Tuesday 24 April 2012

The History of File-Sharing

Dan Bull: Sharing Is Caring


Yesterday a young lad asked me, “Dan Bull in the charts? Is this a ‘fuck off’ to the record industry then?”
Good question, I thought. What do I really want to say to the entertainment industry?
When I released my first album “Safe” in 2009, I sent it to record companies and radio stations but they ignored it. When I telephoned Q magazine with a story, they told me they couldn’t write about it because they only feature artists with record deals.
In frustration at the glass ceiling that independent artists face, I started to publish protest songs on YouTube. To my surprise, they got much more coverage. I was excited, but thought “What if the labels see my tracks? They’ll never sign me now!”.
At that point, I realised something; if they didn’t want me, then the feeling was mutual. I didn’t need a record label telling me what to do, how to do it, and then keeping 80% of the takings for the privilege. I had the internet and I had my brain.
By embracing the free flow of information the internet allows, through filesharing and social media, I’ve found a worldwide fanbase without leaving the house. I’ve collaborated with artists across the globe without ever meeting them, and I can chat to my supporters whilst lying in bed eating pizza.
None of that would have been possible without file-sharing. If I followed the copyright law that lobbyists like the RIAA and the BPI insist is in the interest of artists like me, I would have no musical career. If pro-filesharing sites like TorrentFreak and The Pirate Bay didn’t share my work with you, you wouldn’t be reading this. I owe a debt of gratitude to every person that has ripped, burned, copied and shared anything I’ve done.
Sites such as The Pirate Bay do more to help unsigned artists than industry lobbyists ever have. Projects like The Promo Bay, which devotes The Pirate Bay’s home page, free of charge, to any musician who applies, creates overnight success stories.
The Pirate Bay stands defiantly in the face of corporate bullies who tout such nonsensical non-sequiters as “if you copy files, artists don’t get money, and if artists don’t get any money, they will stop making art.” This is an insult to the millions of dedicated amateur artists around the world.
What’s funny is that I’d have more respect for major labels if they just admitted what we already know – their bottom line is nothing but profit. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s no need to hide it. But there is a need to play fair.
Entertainment lobbyists want to have their cake and eat it – they accumulated massive wealth through exploiting a free market when the means to distribute recorded art was scarce. This scarcity no longer exists – the market has moved on; and now they’re fighting to enforce artificial measures which will recreate those fleeting economic and technological conditions which allowed them to flourish.
Art has always been about sharing, adapting, and re-interpreting what you experience. Our children deserve to grow up in a world where they can enjoy this freedom without the fear that a pack of corporate lawyers will circle in and extradite them overseas.
People born in the late 80s have now lived more of their lives in the 21st century than the 20th century. A new generation has arrived for whom sharing information online is as easy and reflexive as breathing.
This generation isn’t going away; it’s growing larger all the time and to them, defunct business models developed by greying monopolists are utterly irrelevant. But these kids aren’t freeloaders or criminal masterminds, they are normal, decent people. When they hear a song or see a video that they like, they’ll post it to Facebook; they’ll Tweet it. They might remix it, or poke fun at it. This very behaviour which big entertainment claims to be the death knell of creativity, is the same behaviour that I believe will make my single a success.
“Sharing Is Caring” is a satire on this age of instant communication. It’s about what happens when things go wrong, and whether we are using the power of online communication to its full potential. Hidden somewhere in the track you can hear me urinating on a printout of the Digital Economy Act.
There are three main versions of the song – each about a different social network (Facebook, Twitter and Google+). There’s also a dubstep remix by Benny Aves and a reggae-tinged reworking by Animal Circus. I’ve also provided instrumentals and acapellas for you to remix and re-imagine at will.
I invite you to download “Sharing Is Caring” for free. If you like it, and want to support the campaign, you can choose to buy it. Each version you buy will count as a sale towards the charts. There are ten versions in all, meaning a single person can create ten sales towards the charts.
The singles charts are worthless as an indicator of quality, and artists needn’t strive for the validation of reaching them. However, by taking a free song by an unsigned artist to the echelons normally reserved for the industry elite, I want to smash the glass ceiling and show that there is another way of doing things. We don’t need the protection of ACTA, CISPA or any other acronym. As long as our internet is free, creativity will thrive.
And so, to answer the original question – I’m not shouting “fuck off” to the entertainment industry.
I’m saying “excuse me, but I think you’re in my seat”.
Links to the torrent or paid version of “Sharing Is Caring” are available here
@'TorrentFreak'

