Andy Baio pointed out late last year that disclaimers of intent to infringe others’ copyrights and claims of fair use frequently appear in the descriptions of videos on YouTube. He noted 489,000 and 664,000 results for the queries "no copyright" and "copyright" "section 107". Those numbers may have grown significantly in the last nearly 3 months, but should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Yesterday for me, “no copyright” obtained 906,000, while today YouTube has said both 972,000 and 3,850,000 to the same query. For “copyright” “section 107″, yesterday 771,000, today 418,000. I don’t know how many videos were on YouTube 3 months ago, but yesterday an empty query claimed 567,000,000; today I’ve seen 537,000,000 and 550,000,000 — maybe on the order of 1% of videos have some sort of copyright disclaimer. But there are variations that might not be picked up by the queries Baio used, including for example two of the descriptions I posted a few days ago.

Although they’re probably completely useless in preventing automated takedowns and in court (though it’s not entirely clear they ought be useless in either case), as expression they’re at the very least interesting, and perhaps more. Though they can be seen as “voodoo charms”, so can the ubiquitous “all rights reserved”, and even meaningful public copyright licenses can be seen as such to the extent they are misunderstood or totemic. My main objection to the disclaimers Baio brought attention to is that they’re clutter to the extent they crowd out writing or reading other information about works; and just about anything else is more useful, from provenance to expressions of appreciation, eg “In my opinion, one of the greatest songs of the ’80s.”

But my first reaction to such disclaimers is the wish that they would be more expressive, even substantial. Regarding the latter, in many cases the uploader has added something to or rearranged the work in question — e.g., where the work is a song, the addition of images, or the performance of a cover. How often does the uploader grant permissions to use whatever expression they’ve added? (I don’t know; one aggregate tool for exploring such might be the addition of &creativecommons=1 to the aforementioned queries, which will limit results to those marked as CC-BY.) One fairly well known case of something like this is Girl Talk’s All Day:

All Day by Girl Talk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. The CC license does not interfere with the rights you have under the fair use doctrine, which gives you permission to make certain uses of the work even for commercial purposes. Also, the CC license does not grant rights to non-transformative use of the source material Girl Talk used to make the album.

Too bad with the NonCommercial condition, and I really don’t like Girl Talk’s music (for something kind of similar that I prefer aesthetically and in terms of permissions granted, check out xmarx), but otherwise that’s a great statement.

Over the past few months someone or some people have made me aware of another example, one that replaces disclaimers with demands. You can see some of this on my English Wikipedia user talk page (start at “Common IP” — unfortunately webcitation.org doesn’t pass through internal links, so you’ll have to scroll down). It may appear that my correspondent is religious and communicating poorly through automated translation between Russian and English, but there’s a kernel of something interesting there. If I understand correctly, they think that without listening to the Beatles, one cannot develop morally (that comes from elsewhere, not on my talk page) and that per a variety of United Nations declarations concerning human rights and especially cultural diversity, anyone has the legal right and moral duty to share Beatles material. As far as I know they started this campaign at beatles1.ru and moved on to other sites, including Wikipedia. It is pretty clear that they’re not looking for links to beatles1.ru or some other site they control — I think they’re sincerely promoting something they believe in, not a money-making scam.

The flaws in their campaign are legion, not least of which is that there could hardly be a worse body of work than that of the Beatles around which to plead for rights to share in the name of cultural diversity. As the Beatles are one of if not the most popular acts ever, the most obvious conclusion is that more Beatles exposure must lower global cultural diversity. On the related issue of cultural preservation, super-famous material like that of the Beatles is going to survive for a long time in spite of copyright restrictions, even vigorously enforced (see James Joyce).

As to their persistent requests for some kind of permission from me to proceed with their campaign, I say two things:

1. As far as the copyright regime is concerned, the permissions I have to grant to you are nil.
2. As far as demands made in the name of human rights, no human requires permission from any other to pursue those. Godspeed to you, or perhaps I should say, Beatlespeed!

I want to thank my correspondent for causing me to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and subsequent documents. The way they address “intellectual property”, to the extent that they do, is more curious than I would’ve thought. I leave that to a future post.

p.s. My favorite Beatles.

Uploaded by bleach79 on May 27, 2006 / 587,239 views

the year punk broke(1991)

Uploaded by Alguhh on Jul 24, 2010 / 8,573 views

i realized this song wasn’t on youtube, so i got pissed off and downloaded the whole album, and well, here it is.
all copyright rights and all that stuff goes to Rapeman and mr Steve Albini.

