This keyboard is also a multitrack audio recording studio. You'll be plugging in microphones and guitars and recording them along with the keyboard parts.
Why does it have an LCD display? So you can graphically edit the audio you record. So you can program the synthesizer functions. So you can manage huge multi-gigabyte libraries of samples and loops and sounds. So you can sync up video and record musical soundtracks for TV and film.
Why does it have a CD burner? You record music in the keyboard's hard drive, and when you are done, you mix it down and master it to a CD. So you can make records and sell CDs. CDs were for music before they were for computer data, remember? Seems perfectly obvious to me.
This is not just a synthesizer or sampler. It's a complete portable recording studio.
By the way, the thing is expected to list for US$7,000.
At that price it damn well better burn its own CDs.
mini Mac. No viruses. No spyware. Higher security. Let them download everything they want and enjoy the full multimedia experience with no restrictions.
Easier to use. As close to trouble-free as a computer can be, for the user and the tech support (you, their son or grandson).
Grandma still has spam and phishing to worry about, but what platform doesn't?
I've been on the "Buy Grandma a Macintosh" campaign for years. And now it makes more sense than ever.
Microsoft and Logitech make USB keyboards that have a special driver for Mac OS X to swap the Windows and Alt keys.
I have been using a Microsoft Natural USB keyboard with my Mac for more than five years.
In addition, Mac OS X10.3 supports two-button scroll wheel USB mice with no extra driver needed--unless you need left-handed. Then you need a driver. But again, Microsoft and Logitech provided Mac OS X drivers for all their products.
You can buy a four-port external USB hub for $20 or less, and plug it into one of the four ports. That would give you 5 ports altogether. You can get an 8-port USB hub for only a few dollars more.
Or you can get the Bluetooth option for connecting wireless Bluetooth peripherals such as cordless mouse and keyboard, certain cell phones and digital cameras, certain PDAs like Palm and Blackberry, etc.
Good luck finding artists willing to produce art under these terms.
Would you invest $200,000 in making an album or a movie if your only hope of restitution was tips sent in by people you'll never meet, starting one or two years after your project is completed (and paid for)?
What do you do for a living now? Would you work full time for an entire year with no pay whatsoever, anticipating that people you'll never meet will send you tips next year?
If you were a bank, or production company, or venture capital firm, and an artist came to you and asked for a $200,000 loan to make a movie, explaining that the money would be repaid by strangers who might submit tips a year or two from now, would you loan money to the artist?
Tom Scholz, legendary engineer/bandleader for hte rock band Boston, just last month gave an interview published at Gibson.com where he stated that he knew he was going to have to give up on analog reel-to-reel in the next year or two, because nobody would be manufacturing the tape anymore. He has switched to ProTools but hates it, and says he has to have an extra full-time professional engineer on his payroll just to operate ProTools. And he goes on and on about the specific limitations of digital recording (frequent computer crashes) and the digital medium, and the audible superiority of analog tape.
"Classic Sound of Boston is Still Tom Scholz, Still Recording on Tape"
http://www.gibson.com/absolutenm/templates/Featu re Template.aspx?articleid=175&zoneid=2 ------------ -
The big problem here is that analog tape is the universal archival medium.
100 years from now, engineers will be able to play back 2-inch 24-track tape if it's been carefully environmentally preserved. But in 2104, who will be able to access and remix the individual tracks on an IDE hard disk of an elaborately mixed album recorded in Cubase SX 2.2 optimized for a Motorola G4 processor running Mac OS X 10.2? Nobody. All we will have, if we are lucky, is a 16-bit CD with a stereo mix.
In 1997 I interned at Crawford Productions, a huge broadcast post-production facility in Atlanta Georgia. The Martin Luther King Foundation brought in Reverend King's entire library of sermons and speeches, which were on 1/4 inch reel-to-reel and cassette, for archival restoration. While Crawford made DATs and CDs, they explained to the Martin Luther King Foundation that they were also re-copying everything to fresh 1/4 inch analog tape, and that this would be the preferred archival method and the tapes they should most jealously protect.
The Americans spell it one way, and the British (and all other English speaking peoples besides the Americans) spell it the other way.
Same with "color" and "colour" and many other examples.
It's been that way since the American, Noah Webster, wrote his dictionaries the early 1800s. He not only single-handedly "reformed" English spelling, he also wanted to create a distinction between "American English" and that of Great Britain, possibly for political reasons or a sense of nationalism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster
If a certain percentage of people who visit your store frequently shoplift hundreds of dollars of merchandise from your store, when you catch them you don't refer to them as "your customers". You refer to them as "the thieves that robbed my store," even if some of them may have actually purchased one or two items on an earlier visit before they came in and stole dozens of items.
