Library Adds Major Media Collection - The Library Today (Library of Congress)

Library Adds Major Media Collection - The Library Today (Library of Congress)
Contact for Tony Schwartz collection at Library of Congress

Using the Recorded Sound Reference Centre

American Folklife Centre

Tony Schwartz profile by The Kitchen Sisters

Aired June 27, 2008 on WNYC's On the Media

The Listening Life
June 27, 2008

In his 84 years Tony Schwartz produced over 30,000 recordings, thousands of groundbreaking political ads, media theory books and Broadway sound design, invented the portable recorder, delivered hundreds of lectures and had full careers as an ad executive and a pioneering folklorist. And he did it all without leaving his zip code. Schwartz died in June and we offer a piece from the Kitchen Sisters, looking back at his life spent listening. (Photo by (fredseibert/flickr)

Shuffling Roles: The challenge of music culture to the music industry

Insight Discussion about Downloading Music June 3, 2008

Insight's roundtable discussion on the effect of new technologies on the music industry fails to ask the bigger question of the effects of new technologies on music cultures. The banter stays pretty close to the point of sale until Jordan Front-Hodson starts talking about his experience.

JENNY BROCKIE: Jordan, what would make you pay?

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: First of all, I would just like to say that iTunes and another thing I use called beatport, which is you pay for the money, but the music I listen to is there's not a lot of it on iTunes so I go to beatport, but it's also annoying to pay 'cause you have to use a credit card and for under-18s, I think you can't get a credit card. You have to call up your parents because they have a credit card and stuff so it's incredibly annoying to call up your parents if you can't get on to them, so that's usually why I go.

JENNY BROCKIE: So Clive, Jordan's your son so it's your credit card.

CLIVE FROST-HODSON, SHOCK MUSIC PUBLISHING: "Yeah, I'm sorry, I'll call you back."

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: Yeah, but that's another thing. It's really annoying because it's dependent on your parents, kind of thing because...

JENNY BROCKIE: So it's made too hard for you, is what you're saying?

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: Yeah, so yeah, that's basically and the reason why...

JENNY BROCKIE: But what will you pay for? What sort of things - outside the actual tracks - I mean do you spend money on music? Do you go to gigs? Do you buy merchandise?

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: Um, yeah, I do, this is the hoodie that I have now is of hard style, that's what I listen to, it's kind of, it's a style of music and it's a shuffling jumper which is a dance style, so yeah.

JENNY BROCKIE: And how much did that cost, just out of interest?

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: $120.


JENNY BROCKIE: OK, so some of that money's going somewhere.

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: Yeah, and I also...

JENNY BROCKIE: The Audreys are getting a really good idea going here I think.

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: And also there's other things, because there's things for shuffling - there's like suspenders and fat pants which are also kind of thing.

JENNY BROCKIE: And have you bought all that?

JORDAN FROST-HODSON: So, I've got suspenders but I don't have fat pants because they cost US$200.

JENNY BROCKIE: So it might not just be about the music?

CLIVE FROST-HODSON: Can I just say I think one of the biggest problems for the record industry is the fact that there is a complete shift from albums to single tracks and what you have is an industry that cannot survive on single track alone. Not everyone's going to like an album, but because the shift has happened where a particular track is what is appealing to that downloader, they will download that track and they really - unless they're introduced by word of mouth - and that's exactly what the Internet is about - the word of mouth - then what we're going to have is this single business happening the whole time. The record industry cannot survive on selling singles. That's the big problem.

KEVIN BERMEISTER: I think the Jordan just mentioned a very, very important point here which is often overlooked and that's where the content industries really need the help of the ISPs because billing models - for example, credit card, which is a very big barrier to entry when you're buying a 99-cent track, have to be accommodated more frequently and ISPs have the ideal position to essentially bill either subscription on a monthly basis to their existing customers, to a household, or even on a per-track model through the bill-to-ISP model, that's something that has to be embraced and it's a real gating effect on the Internet right now.

