a spectacular book entitled _The_Big_Bang_Never_Happened_
Sensational is more like it. I tried to get into it in the bookstore one time, but every time the author got up to the really juicy part where he was going to explain everything, he dropped his thread and referred me to a later chapter. Also, he was attacking mostly the exterior consequences of Big Bang theory, and as I recall he failed to really get to the main premises. I opted to put the book down. It looked like a crank to me.
A lot of the world is run by computers. Changes to these protected systems can cause a lot of havoc.
That's already illegal. It doesn't need to be made more illegal.
This act is recognizing that hacking (cracking) could be an act of terrorism.
Sorry, I'm not going to give you that one. You cannot kill people with programs. It's not possible. Airplanes still have pilots, and those pilots cannot be taken over by an insidious virus. Aside from which, the examples in the security focus article I referenced were of people wreaking social or financial "havoc," which is NOT terrorism. Cyber-terrorism is not a valid word, and I am attacking its validity.
And again with the splitting of the hairs. Do we need sharper axes or bigger hairs? The original point of my post was that broadly-worded laws are being written by individuals unaware (or unconcerned with) their their long-term implications, one of which would be a brain-drain on the US IT sector. Already foreign programmers are afraid to come here because of Example Dmitry. My original question was, do our legislators care about that? Would that pull their strings? I'm trying to find the lever that changes their minds about this stuff. I'm trying to de-hype the hype which has led to almost any activity performed with a computer being taken with this deadly seriousness. Because if it isn't, I think the usefulness of these devices will shrink away and the advantage of having the best technology will go to someone else in a less benighted nation. Now, do you still need that axe, or are you finished with the hairs already?
First of all, I linked an article on securityfocus, which several people on this thread have now linked. It's real. Secondly, Dmitry Sklyarov is in jail because of another broadly-worded law. That's not unjustified paranoia. It could happen to me, it could happen to you.
Thirdly, I made the point in my letter, and I'll make it here again: computers are just a bunch of people typing on keyboards. There is a gee-whiz mentality that people get carried away with and they start thinking the computer somehow runs the world, and analogies about what you do with a computer vs. what you do in the real world are just not valid, period. I cautioned them not to get carried away with gee-whizness and realize that threatening to send potentially misguided grafitti artists to jail for life (as the securityfocus article quite clearly states) is of no use to anyone, and may actually harm us socially in the future.
The new laws are simply covering the current reality that hacking may have terrorist implications.
I am unaware of any application of computer usage that can lead to death. If I drop a heavy server on your head from the height of the WTC, that could possibly kill someone. If I expose wiring in such away as to insert direct current into the keyboard, and you somehow complete the circuit and get hooked up to the raw voltage coming out of the wall, you could get killed too. But no one has ever written a program called "kill" that did anything so gruesome. That was my point. There is no way a person can terrorize another person with a computer. It just can't have the kind of effect blowing up a bomb can. Hacking into someone's database is already illegal. It doesn't need a stiffer penalty, with a wider net, to make it less possible.
Yeah, and it's getting printed out and mailed this weekend. The more of it they get, hopefully the more it will be in their minds when they go to vote.
No one -- EVER -- has proposed defining all hackers as terrorists.
I referred to this article, and my argument was rather more detailed. Really "hacking ~ terrorism" was not the entire focus of my letter. Changing careers because of that and other broadly-worded laws was. I'd post it here, but it's three pages long, I'm not into karma-whoring, and frankly I'm not interested in watching you dissect it.
Everyone here is aware that more and more broadly-worded laws are getting passed, making all sorts of formerly innocuous computer activities "criminal." I've just emailed my representatives regarding the "hacking is terrorism" nonsense that's being looked at, and I've informed them that laws like this cause me to re-evaluate, on a yearly basis, whether or not I should continue working in IT, or find some job in a safer field which is not under seemingly continuous legislative attack. My question, after all that, is do you think the representative will look at that and care? My state is trying very hard to draw technology workers here, which I'm sure is the case in every state in the union except California and Oregon. Would an appeal to the simple "I'm afraid to do this anymore because it's becoming legally dangerous to work in computers" be of any use, or did I waste my breath?
The office where you can get those from is in Denver, CO. Just get yourself in the neighborhood of 6th Avenue and Kipling. You absolutely cannot miss it. I went down one day just for the fun of it and picked up a complete set of (very nice) maps of Mars for $9. The joy of publicly-funded research results actually being available to the public!
I think it's time we declared "war on tectonics" to prevent a catastrophe like this from ever happening again!
It is you who need to get a sense of perspective. There's not a damn thing any of us can do about preventing earthquakes. It's a "natural disaster." Or the act of a capricious god. It's relatively safe to assume that the next time an earthquake strikes in that region, the inhabitants will have learned what kinds of structures they can and cannot build, and the damage will be minimized accordingly. In the meantime, what precisely do you know about the humanitarian impulses of/. readers?
Of course, most of the truckers roll like hell and then stop for dinner before the end of the toll road.
It's funny, I don't care for survielance cameras on the street, but timing toll booth passes sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Look at the incredible idiocy of the activity you describe. The truckers, afraid of getting caught speeding, rush like hell to the very end of the toll road, risking all kinds of havoc on the way, and then stop completely at the end to avoid getting caught, thus completely negating any real benefit they gain from violating the speed limit.
