dietsch ::

Now my advice for those who die / Declare the pennies on your eyes

Harrison leaves £99m will. George Harrison left more than £99m in his will, it is revealed, as fellow artists take part in a charity tribute concert in his honour.

...

But in an ironic twist on one of Harrison's best-known songs - Taxman - 40% of his fortune will be handed over to the Inland Revenue in death duties.

[BBC News | Front Page | UK Edition]

Yesterday (29 Nov) was the first anniversary of Harrison's death.

ElcomSoft trial starts Monday

California Trial Nears for Landmark Copyright Case. [Registration required.] SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Jury selection in the first criminal prosecution for alleged violations of U.S. digital copyright law will start on Monday in a Silicon Valley court, an attorney in the case said on Friday.

The closely watched case pits Russian software vendor ElcomSoft against federal prosecutors, who charge the Moscow-based firm violated the four-year-old Digital Millennium Copyright Act with a software program allowing users to manipulate material in Adobe Systems Inc.'s (ADBE.O) eBook format by getting around copyright safeguards.

By Reuters. [New York Times: Technology] Here's a question. You go out online and buy an e-book from, say, Amazon.com. You install Adobe's eBook reader to allow you to read the e-book, but you quickly learn that the eBook reader prevents you from running a text-to-speech program on the e-book. So, although you can read the book, your vision-impaired spouse cannot. "Ah," you say. "I'll write a program that converts this e-book from the proprietary eBook standard into a PDF file! I have a PDF reader that will let us run text-to-speech." Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, you've broken the law by circumventing the restrictions Adobe put in place to protect copyright owners. ElcomSoft, the company on trial, is charged with illegally creating and distributing such a product. It's important to know that ElcomSoft's product works only on e-books that a user has legally purchased for his or her own use. If you've downloaded a pirated copy, you can't use the ElcomSoft product. One of the issues at stake here is, when you purchase an e-book, do you have the right to use that e-book as you see fit? Can you transfer it to another computer? Can you copy portions of it under fair-use guidelines? Can you "loan" the e-book to another user as you would, say, a physical book? The DMCA was written to allow publishers to restrict what you, a consumer, can do with digital media files. Is this legal? Is it ethical? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent FAQ available concerning the ElcomSoft case, including a list of activities that Adobe's software prohibits users from doing with e-books they've purchased.

Copyright and computer software

Efficiency, Innovation and Transparency [GrepLaw] Swedish attorney Mikael Pawlo has up a concise overview of copyright protection, open source, and free software licensing.

Site revamp!

Done and done. New design is loaded to the site, new logging tool seems to be working well, after some annoying glitches. Look around. Have a gander. Tell me what you think. That's what the comments are for, dammit.

Redesigns, libraries, etc.

So, the site redesign and update are almost done. I need to cull dead links, tidy up the resume, and make sure all's smooth, but it should be up very soon. Perhaps surprisingly soon. Meanwhile. Saturday was a nice New York day for the Dietsch. I went on a tour, finally, of the NYPL in midtown. The big one with the lions, y'know. Anyway, with all the time I'd spent there, editing and stuff, it was nice to finally have a look around at the place. See things I didn't take the time to look at when I was making it my place of employment, y'know. I hung around after the tour and saw the NYC Eats exhibit, up on the third floor. Cool stuff. Lots of paper ephemera like menus and napkins from restaurants, diners, street vendors, and other food purveyors from New York's history. All of this is in the Library's collection. People don't think of libraries collecting menus and photographs and postcards, but you'd be amazed. I then headed down the Bowery, to CBGB's 313 Gallery, next door to the famous rock venue. 313 had a showing of Illegal Art. The idea is to represent artists who use corporate icons, slogans, or familiar characters in ways of which their owners might not approve. So Disney-character porno cartoons, for example, or Kieron Dwyer's riff on the Starbucks logo. If you read this blog--yeah, both of you--you can understand why this would attract me. Creative expression depends entirely on allowing people to take ideas and concepts from other sources, filtering those ideas through their own mindware, and creating something new. This ties in perfectly with the IP and copyright and cyberlaw stuff I've been following. I could go on, but I've been drinking, and I'm not sure I'd make much sense. Also, I'm not sure either of you want to hear it.

You and the Little Mermaid

"You and the Little Mermaid can both go f*** yourselves." Skip forward to about the 39 minute mark. Requires RealAudio.