By the same token, if somebody steals dozens of songs and distributes them to others, they are certainly not "customers" of the recording industry. They are shoplifters who are stealing from the recording industry.
And please don't forget that the musicians, artists, songwriters, and singers on the pirated music are themselves members of the recording industry, and they depend on the RIAA for their paychecks.
All previous versions were referred to as Emagic Logic.
Today the existing Emagic web site essentially went away (although there is some new information there).
Emagic is a German company and Apple bought it two years ago and stopped its development of Windows products.
So this release of Logic 7 represents the culmination of a huge realignment of music and audio software on the Mac platform, with profound implications for the market and third-party companies that make competing and complimentary products.
In the United States, you can't take a copyrighted film and alter any part of it without the permission of the copyright holder.
Even more basic is the fact that you also can't SHOW a copyrighted film in a theater without a contract from the copyright holder. Let alone sell tickets.
You can't take a copyrighted anything and modify it without the permission of the copyright holder.
Under the Compulsory License provision for audio recordings, You CAN take a copyrighted and commercially released song recording and make your own original recording of the melody and arrangement with parody lyrics (a la Weird Al Yankovic)as long as you pay the compulsory license fee to the copyright holder. The copyright holder CANNOT deny you permission to do this. But under this arrangement you can't sample any of the actual audio from the actual original.
If you want to sample actual audio from the original, you can't do it unless you get contractural permission from the copyright holder--and that usually involves licensing and money.
But rights for film, theater and television are called "grand rights" and are different than rights for songs and audio recordings.
The point here is that this theater wanted to use George Lucas' actual film (which is copyrighted) and change the soundtrack. They might have been able to create their own original film, without using any footage or images from the real Star Wars. But what they were trying to do here is clearly a no-go, legally.
A couple of years ago, as reported here on Slashdot, a company wanted to release DVDs of movies like "Titanic" with the nudity hidden, by digitally painting clothing over the nude actors. They wanted to pay the licensing fees to the copyright holders and sell the DVDs to people who were offended by R-rated movies but would be willing to buy them if the reasons for the "R" were removed. The copyright holders, including the film company that produced "Titanic" rightly stepped in and prevented this from happening.
If you create a work of art and you copyright it, you have the absolute right to control the way that this art is seen in public, and to protect yourself from having what you created altered in any way that doesn't suit you.
The "parody" question comes into play when somebody makes a piece of art that is 100% their own creation which parodies an existing work of art (Mel Brooks' movie "Spaceballs," which is a parody of "Star Wars"). But that is clearly not what the theater in question was wanting to do.
So, no, modifying copyrighted material for parody is not fair use.
The laws defining the concept of "fair use" don't mention parody at all.
No. I'm suggesting that successful songs continue to earn money each year for the songwriters. If you are a songwriter, and you have a succesful song, you want to continue to earn a small amount of money annually from that song not only through your working career but also through your retirement years. You want your wife and children to continue to get annual income checks from that song after you are dead.
Generally the annual checks songwriters actually see from the songs they have written are small, from the first profitable year on. Increasing the term increases the chances that the money will add up over time.
Of course writers of big hit songs make a lot of money in the first two or three years. But these are very few and far between. Most songwriters don't hit it big like that.
If you made your living from being a professional musician, you would have a better perspective on this. Most people with regular jobs get paid in full for the 40-hour week's work they do at the end of every two weeks or every month at the most. But recording artists and songwriters don't get that opportunity. Typically a musician who writes a song has to collect a modest amount of money each year over many years. Hopefully he writes a lot of successful songs and they add up to a decent living. It's not anything like being an IT worker.
My concern in all this is that the average Slashdotter never thinks of this issue from the point of view of the person who is trying to make a living making music. A song or other artistic creation represents a person's labor and livelihood. The average Slashdotter only thinks of how he'll be able to enjoy other peoples' labor for free if copyrights are diminished and peer-to-peer piracy becomes free from legal entanglements and prosecution.
Try putting yourself in the shoes of a musician for a change. I can't imagine why I would want to deprive him or his family from earning money on what he has created.
