From: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org (ecto-digest) To: ecto-digest@smoe.org Subject: ecto-digest V6 #149 Reply-To: ecto@smoe.org Sender: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ecto-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk ecto-digest Monday, May 29 2000 Volume 06 : Number 149 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: Denio in Summertime [Joseph Zitt ] Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla ["Tom Ditto" ] Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla ["Tom Ditto" Subject: Re: Denio in Summertime On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 01:06:04AM -0400, sofa king wrote: > >10-17 July > > Amy Denio & Francisco Lopez tour US East Coast - with other possible > >dates in SW in July. This sounds most intriguing -- I like them both a lot, but am baffled as to what they might do together. - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 12:00:07 -0400 From: "Tom Ditto" Subject: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla Reminded as I was by the visage of Lans Ulrich on a Sunday talk show, an irony in the Metallica suit brought me to attention. While I have written here about the legal rights of artists, I downloaded a Metallica version of Hendrix's "Little Wing" using the Napster server. This Metallica cover of "Little Wing" was simply dreadful, completely missing the light and lyrical quality that sets this Hendrix song apart from his otherwise harder edge, and I deleted the Metallica rendition from my MP3 files. Is this "fair use"? It required one hearing in order to make my determination. If the song had met my criteria for inclusion in my library, would that not mark the point at which the copyright holders might have a claim of malfeasance? I feel somewhat different about "Little Wing" than I would about almost anything else, because of a special link between the song, Hendrix and myself. Having made, without pay, a credible video of this particular song, it doesn't seem unfair for me to have a copy. True, I signed a copyright release for the video in 1982 to Harry Shapiro who held the audio master, and his production group paid out a couple of thousand for my studio time to make the video under the rubric of WTV, my production group, but I can show the piece if I am present at the showing, and I wasn't paid a nickel for the month of my sweat that went into the production nor given a cent of royalties for the dozens of times they spun it out on their USA Network cablecast. The purported holders of this Hendrix copyright, an estate of camp followers like Shapiro who raided Electric Lady Land for the 2 inch masters, put nothing into either the Hendrix song or my video, so I feel entitled to my copies. In fact, I was in Electric Lady Land in the early 70's when these pirates descended, because at the time I was shooting an album cover for another guitarist, Billy Cross, who was laying down tracks in Hendrix's studio even while the shelves of Jimis tapes were being cleared out before our eyes. Indeed, I feel that ownership of this dead rock star's copyrights can be questioned, although I'm not going to be the one to pay the lawyers. So far I've downloaded two live Hendrix performances of "Little Wing" through Napster, and I feel no remorse. OK, mine is a grey area, when the lines generally are clearly drawn. No, it's not right to use Napster like a record store, because no one is paying the artists, the producers, or the record companies. I actually agree with that, despite my regret that it is a group like Metallica making the point. Their metal is filthy lucre, and their artistic accomplishment is not to my liking either. I hear commentators [e.g Joe Nocera, Weekend Edition Saturday May 27, www.npr.org] saying "Get with the program," arguing that Napster should be free, and the artists will gain their livelihood in live concerts. But that's completely unfair to artists who rise to their greatest heights in recording studios to say nothing of a base line distinction. The music orginates with the artists, and hence, by law, they hold the copyright. It's not a law that is wrong. It was mandated in the Constitution. We're talking fundamentals of our democracy here, and let no new technology drive it asunder. While all this is going on, out comes Gnutella. http://gnutella.wego.com Bypassing the bottleneck at the Napster severs, Gnutella is essentially serverless. It allows everyone access to everyone else's shared folder while they are on line. Even if Metallica prevails against Napster (the smart money says they will), Napster is only the tip of the iceberg. Now patrolling these waters will require more than lookouts on the main mast, but an ocean wide sonar, because submerged in the Internet traffic are pirate exchanges in all materials, not just MP3's, and these possible infringements are embedded in the perfectly legitimate exchanges of private communications. I can't begin to untangle the knot. My feeling is that what has passed will be treated as the past; and the future