Kevin Bermeister misses the point when he speaks of the barrier of entry being a credit card (although Jordon's desire for privacy is notable and worthy of thought.)

What's really interesting about Jordan's comments is first, that he introduces the idea that the major labels aren't of much interest to him. Beatport is a specialist download service that sells "MP3, MP4 and WAV formats on a pay per download basis from an impressive library of the world's leading independent labels" and as a business they target DJS--people who are not only going to listen, they're going to use the music they download.

Secondly, he introduces the idea that music producers don't entirely dominate the music culture he participates in. He talks about how specific articles of clothing are relevant to his world--the music culture he considers himself apart of isn't only about the music. That no one saw this as relevant, except to bring up the often trundled out idea that recording artists can make money off of t-shirt sales and performance, is missing the big picture issue of how participation by both market and non-market actors in music cultures is changing the nature of the game. It's not only that the playing field has been enlarged and you have to compete with more people and more product, its also that the playing field has been radically altered. What they see as a market, Jordan sees as a culture.

The problem with the way this discussion was framed as how should industry respond is that it misses the relationship of the music industries to grassroots music cultures. It only sees artists and artistry as people who are attempting with various degrees of success and failure to earn a living off the music they make. But one of the effects of digital technologies has been that more people are making music and more people are able to interact with people in small communities of interest. So when one recording artists says she spent $50000 making her record, the bedroom producer doesn't care because people can and are making music with much much less (and often with far more interesting results.)

The Flying Lizards - articles - Option, 1996

The Flying Lizards - articles - Option, 1996:


"'More and more, I begin to think that music in this century is becoming a music about occasion, about people coming together, about space, about human activity,' he continues. 'I don't see records as being so relevant to that. The rave movement in Britain is a kind of interesting subversion of the record industry in a way that punk never succeeded.'"
--David Cunningham of the Flying Lizards speaking to Neil Strauss in 1996

The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs - NYTimes.com

The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs - NYTimes.com

June 16, 2008
The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs
By SAUL HANSELL

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

The quick about-face came, he said, because a number of well-known bloggers started criticizing its policy, claiming it would undercut the active discussion of the news that rages on sites, big and small, across the Internet.

The Drudge Retort was initially started as a left-leaning parody of the much larger Drudge Report, run by the conservative muckraker Matt Drudge. In recent years, the Drudge Retort has become more of a social news site, similar to sites like Digg, in which members post links to news articles for others to comment on.

But Rogers Cadenhead, the owner of the Drudge Retort and several other Web sites, said the issue goes far beyond one site. “There are millions of people sharing links to news articles on blogs, message boards and sites like Digg. If The A.P. has concerns that go all the way down to one or two sentences of quoting, they need to tell people what they think is legal and where the boundaries are.”

On Friday, The A.P. issued a statement defending its action, saying it was going to challenge blog postings containing excerpts of A.P. articles “when we feel the use is more reproduction than reference, or when others are encouraged to cut and paste.” An A.P. spokesman declined Friday to further explain the association’s position.

After that, however, the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard.

“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy said the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association, a trade group, and others. He said he hopes that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.

Still, Mr. Kennedy said that the organization has not withdrawn its request that Drudge Retort remove the seven items. And he said that he still believes that it is more appropriate for blogs to use short summaries of A.P. articles rather than direct quotations, even short ones.

“Cutting and pasting a lot of content into a blog is not what we want to see,” he said. “It is more consistent with the spirit of the Internet to link to content so people can read the whole thing in context.”

Even if The A.P. sets standards, bloggers could choose to use more content than its standards permit, and then The A.P. would have to decide whether to take legal action against them. One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.

“The principal question is whether the excerpt is a substitute for the story, or some established adaptation of the story,” said Timothy Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School. Mr. Wu said that the case is not clear-cut, but he believes that The A.P. is likely to lose a court case to assert a claim on that issue.

“It’s hard to see how the Drudge Retort ‘first few lines’ is a substitute for the story,” Mr. Wu said.