All music used to be effectively public domain until the first couple of decades of the previous century, when industrial society developed the means to collect royalties and enforce copyrights. Then music, art and entertainment became a means for people to earn a living, and became an industry that fuelled economic growth and prosperity by creating more jobs. Now, because of the Internet and computer technology, and mostly because of non-musicians and non-artists who have no regard for others' property and the law (such as most Slashdotters, it seems) we are reverting to the barbaric days where musicians and artists have to go back to being paupers if they're not lucky enough to obtain patronage. I say, support the musicians.
An extension of the European term to match the US would be particularly damaging to the public domain and efforts such as the Internet Archive as well as increasing the control that the recording industry holds over performers.
An extension would also improve on the currently meager chances that professional songwriters and musicians could actually make income from their labor, over the long term.
Songwriters have to eat and raise children just like the rest of us working stiffs. Very few of them get rich and famous.
Original Agreement, according to Bloomberg News
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· Score: 3, Informative
The two companies' original agreement on the Apple trademark, signed in 1981, allowed the Californian company to use the name only for the sale of computers. Apple Computer later used the logo for computers to edit and record music, prompting the Beatles' company to file a lawsuit in 1989. The companies settled their dispute in 1991 and signed a new agreement after a trial lasting more than 100 days at the High Court.
That contract stipulated Apple Computer could use the logo for computers, data processing and telecommunications, while the Beatles could retain it for music, according to documents filed by the pop group's lawyers at the High Court.
"The High Court" refers to the court of the United Kingdom in London, which is where these judgements have been made.
Also the Bloomberg article erroneously uses the word "logo" where they should say "trade name" in reference to "Apple".
I remember the circumstances now...there were sequencers and a primitive third-party hardware music synthesizer called the AlphaSyntari that was on a board you could install in an Apple II computer. This predated MIDI by a couple of years and was practically the first music composing system available for a personal computer.
The Apple Macintosh, in 1984, was the first brand of personal computer that had audio out as a stock feature. A third-party company made an external box called the MacRecorder that enabled the recording of short snippets of 8-bit mono audio. This incensed the Beatles and caused them to reopen litigation!
Musicians of all stripes will agree with me that most all of the innovation in personal-computer-based music recording took place on the Macintosh platform (well, there was the Atari platform in the early days, but it didn't survive and the Atari developers ported their stuff to Macintosh after that). All the stuff we take for granted today, from Pro Tools to Finale to Logic, which is featured in the recording of every genre of music you can think of, from punk to classical to techno, has been possible because of the Mac platform. (I am not discounting the fact that for some time now there have also been excellent tools for doing this on the Windows platform as well).
And to think that the Beatles have been trying to prevent this from happening all these years! Or, more precisely, they thought it their business to prevent this from happening on the Apple computer platform simply because of their company name!
The Original Lawsuit
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Beatles vs Apple
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· Score: 5, Informative
The original lawsuit of Apple Corps against Apple Computer took place when it came to George Harrison's attention that third-party companies were writing MIDI sequencing programs that ran on Apple computers--Apple II's at the time, and later Macintoshes. This was in the early 1980s.
MIDI sequencing programs are used by professional musicians to compose, arrange and record music. IN those days Apple didn't make or market these programs; they just made the hardware and the operating system. But the Beatles did not sue the third party MIDI sequencer software companies for their products; they sued Apple Computer because they had a product named "Apple" which could be used for composing music, and playing back the music so composed.
It's mind-boggling. MIDI sequencers first appeared around 1982, and have existed in all kinds of specialized keyboard instruments and electronic music hardware as well as on every computer platform/operating system known to Man. But it was the pairing of the concept of a MIDI sequencer with the brand-name "Apple" that set the Beatles on the path of litigation. Never mind that the Beatles' Apple Corps never marketed any computer platforms that could run software for composing music. How could any sane person confuse Apple Computer with the Beatles' Apple Corps?
But, sadly, Apple Computer is obviously in breach of the agreement they clearly made in 1991, and they will have to pay for it. Not only do they have the iPod, Apple now owns and operates emagic.de, which makes Garage Band and the Logic line of professional music composition and recording programs--and that is in direct violation of the original settlement, in a sense, more so than the iPod.
In 1991, if they could not have reached a more favorable agreement, Apple Computer should have simply settled with the Beatles' Apple Corps and agreed to change the name of the computer company to something else, thereby regaining the right to sell their computers and develop music software without any risk of further legal action. They could have become the Macintosh Computer Company and avoided this colossal debacle.
I wonder if Sir Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey et al realize what tremendous harm they are doing to the development of the computer industry and its competitive environment. Any severe blow to Apple is a big boost to Microsoft and a disincentive to healthy competition.
