2 Milly, Alfonso Ribeiro, others drop lawsuits against Epic Games over dances
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-03-09-2-milly-alfonso-ribeiro-others-drop-lawsuits-against-epic-
Supreme Court ruling on copyright law forces plaintiffs to wait for dances to be granted copyright registration
Meet Francis Malofiy, the Philadelphia Lawyer Who Sued Led Zeppelin
►https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/02/11/francis-malofiy-led-zeppelin
https://cdn10.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/02/Francis-Malofiy-portrait-838x1024.jpg Francis Malofiy may be the most hated man in the Philadelphia legal community. He may also be on the cusp of getting the last laugh on rock’s golden gods.
@sandburg Voillà
Meet Francis Malofiy, the Philadelphia Lawyer Who Sued Led Zeppelin
►https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/02/11/francis-malofiy-led-zeppelin
People Laughed When This Philly Lawyer Sued Led Zeppelin. Nobody’s Laughing Now.
Francis Malofiy may be the most hated man in the Philadelphia legal community. He may also be on the cusp of getting the last laugh on rock’s golden gods.
By Jonathan Valania· 2/11/2019
Philadelphia-area attorney Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.The fact that Philadelphia barrister Francis Alexander Malofiy, Esquire, is suing Led Zeppelin over the authorship of “Stairway to Heaven” is, by any objective measure, only the fourth most interesting thing about him. Unfortunately for the reader, and the purposes of this story, the first, second and third most interesting things about Malofiy are bound and gagged in nondisclosure agreements, those legalistic dungeons where the First Amendment goes to die. So let’s start with number four and work our way backward.
At the risk of stating the obvious, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let the record show that “Stairway to Heaven” is arguably the most famous song in all of rock-and-roll, perhaps in all of popular music. It’s also one of the most lucrative — it’s estimated that the song has netted north of $500 million in sales and royalties since its 1971 release. Malofiy’s lawsuit, cheekily printed in the same druidic font used for the liner notes of the album Led Zeppelin IV, alleges that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant — Zep’s elegantly wasted guitarist/producer/central songwriter and leonine, leather-lunged lead singer, respectively — stole the iconic descending acoustic-guitar arpeggios of the first two minutes of “Stairway” from “Taurus,” a song with a strikingly similar chord pattern by a long-forgotten ’60s band called Spirit. At the conclusion of a stormy, headline-grabbing trial in 2016 that peaked with testimony from Page and Plant, the jury decided in Zep’s favor.
When the copyright infringement suit was first filed in Philadelphia by Malofiy (pronounced “MAL-uh-fee”) on behalf of the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust — which represents the estate of Randy “California” Wolfe, the now-deceased member of Spirit who wrote “Taurus” — people laughed. Mostly at Malofiy. The breathless wall-to-wall media coverage the trial garnered often painted him as a loose-cannon legal beagle, one part Charlie Sheen, one part Johnnie Cochran. “Everybody kind of dismissed me as this brash young lawyer who didn’t really understand copyright law,” he says, well into the wee hours one night back in December, sitting behind a desk stacked four feet high with legal files in the dank, subterranean bunker that is his office.
Hidden behind an unmarked door on the basement floor of a nondescript office building in Media, the law firm of Francis Alexander LLC is a pretty punk-rock operation. The neighbors are an anger management counselor and a medical marijuana dispensary. “I think of us as pirates sinking big ships,” Malofiy, who’s 41, brags. Given the sheer number of death threats he says he’s received from apoplectic Zep fans, the fact that mysterious cars seem to follow him in the night, and his claim to have found GPS trackers stuck to the bottom of his car, the precise location of his offices remains a closely guarded secret. Failing that, he has a license to carry, and most days, he leaves the house packing a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson.
While most lawyers are sleeping, Malofiy is working through the night to defeat them, often until sunrise, fueled by an ever-present bottle of grape-flavored Fast Twitch as he chain-chews Wrigley’s Spearmint gum and huffs a never-ending string of Marlboro menthols. We’ve been talking on the record for going on eight hours, and Malofiy shows no signs of fading; in fact, he’s just announced the arrival of his third wind.
