Illegal-art.org

Inspired project. Quote:

“The laws governing “intellectual property” have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork–as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s–will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.

The irony here couldn’t be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.

The Illegal Art Exhibit will celebrate what is rapidly becoming the “degenerate art” of a corporate age: art and ideas on the legal fringes of intellectual property. Some of the pieces in the show have eluded lawyers; others have had to appear in court.

Loaded with gray areas, intellectual property law inevitably has a silencing effect, discouraging the creation of new works.

Should artists be allowed to use copyrighted materials? Where do the First Amendment and “intellectual property” law collide? What is art’s future if the current laws are allowed to stand? Stay Free! considers these questions and others in our multimedia program”

And now for something complete different… corporate blogging

Seems to me a contradiction in terms. Blogging is a personal activity (though I can understand project teams having a collective Blog). But the NYT is adamant that corporate executives “are beginning to participate in an activity once thought to be the preserve of technology geeks and political partisans.

Executives are beginning to blog.”

Hmmm… The first corporate Blog cited looks pretty awkward. It’s written by the CEO of a conference-organising firm and suggests that he can’t quite disentangle his personal thoughts from his CEO-think. Another example is written by a PR executive, and the third is Tim O’Reilly’s wonderful Blog, which doesn’t really count because although Tim runs a terrific company, in spirit he’s a geek.

Pop-up windows and serendipity

I hate pop-ups — and my web browser (Safari) blocks them. But today I was using Mozilla on Linux and this picture

popped up. It’s an Irish landscape which I recognise from my childhood, but I cannot for the life of me recall where it is. Sigh.

Peter Cochrane on spam
From a recent column.

“Averaging a spread of recently published surveys, it seems that:

– 40 per cent of us receive more than 100 spam emails a week

– 20 per cent really object to spam

– 80 per cent with children worry even more about spam

– 40 per cent worry about pornography

– 50 per cent are really irritated about wasting time deleting spam

– 50 per cent don?t use spam filters

– The Nigerian banking scam is now the second largest industry in that country

If spam continues to grow at its present rate it will totally dominate by 2004 and stands a good chance of bringing down the entire internet through overload.

I think it is up to individuals, companies, ISPs and network providers to join forces to spam the spammers.

This column was dictated after deleting 13 unsolicited emails. The tape was then handed to my secretary and typed up on her Apple G4 laptop. It appeared on my screen four hours later via a cable modem link. I revised it over breakfast on the Ipswich to London train and despatched it to silicon.com from Liverpool Street Station using my 2.5G mobile. ”

The Iraqi Quagmire

Sobering piece by Scott Rosenberg. Quote:

Back in March, on the eve of war, I quoted one knowledgeable observer’s predictions:

In a Fresh Air interview tonight that I can only describe as “dreadful,” in the primal meaning of the word, CIA historian Thomas Powers put details on the face of these fears. He predicted, as everyone does, a swift U.S. victory in a month or so. Then a couple months of calm. Then, a gradual awareness: That this project of installing a client government in Iraq, even in the sunniest of outcomes, must last a generation or more. That hundreds of thousands of American troops have now become sitting-duck targets for suicidal terrorists who will have no need to hijack a plane to access their foes. That these troops will now sit on the border with another “axis of evil” enemy, Iran, which, like Saddam’s Iraq, also seeks nuclear weapons. That this war, like Bush’s larger “war on terrorism,” has no clear definition of its aims, its scope or its foes — and that such a war has no end in sight and can have no victory.

That’s pretty much the way it’s gone. This analysis from the New York Times’ Michael Gordon outlines the shape of the guerrilla war we are now locked in, in which each day’s news brings another report of an ambush or an attack, another dead American soldier, another reprisal against some Baathist holdout, another batch of Iraqis wounded or killed.

The warmongering crowd sneered at those who cautioned of this likelihood; we were lily-livered traitors whose use of the word “quagmire” was lampooned as a ludicrous artifact of the Vietnam era. Then consider this quote which appeared in a dispatch from the Times’ Steven Lee Myers, who appears to have spent enough time with the troops he is covering to win their trust:

“You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to go home,” Pfc. Matthew C. O’Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant Betancourt’s platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. “Tell him to come spend a night in our building.”

The First Blog?

This is the first weblog page published in 1997 on Camworld. Useful for an article I’m writing about Blogging.

The other side of the album vs. tracks argument

Interesting piece in Salon. Makes the point that in a track-downloading world, some of the serendipity you get from albums will be lost. Quote:

“Music bundling means that the sure things that are catchy but utterly forgettable, together with the not-so-sure things that can surprise and sometimes nourish our artistic hunger, both end up in the hands of consumers and critics — who can then sample the latter for free. This exposure of chancy ideas is a great boon to the creative process. But because of the discrete selling and buying of music, digital single by digital single, that iTunes and its kin will foster, we can expect a decline in music bundling, and thus in risk-taking and its shy companion, innovation. ”

Getting to the nub of SCO’s claims about Linux and Unix

There’s a fantastically intelligent and illuminating article by Ian Lance Taylor based on a visit to SCO, talking to the folks there about their case against IBM and adding his own reflections on the issue. For the first time I feel I understand what this case is really about.

New life for old hard disks

Recently I decided to breathe new life into this old Dell laptop by installing Linux on it.

But first it needed a bigger hard drive, so one was duly installed. Problem: what to do with the old drive, which is a perfectly good 10Gb IBM unit? Answer: my friend Quentin brought me back a cute little Firewire drive enclosure from the US. It clicks open to reveal a little motherboard and a slot for the drive.

Slide the drive in, snap the case shut, slip on the rubberised shock protector and — Hey Presto! — you have a neat little Firewire drive.

Not quite an iPod, but not bad either!

Where on Earth is Saddam Hussein?

Way back in the Stone Age, my kids had an ‘educational’ game for the Apple Mac called “Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?” The object of the exercise was to seduce children in to learning world geography– quite a challenge for American kids, I would guess. In the box with the disk was an invaluable reference work — the CIA World Factbook. So how about a new game — “Where on Earth is Saddam Hussein?” According to the NYT, US officials are convinced he’s still at large in Iraq. At the moment, this game is for real. But if it should fail, there may be psychic benefits from converting it into a computer-based entertainment. Meanwhile, the unfortunate Iraqis cannot see the joke.