art + anthropology blog
developed for museum library
Check out Visual AIDS' new weblog - hosted by NEWSgrist.
cumulative resource + blog for artists, writers, and activists, launched to coincide with the exhibition Out of the Blue (Spring 2006).
NEWSgrist is hosting a blog for Palladio: an interactive movie about lust, greed, art and advertising by Ben Neill + Bill Jones.
A Search for Comity in the Intellectual Property Wars: symposium at The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, April 28-30, 2006 [slides, audio, transcripts]
THE FAIR USE NETWORK: INFORMATION & RESOURCES FOR FREE EXPRESSION
The Fair Use Network was created because of the many questions that artists, writers, and others have about "IP" issues. Whether you are trying to understand your own copyright or trademark rights, or are a "user" of materials created by others, the information here will help you understand the system — and especially its free-expression safeguards.
Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control, by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles.
[read the sneak preview or download the report [PDF]
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons (Attribution: 3.0) License (US),
though the work this blog incorporates may be separately licensed.
via LAist:
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
An item in “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” at the Queens Museum of Art; The curator Larissa Harris with the Panorama in a foreclosure exhibit at the Queens Museum.
When it came to representing the sprawling nature of the foreclosure crisis in New York City, the artist Damon Rich figured out that the best thing to do was to shrink it down to size.
And so he used the 9,335-square-foot Panorama of the City of New York, the intricate architectural model built for the 1964 World’s Fair, and hundreds of neon-pink triangles to demonstrate just how the city has been marked by economic troubles.
Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.
Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.
This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.
“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.
Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.
Mr. Rich said the exhibition provided a “physical experience” that engages people in a way that a book, a Web site or a television show cannot. “In some way, I hope my exhibitions function as strange educational playgrounds for adults,” he said.
As well as an artist, Mr. Rich is an urban designer and waterfront planner for Newark. He originally created a version of the “Red Lines” exhibition for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an artist in residence in 2007. When one of the center’s curators, Larissa Harris, was hired at the Queens Museum, she asked Mr. Rich to recreate the installation there.
The museum’s director, Tom Finkelpearl, suggested that Mr. Rich use the Panorama. When first built, the Panorama was supposed to simulate the sense of a helicopter ride over New York. Where the walkway now stands, helicopter-shaped cars on elevated tracks gave visitors a nine-minute tour.
“This was built as an urban planning tool,” Ms. Harris said of the Panorama. “I feel so proud of this because we are using it that way.”
The Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project collected the foreclosure information, Ms. Harris said, as she slowly circled the Panorama. The Regional Plan Association, an independent planning group, then crunched the numbers using the Geographic Information System — a mapping program — to create maps of every inch of the city indicating where there had been foreclosures of single- to four-family homes in 2008.
Ms. Harris opened a door off the walkway and descended a few steps to a second door that opened onto the Panorama. She bent down and tilted her head so that her eyes were level with the blue floor that represents the waterways surrounding New York. “When you look at it this way, you can imagine you’re on a boat and coming into Staten Island,” she said.
The first challenge was figuring out how to mark the more than 13,000 foreclosures. “We had a brainstorm,” Ms. Harris said. The small plastic dividers put on the top of a delivered pizza to prevent the cheese from sticking to the top of the box would work perfectly. “We bought 2,000 of them and spray-painted them pink,” a color that would not clash with the Panorama, but would still stand out, Ms. Harris said.
Volunteers from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn of which Mr. Rich is the founder, translated the information from the maps to the Panorama. “We got an amazing crop of kids who just love maps,” Ms. Harris said.
Figuring out how to place the markers without damaging the Panorama proved to be another problem. To get to the East New York section, for instance, volunteers would have had to walk through the rest of Brooklyn, the equivalent of a cadre of building-crushing Godzillas. Ultimately, team members discovered that they could sit on thick squares of foam without damaging the Panorama’s wood and plastic models.
“We took off our shoes, put on little slippers and went out with these maps and pieces of foam,” Ms. Harris said.
