Copyright Criminals (Or How Creativity Made Outlaws)

 

My friend, ndspinelli, mentioned he was soon going to see the great Clyde Stubblefield (from James Brown's band) and that reminded me I'd never posted this PBS program on the current ins and outs of sampling law - a major obstacle for recording artists today, myself included. 

Along with Mr. Stubblefield, it includes many of the biggest names in music criticism (Greg Tate, Harry Allen) label heads (the sour Steve Albini) lawyers, many of the artists and producers I've featured on TMR (George Clinton, DJ Q-Bert, De La Soul, Public Enemy and The Bomb Squad, Coldcut, Prefuse 73, Negativland, etc.) friends of mine (Shock G) all providing a nice over-view of opinions on how the art of recording is done, post-Sgt. Pepper's. I've used them all. 

Dealing with these issues (and how to get around them) is mostly how I spend my free time:

And I'm not ashamed to say, I've been away from it now for almost a month, and it's killing me,...

ADDED - a nice mash-up by the video editors Eclectic Method:

   

Promote Homeopathy (Stop This Crazy Thing!!!)

"Homeopathy is perhaps the most ridiculous of all quackery, since it says that the best medicine is medicine that is entirely gone.

In theory it hardly needs debunking; it’s a cul-de-sac of reason, Poe’s Law incarnate. It’s the solipsism of medicine.

Still, many people believe in it, so in practice it does need debunking.

In a typical essay showing all the myriad ways homeopathy goes wrong, the usual suspects are displayed: the theory behind it doesn’t make sense, water doesn’t have memory, diluting medicine actually makes it weaker, and all that.

But you don’t need to go into all that detail. Why not? Because homeopathy is self-denying!

Just look at it this way:

If homeopathy works, then obviously the less you use it, the stronger it gets. So the best way to apply homeopathy is to not use it at all.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Still, homeopaths tend to be immune to logic and reason (ironically, proving homeopathy at least in principle: the less likely you are to ask for scientific evidence to support it, the stronger homeopathological evidence gets).

So we need a practical application, a way to stop homeopathy practitioners cold. And I think I have it.

The next time you meet one, ask them what they do when they get thirsty.

If they really believe homeopathy, then within days all the homeopaths will be gone, deceased due to diligently dogmatic dehydration.

And the beauty of it?

According to their own logic, once all the homeopaths are gone, they will have reached maximum strength.

They win, we win, medicine wins, logic wins. Everyone wins.

Well, technically, they don’t win, being dead and all. But they made their point! I think.

Anyway, spread the word! And if you’re a homeopath, then it’s your duty to link to this very blog post: according to your own tenets, the more it gets out there, the weaker it is! So submit it to Digg, submit it to Fark, put it on Slashdot, and Boing Boing, and Neatorama. Get millions of people to visit this page. It’s the only way to stop skepticism!"

-- Phil Plait putting Samuel Hahnemann's "logic" to good use, which he surely got from Bad Astronomy.

24: Funnier Than Saturday Night Live