will have to be different. One way to resolve the dilemma is for the media to change to something that cannot be recorded in a living room. It may be possible to up the bandwidth beyond the recording ability of any computer for sale on the street. These new devices would suck modulated laser light from optical fibers at such bit density that the home would again be at the receiving end of art that couldn't be recorded. This won't protect music, which can always be decoded once that portion of the program reaches the loudspeakers, but visual artists may rise to ascendence using 3D display media that are so dense with data that only this delivery scheme will drive the projector. While audio quality is now at an equal to our perception of sound, for a century we have been living in Flatland with movies and videos that are simply one plane of millions in the 3D environment. Once the technology is ramped up to display volumes rather than flat pictures, the data density will swamp Internet delivery and/or typical home data recorders. Dr. Tom ditto@taconic.net "When in excess More is less, But less is less And more is more When keeping score." ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 13:03:55 -0400 From: sofa king Subject: ADMIN: smoe.org move today as promised...smoe.org'll be down for most of the afternoon. >Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 12:56:33 -0400 >From: Jeff Wasilko >To: guests@smoe.org >Subject: ADMIN: smoe.org move today > >smoe.org will be moving today at 2pm Eastern. > >-jeff ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 14:58:28 -0400 From: "Tom Ditto" Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla Joe Zitt wrote: > I've suggested a possible approach to this in a recent post to Slashdot. > http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/05/26/1251220&cid=664 snip > It seems to me that some combination of an ID3 field and a PGP-like signature could somehow indicate that an MP3 was authorised by the musicians. A Gnutella-like client could then check that field and alert the fan, who would then be free to choose whether to download it or not based on that person's moral sense of whether the artist's wishes are to be honored. (I recognize that it would be up to the listener whether to use a client which would honor that field, and whether to act upon that information.) < snip Firstly, I apologize to Ecto (certainly not to Metallica) for misspelling Lars' name. I wasn't listening, so I can't confirm whether I think he comes across as a talking head. As it happened, the TV was on, so I saw a face and a subtitle. This triggered some thoughts which I sought to share. Joe, I don't think the "honor system" is going to be regarded as a solution. Anything that can be hacked will be hacked. Anything that can be hijacked will be hijacked. I've read one commentator who simply suggested criminal sanctions. It's a frightening thought, but that has always been a means of keeping the lid on. Frankly, the Lartians would probably go for punishment as an alternative, at least, that seems to be the personality they project with all that leather and metal. For my part, I'd like feedback on my suggestion. Essentially it boils down to staying one step ahead of the counterfeit copy. With paper money they've tried inks and codes. For art I'd suggest that there are some ways to self-express that can't be copied. Tom ditto@taconic.net "If it must be a word, Then 'God' is a verb..." ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 16:37:31 -0400 From: "Tom Ditto" Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla Hey, Joe, where you going with that smoking MP3 in your hand? There is a certain degree of polarization going on here, from the (I love this characterization) "nyahh, nyahh" Napsters to the Full Metallica Jacketed RIAA. Like all wars, you gotta choose sides, and that pushes us toward either the regard of the copyright lawyers or into the hands of the anarchists. So, my comment about the limited utility of an "honor system" has to do with the copyright lawyers who won't trust anyone further than they can bill them. The copyright must be preserved. It is part of the bed rock of our civilization. If you remove it, intellectual property becomes free, and unprotected creativity goes unrewarded. It's not a lot to ask people who don't make the music to buy the music. Given our history of prosecutions, there will be criminal sanctions for freeloaders. After some not-so-innocents are made examples of by the meat grinder legal system, the pirates will be hiding out in coves. That isn't much of a life. They hunted down and hanged Captain Kidd, a man of culture and taste. All that warfare aside, I suggested that there are means of self-expression that transcend the Napster/Gnutella scheme. Being a visual artist, I have my methods. Recently I bought myself an Alps MD-5000 printer with a few hundred dollars of consumables. I know that the printer produces output with a very long shelf life (waterproof, fadeproof, smearproof). It's the Un-Epson. So