The Panorama was last significantly updated in 1992, so the group made “educated guesses” when computer maps differed from the Panorama, Ms. Harris said. The museum, whose only recent addition to the Panorama is Citi Field, the new Mets stadium next door, has begun a new update called Adopt-a-Building. That effort asks people, schools and businesses to sponsor or buy a building for the Panorama. (So far, there have been no foreclosures.)
As for the pink triangles, there are 582 in Brooklyn; 551 in Queens; 140 in Staten Island; and 151 in the Bronx, mostly in the Wakefield section. The areas are predominantly African-American and Latino, Ms. Harris said, the same neighborhoods that used to be starved of credit by discriminatory redlining before it became illegal in the 1970s. The smaller numbers in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, she explained, are due to a combination of income (too rich or too poor) and building type (apartments instead of single- or multifamily homes).
Ms. Harris acknowledged that most of “Red Lines,” which runs through Sept. 27, is political; it emphasizes predatory and racist lending practices. On Wednesday night the museum is hosting a celebration for housing advocates, featuring a lecture by the urban historian Kenneth T. Jackson.
But she argued that mapping the Panorama was not about taking sides. “I don’t see how it gives a political view, mapping the facts,” she said. “I don’t think you can argue with this. That’s why it’s so powerful.”
In his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson uses Richard A. Muller, a physics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, as a poster child for how giving away information online can bring personal gain. But Mr. Muller says Mr. Anderson doesn’t have his story straight — and that his personal experience does not support the book’s argument.
Mr. Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired magazine, and his book (available free online) has been getting buzz in recent weeks for its argument that businesses can use free information to spark sales of related products and services.
In a pull-out box in the book, Mr. Anderson tells the story of how Berkeley put lectures on YouTube from Mr. Muller’s course “Physics for Future Presidents” that drew more than 200,000 views and turned the professor into “a Web celeb of sorts.” That part is undisputed. But Mr. Anderson then suggests that the celebrity status from the videos led Mr. Muller to secure a book deal, and led to greater interest in the resulting book. As Mr. Anderson concludes, “it’s easy to see just how good Free has been to Professor Muller.”
But in an e-mail interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Muller said the YouTube videos of his lectures did nothing to help him get a contract for Physics for Future Presidents (W.W. Norton).
“That is wishful thinking from someone who is trying to conclude that Webcasts lead to money,” said Mr. Muller. “But correlation is not causation. What Anderson says may be ‘easy to see,’ but it just ain’t so. He is letting his hoped-for conclusion drive his analysis of events.”
Mr. Muller said that the book deal came about when a Norton editor whom he had worked with on previous books (the professor had already published eight) visited his office and asked him if he had any ideas for a new one. “I don’t think [the editor] was even familiar with my online lectures,” he said.
“Norton wasn’t really interested in my online popularity,” Mr. Muller continued. “Best guess: they know that people who buy and read books are a very small population, and probably not the same as those who watch Webcasts of lectures.”
Mr. Anderson’s book argues that the Internet makes information so easy to distribute (and to pirate) that the best business response is to make it free and find some ancillary service to sell instead. “If software is free, sell support,” he writes. “If phone calls are free, sell distant labor and talent that can be reached by those free calls (the Indian outsourcing model in a nutshell).”
Mr. Muller doesn’t buy it, though, and says he has evidence that those video hits are not pumping up his book sales.
“I have been personally contacted by about 1,000 people who saw my Webcasts,” said the professor. “When the book came out, I arranged to e-mail all of them (using Norton’s account) to let them know that a book was now available. I then watched the sales very carefully. (I actually have a computer that downloads the ranking every hour from Google.) Although I had seen huge jumps in my sales when I was interviewed on NPR (3 times) or had a book review in The Boston Globe, and a few other things, the massive e-mailing to my Web fans produced no discernible increase in sales. My conclusion: Web viewers don’t buy many hardcover books.”
