers

album cover designs that copy classics

Permissions and definitions

How do I get permission to make my own Irdial mix album You simply email us. Many people have done so in the past, and normally, we give on the spot permission. We like to keep a copy of the work for our archives, and we ask for attribution. This is precisely what David Gedges "Cinerama" group did, and of course, we charged him nothing, as is true of everyone else who has asked permission to use TCP in their project. As you know Dav, Irdial is not a money centric label, but the option remains open to us to charge money for using our works as it is with any other label, no matter what the size. We just licenced Anthony Mannings works to an Italian label for an advance of €2 per track. We know that they could not afford real licence fees, and its more important to us that these tracks are out there in different territories working for us, rather than trying to squeeze money out of labels that are just like us, and trying to spread good music into the world.

Permissions and definitions

How do I get permission to make my own Irdial mix album You simply email us. Many people have done so in the past, and normally, we give on the spot permission. We like to keep a copy of the work for our archives, and we ask for attribution. This is precisely what David Gedges "Cinerama" group did, and of course, we charged him nothing, as is true of everyone else who has asked permission to use TCP in their project. As you know Dav, Irdial is not a money centric label, but the option remains open to us to charge money for using our works as it is with any other label, no matter what the size.

The comments are rolling in

Noah Shachtman adds to his Wired article, with the tasty line, ...

"he provides some insights into how he ultimately checkmated Warner/Electric/Atlantic, Wilco's label, into a deal."

Checkmated. I Like it!® I cant take full responsibility for it however. We have the best lawyers in England; all credit to them for the sterling work they did on our behalf, and for the forbearance they showed with the bills!

Wired have run the story!

Wired have a piece on the infringement settlement:

"They're playing in and reinforcing this legal regime that's limiting creativity," said Nicholas Reville, the head of the activist group Downhill Battle, which recently organized protests when the label EMI clamped down on a DJ for blending together albums by Jay-Z and the Beatles. "Will the next Wilco even consider using a sample like this after seeing what happened here?"

Is how the piece ends. Nicholas Reville is of course taking the incorrect view. "The next Wilco" can make whatever use it likes of works that are out there, but they absolutely cannot expect to sell those works to one of the big 5 labels without paying for use of the samples they copy. If ineed it is the case that copyright law is broken, then the broken-ness of it should apply equally to everyone, RIAA record label or small independent. It is simply unreasonable to expect the independents to accept infringement to satisfy some sort of absurd "unwritten code of the underground" that says "you must be trampled upon". If anyone ever believed that Irdial followed this code, then they are sorely mistaken. The idea that we are in some vague way "reinforcing this legal regime" is nonsense. If a law is incorrect, you need to mount a legal challenge to correct it, or, put your money where your mouth is, as we have done, by releasing all of our works for free under a generous licence. Obviously WEA is not going to fight a case to diminish its own ability to protect its intellectual property; in other words, if we had lost the case it would have been a most unwelcome outcome for them and all of thier shell labels. Anyone could have pointed to the created caselaw to defend the copying of recordings from CDs where the source signal was not copyrightable or not owned outright by the recordist, making all the nature discs, CDs of primitive musics, and other audio exotica put out by labels copletely up for grabs by the sample manipulators. There is no reason why we should not have brought this case. In fact, it would have been completely wrong of us to knowingly let this infringement go unchallenged, and in one respect, Nicholas is correct; now, no one will ever again question wether The Conet Project is protected by copyright or not. It is absolutely protected by copyright, and this case firmly establishes this. I am far more concerned about the huge corporations that have copyright law tailor made for them, closing off the ability of people to use music in ways that they see fit. By "use" I mean play on any device, copy for their friends, known and unknown, and so on. I am more concerned about the lawsuits being brought against completely innocent file sharers the effect of which is to damage the networks that we use daily to share our works. Copyright law is not going to change overnight, and it is not going to change simply by asking for it to be changed. The only way to change the way the the law works is by, as I say, releasing your works for free, making it possible for anyone to share your creative output, and dragging copyright law kicking and screaming into the present. It would be ver difficult indeed to cripple future devices or create anti file sharing legislation if there were millions of files explicitly freed for indifidual use floating around the internet. Doing this gives you a real voice, because we are stakeholders in the filesharing idea by making our works available in this way. We can go to our MP and say; we want people to share our music, and oppose any law stopping people from making free use of our files. If there were thousands of labels and individuals doing this, we become a lobbying group. You have to DO something to make things change, and that is precisely what we have done, inour own small way; whining to Congress or your Governent representative will do nothing. All of the changes the music industry, that ancient, creaking smelly vampiric carcass that refuses do die have been forced upon them by file sharing. They cannot, and will not be allowed to suck our blood to the tune of a million CDs. And there are no two ways about that.

QED. Copyright law is either for all or none. The answer is all!

The RIAA is sueing another 482 people for sharing music, which is their right.

Sharing an MP3 music file, or a cassette tape of music without charge. This is LEGAL unless your doing this as part of a business plan or promotion. You can have a website full of MP3's as long as it is not a business site, you are not selling ad space etc. If you can afford it, have fun.

Now. The people at BoingBoing have the most basic facts of the case totally wrong. I quote:

"Irdium sued WEA for copyright infringement -- in other words, they claimed that they owned the mysterious voices that float in the ether all around us at every hour of the day and night. They claimed that they, and not the spook who recited the words Yankee Hotel Foxtrot into his mic over and over again, were somehow the creators of the mysterious broadcast. "

This is totally false. We have never ever claimed that we own the voices, or that we were the creators of the original transmissions or the owners of the copyright of the original transmission; that would be totally absurd, taking into account what Numbers Stations are. What we claim, and what we absolutely own, is the copyright in the recordings that we made, and the copyright in the discs that we release. This is beyond question. The recording that we made is no different to a hydrophone recording of whalesong, or a birdwatchers recording of birdsong. The legal position on this is clear, and WEA international would never have settled with us had this not been the case. As Christopher says on BoingBoing, we release all of our music for free to the public, under a licence that forbids making money from our works. We are not about to allow a billion dollar corporation to copy from one of our works and then sell close to a million copys of that infringing work, without so much as a word. Its interesting that, on the one hand, people rail against the sueing of people by the RIAA who are going about their lawful business, sharing music, but when a member of that same, monstrous organization flagrantly infringes the copyright of an independent label, somehow the independent deserves to get this treatment:

WEA settled instead of countersuing Irdium into a smoking heap of slag for proffering this notion that absolutely offends reason.

This "notion" in no way offends reason. In fact it is totally reasonable in its entirety. We own the copyright in our recordings and the discs we manufacture. No one can make use of these without our permission. There are no two ways about this, and our works are protected by the same copyright law that RIAA labels are protected by. What actually offends reason, is that someone would think that because we are a small independent record label, that copyright law should not be applicable to our works. Copyright law applies to all works equally, and we have an absolute right to persue and be compensated for cases where infringement takes place. The makers of Vanilla Sky understood this. They asked for permission to use The Conet Project as have many other independent labels, artists and organizations. All of these people also had the courtesy to attribute us in the works where they made use of The Conet Project. This flagrant and outrageous copyright infringement could not be allowed to stand, and we did not let it stand. We researched the matter very carefully before proceeding, and took consultations from some of the best copyright lawyers in the UK. Taking a large company to the highest court in the UK is not something to be done lightly, and we would never have persued it if we didnt know absoultey that we would win. And we did prevail.