Evol

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DJ JetSet - Fifty minutes of Marko Fürstenberg (the netlabel years)


Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Option23 Marko Fürstenberg
Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Sol (Marko Fürstenberg Rmx) L.O.D.
Long Loco Out Thrill (Surphase Remix) Selffish
Südschleuse Surphase & Rktic
Eissequenzer Marko Fuerstenberg
Busch Marko Fuerstenberg
Porn Infection (Remix) Marko Fürstenberg
Chasm 2 (Surphase Remix) Danny Kreutzfeldt
Trockendock Surphase & Rktic
Kampftruppe Marko Fuerstenberg
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Cory Doctorow: There is a war coming...

Monday 23 April 2012

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death

First Listen: Damon Albarn - Dr Dee

If there's a goal for up-and-coming musicians that encompasses creative satisfaction and relatively stress-free security, it's not chart-topping fame; if anything, success just spikes the cost of failure. The true mark of a fruitful career in music is liberation — the financing to follow flights of fancy, coupled with the credibility to experiment without derision. Jack White has reached that point: He could record an album of Tuvan throat-singing and release it only as a USB drive molded into a lone candy bar sold somewhere in North America, and would anyone second-guess him? The same goes for The Flaming Lips, whose members are free to bend and redefine the very notion of what it means to record and release a piece of music.
Though he's more tethered to traditional means of releasing albums, Damon Albarn has more or less arrived in the same place. He sold millions of records as the leader of Blur, then formed the human-cartoon hybrid "virtual band" Gorillaz with Jamie Hewlett, only to sell tens of millions more. If he wants to record the bizarrely clanging score to 1999's cult horror movie Ravenous, or make an album of Malian music, or start another new band and call it The Good, The Bad & The Queen, or form a side project with Flea and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, he can — and does. The fans remain, the money is available to him and, when he's set to make another recording for a mass audience, it's still a big deal.
Out May 8, Dr Dee is not one of those mass-appeal projects. Billed as a solo album for Albarn, it's an offshoot of an opera the singer helped craft with director Rufus Norris and the inspiration of mercurial comics legend Alan Moore. Based on the life of John Dee — a 16th-century philosopher, alchemist, astrologer and medical advisor to Queen Elizabeth I — Dr Dee fans out in many directions at once. If anything, it adds up to a sort of willfully obscure folk opera, full of baroque flourishes, spoken asides, unsettling rhythm tracks, guest vocalists and hairpin turns that lead down unpredictable cul de sacs.
It's hard not to wish that Dr Dee came with a bit of visual context for Albarn's free-floating musings, or at least footnotes to attach them to the history lessons in play here. But the album warrants the further exploration, with sounds as uncompromising and unconventional as the man who brings them to being.
Stephen Thompson @'npr'

Hear 'Dr Dee' In Its Entirety


Russian Orthodox church prays for 'correction' of anti-Putin Pussy Riot 

RasPutin Propaganda
It was thirty years ago today...

The Flaming Lips VS The Beach Boys


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Giant puppet 'wakes up' in Liverpool for spectacular parade

The Autism Epidemic and Disappearing Bees: A Common Denominator?

Death


Emily Barker and The Red Clay Halo - The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Download
Looking forward to the gig at The Wesley Anne and son#1 will be at the Canberra gig!

Neneh Cherry & The Thing - Dream Baby Dream


+
The original

Another cover

An Open Letter to Silicon Valley

DIE YOU ARROGANT CODE FUCKS!!!

Sunday 22 April 2012

The Flaming Lips’ gummy skull with marijuana flavored brain


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Evolution

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Joy Division - Live at Bowdon Vale Youth Club, Altrincham (March 14th 1979)


Full gig (SBD)

Setlist:
01. Exercise One 0:00
02. She's Lost Control 2:54
03. Shadowplay 7:11
04. Leaders Of Men 10:58
05. Insight 13:23
06. Disorder 17:04
07. Glass 20:36
08. Digital 24:03
09. Ice Age 27:00
10. Warsaw 30:15
11. Transmission 32:37
12. I Remember Nothing 36:07
13. No Love Lost 42:40

Saturday 21 April 2012

Megaupload Trial May Never Happen, Judge Says

Kim Dotcom Lashes Out Against “Corrupt” US Government

Pot Legalization Could Save U.S. $13.7 Billion Per Year, 300 Economists Say

Bahrain protester found dead on eve of grand prix

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Indies go on the record (or how the BIG players tried to fuck up the idea of Record Store Day in Australia)

Anti-Immigrant Group Runs False TV Ad Blaming Global Warming On Immigrants Entering The U.S.

