Be The Media

Waging the media battle

Robert McChesney exposes four powerful media myths, and proposes solid solutions in this excellent article for American Prospect:

"Coming off the media-ownership struggle, there is extraordinary momentum. Scores of groups have emerged over the past few years — local, national, and even global in scope — organized around a wide range of issues. In the coming few years, expect to see major progressive legislation launched to restore more competitive markets in radio and television; to have antitrust law applied effectively to media; to have copyright returned to some semblance of concern for protecting the public domain; to have viable subsidies put in place that will spawn a wide range of nonprofit and noncommercial media; to have a wireless high-speed Internet system that will be superior and vastly less expensive than what Mr. Roth and Mr. Corleone (the cable and telephone companies) have in mind; to have real limitations on advertising and commercialism, especially that aimed at children; to have protection for media workers, so they can do their work without onerous demands upon their labor by rapacious owners. The list goes on and on."

Judge Says Artist Can Make Fun of Barbie

Bill Werde writes in the NY Times:

"Seven years ago when Tom Forsythe, an artist and photographer, was searching for a subject for a new project, he settled on Barbie, ultimately producing a series of 78 photographic images of the wildly famous doll showing her nude, and sometimes posed provocatively, in or around various household appliances.

"I thought the pictures needed something that really said 'crass consumerism,' and to me, that's Barbie,'' Mr. Forsythe said. "The doll is issued in every possible role you can imagine and comes with every possible accessory for each and every role."

Mr. Forsythe developed a theme that he called "Barbie's power as a beauty myth." He displayed his photographs at art fairs in Utah and Kansas City, generating a few thousand dollars in sales but otherwise attracting little notice.

But his work drew the attention of Mattel Inc., which has manufactured the Barbie doll since 1959. In the summer of 1999, Mattel sued Mr. Forsythe for copyright and trademark infringement.

After a lengthy legal tussle, which included a series of appeals, a federal judge late last week instructed Mattel to pay Mr. Forsythe legal fees of more than $1.8 million."

Permissions on media drive scholars to lawbooks

From New York Times by Tom Zeller, Jr.:

"When some 20,000 first-year American medical students reported to their schools last summer, they received a free 20-minute multimedia collage of music, text and short video clips from television doctor dramas, past and present, burned onto a CD-ROM.

But the CD was perhaps more of an education for its developer, Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.

"It's crazy," Professor Turow said of the labyrinth of permissions, waivers and fees he navigated to get the roughly three minutes of video clips included on the CD, which was paid for by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The process took months, Professor Turow said, and cost about $17,000 in fees and royalties paid to the various studios and guilds for the use of clips. The film used ranged from, for example, a 1961 episode of "Ben Casey" to a more-recent scene from "ER."

GarageBand.com offers Creative Commons licenses

GarageBand.com, which hosts indy music and uses a peer review process to identify hot bands - is now offering the Creative Commons Music Sharing License to artists that want to distribute their tunes for free, according to Katie Dean in Wired.com:

"For artists, "it's a way to facilitate and improve self-distribution," said Neeru Paharia, assistant director of Creative Commons. Many musicians put their music on their personal websites and grant permission to users to download their songs, but fans may hesitate because of the current copyright climate. Nearly 3,000 music sharers have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for violating copyright."

How copyright law changed hip-hop

Kembrew McLeod reported for Stay Free Magazine:

"In the mid- to late 1980s, hip-hop artists had a very small window of opportunity to run wild with the newly emerging sampling technologies before the record labels and lawyers started paying attention. No one took advantage of these technologies more effectively than Public Enemy, who put hundreds of sampled aural fragments into It Takes a Nation and stirred them up to create a new, radical sound that changed the way we hear music. But by 1991, no one paid zero for the records they sampled without getting sued. They had to pay a lot. The following is a combination of two interviews conducted separately with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.

Stay Free!: What are the origins of sampling in hip-hop?

Chuck D: Sampling basically comes from the fact that rap music is not music. It's rap over music. So vocals were used over records in the very beginning stages of hip-hop. In the late 1980s, rappers were recording over live bands who were basically emulating the sounds off of the records. Eventually, you had synthesizers and samplers, which would take sounds that would then get arranged or looped, so rappers can still do their thing over it. The arrangement of sounds taken from recordings came around 1984 to 1989.

Stay Free!: Those synthesizers and samplers were expensive back then, especially in 1984. How did hip-hop artists get them if they didn't have a lot of money?

Chuck D: Not only were they expensive, but they were limited in what they could do – they could only sample two seconds at a time. But people were able to get a hold of equipment by renting time out in studios."

"Stay Free!: When you were sampling from many different sources during the making of It Takes a Nation, were you at all worried about copyright clearance?

Shocklee: No. Nobody did. At the time, it wasn't even an issue. The only time copyright was an issue was if you actually took the entire rhythm of a song, as in looping, which a lot of people are doing today. You're going to take a track, loop the entire thing, and then that becomes the basic track for the song. They just paperclip a backbeat to it. But we were taking a horn hit here, a guitar riff there, we might take a little speech, a kicking snare from somewhere else. It was all bits and pieces.

Stay Free!: Did you have to license the samples in It Takes a Nation of Millions before it was released?

Shocklee: No, it was cleared afterwards. A lot of stuff was cleared afterwards. Back in the day, things was different. The copyright laws didn't really extend into sampling until the hip-hop artists started getting sued. As a matter of fact, copyright didn't start catching up with us until Fear of a Black Planet. That's when the copyrights and everything started becoming stricter because you had a lot of groups doing it and people were taking whole songs. It got so widespread that the record companies started policing the releases before they got out.

Stay Free!: With its hundreds of samples, is it possible to make a record like It Takes a Nation of Millions today? Would it be possible to clear every sample?

Shocklee: It wouldn't be impossible. It would just be very, very costly. The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout – meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound – for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album."

"So Sue Me"

Being a Norwegian/English/Scottish/American, I had to publish this one - "DVD-Jon is back in the news - he's the guy that became a hero to global hackers (and DVD consumers) when he developed and distributed a program that copies DVD movies - WHEN HE WAS JUST 15 years old. Yet more proof to Hollywood that no matter how "secure" their digital entertainment, some 15 year old kid somewhere in the world may be able to eventually hack it. They have all the time in the world - and since they are broke - the desire too!

More from Reuters:

"Norwegian Hacker Rebuts Music Piracy Criticism" A Norwegian hacker famed for defeating Hollywood in a cyber piracy trial on Thursday rejected allegations he had illegally unlocked a code that enables unauthorised copying of music files from the Internet.

Jon Johansen, a 20-year-old computer programmer who was cleared of piracy charges in January, has developed a source code for copying music and posted it on the Internet less than a week before he is due to appear in an Oslo appeals court.

Johansen's code allows users of Apple Computer Inc.'s new iTunes online music store to break digital rights management (DRM) technology that prevents people copying files downloaded from the service.

On an Internet site named "So Sue Me", Johansen said critics had "failed to understand that by buying into DRM they have given the seller complete control over the product after it's been sold," calling them "clueless about copyright law".

Johansen, whose DVD-copying made him a hero to hackers worldwide, said he had received a string of emails accusing him of violating copyright law linked to the iTunes codes."