Mr. Anderson stands by his work, and his use of Mr. Muller as an example. “To suggest that all Web viewers don’t buy books seems premature,” said Mr. Anderson in an interview with The Chronicle. He argued that the professor’s exposure on YouTube most likely helped the sales of his book, even if indirectly. For instance, the popularity of the videos may have made reviewers more interested in writing about the book.
“If he believes there’s no correlation, that’s interesting,” said Mr. Anderson. “We have done the same type of experiments and we conclude otherwise.”
“Every product is different and every person is different,” he added. “You’ve got to find your own way to monetize celebrity.” —Jeffrey R. Young
"Presumed Innocents", the trial: 10 years later
Bordeaux Judge Reopens Decade-Old Child-Porn Charge
Against Curators Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude
Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon
Indicted at the end of 2006, after six years of investigations, long
period during which no element was produced that could have fed the
prosecution (the specialized unit for minors and the rectorship gave a
favourable opinion) and after the attorney general of Bordeaux called
for a not guilty decision in march 2008 the trial judge Jean-Louis
Crozier has just decided to refer before the magistrate's court
Marie-Laure Bernadac, Henry-Claude Cousseau, and Stéphanie Moisdon, for
having, within the exhibition entitled "presumed innocent- contemporary
art and childhood " organized 2000 in the CAPC contemporary museum of
art in Bordeaux exposed "violent and pornographic art works "*.
With this decision—which, in an extremely unusual move, disregards the
conclusions of a Parquet investigation—the entire national and
international artistic and professional community, together with the
cultural image of France, have come under attack and stand accused,
offended.
For the first time in France, two museum directors and a curator are to
be tried in a criminal court for exhibiting works of art that have
already been shown throughout the world or put on view since the
Bordeaux exhibition in art shows that have not elicited the least
unfavorable reaction from the public. The thinking that went into
preparing the incriminated exhibition, focused on a major subject of
art history, was developed collectively and was shared by the relevant state oversight authorities.
This court case from an earlier century, fiercely, relentlessly
prosecuted by a single judge in contempt of artistic creation and
individuals' right to accede freely to all forms of art, is indicative
of a dangerous obscurantist attitude. The trial will take place in Bordeaux under pressure from a local child protection association named La Mouette, in turn supported by an extremist press that has already been found guilty of libel against one of the accused.
How is it possible that what is considered viewable and acceptable
everywhere else should not be so in Bordeaux? What will be put on trial
in the Bordeaux magistrates' court a few months from now is the work
and personal and professional conviction of three figures of the world
of art and culture unanimously recognized for their commitment to that
world. They have already received thousands of messages of support from
all horizons.
This attempt to "criminalize" artists and other actors for their
creative work, together with the cultural sites that diffuse that work,
requires us to be extremely vigilant about censorship
of this kind, whose perpetrators are ever ready to use noble causes
such as child protection to authoritarian, liberticidal ends.
MARIE-LAURE BERNADAC, HENRY-CLAUDE COUSSEAU, STEPHANIE MOISDON
* including works by Christian Boltanski, Gary Gross, Paul McCarthy,
Mike Kelley, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Elke
Krystufek, Carsten Höller, Annette Messager, Ugo Rondinone…..
Great show, open today through Sunday. Don't forget to check out the installation in the alley by fierce pussy, pictured above and below.
June 26 – August 1, 2009
Opening: Friday, June 26, 6-8 PM
637 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
T: 212.643.3152
Summer Gallery Hours: Tue - Fri, 11-6 PM
more images and info @ Winkleman Gallery
Shane Hope’s sprawling prints can’t be processed with one or two looks. They are built on thousands of tiny details, rather than around a single focal point, and as the eye travels across the picture field, it sees lines and pieces accumulating in recognizable bodies and then collapsing into chaos, or maybe an order that can’t be discerned by the naked eye. Hope calls them Molecular Modeling prints, or “Mol Mods,” and they are informed by his belief that “the molecule is the brushstroke of the future”—that nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on a molecular scale, will transform industry sometime soon. For now, Hope’s tools are coding languages Python and Perl. Because of the Mol Mods’ size he can only work on one screen-sized swath at a time, and because of their complexity, that is all that can be rendered even on Hope’s homemade desktop, which he proudly calls "faster than any factory-built Mac on the planet.”