It's stuff like that that continues to convince me that people speed only because it gives them a hard-on. I've never seen someone actually make it more than a car length in front of me, even on a major highway, when they speed like that. All they're doing is racing to the next bottleneck. Amazing.
A co-worker tells me the other day that his neighbor's house was broken into by the police, his own security cameras (crushing irony!) and a whole bunch of other stuff (licensed guns, a remote control toy truck, and who knows what else) was "confiscated," while he was away. A warrant was left by way of explanation, but the kicker was the address was wrong by two digits.
Such is the state of Property Seizure Incorporated, otherwise known as Police Budget Acquisitions. The guy got his stuff back, much to my surprise (it's in a rural town and the guy probably made a huge stink about it), and he got a free vacation on the police department. I wouldn't expect as much luck for a dweller in inner-city L.A. The problem is not that the police made a mistake. The problem is that they have more authority than they need already. They don't need the authority to override our property rights whenever it's convenient for them. That's for the courts, when and if a conviction is secured.
You don't just magically 'build' Viagra in day. You don't just build the system and do a final test. You bite off pieces. When will they learn??!?!?!
Maybe the general public doesn't feel like humping out the cash to fund this particular absurd exercise, and would rather see the money spent on something more constructive. That's just what this general public person feels.
people associate the term "light saber" with "highly dangerous medical instrument and associated cover-up scandal"
Ahh. Pinheads with an IQ hovering near room temperature would indeed have trouble distinguishing the two. That's why all of us must give up our rights to freely use these important terms in ways other than their creators (or at least first-to-the-trademark-office-holders) intend, because we might distress and mislead the imbeciles of the world. And who knows what might happen to the U.S. economy if George Lucas couldn't sell another fucking movie ticket!!!!
Wow, what a completely invalid analogy. The car is a rental. The company you rented it from owns it, and has a reasonable right to expect that you will take care of it so they can continue renting it. If you abuse it, expect to pay the cost. The guy didn't bother to figure that out and had his ass handed to him. This doesn't raise any issues with me at all, since I drive a car as if I want to live to see tomorrow, and I treat a rental car as if I'm borrowing it from someone else. I also have this habit of reading all the pieces of paper I sign. I don't know, something about fucking common sense. Sympathy=0.
Intervideo has a legal Linux player coming out soon. It will cost $29.95, but you will rest assured knowing that you are not stealing.
Using Xine or any other unauthorized solution is stealing. Don't steal videos.
Shill, anyone? Anyone for a shill? They're going fast. Good sir, care for a shill to feed your opinion to you?
The companies can't do without the programmer. They will have nothing to sell. However, the college student can do without the CD. There's always something else available for him. Supply, meet mr. Demand. Watch him go away if you cost too much.
I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!
vii is very often a substitute for V, and is used
all the time.
Really? In rock guitar music? Do tell. Would you care to provide an example that I've somehow failed to notice in the last eighteen years of this "common" substitution on the guitar? I know I don't use it because there's no good way to do it with a barred chord, and unless one does it in the key of A one runs the risk of a bunch of jangling, dissonant open strings ruining the chord altogether. And please, don't try to fool me with a Vb7. I can tell the difference, and they are not the same thing at all. It would only be significant if the bass also voiced on the root of vii. If it's voicing the root of V, then the chord is Vb7, no matter what the guitar player or pianist want.
Mr. Mouth, you seem to have a fundamental problem understanding the logic of the situation. I've been reading through your posts, and your tenor as this thread has progressed has become increasingly shrill. It's time to put a couple of things on the table where they can be seen:
Do you know any artists? DO you have an ounce of talent?
This is sloppy logic and pointless. Some of us may be musicians, and some may not. For the record, I note that I have been playing the guitar for eighteen years. I have been there and done all that and have subsisted on the meager givings a musician at the bottom of the rung can make. Whether I have or not is not the point. We are not arguing about who is a musician here.
LAst time I checked a small time musician on the road spends there day as follows. . . all for less than $100,
Ah, the pity. It's a sad day when you can't sympathize with someone's arguments because of how ragged their clothing is. But we aren't arguing about that hypothetical situation either.
In other posts you have pretty much followed the slippery-slope-leads-to-hell and pity-us-poverty-stricken-musician threads to their bitter, terrible ends, and yet I have somehow failed to bite. Let's examine why:
If you're a working musician who makes your money solely from touring and have yet to cut a CD deal, it's not likely you have anxious teenagers picking it out and posting the tab online.
If you are a published songwriter or author, where exactly do you publish tablature? The last time I went into a music store, I found lots of sheet music, printed on traditional staves. I didn't find much in the way of tablature. Remember that tablature is printed by people who by and large cannot read traditional five-line staves of music. The only place I've found genuine tablature is in guitar magazines, and if your music is popular enough that it's getting transcribed in Guitar World, you aren't exactly salivating over the 0.03 royalty check that comes from each sale thereof.