I'm busily putting my computer graphics on this archival paper with its unique reflective foil ink, knowing that long after I'm gone and the printers themselves have been discontinued (that's about to happen Alps fans); no one will be able to copy my work. I'm minting money into the collector's marketplace. A visual artist can go even further backward and use pigments on canvas. I think here one finds an established market, and not until the UPS ads become true and objects fly out of printers (cheaper, faster; better hard drives notwithstanding, this isn't about to happen soon); visual artists can create without fear of mass Napster hysteria. I don't have a solution for musicians, but there is a certain amount of sweet revenge in my ignorance. When I began my career in the mid-60's, I was putting lightshows up behind San Francisco bands. It was expensive to mount a light show my way, because I used motion picture film and 35 mm slides along with the ubiquitous overhead projections. I crafted shows to bands. For example, a Jefferson Airplane concert received filmed performances of dancers who flew around the Fillmore via a gimbaled projection system. After each show, Bill Grahmn gave me $50. He gave the band $500. They grew rich. I went out of business. Why the difference in reward? It had to do with an outlet for the art. I couldn't put my light shows into a mass market, but the bands had the LP. The difference was devastating to my career. I distilled the light shows into single reel films and sold into museum markets, but that didn't support me very well. Ironically, the movies I made were not singular objects, and curators were at a loss of how to parlay them into cold hard cash as they do contemporary painting. Now the tables could be turned. It might be that in order for the musicians to be protected from piracy, they'll have to embed their performances in light shows that can't be copied. If my 3D paradigm is followed, the home projection system will be on a fiber optic line so fast that it wouldn't be possible for the pirate marketplace to steal much more than the audio portion. The data bandwidth required for immersive 3D technology on the receiver simply won't be available from any home computer. Instead, the audience will line up for their pay per view on the fiber optic line. I know that bandwidth is about to change into the home, because the technology transmission are going from electricity to light. It's the same revolution that put the Internet into our homes... not DSL, but much more than that. The average home will receive data at terabit rates, but the terabit pumps will remain capital intensive and restricted to the controls we all know and hate at the Head End. So, Joe, here I 've offered two ways that the artist can work in a copyright protected environment. One is primitive.. the unique objet d'art; and the other is high tech... the immersive 3D performance space. It seems to me that if I can see two avenues, there must be many more. Tom ditto@taconic.net "Do you copy? Over..." ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 14:32:33 -0400 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 02:58:28PM -0400, Tom Ditto wrote: > Joe, I don't think the "honor system" is going to be regarded as a solution. Hmm... that's hard to respond to, since the passivity of "be regarded" doesn't indicate whose regard it concerns. And what one views as a solution depends to a great extent on what one views as the problem. > Anything that can be hacked will be hacked. > Anything that can be hijacked will be hijacked. Agreed. And doing an arms race of making things harder and harder to hack is inevitably doomed. After all, few would have thought ten years ago that it would be feasible to grab a digital copy of a complete album over a telephone line. Yet I just downloaded a complete CD in MP3 format (a CD I already own) over Gnutella in about 20 minutes on my DSL connection. And the 50 MB it takes up on my hard drive (a 30 GB drive the size of a hockey puck) is trivial, especially as compared to my first hard drive -- a 5 MB brick. If the genie is out of the bottle, trust may be all we have. You might be intrugigued by the latest installment in Robert Fripp's diary where he presents a variety of current opinions and policies on bootlegging from the likes of Phish, John Perry Barlow, Mike Kennealy, his readers, and his own label. My suggestion certainly won't appease those who view the copying technology itself as intrinsically evil (such as the RIAA), but I think it would have a positive effect on the ardent fans of the artists in question. > Frankly, the Lartians would probably go for punishment as an alternative, at > least, that seems to be the personality they project with all that leather > and metal. When you read the interview with Lars on Slashdot (to which my posting was a response), your opinion may change. He does seem rather thoughtful, and not set on vengeance. I think he regrets how some of his statements have been spun, and how some of their plans have gone awry. I also blame the bozos in charge at Napster for much of what's gone down -- as with much of their doings, they seem to be operating at a kindergarden "nyahh nyahh" level. But on the other hand, with the rise of Gnutella and its descendants, Napster is already obsolete. We won't have to worry about what its operators might do for very much longer. > For art I'd suggest that there are some ways to self-express that can't be > copied. Other than a live performance in real time in the physical presence of an audience, what might they be? - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 13:26:23 -0400 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla I've suggested a possible approach to this in a recent post to Slashdot. