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Peter Gabriel Wants You to Re-Shock the Monkey
PreacherTom writes "The party line for the music industry has been clear: discourage music downloads at all cost. However, singer Peter Gabriel is taking things in a different direction. In order to promote his own label, he is actually encouraging people to not only download his music, but also adapt it into something more modern. In doing so, he actually posted a sample pack of Shock the Monkey consisting of vocals and other pieces of the original multitrack recording. Some in the music business would call this the commercial equivalent of hiring kidnappers to babysit. In actuality, Gabriel is pleased with the results."
So HE'S the one behind those insipid "shock the monkey" banner ads that inspired me to write AdBlock! I am calling upon all wise men to boycott Peter Gabriel. It shouldn't be hard, considering he's just some stupid blogger.
Nine inch Nails put out a track and allowed it to be remixed..
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see
http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/04/16/1417205.
to remix Peter Gabriel and Paris Hilton's new song and call it Shock the Junkie
... do I "win $20"?
If you compress a single track of a song into an mp3 (or ogg or whatever) does it compress better than compressing multiple tracks mixed together? It's my understanding that the first step of compressing a wav to mp3 is to seperate out all the sound tracks. This being an imprecise process, wouldn't you get better results if the sound tracks were already seperated? So when musicians are making mp3s do they do it with seperate tracks or do they mix the tracks together and then encode an mp3 from the resulting mix, which immediately goes and tries to seperate the tracks again?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Where's PETA when you really need them?
He who questions training, only trains himself at asking questions. -- The Sphinx, Mystery Men
I feel better already.
Real musicians (ie not Britney etc) love having their music remixed & worked on by other musicians. If you listen to hiphop, you'll know that everyone lets everyone else play with their beats, lyrics, etc. Honestly, BFD.
They are facinating in how they work, but let me provide a quick laymen explanation:
.wav file with equivalent (for most humans -some one might disagree - i don't) quality.
.j.
First off, your idea that tracks are "seperated" is an understandable mistake! But, the deal is that it's not the tracks that are seperated, it's the component audio frequencies that compose the sound that make up the song that are.
Let's skip the boring stuff and get right to it. If this interests you, i'm sure that wikipedia will have a full explanation. Imagine three people are whistling (and that this makes up the whole, if somewhat boring, song. Person 1 is whistling at 700hz (hertz, or cycles per second. Human hearing is approx 20-20000 hz, rather like the specs you see on headphones, no coincidence). Person 2 is whistling at 703 hz (NOTE this is close to person 1 on purpose) and person 3 is whistling at 900 hz. So you hear, uncompressed three whistles. There are two things that happen to make an mp3:
1) If I can analyze this sound to find it's frequency components for a given "window" (or in mp3 speak, frame) of time, i can just record that. It would be easier (smaller) to say Persons 1, 2, 3 are whistling at 700, 703, and 900 then it would be to record the full sound of them doing it (think about that)
Still, music can be complex, and there are different qualities of MP3 you can make too (usually refered to as bitrate, like 128, 160, 192 Kbps (kilo bits per second) so we have
2) A principal not unlike optical illusions called Psychoacoustics. It basically says that if you have two signals A and B, and A is louder then B, and A and B are close enough in frequency, a person will only tend to hear A. Common sense time, if a headphone speaker is making a sound, and a big loudspeaker is making the same sound, you'll only hear the big loudspeaker. The question is, how much different will the headphone have to be before you hear it?
This is the science of psychoacoustics. Basically, the more compressed an mp3 is, the more will be "stripped" out - that is as the bitrate gets lower, the amount seperating A and B is allowed to increase. On the flip side, if the bitrate is high enough, there is no practical difference to the human ear, because you just can't hear such a small difference anyway That's why a high bitrate mp3 is STILL five times smaller then a
Check on fourier transforms, psychoacoustics, and mp3 on wikipedia for more (and if anyone has a better example, well, typed this pretty quick, go for it!)
