Category: Media

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My Music

You have undoubtedly heard about the injunctions and the motions and lawsuits and all the legal technicalities of the Recording Industry Association of America’s battle with Napster. The lawyers must be advising the RIAA that they can have an impact on music piracy– and their bottom line– by winning a few court battles against the software giant.

What is most interesting is not who is in court today, but who is not in court today. Napster, my friends, is a scapegoat. Why did the RIAA not file the same motions, injunctions, and lawsuits against Microsoft? Why is Creative Labs sitting there untouched? Why is Yamaha unscathed? Who gave a special blessing to Samsung? Winamp? Music Match? Audio Catalyst? Sonique? Creative Labs? Philips? Iomega?

If you read the advertising for Windows ME and XP and whatever other version of Windows Microsoft is promoting these days, you may have noticed that Microsoft thinks you want to play music on your computer. It has incorporated all kinds of features to allow you to easily and conveniently rip, download, store, and play MP3 files. You can even store them in a directory called “My Music”! Microsoft is obviously trying to profit from the consumer’s demonstrated interest in pirated music.

And Microsoft isn’t the only corporation benefiting from the digital revolution in music. Yamaha makes speakers that are designed to be used with computers, and almost certainly used to play illegal music files. There are now players from Rio, Sony, Creative Labs, Iomega. How come all of these companies are off the hook?

Could it be because they have better lawyers than Napster, the tiny little upstart, does? Could it be that the RIAA is being arbitrary and selective about trying to enforce it’s copyrights? Could it be that the law is an ass, and the RIAA are even bigger asses?

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DivX

If you thought the world’s fat-cat corporate copyright holders had a problem with Napster and MP3’s, you can bet they are about to go into cardiac arrest.

A few years ago, some companies tried to foist a new video standard on a largely unsuspecting, but not entirely stupid, public. It was called DivX. The basic idea was this. Here were all these huge, fat, rich Hollywood companies and here were all these movies that they owned and here were all these consumers– that’s what we are, after all, “consumers”– buying copies of these videos and watching them over and over again after only paying for them once.

Now, if you’re not a lawyer, you probably don’t often think about that situation and think things like, gee, how can we get them to pay for it every time they see it? And why shouldn’t we? Again, you have to be a lawyer…

So these people got together and decided that when the next generation of high quality digital video came out, they would rectify that situation by providing disks to people that would only play once or twice. And then, pffftt! Unless you paid again.

Just what the consumer was demanding at that time, as I recall. Yes, yes, we want to give Viacom and Warner Brothers and Disney Corporation and Bruce Willis and Robin Williams even more of our money!

Anyway, the system was called DivX. And, of course, the hacker community looked upon DivX and just hated it. They hated it for both good and bad reasons. They hated it because like everyone in the world they hate to pay more than they need to to get what they want. But they also hated it for a good reason. The good reason is that these big Hollywood companies and actors already get way more money than they deserve for foisting their disgraceful products upon us. They already annoy us to death with product tie-ins, commercials, outrageous prices for food at the movie theatre, and deceptive advertising.

So the hackers set to work.

It’s not very clear to me (or anybody, apparently) where DivX 😉 (the “;)”, a winking emoticon, is part of the name) came from. It is rumoured to be a hacked Microsoft product. In any case, what DivX 😉 is is a “codec”, a computer process whereby video is compressed into small files so it can be downloaded and copied from computer to computer. It is a very good one, though not necessarily the best, nor the most readily available. But it is good enough to make it reasonable for people to copy movies off of DVD players and distribute them– illegally, of course– through the internet.

The lists of movies available tell you something about the kind of personality involved. You’ll find “The Matrix” and “The Cell” and “Terminator” and “Star Wars” on many sites. You won’t find many copies of “The Sound of Music”… yet.

The only missing piece right now is the equivalent of Napster to really take the whole thing mainstream. But it’s coming. Oh yes, you can bet it is coming.

One browse of the newsgroups devoted to topics like DivX;) and desktop video should be enough to convince anyone that a tidal wave of perverse ingenuity is at work out there and it is bent on completely destroying the entire system of copyright and distribution now in effect.

Is that a bad thing? I don’t know. The problem, as always, is how will artists get paid. On the other hand, the artists don’t get paid now. The lawyers and investors and accountants and manipulators and cheaters and liars get paid. They get paid enormous sums.

