Well, one place is at archive.org, which has a public-domain repository that’s probably second-to-none. But it’s not very user-friendly.

That’s why I’ve been enthralled by the release of Dewey Music. It’s an online front-end for the public domain music at archive.org. You can click and listen, simple as that. It’s also got good tools for browsing and searching.

It offers over a million songs, by over 10,000 artists — no, it’s not iTunes, but there’s some fantastic stuff there. A lot of it is live performance, which isn’t entirely up my alley, but it’s been a lot of fun to listen to.

Bookmarked!

(via BB, which has the story)

A few years ago, if you wanted high-quality digital music, the place to go was Oink’s Pink Palace. A torrent index and forum, it didn’t host any music files itself, but it provided a clearing-house for any and all to share their own files.

It was, hands down, the best online music site ever to have existed on the web. You could find new releases or old favourites. You could find rarities that you had never seen before. And, better than Napster ever was, the emphasis was on quality, quality, quality. The site had strict rules on what could be shared, with a priority on high bitrates and full albums.

It was music nirvana — even musicians thought so, with an endorsement from Trent Reznor, himself a member.

Then it was shut down in a police raid in October 2007.

The court case has dragged on ever since, with terse updates about court dates posted by webmaster Alan Ellis on Oink.cd.

On Friday, he was declared, unanimously, not guilty of copyright infringement.

I think this dovetails with my post, below, about charging for news content. I have my own theories on the future of entertainment, and I think we’re moving more and more towards a performance model, wherein recordings will be seen as promotional loss leaders for the real money, which is in touring and merchandise.

Rees uses clip art and adds his own commentary (which was mostly a response to post-9/11 Bush politics), and while the clip art is fair use, Rees is crying foul play on this advertising by Jamba Juice, which seems to put the clip art in the exact same positions with the exact same text style.

Part of Rees’s (hilarious) response to the ad:

2. The clip art is public domain, of course, anyone can do anything with it … but check out the word balloons! JAMBA JUICE TOTALLY BIT MY GYWO WORD BALLOON STYLE! Rounded-edge text box with single line pointing to mouth? I developed that in 2001 using Quark XPress 4!!! THAT’S MY SHIT!!! Jamba Juice, you’re a bunch of BALLOON-BITERS.

3. First person to sue Jamba Juice on my behalf CAN KEEP ALL THE MONEY. All I care about is destroying Jamba Juice and their overpriced dumb-ass juices. EAT A PIECE OF FRUIT, you morons, you’re missing most of the fiber.

Rees also urges us all to boycott Jamba Juice, which I can manage since we don’t have any in Canada.

This issue is interesting because it’s a fine line between homage and ripping someone off. One of the responses I saw said:

Any IP nerd will quickly tell you an “idea” alone is not protected; but while the idea of doing a comic based on a depressing, stale office environment using public domain clip art cannot be protected under US copyright, has this crossed over from being the “idea” of a GYWO-like comic to a cognizable claim of infringement?  Could you, or should you, be able to claim that while Rees can’t claim copyright infringement from use of a public domain work, he should be able to claim it when Jamba uses the same two public domain works in the same context?I’m rarely (maybe never) one to advocate an expansion of intellectual property law, and I’m trying very hard to imagine how I would feel if Rees ripped on Jamba Juice instead of the other way around, but I feel as though the law should provide remedy for this sort of shameless ripoff.

I doubt any sort of lawsuit will come of this, or will go very far if it does, but it’s an interesting to consider how far the law protects an artist’s work that is partly public domain.

When I was a certain age, my brother and I were basically addicted to a game called Civilization (image above from here). We would play it for hours. Because we had borrowed and copied the floppies from a friend, every now and then we had to answer a challenge question. The question — always asking us what two technologies were required to make a further technological advance in the game — would have been easy to answer with the game’s manual, but we were too cheap to shell out for photocopying.

Luckily, we played it so much that it didn’t take long before we had the whole game’s technology tree memorized. So, this copy protection, while annoying, didn’t make us go out and buy the game.

I did, however, buy Civ3 when I was older and richer, because I knew that the manuals and posters included in the box were wicked cool. They weren’t actually as wicked cool as I had hoped, mind you, but you still got some stuff.

Now, of course, you’re lucky to get a printed “Quick Start Guide” when you buy anything computer-related.

Obviously, I know that it’s cheaper to ship a pdf on a CD than it is to print and bind a real manual, but game designers should realize that all that extraneous stuff had value to the end user.