He has a pretty good ‘fuck you’ attitude that comes from an inner confidence. He might have had a little too much early on,” attorney Jim Beasley Jr. says of Malofiy. “If you piss the judge off with your pirate act, the judge can make it difficult for you. Sometimes you could avoid all that by not swinging your pirate sword around.
Talk turns to the distinctly pro-Zep tenor of the media coverage of the “Stairway” trial. “I was a punch line for jokes,” he says, spitting his gum into a yellow Post-it and banking it into the trash for, like, the 42nd time. Nobody’s laughing now, least of all Page and Plant. Nor, for that matter, is Usher. Back in October, at the conclusion of a dogged seven-year legal battle marked by a bruising string of dismissals and sanctions, Malofiy won a $44 million verdict — one of the largest in Pennsylvania in 2018 — for a Philadelphia songwriter named Daniel Marino who sued his co-writers after being cut out of the songwriting credits and royalties for the song “Bad Girl” from the R&B heartthrob’s 2004 breakout album, Confessions, which sold more than 10 million copies.
Also, in late September of last year, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Malofiy’s appeal of the 2016 “Stairway to Heaven” verdict and ordered a new trial on the grounds that the court “abused its discretion” when the judge refused to allow Malofiy to play a recording of “Taurus” for the jury. (Members were only allowed to hear an acoustic-guitar rendition played from sheet music.) The retrial is expected to begin in the next year, and Page and Plant, along with bassist John Paul Jones, are again anticipated to take the stand. Copyright experts say Led Zeppelin — which has a long history of ripping off the ancient riffs and carnal incantations of wizened Delta bluesmen and only giving credit when caught — should be worried.
Malofiy, who calls Zep “the greatest cover band in all of history,” will go to trial armed with reams of expert testimony pinpointing the damning similarities between the two songs — not just the nearly identical and atypical chord pattern, but the shared melodic figurations, choice of key and distinctive voicings. He’ll also show the jury that Page and Plant had ample opportunity to hear “Taurus” when Zep opened for Spirit on their first American tour in 1968, two years before they wrote and recorded “Stairway.”
“Most big companies rely on the concept of wearing you down, forcing you to do so much work it literally drives you broke,” says Glen Kulik, a heavy-hitter L.A.-based copyright lawyer who signed on as Malofiy’s local counsel when the Zep case was moved to federal court in California. “If you have any chance of standing up to them, it’s going to require an incredible amount of persistence, confidence, and quite a bit of skill as well, and Francis has all those things in spades.” And Kulik would know, having successfully argued a landmark copyright infringement case before the Supreme Court in 2014 that paved the way for the Zeppelin suit.
Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.Ultimately, Malofiy doesn’t have to prove Led Zeppelin stole Spirit’s song; he just has to convince a jury that’s what happened. Assuming the trial goes forward — and that this time, he’s allowed to play recordings of both songs for the jury — there will be blood. Because contrary to his hard-won rep as a bull in the china shop of civil litigation, Malofiy possesses a switchblade-sharp legal mind, an inexhaustible work ethic, and a relentless, rock-ribbed resolve to absorb more punches than his opponents can throw. He’s a ruthlessly effective courtroom tactician with a collection of six-, seven- and eight-figure verdicts, not to mention the scalps of opposing counsel who underestimated his prowess. “I don’t plink pigeons; I hunt lions and tigers and bears,” he says. The big game he’s targeted in the past decade include deep-pocketed transnational corporations like Volvo (an epic seven-year case that ended in an undisclosed settlement) and Hertz (against whom he won a $100,000 verdict).
In the arena of civil litigation, where the odds are increasingly stacked against plaintiffs, Malofiy claims to have never lost a jury trial, and that appears to be true. “I have lost twice — in the Zeppelin case and a lawsuit against Volvo — but got both decisions reversed on appeals,” he says, unsheathing a fresh stick of Wrigley’s. “Now, the same people that were asking me for years why I’m doing it are asking me how I did it.”