CS majors know the time/space tradeoff, but they never get taught the 3rd, crucial, tradeoff of the set: comprehension!
Uh, no. It just letting listeners remix already recorded segments into something they like.
Really.
Journalists are stupid. Sometimes.
and that my friend, is the beauty of innovation. if people willingly choose to give him money when he is giving his stuff away for free, than he's doing what we all try to achieve. profit. If thats not what "earning" your money is about, then I'm not sure I know what is.
As much as I love Peter Gabriel, he isn't the first to release tracks for fans to mix. Barenaked Ladies have also been offering songs from their newest album for people to mix (some of the newly-mixed songs will go on an EP, the proceeds going to charity). Anyways, I think it's great that more popular artists are sticking it to the man, so to speak, and disregarding everything the RIAA wants you to believe. More power to 'em, and if it means rehashing old songs in order to get attention, then so be it. At least they're starting to clue in on the fact that free music does more good than harm (most of the time).
When I think Peter Gabriel my mind is instantly driven to the video for "Sledgehammer" with the stop motion animated food. With all of the Photoshopping talent online, why should the remix project stop with music alone? Music videos would likely be impressive as well.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
You can see that the actual artists -- the people the RIAA pretend to be protecting -- have repeatedly fallen on our side, supporting file sharing and music communities. They are above the petty business interests and sheer greed that has driven the RIAA to attempt to destroy the music industry.
With any luck, more artists will start taking these kinds of steps, and eventually the RIAA will not be watching their own dinner from last night being digested.
Sure, the RIAA could dig some plain-old selling-CDs value out of it, but they've gone to that well plenty of times. So this is as much publicity stunt as artistic endeavor, and it's reaffirming exactly what the RIAA does: promote big acts.
Peter Gabriel is British. He has converted a garden shed on his own property into a recording studio where he produces for his own label. He actually runs his own website.
Yes, he's a big act, but since leaving Genesis he's been as much as possible an independent big act publicly at the forefront of not paying too much mind to copyright issues.
When his "people" came to him all upset that people in India were pirating his records his response was (paraphrasing):
"You idiots, book me. If they're not paying for what we're trying to sell they're at least demonstrating a demand for what we can sell that they can't pirate."
He has a long, personal history of being the good anti-Metallica.
KFG
Freedom to create derivative works. Freedom to distribute. Freedom to use as you see fit. No copyright nonsense.
The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.
The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.
The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.
Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.
It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Your example of two people whistling at 700 Hz and 703 Hz is misleading. I believe you're assuming that since the difference is 3 Hz, and the human ear can only hear Hz greater than 20, that the difference would be inaudible and one could be dropped. But what actually happens is that the two waves will alternatingly compliment and destruct each other, with the net result of a sound around 701.5 Hz coming in and out every 1/3rd of a second. It would basically sound like 3 beeps a second, though more like a siren than a beep. If the waves were at different amplitudes, the same phenomenon would still exist but there would not be complete silence during the destructive phases.
:). I was actually hoping the Wikipedia article would explain the data portion of the MP3 format, and not just the header. But the above is what I learned from reading the actual technical documentation years ago.
This gets to the fundamental mistake in your explanation. If MP3s (or more generally, digital music) only stored the most prominant waves, the above phenomenon would not be recorded. The recording would not match the actual sound at all, as the complimentary aspects of sound waves are a big part of what makes music interesting to listen to.
What actually happens is that the waves are all recorded as one master waveform. The amplitude of this waveform is recorded regularly at very short intervals. For CDs, there are 44,100 recorded points per second. Due to the very small intervals, any waveforms that could not be caught at this fidelity would be due to frequencies so high that they're inaudible. MP3s try to draw the same curve without taking so many recordings. It essentially tries to fit a curve to the master waveform, carefully deciding on which differences would result acceptable errors that are either outside of human hearing or small compared to the other frequencies compositing the wave. There is never a datapoint in either CD or MP3 that says "currently there's a sound at 700 Hz and at 703 Hz." Instead, the only recorded data is where the wave is (in terms of amplitude) and (in the case of MP3s) where the wave is going.