I do know a few things though.

In my opinion, all of this underground activity will not destroy either the music or film industries. Most people will continue to buy CD’s and DVD’s. Knowledgeable hackers and aficionados will use the technologies to access every form of recorded entertainment known to man, but most people still want to pop a video into the console and sit back and munch on popcorn and not give a thought to copyright law and fairness and justice for all.

The entertainment monoliths will have to be nimble and quick. They will have to keep coming up with improvements and enhancements that keep them a year or two ahead of the hackers. They will have to begin to offer CD’s and DVD’s at reasonable prices.

The only thing I’m sure they won’t do is take the high road or offer anything of value to anybody unless they really, really have to.

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Pennies for Peanuts

Yet if the characters’ faith in a better future is quintessentially American, it travels well. “Peanuts” merchandise, starting with a six-inch plastic Snoopy in 1958, now includes toys, videos, clothing, Hallmark cards, sheets, MetLife ads and… well, more than $1 billion in sales every year. If the “Peanuts”-ing of the world seems crassly exploitative to some critics (even one United Media insider says it “casts a mercantile pall over something innocent”), it’s because Schulz can’t say no. It is as if Schulz—who worries that promised TV interviews will be canceled once people realize how unworthy he is—thinks spurning a deal would tempt fate.

Yeah, give it a rest. The truth is that Charles Schultz sold out big time. He was quite capable of making a wonderful living writing a nice little comic about a loser and his pet dog, but he got greedy. He wanted millions, not hundreds of thousands. He wanted his own hockey rink. He wanted an empire. And he got it, because people did not take offense at the idea of cartoon characters designed to enrapture children being used to huckster insurance or phony sentiment (Hallmark).

Stop soft-pedaling the fact that Schultz sold his soul.

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Abba Babble

Get this– from the Toronto Star, April 2, 2000:

Buried in their songs is a complex artfulness disguised in simple pop formulas, a carefully crafted infectiousness that resonates in the group’s shimmering four-part harmonies, crisp, Scandinavian enunciation, and deceptively easy rhythms. These songs, these performances, are the work of pop music geniuses. They reel us in every time we hear them.”

And one day we will all come to believe that Gilligan’s Island is really an existential drama about the dread with which modern man faces technological domination.

Their names are Bjorn Ulvaeus, Anni-Frid Lyngstad (the red-head), Benny Andersson, Agnetha Faltskog (the blonde). Anni-Frid, Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha: Abba.

Faltskog no longer has anything to do with music. Lyngstad is into environmental causes. Benny plays accordion in some obscure folk band somewhere in Sweden. Bjorn is promoting a musical, “Mama Mia” based on Abba songs.

The most disgusting aspect of this revisionism is the pompous self-importance it allows small-time talents like Bjorn Ulvaeus.

You know, I could have sort of liked Abba a little, if I hadn’t read this drivel.

 

“Serious music critics now rank Ulvaeus and Andersson’s songs with those of the Beatles and the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson, and their musical weight in European culture alongside Grieg and Sibelius.”

Exactly which serious musical critic?  Let me assure you, serious music critics do not rate Abba with the Beatles or the Beach Boys or even, probably, with Bobby Sherman.  Well, okay: with Bobby Sherman.

What is this? Some kind of neo-con aesthetic putsch? You have to believe that only an idiot who is unaware of the Beatles’ career beyond 1965 could make such a statement. The kind of idiot who never listened to Revolver, Rubber Soul, Sergeant Pepper’s, White Album, Let it Be, and Abbey Road. As for the Beach Boys, well, yeah, lyrically there’s not much to choose from, but please name me a single Abba song that, in terms of musical imagination, could be uttered in the same breath as “Good Vibrations”.

Exactly which Abba song can be compared to “A Day in the Life”, “Eleanor Rigby”, “Norwegian Wood”, “Penny Lane”, or “Fool on the Hill”?

You want to know something else? The girls were never all that good-looking either.

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MP3’s

Let me make it clear, first of all, that I have no desire to save the music industry. The music industry consists largely of blood-sucking vampires who abuse, deceive, and exploit raw talent. A pox on all of their houses.

But, I do want artists to be paid for their work.

It is clear that there is no way to stop people from using the internet and their computers to freely copy music. It’s too easy. Even if you wanted to pay for the music, it is easier to download a copy from the internet than it is to buy a CD at your local record store.