“Your Mom Is Open Source,” an exhibition of Hope’s work at Winkelman Gallery that opens Friday, features Mol Mods as well as the series “Compile-A-Child,” imagined school assignments by artificial kids (only the latter are reproduced here, because the Mol Mods lose too much when shrunk to bloggable dimensions). Hope’s art is a visual analogy to hard science fiction, a genre where authors base their narratives on projected technologies rather than transposing contemporary dramas to a fantasized, futuristic stage. For viewers poorly versed in hard sci-fi, the conceptual platform of Hope’s work can be opaque; the announcement for “Your Mom Is Open Source” concludes with a mystifying list of keywords, both of his own coinage and borrowed from the fields of his interest. Hope agreed to discuss some of them here.
Singularitarianism
In an analogy to the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity, Vernor Vinge defined the Singularity
as a theoretical future point which takes place during a period of
accelerating change sometime after the creation of a superintelligence,
an artificial brain more intelligent and creative than the human mind.
Hard sci-fi authors, as well as professional forecasters, realized some
two decades ago that nobody could realistically write about anything
occurring past this Singularity. Far-flinging extrapolations could be
flung no further. Simply put, they realized that we were inching toward
inventing the next inventors and couldn't presume to imagine their
imaginings. Futurological films and other envisionings became sort of
mostly doomed to deploy dystopic dramatic drivel—a.k.a.
disasterbation—because it's plainly more possible, however implausible,
to picture a future having fallen into decay than having been
sustainably built. An exponentially divergent Posthuman technocracy
couldn't necessarily be pictured as a trompe-l'œil, for it was as
likely that everything would be powderized into fuzzy storms of
computational matter as it was that advanced augmentations would
invisibly piggy-back upon what looked no different from the current
everyday reality.
Transhumanism
A Transhumanist actively trend-spots technological trajectories with
special emphasis upon feasible applications toward radical yet
relatively safe human enhancements. A Transhuman proper accelerates
artificial selection by early-adopting resultant enhancements, thereby
willfully functioning as bio/non-bio sub-species set on transitioning
into a Posthuman. A Posthuman is post, that is to say no longer strictly human... i.e. Homo evolutis. A vitally important take-away assumption of all this: Clearly, we go from growing ourselves to building ourselves.
Nanofacture
Nanofacture, aka Molecular Manufacturing / Assembly, is atomic-scaled
precise fabrication of, well, ultimately just about anything. Rapid
dissemination of this capability could catapult our kind into
post-scarcity, i.e. by printing printers. Basically, by developing
nanofacturing, we teeter toward twisting objects (and life) into
existence at ever smaller scales. The precision placement of atoms is
poised to become the new pen, conflating or at the very least
problematizing pictorial representation and objecthood.
Compile-A-Child
If you know where/how to look, you'll discover that some of the more
awe-inspiring contemporary hard-sci-fi speculations regarding
superintelligences involve not so much disasterbatory apocalypses nor
runaway self-replicating molecular machines, but rather accounts of
augmented children. Additionally, AI field experts now posit that the
first artificial general intelligences will aptly be raised in online virtual worlds. And of course, there's Marvin Minsky's
answer to whether AIs will inherit the earth: "Yes, but they will be
our children." True, we routinely will all to our descendants. The more
important latent point here to consider is that we ought to take great
care in birthing/building these mind-children. AIs will arise
in any case. The good news is that, in the wake of this understood
eventuality, plenty of investigations now underway aim to proactively
explore issues of machine morality in order to precautionarily engineer
friendly AIs.