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/05/26/1251220&cid=664 - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 19:34:17 -0500 (CDT) From: "Mitchell A. Pravatiner" Subject: Concert Review: Rubygrass and Sonia Dada Last night I was in the audience for performances by two quite different bands, Rubygrass as the opening act and Sonia Dada as the headliner, at the Skyline Stage at Navy Pier here in Chicago. I was drawn to the concert by the fact it was the last performance by Rubygrass, a local independent alternative rock band I have enjoyed hearing several times over the past year, before breaking up to "work on other projects," as the euphemism goes. Their swan song consisted of the same material they did at the various club dates I attended, favorites from their fine CD _Fireflies_. In the smaller, more intimate environment of the clubs, they never failed to energize their audience. It is too bad they couldn't have done their farewell concert in such a place, rather than in a lower-mid-size arena within a festival mall and tourist trap. My reserved seat was toward the back of the house; most of the audience-- consisting initially, I would guess, mostly of people previously familiar with the band--was toward the front. Most of the seats were empty. The overall atmosphere was something like a ball park, with people constantly going in and out, often for trips to the concession stands outside. A lot of people arrived while the concert was in progress, their tickets probably impulse purchases during a visit to the Pier in general. The combination of distance, dispersion and distractions made the venue a less-than-optimal showcase for Oskar Saville's magnificent stage presence, and the band's finely crafted tunes with highly literate lyrics. It is unfortunate that we will not be hearing from them as a group again. Going in, I knew nothing about Sonia Dada. The name sounded to me like an ectophilic singer-songwriter. It is not. It's actually a band whose music is an interesting mix of rock, jazz, Latin, gospel, and R&B. All three of its vocalists are black; most of the backup musicians, which include several brass players, are white. This time, the arena served the performers well. The large crowd, heavily but not entirely white, was on its feet for much of the show, with a whole lotta swaying (ah there, Jerry Lee Lewis :-) ) going on to the music. I was somewhat bored with a couple of their early numbers in the gospel-rock genre, but before long I found their songs quite engaging. Even after I started for home after the first encore, I found myself hanging around the outside of the semi-open-air venue, curious what they would do next. Mitch ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 28 May 2000 21:45:00 -0400 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 04:37:31PM -0400, Tom Ditto wrote: > Hey, Joe, where you going with that smoking MP3 in your hand? Gonna kill my admin -- caught him posting songs on the office LAN. > Like all wars, you gotta choose sides, No, you don't. And you have the choice not to treat it as a war. Compromise is not only possible but inevitable. The question is where the compromise will happen along the spectrum shared by both extremes. > A visual artist can go even > further backward and use pigments on canvas. I think here one finds an > established market, and not until the UPS ads become true and objects fly > out of printers (cheaper, faster; better hard drives notwithstanding, this > isn't about to happen soon); visual artists can create without fear of mass > Napster hysteria. On the other hand, there is a large market for replicas of objects originally painted on canvas. The difference in media makes as little difference to many as the difference between an original recording and its compressed MP3 equivalent. There is a market for the originals -- but much of the market for visual art is as amusingly out of whack as the market for many Internet businesses. > I don't have a solution for musicians, but there is a certain amount of > sweet revenge in my ignorance. When I began my career in the mid-60's, I was Your visual work sounds wonderful. I wish I had seen it. That it fell victim to the market's tunnel view on reproducability of objects is unfortunate, and points to some of the flaws in the