But if the music industry can no longer sell enough CD’s to pay their artists, how will the artists be paid?

Here’s my solution: the government should impose a surcharge on all personal  internet accounts. The surcharge will be collected by all Internet Service Providers and remitted to an organization managed by representatives of the musical artists community. All artists who wish to be paid for their music will have the option of joining or not joining. This organization will find a way to track the volume of downloads for each member artist. Based on these numbers, each artist will be compensated directly from the fund.

The amount of the surcharge will probably only have to be about $2 or $3 a month or less.

The beauty of this plan is that the government is not required to monitor anybody’s downloads, or try to regulate internet usage. All it has to do is impose the fee and ensure that the money is funneled directly to the artists (and not to the parasitical music industry itself).

The only problem with this proposed system is that someone will have to develop a way of monitoring downloads and tabulating the numbers for each artist. I rather think that the makers of Napster, faced with multi-billion dollar law suits from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would be more than happy to comply. As for all those people who are paranoid of government intervention, it should be stressed that the monitoring is done by the proposed artists’ agency and not by the government or the recording industry.

There. Done. A remarkably simple and effective solution. I hereby copyright it.

All I ask is mere .01% of the take.

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Microsoft Word Still Sucks

Normally I sit down and collect details for this kind of rant, but I’m too enraged to do it right now.

The subject is Microsoft Office and Front Page 2000.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office “suites” since they intentionally destroyed Word Perfect for Windows by finagling the settings on the links to the operating system so that Word Perfect crashed frequently. Word Perfect never recovered. (Does anyone still remember when Word Perfect had a huge margin on MS Word, in the DOS world?)

Office has a lot of nice functions, a fairly nice interface, and some intriguing capabilities. You can’t avoid using it because almost every office has standardized on it. Employees request it. And it does have some slick features.

But it has a number of very, very large annoyances, all of which serve to profit Microsoft at the users’ expense.

1. What kind of idiot wants to store all his documents in a directory called “my documents”? Well, an idiot. You get a computer. You don’t understand anything about directories or files. You create something in “Word”. Where is it? Where is my document? Oh! Eureka! It’s in “my documents”. How convenient. Convenient, of course, until you have about 200 documents and you need to sort them into logical directories.

And guess what– Microsoft is carrying this absurdity even further! I just noticed there are two new directories on my computer called “my photos” and “my web pages” and “my music”.

And, after reading Bill Gates’ personal web page, I now understand what the meaning is of “my” in those directory names: your files belong to Bill Gates.

2. I have a lot of documents. I store them in many directories. In order to find what I want quickly, I have a list of “favorites”, which narrows down the search considerably, and quickly. Then I installed Front Page 2000 and Internet Explorer. You know what these incomprehensibly stupid programs did? They added my internet bookmarks to my “favorites” list. Does Microsoft honestly think that I now want to keep all my files on web servers all over the globe? And just try to get rid of the extra “favorites” that refer to web sites like “Amazon” (just where I want to store my personal letters, of course). Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

3. I used to create a certain file in Excel and then save it and then import it into Front Page to convert it to a web page so I could adjust the dĂ©cor, install some images, and fine tune it for my web page. Well, after installing Front Page 2000, whenever I open the file, it opens Excel! Look, you morons, I want to open it in Front Page, not Excel! You can’t even “import” it into Front Page. Are you people incredibly stupid or what?

4. We have an application in the office where I work that runs on Access 95. When we installed Access 97 (as part of Office 97) on our computers, the application could no longer run. So we tried to install Access 95, while leaving the rest of the Office suite alone. Access 95 killed off Access 97. For what reason, pray tell, can you not run both Access 95 and Access 97 on the same computer? Well, the obvious reason is Microsoft’s desire to bully you into upgrading everyone in your office to Office 97.

5. For that same application, we needed some kind of module from the Developer’s Tool Kit for Office 95, which cost about $1000. We bought it. We installed it. Then we found out the application will not work with Office 97. So we went looking for the Developer’s Toolkit for Office 97. Microsoft didn’t offer it anymore. Tell you what though– if you upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2000, you can buy some other combination of stupid modules for $2000 that might give you the same functionality. But then again, it might not. Nobody knows for sure. And just think: right at this very moment, Microsoft is probably hatching their next evil plan to make your life miserable until you buy some new, expensive Microsoft application, which only make your life even more miserable.