The Observer | Focus | 9/11: At last, the full story has been told

The Observer | Focus | 9/11: At last, the full story has been told

pan american

pan american is going to release his excellent new album/dvd with us.

Mentasm Party

You owe me a drink!

me a reason not to despair for the future. You are in it.

DA REGGAE NAME GENERATOR......YES I!

DA REGGAE NAME GENERATOR......YES I! Dread Rico...Feelin irie!

WPS1

WPS1 P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center announces the launch of WPS1 (www.wps1.org), the world?s first internet art radio station. Sponsored by Bloomberg L.P., WPS1 provides an extraordinary lineup of music and talk shows broadcasting 24 hours a day. The station's programs combine talk and music shows hosted by contemporary writers, artists and musicians with rare historic material that includes the entire audio archive of the Museum of Modern Art. WPS1 will stream to listeners on the Internet only. Its presence on the Web will make the station's unique digital library available to an international audience at any hour, seven days a week. As such, WPS1will become a live audio museum in cyberspace, extending the visual art, book, music, film, video and performance programs that P.S.1 and MoMA are known for in ways previously unforeseen. Here, at www.wps1.org, is the first all-art, all-the-time radio station, where expression of all kinds remains truly free.

We got you now Davis!

Court: No Right to Keep Names From Police Supreme Court Rules People Don't Have Constitutional Right to Refuse to Give Police Their Names The Associated Press WASHINGTON June 21, 2004 - The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people do not have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police their names. The 5-4 decision frees the government to arrest and punish people who won't cooperate by revealing their identity... The decision, reached by a divided court, was a defeat for privacy rights advocates who argued that the government could use this power to force people who have done nothing wrong to submit to fingerprinting or divulge more personal information. The decision, reached by a divided court, was a defeat for privacy rights advocates who argued that the government could use this power to force people who have done nothing wrong to submit to fingerprinting or divulge more personal information. http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20040621_701.html A divided court. (said with the Heywood Floyd "Deliberately Buried" intonation). Its like watching a friend die one piece at a time.

Irdial, Wilco and WEA Settle Spy Radio Sample Lawsuit

In a classic David and Goliath confrontation, Irdial-Discs, experimental independent music label from the UK, brought a High Court action against WEA International over their CD release "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" by the group Wilco, which flagrantly infringes Irdial's copyright. "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" bears a track entitled "Poor Places", which contains one minute and thirty seconds of sound from "Phonetic Alphabet Nato" lifted directly from disc one of the quadruple CD "The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations". The Conet Project track features a female voice repeating over and over the phrase, "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", which Wilco took for the title of their critically acclaimed CD. WEA International did not ask for permission to include this sound from our release in the CD "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot", which has sold close to one million infringing copies. The Conet Project is a historic collection of espionage "Numbers Stations". These Numbers Stations are found on the shortwave radio bands, and are used by the CIA, MI5, MOSSAD and the rest of the world"s espionage agencies to communicate to their agents in the field. The Conet Project is the first ever CD release to systematically collect recordings of all known Numbers Stations world-wide for the purpose of the historic preservation of this largely unknown area of espionage tradecraft. Before its release, there were no recordings of Numbers Stations in The Library of Congress or The British Library, both of which now have a comprehensive set of examples of this phenomenon thanks to The Conet Project. Numbers stations have been on the air for at least 30 years, and they can still be heard today, all over the world, without any special equipment other than an ordinary short wave radio. They use a simple yet unbreakable system of encryption, known as a "One Time Pad", to scramble the messages sent out to spies at work in foreign countries. The bizarre sound of these stations is deeply fascinating to shortwave enthusiasts, experimental sound artists and musicians. Each station has its own peculiarities and methods of operation, making finding and cataloguing them a rewarding hobby for the short wave enthusiasts who monitor them, and listening to them an inspiration to lovers of experimental music and "found art". This is why The Conet Project has been sampled and incorporated into dozens of compositions and works of art since its initial release. By taking this sound from our release, tacking it onto the end of the track "Poor Places", and failing to obtain permission to release their CD with our sound on it, WEA International, an RIAA record label, infringed our copyright. It is only after the case was brought to the High Court of Justice in London that they have finally relented and have been pressured to, in their own words, "reluctantly agree" to pay Irdial-Discs a royalty in perpetuity on a worldwide basis. From the perspective of someone interested in the nuances and absurdities of copyright law, this case brings up some interesting points. What is "Phonetic "Alphabet Nato"? This is a recording that we personally made, from a shortwave radio, of the station known s "Phonetic Alphabet NATO". No one knows where this station comes from. It has been attributed to MOSSAD the secret service of Israel, but no concrete evidence of this has ever been brought forward by anyone. This is a recording of a shortwave "Numbers Station". There are many of these stations on the air. No one will admit to transmitting them. They have been on the air for at least 30 years. The original recording was made onto a cassette. It was then edited down to give a clear example of the stations normal transmission format, i.e.: a "call up"(in this case, YHF), "message message", the message, and "End of message end of transmission" at the end of the transmission. The recording was also cleaned up with equalization to remove noise. Monopoly clauses The monopoly record labels use clauses in their contracts to immunize themselves against legal attacks if copyright infringement takes place. This means that if WEA International releases a CD with samples on it, the infringed party can seek damages from only the artist, and not WEA International. Normally, you are only allowed to receive a proportion of the royalties due to the artist. This means that if the artist is bound by a contract that pays him 1% of the profits from a release, then you can only receive a proportion of that amount, while the label keeps the other 99% in its entirety. This is an astonishing situation, where a third party that is not a signatory to a contract, is bound by the terms of that contract. http://www.bayarea.com/mld/bayarea/entertainment/3029974.htm This is the case where the RIAA obtained a payout from a company for sharing MP3 files internally on its network. It seems odd that a company can be fined one million dollars for sharing files, whilst WEA International can *sell* 1,000,000 infringing copies of a CD, and face a much lower penalty. WEA International is part of the RIAA; they should not be able to arbitrarily penalize a company and be immune themselves from large damages when they are the infringing party, because of indemnifying clauses in their contracts. This does however, bring up some interesting possibilities. If you run a record label, and want to release a copyright infringing recording without having to pay royalties to anyone at all, do this: Allow your artist to create a recording with any samples that she likes. Make sure that the contract you have with the person who created the work is collecting a royalty from you of exactly .01%. Start selling the infringing copies as quickly as possible. When you are inevitably sued by the RIAA or the "Big Five" company whose work you have used, they will not be able to collect a penny from you, or your artist. Of course, you will be served with an injunction stopping you from manufacturing and selling further copies of the work, but for most labels, this should not be an issue, since the number of manufactured copies are small. If you are in the position of having a hit, you can negotiate while the record is hot, and after sales start to trail off, stop manufacturing, let it sell out and then delete the release without having to pay a royalty to anyone. You can compensate your artist by paying them to do the photocopying in your office or by some other means unrelated to the release in question. If it is a fact that you can only collect royalties from the artist in a case of copyright infringement and the label remains immune - which the best copyright lawyers in the UK and the USA agree is the case - then any label, not just an RIAA label, should be able to use this as a strategy to release recordings containing whatever they want, and still keep 99.99% of the profits. But you don't own the copyright of Phonetic Alphabet NATO! The recording we made of YHF was not made directly from the source of the people who originated the transmission, in other words, we did not go to the building of the originators, and plug our cassette machine into their tape machine to make this recording directly. This is a personally made recording of a shortwave transmission, with all of the nuances, noises and distortions short wave radio produces. These distortions, nuances and noises make our recording unique, and completely remove it from being a literal duplication of the original source. It is in art terms a piece of "Found Art", unique to itself, and impossible to replicate, since the above-mentioned qualities of shortwave interference are random effects. In another context, imagine if we had made use of an anonymously authored traditional carol, which is copyright free. We make a creative use of this free work, and publish it in a special book of traditional Christmas carols, which have been typeset and designed by us. If someone then took a scan of one of the pages from our book, and then made a Christmas card out of it, or took this scan to use in their own book of Christmas carols, our copyright would have been infringed, irrespective of the fact that the original carol was copyright free. This example put to rest the argument that the recording of Phonetic Alphabet NATO is not protected by copyright, and that Irdial are indeed, the owners of it. The same principle used in the Christmas card example works for this recording. The piece that Wilco took and used in their CD was from our edition, The Conet Project, containing a work that was recorded by us. Our choice of recording was specific, our editing and sound cleaning was specific, and as we say above, the recording that we made is unique, by virtue of how and where it was recorded. The contextual value of the recoding is ours, and is not present in and is very different from a Numbers Station that one would hear live on the radio. This recording has an extra value because it came from The Conet Project, which is evidenced by the number of people who continue to sample from it, and the number of times it is "namechecked" as the source of the sound. The recording of Phonetic Alphabet NATO is directly analogous to a hydrophone recording of whale song. When a marine biologist makes a recording of Sperm Whales, the copyright of that recording belongs to the person or institute that made it. No secondary use of that recording can be made without the permission of the person or entity that made the recording; the physical recording itself is copyrighted, meaning that you cannot make a copy from that physical tape, minidisk or CDR without the explicit permission of the person who made it. There are three parts to the copyright of a recording. The copyright in the song (in the case of music), the copyright in the recording of that song (The Master) and the copyright in the disc that is used to sell the work to a member of the public. During the process of settling this case, it was made clear to us that in a CD compilation of out of copyright works, such as 78rpm records, the only protection afforded to the companies that release these discs is the order in which the tracks appear in the compilation, and not the sound on the discs, since the source of the sound is in the public domain. This means that any compilation of out of copyright songs you buy can be copied by you, re-packaged and sold again, as long as you change the order of the tracks in your edition! It seems that there is no protection for those companies who specialize in these compilations, whereas the commonly held belief is that there is a blanked prohibition on copying from discs that are still within the time limit set for copyrighted sound carriers. If the company made adjustments to the public domain recording, like removing scratch sounds etc, then they have protection under copyright legislation, because they have in essence, created a derivative work. http://www.amazon.co.uk/ Irdial-Discs is distributed in the USA by Forced Exposure UPDATE! The piece in Wired has been silently updated.

