(Re)mixed responses - exploring il/legitimate appropriation from remix to sampling to blatant rip-off
Good on Gotye! Yesterday his track “Somebody That I Used to Know” which he did with Kimbra came in as number one in yesterday’s Hottest 100 count down on Triple J. While I’d heard this cover before, it’s timely to post about it. Canadian band Walk Off the Earth teamed up with Sarah Blackwood of The Creepshow and just one guitar to record an acoustic cover of the track.
In response to Senator Reid’s announcement that the United States Senate vote on the PROTECT IP Act will be postponed, Representative Lamar Smith, who introduced the Bill, also announced yesterday that the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary will “… postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.” Smith’s press release reads:
Statement from Chairman Smith on Senate Delay of Vote on PROTECT IP Act
Washington, D.C. — House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today issued the following statement in response to the Senate decision to postpone consideration of legislation to help combat online piracy.
Chairman Smith: “I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns regarding proposed legislation to address the problem of online piracy. It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products.
“The problem of online piracy is too big to ignore. American intellectual property industries provide 19 million high-paying jobs and account for more than 60 percent of U.S. exports. The theft of America’s intellectual property costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion annually and results in the loss of thousands of American jobs. Congress cannot stand by and do nothing while American innovators and job creators are under attack.
“The online theft of American intellectual property is no different than the theft of products from a store. It is illegal and the law should be enforced both in the store and online.
“The Committee will continue work with copyright owners, Internet companies, financial institutions to develop proposals that combat online piracy and protect America’s intellectual property. We welcome input from all organizations and individuals who have an honest difference of opinion about how best to address this widespread problem. The Committee remains committed to finding a solution to the problem of online piracy that protects American intellectual property and innovation.”
The House Judiciary Committee will postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.
Yesterday Democrat Senate Majority Leader, Senator Harry Reid, senior Senator from Nevada (NV), announced that a vote on the PROTECT IP Act will be postponed. Reid’s press release reads:
Washington, D.C. - Nevada Senator Harry Reid released the following statement today on the Senate’s PROTECT I.P. Act:
“In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act.
“There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved. Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs. We must take action to stop these illegal practices. We live in a country where people rightfully expect to be fairly compensated for a day’s work, whether that person is a miner in the high desert of Nevada, an independent band in New York City, or a union worker on the back lots of a California movie studio.
“I admire the work that Chairman Leahy has put into this bill. I encourage him to continue engaging with all stakeholders to forge a balance between protecting Americans’ intellectual property, and maintaining openness and innovation on the internet. We made good progress through the discussions we’ve held in recent days, and I am optimistic that we can reach a compromise in the coming weeks.”
UPDATE 21 January 2012, 11.18 AM In response to Senator Reid’s announcement, Representative Lamar Smith also announced that the United States House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary will “… postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution.”
To help bring wider attention to the potential ramifications of SOPA and PIPA, an impressive list of internet heavyweights went black yesterday (United States time). While concern over the Bills has been simmering away online since last year, the 18 January blackout was designed to demonstrate the solidarity of it’s opponents and push it’s message to the general internet using population.
Confirmed participants included Wikipedia, Google, Creative Commons, Electronic Frontier Foundation, WIRED, reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, Tumblr, Vimeo, Flickr, the icanhazcheezburger network and Internet Archive, among others.
While Dominic Basulto thinks it’s too little, too late, pushing information about the Bills and why they are problematic in front of millions of internet users who are not digerati is hardly too little.
In/outputs - a taste plate of stuff that’s passed through my feeds this week
- Samsung’s Best New TVs Beat Apple to the Voice (And Face!) Recognition Game (Updated) It was only a matter of time before UI features like gesture control, facial recognition and voice commands which are in other technologies came to televisions. And that time is now. Samsung’s new TVs featured at the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show include what they’re calling ‘smart interaction’ which include all of these features we’re getting used to in our mobile phones (Android’s Face Unlock, Apple’s Siri) and gaming consoles (XBox’s Kinect. UPDATE 11 Jan 2012 @ 8.12 AM While GIZMODO is also reporting that the outcome is less that amazing, it won’t be long till all the television players have perfected it. Awesomely, Samsung has also introduced slot-in hardware upgrades. Pitching it as “future proofing your tv”, their Evolution Kit you can “… easily enjoy the benefits of the latest TV technology year after year without purchasing a brand new set.”
♺ Sam Biddle on GIZMODO, 9 January 2012. - #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods Marking the one-year mark, the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation‘s Media Ecologies and Methodological Innovation Project has released a detailed report on the use of Twitter during last year’s floods. The increasing role of social media in times of crisis is undoubted, but like a lot of occurrences in social media is not widely researched yet. While I haven’t read the report in detail yet (I’ll post a dedicated post about the report when I have), I know the quality of research from Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford well and it is always of a very high quality. Just a read of the executive summary demonstrates the depth of research. Definitely worth a read. ASIDE The report is also available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Australia licence.
