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Now you can help us elaborate on “Bird Song: A cartoon requiem for DRM,” our Lighthearted Cartoon Funeral March for Digital Rights Management.
Below you’ll find links to all of the raw audio, video, and image files you need to proceed with your mashup. Let us know if there are any other formats that might be helpful. All of it is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license, the terms of which you can find here translated into a jillion languages.
Now it’s your turn to add to the story. Here are the raw music and video files:
As for how it was made, we’ll let the designers speak.
Islam Elsedoudi, art direction and design:
We mainly used Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator for the animation and GarageBand for the music.
All the illustrations were drawn in Illustrator using the pen tool for the sleek drawings and the pencil tool for the sketchy drawings. We then brought them into After Effects and built “sets” in a 3D environment with a camera. We put a light source on the background to maintain realism and texture. The solid components of the piece (bird, globe, leaves, chandelier) were treated to look as if they were painted on the background.
The background texture remained consistent and unmoving, while everything else moved as it would in real space. Some of the more crude animations, such as the line rolling into the record and the bird cage falling were conventionally animated, frame by frame, using Illustrator and and a lot of screenshots.
Web radio had a small triumph this week in the royalty cap agreement between the music industry’s Sound Exchange and the Digital Media Association (DiMA). The agreement doesn’t make everything sunshine and roses for the webcasters, but a war has to be won by battles.
Also of note in the agreement was the elimination of Digital Rights Management (DRM) from this part of the discussion.
On the bright side, it doesn’t appear as if DRM is part of the terms this time around. Previously, SoundExchange stated that webcasters who agree to the deal must actively “work to stop users from engaging in 'streamripping'." This began a war of words between the Digital Media Association (DiMA) and SoundExchange, with DiMA accusing SoundExchange of using rate negotiations to push mandatory DRM. SoundExchange fired back, saying that DiMA only continues to spread misinformation about its requests. Earlier this month, however, two senators warned SoundExchange not to push DRM in its negotiations.
If a new bill becomes law, it may soon be illegal to attempt (even if you fail) to share copyrighted material.
“Attempted infringment” appears in new House intellectual property bill
One of the bill’s controversial features is the fact that people can be charged with criminal copyright infringement even if such infringement has not actually taken place. “Any person who attempts to commit an offense under paragraph (1) shall be subject to the same penalties as those prescribed for the offense, the commission of which was the object of the attempt,” says the bill.
Read the gory details here. (pdf)
Despite stumbling on the way to winning approval for ISO standardization of its closed-standard ooxml document format, Micro$oft isn’t deviating from trying to position itself as a peacemaker, appearing to offer an olive branch in the ongoing document format wars by offering to support (or at least stop blocking) adoption of the Open Document Format so long as it “doesn’t restrict choice in formats.”
Restricting choice, as it is used here, can be roughly translated to mean something like, “eroding our stanglehold.” The way they spin it, adoption of the Open Document Format, based on open standards and completely free to use by anyone, will somehow limit users’ choice. So Microsoft is totally cool with ODF, so along as their closed-standard OOXML format somehow wins equivalent standing as an International standard, even though it is not an open standard.
Confused? Mission accomplished.
A similar, but better played anvil disguised as an olive branch maneuver was shown to internet radio operators last week as SoundExchange granted a “reprieve” from enforcement of the onerous royalty ruling handed down by the Copyright Royalty Board. It seems that even the music industry didn’t want internet radio to die.
In a dramatic, last-minute reversal Sound Exchange offered to negotiate more favorable royalty rates for webcasters if they agreed to implement Digital Rights Management technology to prevent “streamripping.”
That’s probably not a deal-breaker for most internet radio operators, but it further restricts a presently-held right of fair use (taping off the radio) for most listeners, and consolidates the music industry’s power online.
Bargaining from a position of strength is good PR, it seems, whether that strength is real or artifice.
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British recording industry strikes anti-sharing deal with ISP’s.
The death of software patents?
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Fight Vandalism
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