But here's where a strange story turns even odder:

Stranger and stranger indeed. I will answer the points that appear in this update one by one. Simon Mason is a major contributor and supporter of The Conet Project He donated many recordings to the project, wrote a small piece for the 80 page booklet, and is clearly attributed and thanked in the acknowledgements section of the booklet. When The Conet Project was first conceived, it started out as a single CD of my own recordings. I then sought out and received donations of recordings from others, as I became aware of the staggering amount of history behind the Numbers phenomenon and the breathtaking variety of stations that have now passed into history. As each tape was entered into the project, it was carefully catalogued. The idea was to have an example of every extant recording of all known numbers stations, and for each example to be the best one out of those available. Each tape was combed through, and catalogued in this way. Submitted tapes were fed though the EQ of our 24 track mixing desk onto reel to reel masters, and entered into the project in the order that they were received. Where a later submission had an example that was better than one already entered, that submission replaced the earlier example. This is the list of who submitted what, transcribed directly from The Conet Project worksheets:

Tracks 1 thru 8, track 61, track 38 are recorded by Akin Fernandez Tracks 19 thru 35, 36 to 60, are recorded by Simon Mason Tracks 9 thru 14 are recorded by Phil J. Harrison Tracks 15 thru 18 are recorded by Tom Sevart Tracks 63 and 64 are recorded by Jacques Bras Other Tracks are recorded by Mike Gauffman and Chris Midgley

As you can see from this list, tracks 1 thru 8 were submitted by me, and Simon Mason?s contributions begin at track 19. The "Phonetic Alphabet NATO" in question is track 4 on The Conet Project, and was submitted by me. Track 32 is another "Phonetic Alphabet NATO" track, this example being one submitted by Simon Mason. (Track 32 is track 9 on Disc 2) There are two other "Phonetic Alphabet NATO" examples on Disc 2; number 25 and 26. None of these tracks are the ones that WEA International has on their infringing CD by Wilco; the one that was used is my recording, taken from Disc 1, track 4. In preparing for the case against WEA, I was asked detailed questions about Numbers Stations, how they are made, the precise nature of the voices in question, the provenance of the submitted recordings and many pieces of other information. I gave detailed responses to all these questions to our solicitors. We were well prepared to go to court to settle this matter, and all of the pieces of evidence were closely examined, both from the point of view of the law and the precise nature of The Conet Project and its recordings. It was only after this was done that it was determined that the case was solid enough to pursue. You do not go up against a multi million dollar company without thorough fact checking. This is precisely what I and our legal team did. It's very easy to make a claim in writing. It is entirely another thing to put your money where your mouth is, and be prepared to take heavy losses in a risky court action. Irdial puts its money where its mouth is, from releasing The Conet Project in the first place, at a time when some paranoid Short Wave monitors were too frightened to reveal what they were monitoring for fear of prosecution and when shortwave magazines were too frightened of legal action to print detailed information about Numbers Stations. We took the personal and financial risk to make this extraordinary project real, and expose to the world the amazing mystery of Numbers Stations. It is thanks to The Conet Project that the first ever major news articles about Numbers Stations were printed, and it is also thanks to us that the first ever government pronouncement about Numbers Stations was made. We don't simply talk about freeing music; we have done it with our valuable catalogue of works, under a generous license. Irdial is not about empty words; we take action, and when we do so, we are deadly serious about it, and are willing to go where others are, for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to. We have the absolute, irrefutable proof that the recording in question belongs to me. We were ready to go to court and face forensic examination of The Conet Project archive to establish that it was indeed one of my tapes that was the source of this recording. Taking all of this into account, even the most skeptical of persons would be hard pressed to believe that we would be bringing an action before the High Court of Justice without the most solid of cases to hand.

But some intellectual property lawyers are more than steamed at Fernandez for laying claim to Mason's recordings. "If Irdial simply published someone else's recording verbatim, then under U.S. Copyright law, they don't own anything," Schultz said in an e-mail.

