This did happen to me. I'm a composer, and I had a bunch of my own songs recorded for me on a CD - but in.wma format. So when I went to share the files with a friend, it said I was committing copyright infringement by sharing.wma files that were already of my own computer. Since when did the RIAA have copyright of MY songs?
My sister got a major internship this past summer. After a few days, her new boss mentioned something about "What's this about how you can balance a stack of twelve books on your head and gargle entire scenes from "The Phantom of the Opera?""
Of course these had never been mentioned, but her boss had googled her name and found her college dorm website with a picture of her balancing a textbook, pizza box, bottle of laundry detergent, a bottle of soda, and a board game on her head all at the same time, along with the program from a dorm open mic night (where she did, indeed, gargle a scene from "The Phantom of the Opera." Luckily, her boss thought this was cool, instead of scary - but it could have gone the other way.
The other thing to consider is, unless you are going to a really really really big name school (MIT, Harvard, Duke, Oxford, etc.), the difference between your state degree and a degree from a better school that may only be regionally acclaimed is practically nothing. Unless you are planning to get a job in the same state as your new school and there is a good chance the people hiring you would think great things of it, it just won't make a difference.
Also, from having worked in the admissions department of one of these top-tier schools (Duke), your chances of transfering in are practically nil - Duke took 40 transfers per year for a school of 6,000. And if you're not tranferring to somewhere like that, it won't matter.
the article conveniently ignores the Neopian Stock Exchange, where you can learn about investing, among other quality games . . . I've been playing this for years (I'm 23) and it's a great time-waster. How is playing with a pink alien animal pet addictive?
I work in a small bookstore, and looking through this list, it's pretty much the required summer reading for this area (minus the sex books). I'm in a pretty conservative part of the south, too - perhaps it's GOOD that kids are reading something that causes them to think about racism, gender stereotypes, religious differences, etc.
Okay, I just graduated from Duke, and worked in the admissions office this spring when this came to light internally. The money for this was sitting in a fun earmarked for "technology" but with several restrictions on it (I assume from some donor). So this is not coming out of tuition (this year), and Duke could not have done much else with it.
my father's medical office pays for Muzak to be pumped in - they have a choice of 40 or so channels of different type, and pay per month. Of course, when the Muzak company switched all the stations around, and they started getting Muzak-booty rap instead of Muzak-oldies, they had to pay the $200 "fee" because they changed their station preference. I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of dentists' offices (at least here in the states) have a similar subscription system.
actually, no: over half of Duke students are on at least partial financial aid, and less than 5% are "development admits" (fancy words for "filthy stinking rich"). Don't assume that everyone at an expensive school can pay for it.
I graduated from Duke this May; my little brother will be one of the lucky Duke freshmen this fall. The interesting thing is, THEY HAVEN'T TOLD THE FRESHMEN YET. This article on Slashdot was the first either of us had heard of this whole thing. Think they'll say something ahead of time, or just hand out iPods along with their first crappy meal at the Freshmen dining hall?
The problem is, the early "atonal" music was written EXPRESSLY to follow no pattern. The composers would literally flip a coin, circle imperfections in the staff paper and turn them into notes, or find other ways to randomize the notes and durations. Later "atonal" music allows for art to add to the math - Philip Glass is a good example. Although there really is no tonal center (which is all "atonal" means), it is not aleatory (chance music). And it does sound good.
Most Hollywood music is atonal precisely because it does convey strong emotion well without becoming repetitive. The article is just saying "I looked at music and at speech, and I found that things that are more common are the same things that are more common."
That only was true pre-1700, when the piano was based on harmonics rather than math. Pianos (well, harpsichords) were tuned in a certain key, and had to be re-tuned halfway through the concert to play in something different. Therefore, a harpsichord tuned in C would sound great in C, and sound okay in G or F, but if you tried F# the relationships between the major notes would be wrong, and the whole thing would sound awful.