If you are are selling CD's, only then do you have enough fan-level interest to start seeing tabs of your material show up on the internet. At that point, you have already sold a $12-$20 CD to most of the people listening to your songs. In order to make the tab useful (remember, there is no rhythmic notation in the tab beyond the bare mention of the bar lines) they have to get a copy of the song. That is a transaction you can benefit from.
So from where I sit, tablature is not competing with anything musicians are selling today anyway. This activity that we now see on the internet has been going on for years and years anyway. I know, because remember I have been doing this for eighteen years, long before there was a world wide web. I traded tabs with dozens of guitar-playing friends at school. None of us intended to starve the poor members of Led Zepplin or Rush with our tabs, and even if we were, the transaction we were performing was invisible and untraceable, and therefore any law against it was completely unenforcable.
Finally, you fail to address the primary point of this all anyway, which is that the users and creators of this tablature feel that it is perfectly justifiable fair use. Copyright draws a boundary between the private ownership of IP and the public's use of it, and as copyrights have been increased in an effort to nickel-and-dime the consumer out of as much cash as possible, the public's benefit from these works (the entire reason copyrights are granted in the first place) has diminished. In this case it is the very concrete loss of the right to learn from and imitate art and one's culture. All art is imitation. Every artist in every era has imitated the work of his predecessors. If artists of today are so unwilling to share their work with students, they may derive from this greed an unexpected effect:
If they (or their handlers) are unwilling to grant the modicum of freedom with their works that is fair use, quotation, and educational, they may find themselves omitted from historical record. The medium on which most music is recorded, nowdays, is CD. Once the CD stops becoming popular (i.e., the kids who listened to it grow up) the only way to preserve it is to start copying it. But if it's illegal (and indeed impossible) to copy the CD, it won't make its way into educational materials, won't be studied as a period in music history, and in a hundred years or so, it will all but vanish from our culture. So the artists who want their kids and great grand kids and great great grandkids to be the only ones allowed to copy their material: think carefully before you wish for that. Your material is already, in my opinion, in grave danger of vanishing from the face of the earth altogether.
Finally, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the surest indication of success. If no one imitates your songs, they probably aren't that popular. And if no band ever tries to clone your act (by first learning your songs, then imitating them), you probably won't make it into anyone's hall of fame, either.
As if this was part of the issue. I program computers for a living.
I think you should work for the next year, with only an advance, then at the end of the year not be paid anymore.
I think I have. Actually, I didn't get paid anything that year. I subsisted on the good will of friends.
ho are you to decide that since you can copy their work it has no value, I CAN go to your house with a rifle and take everything I want from your house.
God DAMN it that is not the same at all. Where do you get this shit? You've got to be the most irrational person I've met all day. How the fuck does two people trading tablature take money out of the artists' pocket? How? When is the amateur guitarist going to go down to the store and find copies of tab somehow made by other amateurs? How is tablature considered to be "ripping off." I would like to point out that if I couldn't get the tab I'd just pick it out by ear. I can pick out just about anything I want to by ear. Am I stealing from the artists if I just bypass the entire process and DO IT MYSELF? That is really what's the issue here. Let me repeat it so you can see it, and have it tatooed to your fucking forehead so you don't forget it: IF YOU WANT SOMEONE TO HEAR YOUR WORK YOU MUST EXPOSE IT TO THEIR EARS AT SOME POINT! There is the associated risk that they may imitate you. And you might not make a dime out of that transaction. But it is not neccesary to nickel and dime your audience for the pleasure of your work. Doing so will just piss them off and drive them away. If they enjoy you they will support you. They will arrive at your shows and buy your t-shirts and hang on your every word. If they do not you will have to find something else to do for a living. That is where I am today. But you must accept the risk like everyone else, and get the hell used to it.
I will be a very dull world the moment copyright dissapears.
You're already pretty dull. If you cannot view music and art as anything but property, you haven't grasped their fundamental worth anyway.
Yesterday I rented the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie. It was supposed to be entertaining to the kids, but it was kind of flat. After the movie we watched the "deleted scenes" as my son calls them. The daughter of Jay Ward, creator of the original series, apparently had started to try to make the movie almost immediately after his death in 1989. Her description of the film was a "fine, family oriented property." I don't know about you, but when I go to see a film, I don't consider myself to be viewing a property. That's what I do when I go looking for a house. I can't buy a film from the maker. I can buy a copy of it. But the real payback, for any person with genuine creativities, is ultimately not the money. The money is not why I create. I do not write songs for money, I do not write essays or books for money. I do them because they need to be done. I have invested thousands of dollars in musical instruments because I need to play them. Not because I expect to make money off them. I do not collect bass guitars because I expect to sell them in twenty years. I have them because I need them like a drug addict needs heroin, or a fourteen-year-old needs to jack off. It's an unstoppable urge that has no reason and no excuse. My 1973 Rickenbacker 4001 has a sound that I FUCKING NEED. I sit at my job all day and sometimes I can feel the strings beneath my fingers. It relieves my tension. I tap on office furniture with my right hand to the rhythm of songs. I fret imaginary notes with my left hand when no one's looking. I whistle in the elevator and harmonize to the songs I hear in my head.