6. I invest a lot of work in templates. They save a lot of time, if you create web pages that essentially require similar formats and images. So where are the templates for Front Page? Where are they hiding? In a directory called “templates”? Damned if I know. Where are the Office 2000 templates now? Here’s a history of where templates used to go:

 

  • Word 6.0 c:\msoffice\msword\templates
  • Office 95 c:\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97a c:\program files\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97b c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates
  • Office 2000 c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates\??????

When I tried to find my Front Page templates, I ended up in a directory called:

..\..\..\windows\application data\Microsoft\chromehorse\images\rotw.jpg

Now the “chromehorse” and “rotw.jpg” are mine. They belong in c:\chromehorse. What is this file doing here? Why is Microsoft continually hiding stuff all over the place on my humungous hard drive, so it is almost impossible to figure out what files belong where and what they do? Well, it’s not some weird sort of complex system of preserving your data. In fact, this ‘system’ is designed to embed defaults into Windows that make you wholly and utterly dependent on the operating system (Microsoft) to manage your data. And the aim of all of this is to make it less and less conceivable or possible for you to use any product that doesn’t understand these secrets intimately. In other words, any product other than those made by Microsoft.

7. Do you use the power save functions of Windows? Then your system has probably crashed. It probably went into power save mode and wouldn’t “wake up”. It went into a coma. And guess what? If you shut off the power switch on the back of your computer so you can reboot, you might very well lock the system into a permanent coma. You might have to pull the battery off the motherboard to get it to wake up again. If they can’t make the power save functions work properly, why do they even bother to put them in?

8. Wow. Even as I was writing this, I discovered a new incredibly irritating “feature”. In order to get around the other idiotic defaults of Office 2000, I decided to import my favorite Front Page template into Word and save it as a Word template. Then I can use it to write my rants in Word and save them in HTML for transfer to my web page. But guess what? When I try to import the template, Office opens Front Page instead of Word, even when I try to open the document in Word!

Whoa nelly! I just found out where Microsoft is really storing my Office templates! It’s in:

c:\windows\application data\Microsoft\templates

So we can add this to the list.

And you can think about how efficient it is to keep moving your files around like that. It’s as if every six months, your company moved their head office to a different building in a different town, and hid all the office supplies in various new locations, and changed all your user names and passwords, and won’t tell you where the parking garage is.

Wow.

As for my templates
.

I’m not sure where my templates are actually. There are some bizarre file names at the tail end of that directory, none of which tell me where my laboriously designed and crafted templates are.

So, never forget that Microsoft’s goal is to put a computer into every trailer in every trailer park in America. Never forget that customers can be broken down into three categories.

10% all smart people

44% all educated people and smart people

90% people who live in trailer parks and smart people and educated people

And Microsoft probably understands that 90% very well.

“Honey, where the hell are my documents?”

“You don’t have any documents, dear. You are illiterate.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

By the way, Microsoft isn’t the only evil empire out there. Netscape stores your precious e-mails and bookmarks in a directory called:

c:\program files\communicator\users\mail

And your e-mail files are huge. Why? I don’t know. What are they storing in there? One of my email files is about 80 megabytes and contains about 500 messages. What on earth are they storing in there? Every address of every web page on the face of the earth in every message? Details of the merger with Warner Brothers?

Folks, it’s like TV. When TV started, in the 1950’s, we had some first-rate plays and dramas sponsored by Hallmark and other corporations looking for prestige.

Within ten years, we had “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Green Acres”, “Mr. Ed”, “Petticoat Junction”, and “Gomer Pyle”.

 

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Survivor: Fake TV

Well, Survivor II is in full swing now. In case you missed it, a group of individuals are placed in a primitive, uncivilized location and forced to fend for themselves for three months or so while relying strictly on their wits, skills, and courage– and the generosity of the camera crew– to survive. Once a week, they have a “tribal council” meeting and vote one member out of the club. The last remaining member wins $1 million.

The movie is called “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” based on a novel by Horace McCoy (1935) and filmed by Sydney Pollack in 1969 (starring Gig Young, Bruce Dern, Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Sarrazin and Jane Fonda).

What? How can that be?