While Bach was composing, a new idea of "equal temperment" gained popularity, where the difference in frequencies between notes on the keyboard were all the same (1/2^12). You could play in any key you wanted to and it would sound the same as any other key. Bach liked this so much he wrote a prelude and a fugue in each key, just because he could, and then he did it again. These are some of the most popular of Bach's preludes.
For their unpaying customers, like me, I now no longer can get the Yahoo! mail page to load properly, I can't view my email, and I am once again getting HTML mail (how many times do I have to turn it off?). Until they fix the bugs, I want my old email back.
"Journal In Support of the Null Hypothesis" is a new journal started a few years ago to combat this tendency of papers that didn't prove something spectacular to not get published. If I did a study that found that asprin did not, in fact, prevent heart attacks, I'd have a hard time getting it published - people only want to hear about new things that ARE true, not old things that AREN'T true. Finding your hypothesis was wrong is tantamount to having to start over.
As it stands, you already can't legally whistle a copyrighted song and make money on it without paying royalties (well, you're not supposed to). You can whistle all you want as long as it doesn't cost them revenue, though. The reason the cell phone companies had to pay royalties for the ring tones was people wanted them only because they were already famous songs - hence the artist could (conceivably) be losing money while his/her song is being played by hundreds of thousands of annoying people in theaters and subways everywhere.
Part of the problem is that electronic media (print or music) is different from printed media in that it can be immediately copied. Take the example of the article by a Princeton student about how the new protection on CDs could be circumvented by using the SHIFT key - because it wasn't taken down immediately, there was a big outcry when it was challenged and other people copied the information to other places, effectively keeping it from ever being removed.
Now, we all know the RIAA is evil, etc., but what if that student's article had been an unauthorized copy of, say, detailed instructions on how to blow up a skyscraper? Aside from the political effects of the PATRIOT act, if the ISP didn't take it down immediately, they ran the risk of never being able to stop that information from getting out. Likewise, they ought to remove something being debated (temporarily) while they investigate, and only put it back on the internet if there are no problems.
The problem isn't that they took it down; the problem is that they didn't look into the copyright claim (as far as I can tell from the article).
the problem is that the closer we are, the more we realize we aren't there yet. With Mario and Luigi, we aren't expecting them to be real people. We can interact with them (gamewise) through a set of behaviors we use only in videogames, but not in real life. With some of the more "lifelike" animation out there, we are supposed to be fooled into behaving as if the character was a real person - but every little glitch in the skin, eyes, and movements screams "something's wrong here!" All our ancestral evolution tells us to stay away from anyone acting not normal. So yes, once we get to fully humanlike animation we'll be fine, but we won't get there if we can't even get close.
Newspapers do this frequently - send you a free paper, then send you a "bill" for your subscription. I've had to call a few times to double-check they won't ruin my credit by me not paying for a paper I never wanted - especially since it's so easy to answer "yes" to a telemarketer trying to sell you one, and then you are bound by contract.
There are several types of contracts artists can sign, and which one they end up with depends on how famous they are and how good their lawyers are.
The artist can pay cash upfront to the record company, and receive some portion of royalties when the song sells (garage bands tend to do this)
The record company can grant the artist royalties, but recoup all losses before the artist sees a penny (this is pretty common for new artists)
The artist can be paid a flat fee per song, with no royalties (often used for advertisements)
The artist can be salaried by the year to produce X songs (frequently used for songwriters, but for artists too)
A lucky artist can negotiate a flat fee upfront plus a percentage of the royalties, which is what the Britney Spears' of the world try for. To avoid this, record companies often make new artists sign complex contracts upfront (before they've made it big and can afford good lawyers) locking them in to one of the other payment types.
Just like customer service and tech support, radio stations are looking for music that is just slightly better than the most watered-down commerciality you'll listen to. It's a lowest common denominator. Sure, the Backstreet Boys were annoying, but I have to admit the sound of actual harmony was nice - the first few times I heard their songs. They were only annoying because they were mass-marketed and sold as something everyone will tolerate but nobody loves. (Even the pre-teen girls bought them because they were cute, their friends had the CDs, etc. - not for the music. And look how loyal they are to the Backstreet Boys now.)