Transubstrational
Not certain I've coined the term “transubstrational,” but I use it to
concisely communicate the likelihood of living/thinking/existing in or
across substrates. By substrate, I mean the material within or upon
which our default, for now human, general intelligence system operates,
i.e. biology. As we technologically augment ourselves, we'll
ontologically wiggle our way out of the current default substrate of
biology and into/across novel material structures. Most are warily
familiar with the concept of uploading, that is, the transfer of a
personality from the biological human brain to a suitable synthetic
computing device in order to allow easier upgrading of intelligence,
self-modification, and backup of the self. To counteract the
reactionary yet somewhat justifiable concern over what could be
considered an essentialization of our ridiculously complex human
personalities, some amend that uploading will be gradual, almost
unnoticeable, proceeding update by update, right up until we upgrade.
Personally, I prefer to explain it in this willful way: We will think our way across.
Parents of young woman shot dead near protests are banned from mourning and funeral is cancelled, neighbours say
The home of Neda Agha Soltan
The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were circulated around the world.
Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.
"We just know that they [the family] were forced to leave their flat," a neighbour said. The Guardian was unable to contact the family directly to confirm if they had been forced to leave.
The government is also accusing protesters of killing Soltan, describing her as a martyr of the Basij militia. Javan, a pro-government newspaper, has gone so far as to blame the recently expelled BBC correspondent, Jon Leyne, of hiring "thugs" to shoot her so he could make a documentary film.
Soltan was shot dead on Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators, turning her into a symbol of the Iranian protest movement. Barack Obama spoke of the "searing image" of Soltan's dying moments at his press conference yesterday.
Amid scenes of grief in the Soltan household with her father and mother screaming, neighbours not only from their building but from others in the area streamed out to protest at her death. But the police moved in quickly to quell any public displays of grief. They arrived as soon as they found out that a friend of Soltan had come to the family flat.
In accordance with Persian tradition, the family had put up a mourning announcement and attached a black banner to the building.
But the police took them down, refusing to allow the family to show any signs of mourning. The next day they were ordered to move out. Since then, neighbours have received suspicious calls warning them not to discuss her death with anyone and not to make any protest.
A tearful middle-aged woman who was an immediate neighbour said her family had not slept for days because of the oppressive presence of the Basij militia, out in force in the area harassing people since Soltan's death.
The area in front of Soltan's house was empty today. There was no sign of black cloths, banners or mourning. Secret police patrolled the street.
"We are trembling," one neighbour said. "We are still afraid. We haven't had a peaceful time in the last days, let alone her family. Nobody was allowed to console her family, they were alone, they were under arrest and their daughter was just killed. I can't imagine how painful it was for them. Her friends came to console her family but the police didn't let them in and forced them to disperse and arrested some of them. Neda's family were not even given a quite moment to grieve."
Another man said many would have turned up to show their sympathy had it not been for the police.
"In Iran, when someone dies, neighbours visit the family and will not let them stay alone for weeks but Neda's family was forced to be alone, otherwise the whole of Iran would gather here," he said. "The government is terrible, they are even accusing pro-Mousavi people of killing Neda and have just written in their websites that Neda is a Basiji (government militia) martyr. That's ridiculous – if that's true why don't they let her family hold any funeral or ceremonies? Since the election, you are not able to trust one word from the government." A shopkeeper said he had often met Soltan, who used to come to his store.
"She was a kind, innocent girl. She treated me well and I appreciated her behaviour. I was surprised when I found out that she was killed by the riot police. I knew she was a student as she mentioned that she was going to university. She always had a nice peaceful smile and now she has been sacrificed for the government's vote-rigging in the presidential election."
I am pleased to announce the publication of CULTURAL POLITICS Volume 5, Issue 2, July 2009, which is a General Issue. The new and much improved Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website is now up, and is exclusively dedicated to presenting the projects of artist contributors. This issue presents recent work by Brooklyn-based artist Sarah Trigg.
Please distribute widely.