whole intersection of art and commerce. > Now the tables could be turned. It might be that in order for the musicians > to be protected from piracy, they'll have to embed their performances in > light shows that can't be copied. If my 3D paradigm is followed, the home > projection system will be on a fiber optic line so fast that it wouldn't be > possible for the pirate marketplace to steal much more than the audio > portion. If it can be streamed, it can be captured. If it can be captured, it can be duplicated. If it can be duplicated, it can be bootlegged. > The data bandwidth required for immersive 3D technology on the > receiver simply won't be available from any home computer. I have frequently heard in the past that things that are now available wouldn't be possible. Based on the history of such predictions, I see cause for optimism. > So, Joe, here I 've offered two ways that the artist can work in a copyright > protected environment. One is primitive.. the unique objet d'art; and the > other is high tech... the immersive 3D performance space. It seems to me > that if I can see two avenues, there must be many more. But will those others have similar flaws? Looping back to earlier in the discussion, I spotted an intriguing quote in the recent Rolling Stone: "The new Dave Matthews Band album won't be out until July, but Matthews is betting that resourceful fans will have heard the songs before show time. 'After the third or fourth show, some of their friends will send them across the Internet, because they'll have taped the show,' he says. 'I don't mind. And then we'll just have our studio version that will come out and disappoint them terribly.' - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 00:22:01 -0400 From: "Tom Ditto" Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla Tom wrote: > > Like all wars, you gotta choose sides, Joe replied: > No, you don't. And you have the choice not to treat it as a war. > Compromise is not only possible but inevitable. The question is where > the compromise will happen along the spectrum shared by both extremes. I guess the war metaphor is a bit extreme, because in war you don't get to compromise, and in legal battles you do. Nonetheless, I sense a bipolar situation where the copyright is at stake, and the basic right cannot be compromised except in "fair use." That standard does have variations, but it wouldn't allow for wholesale copying and distribution ala Napster. The resulting situation is somewhat war-like, that is, infringement carries real world penalties: fines and jail. Like war, it isn't a pretty picture. Joe observes: > > ..., there is a large market for replicas of objects > originally painted on canvas. Actually, the reproduction of paintings raises the value of the original so much that reproductions are usually welcomed by the holders of the original. It is understood that the reproduction is not as good as the original, so the original gains value. There are methods to produce a facsimile of an original, but the technology is cumbersome, expensive and easily distinguished from the original. Successful forgers are few and far between, and their work is generally on a one-off basis. Mass forgery is out of the question. Machine made copies are easily distinguished from originals. > The difference in media makes as little > difference to many as the difference between an original recording and > its compressed MP3 equivalent. There is a market for the originals -- > but much of the market for visual art is as amusingly out of whack as > the market for many Internet businesses. I'll agree that the visual art market is out of whack, but painting is not a mass medium. By way of contrast, while there is a market for manuscripts and first editions, the value of work of literature is fundamentally measured by how many copies are made. That's why copyrights have been so important in music, literature, film, and video. The problem is most acute in digital arts, where the copy equals the original. > > If it can be streamed, it can be captured. > If it can be captured, it can be duplicated. > If it can be duplicated, it can be bootlegged. True, BUT there will probably be some latency in having a capture technology equal to the demands of the emerging fiber bandwidth. There is yet even another "paradigm shift" (pardon the lingo) that will be coming with fiber optic communications into the home, of which the Internet itself is a first hint. When data bandwidth into the house is greater than the capture rate or bit depth of the recording or playback devices inside the house, then the situation resembles the TV broadcasting of yesteryear, a one way bit stream that can be seen but can't be recorded. If you want to criticize my prognostications, my speculation that somehow there would be a data-hungry new 3D immersive medium would seem my weakest assertion. The medium doesn't exist, and I'm speculating that it could. In anticipation of the criticism, I would quote you back when you say: > I have frequently heard in the past that things that