Mr. Kennedy argued, however, that The Associated Press believes that in some cases, the essence of an article can be encapsulated in very few words.

“As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.

But he also said that the association hopes that it will not have to test this theory in court.

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Anna Davis & Jason Gee | MIC Toi Rerehiko

Anna Davis & Jason Gee | MIC Toi Rerehiko


Anna Davis and Jason Gee, Bioheads (2005-2008)



Data is meaningless. Ones and zeros judge nothing. Puppets need masters. But still, when we encounter Anna Davis and Jason Gee’s Bioheads, digitally-animated ventriloquist dolls that sing pop songs and spit out psychobabble, we’re not exactly sure whose lips are moving.

Davis and Gee download the digital detritus of contemporary culture—snapshots of dusty ventriloquist dolls sold on eBay, self-help tomes hawked at Amazon.com, celebrity photographs with viral tendencies, and some of the catchy little numbers that populate peer-to-peer networks—and remix and reanimate the random data (with the help of easy-to-use animation software) in an absurdist attempt to make sense of it all.

Naturally the puppets get all of the attention. When George Bush and Osama Bin Laden sing a duet of Snap’s “I’ve got the Power” or Stalin, Hitler and Mao get together for a rousing rendition of “I Get Around” by The Beach Boys in Bioheads Karaoke, it’s a performance not to be missed. More than just a good gag or a clever juxtaposition, however, Bioheads pack a satirical punch because they are composite reflections of what really exists. The seeming humanity of Bioheads is all borrowed: we’re the ghost in the machine.

In Biohead Actualized, Davis and Gee show us what “greedy little dolls” (1) we’ve become. This new video installation holds a mirror up to the contemporary quest for self-improvement and perfection, and gives life to a post-modern Prometheus, a creature who speaks only the language of self-help, spewing distrustful, selfish and even silly advice at unsuspecting passersby. But the Biohead isn’t making any of it up—Everything he utters is lifted directly from a self-help audio book. The Biohead is the kind of personality that develops when fed a steady diet of actualization mantras —no wonder his psyche seems so sinister. He has been reprogrammed.

But as creepy as Bioheads may be, there is also a playfulness that stems from both the work’s humour as well as the empowerment afforded by sample-based digital culture. One can make George Bush bark like a dog if one wants to. The digital environment makes use a more powerful critical tool than production and turns consumption on its head. By agitating the media environment Gee and Davis exercise powerful artistic agency in the face of media hyper-saturation and proliferation. They’re pulling all the strings now.

While Davis and Gee may coax the Bioheads to come out and play, they also speak about the strange sense of autonomy the Bioheads exert, explaining that the digital dolls seem to develop personality partly on their own. The artists tease out subtle facial expressions and meaningful gestures from what’s already there, creating a life-like being from a single moment once captured in a photograph. That moment now has a life of its own and there is a palpable glee in watching as the image runs away from its past and into any number of digital futures.

Text by Margie Borschke

(1) From a conversation with Anna Davis & Jason Gee on March 8, 2008.




Photos by Alex Davies

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas Carr

The Atlantic Online | July/August 2008 | Is Google Making Us Stupid? | Nicholas Carr

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

Are re-edits the real revenge of disco? | Music | Guardian Unlimited

Are re-edits the real revenge of disco? | Music | Guardian Unlimited: "Ron Hardy was spinning in Chicago's proto-house club The Music Box than anything we've heard in house music clubs this past decade. Maybe disco didn't require retribution after all, perhaps it just needed time?

...


"Over the last six months it's become the main genre we sell," says Simon Rigg, manager of London dance music specialist Phonica Records, who guesses that up to 40% of his current vinyl stock comprises reworked versions of older music. The same tale comes from Alec Greenhough, who runs distributor Toko and All Ears Ltd.