Then there's the fact that virtually every musical recording you've heard in the last fifteen years has had an Apple Macintosh computer involved in its creation at some stage, usually in the recording studio, sometimes on the concert stage as well. I can't imagine why McCartney and company are so hell-bent on damaging that achievement.
Grandma does not have to become a computer security expert. All she needs is a Macintosh.
Friends don't let elderly friends drive Windows on the Internet.
Broadcast Music International collects royalties for songwriters. It does not make a profit! It collects royalties for songs recorded by record companies (and sold as CDs or downloads) and broadcast by radio stations. BMI then turns the royalties over to the songwriters, keeping a percentage for operating costs.
The Recording Industry Association is a trade organization that represents the interests of record companies, who sell records.
There is no connection between the two, per se.
But it is a distortion to say that BMI makes a profit. What this article is refering to is that, by their count, the community of professional songwriters in America is making more money than they were the last time somebody counted.
You must also note that there are two other organizations in the US that collect songwriting royalties on behalf of songwriters. One is ASCAP, which is non-profit, and the other is SESAC, which is a for-profit, private company.
If you are a professional songwriter, you affiliate with either ASCAP, BMI or SESAC for your career, and the one you select is the one that collects royalty money for you.
MS Word has the easiest drag-and-drop interface for throwing down ideas and dragging them into hierarchies. Headings and subheadings can be collapsed and expanded, and dragging a header to a new location moves everything nested under it.
This is invaluable for constructing documents and manuals of, say, 50 pages through several hundred pages in length.
If you compose a long document with a table of contents, you can construct all your chapters, headers and subheaders, the whole thing in Outline View and place your body paragraphs underneath the headings. Then reorganizing the structure of the document (a major task) becomes a snap. You can also use style sheets to give your headers a consistent look.
OpenOffice and AbiWord ignore outlining. This is one piece of Word's functionality that they have never felt it a priority to clone.
I know this is a feature that few people use, but I can't live without it. If I need to compose a letter of a few pages, there are any number of programs I can use. But if I have to write a medium-sized technical manual, there is nothing out there that will do what Microsoft Word can do, for me.
For years I have suggested to the OpenOffice team that they incorporate an Outline View like MS Word's, but they have never responded to this. I guess I'm in the minority.
All broadcast entities and production companies have what they call a Bureau of Standards and Practices. This is a group which determines what is appropriate content for that company to create and/or distribute. They are given the task of reveiwing everything that goes through the company and determining whether or not it lives up to the Standards and Practices. If it does not, they make changes, or they reject the project altogether.
Many years ago these Bureaus of Standards and Practices were called Bureaus of Censorship. They have the same function today that they did many years ago.
When any organization established rules and guidelines on what they will create or distribute, we call this "being principled" and "having values, and "policing your own neighborhood." Note that neither I nor anyone else is telling any organization what those values should be. It's up to them to define their own.
Richard Dreyfuss knew he was producing a program for PBS, and that it would have to pass FCC guidelines as well as PBS' own internal guidelines. Richard Dreyfuss knew darn well what those guidelines were, and he knew that PBS' Bureau of Standards and Practices would review his work and approve it or send it back for revisions. Richard is being a pompous bully by deliberately running afoul of those standards and practices and then complaining that it was some political plot that thwarted his efforts.
If Richard Dreyfuss wanted to direct a program full of material that was not appropriate to the standards and practices of PBS, he was free to take his production to some other broadcast network, say Showtime or HBO. That's how our free society works.
Richard Dreyfuss made a movie for public television. If he can't understand what the guidelines are for language or content according to the FCC and PBS rules, he's not being a competent director or editor.
The FCC and PBS are simply asking the production company of the movie to adhere to the FCC and PBS standards and practices, and to use good taste and common sense. This is perfectly normal.
Richard, calm down and behave.
The problem is that Slashdot-frequenting code-heads believe in open source--which is a very new idea.
Visual artists and musicians do not believe in open source. Visual artists and musicians are trained, and taught by experience, that making art and music for free is very bad business. This is because it's extraordinarily difficult for visual artists and musicians to make money from their hard-won talents in any event. They want to make dollars from their art, not from the day job delivering pizza that they have to take in order to finance their art and music hobby.
That being understood, there are two ways that artists and musicians create work for distribution: 1) Royalties and 2) Work for hire.
With royalties, the artist/musician retains ownership of the work and has the right to collect royalties on sales.
With work-for-hire, you draw up a contract that says that you are paying the artist/musician for the work outright. You will own the work from that point forward. The artist agrees to take the money up front and what they create is no longer their property and they forfeit any right to collect any more money from it.