The movie is about a dance marathon. During The Great Depression, various organizations, including radio stations, would host these crazy dance marathons to attract an audience, and, I suppose, to distract people from their problems. Couples or individuals would sign up and dance and dance and dance, non-stop, until only one couple was left on the floor. That couple won some money. The prize was never really very big, but it was the depression. People were desperate.

Gig Young, in one of the great roles of American cinema, plays the MC of this particular dance. His performance is dazzling. He is a mixture of Dick Clark, Billy Graham, and Satan, cajoling the dancers onwards, promising them extravagant rewards and fame, ruthlessly weeding out the half-hearted, the weak, and the indifferent. When a beautiful young girl offers to have sex with him on the understanding that he will help her win, he smiles slightly, takes the sex, but delivers nothing. The girl mistakenly believed some kind of obligation would exist, when she knew full well that she had no power to compel it.

Some medical care is provided for the dancers, but they are generally brutalized, ruthlessly weeded out, and cruelly disposed of when they give up.

When it becomes clear that not enough dancers are falling fast enough, they hold “sprints”. The dancers race around in a big circle, and the last couple is eliminated. During one of these sprints, a sailor (Red Buttons) has a heart attack and dies. His girl continues dragging him along and over the finish line ahead of one other couple. As medical personnel attend to him, Gig Young orders the band to play to distract the crowd– the party goes on. And now a word from our sponsor.

The similarities between “They Shoot Horses Don’t They” and “Survivor” are uncanny. Except that Jeff Probst is to Gig Young what Dean Jones was to Laurence Olivier. But the message is the same. Survivor is about our system, our society, and what makes you a winner or loser in the general scheme of things by which most of us live. As such, it is a remarkably amoral scheme. There are no rewards for virtue, honesty, or integrity.

The scheme of Survivor is sold to us as a contest in which the most talented and strongest are the likely winners. But it soon became clear that the most talented and strongest were the first to be voted off the island, and the most devious and manipulative dominated the proceedings. It is a tribute to the endless resourcefulness of our culture that this state of affairs was readily absorbed and adapted. Richard Hatch, the cleverest and most cunning of the contestants, quickly became a celebrity.

It is interesting that, while selling us the program as a test of survivor skills (even the name…), the producers didn’t have the guts to stay with the original concept for very long. First of all, emergency medical help was always readily available. Secondly, food had to be flown into the island on a regular basis in order to keep the contestant’s alive. Thirdly, scenes were regularly staged or re-enacted to improve on camera angles.

But most importantly, contestants were routinely manipulated in order to provide more conflict– and better television.  Left to their own devices, they were quite likely to have cooperated, something that could only be allowed in the worst nightmares of the sponsors.

But the most important element of phoniness in the whole thing is the rather bizarre ritual of voting someone off the island at the end of every episode, as if this process is analogous to some indispensable element of human society. Think of the possible alternative ways of determining a winner. A simple vote by all the contestants at the end of three months. A vote by the audience. A skills contest. Or they could even have split up the million among anyone who could survive one year without any outside help.

What might have happened is that the group would have pulled together, built a society that works for them, and learned the value of cooperation and sharing. But hey, even Sesame Street has advertising nowadays.

On the other hand, they might have broken down into competing factions, started bickering, and ended up killing each other.

What is clear in “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They” is that the entire contest is rigged. The participants are urged to believe that, “in this great country of ours”, the rules are fair, the rewards are just, and anyone can win. The belief in this system is what propels people to join the marathons, and what provides the owners of the marathons with their wealth. The climax of the story is when the contestants find out that the cost of all of their “expenses” (food, water, bedding) are deducted from their winnings. Not only are they exploited and cheated– they are obliged to finance the very means by which they are exploited and cheated!

In the same way the Capital Gains Deduction takes money out of the revenue stream and hands it over to the rich, so that middle-class taxpayers– who can’t afford personal accountants, and can’t make the huge investments that are eligible for capital gains exemptions– are essentially funding the very system by which they are cheated.

The weekly tribal council idea is propaganda for the right wing. There are only so many goodies to go around, and the best way to distribute things is to have a system that rewards the greediest and most ruthless among us, and punishes the nice. It’s George Bush Jr.’s tax cut in the flesh.