Uploaded by quarknimble on Sep 8, 2008 / 13,285 views

from the Budd EP

displayed under FAIR USE doctrine, pursuant to 17 USC S.107: “…the fair use of a copyrighted work…for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.” THANKS AND CREDITS to Sir Master Steve Albini and Rapeman

Uploaded by albecatoblepaII on Jan 3, 2012 / 81 views

From the album “Customs” (1989). In my opinion, one of the greatest songs of the ’80s.

p.s. I still wish I could recall who sang “Satan isn’t boring, he’s very talkative … Satan doesn’t need Sonic Youth around anyhow.”

Update 20120512: I was thinking of “Satan’s Buddies” by Couch Flambeau:

Uploaded by StripperTweets on Mar 7, 2010 / 595 views

If you don’t feel like seeing a play in San Francisco, I recommend Jacob Appelbaum’s talk on surveillance, the security state, and free software at linux.conf.au 2012. It contains everything important Little Brother does and more, and isn’t fiction:

I also just watched Karen Sandler’s LCA talk, which I can’t recommend highly enough. It is more expansive than a short talk she gave last year at OSCON based on her paper Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices.

I frequently complain that free/libre/open software and nearby aren’t taken seriously as being important to a free and otherwise good society and that advocates have completely failed to demonstrate this importance. Well, much more is needed, but the above talks give me hope, and getting Appelbaum and Sandler in front of as many people as possible would be great progress.

My employer’s office moved from San Francisco to Mountain View in April, contributing to a number of people leaving or transitioning out, which has been a bummer. I’ve been working exclusively from home since May. Still, there have been a number of good developments, which I won’t attempt to catalog here. My favorites include agreement with the Free Software Foundation regarding use of CC0 for public domain software, small improvements in the CC legal user interface, the return and great work of a previous colleague, retirement of two substandard licenses, research, and a global summit/launch of a process toward version 4.0 of the CC licenses, which I hope over the next year prove at least a little bit visionary, long-standing, and have some consideration for how they can make the world a better place.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent more time thinking about social science-y stuff in 2011 than I have in at least several years. I’ll probably have plenty to say regarding this on a range of topics next year, but for now I’ll state one narrow “professionally-related” conclusion: free/libre/open software/culture/etc advocates (me included) have done a wholly inadequate job of characterizing why our preferences matter, both to the general public and to specialists in every social science.

Apart from silly peeves, two moderate ideas unrelated to free/libre/open stuff that I first wrote about in 2011 and I expect I’ll continue to push for years to come: increasing the minimum age and education requirement for soldiers and tearing down highway 980.

I haven’t done much programming in several years, and not full time in about a decade. This has been making me feel like my brain is rotting, and contributes to my lack of prototyping various services that I want to exist. Though I’d been fiddling (that may be generous) with Scala for a couple years, I was never really super excited about tying myself to the JVM. I know and deeply respect lots of people who doing great things with Python, and I’ve occasionally used it for scripts over the past several years because of that, but it leaves me totally non-enthused. I’ve done enough programming in languages that are uglier but more or less the same, time for something new. For a couple months I’ve been learning Haskell and doing some prototyping using the Yesod web framework (apparently I had heard of Haskell in 2005 but I didn’t look at it closely until last year). I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like, mostly due to unrelated distractions. The biggest substantive hurdle has not been Haskell (and the concepts it stands for), but a lack of Yesod examples and documentation. This seems to be a common complaint. Yesod is rapidly moving to a 1.0 release, documentation is prioritized, and I expect to be really productive with it over the coming year. Thanks to the people who make Yesod and those who have been making Haskell for two decades.

This year I appreciated three music projects that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, much to my detriment: DNA, Moondog, and especially Harry Partch. I also listened a lot again to one of my favorite bands I discovered in college, Violence and the Sacred, which amazingly has released some of its catalog under the CC BY-SA license. Check them out!

Finally, in 2011 I had the pleasure of getting to know just a little bit some people working to make my neighborhood a better place, attending a conference with my sister, seeing one of my brothers start a new job and the other a new gallery, and with my wife of continuing to grow up (in that respect, the “better half” cliche definitely applies). Now for this world to end!

Last Sunday I appeared (mp4 download) on a tech interview program called Press: Here. It went ok. Most of the questions were softball and somewhat repetitive. Lots more could have been said about any of them, but I think I did a pretty good job of hitting a major point on each and not meandering. However, one thing I said (emphasized below) sounds like pure bs:

this has been done in the open source software world for a couple decades now and now that people are more concerned about the content layer that’s really part of the infrastructure having a way to clear those permissions without the lawyer-to-lawyer conversation happen every single time is necessary

BobChao / CC BY-SA

I could’ve omitted the bolded words above and retained the respect of any viewer with a brain. What the heck did I mean? I was referring to an argument, primarily made by Joi Ito over the last year or so, using a stylized version of the layers of a protocol stack. David Weinberger’s live-blogging of Ito provides a good summary:

Way back when, it was difficult to connect computers. Then we got Ethernet, then TCP/IP, and then HTTP (the Web). These new layers allow participation without permission. The cost of sending information and the cost of innovation have gone down (because the cost of failure has gone down). Now we’re getting another layer: Creative Commons. “By standardizing and simplifying the legal layer … I think we will lower the costs and create another explosion of innovation.”