And I own every single note I play or write. I own it all, more truly than I own my house and my cars and all the things inside them. I own the fruits of my intellectual labor because they are original to me and clearly mine. When I play someone a recording of me, they never doubt that it is me because that's my voice singing on the recording. When I show someone an essay or story I have written they never question whether I copied it from the Internet because they recognize my voice in the words.
And it is for these reasons that I find the entire concept of intellectual property to be, well, fucking absurd.
At that point we might as well blow out our brains
What would make me want to blow out my brains would be a world where no one could talk about music, or literature, without a plethora(tm) of (c) idiotic trademarks(r) and Capitalized Trendy Words, and Licensing fee$ interfering. When art becomes all about money, it becomes prostitution, and artists become whores. Look no further than Hollywood for what happens when it becomes about the money. Once in a very long while an independent filmmaker comes along and turns the industry on its ear, by making genuinely inspired, original art for no other reason than the joy of it. The year following, we see eight or ten shameless, lifeless ripoffs following in its wake.
the idea of completely free IP sickens me
Free IP didn't stop Virgil from writing the Aneid. Bare substinence living didn't stop Mozart from writing some of the most brilliant music of all time. Hand-to-mouth returns on their efforts never stopped the Van Goghs or the Edgar Allan Poes. And as thousands of slashdotters will immediately attest to, lack of profits do not stop contributors from putting their mark on the Linux source code. Intellectual efforts are created because someone needs to do it. Creativity is beyond business models or investor expectations. If you don't understand how that works, well I pity you that you've never had the fire inside you. There's nothing like it in the world.
How close does a song have to be to the original before it can be declared the original?
Let's ask George Harrison. I'm sure he's got a highly sarcastic reply.
Seriously, there are only seven available chords in any given key anyway. I ii iii IV V vi and vii. Most rock musicians to my knowledge do not bother with vii as it's highly dissonant and hard to play on a guitar besides. Almost every song you will hear on the radio alternates betwee I and V and IV, unless you listen to the "alternative" station in your area, where you will hear fucked up minor chords in no key in particular.
Shifting the key doesn't make much difference except to people with perfect pitch. A large number of alternative groups drop their guitars down to eb or d (nirvana, korn, etc) anyway.
Chordless riffs (the opening of "Day Tripper" if you're over 40, or the opening of Rush "Limelight" or Ozzy's "Crazy Train" if you're an '80's metalhead, or to PJ's "Jeremy" if you're an alterna-dude) qualify as melody, and you really couldn't disguise them without ruining them. If you flattened the G in Day tripper to an F# to put it in the same key as the rest of the riff it would just barely be recognizable as the wrong riff. Alter any other note in the riff by a semitone and it becomes cacophany. Alter it by more than a semitone and it becomes increasingly difficult to play.
add in new notes (according to a map),
That would definitely obscure things, but only if done in a random way. You can add trills and grace notes to most existing songs and you'll just sound like you're showing off.
and change the tempo
Since tablature doesn't contain rhythm, this won't make any difference.
Although, now that this interesting fact has re-occurred to me, I wonder if tab can be seen as infringing at all? Since it doesn't contain that vital third dimension in music, the rhythm, they can't really be considered as a copy of the music. It's one reason why I don't use tab anymore, becase most bass parts are rhythmic, not melodic, and tab can only show me so many times that I play an E for eighteen mind-numbing measures.
Anyway, what I think is far more likely is that the greed-driven activity of lawyers will once again drive a harmless activity underground, make more previously harmless people into angry dissidents, fester discontent in our society, foster disrespect for the law in general, and push us all one more step closer to a societal collapse. Thanks, Harry Fox Agency.
Tablature is not generated by the artist. Tabs are generated by listeners who pick the songs out for themselves. They may or may not be accurate. They are reverse-engineering. They are not the song. They are not a recording. They are a guide to playing one part of the song.
It's the copyright holder's choice and publishing the tabs without permission is the equivalent to hacking into Microsoft's computers, stealing the source code to Win98 and posting it online for the world to see.
God this analogy is fucking weak. First of all, as people trying to copy-protect music have discovered, if you want someone to hear your music, eventually you have to unpack the data and let it reach their ears. You have to expose yourself to copying if you want to have a business at all.
Secondly, if you want to have music, you have to have musicians. Musicians who don't go to the Juliard school of music usually don't get a lot of either money or encouragement. To learn how to play the easiest method is to learn someone else's songs. Right now I'm doing that for a student of mine. She has brought me CD's she would like to play, and I am learning the songs and transcribing them for her. If I were not doing this she would be subjecting herself to a ludicrous game of hunt-the-music. There is no way in hell all of the sheet music to all of the CD's in the world can be published. Even when it is it's frequently not accurate. I've got a Rush book which is filled with errors and omissions, and it's all arranged on two staves, as if some pianist would sit down and churn through "Limelight."
If musicians are unable to learn songs they know, they will surely never progress to writing songs, and the Harry Fucking Fox Agency will have no one to "protect" from copyright infringement.
I think transcribing a tab for amateur musicians' edification easily falls under fair use. It's used to illustrate a point or as an educational tool, or for hobbyists to share amongst one another. It is not demonstrably taking money out of someone's pocket -- let's face it, what 16-year-old kid has eight bucks to blow on learning a single song? If that had been my option back then I would have simply stuck to learning it myself.
