This is succinct: ” All DRM has ever done is annoy consumers who actually paid for their music.”

Yes. DRM is a gig where you get to slap each patron as they pay the cover. They will quit coming.

Cultural relevancy has not been their thing for some time. Amazing to see them still hedging at this point.

But onward, right?

I’ve completed the scene in Facebook/Vivaty integrating the videos, music other materials:

1. Smooth. Easy Drag Drop and Go.
2. Integration: fast dialog building for pulling in YouTube, Facebook, and externally hosted audio
3. Time to setup: about eight hours total.
4. Results: excellent.

Bands on Facebook who don’t build one of these for their act and business quick need cranial exams. This is the way to get it done in social network markets.

As the stagecraft objects improve, this will also be how albums are made, released and navigated. In fact, these become the albums++.

Big juju, musicTribe. Bery big.

Media convergence at long last!!!

The selection is topical and emotionally consistent. And the *computer* chose that. It is a playlist as consistent as many people would select except it has millions of choices to choose from before it presents a choice of choices. This is a second order effect. It is emergent.

Emergent choice is a hallmark of thought. Deep breath….

Might be time to get out the preemergence bottle and spread it around those tubers.

The YouTube video I put up as I told Armand I would is to make a point: this kind of thing is only possible if we can use the digital archives. It takes hundreds of eyes over decades to create that one video. Would I want to give all credits for all of those images? Of course but finding those and getting the agreements is an operational burden the solo artist can’t handle. So to have the expressive power to bring human memory, the real juju to that song, I need to be able to use those images fairly. IOW, if society wants and needs the artist to reflect society, it must make the human memory available to us. The images in the song are real. They are what the search engine reveals when asked certain questions on certain topics. That is why it works. It is authentic.

I have a concept of the fair witness provision that extends fair use. It essentially is that as long as a copied image or song or whatever is not used in any way that is injurious to the expression of the author, the assumption of law is that it is fair use. Just as copyright has to be enforced by the author/owner, an image owner, song owner, etc., only has to register the protest that this is not fair use. The only difference in what is policy for the services is now is in the definition of what is fair. For me, it comes down to the fair witness decision: an author is bound to fair presentation, or as it says, to reveal all they see. They should not use the material to beg an argument not intended. This is weak but I think it needs to be to maximize expressiveness.

That’s what it was designed for, that’s what it provided for, and that’s what it should be limited to. For content that lives and evolves in disembodied digital streams, we need something entirely new, and native to that medium.

What this law will look like is still uncertain, but the social norms that have already developed provide some indication. Sharing and remixing files is okay. Plagiarism or distortions of credit are vehemently not okay.

What is certain is that existing copyright law is almost perfectly unacceptable, developed, as it was, around the realities of capital-intensive analog production for distribution on segregated, privately owned, and tightly controlled platforms .

And because physical media is very unlikely to disappear completely, the need for these laws is alive and well. We don’t need reform. We need something fresh.

After all, the present trouble comes from assuming that content and container are always one and the same. They’re not. And laws that only assume the existence of containers in a world that’s becoming profoundly uncontained are a terrible way to govern content in that world.

Of course, developing appropriate law will demand further evolution in the concept of property itself. In the same way that we developed the concept of Intellectual Property as being distinct from tangible goods (along with a distinct set of laws to match) we need to recognize disembodied datastreams as having their own set of internal rules.

The purpose of Property (as a concept) remains the same – advancing the economic benefit of society as a whole, while providing just recompense to the members of society who create the value enjoyed.

Now, it needs to be adapted to meet these ends in a manner that reconciles – in law – the realities of the medium, the emerging social norms, and the principles of the US Constitution.

Of course, the medium extends beyond the nation’s borders. But so does the idea that ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness’, and that, above all, these truths are self-evident – not simply to Americans, but to humans everywhere.

Simply making that declaration is soft power writ large. It’s what we did first, and it’s what we can still do best. Successfully separating physical copyright law from the governance of content in general is a great way to put those principles into action.

Boy howdy, I’d love to go to this one.