Protocol geeks may object, but I think it’s a fairly compelling argument, at least for explaining why what Creative Commons does is “big”. The problems of not having a top layer (I called it “content”, the slide photographed above says “knowledge” — what it calls “content” is usually called “application”, and the note above says “legal”, referring to one required mechanism for opening up permissions around content, knowledge, or whatever one wishs to call it) in which a commons can be taken for granted (ie like infrastructure) is evident, for example in the failure by lawsuit of most interesting online music services, or the inaccessibility of much of the scientific literature to most humans and machines (eg for data mining), as are powerful hints as to what is possible where it exists, for example the vast ecology enabled by Wikipedia’s openness such as DBpedia.

I didn’t make that argument on-screen. Probably a good thing, given the previous paragraph’s tortured language. I shall practice. Critique welcome.

…

Press: Here is broadcast from its SF bay area home station (NBC) and I’ve heard is syndicated to many other stations. However, its website says nothing about how to view the program on TV, even on its home station. I even had a hard time finding any TV schedule on the NBC Bay Area website — a tiny link in the footer takes one to subpages for the station with lame schedule information syndicated from TV Guide. I found this near total disconnect between TV and the web a very odd, but then again, I don’t really care where the weird segment of the population that watches TV obtains schedule information. Press: Here ought to release its programs under a liberal CC license as soon as the show airs. Its own website gets very little traffic, many of the interviews would be relevant for uploading to Wikimedia Commons, and the ones that got used in Wikipedia would drive significant traffic back to the program website.

It was fun to hear of her interactions with Andy Kaufman (as his “straight woman”), JFK (received advice and flowers when she ran for class president during his temporary dictator campaign), and Herman Melville (via his bible, lent from a friend who bought it at auction), among others.

There was of course lots of discussion about music and technology, thankfully 100% actually about music and technology, not the mislabeled and tired conversation that goes by the same name (Anderson did make a passing reference to the imploding music recording industry, but only to say that it is great that the focus has shifted back to live music — on that note Anderson said she likes seeing noise and improv music, which means she has great taste — it’s always disappointing to learn that a fine artist is into dreck, and heartening to learn the opposite).

When asked to predict what music would be like in 2021 (I think the significance of the date was that she had supposedly last been “here” 12 years ago, which sounds really unlikely if “here” meant San Francisco — I saw her twice around then, at SFMOMA and the Other Minds festival, but surely she has been back since), given technology changes, Anderson mentioned “Hi Fi” and sound museums, both of which seemed really curious because they seemed like throwbacks and also not mass market. Of course why should they be? Effectively she meant the same thing by both — taking advantage of technology and space to do much more with sound than is possible with mp3s and earbuds (or an audiophile stereo system for that matter). As an example, she’s currently working on a “sound forest” installation in Basel.

Despite being known as a multimedia artist, Anderson is clearly not enamored with technology per se. On the other hand, the solution is more technology — she is sick of being a “protools serf” (referring to the program’s workings, not its non-freedom), so she’s supposedly working with programmers on something simpler, and looks forward to something the size of a mobile device replacing all of her performance gear.

One question concerned why NYC had an especially fertile arts scene in the 1970s (her bio in the program mentioned that she wrote an article for Britannica on NYC culture — how quaint) — she said that it was supported by a culture that celebrated poverty (or rather prioritized making art or just about anything else over career) coming out of the 1960s. Doesn’t explain why NYC, but curious nonetheless. What if freegans were as plentiful today as hippies were back then?

Mike Masnick posted video of a pretty good lecture on successful “music” business models based on the success of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV and other efforts. Earlier today I praised the lecture on the Creative Commons blog.

At the end of the video Masnick says that copyright isn’t even necessary for the model he describes (capture above), and that hearing this upsets people.

But this begs the question of whether any “business model” is necessary for music at all.

My other complaint (and I’m almost as guilty as anyone) is a near total failure to look at obvious examples slightly outside the contemporary first world milieu (i.e., the past, future, and much of the present world). This is a general unrelenting complaint, not directed at Masnick’s 15 minutes in front of an industry conference!

I will be more convinced when I see an actual increase in the number of quality musicians who don’t have to supplement their art with a job delivering pizza.

Commenter Chris O. delivers the right correction:

The measure of success is not how many people are delivering pizza, but if the music listener is getting good music.