This is really just the gigantic fist of a gigantic corporate monolith, squashing that which it does not comprehend. No good will come of it, I guarantee. If amateur tab is driven off the web, it will show up in furtive emails and newsgroup postings instead. It will get encrypted, and it will be impossible to trace or control.
Then I must owe the Harry Fox agency about eight billion dollars. Could you provide a link where I might discover how the Harry Fox agency obtained this fabulous monopoly, and how they intend on collecting on more than a handful of the dues they are supposedly owed. Also, I was told (never confirmed, of course) that nightclubs paid some sort of yearly fee to a music publisher's industry that was sort of like a volume license. I certainly, in the hundreds of gigs I've played, have never been required to list by the dollar and dime which of the popular slop I am playing I owe royalties on.
BTW Harry Fox is about the protection of the songwriter.
Slashdot Mirror
Sensational is more like it. I tried to get into it in the bookstore one time, but every time the author got up to the really juicy part where he was going to explain everything, he dropped his thread and referred me to a later chapter. Also, he was attacking mostly the exterior consequences of Big Bang theory, and as I recall he failed to really get to the main premises. I opted to put the book down. It looked like a crank to me.
That's already illegal. It doesn't need to be made more illegal.
This act is recognizing that hacking (cracking) could be an act of terrorism.
Sorry, I'm not going to give you that one. You cannot kill people with programs. It's not possible. Airplanes still have pilots, and those pilots cannot be taken over by an insidious virus. Aside from which, the examples in the security focus article I referenced were of people wreaking social or financial "havoc," which is NOT terrorism. Cyber-terrorism is not a valid word, and I am attacking its validity.
And again with the splitting of the hairs. Do we need sharper axes or bigger hairs? The original point of my post was that broadly-worded laws are being written by individuals unaware (or unconcerned with) their their long-term implications, one of which would be a brain-drain on the US IT sector. Already foreign programmers are afraid to come here because of Example Dmitry. My original question was, do our legislators care about that? Would that pull their strings? I'm trying to find the lever that changes their minds about this stuff. I'm trying to de-hype the hype which has led to almost any activity performed with a computer being taken with this deadly seriousness. Because if it isn't, I think the usefulness of these devices will shrink away and the advantage of having the best technology will go to someone else in a less benighted nation. Now, do you still need that axe, or are you finished with the hairs already?
Thirdly, I made the point in my letter, and I'll make it here again: computers are just a bunch of people typing on keyboards. There is a gee-whiz mentality that people get carried away with and they start thinking the computer somehow runs the world, and analogies about what you do with a computer vs. what you do in the real world are just not valid, period. I cautioned them not to get carried away with gee-whizness and realize that threatening to send potentially misguided grafitti artists to jail for life (as the securityfocus article quite clearly states) is of no use to anyone, and may actually harm us socially in the future.
The new laws are simply covering the current reality that hacking may have terrorist implications.
I am unaware of any application of computer usage that can lead to death. If I drop a heavy server on your head from the height of the WTC, that could possibly kill someone. If I expose wiring in such away as to insert direct current into the keyboard, and you somehow complete the circuit and get hooked up to the raw voltage coming out of the wall, you could get killed too. But no one has ever written a program called "kill" that did anything so gruesome. That was my point. There is no way a person can terrorize another person with a computer. It just can't have the kind of effect blowing up a bomb can. Hacking into someone's database is already illegal. It doesn't need a stiffer penalty, with a wider net, to make it less possible.
Yeah, and it's getting printed out and mailed this weekend. The more of it they get, hopefully the more it will be in their minds when they go to vote.
I referred to this article, and my argument was rather more detailed. Really "hacking ~ terrorism" was not the entire focus of my letter. Changing careers because of that and other broadly-worded laws was. I'd post it here, but it's three pages long, I'm not into karma-whoring, and frankly I'm not interested in watching you dissect it.
Everyone here is aware that more and more broadly-worded laws are getting passed, making all sorts of formerly innocuous computer activities "criminal." I've just emailed my representatives regarding the "hacking is terrorism" nonsense that's being looked at, and I've informed them that laws like this cause me to re-evaluate, on a yearly basis, whether or not I should continue working in IT, or find some job in a safer field which is not under seemingly continuous legislative attack. My question, after all that, is do you think the representative will look at that and care? My state is trying very hard to draw technology workers here, which I'm sure is the case in every state in the union except California and Oregon. Would an appeal to the simple "I'm afraid to do this anymore because it's becoming legally dangerous to work in computers" be of any use, or did I waste my breath?
The office where you can get those from is in Denver, CO. Just get yourself in the neighborhood of 6th Avenue and Kipling. You absolutely cannot miss it. I went down one day just for the fun of it and picked up a complete set of (very nice) maps of Mars for $9. The joy of publicly-funded research results actually being available to the public!
It is you who need to get a sense of perspective. There's not a damn thing any of us can do about preventing earthquakes. It's a "natural disaster." Or the act of a capricious god. It's relatively safe to assume that the next time an earthquake strikes in that region, the inhabitants will have learned what kinds of structures they can and cannot build, and the damage will be minimized accordingly. In the meantime, what precisely do you know about the humanitarian impulses of /. readers?