are now available > wouldn't be possible. Based on the history of such predictions, I see > cause for optimism. Joe wants to know: > > But will those others have similar flaws? > Meaning, I take it, that since you've proven my various assertions wrong, any new medium would be as flawed as those we can now rip off so readily. But I don't think that you demonstrated the reproducibility of a painting nor that my Alps prints can be copied after Alps jettisons its unique line of printers. You didn't even address that little bit of my art/nerd babble. With regard to 3D immersive and fiber communications, I'm just guessing that the flux in the technologies will produce an unexpected turn for visual art. If this happens, it may not carry over to music, except in so far as music attaches itself to visual art. But I'll admit this is all wild speculation. To bring this back on itself, as you have done with a _Rolling Stone_ anecdote concerning concert tapes, I'd like to compare the rationalizations I've heard about downloading copyrighted works for free to the mental excuses spawned by drug addiction. The compulsion to listen to a track that one wants to hear is as compelling as any physiological drive, and when people ignore the obvious illegality of making copies, it reminds me of how crazy addicts can be. Ectophiles suffer enough from Empty Wallet Syndrome, and to be tempted with the MP3's plays upon our weaknesses. I do think there are grey zones, and I have tried to recite how I have found myself inside the grey zones from time to time. There is my "Hendrix Experience." There were others whee I'll assert a right to copy a piece of music that I didn't make, because I realized credible visuals to match it. But I'll admit there are times where I have just had to hear a piece of music and faced with the choice of hearing it for free or paying for a copy; I've opted for the former. Now back to work and lurk. Tom ditto@taconic.net ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 00:09:57 -0400 From: Joseph Zitt Subject: Re: Napster Suits and the 400 pound Gnutella Gorilla On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 12:22:01AM -0400, Tom Ditto wrote: > I guess the war metaphor is a bit extreme, because in war you don't get to > compromise, and in legal battles you do. Well, some wars are ended by treaties, rather than unilateral defeats or victories. > Nonetheless, I sense a bipolar > situation where the copyright is at stake, and the basic right cannot be > compromised except in "fair use." That standard does have variations, but it > wouldn't allow for wholesale copying and distribution ala Napster. The > resulting situation is somewhat war-like, that is, infringement carries real > world penalties: fines and jail. Like war, it isn't a pretty picture. I'm not convinced that this is a strictly bipolar situation. Such legal decisions such as the decisions on videotape show that we are dealing with quite flexible definitions. And law itself is continually evolving and mutating. > Joe observes: > > > > ..., there is a large market for replicas of objects > > originally painted on canvas. > > Actually, the reproduction of paintings raises the value of the original so > much that reproductions are usually welcomed by the holders of the original. > It is understood that the reproduction is not as good as the original, so > the original gains value. There are methods to produce a facsimile of an > original, but the technology is cumbersome, expensive and easily > distinguished from the original. Successful forgers are few and far between, > and their work is generally on a one-off basis. Mass forgery is out of the > question. Machine made copies are easily distinguished from originals. So far... > I'll agree that the visual art market is out of whack, but painting is not a > mass medium. By way of contrast, while there is a market for manuscripts and > first editions, the value of work of literature is fundamentally measured by > how many copies are made. That's why copyrights have been so important in > music, literature, film, and video. The problem is most acute in digital > arts, where the copy equals the original. I've never quite understood the market for first editions and the like. The market for autographs seems similar and is even more baffling. It's another area where objects are seen by some people as having value not so much because of anything intrinsic about them as because they perceive that other people want them. And the other people want them because yet other people want them. It's turtles all the way down. > > If it can be streamed, it can be captured. > > If it can be captured, it can be duplicated. > > If it can be duplicated, it can be bootlegged. > > True, BUT there will probably be some latency in having a capture technology > equal to the demands of the emerging fiber bandwidth. There is yet even > another "paradigm shift" (pardon the lingo) that will be coming with fiber > optic communications into the home, of which the Internet itself is a first > hint. When