"A lot less imagination seems to go into new dance music these days," says Danny Webb, dance music purchaser at Manchester's Piccadilly Records, where re-edits account for a similar percentage of dance vinyl sales. "I think DJs would rather spend their money on older records that may have been re-edited as these have, [and] in many cases been tried and tested on dancefloors by DJs over many years.""

The cultural cachet of the fake bag

It wasn't so long ago that the fashion editors at high-fashion titles were letting readers in on a little secret: the cool kids were either picking up "fake" bags for $20 on Canal Street or putting their name on lists for meticulously handmade it-bags. Both fashions were decidedly about money. The latter was a case of conspicuous consumption made palatable for upper middle class values by invoking the language of longevity and anti-fashion: it was an 'investment piece' and the money spent was worth it because it was a classic and would never go out of style. The 'fake' bags, on the other hand, were of-the-moment precisely because they screamed out that the moment would pass. They acknowledged the speed of trends and the need to move on once the masses got there. So too they can be seen as a case of classic slumming it (fake bags were no where near as cool if you weren't wearing Balancegia pants.) Their status as fashionable also stemmed from the young fashion assistants, models and downtown girls who carried them, the young things whose approval the fashion industry so desperately needs and whose creativity they so mercilessly borrow from and co-opt. So the Canal St bag's popularity was also a nod to the fact that the fashion industry's young minions and inspirations were not paid nearly enough to enjoy the lifestyles they were involved in creating. It was ironically aspirational in the urban context (actual aspiration being reserved for people in the suburbs.)

If ever there was a designer who was able to play with the dialectic of fashion and all of the social commentary inherent in it, it is Marc Jacobs.

In 2000 Jacobs revived the career of Stephen Sprouse, a designer who made his name in the 80s and was known for a pop punk aesthetic. Sprouse's Louis Vuitton bag (or is it Louis Vuitton's Sprouse?) was a classic Vuitton shape, covered in Sprouse's graffiti. Sprouse turned the label's ubiquitous logo into a tag and by doing so gave the bag multiple meanings and spoke to different groups of people in different ways. Fashion commentators will often note that Sprouse gave the label street-cred but the limited availability of the $700 bag also made Canal street knock off the real prize. If you're going to thumb your nose at the meaning and meaninglessness of a luxury logo, why not do it properly?

Today, the fashion industry is on the warpath against "fake" bags and the same magazines who admitted that 'fake' bags could have real cultural cachet, regularly run features that claim counterfeit luxury labels are responsible for everything from terrorism and drug trafficking to child-labour in China.



So while the fashion press is reporting that the simultaneous New York launch of © MURAKAMI at the Brooklyn Museum
and 'Monogramouflage' his latest collaboration with Vuitton is set to highlight the 'problem' of counterfeits, it's just as easy to see other not-so-corporate narratives at work. Coinciding with the launch, Vuitton has set up 10 fake street vendors outside the museum to sell fake fakes, that is 'real' Vuittons that cost real money. Authenticity is the luxury markets new buzzword and apparently there is nothing more authentic than not having enough money to buy an overpriced limited-edition bag that was made using the mechanisms of mass production. So the upper east side socialites who trudged their way to Brooklyn are rewarded with some good old fashioned slumming it (so 'fun') and Vuitton gets to have its cake and eat it too, co-opting reality for it's own purposes.

The Pirates Can't Be Stopped in Portfolio

Daniel Roth's excellent piece "The Pirates Can't be Stopped" in Portfolio. He also discussed the story on NPR's On the Radio (full transcript.

Yet it has been difficult to quantify the damage supposedly wreaked by downloading. In mid-2007, economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee, from Harvard, and Koleman Strumpf, from the University of Kansas, published the results of their study analyzing the effect of file sharing on retail music sales in the U.S. They found no correlation between the two. "While downloads occur on a vast scale," they wrote, "most users are likely individuals who in the absence of file sharing would not have bought the music they downloaded." Another study published around the same time, however, found there was, in fact, a positive impact on retail sales, at least in Canada: University of London researchers Birgitte Andersen and Marion Frenz reported that the more people downloaded songs from P2P networks, the more CDs they bought [READ FULL REPORT]. "Roughly half of all P2P tracks were downloaded because individuals wanted to hear songs before buying them or because they wanted to avoid purchasing the whole bundle of songs on the associated CDs, and roughly one-quarter were downloaded because they were not available for purchase."