If you want good music, go out on a limb and search for it, becase the more centralized the music industry becomes, the fewer choices we'll have. (Just like software, cellphone companies, board games, or anything else.)
The good news is that home music studios are becoming much cheaper ($1000-$3000 for enough equipment to make your own CD-quality recordings) and it's entirely possible to record an Enya-like musical texture all by yourself. It takes time, but it is possible - and getting easier. I predict withing twenty years, official recording studios will be obsolete.
Re:Why Final Fantasy failed.
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
Sometimes that's necessary, though. If Wendy Carlos hadn't done a passable recording of Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos" with all electronic instruments, there would still be nobody who took the ability to generate realistic electronic music seriously.
These suits have happened - someone posted on a bulletin board that a pet supply chain (PetCo?) had a defective product, in their experience, and PetCo successfully sued the board and the poster for defamation. I'll see if I can dig up a link.
How about: you're located in China. You get your kicks from reminding millions of Americans, through email every day, that their penises are small and their mortgage rates are too high. Let's place this far enough in the future that the US cares and China still doesn't. Can you be penalized, assuming all your servers are in China?
"Until then, Canadian online music traders are free to keep swapping songs, Akin said."
Um, but aren't they facing the chance of being sued anyway? So yes, you can go back to swapping songs, since nobody has been sued YET - but that doesn't mean you aren't leaving yourself open to it when they get their act together.
I work in the admissions department for a major US college, and AOL has shunted all our emails to high school students to their spam folders. So when we offer to send out admissions decisions online, AOL customers can't get theirs, and have to wait about a week longer to receive their snailmail versions. How exactly do we fix this?
Slashdot Mirror
This did happen to me. I'm a composer, and I had a bunch of my own songs recorded for me on a CD - but in .wma format. So when I went to share the files with a friend, it said I was committing copyright infringement by sharing .wma files that were already of my own computer. Since when did the RIAA have copyright of MY songs?
My sister got a major internship this past summer. After a few days, her new boss mentioned something about "What's this about how you can balance a stack of twelve books on your head and gargle entire scenes from "The Phantom of the Opera?""
Of course these had never been mentioned, but her boss had googled her name and found her college dorm website with a picture of her balancing a textbook, pizza box, bottle of laundry detergent, a bottle of soda, and a board game on her head all at the same time, along with the program from a dorm open mic night (where she did, indeed, gargle a scene from "The Phantom of the Opera." Luckily, her boss thought this was cool, instead of scary - but it could have gone the other way.
The other thing to consider is, unless you are going to a really really really big name school (MIT, Harvard, Duke, Oxford, etc.), the difference between your state degree and a degree from a better school that may only be regionally acclaimed is practically nothing. Unless you are planning to get a job in the same state as your new school and there is a good chance the people hiring you would think great things of it, it just won't make a difference. Also, from having worked in the admissions department of one of these top-tier schools (Duke), your chances of transfering in are practically nil - Duke took 40 transfers per year for a school of 6,000. And if you're not tranferring to somewhere like that, it won't matter.
the article conveniently ignores the Neopian Stock Exchange, where you can learn about investing, among other quality games . . . I've been playing this for years (I'm 23) and it's a great time-waster. How is playing with a pink alien animal pet addictive?
I work in a small bookstore, and looking through this list, it's pretty much the required summer reading for this area (minus the sex books). I'm in a pretty conservative part of the south, too - perhaps it's GOOD that kids are reading something that causes them to think about racism, gender stereotypes, religious differences, etc.