If Malofiy prevails in the coming “Stairway” retrial, he’ll completely shatter the Tolkien-esque legend of the song’s immaculate conception — that it was birthed nearly in toto during a mystical retreat at a remote Welsh mountain cottage called Bron-yr-aur, to which many a starry-eyed Zep disciple has made a pilgrimage once upon a midnight clear when the forests echo with laughter. It will be like proving that da Vinci didn’t paint the Mona Lisa, that Michelangelo didn’t sculpt David. Barring a last-minute settlement, many legal and copyright experts predict that Malofiy may well emerge victorious, and credit for the most famous rock song in the world will pass from the self-appointed Golden Gods of Led Zeppelin to some obscure, long-forgotten (and not even very good) West Coast psych band, along with tens of millions in royalties, effectively rewriting the sacred history of rock-and-roll. And the man who will have pulled off this fairly miraculous feat of judicial jujitsu is the enfant terrible of Philadelphia jurisprudence.
Malofiy hates wearing a suit and tie. Outside the courtroom, he dresses like a rock star masquerading as a lawyer: a crushable black trilby perched at a jaunty angle atop a blue bandana, a collarless black and orange leather Harley jacket, and a pair of beat-to-fuck brown Wesco boots, unlaced. “I’m always in jeans and boots when I meet new clients,” he says. “I warn them up front: ‘If you want a fancy lawyer in a suit, you should go elsewhere.’”
The barrier to entry for new clients at Francis Alexander LLC is steep, because Malofiy doesn’t take on new cases so much as he adopts new causes. A case has to register on a deeply personal level if he’s going to eat, sleep, and fight to the death for it for the next five to seven years.
“Lawyers have an ethical responsibility to advocate zealously for their clients,” says attorney Max Kennerly, who’s worked with Malofiy on a number of cases. “But frankly, in this business, a lot of lawyers play the odds and just do a ‘good enough’ job on a bunch of cases. Sometimes they win, and sometimes they lose. Francis really throws himself into his cases.”
After 10 years of struggle, things finally seem to be breaking Malofiy’s way. Fat checks from cases settled long ago are rolling in, alleviating some fairly crippling cash-flow issues, and big cases just keep falling out of the sky — more than his two-lawyer outfit can field. They need to staff up, stat. Malofiy wants to hire some young bucks fresh out of law school — preferably Temple — as force multipliers in his quest to hold the powerful accountable on behalf of the powerless. “Most kids in law school right now will never see the inside of a courtroom,” he says. “Law schools don’t want to teach you how to change the system; they want to load you up with debt so you have to go do grunt work for some corporate law firm that specializes in maintaining the status quo.”
Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.Malofiy doesn’t have a website. He doesn’t do social media. He doesn’t trawl the watering holes of the rich and powerful. He doesn’t even have a business card. Thanks to the notoriety and name recognition that came with the Zeppelin trial, new clients chase him. He just got off the phone with a Brooklyn puppet maker who wants him to sue the band Fall Out Boy for alleged misuse of two llamas — Frosty and Royal Tea — that it created. Right now, he’s on a conference call with a trio of British songwriters who want Malofiy to sue the Weeknd for allegedly lifting a key section of their song “I Need to Love” for a track called “A Lonely Night” on his 2016 Starboy album, which has sold more than three million copies to date.
“Why are you guys calling me?” he asks.
“We’re looking for an honest person fighting for ordinary working people,” says Billy Smith, one of the Brit songwriters in question. Malofiy clearly likes the sound of that. After thinking it over for a few moments, he tells them he’ll take their case and gives them his standard new-client spiel. “I can’t promise we’ll win, but I can promise I won’t turn yellow when things turn bad. I won’t put my tail between my legs and run,” he says. “If there is any bad news, you will hear it from me first.”
His teeth have been bothering him for days, and near the end of the call, one of his dental caps comes loose. He spits it out, and it skitters across his desk before he traps it under his palm. Most lawyers would be mortified. Malofiy thinks it’s hilarious. “I got teeth like you people,” he says to the Brits. Everybody laughs.
Many people mistake Malofiy’s unconventionality as a design flaw when it’s actually a feature. “I think that’s an incredibly important part of what makes him so good as an attorney,” says A.J. Fluehr, 33, Malofiy’s right-hand man, co-counsel and, though eight years his boss’s junior, voice of reason. “Because he’s so unorthodox, I believe it causes a lot of other attorneys to underestimate him and think, ‘Oh, he’s not serious; he doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ All of sudden, there’s a massively serious case against them.”