The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal

Eric Burdon & War (Beat club 1970)

You can never get enough cowbell!!!
(Thanx Reinhard!)

'Tactfulness of the Heart' - Angela Davis on Jean Genet and The Black Panthers

(Excerpts from an unpublished Angela Davis speech at the Odeon seminar in Paris, organized by Albert Dichy for IMEC, May 25th, 26th and 27th 1991.)
When Jean Genet came to the USA in spring 1970, although it was our first meeting with him, there were many of us Black Americans who already considered him an ally because of his play The Blacks that had showed in New York a few years before. The Black Panther Party invited Genet so he could help them, holding conferences in different universities over the USA. It was a major critical stage of the black of struggle in the USA. I was in charge of translating his speeches, for instance at UCLA where I was teaching philosophy. A party was arranged for him in the house of filmmaker Dalton Trumbo in Hollywood: many stars showed up and it helped raise funds to pay the imprisoned Panthers' lawyers. David Hilliard, a member of the Black Panther Party, largely mentioned in Prisoner of Love, told me Genet had arrived with worn out clothes and was asked to get a bit dressed up. He was taken to a San Francisco shop run by a Black man so moved that Genet came to the USA to help the Panthers, he offered him a jacket, a pair of trousers and a shirt. I remember him, so happy to wear these gifts, and me, so excited to meet him. I knew his writings, he was a mythical character to me but, face to face with him, I had an almost motherly feeling. He was like a little boy, very kind and laughing a lot . . .
At the time he gave his speeches, the situation was quite complicated: there were not many White folks willing to support an organization very wrongly described as a "terrorist" one, made up of people willing to kill policemen, etc. At the time, I was a member of this movement and had lost my job as a teacher in UCLA but I quashed the decision on appeal and was reintegrated. It was very difficult to succeed in spreading out the movement and find support for Black political prisoners. On the campus, teachers and students alike would often demonstrate against the war in Vietnam. For instance, there had been a demonstration against Nixon's policy in Vietnam with ten to fifteen thousand persons; nevertheless, two weeks later, when we tried to arrange another demonstration to obtain the release of Bobby Seale, Erika Huggins and the "Soledad Brothers" ( George Jackson, John Clutchette, Fleeta Drumgo) who were in jail, we only managed to gather two hundred persons, most of them Blacks. We just didn't succeed in raising a great multiracial movement and thought Genet, thanks to his fame, could help us reach White progressives.
When we advertised for his conference, the posters did not mention that Genet would talk about the Black Panthers. We just said he would speak and a huge crowd came to hear him because he was Jean Genet, the great writer. He started saying he would talk about the Black Panthers and made a very moving appeal - a very theoretically advanced one, I'd say - about how to fight racism. Genet had made some proposals twenty years before that we just started to develop; for instance the White participation in the struggle against racism. After a quarter of an hour, many members of the audience started to get upset and to whisper and, suddenly, someone even interrupted Genet asking him to speak, at last, of himself and his work! Genet answered: "No, I'm not here to talk about literature or my books. I came to defend the Black Panther Party."
Then, something deeply shocking to me occurred: half of the audience progressively left the place. They didn't want to hear about the BPP. For us, it was a real lesson. We could judge how much work had to be done to generate a real movement against racism. Many teachers I was familiar with were unable to attend such debates because, in a way, they felt Genet was accusing them of collusion. However, those who did stay were giving us something invaluable. Genet knew how to speak his heart without pity or condescension. Now, we have learned how not to mistake solidarity feelings for feelings of pity among the representatives of the ruling culture. Genet, he already knew how to distinguish them. In his Yale speech, on the Mayday Speech day, he even goes so far as to advocate the development of a "tactfulness of the heart" when dealing with Black folks. He also says that Blacks had silently been observing Whites for centuries and had learned a lot about them and their cultural background. And Whites did not even realize they were being observed. What we develop nowadays in our lectures means the same: White folks have got to go to Black school; they have to learn something from them. From Black folks but also Indians, Chicanos and the whole multicultural U.S. population.
One last important point: it was Genet who heightened the Black Panther Party awareness to the Homosexual Rights issue. David Hilliard told me that when they were traveling together from state to state, from one university to another, some members of the Party were using very rude and homophobic words to insult Nixon or Mitchell. Genet was hurt by these words and told them they should not use such vocabulary. One night, he even showed up at the hotel - there used to be four or five men per room during these trips - dressed in a sort of pink negligee, and a cigar in his mouth. Well, they all thought Genet was going crazy! He had just wanted to bring about a discussion on the similarities between the struggle against racism and the struggle against homophobia. After these trips in 1970, David Hilliard and his mates largely spoke of the matter with Huey Newton (the BPP's president, in jail at the time) and later published soon after an important article in the BPP's newspaper saying: "Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (Genet also had spoke about women's liberation during his stay - Angela's note), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion. I say: 'whatever your insecurities are' because as we very well know, sometimes our first instinct is to want to hit a homosexual in the mouth, and want a woman to be quiet. We want to hit a homosexual in the mouth because we are afraid that we might be homosexual; and we want to hit the women or shut her up because we are afraid that she might castrate us, or take the nuts that we might not have to start with. [ . . . ] Remember, we have not established a revolutionary value system; we are only in the process of establishing it. I do not remember our ever constituting any value that said that a revolutionary must say offensive things towards homosexuals, or that a revolutionary should make sure that women do not speak out about their particular kind of oppression. [ . . . ] And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society. [ . . . ]"