Copyright and IP stuff again.

Copyright and IP stuff again. I know, it ain't your bag, probably. Oh fucking well. But this is more ha-ha than zzz-zzz, so be cool. I was out at St. Mark's Bookshop tonight and I bought a couple issues of 2600, along with the paperback edition of Laurence Lessig's latest book, The Future of Ideas. My interest in copyright and IP stuff went on hold while I moved, found a place to live, found a job, and so on, but now I can pay more attention to these things again. Anyway, I started reading Lessig's book tonight. I'm not far in yet, but it's interesting. Remember the days, about six years ago, when everyone said the Internet would revolutionize communication and entertainment? "Watch out, big boys," they all said. "When consumers can get music and movies and books over the Internet, why will they need cable or record stores or Borders, eh? It's a new world, old media, so adapt or get the hell out of the way." So, it's 2002, and where are we? Napster is dead. Audiogalaxy, dead. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act have double-teamed the American public, stifling innovation and keeping older works from entering the public domain. Someone "adapted" in the old vs. new media war, and it sure wasn't old media. These are the issues Lessig covers. And, really, I've been meaning to read his book for months. But it took until now. So, I sat and read about 30 pages tonight and then I got to thinking, "Hmmm. Anna Mojo has been discussing IP stuff off and on in her Web log also. I wonder whether she has anything new on this." Go have a peek and see what I saw when I got on her log. Maybe you'll chuckle as I did.

Goddamn is it windy today!

Goddamn is it windy today! I just saw a four-year-old kid in a long coat swept up by the wind, carried across the Harlem River, and deposited safely in the park across the way. Well, okay. I made that up. But it is bloody damn windy today.

Radio silence

Sorry for the lack of updates. I've been busy working on a redesign for this place. I have the basic look worked out, although there's some bugs to fix. I still need to overhaul this damn Web log, and go through all my content pages, culling out dead links, adding and subtracting content, and so on. That's taking up time I might otherwise spend blogging. Trust me. I think you'll appreciate the time I've spent on all this.

Patti Smith

Patti Smith performed Friday night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which might be a strange venue for a rock show, but it wasn't really a rock show, so I suppose it doesn't matter. The performance was billed as a night of remembrance in honor of All Saints Day. She brought a ragoût of spoken word, poetry performance, and music, assisted by Phillip Glass (on a Burroughs tribute), among others. Patti's mother, Beverly, died just over a month ago, and her memory permeated the performance. I almost wrote that it hung heavily, but that's not the case at all. Her mother seems to have had a very irreverent and light-hearted personality and that was the spirit that Patti herself had when talking about her. Much of the show was Patti Smith, onstage alone, at a microphone, reading poetry, telling stories about her friends and family, and joking with the audience. She seemed both at-ease and nervous, at the same time. Her hair, once black, is now silver-gray, and she wears it long and straight. Her love of androgyny remains: she wore a black suit, a loosened thin black tie, and a white shirt, open at the collar. Although she's certainly not conventionally pretty, I believe that Patti Smith remains, at 56, one of the sexiest women I've seen. I can never quite describe what Smith's music means to me and even when I play it for people, they often don't get it. When I do try to explain it, I sound like I'm speaking cliches: she "understands" me, her music "resonates," whatever. All I know is that I feel a deep, intimate interlocking with her music. Something about her music and my spirit just snap together. To hear her voice in person was profoundly moving for me. Smith spoke about her friends, her mentors, her heroes: William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ezra Pound, Alan Ginsberg, Georgia O'Keefe. She read poems by or about those people. She spoke of her family--her parents' separation during WWII, her mother's work to provide joy to her children when no one knew how they'd afford another day's meals. She sang Sonny Boy in honor of her brother, and When My Ship Comes In to memorialize her parents. She spoke with disarming candor about her feelings and inspirations. She spoke to us as if we were each her friends. A woman of modesty and wisdom, she was surprisingly sentimental and even goofy at times. That appeals to me, for anyone who knows me well understands that I too can be sentimental and goofy. For an evening, I was in the largest living room in Manhattan, listening to one of my heroes discussing her heroes as if we were talking over coffee. She performed only one song, to my knowledge, that she's recorded before--Dancing Barefoot--during a two-song encore that began with a charming performance of the Beatles song Blackbird, during which she flubbed the lyrics and then giggled.