The parent poster asked about "tracks" and how they're seperated out. I believe this the poster's just using the wrong terminology. What's actually seperated out is the output from the different speakers. These are more accurately called channels. "Tracks" are the output of a specific instrument, and are traditionally stored as two unique channels in recording studios. The bitrate of these channels would match, or exceed, the quality of the end recording. Therefore if a pop song has 16 tracks, it would take 32 channels, all individually stored at high bitrates, to store in an unmixed format. This is a lot more data than distributing the "mixed" version, where all the waveforms are saved together as two channels, and is what is sold at CD stores and as MP3s/AACs.
I hope this explains things a bit better
Jon
ps. Sorry for the original post as AC, but I don't want this post to be buried at 0 moderation.
my blog
Same on the dedicated website http://bush-of-ghosts.com/remix/bush_of_ghosts.htm ; you can upload your remixes, which are then made available inline with the Creative Commons licenses.
I sincerely wish that this was something which could be solved so easily.
Your argument is interesting, but after further examination, somewhat akin to early Communist and Socialist economic models. It looks good on paper, but might not really manage to create a situation where many content creators would be motivated to do so, or even in a position where they could make the commitment of both time and resources necessary for them to come up with the music at the level of sophistication that a Peter Gabriel album does when it is conceived, written, played, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered. This in turn could lead to the kind of long-term and endemic paucity of outstanding creative works in a similar fashion to that which ended happening in the former Soviet Union with their economic policies.
There are far many more complex and entertwined issues to this dilemna, and while I wholeheartedly agree that current copyright issues are increasingly antiquated and will likely slowly disappear in their present form, there are many reasons why this particular approach will probably not be adopted as law. Mind you, the 'de facto' result at the street level today is already so completely out of hand, that it may make less and less of a difference anyway, as it has proven utterly impossible to police and regulate. Major Hip-Hop artists make no bones about selling bootleg 'mixtapes' by the bucketload as part of their viral marketing strategies, everyone and their sister can create instant mashups which besides being difficult to even recognize, make it utterly impossible for anyone to try and collect royalties from, so in a sense the result is pretty much the same. But consequently and already noticeable, many contemporary artists have reduced the amount of time they can afford to spend in the studio crafting recording masterpieces which no one will buy in great numbers, choosing to instead put out slighty more 'average' albums and dedicate their time and energies to performing live, which for many has proven to be a reliable way to help to pay the bills...
As a whole, it is quite flattering to see that someone like Peter Gabriel (who besides being a legendary performer, also has consistently tried to further his participation to the global music community, with his World Music festival (WOMAD), Real World recording studio complex, as well as through his record label which is supporting many great, unknown but talented artists.) doing something that few have dared to try in order to stay relevant. Kudos all the way!!
Z.
dude, Peter Gabriel performs with Zorb balls and Segways on stage.
He's as much a nerd as the rest of us!
Some may not like his music, but he's a shrewd musician and his performances are always spectacular.
The best idea I've ever seen in the music business as well, was that he released the audio from the concert on CD. So for each concert, in each major city, there's a CD recording the night. It's not edited clips or 'the best bits' - it's local hecklers and the bits where he gets his tongue tied doing a link to his next song recorded directly from the mixing desk - it helps you recall the night you experienced in your local arena/city hall, not the night someone else experienced in the Texas Dome, or whatever.
Baka Drew
We recently read about something quite similar here in Sweden. An artist had found out that someone had downloaded a bootleg copy of a song he mostly performed live, remixed it and released it onto the internet crowds. When said artist found the song, he released it as his own on his new album. This was an excellent way to show how piracy _really_ works. It's not destructive. It's not anti-artistic. It won't hurt anyone if you don't take it so bloody damn serious!