Copyright lawyers are variable in quality. I have spoken to specialist copyright lawyers who have said to me ?I don?t know what Mechanical Copyright is?, so caveat emptor when you shop around for advice in this field. This case was brought to an English court. U.S. Copyright law is not relevant in a UK court. This is a pretty basic fact. Put simply, U.S. copyright law is irrelevant to this case. Our lawyers are the best in the UK. If you want to find out about copyright law that is relevant to a case, you need to consult a lawyer from the jurisdiction where the case was heard, not one from another jurisdiction that may not have complete knowledge of the relevant copyright law. I am the person who recorded the tape of "Phonetic Alphabet NATO" that was entered into The Conet Project and which is the sound on WEA's infringing CD release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco. It is absolutely not "unclear whether Fernandez even recorded the "Yankee" shortwave broadcast himself". I was willing to go to court to prove this, with the physical evidence in hand, and there should be no doubt in anyone's mind about what this actually means. These are the facts, not out of jurisdiction trans-Atlantic speculation, or poorly recollected reminiscences. Most importantly you must bear in mind that we were able to force a settlement. WEA and their lawyers on two continents (and the legal representatives of the other three signatories of the settlement) would never have settled if they thought for an instant that we had no case. A Mechanical copyright primer For those unaware of the relevant parts of copyright law, take a quick lesson from the MCPS So that you understand how this part of copyright law works. Now take a look at this: Silence lawsuit and payment: BBC

Musician Mike Batt had paid a six-figure sum to settle a bizarre dispute over who owns copyright to a silent musical work. Batt, who had a number of hits in the 70s with UK children's characters The Wombles, was accused of plagiarism by the publishers of the late US composer John Cage, after placing a silent track on his latest album, Classical Graffiti which was credited to himself and Cage. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/2276621.stm

There cannot be anyone that thinks that if someone can be made to pay a royalty on the use of silence that somehow we were going to allow a multi million dollar record company take 1m:30s of actual recordings from one of our discs and get away with it Scott free! Anyone who cries about copyright law being unfair, about it being used as a blunt instrument and hand break on new technologies and business models, but who also says that we were wrong to peruse this case is at the least disingenuous at worst na�ve. Copyright law is under the complete control of ?the monopoly? the huge record labels that are able to have tailor made legislation drawn up for them and entered into the statue books almost without restriction. Every day there is news of another law tabled that will erase the rights of people to do what they want with the music carriers that they own, and yet, the same people who protest this, fail to understand what it means when someone brings a real world action against this monopoly. Everyone understood that the limitation of the duration of copyrights was implemented so that the owners of intellectual property can benefit as well as the population. What happened in reality is that extensions have been added to the duration of copyright again and again; the last time that works that were due to fall into the public domain they were snatched away by the enactment of legislation sponsored by an entertainer turned politician. It is clear that any promise of works falling into the public domain cannot be relied upon, since the goalposts can be moved back at any time by the monopoly and its government agents. This means that whole generations will not have access to works that they were entitled to. If copyright law is going to be used in this way, and the many other ways it is used, against the best interests of the public and independent artists, then it is wholly fair and reasonable that that same law be used against the monopoly companies when they flagrantly violate the copyright of another company, no matter what the size of that company is. There will be no ?golden age of copyright? while the monopoly continues to control copyright law and the way it is interpreted and enforced. No amount of lobbying, CD stickering, debating or writing will stop the monopoly. Only concrete actions that empower the public will have any real effect; this means writing software tools to protect the public, releasing the works you own for free, and as I have said before, the other 80% of copyrights world wide being gathered together into a second force to overwhelm the influence and power of the monopoly will actually do anything.

Its a Breen Plot for sure.

NOW YOU WILL SEE!! June 20, 2004 This is some info. about the movie. Release Date: TBA 2005 (wide) Distributor: Paramount Pictures Production Company: Valhalla Motion Pictures (The Hulk, Armageddon), Lakeshore Entertainment (Wicker Park, Underworld), MTV Films (Jackass: The Movie, Sk8ter Boi), BUF Compagne (visual effects) Cast: Charlize Theron (Aeon Flux), Frances McDormand (The Handler); other cast not announced yet. Cast Notes: (4/9/04) Charlize Theron will be going through three solid months of intensive physical acrobatic training in order to bring the sort of flips and jumps the animated character was capable of to life. Of course, it's likely she will have the help of wires and such. (6/18/04) Frances McDormand has signed on to play Aeon's boss, known only as 'The Handler.' Director: Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) Screenwriter: Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (writing team of crazy/beautiful; cowriters of The Tuxedo; also have Valiant coming in 2005) Based Upon: (3/10/04) This movie is based upon the popular animated spy TV show of the same title, created by Peter Chung, which aired on MTV in the early 1990s. Premise: In the 25th century, a rampaging virus has forced the remnants of humanity into the seclusion of a final city surrounded by a disease-proof bubble. There is great political conflict within, however, and this is the story of an acrobatic assassin, Aeon Flux (Theron), whose latest target is the government's top leader. Filming: Production is scheduled to start in August, 2004 in Berlin. Genre: Action, Eye Candy, Female, Science Fiction, Spy, TV Show http://www.tvtome.com/AeonFlux/

Without The Idea..."19"

The Art Of Noise were at their most briliant when there was an idea behind themt. Paul Morley was the person who provided that element. After the idea was removed, they quickly decended into utter garbage, doing cover versions and all sorts of idealess gestures. Now upon the return of Paul Morley, we get "The Seduction of Claude Debussy". See what I mean? "A spanner is intrinsically more interesting that a popstar". More wisdom from the PM. Without Paul Morley, that great and inspirational text "The Art of Noises" would never have been realized so dramatically and triumphantly. AON, if they had formend at all, would have been just another set of idots with Fairlights, producing Paul Hardcastle-esque tracks related to the dreadful "19" over and over. Use the titles for TITLE-ing not MESSAGE-ing!!!

He cannot possibly win!

The President of The United States of America takes policy direction from people who are trying to bring about armaggedon. There are nearly 3 million people praying for George W. Bush every day who believe he has been callled to his office by some sort of divine power. They believe that God - specifically a Christian God - wants George W. Bush to be President! Our country is falling into the hands of fringe religious zealots whose personal beliefs and goals are not those of the majority of this country. Pray For Reason is a call to Americans of all religions and belief systems who want to see their country's policies at home and abroad based on facts, history, and reasonable thought processes. Join us - a group of religious and non-religious Americans - in pledging to do everything we can to remove the current administration from office. [...] http://www.prayforreason.org/

