[Commons-Law] relay

Via: "Art, Resources & Teaching Bangalore"

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Via: chan park

Via: "Prashant Iyengar"

http://www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/327061.html

What's obscene? Google could have an answer

New York Times

Posted online: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 2235 hrs IST

Washington, June 24
Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material
is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material
violate community standards?

That is often a tricky question because there is no simple, concrete
way to gauge a community's tastes and values.

The Internet may be changing that. In a novel approach, the defence in
an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google
search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbours have
broader interests than they might have thought. In the trial of a
pornographic website operator, the defence plans to show that
residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for
terms like "orgy" than for "apple pie" or "watermelon". The publicly
accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people
are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time.
But the defence lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence
is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects
exceeds that of more mainstream topics.

It is not clear that the approach will succeed. The Florida state
prosecutor in the case, which is scheduled for trial July 1, said the
search data may not be relevant because the volume of Internet
searches is not necessarily an indication of, or proxy for, a
community's values. But the tactic is another example of the value of
data collected by Internet companies like Google, both from a
commercial standpoint and as a window into the thoughts.

Walters last week also served Google with a subpoena seeking more
specific search data, including the number of searches for certain
sexual topics done by local residents. A Google spokesman said the
company was reviewing the subpoena. He is defending Clinton Raymond
McCowen, who is facing charges that he created and distributed obscene
material through a website based in Florida. The charges include
racketeering and prostitution, but Walters said the prosecution's case
fundamentally relies on proving that the material on the site is
obscene.

Such cases are a relative rarity. In the last eight years, the Justice
Department has brought roughly 15 obscenity cases that have not
involved child pornography, compared with 75 during the Reagan and
first Bush administrations, according to Jeffrey J Douglas, chairman
emeritus of the First Amendment Lawyers Association. (There have been
hundreds involving child pornography.)

The question of what constitutes obscenity relies on a three-part test
established in a 1973 decision by the Supreme Court. Essential to the
test has been whether the material in question is patently offensive
or appeals to a prurient interest in sex— definitions that are based
on "contemporary standards".

Lawyers in obscenity cases have tried to demonstrate community
standards by, for example, showing the range of sexually explicit
magazines and movies available locally.

A better barometer, Douglas said, would be mail-order statistics,
because they show what people consume in private. But that information
is hard to obtain.

Via: "siddharth narrain"

Via: "=?UTF-8?Q?Nishant_?= =?UTF-8?Q?|_=E0=A4=A8=E0=A4=BF=E0=A4=B6=E0=A4=BE=E0=A4=81=E0=A4=A4?="

Via: "Patrice Riemens"

In Le Monde Diplomatique of this month (june), a fairly hilarious piece on
how the Europ. Football federation (UEFA) is 'robustly' enforcing its
'intellectual property rights' (basically on anything and everything even
remotely connected with 'football'). Small shopkeepers lost in the Engadin
or Appenzell InnerRhoden get sued, and three restaurants in Basel who
happen to be situated in the 'Fan-zone' and refused to sell the 'EU2008'
brand of beer (the green & yellow horsepiss made in DK) together with
paying the exorbitant franchise rate (1-5K /day) got themselves isolated
thru a Berlin wall contraption so you could only reach them from outside
of the zone ...

Together with "Apple sues kids writing letters to the company" (WIRED,
march issue's article on Steve Jobs), that was favorite 'IP dystopia' item
for this month...

Via: Sunil Abraham

-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Amulya Gopalakrishnan

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=2b354d15-f127-4893-8788-f76f4e3c8d9d

The urge to make the work our own is elemental to the act of
encountering art, and we try to satisfy it in many ways. We look at a
painting or listen to a piece of music and take it in, hoping that it
will prove to be not only an expression of human feeling but also a
stimulus to it; we expect art to move us in a personal way. Or we buy
the artwork or a copy of it, making our ownership literal (if not always
legal, in case of downloading bootleg digital files). Or we wear our
esteem for the work like a fashion label, for the social or professional
status it confers. Or we draw inspiration from the work and apply it to
things we make ourselves, using whatever of it serves our needs. In one
way or another, to experience art of any kind is to appropriate it, and
to be a devotee of any art or artist is to be a claimant.

In the music world, recording technology has greatly complicated the
issues of ownership, authorship, and proprietary rights by simplifying
the acquisition of creative property. Since the rise of sampling and
downloading, digital technology has transferred many of the privileges
of authorship from what was once an elite of professional musicians to
the iPod-ed masses. Anyone with a laptop and home mixing software such
as GarageBand (a substitute for both the garage and the band) or Pro
Tools (an electronic kit to help amateurs sound as if they are not) can
put together technically impressive multi-track recordings. To generate
the music for those tracks, home producers have for some time now been
able to extract snippets from any recordings in the digital domain,
doctor them electronically, edit them, and perhaps even use traditional
instruments and vocal tracks. The exponential growth in the popularity
of such home recording over the past several years has helped fill the
pages of MySpace with fragmentary sound-alike songs, while providing
countless musical neophytes with gratifying quasi-creative experiences
and inflated conceptions of their musical talent. As the record industry
burns to ash, record-making is thriving in the same sense that
moviemaking, of a sort, is booming on YouTube--that is, in the
diminished form of derivative, perfunctory goofing around, the products
of which may have momentary entertainment value, especially to their
creators.