Blog -
I know it's been said before, but Gabriel and other artists who opt to do this are smarter than it might initially look.
;-)
As in the terminology of the open source software market, in this context Gabriel's music constitutes what they call a "loss leader."
He puts his entire discography online, free for the taking. He doesn't make a cracker from that, and presumably he wouldn't plan to. He also lets people do the mashy thing as Bowie did. This generates enormous positive PR for him that he supposedly "gets the open source revolution." Then after a while, he either decides he's got bored sitting at home, or he wants to make some additional revenue...so he decides he wants to do a comeback series of concerts. He'd use his site with the free music as a point of sale for the concert tickets. Let's also say hypothetically that in the meanwhile, a particular one of the mashies of his music has become unusually popular. So he arranges for the author of this particular mashy to play at the concerts with him as a supporting act...Mashy Kid either does his thing solo, or better yet, he and Gabriel do a duet of sorts. Gabriel could also do something like a "very limited" run of autographed photos or CDs to sell at the concerts...which given the infinitely replicable nature of the music files, would hold particular appeal as unique objects.
Mashy Kid gets professionally discovered, so he's very happy...Gabriel's positive public image would be through the roof by this point...and he could also more or less surf home after the concerts on the tidal wave of cash that would have been forthcoming. (Assuming he still has a large fanbase of course, which I'm assuming he does...not to mention the additional demand that would have been raised by the chance of seeing Mashy Kid play)
This of course is only one of an infinite number of possible scenarios by which he could make a fortune with this.
So...yep, it's a crazy move, all right. Crazy like a fox.
Creative Commons. There are a variety of licenses not designed for software from this group.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
For example:
1. Interactivity - Why does those youngsters need a plethora of widesceen/surround sound/commentary/frappuchino options on every bloody DVD that comes out? By the time you've worked out what bleeding settings you want, you've changed your mind about what you wanted to watch in the first place! BUT, make a nice hot strong cup of tea first, sit down in your favourite chair, take a sip of your tea and it *DOESN'T MATTER* what sound/screen/moccachino options are set, you WILL just relax and enjoy your movie whatever way the screen or sound is!
2. Remixing - What's this constant need to "fiddle about" with music with that lot? Why have they got to take "this bit from that track, that bit from this track" and then, *WHEN THEY'VE FINISHED* fiddling with it, they get some big black American bloke to do so much talking over it that you can't hear it anyway! BUT, if they just had a sip of a nice strong hot cup of tea first, they'd put all the CDs they want to listen to in a little pile next to their comfy chair and just *PLAY EACH ONE IN ORDER* while listening intently in a relaxed mood.
3. Coffee - What's all this business about "iced mocha laccamaccachino with marshmallows and little umbrella in the top" in, for example, Starbucks? You get a coffee because you are thirsty, you stand in a queue for 30 minutes and when you finally get to the end of the queue, you order something that takes a further two days to manufacture from start to finish... and then you wonder why you're miserable??? How simple is a nice hot cup of tea to make - teabag, hot water and milk and sugar if you want it, what's the big deal? And you can put it in a thermos flask and carry it about with you so you can have a nice, hot cup of tea whenever you want one.
4. Fashion - What's all this business about wearing jeans where the gusset is dangling down round by your knees? If we'd have worn those in my day, friends would have laughed at you for looking like you'd dropped a "brown trout" or two in the back of your Levi's! And how do you run??? Is this planet eventually going to be entirely inhabited by people in "sensible, cheap, elasticated waist jeans" because all the fashionable ones weren't able to run away quick enough from falling buildings, crashing airliners and raging infernos? BUT, before making those clothing choices, have a nice, hot, strong cup of tea and the caffeine entering your system combined with the warmth from the hot liquid, and "terminal clothing" will be a thing of the past!
Tea, nice and hot... that's the answer.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Hmmmmm... I'm not sure if 'Troll' is the appropriate moderation, but I guess the moderator was trying to find something fairly close to "-1 Asshole".