Joy Garnett
Arts Editor, Cultural Politics
Cultural Politics’ Artists’ website: http://culturalpolitics.org
+++
Cultural Politics
Volume 5, Issue 2
July 2009
The Haunted Nomos: Activist-Artists and the (Im)possible Politics of Memory in Transitional Argentina
Vikki Bell and Mario D Paolantonio on the role that contemporary visual art and activist-artists have played in transitional Argentina
The Fantasy of the Elite Force Aviator: On Dolls and Desire
Neal Curtis explores the relationship between mimesis and fantasy and the changing face of the military-industrial complex
Activism, Acceleration, and the Humanist Aporia: Indymedia Intensified in the Age of Neoliberalism
Ingrid Hoofd considers the humanist aporia at work in the Indymedia project and the techno-acceleration of neoliberalism’s speed-elitism
Brooklyn based US artist Sarah Trigg discusses and presents her most recent series of paintings: satellite photographs, missiles, politics, and nonlinear history revealed as the land, sea, and airscapes of a truly paranoid humanity
Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation, and the Work of Organization
Soenke Zehle and Ned Rossiter consider the return of political ontology, the critique of representation, and the antagonistic conception of the political
Book Review
The Cultural Politics of Once Were Warriors
Jo Smith on Emiel Martens’ Once Were Warriors and the ‘war of interpretation’ surrounding Maori writer Alan Duff’s novel and the film adaptation of the book by Lee Tamahori.
------------------------------
About Cultural Politics
“Cultural Politics is a welcome and innovative addition. In an academic universe already well populated with journals, it is carving out its own unique place—broad and a bit quirky. It likes to leap between the theoretical and the concrete, so that it is never boring and often filled with illuminating glimpses into the intellectual and cultural worlds.” Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina, USA.
Edited by
John Armitage, Northumbria University, UK
Ryan Bishop, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Cultural Politics is an international, refereed
journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture
and politics. It analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors,
political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized,
examined and resolved. In doing so, the journal explores precisely what is
cultural about politics and what is political about culture. It investigates
the marginalized and outer regions of this complex and interdisciplinary
subject area.
Each issue publishes artwork by selected artists reflecting contemporary
cultural and political issues.
Joy Episalla: scarf dissolves (still).
Photo via flickr: lreed7649. View more photos tagged with “kodachrome” and also in the Kodachrome group pool.
originally spotted at flickr blog.
via A Thousand Words (Kodak), June 22, 2009:
via techdirt:
As a whole bunch of you have sent in, the musician Moby has put up a blog post where he suggests the RIAA should be disbanded for its $1.92 million win over Jammie Thomas. While (unfortunately) he gets a few of the facts wrong (they didn't sue her for $2 million, but it's what the jury chose -- though it is accurate that the RIAA has clearly suggested it has no problem with the statutory rates for infringement in the past), his overall point is sound. It's ridiculous that the RIAA thinks this is the proper strategy:
This isn't new territory for Moby. Way back in 2003, he got angry after finding out that some of his songs were being used by the RIAA to sue people, and stated: "I'm tempted to go onto Kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the RIAA would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive."argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?
punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the 'it's better to be feared than respected' approach to dealing with music fans. i don't know, but 'it's better to be feared than respected' doesn't seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of 'it's better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices'?
i'm so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.
the riaa needs to be disbanded.
via Pulse2:
There are currently two high profile RIAA lawsuits taking place. One of them involves a Harvard professor and the other involves Jammie Thomas-Rasset. Now the lawyers in both cases are forming a partnership to file a class-action lawsuit against the RIAA to get back the $100 million that they claim the recording industry stole.
Kiwi Camara represents Jammie Thomas-Rasset in a lawsuit that the RIAA filed against her. There is a retrial taking place in Minnesota next week. Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson is representing Boston student Joel Tenenbaum in an RIAA trial as well. Kiwi and Charles are the ones getting together to file the $100 million class action lawsuit against the RIAA.
Camara did an interview with Ars Technica earlier this week and revealed two pieces of evidence that will help his case. MediaSentry was hired by the RIAA to track down the IP address of those who share files. Camara is arguing that MediaSentry is not licensed as a private investigator in Minnesota. This makes them running an illegal “pen register” and their evidence should be barred.