Okay, I just graduated from Duke, and worked in the admissions office this spring when this came to light internally. The money for this was sitting in a fun earmarked for "technology" but with several restrictions on it (I assume from some donor). So this is not coming out of tuition (this year), and Duke could not have done much else with it.
my father's medical office pays for Muzak to be pumped in - they have a choice of 40 or so channels of different type, and pay per month. Of course, when the Muzak company switched all the stations around, and they started getting Muzak-booty rap instead of Muzak-oldies, they had to pay the $200 "fee" because they changed their station preference. I wouldn't be surprised if plenty of dentists' offices (at least here in the states) have a similar subscription system.
actually, no: over half of Duke students are on at least partial financial aid, and less than 5% are "development admits" (fancy words for "filthy stinking rich"). Don't assume that everyone at an expensive school can pay for it.
I graduated from Duke this May; my little brother will be one of the lucky Duke freshmen this fall. The interesting thing is, THEY HAVEN'T TOLD THE FRESHMEN YET. This article on Slashdot was the first either of us had heard of this whole thing. Think they'll say something ahead of time, or just hand out iPods along with their first crappy meal at the Freshmen dining hall?
The problem is, the early "atonal" music was written EXPRESSLY to follow no pattern. The composers would literally flip a coin, circle imperfections in the staff paper and turn them into notes, or find other ways to randomize the notes and durations. Later "atonal" music allows for art to add to the math - Philip Glass is a good example. Although there really is no tonal center (which is all "atonal" means), it is not aleatory (chance music). And it does sound good.
Most Hollywood music is atonal precisely because it does convey strong emotion well without becoming repetitive. The article is just saying "I looked at music and at speech, and I found that things that are more common are the same things that are more common."
That only was true pre-1700, when the piano was based on harmonics rather than math. Pianos (well, harpsichords) were tuned in a certain key, and had to be re-tuned halfway through the concert to play in something different. Therefore, a harpsichord tuned in C would sound great in C, and sound okay in G or F, but if you tried F# the relationships between the major notes would be wrong, and the whole thing would sound awful.
While Bach was composing, a new idea of "equal temperment" gained popularity, where the difference in frequencies between notes on the keyboard were all the same (1/2^12). You could play in any key you wanted to and it would sound the same as any other key. Bach liked this so much he wrote a prelude and a fugue in each key, just because he could, and then he did it again. These are some of the most popular of Bach's preludes.
For their unpaying customers, like me, I now no longer can get the Yahoo! mail page to load properly, I can't view my email, and I am once again getting HTML mail (how many times do I have to turn it off?). Until they fix the bugs, I want my old email back.
a PhD might be a Philosophical Doctorate, but a pHD must deal with pH, like, acid. So a college degree from a few decades ago . . .
"Journal In Support of the Null Hypothesis" is a new journal started a few years ago to combat this tendency of papers that didn't prove something spectacular to not get published. If I did a study that found that asprin did not, in fact, prevent heart attacks, I'd have a hard time getting it published - people only want to hear about new things that ARE true, not old things that AREN'T true. Finding your hypothesis was wrong is tantamount to having to start over.
As it stands, you already can't legally whistle a copyrighted song and make money on it without paying royalties (well, you're not supposed to). You can whistle all you want as long as it doesn't cost them revenue, though. The reason the cell phone companies had to pay royalties for the ring tones was people wanted them only because they were already famous songs - hence the artist could (conceivably) be losing money while his/her song is being played by hundreds of thousands of annoying people in theaters and subways everywhere.
Part of the problem is that electronic media (print or music) is different from printed media in that it can be immediately copied. Take the example of the article by a Princeton student about how the new protection on CDs could be circumvented by using the SHIFT key - because it wasn't taken down immediately, there was a big outcry when it was challenged and other people copied the information to other places, effectively keeping it from ever being removed.
Now, we all know the RIAA is evil, etc., but what if that student's article had been an unauthorized copy of, say, detailed instructions on how to blow up a skyscraper? Aside from the political effects of the PATRIOT act, if the ISP didn't take it down immediately, they ran the risk of never being able to stop that information from getting out. Likewise, they ought to remove something being debated (temporarily) while they investigate, and only put it back on the internet if there are no problems.