So you need to find young, un-established artists that are willing to do the job for a reasonably small sum, and draw up a good work-for-hire contract.
You can find examples of these contracts in several books on music business which you can find at the local library or on Amazon.
I second the motion for Agendus and Agendus for Windows. Can't live without them. Amazingly compact and functional and well-thought-out. I've used Agendus on my Palms since 1998. The Agendus for Windows desktop application is only a couple years old.
Agendus for Windows does not have custom conduits. It works with the existing Palm HotSync conduits, and stores all the data in a Palm- and Palm Desktop-native format. One less thing to go wrong, and one less problem to troubleshoot.
There is another rusting Saturn V in even worse shape at the NASA museum and space camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I believe they're soliciting donations to restore that one as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get this straight. The person who made the previous post did not realize that he was writing about a musical instrument--a synthesizer.
He thought he was writing about the computer input device that you type on.
Geez. Read up a little before you post.
Korg has been one of the leading electronic musical instrument companies for the last 30 years. Haven't heard of them?
Dude, read the documentation.
This keyboard is also a multitrack audio recording studio. You'll be plugging in microphones and guitars and recording them along with the keyboard parts.
Why does it have an LCD display? So you can graphically edit the audio you record. So you can program the synthesizer functions. So you can manage huge multi-gigabyte libraries of samples and loops and sounds. So you can sync up video and record musical soundtracks for TV and film.
Why does it have a CD burner? You record music in the keyboard's hard drive, and when you are done, you mix it down and master it to a CD. So you can make records and sell CDs. CDs were for music before they were for computer data, remember? Seems perfectly obvious to me.
This is not just a synthesizer or sampler. It's a complete portable recording studio.
By the way, the thing is expected to list for US$7,000.
At that price it damn well better burn its own CDs.
mini Mac. No viruses. No spyware. Higher security. Let them download everything they want and enjoy the full multimedia experience with no restrictions.
Easier to use. As close to trouble-free as a computer can be, for the user and the tech support (you, their son or grandson).
Grandma still has spam and phishing to worry about, but what platform doesn't?
I've been on the "Buy Grandma a Macintosh" campaign for years. And now it makes more sense than ever.
Who cares about market share?
Apple is a very profitable company with no debt and huge cash reserves.
They will never dominate the market but they will make a tidy profit selling their superior machines. What's wrong with that?
Microsoft and Logitech make USB keyboards that have a special driver for Mac OS X to swap the Windows and Alt keys. I have been using a Microsoft Natural USB keyboard with my Mac for more than five years. In addition, Mac OS X10.3 supports two-button scroll wheel USB mice with no extra driver needed--unless you need left-handed. Then you need a driver. But again, Microsoft and Logitech provided Mac OS X drivers for all their products.
You can buy a four-port external USB hub for $20 or less, and plug it into one of the four ports. That would give you 5 ports altogether. You can get an 8-port USB hub for only a few dollars more.
Or you can get the Bluetooth option for connecting wireless Bluetooth peripherals such as cordless mouse and keyboard, certain cell phones and digital cameras, certain PDAs like Palm and Blackberry, etc.
Good luck finding artists willing to produce art under these terms.
Would you invest $200,000 in making an album or a movie if your only hope of restitution was tips sent in by people you'll never meet, starting one or two years after your project is completed (and paid for)?
What do you do for a living now? Would you work full time for an entire year with no pay whatsoever, anticipating that people you'll never meet will send you tips next year?
If you were a bank, or production company, or venture capital firm, and an artist came to you and asked for a $200,000 loan to make a movie, explaining that the money would be repaid by strangers who might submit tips a year or two from now, would you loan money to the artist?
I don't think so.
Tom Scholz, legendary engineer/bandleader for hte rock band Boston, just last month gave an interview published at Gibson.com where he stated that he knew he was going to have to give up on analog reel-to-reel in the next year or two, because nobody would be manufacturing the tape anymore. He has switched to ProTools but hates it, and says he has to have an extra full-time professional engineer on his payroll just to operate ProTools. And he goes on and on about the specific limitations of digital recording (frequent computer crashes) and the digital medium, and the audible superiority of analog tape.
u re Template.aspx?articleid=175&zoneid=2- -
"Classic Sound of Boston is Still Tom Scholz, Still Recording on Tape"
http://www.gibson.com/absolutenm/templates/Feat
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The big problem here is that analog tape is the universal archival medium.