Samizdat, Magnitizdat and how individuals overcame state censorship with private copies

A Book review from the New York Times, March 24, 1985

NEXT, MAGNITIZDAT

By JERI LABER; JERI LABER IS THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF HELSINKI WATCH.
Published: March 24, 1985

BEHIND THE LINES

The Private War Against Soviet Censorship. By Donald R. Shanor. 179 pp. New York: St. Martin's Press. $13.95.

FACED with a revolution in technology that is rapidly transforming the industrialized world, the leaders of the Soviet Union are in a quandary. If they openly embrace the new technology, the horizons of Soviet citizens may expand far beyond the limits set by official censorship. But if they close their doors to new discoveries, they may soon lose their place among the advanced nations of the world. Soviet rulers, early on, sacrificed the freedom of their people at the altar of industrial progress; now they are afraid to loosen the bonds, even at the expense of scientific advancement.

This fascinating dilemma is an underlying theme in Donald R. Shanor's ''Behind the Lines: The Private War Against Soviet Censorship.'' Using interviews with more than 150 present and former Soviet citizens, Mr. Shanor, a professor of journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, investigates the ways in which censorship is circumvented in Russia. He also explains how Soviet public opinion is expressed and examines the programming of United States radio stations broadcasting to the Soviet Union. But it is his description of the resourcefulness of ''the underground telegraph'' that is most intriguing.

Mr. Shanor points out that the samizdat literature of the dissidents is but a small part of an underground information network that probably includes the vast majority of Soviet citizens - people who are not dissidents but simply want to know the truth about what is going on around them. They carefully read between the lines of the official press and eagerly circulate news gleaned from relatives abroad. They listen regularly to foreign radio broadcasts and to audio and video cassettes smuggled from the West. Music, politics, drama - every subject is of interest. For those living under Soviet rule, information is the coin of the realm.

Recent reports indicate that the Soviet Union is now negotiating to buy large numbers of Western-made personal computers, but it is not clear how such computers will be used. The Russians have as yet no organized program to develop computer literacy among the young. They seem more concerned with maintaining their centralized control over communications. And so vast sums of money are spent on technology used to jam Western broadcasts. Copying machines are kept under lock and key, the production of video recorders has been halted, and direct telephone dialing abroad came to an end soon after the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

Despite these controls, audio tape recorders have become a staple in Russian homes, and there are now more than 168 million radios and 100 million television sets out of a populaton (in 1980) of about 267 million. While Soviet censors busy themselves tracking down samizdat authors by the typeface on their typewriters, ordinary citizens are planning picnics out of town, beyond the range of the jammers, where they tape-record Western broadcasts on shortwave radios that they have rewired themselves. Finnish television programs are picked up in Estonia, ''the unofficial video recording center of the U.S.S.R.,'' where they are recorded on video cassettes and then distributed throughout the country, sometimes with Russian-language voice-overs. Magnitizdat (tape publishing) is taking its place alongside samizdat .

The future holds new problems for Soviet censors, as foreign companies compete to develop smaller, cheaper and more efficient products - word processors and personal computers with printout capabilities; tiny wireless radios and televisions, powerful enough to pick up international transmissions; cordless telephones no larger than a wristwatch that can be dialed directly to receivers abroad.

Mr. Shanor believes that in the long run the Soviet Union will be unable to control the private use of the new technology. Let us hope he is right. His is an optimistic view, one that foresees a better informed Soviet public demanding more openness from a new generation of Soviet leaders and holding them accountable for their actions.B

A report on MySpace profile pic used in news stories

From Photo District News

http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswire/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003725145

March 13, 2008

By Daryl Lang

When a prostitute hired by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was identified Wednesday, news outlets eagerly published photos grabbed from her MySpace profile.

