PROTECT IP Act Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Next up is the great hobby of reenacting. Rule one, only reenact with people who won’t really shoot you. I always thought this was an important rule.

Lastly we have my beloved Orioles who are coming off a truly dreadful season without prospects for much better anytime real soon. In many ways it was a typical season for them, an early hot streak to get the fans excited followed by a complete fade post All Star Game but this year was made worse for me by Tampa Bay doing great and a comment as the fade started by Brian Roberts along the lines of ‘We can’t play every game like a playoff game.’ This is certainly true, baseball’s long season is a marathon not a sprint, however that mindset spoken out loud gave me the impression that nobody was ever playing any game like it was for real so I stopped watching. Worst season for me as a fan ever. Anyhow, the Sun grades the players here, I am harder in my grading on the veterans than they are as I feel a lax attitude from them this year has hurt the many young players the O’s brought up and will slow them down even if they improve.

Edit: Just had to add that Wondermark today sums up my view on the rush to a financial ‘solution’ that the usual idiots are pushing.

Edited to Add: Microsoft explains, its just too hard and we didn’t really want to do it in the first place and it only effects a few people and you can just make lousy copies and yadda yadda yadda. Sucker.

First up the Itunes store has this album and three other The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets albums. Thats the good news, the bad news is they are only availble as classic Itunes store downloads, which means they DRMed heavily and in the odd aac format that Apple uses to keep others from selling DRMed music that works on the iPod. Price is $10, not bad but it would cost more if it were available DRM free as Apple charges a premium for removing the DRM when the record company lets them.

Next up Emusic. They have the album as well but you can’t just buy it, you have to subscribe to one of their monthly plans to get it. The album has fifteen tracks which means that it will take about half your monthly plan if you have the smallest Emusic monthly plan, thirty tracks every month for $10. This makes Emusic the cheapest place to get the album at $5. It is DRM free mp3 files which will work on any music player including the iPod. However after buying this one you still have fifteen downloads left for the month, finding an album with exactly fifteen tracks to make it even for the month can be a challenge. If you find one with eighteen track album then you have to buy a top up, which come in units of ten, leaving you looking for a seven song album and so on and so on. I gave up on Emusic, I am a simple animal and it all got to complicated for me.

CDBaby was a favorite for me, they stock almost all independents and are now offering most music as downloads as well physical CDs. They have the album and a full set of Thickets albums and are the ones the Thickets point you to from their own site. I am annoyed with them however as the download price is no cheaper than getting a CD. I want the music immediately, that is why I download normally, but I feel like a sap if I could have gotten the actual CD in my hand for the same price. In addition they aren’t cheap, at $13 they are the most expensive of any of the download services although they do give you a nice high quality DRM free mp3 when you buy from them.

Last up is Amazon. Amazon has the album and the other three from the Thickets at a decent price of $9 each. They come as DRM free mp3 files but Amazon has its own oddity in its download manager which is the only way to get music you buy from them. It is actually a handy tool as it loads the songs into your Itunes library after downloading them (which normally you have to do manually if you buy from someone other than the Itunes store) but it does have some quirky behavior, like not downloading unless it is the latest version, then forgetting what you were going to download if you upgrade the bugger. Amazon also has some odd terms of use when they sell you music which basically say you are licensing the music from them, not buying it like when you buy a CD.

So there is no perfect answer, each store has some annoying stuff but for this one I picked it up at Amazon. The price was good, it is DRM free and while annoying their terms of use and download tool can be ignored once I have the music on my PC. Amazon isn’t always the winner though, I am not kidding when I say we are in a wild west period for music downloads, I check around before buying any music online. In my next post I will go over some of the other choices out there for online shopping that muddy the water even more.

It seems Amazon isn’t actually selling me the files, they are licensing them to me. This comes with restrictions, for example I could not buy a bunch, copy them to a cd or USB drive then give them to someone else even if I delete them from my system. This is annoying, but as they have no real way of knowing when this happens not overly fatal, but Cory Doctrow over at Boing Boing points out the real reason they are doing this, it is so the record companies can screw the musicians. Surprise! You see they have to pay a higher royalty when a song is sold then when one is licensed. So by not ‘selling’ the song I download to me the record company gets to keep gets to keep forty-two and a half cents that would otherwise go to the artist. To Amazon it is the same whether it is a sale or a license, the only people it matters to are the artist and the record company. Next time you hear them lobbying about how important the record companies are for the protection of the artists remember this one.

In the case of the video however I feel she is wrong. This was clearly fair use under almost all the definitions of fair use bar the academic. She should let go on this one. She won’t though, she is convinced that her property rights are absolute and trump all and so is striking back at the wrong target. This won’t help her in the long run, people will remember this instead of the times she is clearly in the right. I had never heard of her before, now I associate her with abuse of the DMCA. She will probably stay bitter and blame the video.

This sort of thing is why I think we need some common sense reform in the copyright world. Ms. Hartwell should be protected from real theft, artists should be allowed to create and people should know when to let go. The only way to make sure your work is never stolen is to never show it to anyone. Once you show anything it becomes part of our culture, expecting it go completely back into your box is both greedy and naive. I think it is sad that Ms. Hartwell has decided to hide her work from the world and it is definitely not to the public good that she has had the video pulled from two sites already. Is that what we as a society want? Art suppressed and artists hiding their works to be ‘safe’?

EDIT: The offending photo has been pulled. Ms. Hartwell has suceeded in further hiding her work from the world both here and on Flickr. A win for her, a loss for the rest of us on both counts.

Edit: It gets worse, now you are supposed to hide from Carolers as you cower in fear in your own home.

Sadly I am a poor public speaker, passionate but unable to congeal my arguments into cohesive form. Luckily for me there are very good speaker who eloquently make my case for me such as Larry Lessig. Below is his speech at the TED conference, about eighteen minutes long and very well done. He doesn’t cover all my arguments, but he does make a nice case and he explains why we can’t just trust the government to fix this mess. His point about having everyone working against the law because the law is just being an ass here is a very good one.

I feel that the inability of the law to apply common sense to copyright is damaging the United States and it will only get worse. I should mention the Electronic Freedom Foundation here, it is one of the organizations I give money to. Give them a look as well. I also post my photos on Flickr and all content on this site under a Creative Commons license and encourage people to do the same. The public domain belongs to all of us, it is our culture, don’t let it slip its loss stifle our nations voice.

I am well aware that providing access to these artifacts isn’t free, and a reasonable charge wouldn’t be out of line, but restricting access to only those who agree to work within this deal cannot be good for the country. I know several people who have made signifigant donations to museums in the past, do you think they thought they were donating to Showtime?

Update I am amazed at the lack of coverage on this issue in the media. Here a publicly funded organization is selling off access to our culture to a private TV network, how can this possibly be a good thing? I have just written my Congressman and both Senators on this, I ask if this interests you at all to please to do the same.