100 years from now, engineers will be able to play back 2-inch 24-track tape if it's been carefully environmentally preserved. But in 2104, who will be able to access and remix the individual tracks on an IDE hard disk of an elaborately mixed album recorded in Cubase SX 2.2 optimized for a Motorola G4 processor running Mac OS X 10.2? Nobody. All we will have, if we are lucky, is a 16-bit CD with a stereo mix.
In 1997 I interned at Crawford Productions, a huge broadcast post-production facility in Atlanta Georgia. The Martin Luther King Foundation brought in Reverend King's entire library of sermons and speeches, which were on 1/4 inch reel-to-reel and cassette, for archival restoration. While Crawford made DATs and CDs, they explained to the Martin Luther King Foundation that they were also re-copying everything to fresh 1/4 inch analog tape, and that this would be the preferred archival method and the tapes they should most jealously protect.
What now?
The Americans spell it one way, and the British (and all other English speaking peoples besides the Americans) spell it the other way. Same with "color" and "colour" and many other examples. It's been that way since the American, Noah Webster, wrote his dictionaries the early 1800s. He not only single-handedly "reformed" English spelling, he also wanted to create a distinction between "American English" and that of Great Britain, possibly for political reasons or a sense of nationalism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster
If a certain percentage of people who visit your store frequently shoplift hundreds of dollars of merchandise from your store, when you catch them you don't refer to them as "your customers". You refer to them as "the thieves that robbed my store," even if some of them may have actually purchased one or two items on an earlier visit before they came in and stole dozens of items.
By the same token, if somebody steals dozens of songs and distributes them to others, they are certainly not "customers" of the recording industry. They are shoplifters who are stealing from the recording industry.
And please don't forget that the musicians, artists, songwriters, and singers on the pirated music are themselves members of the recording industry, and they depend on the RIAA for their paychecks.
All previous versions were referred to as Emagic Logic.
Today the existing Emagic web site essentially went away (although there is some new information there).
Emagic is a German company and Apple bought it two years ago and stopped its development of Windows products.
So this release of Logic 7 represents the culmination of a huge realignment of music and audio software on the Mac platform, with profound implications for the market and third-party companies that make competing and complimentary products.
Even more basic is the fact that you also can't SHOW a copyrighted film in a theater without a contract from the copyright holder. Let alone sell tickets.
You can't take a copyrighted anything and modify it without the permission of the copyright holder.
Under the Compulsory License provision for audio recordings, You CAN take a copyrighted and commercially released song recording and make your own original recording of the melody and arrangement with parody lyrics (a la Weird Al Yankovic)as long as you pay the compulsory license fee to the copyright holder. The copyright holder CANNOT deny you permission to do this. But under this arrangement you can't sample any of the actual audio from the actual original.
If you want to sample actual audio from the original, you can't do it unless you get contractural permission from the copyright holder--and that usually involves licensing and money.
But rights for film, theater and television are called "grand rights" and are different than rights for songs and audio recordings.
The point here is that this theater wanted to use George Lucas' actual film (which is copyrighted) and change the soundtrack. They might have been able to create their own original film, without using any footage or images from the real Star Wars. But what they were trying to do here is clearly a no-go, legally.
A couple of years ago, as reported here on Slashdot, a company wanted to release DVDs of movies like "Titanic" with the nudity hidden, by digitally painting clothing over the nude actors. They wanted to pay the licensing fees to the copyright holders and sell the DVDs to people who were offended by R-rated movies but would be willing to buy them if the reasons for the "R" were removed. The copyright holders, including the film company that produced "Titanic" rightly stepped in and prevented this from happening.
If you create a work of art and you copyright it, you have the absolute right to control the way that this art is seen in public, and to protect yourself from having what you created altered in any way that doesn't suit you.
The "parody" question comes into play when somebody makes a piece of art that is 100% their own creation which parodies an existing work of art (Mel Brooks' movie "Spaceballs," which is a parody of "Star Wars"). But that is clearly not what the theater in question was wanting to do.
So, no, modifying copyrighted material for parody is not fair use. The laws defining the concept of "fair use" don't mention parody at all.
Generally the annual checks songwriters actually see from the songs they have written are small, from the first profitable year on. Increasing the term increases the chances that the money will add up over time.
Of course writers of big hit songs make a lot of money in the first two or three years. But these are very few and far between. Most songwriters don't hit it big like that.
