So there I was this morning feel a wierd combination of creativity and romance.
So I decided to try and realize this image I had in my head. The result as seen below (click to see the full-size version) raises the age old question: "can sincerity replace actual talent ?"
I’ll just leave the answer as an excercize for the reader.
¨There is a new form of music piracy running rampant around the world, and your children could be involved placing you at risk of legal persecution¨ – the recording industry association of America (RIAA) warned parents to keep watch of their children´s activities in order to curb this new form of theft, stating ¨we will not hesitate to use the full power of the law to punish those who steal our intelectual property and parents will be held accountable for the actions of their children.¨
The RIAA´s South-African counterpart ASAMI echoed these thoughts.
Explaining the details of the crime in a press release, the RIAA stated that this new form of piracy goes beyond digital media exploiting an innate bug in the way music is heard to make copies into the human brain itself.
¨Basically, when you remember something, your brain has made a copy of it. Copyright prohibits copying anything without our consent and ergo, this is a crime.¨
The RIAA fears that there have been untold lost CD sales already due to people stealing music in this manner (coloqially known as ¨remembering¨). What is worse says the release, is that often people will remember a song they hear on the radio or television or at a friends house, and then decide they don´t like it – costing the artists a sale they would have had, had the person not remembered how bad the song was.
On top of this memory inately allows music to be utilized in other illegal ways including derivative works (known in the vernacular as ¨humming¨ a song).
While it is true that memory doesn´t always provide perfect quality copies, and people will often only remember parts of a song some people do in fact remember songs in their entirety, especially if they copy it to their brains multiple times as memory has the ability to fill in missing bits each time a song is received, the RIAA is frank about it all: Everytime somebody remembers a song, he is guilty of thef, and besides what about people with photographic memories ?
Appart from legal action against perpetrators, the RIAA is simultaneously pursuing legislative and techincal measures to curb the activity. A bill currently pending before the US congress will demand and extension of the CSSCA and DMCA protections to the human brain.
¨Basically if the bill passes, it will be legally required for all newly-made human babies to have genetic protection software installed which will prevent music from being remembered¨ said sponsoring congressman Geemee Cash.
On the technical front Sony-BMG is taking the lead with a new generation of CD copyprotection. A sony programmer who wishes to remain anonymous describes the system:
¨Essentially we are coating all new cd´s with a thin-layer of crystalized LSD, when heated by the CD-laser the LSD reverts to liquid and then to gass form, the listener then breaths it in, effectively destroying their abillity to remember the song they heard.¨
These moves however have not been without controvercy, a spokesman for the EFF responded by declaring that remembering music is an explicity allowed copyright exception under section 17 of the US copyright law, the fair-use statute and similiar laws internationally. The EFF went further to declare the RIAA´s plans for genetically preventing music-memory as a ¨gross invasion of privacy¨ stating that ¨how people choose to make new human beings is one of the most sacredly private matters in the law¨.
When asked about SONY/BMG´s proposed new LSD-layer copyprotection the EFF spokesman snorted and said ¨That´s just crazy, it´s even worse than that whole rootkit debacle – and besides it wouldn´t work ! The last time Japanese engineers mixed drugs and music we ended up with Kareoke !¨
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PS. This post is a parody… (I hope).
Richard Stallman is best known as founder of the Free Software Movement, and I have written about that, and this man here many times before.
Now those of you who know Stallman, will find the first parts of this interview to be ‘refreshers’, things you’ve read before. But in the second half, he addresses things like other social inequities, globalism and similiar issues, how free software relates and differs and why those who seek to serve freedom in other parts of society should push for it in the digital realm as well.
Also look out for some interesting discussion on Ghandi.
it seems that heads are heading to cape town this weekend for the sessions ekapa.
will be coming out from my hide out to join the masses this summer and will try to get some pics whilst there.
i don’t know about the Jozi dudes but cape town seems to be getting a lot of slices of the art world of mzantsi.
is cape town the new big thing and are cape town artist now the big deal? Are cape town artists and galleries in?all eyes on ekapa!!
Those of you with Satelite will know that the series channel is showing old reruns of Saturday Night Live on Saturday nights (apparently the television executives do not see any logical inconsistencies anywhere in that sentence).
I actually don’t have satelite, but my parents do so when I visit over weekends I sometimes watch the SNL reruns.
Now prior to this, my total knowledge of SNL was that
1) Tiny Toons once did a spoof of it (called weekday afternoon live), with as special guest start
a Bart Simpson rip-off.
2) It gets mentioned in a very powerful line in Coyote Shivers’s song Sugarhigh
3) Andy Kaufman used to be in it (which I know from having watched Man on the Moon)
4) Will Wheaton says they used to be great but they sold out
Now whether or not the current reruns are set before or after the “selling out” I can’t say, not having enough context, and to make things even more difficult the exec’s seem to think chronology is something that happens to other people, so the first episode I saw was Will Ferrel’s last guest starring Winona Rider shortly after that whole “shoplift my way back into the limelight” business, the second I saw (several months later) must apparently have orriginally been done during the 2000 elections, as it shows Will Ferrel making a huge spoof of Bush’s “middle of the road” campaign and complete lack of commitment on any point at all (man was America ever in for a shock … middle of the road… yeah right).
What I can say is that I haven’t actually enjoyed it all that much. The sketches aren’t funny for the most part, the music has no soul… frankly the only thing that makes it worth watching is the in-between dialog – that’s the only bit where these talented commedians, these master fun-makers actually seem to have the balls to make some fun of things. Sketch based satire is of course one of the hardest forms of comedy to pull off, but I’ve seen most of these actors in their other work and they do have what it takes… so why is it that on this show, the moment they stop improvising to talk and start to act a sketch, they wilt like last weeks daisies ?
My theory… Will was right, this is a sold out show, talented performers are only as good as the network allows them to be. Oh well, I suppose I’ll just have to keep watching “Whose line is it anyway”, at least they are (still?) not afraid to make fun of anything.