The problem isn't that they took it down; the problem is that they didn't look into the copyright claim (as far as I can tell from the article).
the problem is that the closer we are, the more we realize we aren't there yet. With Mario and Luigi, we aren't expecting them to be real people. We can interact with them (gamewise) through a set of behaviors we use only in videogames, but not in real life. With some of the more "lifelike" animation out there, we are supposed to be fooled into behaving as if the character was a real person - but every little glitch in the skin, eyes, and movements screams "something's wrong here!" All our ancestral evolution tells us to stay away from anyone acting not normal. So yes, once we get to fully humanlike animation we'll be fine, but we won't get there if we can't even get close.
Newspapers do this frequently - send you a free paper, then send you a "bill" for your subscription. I've had to call a few times to double-check they won't ruin my credit by me not paying for a paper I never wanted - especially since it's so easy to answer "yes" to a telemarketer trying to sell you one, and then you are bound by contract.
There are several types of contracts artists can sign, and which one they end up with depends on how famous they are and how good their lawyers are.
The artist can pay cash upfront to the record company, and receive some portion of royalties when the song sells (garage bands tend to do this)
The record company can grant the artist royalties, but recoup all losses before the artist sees a penny (this is pretty common for new artists)
The artist can be paid a flat fee per song, with no royalties (often used for advertisements)
The artist can be salaried by the year to produce X songs (frequently used for songwriters, but for artists too)
A lucky artist can negotiate a flat fee upfront plus a percentage of the royalties, which is what the Britney Spears' of the world try for. To avoid this, record companies often make new artists sign complex contracts upfront (before they've made it big and can afford good lawyers) locking them in to one of the other payment types.
Just like customer service and tech support, radio stations are looking for music that is just slightly better than the most watered-down commerciality you'll listen to. It's a lowest common denominator. Sure, the Backstreet Boys were annoying, but I have to admit the sound of actual harmony was nice - the first few times I heard their songs. They were only annoying because they were mass-marketed and sold as something everyone will tolerate but nobody loves. (Even the pre-teen girls bought them because they were cute, their friends had the CDs, etc. - not for the music. And look how loyal they are to the Backstreet Boys now.)
If you want good music, go out on a limb and search for it, becase the more centralized the music industry becomes, the fewer choices we'll have. (Just like software, cellphone companies, board games, or anything else.)
The good news is that home music studios are becoming much cheaper ($1000-$3000 for enough equipment to make your own CD-quality recordings) and it's entirely possible to record an Enya-like musical texture all by yourself. It takes time, but it is possible - and getting easier. I predict withing twenty years, official recording studios will be obsolete.
Sometimes that's necessary, though. If Wendy Carlos hadn't done a passable recording of Bach's "Brandenburg Concertos" with all electronic instruments, there would still be nobody who took the ability to generate realistic electronic music seriously.
These suits have happened - someone posted on a bulletin board that a pet supply chain (PetCo?) had a defective product, in their experience, and PetCo successfully sued the board and the poster for defamation. I'll see if I can dig up a link.
How about: you're located in China. You get your kicks from reminding millions of Americans, through email every day, that their penises are small and their mortgage rates are too high. Let's place this far enough in the future that the US cares and China still doesn't. Can you be penalized, assuming all your servers are in China?
"Until then, Canadian online music traders are free to keep swapping songs, Akin said."
Um, but aren't they facing the chance of being sued anyway? So yes, you can go back to swapping songs, since nobody has been sued YET - but that doesn't mean you aren't leaving yourself open to it when they get their act together.
I work in the admissions department for a major US college, and AOL has shunted all our emails to high school students to their spam folders. So when we offer to send out admissions decisions online, AOL customers can't get theirs, and have to wait about a week longer to receive their snailmail versions. How exactly do we fix this?