If you made your living from being a professional musician, you would have a better perspective on this. Most people with regular jobs get paid in full for the 40-hour week's work they do at the end of every two weeks or every month at the most. But recording artists and songwriters don't get that opportunity. Typically a musician who writes a song has to collect a modest amount of money each year over many years. Hopefully he writes a lot of successful songs and they add up to a decent living. It's not anything like being an IT worker.
My concern in all this is that the average Slashdotter never thinks of this issue from the point of view of the person who is trying to make a living making music. A song or other artistic creation represents a person's labor and livelihood. The average Slashdotter only thinks of how he'll be able to enjoy other peoples' labor for free if copyrights are diminished and peer-to-peer piracy becomes free from legal entanglements and prosecution.
Try putting yourself in the shoes of a musician for a change. I can't imagine why I would want to deprive him or his family from earning money on what he has created.
All music used to be effectively public domain until the first couple of decades of the previous century, when industrial society developed the means to collect royalties and enforce copyrights. Then music, art and entertainment became a means for people to earn a living, and became an industry that fuelled economic growth and prosperity by creating more jobs. Now, because of the Internet and computer technology, and mostly because of non-musicians and non-artists who have no regard for others' property and the law (such as most Slashdotters, it seems) we are reverting to the barbaric days where musicians and artists have to go back to being paupers if they're not lucky enough to obtain patronage. I say, support the musicians.
Songwriters have to eat and raise children just like the rest of us working stiffs. Very few of them get rich and famous.
From February 25, 2004:
"The High Court" refers to the court of the United Kingdom in London, which is where these judgements have been made.Also the Bloomberg article erroneously uses the word "logo" where they should say "trade name" in reference to "Apple".
I remember the circumstances now...there were sequencers and a primitive third-party hardware music synthesizer called the AlphaSyntari that was on a board you could install in an Apple II computer. This predated MIDI by a couple of years and was practically the first music composing system available for a personal computer.
The Apple Macintosh, in 1984, was the first brand of personal computer that had audio out as a stock feature. A third-party company made an external box called the MacRecorder that enabled the recording of short snippets of 8-bit mono audio. This incensed the Beatles and caused them to reopen litigation!
Musicians of all stripes will agree with me that most all of the innovation in personal-computer-based music recording took place on the Macintosh platform (well, there was the Atari platform in the early days, but it didn't survive and the Atari developers ported their stuff to Macintosh after that). All the stuff we take for granted today, from Pro Tools to Finale to Logic, which is featured in the recording of every genre of music you can think of, from punk to classical to techno, has been possible because of the Mac platform. (I am not discounting the fact that for some time now there have also been excellent tools for doing this on the Windows platform as well).
And to think that the Beatles have been trying to prevent this from happening all these years! Or, more precisely, they thought it their business to prevent this from happening on the Apple computer platform simply because of their company name!
MIDI sequencing programs are used by professional musicians to compose, arrange and record music. IN those days Apple didn't make or market these programs; they just made the hardware and the operating system. But the Beatles did not sue the third party MIDI sequencer software companies for their products; they sued Apple Computer because they had a product named "Apple" which could be used for composing music, and playing back the music so composed.
It's mind-boggling. MIDI sequencers first appeared around 1982, and have existed in all kinds of specialized keyboard instruments and electronic music hardware as well as on every computer platform/operating system known to Man. But it was the pairing of the concept of a MIDI sequencer with the brand-name "Apple" that set the Beatles on the path of litigation. Never mind that the Beatles' Apple Corps never marketed any computer platforms that could run software for composing music. How could any sane person confuse Apple Computer with the Beatles' Apple Corps?
But, sadly, Apple Computer is obviously in breach of the agreement they clearly made in 1991, and they will have to pay for it. Not only do they have the iPod, Apple now owns and operates emagic.de, which makes Garage Band and the Logic line of professional music composition and recording programs--and that is in direct violation of the original settlement, in a sense, more so than the iPod.
In 1991, if they could not have reached a more favorable agreement, Apple Computer should have simply settled with the Beatles' Apple Corps and agreed to change the name of the computer company to something else, thereby regaining the right to sell their computers and develop music software without any risk of further legal action. They could have become the Macintosh Computer Company and avoided this colossal debacle.
I wonder if Sir Paul McCartney and Richard Starkey et al realize what tremendous harm they are doing to the development of the computer industry and its competitive environment. Any severe blow to Apple is a big boost to Microsoft and a disincentive to healthy competition.
Then there's the fact that virtually every musical recording you've heard in the last fifteen years has had an Apple Macintosh computer involved in its creation at some stage, usually in the recording studio, sometimes on the concert stage as well. I can't imagine why McCartney and company are so hell-bent on damaging that achievement.