Even some of the defense lawyers who’ve done battle with Malofiy begrudgingly acknowledge his chops. “I’ve known Francis for four years now. He is difficult to deal with but a fierce advocate for his clients and his cause,” says Rudolph “Skip” DiMassa, a partner at Duane Morris. “Calling him ‘abrasive’ would be putting it mildly. But he wears it like a badge of honor that he is not like all the other lawyers in town.”
When I read that and similar assessments from other lawyers back to Malofiy, he chalks them up to blowback for the heresy of Robin Hooding a corrupt status quo. “I have a target on my back because I sue big corporations, politicians, big law firms. Hell, I sued DA Seth Williams,” he says one night at the Irish Pub, as he’s nursing a screwdriver he’ll chase with a root beer. “When you start stepping on toes and suing the wrong people and get a few million shifted from those who have it to those who don’t — that’s where the change happens; that’s where you make a difference. And there is a price you have to pay for that.”
•
According to family lore, Francis Malofiy’s maternal grandfather was murdered by Nazis in occupied Greece; his great-grandmother had to cut the body down from a tree and carry it home on the back of a mule. Concurrently, his paternal grandfather was murdered by Nazis in Ukraine, while his father and grandmother were frog-marched to camps in Germany. Some things can never be forgotten or forgiven. That’s why Malofiy is always kicking against the pricks. A slight child, he was often bullied at school, and after a brief experiment with turning the other cheek, he started fighting back. Hard. He recalls the day that a bully was picking on a girl half his size; young Francis cold-cocked him and threw him into a closet door. The kid had to be taken out on a stretcher. After that, the bullies moved on to easier prey. “I was always fighting for the little guy, even back then,” he says.
In the third grade, friends turned him on to Poison’s Look What the Cat Dragged In and Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, indelibly imprinting the spandexed bikers-and-strippers aesthetic of ’80s hair-metal onto his psyche. He started channeling the energy he once put into beating back bullies into beating the drums. One day in the sixth grade, he came home to tell his dad about a band all the kids were into: “The Led Zeppelins.”
“He said, ‘No, son, it’s just Led Zeppelin.’”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s the Led Zeppelins.”
So his father, who’d seen the band at the Electric Factory, drove Francis to the record store at the Granite Run Mall, where the clerks set him straight. His father bought the four-cassette Zep box set that had just come out. On the way home, Malofiy heard “Whole Lotta Love” for the first time, and before the song even ended, it was official: Led Zeppelin was his favorite band. When he was in high school, his drum teacher gently broke the news that Zep didn’t exactly, um, write all their own music — that key parts of their iconic songs had been cherry-picked from old, obscure blues recordings. “I said, ‘C’mon, don’t talk shit about Jimmy Page!’” Malofiy recalls. Then his teacher played him the Willie Dixon-penned Muddy Waters track “You Need Love” — which is what “Whole Lotta Love” was called before Zep hijacked the lyrics and the riff and Frankensteined them into the gloriously scuzzy heavy-metal Viking porno movie for the ears we’ve come to know and love. It was hard for Francis to process, and even harder when he was tipped to the uncanny similarity between Spirit’s “Taurus” and “Stairway.” Still, the spell Zep cast over him remained unbroken.
https://cdn10.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/02/Francis-Malofiy-portrait-838x1024.jpg
Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.As a young teenager, he built go-karts, dirt bikes and small-block Chevys. To make spending money for guitars and records, he started buying beater cars, fixing them up, and flipping them for quadruple what he paid for them. He almost didn’t graduate from high school because he’d played hooky too many times, to go fishing or work on cars or play guitar. When he finally got his high-school diploma, he raced home from school to show his mother in his Chevy S-10 lowrider. Tearing ass on the backcountry roads of Media, he blew past a cop who immediately lit up his cherry top and gave pursuit. Soon, one cop car became two, then three, until there were five cars tailing him.
Much to his parents’ dismay, his run-ins with the law became common. They were never for anything all that serious, just the usual teen-rebel monkeyshines: fighting, speeding, the occasional high-speed car chase. He got a big wake-up call in 1998 when his beloved Uncle Nick — a.k.a. Nicholas “The Greek” Vasiliades — was handed a life sentence for running a high-volume meth lab in a warehouse in Manayunk that supplied the drug networks of the Pagans and the Mafia, as well as for his 50-gun arsenal of illegal weaponry. Malofiy was devastated. “I was going down a bad path,” he says. “My uncle pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re smart enough to do it the right way. You need to step away.’”