It's funny, I don't care for survielance cameras on the street, but timing toll booth passes sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Look at the incredible idiocy of the activity you describe. The truckers, afraid of getting caught speeding, rush like hell to the very end of the toll road, risking all kinds of havoc on the way, and then stop completely at the end to avoid getting caught, thus completely negating any real benefit they gain from violating the speed limit.
It's stuff like that that continues to convince me that people speed only because it gives them a hard-on. I've never seen someone actually make it more than a car length in front of me, even on a major highway, when they speed like that. All they're doing is racing to the next bottleneck. Amazing.
A co-worker tells me the other day that his neighbor's house was broken into by the police, his own security cameras (crushing irony!) and a whole bunch of other stuff (licensed guns, a remote control toy truck, and who knows what else) was "confiscated," while he was away. A warrant was left by way of explanation, but the kicker was the address was wrong by two digits.
Such is the state of Property Seizure Incorporated, otherwise known as Police Budget Acquisitions. The guy got his stuff back, much to my surprise (it's in a rural town and the guy probably made a huge stink about it), and he got a free vacation on the police department. I wouldn't expect as much luck for a dweller in inner-city L.A. The problem is not that the police made a mistake. The problem is that they have more authority than they need already. They don't need the authority to override our property rights whenever it's convenient for them. That's for the courts, when and if a conviction is secured.
Don't know which variety of religious right you've encountered lately. Certainly not the one I have.
Maybe the general public doesn't feel like humping out the cash to fund this particular absurd exercise, and would rather see the money spent on something more constructive. That's just what this general public person feels.
Ahh. Pinheads with an IQ hovering near room temperature would indeed have trouble distinguishing the two. That's why all of us must give up our rights to freely use these important terms in ways other than their creators (or at least first-to-the-trademark-office-holders) intend, because we might distress and mislead the imbeciles of the world. And who knows what might happen to the U.S. economy if George Lucas couldn't sell another fucking movie ticket!!!!
Wow, what a completely invalid analogy. The car is a rental. The company you rented it from owns it, and has a reasonable right to expect that you will take care of it so they can continue renting it. If you abuse it, expect to pay the cost. The guy didn't bother to figure that out and had his ass handed to him. This doesn't raise any issues with me at all, since I drive a car as if I want to live to see tomorrow, and I treat a rental car as if I'm borrowing it from someone else. I also have this habit of reading all the pieces of paper I sign. I don't know, something about fucking common sense. Sympathy=0.
Using Xine or any other unauthorized solution is stealing. Don't steal videos.
Shill, anyone? Anyone for a shill? They're going fast. Good sir, care for a shill to feed your opinion to you?
Just plant your garden in used kitty litter. eech!
The companies can't do without the programmer. They will have nothing to sell. However, the college student can do without the CD. There's always something else available for him. Supply, meet mr. Demand. Watch him go away if you cost too much.
I think this can be safely classified as a completely unexpected result. Careful, patent litigators. The sword you hold isn't just double-edged -- it's got no fuckin' handle either!
all the time.
Really? In rock guitar music? Do tell. Would you care to provide an example that I've somehow failed to notice in the last eighteen years of this "common" substitution on the guitar? I know I don't use it because there's no good way to do it with a barred chord, and unless one does it in the key of A one runs the risk of a bunch of jangling, dissonant open strings ruining the chord altogether. And please, don't try to fool me with a Vb7. I can tell the difference, and they are not the same thing at all. It would only be significant if the bass also voiced on the root of vii. If it's voicing the root of V, then the chord is Vb7, no matter what the guitar player or pianist want.
Do you know any artists? DO you have an ounce of talent?
This is sloppy logic and pointless. Some of us may be musicians, and some may not. For the record, I note that I have been playing the guitar for eighteen years. I have been there and done all that and have subsisted on the meager givings a musician at the bottom of the rung can make. Whether I have or not is not the point. We are not arguing about who is a musician here.
LAst time I checked a small time musician on the road spends there day as follows. . . all for less than $100,
Ah, the pity. It's a sad day when you can't sympathize with someone's arguments because of how ragged their clothing is. But we aren't arguing about that hypothetical situation either.
In other posts you have pretty much followed the slippery-slope-leads-to-hell and pity-us-poverty-stricken-musician threads to their bitter, terrible ends, and yet I have somehow failed to bite. Let's examine why:
If you're a working musician who makes your money solely from touring and have yet to cut a CD deal, it's not likely you have anxious teenagers picking it out and posting the tab online.
If you are a published songwriter or author, where exactly do you publish tablature? The last time I went into a music store, I found lots of sheet music, printed on traditional staves. I didn't find much in the way of tablature. Remember that tablature is printed by people who by and large cannot read traditional five-line staves of music. The only place I've found genuine tablature is in guitar magazines, and if your music is popular enough that it's getting transcribed in Guitar World, you aren't exactly salivating over the 0.03 royalty check that comes from each sale thereof.
If you are are selling CD's, only then do you have enough fan-level interest to start seeing tabs of your material show up on the internet. At that point, you have already sold a $12-$20 CD to most of the people listening to your songs. In order to make the tab useful (remember, there is no rhythmic notation in the tab beyond the bare mention of the bar lines) they have to get a copy of the song. That is a transaction you can benefit from.