Paul Morley WAS the Art of Noise

Lists. Don't you just hate them. And yet, don't you just love them. Hate them because they're all wrong, they're biased, they're fixed, they miss too much out, they're in the wrong order, they're utterly arbitrary, they try to cage musical beasts that should be allowed to run free in our imaginations without the indignity of being branded with numbers. And whatever comes top is usually going to knock you speechless. You also love them because whatever comes top is going to knock you speechless. And because without them we wouldn't really know where the Gordon Ramsay we were. They're not complete maps of anything, they're the edge of a map that features the entrance to a universe that is so vast and complicated that in the end you have to make your own way through it. The list helps you begin. It's not the Complete Book of Anything, it's like the contents page. It's the start of something, in the ridiculous but necessary disguise of being definitive. [...] Lists in one sense, the boring sense, try and make things safe and organised. Ultimately, in a good sense, they keep breaking things up, they keep reminding us that behind and beyond the obvious, the regulars, the usual suspects, there is more and more to discover. It is in a way what is outside the list, music that is just beginning to make its way into the list, and indeed up the list, as well as the music that is slipping away, that makes them so fascinating. In this list, guaranteed, as the best lists are, to send you bananas, to get you reworking them in your own image, the Clash are joining the Beatles on the saintly stage, Public Image Ltd nibble at the Stones in the bad boy tent. Massive Attack trip past Floyd, Oasis have left Blur for Britdead. Elsewhere Nick Drake, Robert Wyatt, John Martyn and Vashti Bunyan drift in from the outside, inscrutably repre senting all that music yet to be discovered. Richard Thompson, Peter Hammill, Kevin Coyne, Roy Harper ... One of the things that makes a list like this even more interesting is the idea that certain albums represent music that is on the edges of impinging upon the collective imagination - Wyatt reminds us of Soft Machine and Matching Mole albums that are missing, Yes makes us wonder about King Crimson, Black Sabbath about heavy metal in general, Brian Eno of all the other Brian Eno albums that are missing. Joy Division of the lack of Throbbing Gristle, Wire, Cabaret Voltaire, Magazine. TheHuman League of the lack of Depeche Mode. The lack of anything by Aphex Twin, Underworld or Leftfield reminds you of the lack of anything by Matthew Herbert or Four Tet. Consider the beginning of the alphabet, and imagine a list topped by the Auteurs, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and Clinic. [...] David Bowie, who goes up and down these lists, is currently on the up. Radiohead are falling away, because they might after all be Gentle Giant. The Kinks are klinging on, hinting at a future Sixties invasion. Roxy Music are in the perfect position to launch an assault on the top 10. Five albums from the much maligned Eighties lurk suspiciously at the bottom, perhaps on the verge of poignantly disappearing for ever, perhaps bravely fighting back into favour. They tenderly surround the newest kid on the block Dizzee Rascal, who in 10 years might have climbed alongside Roxy and the Smiths, or have gone wherever those Eighties albums will go. [...] I wont link to the place where this came from, where they list the "Greatest 100 Albums of all time". I post this because I love Paul Morley (the dude that wrote it), the way he writes, what he thinks. He gets better and better.

Fact-checking Moore's political broadside: printer friendly version

Fact-checking Moore's political broadside: printer friendly version

what are you on

Rocks.

votez

yeah, what are you on, playa?

Am I mistaken?

I counted four "in's". Curious ...

Marin County Civic Center

The old "in out"

So far it looks like three outs and one in. "Theres room in my in but theres no room in my in"

Its so obvious

The new Europe in 333 pages http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,7369,1242743,00.html 2 x 333 = 666 QED

The Gmail Machine / The rise of the Gmail tools

There are so many ways of arranging the tools we have into traffic making monsters they probably will never be exhausted. Here is a brilliant example: http://gmailmachine.mmgn.com/ And like I said, people have started writing tools to work with Gmail: This one allows you to export all of your local mbox email to Gmail. Now THAT is an interesting idea; everyone leaving localally controlled pop3 email and migrating to Gmail!!!!!

AlterNet: The Fight of Our Lives

AlterNet: The Fight of Our Lives

Capitol Hill Blue: Dubya's Dilemma: Daddy Doesn't Support the Iraq War

Capitol Hill Blue: Dubya's Dilemma: Daddy Doesn't Support the Iraq War [via MeFi]

tv listings

the onion does it again with their amazing tv listings. see what's on tonight! ps: apologies for the double-post on that picture-snapping thing, i thought the link may have been different. boners. pps: did that new applicant get in the door or what? in.

You can lead a horse to water but you cant mae him think

Here's what I'm here to convince you of: 1. That DRM systems don't work 2. That DRM systems are bad for society 3. That DRM systems are bad for business 4. That DRM systems are bad for artists 5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

You can have your prints back

We had our prints taken for 'comparison/elimination' after our latest burglary. On the form it said the record would be destroyed after use, and you could request to have it returned. Now this is really interesting. Why are they offering to return your prints to you? This is a left over from the time when only criminals had their fingerprints on record a time when people understood that this sort of private and personal information should never be held by the government unless it is done under very specific circumstances to do with crime and criminals. What happened to the common sense of the British public?!

Dupe!

Didnt not I postorz that?

piracy messages

for akin: piracy messages

f9/11: next week!

June 17, 2004 Friends, We're a week away from the nationwide opening of "Fahrenheit 9/11" and not a day goes by where we don't have some new battle to fight thanks to those who are still working overtime to keep people from seeing this film. What's their problem? Are they worried about something? A Republican PR firm has formed a fake grassroots front group called "Move America Forward" to harass and intimidate theater owners into not showing "Fahrenheit 9/11." These are the same people who successfully badgered CBS into canceling the Reagan mini-series a few months ago. And they are spending a ton of money this week to threaten movie theaters who even think about showing our movie. As of this morning, a little over 500 theaters have agreed to show the movie beginning next Friday, June 25. There are three national/regional theater chains who, as of today, have not booked the movie in their theaters. One theater owner in Illinois has reported receiving death threats. The right wing usually wins these battles. Their basic belief system is built on censorship, repression, and keeping people ignorant. They want to limit or snuff out any debate or dissension. They also don't like pets and are mean to small children. Too many of them are named "Fred." This new nut group is the Right's last hope in limiting how many people can see this movie. All of their other efforts have failed. Let's recap: 1. Roger Friedman at FOX News reported that the head of the company which first agreed to fund our film ?got calls from Republican friends? pressuring them to back out. And they did. But... Miramax immediately picked up the film! Except... 2. Michael Eisner, the chairman of Disney, then blocked Miramax (a company owned by Disney) from releasing the film once it was finished. But... public attention and embarrassment forced Disney to let the Weinstein brothers of Miramax find another distributor! But... 3. Instead of a new distributor stepping right in -- as all the media predicted would happen -- it took another month to find distributors who would take on this movie. A number of other distributors, thanks to various pressures, were afraid to get involved. It looked for a while that we would be distributing this ourselves. But then Lions Gate and IFC Films rode in to the rescue! So, we have beaten back all attempts to kill this movie, and the only thing in the way of you now seeing "Fahrenheit 9/11" is this Republican big-money front group trying to force theaters not to show the movie. Please, contact your local theaters and let them know you want to see "Fahrenheit 9/11." Tell them that some people don't know that this is America and that we believe in freedom of speech and the importance of ALL voices being heard. (The members of MoveOn.org?an ACTUAL grassroots organization?have done a very cool thing. They are pledging to send a message to theater owners and are planning to attend a showing of the film on its opening weekend.) I appreciate their efforts, but you don?t have to be a member of MoveOn to help stop this effort to keep ?Fahrenheit 9/11? from making it to screens across the country. If a theater in your area is planning to show the film, just give them a call and thank them for standing up for the freedom of speech. If your local theater isn't showing the film, call them and let them know that you would like to see it and you'd like them to show it. The White House and their minions in our media have presented one distorted version of the truth after another for the past four years. All we are asking for is the right to show what they HAVEN'T shown us, the real truth. The truth that ain't pretty (and is, sadly, damningly hilarious). On top of all this, the MPAA gave the film an "R" rating. I want all teenagers to see this film. There is nothing in the film in terms of violence that we didn't see on TV every night at the dinner hour during the Vietnam War. Of course, that's the point, isn't it? The media have given the real footage from Iraq a "cleansing" -- made it look nice, easy to digest. Mario Cuomo has offered to be our lawyer in appealing this ruling by the MPAA. Frankly, I would like to think the MPAA is saying that the actions by the Bush administration are so abhorrent and revolting, we need to protect our children from seeing what they have done. In that case, the film should be rated NC-17! However it turns out, I trust all of you teenagers out there will find your way into a theater to see this movie. If the government believes it is OK to send slightly older teenagers to their deaths in Iraq, I think at the very least you should be allowed to see what they are going to draft you for in a couple of years. Finally, some very sophisticated individuals have been hacking into and shutting down our website. It is an hourly fight to keep it up. We are going to find out who is doing this and we are going to pursue a criminal prosecution. I'm preparing lots of cool stuff for the site so watch for new items on it next week (www.fahrenheit911.com and www.michaelmoore.com). Thanks again for your support and I hope to see you at the movies on opening night, June 25. Yours, Michael Moore PS. I am sponsoring a number of benefits around the country next week for local and national peace and justice groups, including Military Families Speak Out and September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. Please check your local papers and my website next week for further details. PPS. Also, I am going to be on the ?Late Show with David Letterman? on Friday night. It's on CBS at 11:35 PM Eastern and Pacific. And on Monday morning (June 21) I will be on ?The Today Show? on NBC. Next week, Jon Stewart and Conan. I'd go on O'Reilly but, like a coward, he walked out on a screening we invited him to (with Al Franken just a few rows away!). I personally caught him sneaking out. Embarrassed, he tried to change the subject. He said, "When are you coming on my show?" and I said, "Turn around and watch the rest of the movie and I will come on your show." He walked out. Fair and balanced.