Some rock acts that made their reputations as sonic experimenters a long
decade ago, such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, seem humbled in the
presence of the shape-shifting creature that popular music has become in
the digital age. Both those bands recently made high-profile attempts at
Web innovation that are essentially acts of capitulation, if not
desperation. Radiohead made lots of news when the band released its
first album since 2003, In Rainbows, through its website in a plan that
allowed downloaders to pay whatever price they chose--a great publicity
stunt in the form of a vast, universal tip jar. After too many listeners
decided to drop in too few coins, the band released another version of
the album, priced conventionally. More recently, Trent Reznor made the
new Nine Inch Nails album The Slip available through the band's website,
for free. In an announcement of the release on his site, Reznor wrote,
"thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years--this
one's on me." A CD release of The Slip, at a price to be determined,
will follow in July, at which time Reznor and the latest incarnation of
his band will have begun a national tour, for which seats will likely
cost at least four or five times the price of a CD.

There is nothing wrong with--or new about--giving away samples to entice
customers to pay for other, profitable goods. The technique has long
been common in the narcotics trade and in the marketing of supermarket
cheeses. More interesting than the fact that Radiohead and Nine Inch
Nails have provided albums to listeners for free or for cheap are the
efforts that both bands have recently made to come to terms with the
phenomenon of home record-making. Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have
each now ventured into "open-source remixing, " a growing sphere of
digital play in which enthusiasts are granted access to the stems of a
song--the individual parts of a multi-track recording, each of which
might have, say, the drums or the bass line or a guitar part--in order
to manipulate them or add to them at home. In differing ways and to
differing degrees, both bands are opening up their processes, making
public the component parts of their music to give fans the feeling of
collaborating with their idols--shadow-dancing with the rock stars.
Through open-source remixing, music fans who might have been just
listeners are assuming a kind of ownership which is, on its face,
revolutionary, but which is, ultimately, illusory.

Radiohead, in April, made available for purchase through iTunes the five
stems, one for each of the five band members' instruments, that make up
"Nude," a single from In Rainbows. (Side note: in the group's native
Britain, more than half of all singles are still released as seven-inch
vinyl records, as well as on CD and as downloads; it seems to me that
the survival of 45s there has to do with both an English reverence for
the tradition that vinyl represents and a frugal English reluctance to
throw away perfectly good record players.) With each of the stems going
for iTunes's usual per-song price of 99 cents, "Nude" costs five times
as much to buy in parts as it costs as a song. This is to be expected.
To break anything sellable into bits is to grant each of those bits a
value that justifies a price.

"Nude," like several of the songs on In Rainbows, is one that fans of
the band have long known in multiple earlier incarnations. At concerts
in 1998, the tune was a soul ballad framed around the sound of a Hammond
organ. By 2005, Thom Yorke was doing the song in solo performances,
strumming it gently on the acoustic guitar and murmuring it like an emo
navel-gazer. On In Rainbows, it opens with a swirling cloud of synth
effects and settles into a shuffling bass- driven groove. (The terse
lyrics center on the phrase "Don't get any big ideas/ They're not gonna
to happen," a blunt plea to resist the sexual imagination.) A wisp of a
piece unaligned to a fixed arrangement, it is suited to remixing;
indeed, Radiohead has itself been toying with the song for ten years.

To encourage remixes of "Nude" (and purchases of its stems), Radiohead
sponsored a competition and started posting submissions on the band's
site. By mid-May, more than 2,200 remixes of the song had been posted
and voted on by fans (and, presumably, also automatic-voted on by the
digital ringers that hackers can conjure and viral-marketing services
can provide for pay). I started listening to the posted remixes (and
casting votes, nay and yea, for some of them) shortly after the first
went up in April, and over a month's time I got to hear about two
hundred versions of "Nude." I did the listening in spurts, taking in a
post or two when I felt in the mood, to prevent the repetition of the
tune from having the effect of torture.

A great many of the "Nude" remixes I have heard are attempts to change
the overall mood of the song by doctoring the tonal colors and
redistributing the weights of the musical elements. In a high number of
cases, the bass line that dominates the In Rainbows version recedes, and
new beats of all sorts take over: intricate and realistic-sounding drum
patterns are among the easiest things to generate with software such as
GarageBand. The gently pulsing waltz pattern of the official release
gives way to heavy beats, often in the propulsive 4/4 basic to rock and
hip-hop. Since GarageBand can change the time signature, the tempo, or
the key of a song with a few mouse clicks, all those features of the
composition get transformed in various "Nude" remixes, with results that
can only with a snicker be called mixed. Much of the alteration and
ornamentation in the "Nude" remixes seem arbitrary, stunty, or
inappropriate. In nearly a dozen of the hundred remixes ranked highest
on the Radiohead site, fans added keyboard tracks that oversimplified
the already simple chords of the tune or simply got the chords wrong.
Re-harmonization is not at all uncommon in the realm of interpretive
music; but its point is generally to reconsider, rather than to reduce
or to misrepresent, the original music.

