Thursday, 19 April 2012

Sony release version of God Save The Queen to combat Universal's Sex Pistol re-release. Promoter asks "if you will please help Her Majesty".

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Wikileaks, Assange & Defending Democracy (Live from Federation Square Melbourne)

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The online copyright war: the day the internet hit back at big media

A casual observer could be forgiven for thinking that major media firms hate technology. They certainly fear it. Since Jack Valenti, the legendary film industry lobbyist, said in 1982 that the VCR was like the Boston Strangler, preparing to murder the innocents of Hollywood, they have viewed such advances as a Godzilla creature rising from the sea to threaten their existence.
In the past 30 years in the US, they have lobbied for 15 pieces of legislation aimed at tightening their grip on their content, as technology has moved ever faster to prise their fingers open.
In this seemingly never-ending battle, 18 January 2012 was a defining date, a day when the internet hit back. Mike Masnick, founder of TechDirt and one of Silicon Valley's most well-connected bloggers, remembers running through the corridors of the Senate in Washington, laptop open, desperately trying to find a Wi-Fi signal.
Around him was chaos. Amid a cacophony of phones, political interns were struggling to keep up with the calls and emails from angry people across the US and the world claiming Hollywood-backed legislation was about to break the internet and end its open culture forever. In an unprecedented day of action, Wikipedia and Reddit, a social news website, had gone offline in a protest organised by their communities of editors, and backed by thousands of other sites, large and small. Google had blacked out its logo in protest. Students around the world were bitching on Twitter that they couldn't get their homework done without Wikipedia. Even Kim Kardashian came out swinging.
One senator's office that Masnick visited calculated they had taken 3,000 calls. Within hours of the unprecedented assault, Sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act, was dead and a sister act, Pipa, a neat acronym for the tortuously titled Protect IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act) was sunk too. In Europe, the action buoyed up opponents of Acta, the US-backed international copyright treaty that has sparked protests across the continent. Countries including Bulgaria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia have all refused to sign, arguing that Acta endangers freedom of speech and privacy, and the bill has stalled. But for how long? "The industry has this down cold," Masnick says. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Valenti's old stomping ground and one of the most powerful lobbying bodies in Washington, has emerged bruised from the battle, but few doubt it will rally.
There is widespread anger among leading media companies about the way the Sopa fight played out. The protest had many voices but there was no doubting whom the media executives blamed – Silicon Valley in general and Google in particular. President Barack Obama had "thrown in his lot with Silicon Valley paymasters", according to Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp empire includes the Fox studios. "Piracy leader is Google who streams movies free, sells advts around them," Murdoch wrote on Twitter. "No wonder pouring millions into lobbying."
But trying to blame Google or even to cast this as a battle between Silicon Valley and Hollywood is to misrepresent a major shift in the media landscape, say those pushing for a more open internet...

Continue reading

Dominic Rushe @'The Guardian'

Google's Sergey Brin: state filtering of dissent threatens web freedom

R2-D2's Other Message

(Thanx Stan!)

'1-2-3-4 Rock The House Down'

Via
(Thanx Ian!)

Pixies - Coachella 2004 (Free Download)

1) U - Mass
2) Monkey Gone To Heaven
3) Hey
4) Caribou

Dick Clark Passes Away At 82

'Dick Clark, the perpetually youthful-looking television host whose long-running daytime song-and-dance fest, ‘American Bandstand,’ did as much as anyone or anything to advance the influence of teenagers and rock ’n’ roll on American culture, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.'

@The New York Times

Wednesday, 18 April 2012

Why Clingy People Feel Colder

The Forty Year Itch

NSFW Girlz With Gunz #165

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The Secret History of Warp Records

'By the midpoint of the 1990s the momentum of the independent sector had stalled almost to a halt.
Rough Trade and Factory had both ceased trading. Creation and 4AD were in the hands of a support staff as [Alan] McGee and [Ivo] Watts-Russell, exhausted and broken, had removed themselves from the day-to-day running of their compaines. Daniel Miller was finding himself in the difficult position of firing and rehiring staff as Mute’s finances became increasingly volatile. With the end of Rough Trade Distribution came the end of the most sympathetic route to market for independently released music – a market that was now beginning to harden into a professional era of double-format CD singles, high-end advertising campaigns and overpriced albums. The music often associated with independence or indie – four-piece guitar bands referencing the Sixties – had become mainstream and rebranded Britpop. Almost none of the bands associated with it were signed to independent labels...'

Via Fact