So from where I sit, tablature is not competing with anything musicians are selling today anyway. This activity that we now see on the internet has been going on for years and years anyway. I know, because remember I have been doing this for eighteen years, long before there was a world wide web. I traded tabs with dozens of guitar-playing friends at school. None of us intended to starve the poor members of Led Zepplin or Rush with our tabs, and even if we were, the transaction we were performing was invisible and untraceable, and therefore any law against it was completely unenforcable.
Finally, you fail to address the primary point of this all anyway, which is that the users and creators of this tablature feel that it is perfectly justifiable fair use. Copyright draws a boundary between the private ownership of IP and the public's use of it, and as copyrights have been increased in an effort to nickel-and-dime the consumer out of as much cash as possible, the public's benefit from these works (the entire reason copyrights are granted in the first place) has diminished. In this case it is the very concrete loss of the right to learn from and imitate art and one's culture. All art is imitation. Every artist in every era has imitated the work of his predecessors. If artists of today are so unwilling to share their work with students, they may derive from this greed an unexpected effect:
If they (or their handlers) are unwilling to grant the modicum of freedom with their works that is fair use, quotation, and educational, they may find themselves omitted from historical record. The medium on which most music is recorded, nowdays, is CD. Once the CD stops becoming popular (i.e., the kids who listened to it grow up) the only way to preserve it is to start copying it. But if it's illegal (and indeed impossible) to copy the CD, it won't make its way into educational materials, won't be studied as a period in music history, and in a hundred years or so, it will all but vanish from our culture. So the artists who want their kids and great grand kids and great great grandkids to be the only ones allowed to copy their material: think carefully before you wish for that. Your material is already, in my opinion, in grave danger of vanishing from the face of the earth altogether.
Finally, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the surest indication of success. If no one imitates your songs, they probably aren't that popular. And if no band ever tries to clone your act (by first learning your songs, then imitating them), you probably won't make it into anyone's hall of fame, either.
As if this was part of the issue. I program computers for a living.
I think you should work for the next year, with only an advance, then at the end of the year not be paid anymore.
I think I have. Actually, I didn't get paid anything that year. I subsisted on the good will of friends.
ho are you to decide that since you can copy their work it has no value, I CAN go to your house with a rifle and take everything I want from your house.
God DAMN it that is not the same at all. Where do you get this shit? You've got to be the most irrational person I've met all day. How the fuck does two people trading tablature take money out of the artists' pocket? How? When is the amateur guitarist going to go down to the store and find copies of tab somehow made by other amateurs? How is tablature considered to be "ripping off." I would like to point out that if I couldn't get the tab I'd just pick it out by ear. I can pick out just about anything I want to by ear. Am I stealing from the artists if I just bypass the entire process and DO IT MYSELF? That is really what's the issue here. Let me repeat it so you can see it, and have it tatooed to your fucking forehead so you don't forget it: IF YOU WANT SOMEONE TO HEAR YOUR WORK YOU MUST EXPOSE IT TO THEIR EARS AT SOME POINT! There is the associated risk that they may imitate you. And you might not make a dime out of that transaction. But it is not neccesary to nickel and dime your audience for the pleasure of your work. Doing so will just piss them off and drive them away. If they enjoy you they will support you. They will arrive at your shows and buy your t-shirts and hang on your every word. If they do not you will have to find something else to do for a living. That is where I am today. But you must accept the risk like everyone else, and get the hell used to it.
You're already pretty dull. If you cannot view music and art as anything but property, you haven't grasped their fundamental worth anyway.
Yesterday I rented the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie. It was supposed to be entertaining to the kids, but it was kind of flat. After the movie we watched the "deleted scenes" as my son calls them. The daughter of Jay Ward, creator of the original series, apparently had started to try to make the movie almost immediately after his death in 1989. Her description of the film was a "fine, family oriented property." I don't know about you, but when I go to see a film, I don't consider myself to be viewing a property. That's what I do when I go looking for a house. I can't buy a film from the maker. I can buy a copy of it. But the real payback, for any person with genuine creativities, is ultimately not the money. The money is not why I create. I do not write songs for money, I do not write essays or books for money. I do them because they need to be done. I have invested thousands of dollars in musical instruments because I need to play them. Not because I expect to make money off them. I do not collect bass guitars because I expect to sell them in twenty years. I have them because I need them like a drug addict needs heroin, or a fourteen-year-old needs to jack off. It's an unstoppable urge that has no reason and no excuse. My 1973 Rickenbacker 4001 has a sound that I FUCKING NEED. I sit at my job all day and sometimes I can feel the strings beneath my fingers. It relieves my tension. I tap on office furniture with my right hand to the rhythm of songs. I fret imaginary notes with my left hand when no one's looking. I whistle in the elevator and harmonize to the songs I hear in my head.
And I own every single note I play or write. I own it all, more truly than I own my house and my cars and all the things inside them. I own the fruits of my intellectual labor because they are original to me and clearly mine. When I play someone a recording of me, they never doubt that it is me because that's my voice singing on the recording. When I show someone an essay or story I have written they never question whether I copied it from the Internet because they recognize my voice in the words.