But I’ll bet the producers of Survivor didn’t consciously think that they were providing the right wing with free advertising. I’ll bet they just thought that a bunch of people cooperating and helping each other would be pretty boring to most viewers. And as much as I despise them, they got the viewers, and the headlines, and the talk shows, and the book deals.

They are the real survivors.

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CNN: Pabulum for the Brain

CNN, the world’s most important news station (and so say all of us!) showed it’s true colours tonight.

Tonight is the 10th anniversary of one of the most significant events of the 20th century, the tearing down of the Berlin wall. Though the end of the cold war was marked by many different stages and events, the tearing down of the wall was easily the most powerful and dramatic. It marked an end to almost fifty years of isolation and hostility, that macabre dance of death between the two lethally-armed super-powers, the exploitation of proxy states in the third world, and the polarization of the globe’s communities. It provided the world with a striking symbol of the failure of communist ideology to satisfy the needs and aspirations of millions of people. It was one of the most important events of the century.

In honor of this event, CNN decided to broadcast an interview
 with Princess Diana’s butler.

You know, this is pretty consistent with CNN’s general philosophical point of view, if you can call it that. News is entertainment. That was clear from the early days of “Eyewitness News”, a stylistic innovation pioneered by the masters of trashy tv in the 1970’s, ABC. “Eyewitness News” redefined “importance” to mean “that which provides the most exciting film footage”. The top news story would be that blazing car wreck at Jefferson and Wilson, or a gaggle of high school cheer-leaders holding a car-wash to raise money for fashion orphans, instead of some new disarmament treaty or new labour laws or trade agreements or whatever. Eyewitness news injected humour and trite personal comments by the newscasters. It emphasized the chemically enhanced skin tones of their anchors and their flashy hairstyles.

This is where most Americans ingest their news. Pabulum for the brain.

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Reversed Progress

Here is an illustration of backwards progress.  Yes, I know, all these pictures are reduced to 72 dpi for display on computer– these are illustrations.   To give you real samples to analyze with me, I’d have to post some files that are very, very large, to show what the pictures look like, for example, at 400 dpi. However, anyone with an actual collection of photos can verify my argument.  You can  see that the black and white photos from the 50’s and 60’s have better resolution than the Instamatic or Polaroid shots from the 60’s,  70’s, and 80’s.

brownie50.jpg (13454 bytes)
Kodak Brownie Picture, 1950’s.  Large negative format = decent print.

brownie1.jpg (17509 bytes)
Brownie Picture – 1960’s still quite decent.

bw35mm1.jpg (12144 bytes)
35mm black and white, 1960’s: very sharp.

brownie_c.jpg (18931 bytes)
Brownie colour photo, 1960’s.

instamatic_c.jpg (16654 bytes)
Instamatic Picture, 1960’s. 


pocket1.jpg (14880 bytes)
Pocket Camera, 1977.  Ever try enlarging one of these sandbags?

polaroid1.jpg (17934 bytes)
Polaroid Picture, taken in 1980’s. Yecch.  To the turtles too.

cabaret.JPG (14680 bytes)
35mm colour, 1992

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Photoplay and Copyright

Photoplay

I just can’t leave the issue of copyright alone. It comes up everyday in one situation or another.

Today, it was my son remarking that he wasn’t allowed to use an Albrecht Durer woodcut as the basis of a project he was working on because his teacher was afraid it would violate some rules of copyright and plagiarism. He argued that a painter who has been dead for 400 years can’t possibly have any works under copyright anymore, and that it isn’t plagiarism if you acknowledge the use of the work. This teacher was so paranoid of the copyright police, however, that she still refused permission.

Here’s an interesting fact. Though most “classic” paintings are no longer under copyright, a photograph of the painting can be.

Whoa! Let’s think about that. Let’s think a lot about that, because a lot of museums, including our own Art Gallery of Ontario, won’t let you take pictures inside their galleries anymore. Even when the paintings are hundreds of years old, as in the case of the “Old Masters” show they did recently. So if you can’t take your own picture, then you have to get a copy from somewhere else. A logical place to look is in an art history book with lavish illustrations. But, according to the copyright police, you can’t copy that picture because, though the work of art itself is public domain, the photograph of it is not.

[Added 2022-04-12: I am pleased to note that many museums do, in fact, allow photography of the art work, as long as you do not use a flash.]

