Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who officially retired this week after 35 years on the bench was responsible for one of the biggest copyright decisions of our lifetime: Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. AKA the Betamax decision. Justice JPS was able to reverse a lower court’s decision and convince other skeptical judges’ opinions that taping videos off the airwaves for private use was legal.
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In a thought-provoking interview with Torrentfreak this weekend, American indie director Sam Bozzo shared some surprising thoughts about file sharing and its effect on box office sales for indie and mainstream films. He was contacted because of a leak of a rough cut of his stalled film Hackers Wanted but he wrote at length about the leak of Blue Gold which he believes helped the film’s success rather than hurt it. He makes some good points about indie films getting free publicity by downloaders spreading the word to their “non-torrent-downloading friends” but what I found most interesting was Bozzo’s comparison of downloading to a group of friends all watching a movie at someone’s house.
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To read the news it would appear that the RIAA are winning their crusade to stamp out digital piracy. Most recently it was the storming of the discrepant Limewire empire which news outlets heralded with headlines like “Music Biz Wins Big in Limewire Copyright Case” and “[Judge] Squeezes the Juice Out of LimeWire.” Surely reading such articles is good for crusaders’ morale but it does seem like the industry lawyers are cleaning up oil one gulf beach at a time without having any idea how to plug the giant undersea leak. The leak being the recording industry’s business model, which, like the oil age, will have highs and lows and will one day exhaust itself altogether.

As if to combat the victorious headlines I’ve recently noticed some of the industry’s great artists are speaking out on the decline of recording industry and the fact that piracy is not to blame.

Last month Brian Eno offered an excellent analogy in an interview with the The Guardian:

“I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate — history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”

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Sometimes I fear that making virtual digital purchases is like putting money into the box at church: if there’s no heaven, how will you ever collect? And if there’s no cloud, what will happen to all your Lala songs when Itunes takes over? At least we can be happy that we’re music nerds and not nerd nerds. This week a group of Second Life players initiated a class action lawsuit against the game’s maker for changing the rules about owning real estate. Although I don’t personally know anyone who sunk real money into this avatar goldrush, it did become a popular topic of conversation for the semi-informed masses.
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Did you ever play by the rule that it was bad luck to listen to the band whose show you were going to see on the day of the show? I think the rule may have originated in Boston because I definitely associate these spates of bad luck with places like the Middle East and TT the Bear’s. In high school we used to play by the opposite rule: we’d hear about some hardcore band coming to my town and go and buy their record and listen to it all day up until minutes before they went on stage – with the goal of screaming along with our own interpretation of their lyrics.
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How often do you text or chat something absurd to a friend only to have them take you seriously and get offended or confused? The challenge of conveying sarcasm over text-only communication has been a problem since the days of AOL. In terms of saving friendships, there are no plans to invent a way to recall late night mext (mass-text) marriage proposals, there are two projects in the works to define a universal symbol of sarcasm. The first project, called Sarc Mark, proposes a new-age looking spiral that looks like one of Kokopelli’s pubes. From Sarc Mark’s website:
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Whenever TTH contributors want to use a pseudonym it sparks a bit of a debate in the offices. It happens more often than you’d think (Q: Where the hell did I get the name Tret Lo? A: An Asian gang of “Worms” in 9th grade). But why these pseudonyms? Are we worried about those fearful letters T T H popping up on our presidential background check? There’s a part of me which wouldn’t mind if everyone used a list of absurd and ever-changing pseudonyms, “handles” if you will, like some ’90s chatroom rave. But the argument goes that we’re a community of writers and artists and we should be celebrating our real personalities hand in hand with our hard work.

Authenticity arguments aside, there’s a new good reason to be anonymous on the internet: http://pleaserobme.com/. It’s a site which lists twitter users who are good targets for robbery based on their status updates on Foursquare. Continue reading this column... « Less

If you own an iPhone 2G or 3G you may have suffered from a bit of jealousy at the vivid sexts your friends with new iPhone 3GS’s were able to send and you were only able to receive. You might have even considered hacking your phone to allow it to record video. Well just last week Apple approved iVideoCamera, an app capable of shooting decent videos and uploading them straight to YouTube. The framerate and resolution are well below that of the iPhone 3GS but for a buck you’ve got the best feature of the 3GS in most of its glory—all the more reason to hold out till June (or sooner) for the rumored iPhone 4G!

Below is a sample video I made to testing the functionality of the iVideoCamera app by shooting my favorite SkinaMax show from childhood, Red Shoe Diaries, off the TV while listening to Mannequin Men singing “Sex Off T.V.” (Not Safe For Workplaces That Don’t Approve of Sexy Videos):
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Whether or not you’ve heard the buzz about Bing Maps Beta or you’re still psyched about Google’s street view of Stonehenge, you should to take a moment to feel out Damien Webber’s penis-crazed mashup of New York’s subway map called EAT MOUNTAINOUS WANG. The project, which has consumed four years of the artist’s life, contains some arousing gems including Cockefeller Center, Wanker Square Park, Penis Station and Dick Christopher Street.
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Tomorrow will be the biggest shopping day of the year and the dying newspaper industry is hoping to cash in. No, people aren’t stocking up on commemorative “Thanksgiving 2009″ newspapers but several publishers are raising today’s cover price hoping that the same people who watch the Superbowl for the commercials will buy the Thanksgiving paper for the Black Friday ads. It seems absurd that anyone would pay a premium for a paper stuffed with glossy ads but as someone who wasn’t embarrassed to fish the weekly Circuit City ad out of the recycling bin I can see why the idea might work.
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The same week the Pirate Bay pulled the plug on its trackers, untouchable rapper MC Hammer has gone on the record against the music industry’s never-ending quest to fine and imprison music fans.