The way GarageBand works, the process of personalizing music is highly
regimented--that is, depersonalized. For each creative decision involved
in customizing a track, the software provides a handy drop-down menu of
options. What kind of guitar sound would you like, "Arena Rock" or
"Glam" or "Clean Jazz"? What sort of vocals, "Female Basic" or "Epic
Diva"? The system transforms music-making into shopping, and it provides
the same illusion of individual expression that we find in the mall. Now
we can make our sound in the same way we create our own look--by mixing
and matching a handful of items from the racks of the same stores that
everyone else in America is choosing from. After all, what does "Clean
Jazz" mean, other than "Banana Republic"?

Trent Reznor, in a grand gesture of magnanimity, has made the stems of
the last several Nine Inch Nails albums (including White Teeth from 2005
and Year Zero from last year) available for remixing, at no cost,
through the NIN site. A longtime hero among rock techheads for the
loving noisy artifice of his one- man-band recordings, Reznor is so
eager to be aligned with the home-remixing phenomenon that he has
sponsored a compilation album of fan remixes of songs from White Teeth
and Year Zero. Called The Limitless Potential, the album of twenty-one
selections is free for downloading, although the individual stems of the
tracks that the fans contributed are not accessible for further remixing
through the Nine Inch Nails site. (Evidently the "open" in open-sourcing
has its limits.) Most of the Nine Inch Nails remixes posted, like the
"Nude" remixes, are efforts to move the songs from one mode--industrial
rock, the style Reznor practically invented in the 1980s--to some other
style: house music, or psychedelia, or an approximation of funk. The
remixes tend to take lateral steps, hopping across category lines from
stylistic box to box. They do not, as a rule, try to differ from the
originals in point of view or depth or aesthetic value; they seek to
differ primarily in kind.

Despite its obvious debts to the Web era, home remixing in one sense
suggests a return to the musical culture of the days before sound
recording on wax cylinders, around the turn of the last century. In
their capacity as remixers, members of the musical public are again
assuming participatory roles, interpreting compositions at home, much as
late Victorians played sheet music in parlor musicales. There is also a
social component to both spheres of participation, as remixers post
their efforts, listen to one another's, and vote on them. I spent a good
part of a weekend making my own remix of "Nude." (For the record, I
added some wan obbligato lines on guitar and concocted a vocal
counter-melody, which I sang with the essential assistance of a pitch-
correction plug-in.) Dissatisfied with the results, I decided not to
post them, and I feel as if my remix, as one unposted, is not real in
the same way that the worst remixes on the Radiohead website are. In the
ballooning community of remixers, as in the rest of the Web universe, to
post is to be.

was further deterred from submitting my remix to the "Nude" competition
by the "terms and conditions" of submission. Despite the fact that
remixers can not only amend the elements of the Radiohead recording but
also add tracks of their own devising--new beats, different chords,
additional melodies (such as the admittedly weak guitar and vocal lines
I made up), even whole new sets of lyrics (or spoken
language)--Radiohead claims full ownership of every part of the remixes
sent its way. Every part: not just the original stems, but every bit of
music anyone might add to a submitted track. The fine print specifies,
"All rights in and to any remixed versions ('Remixes') of the song
'Nude' ('the Song') created by the Entrant shall be owned by Warner/
Chappell Music Ltd ('WCM') and to the extent necessary the Entrant
hereby assigns all rights in the Remixes of the Song to WCM throughout
the World for the full life of copyright and any and all extensions and
renewals thereof.... Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed
O'Brien and Phil Selway will be registered and credited as the sole
writers and WCM the publishers of the Remixes of the Song created by the
Entrant."

If this is legal, it is also extortionate and an act of terrible
hypocrisy--a revocation of the promise of creative ownership that is
drawing people to remixing, the promise that Radiohead has been eager to
exploit, in large print, to sell its stems. The very idea of remixing
implies remaking, and that carries with it a legitimate claim of
ownership--aesthetic, ethical, and legal. If most of the remixes on both
the "Nude" site and Nine Inch Nails's The Limitless Potential* album
speak unpersuasively for remixing's potential, they are not definitive
proof of remixing's limits. For the moment, Yorke and his band have a
message for fans loaded with GarageBand and an urge to own a part of
Radiohead: Don't get any big ideas. They're not going to happen.

But more troubling even than the hypocrisy of a few rock stars is the
narcissism at the heart of the phenomenon of home remixing--the notion
that to take a work of creative expression and make it "ours" is to
improve it. It is a colossal mistake to coerce an expression of others
into an expression of ourselves. The premise of open-source remixing is
that finally we can admire nobody so much as ourselves. But in music, as
in all art and love and politics, there is usually more to gain in
trying to understand what belongs, uniquely and idiosyncratically and
serendipitously, to somebody else.

David Hajdu is the chief music critic for The New Republic.

Via: "Pranesh Prakash"

Via: chan park