Another approach that Camara is considering is making the RIAA prove that they own the copyrights in question. If the RIAA or MediaSentry cannot prove any of the above scenarios, then the cases will fall apart for them. Camara’s approach is quite unorthodox.
Camara said that the RIAA basically committed a “technical screw-up” when it came to claiming the proper copyright ownership. The RIAA lawyers provided courts with “true and correct” copies of the evidence, but they were not “certified copies” required by federal rules of evidence.
The RIAA asked the judge to take judicial notice for these claims, but the judge refused. The recording industry will now have a limited amount of time to file for the certified copies. Camara already has rebuttals in mind just in case the RIAA is able to get all of the certified copies necessary for the case.
More news on the trial as it develops. Kudos to Ars Technica for their thorough coverage of this case.
[via Ars Technica]
[Image: Mike Bouchet's Watershed being towed through Venice towards the Arsenale basin, against a backdrop of Italian palazzi].
via BLDG BLOG:
[Image: Mike Bouchet's Watershed goes down].
A two-minute video of the house's journey, and eventual fate, can be seen in full on YouTube.
(Originally spotted on Flavorwire).
And to prove that he doesn’t understand that correlation is not causation, Anderson asserts that he does see a correlation. But, of course, Muller does not deny a correlation, he points out that that does not provide evidence that one thing is causing the other. Arguments about the Web seem to me often to be made up of this sort of fallacious conflation of correlation and causation, along with “wishful thinking.”
— exile Jul 9, 03:58 PM #
web fans: 1000 emailed
web viewers: 200,000 total
i’m thinking marketing departments need to learn how to better target the latter group. more wishful thinking perhaps…
— production serf Jul 9, 05:44 PM #
See my post (the first one) on Anderson’s self-promotion in the previous posting of his inane proposition that free is the future of fortune: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3869/college-lectures-should-be-free-online-argues-wired-magazine-editor-in-new-book
Anderson’s thesis is 1995 Negropontean (being digital), an immensely flawed book as it fails to see how marketing would take advantage of programming.
By now, every journalist should know that hits on a Web site do not translate into sales, whether we’re talking about books or newsprint.
I’m astounded that an author like Anderson didn’t fact check his assertions about Richard Muller whose serious science seems tainted by the hoopla leaps in logic (i.e. more interactive exposure equals more sales).
That said, I send kudos to Jeffrey Young for challenging Anderson and providing his readers with first-class journalism rather than rehashed technology “news.”
— Michael Bugeja Jul 9, 05:44 PM #
Muller might be right and Anderson wrong on the specific issue of “causality,” but I think Muller suffers from a surprisingly common delusion among academics: “People publish my books because I’m brilliant.” Not because publishers are desperate to recover their costs, and because name recognition, trendiness, pedigree, and other factors are at work, but because . . . well, because he’s so smart that editors walk into his office and say things like, “Have any good ideas?”
Sorry, who is guilty of wishful thinking here?
— Stephen Ramsay Jul 9, 05:45 PM #
Actually, Muller accounts for the points about recouping costs and making a profit by noting that he had worked with the editor on 8 previous books. That suggests a proven track record in producing books that make money, and reflect well on the publisher. While Muller may suffer from the academic delusion that he is published because he’s brilliant (who doesn’t?), his track record with the publisher would seem to be the most salient reason this book is getting published.
— exile Jul 10, 02:51 AM #
It’s no small task to be published by Norton, I assure you; nor are editors there likely to be impressed with YouTube posts of Richard A. Muller’s lectures. They do recognize that he is a member of one of the best physics departments in the world, at Berkeley, with an exceptional vita that contains both scholarly and teaching awards, indicating he can convey core truths about complex topics. Those editors also know that mainstream media continues to be the best route for book sales as many have third-party agreements with sellers. National Public Radio, for instance, has such an agreement with Amazon. Dr. Muller’s book was featured in December on NPR’s “Science Fridays.” For those who would like to hear him, here is the link: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97848779
— Michael Bugeja Jul 10, 07:20 AM #