Can they get away with that?

Three attorneys who specialize in copyright law say media organizations are sailing in dangerous waters if they publish a personal snapshot without permission.

"Whoever took that picture owns that picture," says New York attorney Nancy Wolff. "It's either an infringement or they [the news outlets] have to make a fair use argument."

Wolff says the news organizations probably decided the risk of a lawsuit was low. They also probably considered competitive pressure as other sources published the same photos. "It's a fast business decision," Wolff says.

The fair use argument would be a thin one, attorneys say. Fair use cases consider factors such as whether the image has been transformed and whether publishing the image displaces the market for the image, according to New York attorney Joel Hecker.

In this case, Hecker says, the image was not transformed and it diminishes the market for the image rights.

"If these are the only images available, they might go for thousands and thousands of dollars on licensing," Hecker says. "I think the probability would be that this would not fall under fair use."

Hecker says he would advise a photographer in this situation to contact news agencies and negotiate a fee, and if that fails, to sue.

Another New York attorney, Edward Greenberg, who has handled several recent cases involving media outlets that ran unlicensed images, says one consideration is whether the photographer has registered the images with the copyright office*, or does so within 90 days of publication.

"Some infringers will intentionally infringe and wait for a letter from a photographer, and there's a 95 percent chance they'll never get one," Greenberg adds.

The New York Times appears to be the only news outlet to speak to the woman previously known only as "Kristen." The newspaper identified her as Ashley Youmans and said she goes by the name Ashley Alexandra Dupré on her MySpace page.

The Times published three images of Youmans on its Web site Wednesday, crediting them to MySpace.com. Two of the images also appeared in the print newspaper Thursday. Times assistant managing editor for photography Michele McNally declined to comment on whether the paper obtained permission before publishing the photographs.

Other outlets, including TV networks and the Associated Press and Reuters wire services, have also run some of the photos, crediting MySpace.

The AP noted that the images were "obtained from a MySpace webpage" and specified that they were to be used, "only to illustrate news reporting or commentary on the facts or events surrounding the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal." Reuters identified the images similarly, and flagged them as available only for editorial use.

Associated Press director of photography Santiago Lyon says AP consulted with its legal department before deciding to use the photos.

"Given the news value of the photographs, we decided that these were images that the public needed to see," Lyon says.

MySpace's Terms & Conditions page states that "MySpace does not claim any ownership rights" over the photos users post on the site. It says MySpace has the right to display user content within MySpace, but "This limited license does not grant MySpace the right to sell or otherwise distribute your Content outside of the MySpace Services."

The photos remained on Youmans's MySpace profile Thursday morning, but had been taken down by Thursday afternoon.

*Copyright does not require registration but creators do have an opportunity to register their copyright if they so choose. See copyright office basics:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#cr

Grain.org on the opening of a Global Seed Repository

Dot Earth Entry in the New York Times on the opening of the The Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/26/buried-seed-vault-opens-in-arctic/

Here's what Grain.org had to say

Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. This has happened throughout the ex situ system, not just in gene banks of developing countries. So the issue is not about being for or against gene banks, it is about the sole reliance on one conservation strategy that, in itself, has a lot of inherent problems.

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. The logic is that as people’s traditional varieties get replaced by newer ones from research labs -– seeds that are supposed to provide higher yields to feed a growing population – the old ones have to be put away as “raw material” for future plant breeding. This system forgets that farmers are the world’s original, and ongoing, plant breeders.

I gave a talk at the Australasian Cultural Studies conference in Dec 2007 on a related subject. In "Are Seeds Software" I spoke of the importance of use as a guarantor of continued diversity and the backyard gardener as an important site of conservation. I will post a link when the paper is published.

storytelling and copyright

If storytelling is the sign of a healthy community, what are the implications of a society that treats some stories as property?