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
It's alright, I already have enough blank CDs, thank you.
Marillion did the same thing to a whole album (Anoraknophobia) as a competition a few years back and released the best remixes as the CD Remixomatosis (and the nearly-best-remixes as a "free" fan club CD). Winners also got cash prices, and many of the remixes sound really, really excellent.
Parent is broadly correct, the only comment I'd make is on the budget for movies, where I wonder about whether it's possible for cinema showings/movie theaters to act as "live performance" as it were for films they show, i.e. for theaters to organise themselves in advance and under contract/by subscription to fund new movies, paid for at the box office. In other words, in a post-copyright world, to serve the same sort of function for movies that live performance concerts and touring would provide for musicians.
Comments that this model is like Socialism or Communism are wrong; there is a similarity, but the difference is that we are not talking about tangible property in limited supply. We are talking about intangibles which cost nothing to replicate or distribute, and which are therefore in infinite supply, which is why this model can work. This wasn't previously the case, content was always tied to physical expression in tangible/scarce media in the past, which is why 18th/19th century copyright made a kind of sense it doesn't any more.
Think about this; if physical goods was instantly replicable, Star-Trek style, at zero cost, then you might find not only that our ideas about property would be forced to change, but also that Socialist/Communist ideals might suddenly work in that context, whereas in a real world of scarce goods they do not. For digital content, however, there is no scarcity, and copyright is a wholly artificial scarcity imposed on that which makes our society poorer than it need be, as well as supporting a wholly artificial "industry" that does not in fact add value or generate wealth at all, however much money it handles.
Though a little harsh on the other posters, the parent is correct. Also, just to finish the process discussed in parent, the real compression comes when the psychoacoustic model tells the quantizer where to distribute available bits, with the number of available bits being driven by the desired bit rate. Basically you look at the signal to mask ratio in each subband, and distribute the most bits to the subbands that have the highest SMR.
"Don't dump your crap into the marketplace and expect the best talent to do your bidding for free."
Because a song that charts at #29 is "crap?" I mean, it ain't like he's releasing some no-name b-side that nobody's heard of.
Am I the only one who thinks that this is a completely unreasonable BPM to work with? 148.5 I could understand. Ah well... perhaps I can hack up a remix in spite of that.
-=Zeus=And=Hades=-
I told you!!!!!
... and actually used the track on the disc.
For Revolverlution Public Enemy not only had a remix contest, but it was before the album was even released. They had a couple tracks on their website, including the title track Revolverlution. The winner of the remix contest was put on the album. The cool thing, it's really a different track, the guy has a totally different flow than Chuck D., and definitly falls into the "using current song to create a new song" rather than just simple copying (like the labels tend to say about remixes).
Peter Gabriel is a real pioneer in thinking about how music, technology and communities come together. And this action is just the latest step in a long road. He realized early on the power that labels had over his music, so in the '80s and early 90's he bought back the rights to his catalog from the labels that had originally published it. (It is standard practice in contracts for the musician to sign over copyright to their songs to the label). Once those rights were secured he began to explore new ways of using his music. Two very early efforts were the Xplora and EVE cd-roms (see the site here .
In the summer of 1994 I was hired by the Starwave Corporation in Seattle to be part of a small team developing EVE. The idea was pretty interesting -- pair the work of different contemporary visual artists up with songs from Gabriel, treating each as raw material, then create a framework in which people can explore, share and remix that material to create an integrated audio/video hybrid that is greater than the sum of its parts. I had just finished a graduate art program that had similar ideas, so I felt right at home.
We used the work of artists Helen Chadwick , Yayoi Kusama , Cathy de Monchaux , and Nils-Udo -- using high rez scans of their work as starting points. They were paired up with Gabriel's songs 'Come Talk To Me' , 'Shaking The Tree' , and 'In Your Eyes'. We had the equivalent of the sample packs that he has made available on-line for Shock the Monkey. These were professionally produced loops from the multi-track masters. Gabriel's recording process usually involves dozens and dozens of tracks, so these samples weren't mix-downs, but elements from a single track.