So this is one of the correct metrics, and there’s plenty of reason to think there’s zero problem with supply. Commenter Nathan provides the obvious reason:

Because the reality is, if there are enough people who fit that description, and if even 1 out of 1000, or 1 out of 10000 makes stuff that is at least interesting – and if there are appropriate communities for sorting and rating the stuff – then there really isn’t a natural market for buying recordings of many kinds of music. Right? This is the reality of the market, the thing that blogs have made perfectly clear – there are a lot more people talented and skilled at certain tasks than your instincts would tell you, and it’s always a bad idea to try to make lots of money in a space where people love what they do and are willing to work for nearly nothing

Read subsequent comments for more in that vein.

A little less obviously, see Tom W. Bell’s Outgrowing Copyright: The Effect of Market Size on Copyright Policy.

Somewhat oddly (to me), Keith Kahn-Harris, a “sociologist and the convener of New Jewish Thought” makes a whole lot more sense, and takes the argument further, writing In praise of part-time musicians in the Guardian:

Yet my argument is not that participation in capitalist society compromises musical excellence, but that participation in capitalist society can support musical excellence provided that musicians earn a living away from music. Yes, I am writing in praise of the “day job”.

Via Bodó Balázs.

Regarding the title of this post, no I am not optimistic, regardless of policy.

After mercifully brief attempted introductions (the genre discovery story above is the first of seven) to the book, Browne spends about 390 pages relating the nuts and bolts of Sonic Youth’s prehistory and history through about 2006. If you aren’t a big Sonic Youth fan, just skim the group’s Wikipedia article instead of reading this book.

Sonic Youth was my last singular favorite band. I’ve probably listened to their music for thousands of hours, mostly during 1988-1998 (and mostly their music released from 1982-1995). I still try to see them when I can, most recently performing all of Daydream Nation live in Berkeley (a review on what looks like a nice blog) and Thurston Moore’s solo rock project at Amoeba Records and Great American Music Hall, all in 2007, and by far the best, Kim Gordon with Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Trevor Dunn, and Yoshimi at Montalvo Arts last year. So that’s why I stuck with the book.

I learned a few things from the book — I knew the names and sequence of all of the group’s drummers, but didn’t realize how chaotic that sequencing was; I didn’t realize that Moore played with Glenn Branca’s ensembles after Sonic Youth started, not before; nor that Lee Ranaldo came close to leaving the group at one point. I already knew that some members of the group have a pop culture fascination, though it is always sad to see that confirmed in anyone.

Browne writes a fair amount about the band’s business, the success of which is pretty marginal, with one distantly related exception — Gordon received close to $500,000 for her half of X-Girl, a fashion company she co-founded that became popular in Asia (page 319). Sonic Youth’s first three major label albums (released in 1990, 1992, and 1994) first year sales were under 200k, nearly 300k, and nearly 250k respectively (pages 259 and 277). Subsequent (and previous) albums all sold under 100k copies, though I’d have to guess Daydream Nation (1988) has racked up considerably more than that over the past 20 years given its classic status.

I’ll guesstimate that the band has sold 2 million albums over its 26 year history. Given the approximation that artists make $1.60 on each album, Sonic Youth has made only $3.2 million on album sales, or about $120k/year, or $30k/year/band member — in New York City for almost their entire history.

Unsurprisingly live shows have remained their leading source of income (page 386), and through most of their artistically most interesting period (the beginning through 1988, in my opinion) they worked day jobs (pages 151 and 179).

Browne mentions many times the band’s frugality and nearly complete lack of stereotypical rock and roll lifestyles. Presumably this has been important in keeping them together for so long and keeping them creative — although I said above that I consider their early work their most interesting, their subsequent work as a band is still very good, and many of their individual projects continue to be amazing.

Mostly because I love Sonic Youth, I’ve long daydreamed about them doing something with Creative Commons. In 2005 Moore published a column in WIRED that concluded with this:

Once again, we’re being told that home taping (in the form of ripping and burning) is killing music. But it’s not: It simply exists as a nod to the true love and ego involved in sharing music with friends and lovers. Trying to control music sharing – by shutting down P2P sites or MP3 blogs or BitTorrent or whatever other technology comes along – is like trying to control an affair of the heart. Nothing will stop it.

It’s great to see someone who appears to be well respected in the recorded music industry providing such a radical and rational (in today’s context) proposal, but the key insight has nothing to do with the specifics of his proposal. Dubber writes (emphasis added):

Current blanket copyright terms ‘protect’ (I use that term in the sense of ‘racket’) copyright owners so that they can continue to be paid over and over again for work they did years ago. It prevents anyone else from making money out of works that have been shelved.

It does not, in any real sense, ‘incentivise creativity’.

So obvious, so completely ignored by policy.

Via Techdirt.