data bandwidth into the house is greater than the capture rate or > bit depth of the recording or playback devices inside the house, then the > situation resembles the TV broadcasting of yesteryear, a one way bit stream > that can be seen but can't be recorded. And by that analogy, betting on that as a solution might in the not-so-long term be as risky as having bet 40 years ago that viewers would never get the technology to record in the home. > If you want to criticize my prognostications, my speculation that somehow > there would be a data-hungry new 3D immersive medium would seem my weakest > assertion. The medium doesn't exist, and I'm speculating that it could. I certainly hope that it does; it sounds like it could be wonderful. > In anticipation of the criticism, I would quote you back when you say: > > > I have frequently heard in the past that things that are now available > > wouldn't be possible. Based on the history of such predictions, I see > > cause for optimism. > > Joe wants to know: > > > > But will those others have similar flaws? > > > > Meaning, I take it, that since you've proven my various assertions wrong, > any new medium would be as flawed as those we can now rip off so readily. Note that I asked that as a question, rather than stating it flatly. > But I don't think that you demonstrated the reproducibility of a painting > nor that my Alps prints can be copied after Alps jettisons its unique line > of printers. You didn't even address that little bit of my art/nerd babble. Well, it did point out that it is somewhat reproducible. And the question remains as to whether the difference in quality would matter to enough people to make them see the original object as valuable. I'll admit, though, that I pretty much just don't get visual art. I grew up going to lots of museums, but other than noticing that many other people are interested in and affected by the objects therein, I've never connected with it much, except in areas where it interacted with text of music. > To bring this back on itself, as you have done with a _Rolling Stone_ > anecdote concerning concert tapes, I'd like to compare the rationalizations > I've heard about downloading copyrighted works for free to the mental > excuses spawned by drug addiction. The compulsion to listen to a track that > one wants to hear is as compelling as any physiological drive, and when > people ignore the obvious illegality of making copies, it reminds me of how > crazy addicts can be. Ectophiles suffer enough from Empty Wallet Syndrome, > and to be tempted with the MP3's plays upon our weaknesses. I do think there > are grey zones, and I have tried to recite how I have found myself inside > the grey zones from time to time. There is my "Hendrix Experience." There > were others whee I'll assert a right to copy a piece of music that I didn't > make, because I realized credible visuals to match it. But I'll admit there > are times where I have just had to hear a piece of music and faced with the > choice of hearing it for free or paying for a copy; I've opted for the > former. There is that similarity -- I have had on occasion a several CD a day habit, and, doing a quick calculation realize that I have spent nearly $200 this weekend, in stores and online, on CDs, while I have some 400 CDs sitting there on my not-yet-listened-to rack. At this point I have, with very few exceptions, limited myself to downloading only tracks that I already had bought over the years on LP or CD (but that's a lot of tracks) or materials that I intended to get (I downloaded the new Sonic Youth the moment it came out, having to wait a few days before I could buy it). But the temptation is strong -- I'll admit to having grabbed snippets of recent King Crimson live boots, despite Crimson's strong distaste for this. Interestingly, they're taking a different approach to recording: starting at some point in their current European tour, they're making video recordings of every gig available for paid downloading, and will be making CDs on demand of each. This pretty much means that there will be no reason for anyone to make a bootleg recording of the gigs (though it still doesn't address the Gnutella issue except as, again, a matter of trust). I have a feeling I'll be buying even more than usual from Discipline Global Mobile this summer.... > Now back to work and lurk. Yeah, I've spent much of the weekend editing, encoding, and posting the latest Gray Code gig (possibly our best ever) on our site. I would be quite happy to see the files go flying across Gnutella, and am making them available as such when I'm done shuffling things appropriately on my PC. Art and technology march on... - -- |> ~The only thing that is not art is inattention~ --- Marcel Duchamp <| | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt | | Latest CD: Jerusaklyn http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt | | Comma: Voices of New Music Silence: the John Cage Discussion List | ------------------------------ End of ecto-digest V6 #149 **************************