We created something called the Interactive Musical Xperience to bring these elements together. It was a kind of audio/video sampler that you could play with your keyboard, triggering sound and animation loops against a rendered landscape background. The software quantized everything so you would always be in time and you could work improvisationally or with a simple graphical timeline. The team developing it had a diverse background in software development, fine art and filmmaking. My job eventually became to create functional mockups of the interaction using Director 4....! The production team eventually relocated to the Real World studios in Box, UK which was an incredibly intense creative environment -- musicians, engineers, filmmakers, photographers, designers all working together in a bucolic 'campus' made from an old mill complex.
Although I eventually left Real World and Starwave to pursue my own artwork, it was a really great experience. The fact that the rest of the world has started to catch up to the ideas Peter Gabriel has been thinking about since the early 90's only reaffirms how resonant those ideas continue to be.
I am not a lawyer, but I am a published author and a professional writer. And, while there's a lot wrong in the post one branch above this one, getting into a pissing match over it isn't going to help, particularly when most of this tends to be over a misunderstanding about what copyright is and why it is there.
So, instead of arguing, I'm going to educate - this is copyright 101. So please pay close attention, and you'll understand what is going on a lot better. I'm going to start by describing what copyright is and what it does, and then talk about why we still need it (and, I'd argue, need it even more than before).
Copyright today in most western countries is based on an international agreement called the Berne Convention, first signed at the end of the 19th century, and most recently updated in the 1970s. There is a history of copyright that goes far beyond the Berne Convention, such as the Stationer's Log in 17th century England and a clause in the original U.S. Constitution, but we're dealing with copyright as it is today, not its history (which, while relevant, is for another discussion). For the sake of this discussion, we'll call the copyrighted material "art" (it takes less time to type than "copyrighted material").
Copyright covers two basic functions - the first is the right to distribute (hence "copy-right"), and the second is derivative works. Both of these tend to be misunderstood a great deal by laymen.
The right to distribute basically means that the creator of the art is able to decide how that art is to be distributed within reasonable means. If the creator wishes the art to be released to the public for free download, the creator is allowed to do that. If the creator wants to sell the publication rights to a publisher, the creator can do that too. It's important to note that there is no explicit instruction in copyright law of how a creator is to distribute his/her art - what this amounts to in the end is that the wishes of the creator must be respected under law.
There are limits to these wishes, however. For example, while the creator owns the copyrights to the content itself, s/he does not own what the content is distributed on. So, if I write a book about an alien invasion where the aliens are using biological weapons, sell the publication rights to a publisher, and you buy the printed book, I cannot tell you that you can only read it in the wee hours of the morning, or anything like that. I also cannot tell you that you can't give that book you just bought away as a present, or sell it to a used bookstore, as you own the paper it is printed on, and can do what you like with it in that regard. I CAN tell you that you cannot copy it and sell it on the street corner, or give copies of it away, as that would undermine my wishes as to how it is to be distributed. If you disregard my wishes in terms of distribution, copyright law allows me to take action to protect my intellectual property and ensure that my wishes are respected.
(An example of copyright in action is the open source license, which recently stood up in court. That license has its binding power because copyright law supports it.)
These wishes are also mitigated by fair use. Fair use means that if you are writing an academic paper and you want to quote the aforementioned book about the alien invastion, you may do so without asking permission, so long as you give credit where it is due. There are other clauses and limitations, but those vary internationally, and most people here actually do have a good sense of what fair use is - it's copyright that seems to cause people all the trouble.
Depending on what country you are in, copyright extends anywhere from 50-75 years after the death of the creator. This is a source of much debate. On the creator's side, it allows the creator to leave a legacy for his/her family based on his/her hard work. When it comes to what it means on the side of the publishers or public, it's a bit more complicated. A lot depends on what ri
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive