A Voice in the Dark

I see this question a lot about songs by some artist or other who has a large catalog of songs available on the Zune marketplace. It frequently comes down to a question of legality.

Imagine that there is a band named The Band. One of the members of The Band - Bob Guy - writes a song. This song may be credited to The Band, or to Bob Guy. If it’s credited to The Band, the record label usually has the right to decide how they distribute it. However, if it’s credited to Bob Guy, the record label needs his permission to distribute it - because only The Band has given them that right. Even though Bob Guy was in the band and took part in that decision, listing him as the author gives him additional rights over that song.

Now let’s imagine Bob Guy goes out and starts a solo career. When he releases an album as Bob Guy, an invisible distinction is created between Bob Guy the band that released a solo album, and Bob Guy the individual person. To the listener reading the credits, there is no difference - indeed, they are the same person. But from a legal perspective, Bob Guy the band and Bob Guy the artist are different legal entities. Any number of subtleties in the contract language can create a legal requirement to get permission from Bob Guy the artist to distribute songs he wrote for Bob Guy the band.

To make matters worse, Bob Guy is probably not his real name. His real name might be Eric Schmidt, and one or more songs may be credited to Eric Schmidt. Even thought Eric Schmidt is Bob Guy the artist and Bob Guy the artist is Bob Guy the band, if the song was written by Eric Schmidt, they need Eric Schmidt’s permission to distribute it.

Confused yet? It gets worse. What if Eric Schmidt is dead?

It is likely that Eric Schmidt has passed on the rights to Bob Guy’s music, both the band and the artist. But Eric may have simply forgotten that once upon a time, he released music written by Eric Schmidt, and in the absence of a legal name change all unestablished rights to that music disappear until it eventually falls into the public domain. Nobody has any legal right to make decisions about it. For 75 years after his death, these songs are in limbo, and cannot be legally distributed except as already contractually established.

So when digital download became available, and those rights had never been negotiated, a significant part of the world’s music library was simply not legally distributable at all until it hit the public domain. Even if Eric isn’t dead, the music industry is finding that after they shit all over Eric’s career as Bob Guy, drove him hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt with “advances on royalties”, and ultimately bought all rights to his music at bargain-basement prices… well, he’s not well-disposed to giving them a fair deal on the digital distribution rights. He wants his piece of what they took from him. Unlike the day he signed away the fruits of his creativity to wipe out a half million dollars in debt, the record label doesn’t have any leverage now. They want something from him, they can’t get it anywhere else, and he’s going to drive a hard bargain before they get anything - because he holds all the cards.

So in general, the reason a song isn’t available for download is usually that there are complicated legal matters around rights, holes in many legacy contracts that can’t be fixed, and bitter artists the industry has abused.

Filed under: Business, Intellectual Property, Media, Music
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So I see a headline in the drugstore tonight:

“Angelina Jolie Gains 10 Pounds! Is She Pregnant?”

Well, let’s see. She’s an actress who is frequently painfully and unattractively thin. If she gets a role in a movie where she’s supposed to be attractive - like, say, any role in any movie - I suppose the first thing they might say is “GAIN SOME FREAKING WEIGHT”.

But that wouldn’t be news, would it?

Filed under: Media
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I keep seeing this “above the influence” commercial where a girl’s dog lectures her about smoking weed.

I appreciate the sentiment, but we all know that just after the camera went off, the girl muttered “whoa, this is some good shit” and went to buy some more. A talking dog might freak you out, but a dope smoker probably thinks it’s pretty cool.

My favorite anti-drug commercial ever was the one where the guy was sitting around on his couch ranting that all the “just say no” stuff was bullshit, because he’s been smoking weed ever since high school, and he hasn’t changed. Then a door slams, he freaks out and starts fanning smoke out the window, an angry voice yells “did you even look for a job today?”… and he yells back “no, mom”.

Point made, I think.

Filed under: Media
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On a guitars and music forum I won’t name to save people some embarrassment, the link http://www.bonsaisandals.com/ was posted on Monday morning. Everyone there made fun of it. A couple days later, I went back to the site to make sure it was still up before sending the link to my wife.

As of this writing, they’re sold out of every men’s size and style on the site. (They say they’ll be restocked by the end of the month.)

Now, I’m not really sure what happened here, but it sure looks like a bunch of he-manly guitar players said “that’s stupid!” and then ran off and bought some.

 

Filed under: Media
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I was sitting around thinking the other day, and I got to wondering.

What would happen if you somehow managed to cram a half dozen gay-bashers into a small space with a half dozen gays for several days?

The immediate answer is, the gay-bashers would beat the crap out of the gays. So what if the gay-bashers can’t let it be known that they’re gay-bashers, and have to pretend they’re just plain old straight guys?

I think what would probably happen is that they’d get over their homophobia, because homophobes base their hatred largely on misconceptions about gays. Once they perceive that these aren’t true, the homophobia would start to seem silly. Alternately, if you simply pretend you don’t hate gays for a week, maybe it will become a habit.