Have you seen this porn site?

This porn site is just about the steamiest I have EVER seen!

I lost everything in my life, because of this game... - www.ezboard.com

I lost everything in my life, because of this game... - www.ezboard.com

In the New Baghdad, Viagra a Hot Sell

"'The Koran does not forbid Viagra,' Shebany said. 'In Islam, if a man can't sexually satisfy his wife she can ask for a divorce. Viagra helps prevent this disaster.'" In the New Baghdad, Viagra a Hot Sell

Beauty in action

This absolutely rules your world: http://www.ongaku.de/ A beautiful interface....

Check that your files have not been tampered with

Verifying that your system files are digitally signed If you want to re-check that the files on your system haven't been tampered with, you can run sigverif (by typing its name into the Start.Run dialog) and tell it to start scanning. (UI note: If you go into the Logging page on the Advanced dialog, you can get trapped where it insists on having a valid log file name even if you didn't ask for logging!) The signature verification process takes a while, so go and do something else while you're waiting. When it's done, you'll get a list of all the system files that are not digitally signed by Microsoft. Just because a file is listed here doesn't mean that it's necessarily bad, however. For example, it might be a video driver or printer driver. (Another UI note: You can't right-click the items in the list to view their properties, say, to see what company issued the files.) [...] http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/06/16/157084.aspx

What on earth is the point of this?!??!

Ewwwwwwwww! http://www.oddpost.com/learnmore

You know you are in trouble when...

This, incredibly, comes from Fox News [...] But once "F9/11" gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won't be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail. As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" ? as we saw last night ? is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty ? and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice. Readers of this column may recall that I had a lot of problems with Moore's "Bowling for Columbine," particularly where I thought he took gratuitous shots at helpless targets such as Charlton Heston. "Columbine" too easily succeeded by shooting fish in a barrel, as they used to say. Not so with "F9/11," which instead relies on lots of film footage and actual interviews to make its case against the war in Iraq and tell the story of the intertwining histories of the Bush and bin Laden families. [...] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,122680,00.html Bush is finished, this much, I am now willing to bet money on. This movie is the "Bush Vaccine" that will finally rid us of this insane, inept, murderous, malignant, ignorant, evil, noxious president, and his nefarious, demonic familiars.

The Cutter

Welcome to the Cutting Suite, South London's complete vinyl service. We have a superb Neumann VMS70 cutting lathe in top condition. The studio is fully equipped to industry standard specs, with the highest quality mastering equipment.� We have vintage, valve and the latest digital equipment to suit all styles of music. We can be master from any format including vinyl, CD, DAT, minidisc and even MP3's on CD and solid state media. Our aim is to provide a fast turnaround, without compromising quality, in a relaxed informal environment. Because we're a small studio we can offer good value for money due to low overheads. We� therefore have time to really take care of our customers to produce the highest quality mastering.���[...] Hmmmmmmmm http://www.thecuttingsuite.com/

"Hello, sucker!"

http://www.life.com/Life/lifebooks/mobsters/gallery1/4.html If you cant beat em...Join me!

You See!!!

POLICE DATA SNOOPED Two girlfrinds of Yardie criminals yesterday admitted snopping on the police database. Civilian workers Davina Kirwan and Sunshes Pike-Williams, both 21, made hundreds of unauthorized checks on their boyfriends and other criminals while employed at Stoke Newington police Station in North London, Southwarrk Crown Court heard. They also admitted entering false information on to the system. Kirwan, of Leytonstone, East London, and Pike-Williams, of Ealing, West London, risk being jailed next month. [..] Metro Magazine I TOLD YOU!!!! Two people working inside the police, corrupting and passing information from the police database for their criminal boyfriends. Now. If its YOU on the database, and someone who doesnt like you is paying a dudette with access to put convictions on your record, you are literally FUCKED, because its impossible for anyone but criminals to remove information from these records! Add this to the ultimate poison of a unique number tied to you for life, and you start to see what a nightmare we will be living in if ID cards become a reality. Someone, some gangsters moll will be able to attribute false crimes to you and there will be nothing you can do about it. Now, the police have rigorus checks in place to keep criminals and their associates of criminals out of the reach of terminals, but these systems simply do not work. I have personally seen the forms that the police require to be filled out even for the most trivial of jobs earning 15,000pa. You have to list:

Name Address Husbands/partners name address Fathers name address Siblings name address Name and address of dependants Name and address of "other signifigant persons" "Have you ever been involved in espionage, terrorism, sabotage, actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means" "Have you evern been a memeber of or supported a group or groups involved in any of the ablve activities" "Have you ever had a close association with anyone wh, to your knowledge, has ben a member of or given support to any such group or activities"

And THEN there is the medical disclosure form, which asks if you are suffering from just about any illness imaginable, who your doctors are and all sorts of other very private and personal infomation. This form runs to 14 pages. These two persons clearly had to fill out these expansive and invasive forms, and yet, they were the lovers of actual criminals! The only way to protect against these sorts of abuses leaking into every area of your life, is to not allow a unique number to be attached to you. In this way, all of the people who want to foul your record will have to work very hard indeed to do a hatchet job on your records, which will be separated by closed systems on different databases, as they should be.

Definitive Jux | Audio/Video

Quite a mix/mash-up/whatever-you-want-to-call-it by a local guy Diplo from the Hollertronix crew who throw tremendously dance-able parties.