(Thanx Ken!)

An Afghan police commando's story


On 16 April 2012 the Taliban launched their most ambitious ever attack on Kabul, targeting parliament and the diplomatic enclave. The assault caught the city by surprise, but so did the response of Afghanistan's security forces, who for perhaps the first time ever were fully in charge of the fight against the insurgents.
When multi-media project Kabul: A City At Work got exclusive access to police commando Hamidullah – captured on camera in his bloodied combat fatigues – he became the face of Afghan heroism. This is his story…
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Marijuana: A Second Look at a Drug of Isolation Booklet (1987)

MORE

Andy Kaufman on Letterman (June 24th 1980)

Tony Clifton on The Dinah Shore Show


Bonus:
Andy Kaufman's first TV appearance as Tony Clifton (1977)

The TSA's mission creep is making the US a police state

Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance - 'We Don’t Live in a Free Country'


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A flower that smells like shit and resembles vagina dentata

♪♫ Lyle Lovett - Nobody Knows Me


And I like cream in my coffee
And I like to sleep late on Sunday
And nobody knows me like my baby
And I like eggs over easy
With flour tortillas
And nobody knows me like my baby

And nobody holds me
And nobody knows me
Nobody knows me like my baby

But it was a dream made to order
South of the border
And nobody knows me like my baby
And she cried man how could you do it
And I swore that there weren't nothing to it
But nobody knows me like my baby

original version appeared on the album "Lyle Lovett and His Large Band" (1989)

Friday 20 April 2012

Tasting The Rainbow


Ring of colour: An ant’s transparent abdomen shows the colour of the food they have eaten. (Mohamed Babu / Solent News & Photo Agency) 
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Just me?

Or is there something wrong with this sentence -
'The restriction on voting rights will remain in place ''for as long as the company deems it necessary to maintain compliance with US law'', News Corp said.'

Cherry blossom watching in Fukushima Prefecture

今年も桜は精一杯咲いている。

いわき市久ノ浜にあった自宅から車ですぐ、
お隣さんの町、福島県富岡町の夜ノ森公園。
浜通りでも有数の桜の名所。
立ち入りができない、人のいない夜ノ森公園で
今年も桜たちは思いっきり咲いてくれている。

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(Thanx Katherine!)

Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney

http://www.ted.com Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage.
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Lucinda on Levon

A little over a year ago, Levon Helm invited me to open two shows for him in Toronto.
Well aware of my Louisiana heritage, he enthusiastically let it be known that he and his band had worked up a version of "Crescent City" and asked if I would sing that song with them and also sit in on "Evangeline". I'll never forget Levon's ear to ear grin as we played those songs.The short time I spent with him over those two nights left a deep and lasting impression on me.
I heard the sad news today and I am in tears as I write this. I lost a hero and a friend. His music inspired and influenced me during my early years and still does, to this day. And now that I've been honored to have spent some time with Levon, I have to say that I will always remember him with a twinkle in his eyes, a smile as warm and friendly as his native Arkansas land and an endearing and infectious spirit that will live on forever.
Thank you for your musical lessons, Levon. Rave on, brother.
- Lucinda Williams