Since a disproportionate number of homophobes are overcompensating for their own homosexual desires, chances are one of the gay-bashers would turn out to be gay. This would also encourage dropping the homophobia.

And when you put all this together, it could be a really great movie. It has all the right pieces and parts. Maybe I could write a screenplay.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Media, Philosophy
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Where “interest” is defined as a return contact from a hiring company after submitting a resume: 

Direct application to hiring company: 0% interest (14 submissions, 0 contacts)

Application through contract agencies: 3% interest (~70 submissions, 2 contacts)

Online application through Monster.com: 5% interest (83 submissions, 4 contacts)

Online application through Careerbuilder.com: 12% interest (32 submissions, 4 contacts)

Monster and Careerbuilder results do not include advertiser spam.

In this decidedly unscientific analysis, Careerbuilder appears to be 50% more effective than all other methods combined.

Anyone else have observations or insights on this?

Filed under: Business, Media
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As usual, I’m here thinking about who’s doing what in the competition.

For the boys, we have Chris Richardson and Blake in the “high-end but not a winner” category, with Chris Sligh and Phil in the “possible finalist” category. Sundance is horrible. I don’t know why he’s gotten this far.

For the girls, we have Jordin and Melinda placing high but not winning with Lakisha, and Sabrina as possible finalists.

(more…)

Filed under: Media
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I took one of those quizzes, this one about which super villain you are. (H/T Least I Could Do.) Amusingly:

You are Apocalypse

Apocalypse 90% Magneto 88% Riddler 84% Lex Luthor 80% Dr. Doom 80% Dark Phoenix 77% Juggernaut 68% Green Goblin 68% Two-Face 68% Venom 64% The Joker 60% Kingpin 54% Mr. Freeze 42% Mystique 36% Catwoman 33% Poison Ivy 30%

  You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

  How strange. A guy named Caliban takes the quiz, and turns out to be his supervillain mentor… 

Filed under: Media, Philosophy
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I just saw a television commercial for a combination PC, DVR, and game console. It’s from EnvisionsInc.com. When you go there, there’s nothing on the site. If you look them up, you’ll find them on the list of members for the Fort Wayne, Indiana Chamber of Commerce:

Envisions, Inc.
Audio/Visual Equipment-Dealers
3201 Stellhorn Road, Suite C143 Fort Wayne, IN 46815
Phone: (260) 407-1762     
http://www.envisionsinc.com
Timothy Wheeler, President & CEO

There’s also the usual WHOIS check which turns up the same information, plus an email address and a different phone number for Mr. Wheeler. (I don’t believe it’s helpful to publish these. Even if they are available to the general public with next to no effort, the minor hurdle of having to run a WHOIS query prevents an awful lot of abusive behavior.) The domain name is on a list of domains that expired in August of 2004, was registered in February of 2005, and expires in 2008. Name services are provided through NS73 and NS74 at worldnic.com.

This is pretty much all the information I can find about the company or its products. Since it’s currently 7 PM their time, calling the phone numbers is unlikely to accomplish anything. I’ll give them a call in the next couple of days and see what I can find out.

My gut instinct is that this product does not exist, never will exist, and if it ever does exist it will suck mightily and be a massive failure. But I’d like to do some digging. Anyone who wants to help is more than welcome to post a comment or two.

Update: I’m retarded. The correct domain is envizionsinc.com with a Z. There’s plenty of information there. I have never been so tempted to delete a blog entry in my life.

Filed under: Business, Media
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We have been without power for fourteen hours today, because there was a massive windstorm that knocked out power to over a million people. And I can’t help but think that when the media constantly freak out over every little thing, disaster forecasts don’t look at all unusual. If we had been given some indication that this was really going to be a huge crisis, we would have planned ahead and made sure to have batteries, candles, bags of ice, etc.

Instead, we just saw the typical idiots on the typical newscast talking about how many people might lose power in the storm. That didn’t sound so bad. We have talks like this about every storm of any appreciable size, and at worst we lose power for two to three hours. 

Instead, we lose power at one in the morning and spend the whole morning without it. Meanwhile, the power company is swamped with calls about outages, and tells us wonderful little pieces of news like how there are outages in parts of six counties. Teams will begin assessing the damage on Friday or Saturday. Emergency teams have been called in from adjacent states. Restoration of power will begin as soon as the storm subsides, and should be completed in seven to ten days.

Now, I’m not incapable of surviving without power. I grew up in the seventies. I was a scout. I went to camp. I had survival training in the military. A power outage is just an inconvenience for me. The biggest loss would be the food in the freezer, which at the moment is roughly $30 worth of chicken breast and ground beef. Not a big deal.

But it’s still an inconvenience, and it would have been LESS of an inconvenience had the media given us proper warning about it. Because they’re constantly whining about stupid shit, the real warning blended in with everything else, and I had no clue this was going to be anything more than a few gusty winds.

Which is why I get really annoyed at all the alarmist bullshit on the news. It inoculates us against real warnings, until we can’t tell the difference. Which is a prime example of how the media damages the public with shit that doesn’t matter.

 

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics
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