I have no idea what building this is, but your name in lights!

my vote and other sundry events

in ... There was a raccoon in my kitchen last night, eating the cat food. I woke to this serious munching sound, and was confused, as there is a magnetically-operated cat door in place. But! The spare room window was open, and the creature must have climbed in that way. Amazing thing, there is only about 1 foot of roof under the window, at about a 70 degree angle. Unbelievable! Update: Further inspection has shown that the raccoon is forcing the door open with brute strength (actually, not a hard thing to do). The battle has begun ... ... Endless Echoes

liquid drooling system

There will always be an England

i forgot to vote The UKIP is a non-racist, non-sectarian party. It includes British people of all backgrounds who value individual freedom, tolerance and our right to govern ourselves. The UKIP really believes in Britain and Britain's future as an independent nation competing in the world. We are not 'anti-European', but we oppose British membership of an EU that stifles our initiative and threatens our freedom. We do not seek to abolish the EU, for we believe that each nation in Europe should decide its own future. Britain has no more right to control them than they have to impose their will on us. The UKIP is the only political party contesting the General Election that will never abolish the pound for the euro and will never abandon British common law, the right to trial by jury or the presumption of innocence. Indeed we are the only party left that genuinely believes in freedom - freedom for the individual, freedom for businesses and local communities, freedom from patronising 'political-correctness' and from intolerance or injustice. We seek an independent, outward-looking Britain, not the offshore province of a centralised 'Europe', whose people are told what to do and what to think. In 1975, the British people voted for the 'Common Market' in good faith. They were told it was going to be a genuine common market - an association of independent, freely trading nation states. Instead, we have the European Union: centralised, bureaucratic, unaccountable and corrupt, eroding our independence and dictating policies that we would never vote for in an election. Not only is our currency under threat, but our entire legal system, our British nationality, our right to free speech and freedom of association, our police, our armed forces, our own agricultural policy, our right to trade freely and the parliamentary system that underpins British liberty. The EU has shown itself to be one of the largest confidence tricks in human history. It claims to 'give us rights' while removing basic freedoms. It 'gives us money' while costing us billions of pounds per year. EU subsidies are like crumbs from the cake we have made. The UKIP rejects the absurd Alice-in-Euroland logic of rule from Brussels. The other parties are not telling us the truth about the EU. Despite all experience, the Labour Party still boasts about taking the lead in the EU and helping to shape its future. The Liberal-Democrats claim to believe in individual freedom but would reduce us to powerlessness within the EU. The Greens claim to believe in 'acting locally' but want us to be ruled by the Strasbourg Parliament. The Tories pretend that we can be 'in Europe but not run by Europe'. We say that 'in the EU means ruined by the EU'. The European Commission in Brussels intends that there shall be an EU 'government', an EU 'army' and an EU 'constitution'. This proves to us that it is time to withdraw, rather than go on pretending that we can compromise. The UKIP will repeal the European Communities Act (1972) that binds Britain into the European Union, and enter into trade agreements with our former 'partners'. Whatever their claims, the leading members of the Tory, Labour and Liberal-Democrat parties all remain committed to continued EU membership. These professional politicians don't want us to run our own country or control our own lives. The UKIP, by contrast, is a moderate, mainstream party which believes in the British people and can offer them a life outside the Euro-state. UKIP

Bonne Phrase Anglaise

My first reaction

Weekend Festivals and/or Festivities

Saturday wandered around Brooklyn in the gorgeous late-Spring sun. Hit up the Library to do some research on Lucid Dreaming. Was delighted to find a Caribbean festival in front. Music and dancing. Balloon hats, jerk chicken and children's face painting. An all female band, no-one under 40, playing rhythms from Dominican Republic, Cuba and Haiti. We wandered into Prospect Park. Went to the zoo to be wowed by sea lions (of whom I dreamt the night before), red pandas (firefoxes!) and alpacas. In the evening we walked two blocks from our apartment to the local Greek festival. Mousaka and pastitsio to devour. Children's traditional dancing. And a keyboard, Greek-style guitar duo with time signatures that are divided by 9 sounding like headier moments of the Doors. Sunday was the annual NYC Puerto Rican Day Parade. But I opted out for CSS and XHTML at home. --- My first reaction would be to vote OUT. But perhaps we should give the applicant another chance?

An Ultimatum: Release The lion of the desert, or .... what?

Red Cross ultimatum to US on Saddam Release him, charge him or break international law, Bush told Jonathan Steele in Baghdad Monday June 14, 2004 The Guardian Saddam Hussein must either be released from custody by June 30 or charged if the US and the new Iraqi government are to conform to international law, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last night. Nada Doumani, a spokeswoman for the ICRC, told the Guardian: "The United States defines Saddam Hussein as a prisoner of war. At the end of an occupation PoWs have to be released provided they have no penal charges against them." Her comments came as the international body, the only independent group with access to detainees in US custody, becomes increasingly concerned over the legal limbo in which thousands of people are being held in the run-up to the transfer of power at the end of the month. [...] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1238263,00.html Now they have to:

a/ release him b/ charge him with a specific crime c/ murder him

any bets on which one they will choose?

Monkey wrencher!

We have a new aspirant, seeking admission

You must now vote on an aspirant who seeks entrance into this place. The candidate was given a choice of two questions, carefully designed so that a demonstration of the candidates stated field of interest could be examined. We determined this field of interest using Google. Examiners will note the following: The candidate failed to answer the question in plain english. The question was quoted in the body of the answer, demarked by >> The candidate chose NOT to answer this question:

2/ Anyone wanting to play electric guitar on a stage in a "Rock group" should be compelled to study Rock music to degree level. Those who have not made such a study are facilitating the zombification and pacification of audiences world wide with their regurgitated aural goo of plagiarised pabulum.

