I came across an article in The Register a little while ago about one mom’s fight to keep a 29 second video clip of her son dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” up on YouTube.
In summary: The PA resident, Stephanie Lenz, had placed a 29 second clip of her dancing baby boy up on YouTube in order to share with family and friends. Universal (Prince’s label) contacted YouTube purportedly at the artist’s behest, citing the DMCA
Momma contacted the EFF and also filed a suit against the record label, Universal Music Group, to get the clip put back up as well as damages.
Current the clip is back up on YouTube, but as of the Register’s October 30th article, the lawsuit is still underway.
Without further ado, the “objectionable” clip.
I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this. I personally feel like the artist and recording company have lost face with this action, and that the more public this becomes, the worse it will look for the two of them. The mother has nothing to lose but time, and possibly some serious lawyer’s fees. In my mind this is not a landmark case in terms of establishing laws, but in enforcing them. And of course the neverending “Corporate vs. Consumer” idea that pervades the culture these days.
I use a few Linux distros at home and at work, and being a half-baked nincompoop, I prefer the shiny new ones that end in “buntu”. The 64-bit version of Kubuntu is what I run at the office, and I have installed my preferred web-browsing application, Firefox 1.5.x, with my favorite themes, and a ton of useful extensions, most of which I need for work.
Among these extensions, there is a slick little application called Sage. This is an RSS reader embedded into Firefox, which is almost unspeakably convenient. I am expected to do research at least some of the time because my job demands it. Therefore, I am subscribed to numerous feeds, some authored by unabashed marketroids in Manhattan, others by squirrelly black-leather-jacket types in exotic places like Prague.
Every once in a great while, the workload becomes, um, constipated. Don’t get me wrong, there’s never a shortage of things to do around the place, but lately we tend to hyperfocus on a few high-priority items at a time - as opposed to taking a more holistic view (as in “HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE HAVE SO MUCH TO DO HOW THE FUCK ARE WE GOING TO DO THIS GIMME A CIGARETTE YOU PEEEN-ARSE YES I KNOW I DON’T SMOKE” etc). It might be perceived as inefficiency but our deliberately selective awareness of imminent doom allows us to actually get things done without the embarrassment of pissing our collective pants in abject terror after suffering massive aneurysms.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh yeah. Slow day at work. Reason: we have a balky cms built in deprecated php. The code is liberally commented in at least one Central European language, but aside from that, documentation is scant. This cms has the quirky habit of eating posts according to some fiendish glitch. Programmatic functionalities combine with traditional meatbag error and really weird things happen to our precious data. We would like to begin serious repair of the website but there is no way to do this, at this time, without using this cms. (By the way, if you want to know what using our cms is like, imagine if Franz Kafka wrote Catch-22).
So, we must wire Switzerland and tell them to put their finest gnomes to work. By tomorrow, we expect these gnomes to be busily engaged in pulling meaningless strings of ones and zeroes from the mysterious innards of the database and weaving them into more or less normal html.
In the meantime, there’s various personal crises and dramas to fill the available time. All this stuff, on top of a two-long-island-iced-tea lunch and a nasty sugar crash caused by socially mandatory birthday cake, makes me stupidly susceptible to opening up the feedreader and clicking links. As a result I am now fully briefed on a variety of current events in the nerd universe.
First, let’s start off with what we already know. At 9pm EST yesterday, instead of deleting forum spam like a good boy, I was glued to my monitor, drinking a beer and watching as Digg rioted. This was absolutely fascinating. I’ve tried to spam Digg a few times so I know what kind of raw power was needed to unleash something like that, and believe me, the power level over there was waaaaaaaaaaay over nine thousand. A few places like the nefarious Forbes.com (more on those assholes later) were Diggbaiting this story earlier today (reposting a similar story at their own url in an attempt to attract backlinks), and earning upwards of 1000+ diggs. If I was into AdSense arbitrage I would have done the same thing. Digg is famous for funneling huge traffic to popular pages, enough traffic to crush a server. Some of those visitors will click an ad or two. Wash, rinse, repeat - voila! There’s your business model.
What was most interesting was Kevin Rose’s attitude. I was really impressed that he decided to side with the majority of Digg users. Unfortunately this flies in the face of all business sense (wherein you are supposed to avoid getting sued and do nothing except increase shareholder value, regardless of the collateral damage). In the more profit-minded areas of the intarwebs he has been damn near vilified, not so much for taking a stand, but the manner in which he took it. However, this issue involves more than just money. This is a matter of ethics. The future is at stake here, and rather than defer to the corporate interests involved, Kevin Rose did what was right. We won’t know the outcome for a while, but a line has been drawn in the sand, and a million computer enthusiasts are loudly saying with one voice “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
But, I’m beating a dead horse with all this Digg stuff. We all know about that shit. What I am really interested in is space.
Some kids play in the sandbox. We play in the.... litterbox??? The RKNet staff is pleased that you decided to stop by. Currently this is a multi-author project, with a rotating cast of totally kooky characters. Contact giania [at symbol] gmail [dot] com if you'd like to play here too.
