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Campus Progress on NYPL event

April 20, 2005 10:12 PM - comments (5)

Campus Progress has a report including some audio from the event I did (first time I've ever been embarrassed to use the word "gig") with Tweedy and Johnson at the NYPL.

Posted on April 20, 2005 10:12 PM | | technorati

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Comments (5)

April 21, 2005 1:53 AM David Dixon:

'Twas great to finally be able to hear this exchange. I'm already forwarding the link.

The second-to-last Q&A questioner mentioned satirical works.. a notable current example of this is the travails of the group Beatallica, which parodied (or satirized, depending on your legal viewpoint) the works of the Beatles in the style of Metallica.

http://www.beatallica.org
Beatallica mp3's

I am the webmaster (of puppets) for this band, and I personally received a cease-and-desist notice from Sony/ATV demanding monetary compensation. You can read it here.

We thankfully have not had to go to court, because none other than Lars Ulrich of Metallica stepped in to help us through inside channels. Without his help, Beatallica would most likely be shut down for good, since we don't have the money to front a defense, and the EFF couldn't take us on as clients (as they did with Jibjab) because their resources were limited due to the Grokster case.

So, in the end, we got lucky, thanks to Ulrich's sense of humor. But there are a number of tribute/spoof bands out there who, if they were as well-known as Beatallica is, would be threatened as well. I spoke to Peter Paterno, the Metallica lawyer who brokered a peace with Sony on our behalf; I mentioned one particular "spoof" band, and he said, "If [deleted] knew about that, he'd sue in a minute."

So for now, Beatallica is (almost) out of the woods, but the chilling effects go on. If we had stayed a local phenomenon, we most likely wouldn't have gotten noticed, but thanks to the internet, local phenomena can quickly become global phenoma.

April 21, 2005 4:53 PM Tom Maddox:

Larry, the Campus Progress report alludes to your PowerPoint presentation, which it says is "the only cool" one the writer's ever seen. How about putting it online so the rest of us can see it?

April 22, 2005 10:11 AM Luiso:

There are a problem nowadays, we think that the blog is a personal, but bots of searchers are making that this webs go arround the word.

April 23, 2005 2:48 PM J.B. Nicholson-Owens:

Does anyone have this in a format free software players can play without violating patent law? Ogg Vorbis is the portable and free compressed audio format of choice because Ogg Vorbis is free and higher quality than MP3. MP3 is patent-encumbered, and thus not playable in free software audio players.

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