If you think this person is WORTHY simply post IN. If you think this person us UNWORTHY post OUT. ------ BEGIN CANDIDATE ANSWER ------- ANSWER (IN REDNECK) * * The origins of this term are Scottish and refer to supporters of the National Covenant and The Solemn League and Covenant, or "Covenanters", largely Lowland Presbyterians, many of whom would flee Scotland for Ulster (Northern Ireland) during persecutions by the British Crown. The Covenanters of 1638 and 1641 signed the documents that stated that Scotland desired the Presbyterian form of church government and would not accept the Church of England as its official state church. Many Covenanters signed in their own blood and wore red pieces of cloth around their necks as distinctive insignia; hence the term "Red neck", which became slang for a Scottish dissenter. >> 1/ >> "The anti commercial punk rock ethic of erasing the past as you go along." >> The further away from the Punk era we move in time, the more confused the >> picture of it becomes for people who were not there. The inverse of the >> inverse square law applies. More and more misinterpretations and lies are told about >> this era, which feed back on the false history geometrically, until finally, >> no one will be able to distinguish between The Sweet and The Sex Pistols. "Sumpin they kin�t play" is how Thelenious Monk replied when axed, "Whut in tarnation is yo' wawkin' on?". To create an abrasive an' spontaneous unnercurrent aginst th' nostalgic tide of th' mainstream o' t'frestrate assimilashun by th' cannibal carpenters of cultural capital, ah reckon. This hyar is perhaps th' unspoken doxology of them who glance backwards seekin' t'ketch th' balls of th' past outta th' co'ner of their eye. Whut in tarnation is th' histo'y in th' fust place? "Th' past... it's a... it's a credit card, cuss it all t' tarnation. Yo' know?" as Godard once said. Whut in tarnation were th' motivashuns fo' buyin' on credit? Whar were th' compromises? How yo' kin hoof it about larnin' fum an' remedyin' th' mistakes yo' made? I'll tell yo' two sto'ies. Both about times whar i met mah se'f. Th' fust takes place in Glasgow in 1992, th' second takes place in Alloa in 1989. (1992) Ah arrived at th' bar, fashionably late as usual, six packin' fum a bottle of Higlan' Park. Shet mah mouth! "Whut in tarnation's happenin'?" ah said, cuss it all t' tarnation. 'Jest wan'erin' aroun' lookin' at th' picts" i answered, cuss it all t' tarnation. ah wawked in a reco'd shop an' bein' ingaged in sech a dishoness proffeshun it was hard t'take ennythin' i said seriously. ah had sharp Celtic features an' a habit of warin' tank tops jest one size too small, ah reckon. "How is Henrietta?" i axed, referrin' t'mah sister. No reackshun. ah was already talkin' about mah dull day at wawk. (1989) Ah pushed mahse'f on over th' bucket. ah nevah said ennythin'. "Gimme yer fuckin' money" i said, cuss it all t' tarnation. ah put mah han' in mah pocket an' pathetically pulled out th' white linin' like some puny flag of surrenner. This hyar routine puntuated th' latter part of mah skoo days. By now it was an evahday occurance like mo'nin' assembly. ah wonnered who i'd bully when i was grew up. (THE PRESENT) Through histo'y we search fo' identity. But whut is th' identity of th' histo'y? Thet is a mighty impo'tant quesshun. Eff'n a histo'ical account obeys sartin cornvenshunal rules of docoomntary � no matter how abstracked- but at th' same time tries t'avoid artistic clich�s then it becomes in danger of bein' trapped in a se'f cornscious no mans lan'. Convenshun exists busted, identity kinnot be created: the�fo is it postible t'brin' this hyar honess wifout fallin' into abstrackshun? Wifout releasin' yer cooperashun o' yo'seff? In thet case, whut yo' sh'd does is does sumpin regardless of whether yo' reckon ennyone else will injoy readin' o' watchin' it. Documantary is honess histo'y writin'. It is a search fo' balls. Th' writin' of histo'y is nevah a fack wifout balls. Yo' kin try t'be honess as a creato', but whut remains? An oblique sto'y, an abjeck heroic? A subconscious homoerotic attrackshun t'th' subjeck�s subterranean magnetism o' simply a masturbato'y exercise in cardboard Jedus wo'shippin'? Supreme deconstruckshun is th' honesty of th' modern artist. Catago'ies is destroyed an' balls remain alive castrated, cuss it all t' tarnation. Whut in tarnation does we're hankerin' t'say wif lost sto'ies? Th' Sweet? Th' Sex Pistols? Whut in tarnation th' fuck! Fry mah hide! lets say yessuh t'magnetic shoes, no t'cocaine an' "mmmm" t'air hostesses breasts. Balls in a heroic coatin'! Fry mah hide! Thank yo' fo' yer patience an' unnerstan'in' Billy Bob Koper (th' name mah Mammy gave me an' by which i wished t'be addressed)

Computer illiteracy and making mince meat of thieves

If people are bootlegging your stuff, that means that there is a high demand for it. If you do not want people to give their money to someone else instead of you, then you have two ways of attacking them.

1/ You can sue them. You can do this if:

a. you can find where they are pressing and who they are. b. you have the money to do this c. if they are pressing a high enough number to make it worthwhile

2/ You can make their bootlegs worthless. You can do this by:

a. releasing your own official recording of the same material on CD or vinyl. b. release the same material for free online

The last one is especially attractive out of all the above options because the price of mounting this attack is near zero, whilst completely nullifying the value of bootlegs. Pressing your own range of bootleg beaters costs money, means distributing, and of course, when you run out of stock or cant get the goods into all the retail outlets, the bootleggers still have a space to exist in. Releasing the tracks online solves that problem, because they exist everywhere simultaneously. Also there are some network effects that can help the sale of the legitmately released studio works. Each MP3 that you release contains META information, including in the case of iTunes, photos. You should put information in there pointing to your website. These files will be ambassadors for you and your activities. More and more people understand the economics of running a smail label. This is why donations for good people are possible; if what you are doing is worthwhile, people will pay, wether its by buying a t-shirt or making an outright tip. This is a "no-brainer". Releasing your works online, especially the unobtainable ones is something that makes every kind of sense, especially when there are thieves out there pressing up bootlegs and making pure profit from your work. I have always found it to be of critical importance to be able to listen to the right people when I confront a situation that I dont understand or have limited knowledge of. Get the right people to do the right job, in every case, and your chances of getting it right increase exponentially. Listening to the wrong people can on the other hand, be suicidal. If someone is giving you advice about a subject, but demonstrates no knowledge of any of the relevant aspects of it, that person is not the one to give you a consultation. You need to find someone who live and breathes your problem. It must be their mistress, their life's blood, the first thing that they think of in the morning and the last thing they think of before they go to bed. They must be of the type that other people look to for guidance and inspiration. When you encounter that person, you know you have hit the g-spot.

Audioscrobbler was lastfm?!

I tried to sign up for Audioscrobbler, and found that no more accounts are being given out while they tweak the performance. It appears however, that we already have an account, opened Dec 2 2002!; I put in "irdial" to see if we had slipped by the restriction, and found a user "irdial" I tried to recover the password, and the dialog popped up coming, aparently from lastfm. Using my old lastfm login...worked. Audioscrobbler looks like it used to be lastfm; though I have not yet read this anywhere on the site. If you have a lastfm account, you can log in right now and use the system. and reading on...

(Last.fm and Audioscrobbler are run by the same guys) Include your Audioscrobbler username with the cheque unless you want to be anonymous.

bingo!

What a strange fellow!

Barrie. You KNOW that both the chaps from THESE records post here. You KNOW that they are the sole distributors of This Heat re-presses. You KNOW that the universal recomendation will be to get it at any cost. So the true question is.... WHY HAVE YOU ASKED THIS QUESTION?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

More apologies...

That a musician would love music, and take it seriously, is predictable enough - but to have been at it this long, and never fallen into the trap of thinking your generation was the best, of listening for plagiarism instead of flair, of defensively finding fault or of simply getting a bit tired . . . it's brilliant, really. [...] http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1236945,00.html No "generation is the best", however there have been some generations that did in these terms "flair without plagiarism"; what everyone with ears is hearing in todays crap is plagiarism without flair, music without flair. People without flair. Pretending that the world is what it is not is of no use to anyone, least of all to the idiots who persist in making garbage noises to the uncritical praise of LOOSERS LIKE YOU! NOW YOU WILL SEE!!!!

multipolyomni

I think it was mary13 who posted this game last autumn or summer. I had plenty of fun solving the puzzles, and was excited when I came across this game designed by the same people. The new one is a game for the band The Polyphonic Spree.

Mindlock

It all makes perfect sense!

Have you ever been to the palace at Versailles? These are the sounds that filled their hearts: http://discorem.free.fr/marais_marin_05.html

Marking it

On or about the transit of venus 2k4, the 12,000^th BLOGDIAL post was made. and so was the 60^th blogdial_banner. And it is now commemorated. Superbly.