In a seeming reference to the fallen Pirate Bay, Hammer came out strong againt the RIAA strategy and made the case for digital formats over cd’s (from his interview with The Age [AU]):
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Our friends over at Featherproof books who brought you printable, origami-style mini books and the Dollar Store Reading Series have taken a brave step into electronic fiction with their new iPhone App, TripleQuick Fiction. $1.99 gets you access to an ever growing library of 333-word stories from the likes of TTH contributors Zach Dodson, Amelia Gray and the mysterious Kate Axelrod.
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I got into a little comment debate last week with BC Smith about the use of CGI in the Where the Wild Things Are. In Ben’s column, he observed that the Wild Things had the “saddest CG-Eyes I’ve ever seen.” I responded “CG Eyes they are not” with authority because of an interview I’d just heard with Spike Jonze on Fresh Air where he spoke about not wanting to use computer-generated-imagery. Ben and I went back and forth on the CGI question; quoting articles we’d read but the last word on the subject wasn’t certain. Spike was keeping his cards up his sleeve.

My curiosity drove me to watch all the Spike Jonze interviews I could find; a pursuit which ended up raising more questions than it answered. For one, I was surprised at how lo-fi most of the interviews were. Besides an appearance on late-night television, most of the available interviews were shot by amateurs in moving cars and cluttered offices. Youtube goes a fair distance towards destroying the pedestals which raise artists high above the rest of us—with a few quick searches we’re watching Spike nearly falling asleep while munching Peanut M&M’s, waiting at a stop light, and losing his train of thought. But here is a director who refuses to step politely down from the pedestal. Jonze would rather play the high-art prankster, setting the pedestal on fire only to bunjee jump down into the firemen’s net. Here are a selection of interviews which show the games Jonze plays to avoid traditional forms of publicity:
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As the latest in their series about using technology while driving, the Times had a crazy article about truckers who don’t want to give up their dashboard computers despite new laws prohibiting texting and cell phone use by drivers.

Writer Matt Richtel couldn’t have dreamt up a list of more aptly named interviewees: there’s the Chihuahua-loving long-haul trucker Kurt Long who is proud to have subverted his dashboard computer’s safety features:

On the computer screen, there is a warning: do not use while vehicle is in motion. But it gives you a proceed button.

Then there’s Randy Mullett, the trucking company executive who equates using dashboard computers to pressing a button on a radio.

Asking truckers to pull over for such a simple action is inefficient and expensive, Mr. Mullett said, given that the company loses about $1.50 a minute when a truck is idle.

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This week marks the thirtieth birthday of the Walkman portable cassette player. As well as being musical accompaniment to our eighties upbringing, the story of the Walkman’s surprising success is one to remember. Nothing tells the story of the brand as thoroughly or enjoyably as this flickering VHS transfer of a BBC documentary on the design history of the Walkman (viewable below).
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This summer “decision engines” are the new Sparksicles. Nobody wants to make a decision when it’s hot and humid, so people are turning to new sites to tell them how to peel themselves off of their leather sofas and live their lives. Microsoft wants you to “Bing and Decide” with its Bing search engine or you’ve got ChaCha which supplies “manswers” to all your text queries. Then there’s Caterina Fake of Flickr’s Hunch, which makes a choose-your-own-decision game out of its advice giving. When you ask Hunch a question it behaves like your underground therapist and asks you ten questions in return. At the end of the quiz, it spits an answer at you, then asks you if you like the answer. Try asking HUNCH the question most New Yorker asks themselves every day: Should I get Drunk Tonight?
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Ever since a particular incident involving 3 pitchers on a restaurant balcony in Montreal, I have retained the title Queen of Spills among my high school friends. This cultivated clumsiness combined with my romantic feelings for my laptop makes me a proponent for the use of keyboard condoms. You know what I’m talking about, those silicone masks perfectly fitted to your laptop keyboard to prevent water damage? Perhaps you’ve even touched a keyboard condom yourself and been surprised by the rubbery feeling of the keys and the dampening of your taps. But joke as you may about the loss of sensation, my laptop protector has already saved me several expensive repairs.
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A Swedish judge who spent months debating the fate of four self-proclaimed Pirates returned with a guilty verdict today in what many called “the internet piracy trial of the decade,” the Pirate Bay Trial. American Media Giants are sure to party tonight, having won a symbolic victory: 3.6 million in damages and 1 year in prison for each of the four defendants. Upon hearing the verdict Co-defendant Peter Sunde, (codename Brokep) played the broke card:

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”

“It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.

If you get off on the idea of bunkering down and preparing for the worst, you have a good excuse tonight! Not since the Y2K fear has a single date inspired such fear in the hearts of the internet community as is looming tomorrow. At midnight on April 1st 2009, an army of millions of zombie computers controlled by the Confiker Worm are expected to connect to secret servers to receive instructions from the author of the worm. Continue reading this column... « Less

Recommended Guiltless Download:

In the recent Pirate Bay trial the defendants asserted that a majority of the files tracked by the Pirate Bay were in fact legal, uncopyrighted works. Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi carried out a survey of his own site and reported that 80 percent of the torrents were legal to share online.
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