From Apophenia June 18, 2003

storytelling... Sandra Ball-Rokeach

Talking with my advisor yesterday, he spoke about Sandra Ball-Rokeach at USC's Annenberg School For Communication who suggests that the sign of a healthy community is one that tells stories. Storytelling has been dramatically undervalued in contemporary society. Creating characters, talking about events, sharing philosophies all through the power of story... I guess TV has replaced this, creating a common story. But the least common denominator is far from interesting... What are the stories that emerge out of truly connected communities? Shared stories of experience and shared fables for enjoyment? Are there communities out there that still value that form of connecting?

Zhang Daqian: Painter, Collector, Forger at MFA Boston

Press release from MFA Boston:

Zhang Daqian (1899-1983) casts a long shadow over the modern history of Chinese painting. As a painter, he was known for his singular ability to mix traditional techniques and styles with contemporary ideas and currents. As a collector, he accumulated important examples from all genres of Chinese painting and left behind copious seals and inscriptions. As a forger, Zhang so mastered the art of deception that his fakes were purchased unwittingly by nearly every major art museum in the United States—the MFA included. Indeed, the first question asked by experts when a work is considered suspect is: “Could this be by Zhang Daqian?”

This exhibition focuses on all three facets of Zhang’s career and features a rich selection of works from the MFA alongside loans from private collections. Of particular interest is a master forgery acquired by the Museum in 1957 as an authentic work of the tenth century. The painting, which was allegedly a landscape by the Five Dynasties period master Guan Tong, is one of Zhang’s most ambitious forgeries and serves to illustrate both his skill and his audacity.

Be Kind Rewind Trailers and the etymology of 'Sweding'

Trailer for Be Kind Rewind (out in Oz, March 20, 2008)





Be Kind Rewind You Tube Profile
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=BeKindMovie


Director Michael Gondry 'swedes' (translation: re-makes) his own film trailer.


Gondry's explanation on the etymology of sweding as told Chris Lee of the Los Angeles Times:

"I wanted a name that meant nothing," Paris native Gondry said in Clouseau-esque Franglais about the invention of the verb. "I had in mind, like, the suede shoes -- a fake velvet. A sort of ultra-suede? But I always get the word wrong because I'm French."

Another version of the origins of 'sweding' is propsed by Jennifer Hillner in her Wired profile (12.24.07)Wired of Gondry.

Gondry even invented a verb to describe it. To swede: the act of making a movie from everyday materials and simple technology. The word comes from a scene in the movie where Black explains to customers why the store's remade tapes cost $20 per rental and won't be ready for a week — they're imported from the far-off land of Sweden.

So when we see an authority figure threaten to confiscate our heroes video creations, one can't held but think of copyists of another sort: the Swedes behind the bit torrent tracking site Pirate Bay.

Official-type guy: "I have a warrant to destroy all your tapes. The FBI warning its at the beginning of every video tape."

Jerry (Jack Black): "Well, we erased that."

Granting permission where none is needed

"During my conversation with her representative, Mr. Blair, he pointed me to Ms. Rowling’s Web site, suggesting that would be the best place to find her response to the RDR Books case and the Harry Potter Lexicon. “You have our permission to quote from her Web site,” he said.

I already have that right, Mr. Blair. But thanks anyway."


From "A Tight Grip Can Choke Creativity", JOE NOCERA, in The New York Times, February 9, 2008 in which "A small book publisher faces off against the titans in a Harry Potter copyright case."

Greg Curnoe's Marilyn Langstaff

Marilyn Langstaff
by Greg Curnoe
Date made: 1962
Materials: gouache, dayglo, stamp pad ink
Measurements: 28.5 x 26 cm

Wikipedia helps the smart journalists, confounds the rest

It's not a reliable source, some journalists say Wikipedia can lead you to reliable sources. "Any reasonable person has to be up front that there are weaknesses," says founder Jimmy Wales. "On the other hand, there are lots of sources that have weaknesses."

read more | digg story

(This post was automatically generated by Digg, based on the original poster's summary. )