♺ Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Kate Crawford, and Frances Shaw in #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods, January 2012. ★ CCI Report Highlights Role of Social Media in Floods Coverage and Response on CCi, 10 January 2012. - [New Data] What Percentage of your Tweets Should be Links or Replies According to (self-proclaimed) social media scientist Dan Zarrella engaging in the conversation isn’t the way to get retweeted on Twitter. Turns out tweeting links to interesting content is. While I question the motivations to want to get retweeted, it is an interesting finding. He came up with this myth-buster by analysing a random sample of 100,000 active Twitter accounts’ tweets. He looked at the number of their tweets retweeted and at the number of their tweets containing a link or starting with an at reply (although of course, not all tweets place the at reply at the beginning of tweet). (On the data) it turns out that those accounts with high numbers of links (between 60% and 80%) and those with low numbers of at replies (between 0% and 10%) had the most retweets.
♺ Dan Zarrella on DanZarrella, 11 January 2012.
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In/outputs - a taste plate of stuff that’s passed through my feeds this week
- Tiny wire to have big impact on computers Quantum computing is one step closer with the development of a wire 10,000 times smaller than a human hair that has the same electrical resistivity of copper wiring. The wire was created by the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales and measures just four atoms wide and one atom tall. While the quantum computer is still awhile off yet, this technology marks as significant addition to the components needed to make one.
♺ Mitchell Nadin in The Australian, 6 January 2012. - From Andy Warhol to Mark Twain, 400 Years of New York Diaries The history of New York City is well documented. There must be thousands of books published that recount the Big Apple through the ages. But Rockmelt‘s social reading feature helped me find out about one that I would really love to get my hands on. New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009 (2012, Modern Library) clusters together journal entries of New York residents over the past four decades. Editor Teresa Carpenter has curated personal musings from famous and ordinary people alike. I also really like that she’s ordered the entries by the day of the year, giving the reader a snapshot of what that day was like across the decades. There are some extracts on Brain Pickings.
♺ Maria Popova on Brain Pickings, 6 January 2012 via Sarah Jansen‘s Rockmelt social reading list - WikiLeaks Supporters Lose Court Bid to Protect Twitter Records The WikiLeaks saga continues with supporters Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Jacob Appelbaum and Rop Gonggrijp unsuccessful in their attempt to appeal a decision not to protect their Twitter records from American investigators that ultimately hope to prosecute WikiLeaks for publishing secret and sensitive government documents. The trio took action in response to a subpoena served against Twitter back in December 2010 as part of a Grand Jury investigation looking at possible criminal charges against the whistleblowing site. Pursuant to 18 USC § 2703(d) a court order may be issued where “… the governmental entity offers specific and articulable facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the contents of a wire or electronic communication, or the records or other information sought, are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation,” even where the people targeted in the records are not suspected of criminal wrongdoing themselves. The US Justice Department is seeking the full contact details for the Twitter account holders, associated credit card and bank account information, IP addresses used to access the account, records of session times and durations and data transfer information (Although, as Threat Level points out, some of this isn’t collected by or is technically possible in Twitter). Judge Liam O’Grady of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied the appeal of Judge Theresa Buchanan’s decision that the trio lacked standing to challenge the government’s request for the records because the government was not seeking the content of the Twitter accounts.
♺ Kim Zetter on Threat Level, WIRED, 5 January 2012.
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If you’re RSS feeds are anything like mine, then you’ve already conceded that you just can’t read everything that pings to you. Not possible. So you just dip in and out every so often. But there’s always the few things you check regularly.
London-based designed agency BERG have come up with an interesting little device to help you cherry pick the best bits. Forget the paper verse pixel debate with BERG’s Little Printer. It’s a palm-sized wireless thermal printer that you can push aggregated information to.
Using your smart device you can print from a number of sources on it’s receipt sized paper. It might be your daily to do list, the latest headlines from Google News and The Guardian, or a list of where your friends are from Foursquare. While it has a list of partners, you can also push other things like messages and images. You can even schedule stuff so that your info is on hand when you want it to be.
The ‘Little Printer’ holds a compact, inkless, thermal printer which has zero-configuration wireless connection to the Web (via the Bridge unit, included), allowing you to place it wherever you have a power outlet in your home or office. It’s constructed in high-gloss injected moulded plastic, while a brushed steel faceplate holds the paper, framing each delivery as it prints. You can even schedule print runs so your info is on hand at your preferred time.
♺ The Little Printer Melissa Werry on Concrete Playground, 1 December 2011.