Personally, I value LPs with included posters and psychedelic cover art far more highly than I value mp3s, which are just the music. Games are kind of the same way. I like being able to zone out with a game in front of my computer, but it was always nice to have something extra, something tangible, something that made the game feel like it was mine, and not my computer’s.

Chris Kohler at Wired feels the same way. He recalls buying an Indiana Jones game — just for the included “Grail Diary”:

The downside to this form of copy protection was that if you ever lost the manual … you’d render your game unplayable. …

I just find it interesting, in this day and age of protests against DRM, to look back on a time when game publishers occasionally found solutions that gave the consumer some notable benefits to make up for the fact that they were being inconvenienced by the copy protection schemes. I read the diary cover to cover before even installing the game.

I hope that the transition of everything to digital doesn’t mean we’re going to completely leave physical artifacts behind. In fact, I’d argue that the fact we’re wired into virtual stuff so much actually leaves us hungrier for “authentic” things. Companies would be wise to exploit that.

From the Canadian Press:

After scoring a surprise electoral win in Sweden and getting high-profile support in Germany, The Pirate Party’s next port of call may be Canada ….

Right now, they’re a handful of loosely-organized individuals spread across the country. But they want to become an official federal political party within the next few years and get enough support to persuade Parliament to relax proposed copyright laws they say are heavy-handed and a violation of personal privacy.

The website, at piratepartyofcanada.com, is currently bare-bones at best, but there’s some forum chatter that sounds like the people behind this are sincere, intelligent and motivated.

At first, I thought that the name of the party was unfortunate, but I’m starting to think it has advantages. First of all, it’s distinctive and recognizable. It’s, arguably, cool. And, I’m starting to think that, after being (IMO wrongly) characterized as thieves and pirates, copyright infringers who think they have a moral right to interact with locked-down culture in a modern way (myself included) may actually be able to reclaim the word “pirate” and make it or own.

Most of the copyright infringers I know don’t necessarily want all copyright to be banished — but the current framework of law seems overly draconian. From the article again:

The party’s goals are fairly simple. It says people should have the right to share and copy music, movies and virtually any material, as long as it is for personal use, not for profit.

It opposes government and corporate monitoring of Internet activities, unless the monitoring is part of a criminal investigation. And it also wants to phase out patents, arguing that patents on new drugs, for example, raise the cost of medical care and keep life-saving medicine out of the hands of many people.

“For me, I think copyright at its core is a good idea but I think it’s been taken too far,” said Rob Britton, a Montreal web developer who has also joined the Canadian Pirate Party movement.

“I think stronger copyright and stronger patent law stifles innovation and discourages a free-market ecosystem.”

I’d vote for ‘em.

But I doubt it would be okay to republish wholesale the full text of someone else’s work, even with attribution. It would at the very least make me uneasy. Maybe if there was extensive commentary and no way to clip just a portion of the work involved?

Now, here’s what happened in California: A girl graduates high school and goes away to college. Upon her return on holiday, she writes a MySpace blog post that describes how much she dislikes her family’s hometown. Her former high school principal discovers the posting, and hands a copy of it to the local paper’s editor, who runs it as a letter to the editor, attributing the girl, without her knowledge.

The fallout: the girl’s family has their house shot at, their business ruined, and they are forced out of town.

She sues the principal and the paper for copyright infringement.

What do you think the outcome should be?

There’s an extensive analysis and ensuing discussion over at Slashdot, plus on this blog, plus some news stories here and here.

Here’s the fallout so far: the girl’s copyright lawsuit has been thrown out, but it remains before the court whether the principal acted with malicious intent. The newspaper itself is protected underthe First Amendment, but the editor was fired, presumably for the serious breach of ethics involved.

Where would you draw the line?

El! Oh! El!

When the Pirate Bay founders were slapped with a 30 million kroner fine (1 Swedish kroner is like 15 cents Canadian) they first vowed not to pay. Now, though, they may be going one better:

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm noted that he was directed to pay his fine to a specific law firm. Then someone told him that the bank account he was directed to deposit it to only allows 1,000 free transactions. Transactions after that each cost the law firm 2 Swedish kroner.

Svartholm is now asking his Internet supporters to make micro-payments — of about 1 SEK each — to that bank account. But instead of being a credit, the transaction fee means that the firm will actually be losing out.

BlogPirate calls it a DDo$ attack.

(from Slashdot)