And it is for these reasons that I find the entire concept of intellectual property to be, well, fucking absurd.
At that point we might as well blow out our brains
What would make me want to blow out my brains would be a world where no one could talk about music, or literature, without a plethora(tm) of (c) idiotic trademarks(r) and Capitalized Trendy Words, and Licensing fee$ interfering. When art becomes all about money, it becomes prostitution, and artists become whores. Look no further than Hollywood for what happens when it becomes about the money. Once in a very long while an independent filmmaker comes along and turns the industry on its ear, by making genuinely inspired, original art for no other reason than the joy of it. The year following, we see eight or ten shameless, lifeless ripoffs following in its wake.
the idea of completely free IP sickens me
Free IP didn't stop Virgil from writing the Aneid. Bare substinence living didn't stop Mozart from writing some of the most brilliant music of all time. Hand-to-mouth returns on their efforts never stopped the Van Goghs or the Edgar Allan Poes. And as thousands of slashdotters will immediately attest to, lack of profits do not stop contributors from putting their mark on the Linux source code. Intellectual efforts are created because someone needs to do it. Creativity is beyond business models or investor expectations. If you don't understand how that works, well I pity you that you've never had the fire inside you. There's nothing like it in the world.
Let's ask George Harrison. I'm sure he's got a highly sarcastic reply.
Seriously, there are only seven available chords in any given key anyway. I ii iii IV V vi and vii. Most rock musicians to my knowledge do not bother with vii as it's highly dissonant and hard to play on a guitar besides. Almost every song you will hear on the radio alternates betwee I and V and IV, unless you listen to the "alternative" station in your area, where you will hear fucked up minor chords in no key in particular.
Shifting the key doesn't make much difference except to people with perfect pitch. A large number of alternative groups drop their guitars down to eb or d (nirvana, korn, etc) anyway.
Chordless riffs (the opening of "Day Tripper" if you're over 40, or the opening of Rush "Limelight" or Ozzy's "Crazy Train" if you're an '80's metalhead, or to PJ's "Jeremy" if you're an alterna-dude) qualify as melody, and you really couldn't disguise them without ruining them. If you flattened the G in Day tripper to an F# to put it in the same key as the rest of the riff it would just barely be recognizable as the wrong riff. Alter any other note in the riff by a semitone and it becomes cacophany. Alter it by more than a semitone and it becomes increasingly difficult to play.
add in new notes (according to a map),
That would definitely obscure things, but only if done in a random way. You can add trills and grace notes to most existing songs and you'll just sound like you're showing off.
and change the tempo
Since tablature doesn't contain rhythm, this won't make any difference.
Although, now that this interesting fact has re-occurred to me, I wonder if tab can be seen as infringing at all? Since it doesn't contain that vital third dimension in music, the rhythm, they can't really be considered as a copy of the music. It's one reason why I don't use tab anymore, becase most bass parts are rhythmic, not melodic, and tab can only show me so many times that I play an E for eighteen mind-numbing measures.
Anyway, what I think is far more likely is that the greed-driven activity of lawyers will once again drive a harmless activity underground, make more previously harmless people into angry dissidents, fester discontent in our society, foster disrespect for the law in general, and push us all one more step closer to a societal collapse. Thanks, Harry Fox Agency.
It's the copyright holder's choice and publishing the tabs without permission is the equivalent to hacking into Microsoft's computers, stealing the source code to Win98 and posting it online for the world to see.
God this analogy is fucking weak. First of all, as people trying to copy-protect music have discovered, if you want someone to hear your music, eventually you have to unpack the data and let it reach their ears. You have to expose yourself to copying if you want to have a business at all.
Secondly, if you want to have music, you have to have musicians. Musicians who don't go to the Juliard school of music usually don't get a lot of either money or encouragement. To learn how to play the easiest method is to learn someone else's songs. Right now I'm doing that for a student of mine. She has brought me CD's she would like to play, and I am learning the songs and transcribing them for her. If I were not doing this she would be subjecting herself to a ludicrous game of hunt-the-music. There is no way in hell all of the sheet music to all of the CD's in the world can be published. Even when it is it's frequently not accurate. I've got a Rush book which is filled with errors and omissions, and it's all arranged on two staves, as if some pianist would sit down and churn through "Limelight."
If musicians are unable to learn songs they know, they will surely never progress to writing songs, and the Harry Fucking Fox Agency will have no one to "protect" from copyright infringement.
I think transcribing a tab for amateur musicians' edification easily falls under fair use. It's used to illustrate a point or as an educational tool, or for hobbyists to share amongst one another. It is not demonstrably taking money out of someone's pocket -- let's face it, what 16-year-old kid has eight bucks to blow on learning a single song? If that had been my option back then I would have simply stuck to learning it myself.
This is really just the gigantic fist of a gigantic corporate monolith, squashing that which it does not comprehend. No good will come of it, I guarantee. If amateur tab is driven off the web, it will show up in furtive emails and newsgroup postings instead. It will get encrypted, and it will be impossible to trace or control.
BTW Harry Fox is about the protection of the songwriter.
Was I supposed to laugh at this?