Grandma does not have to become a computer security expert. All she needs is a Macintosh.
Friends don't let elderly friends drive Windows on the Internet.
Broadcast Music International collects royalties for songwriters. It does not make a profit! It collects royalties for songs recorded by record companies (and sold as CDs or downloads) and broadcast by radio stations. BMI then turns the royalties over to the songwriters, keeping a percentage for operating costs. The Recording Industry Association is a trade organization that represents the interests of record companies, who sell records. There is no connection between the two, per se. But it is a distortion to say that BMI makes a profit. What this article is refering to is that, by their count, the community of professional songwriters in America is making more money than they were the last time somebody counted. You must also note that there are two other organizations in the US that collect songwriting royalties on behalf of songwriters. One is ASCAP, which is non-profit, and the other is SESAC, which is a for-profit, private company. If you are a professional songwriter, you affiliate with either ASCAP, BMI or SESAC for your career, and the one you select is the one that collects royalty money for you.
This is invaluable for constructing documents and manuals of, say, 50 pages through several hundred pages in length.
If you compose a long document with a table of contents, you can construct all your chapters, headers and subheaders, the whole thing in Outline View and place your body paragraphs underneath the headings. Then reorganizing the structure of the document (a major task) becomes a snap. You can also use style sheets to give your headers a consistent look.
OpenOffice and AbiWord ignore outlining. This is one piece of Word's functionality that they have never felt it a priority to clone.
I know this is a feature that few people use, but I can't live without it. If I need to compose a letter of a few pages, there are any number of programs I can use. But if I have to write a medium-sized technical manual, there is nothing out there that will do what Microsoft Word can do, for me.
For years I have suggested to the OpenOffice team that they incorporate an Outline View like MS Word's, but they have never responded to this. I guess I'm in the minority.
Arlo Guthrie will be very disappointed.
Many years ago these Bureaus of Standards and Practices were called Bureaus of Censorship. They have the same function today that they did many years ago.
When any organization established rules and guidelines on what they will create or distribute, we call this "being principled" and "having values, and "policing your own neighborhood." Note that neither I nor anyone else is telling any organization what those values should be. It's up to them to define their own.
Richard Dreyfuss knew he was producing a program for PBS, and that it would have to pass FCC guidelines as well as PBS' own internal guidelines. Richard Dreyfuss knew darn well what those guidelines were, and he knew that PBS' Bureau of Standards and Practices would review his work and approve it or send it back for revisions. Richard is being a pompous bully by deliberately running afoul of those standards and practices and then complaining that it was some political plot that thwarted his efforts.
If Richard Dreyfuss wanted to direct a program full of material that was not appropriate to the standards and practices of PBS, he was free to take his production to some other broadcast network, say Showtime or HBO. That's how our free society works.
Richard Dreyfuss made a movie for public television. If he can't understand what the guidelines are for language or content according to the FCC and PBS rules, he's not being a competent director or editor. The FCC and PBS are simply asking the production company of the movie to adhere to the FCC and PBS standards and practices, and to use good taste and common sense. This is perfectly normal. Richard, calm down and behave.
The problem is that Slashdot-frequenting code-heads believe in open source--which is a very new idea. Visual artists and musicians do not believe in open source. Visual artists and musicians are trained, and taught by experience, that making art and music for free is very bad business. This is because it's extraordinarily difficult for visual artists and musicians to make money from their hard-won talents in any event. They want to make dollars from their art, not from the day job delivering pizza that they have to take in order to finance their art and music hobby. That being understood, there are two ways that artists and musicians create work for distribution: 1) Royalties and 2) Work for hire. With royalties, the artist/musician retains ownership of the work and has the right to collect royalties on sales. With work-for-hire, you draw up a contract that says that you are paying the artist/musician for the work outright. You will own the work from that point forward. The artist agrees to take the money up front and what they create is no longer their property and they forfeit any right to collect any more money from it. So you need to find young, un-established artists that are willing to do the job for a reasonably small sum, and draw up a good work-for-hire contract. You can find examples of these contracts in several books on music business which you can find at the local library or on Amazon.
Agendus for Windows does not have custom conduits. It works with the existing Palm HotSync conduits, and stores all the data in a Palm- and Palm Desktop-native format. One less thing to go wrong, and one less problem to troubleshoot.
There is another rusting Saturn V in even worse shape at the NASA museum and space camp in Huntsville, Alabama. I believe they're soliciting donations to restore that one as well.