Now, photographers who create original pictures can definitely copyright their work. If I am walking along a boulevard in Toronto and I see a bum who looks like Mike Harris poking through a garbage bin and I take a picture and then publish it in the Toronto Sun, that is my copyrighted work. I saw the image. I took the picture. I chose the aperture and the angle and the type of film. If I was a professional photographer, I may have developed the picture and printed it myself. I may have edited it on my computer, before handing it over to the Sun for publication. Fair enough. It’s my work. I deserve to get paid for it. Let’s leave aside the question, for the moment, of whether or not the bum should also get paid. The photograph has a certain value because of the intellectual and physical effort of the photographer. That seems pretty fair.

However, the same photographer walks into the Louvre in Paris and snaps a picture of the Mona Lisa. His goal is not to create something new and original (unless, like Marcel Duchamps, he wants to put a moustache on it). His goal is to create an exact, faithful rendering of the original, so that art students can study it in a text book at a mediocre high school somewhere in Peoria. The value of the image is determined entirely by the value of the work of Leonardo Da Vinci that went into it. But since Da Vinci has died years and years ago, the image has now become a part of cultural heritage, for all to share.

So why is this image copyrighted? Legally, in fact, it is. That’s an outrage. It isn’t entitled to copyright protection anymore. It really isn’t. It’s absurd. I refuse to accept this copyright. I refuse to acknowledge it. If I choose to scan that image into my computer’s memory and show it on my web page, I will.

Here’s another interesting case of aggressive copyright imperialism: the company that sells sheet music to high school bands insists that the band is not allowed to make any copies of the actual sheet music itself, no matter what. No photocopies, no overheads. But, we are told, the copyright laws apply to intellectual property, not physical property. Remember, this is why you can’t copy software or music CDs. Because even though you own the physical disk, it is the content of the disk that is protected.

So if a school buys sheet music for the entire band, and decides to prevent the paper copies from deteriorating by photocopying them and handing the copies out to band members, there should be no problem. Remember, the school has paid for intellectual property to be used by each student in the band. What difference does it make whether they read it off the original print or a copy of it? The school didn’t buy half a copyright. It didn’t pay $20 a sheet for paper. It paid for use of copyrighted material by each member of the band. If so, there is no ethical or moral reason why the band can’t access that material in any way they choose, including computer screens.

If that is true, there should be no obstacle to making copies of the protected material for your own use. For example, I used to tape all of my vinyl LP’s as soon as I bought them, in order to minimize the wear and tear on the fragile plastic itself. I paid for the LP. I own a right to use the intellectual property on it.

Well, the record companies are finally coming around to the fact that they can’t very well have it both ways. If the copyright applies to the physical object, the CD itself, than either the intellectual property is what is copyrighted—in which case you can make as many copies as you want for your personal use—or it’s the physical object that is copyrighted, in which case you can make as many copies as you want for almost anybody.

Who else should get Copyright Protection by These Standards?

My son plays bass in a high school orchestra. They recently issued a CD as part of a fund-raiser. They carefully obtained the correct copyrights for any piece of music that was not public domain.

However, my son frequently improvises the bass line. So he creates, through his own original and unique thought processes, a piece of music that is utterly his own. Should he be able to demand royalties for each CD sold?

That bum that looks like Harris—he owns his face, his hands, his ragged clothes. He owns his posture, the look on his face, the minute the photograph is taken. But it is the photographer who collects the royalty, not him. He doesn’t even get a share.

And who should get copyright protection but doesn’t have it yet


That’s right—you and me. Your name and my name. Your address and my address. I chose to move to this address and I chose to have this particular e-mail address. I hereby copyright it. No use without permission. I’m not kidding. If you use my name and address on your printed envelope or your electronic mail, you owe me $50.

I register a software package I have purchased to do my home accounting. The software company sells my name and address to another software company, with the result being that I get more garbage in my mailbox, inviting me to subscribe to some stupid investment service. How dare they? What right do they have to sell my name? Who decided that I can’t copy one of their software applications to give to a friend—who would be pleased with the favor–but they can sell my name to another software company—to my great annoyance?

So I propose a simple act of parliament or congress that simply assigns the copyright of a person’s name, and his address and any other personal information, including medical or credit histories, to the person him or herself. Done. From now on, anybody who wants to sell this information must pay a copyright fee to the owners. The only exception would be the standard copyright exception: research, journalism, and reviews. Done. Justice at last.