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Ian Rogers of Yahoo! Music has posted both a great presentation and a great promise:
If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.
Go read this great summary of the last eight years of digital music and Rogers’ vision for the music industry’s future.
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.
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.
Not since they tried to book Kid Rock for an Inaugural “youth concert” have the Bush Twins (aka: Jenna and Barbara) put their beleagured father in such jeopardy. (Um, except maybe for that time they got caught smoking and drinking backstage at another Kid Rock concert…)
According to reports scorching the world wide webosphere, the latest blow to the faltering Bush presidency came in the form of a sweet fathers day gift. On a rainy day in Crawford, the ebullient twins gave the President “a CD they had made for him to listen to while exercising.”
Hollywood, Florida attorney Mitchell L. Silverman took notice and fired off a letter to the RIAA asking them to take notice, encouraging the Recording Industry group to pursue the twins as aggressively as they do other offenders, pointing out that, by his calculations, damages could exceed $1,000,000.
On his blog, The Scrivener, Silverman’s first commenter points out that copying music for family members is probably fair use, but that didn’t stop anyone from having a good laugh.
Boing Boing: Lawyer to RIAA: Sue the First Twins for copyright violations!
Quicktime | Real
Real Stream | Ogg Theora
The death of software patents?
Wikipedia Tries Approval System to Fight Vandalism
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