•
Malofiy took the warning to heart and focused on getting a college education, graduating from Penn State in 2000 with a degree in finance. After college, he went back home to Media and his true loves: cars, girls and heavy metal. With a revolving cast of musicians, he formed multiple go-nowhere suburban hard-rock bands with cringe-y names like Prada G and Sluts ’n Slayers. Unimpressed, his parents urged him to enroll in law school. Eventually he relented, forging this pact: He would go to law school if he: a) could do whatever he wanted with the unfinished basement of his parents’ home (i.e., build a high-end recording-studio-cum-man-cave tricked out with a kitchen, bedroom and bathroom); and b) nobody hassled him about having long hair, rocking out and chasing girls. Deal. Malofiy took the LSATs and scored just south of 160 — hardly off the charts, but good enough to get into Temple, where he found himself drawn to copyright law.
He graduated from law school in December of 2007 and took the bar exam the following July. On the night of August 16, 2008, he stopped into the Liberty Bar at 22nd and Market with his then-girlfriend. It was crowded, but they found a table in the back. After ordering drinks, they started getting static from a group of three young men in ball caps and white t-shirts. “Three drunken jerkoffs, white privilege out the ass,” says Malofiy. According to Malofiy’s testimony, the trio mocked his bandana and called him “cunt,” “pussy” and a “dirty spic.” (It was summer; Malofiy was tan.) According to Malofiy, at some point the men apologized and the situation seemed defused, but then one of them grabbed Malofiy’s girlfriend’s ass. “I said, ‘That’s it. Follow me out,’ and made for the door,” Malofiy says, but he was blocked by a member of the group. As they stood chest-to-chest, Malofiy says, the man struck him twice. Finally, Malofiy, who boxed in college, unloaded with a right cross that landed squarely on the guy’s left cheekbone, shattering the glass still clenched in Malofiy’s fist.
The man suffered a deep gash in his cheek that would require 150 stitches and reconstructive surgery. Malofiy nearly severed the tendons in his thumb. Bleeding profusely, he had his girlfriend drive him to the emergency room at Penn Presby to get stitched up and then to Central Detectives to file a criminal complaint.
Two months later, in October, notice came in the mail that he had passed the bar. His mother was ecstatic and insisted on driving him to the Pittsburgh office of the Prothonotary of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania immediately to obtain his law license rather than wait two weeks for the formal ceremony. When they got home the next day, Malofiy got a call from Central Detectives, who said they had a “body warrant” for his arrest on aggravated assault and related charges stemming from the Liberty Bar fight. The next day, he turned himself in and spent a night in jail awaiting a bail hearing. Had he not gone to Pittsburgh at his mother’s behest, it’s unlikely he’d have gotten his law license with a felony arrest on his record.
Malofiy’s first case as a newly minted lawyer would involve defending a client staring down decades in prison if convicted: himself. Heeding the maxim that a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client, Malofiy hired Sam Stretton, one of the most respected criminal defense attorneys in the city. Malofiy took the stand and delivered an impassioned defense of his actions. “He had already hit me twice, blocked my exit-way,” he testified. “I was scared for my safety and my girlfriend’s safety, and his friends had just yelled ‘Fight!’ and came up to me with fists drawn. I thought I had no other option.” The jury found him not guilty on all charges.
•
“Welcome to Hogwarts,” Malofiy jokes as he shows me around the vast oak and stained-glass room that houses the law library at the Beasley Firm, possibly the most fearsome and feared personal-injury law firm in the city, where he worked, in an of-counsel capacity, from 2012 to 2014.
Fresh out of law school and still wet behind the ears, Malofiy showed up one day in search of mentoring. Granted an audience with Jim Beasley Jr., one of the most successful plaintiff’s attorney in the city, Malofiy ended up with a promise of rent-free office space, the phone extension 666, and a commitment to help finance some of the highly ambitious cases he was mounting — a product-liability suit against Volvo, and a breach-of-contract suit, against a marble manufacturer that had screwed his client out of an ownership share, that resulted in a $4.2 million verdict — not to mention the Usher case. “Jim was like, ‘I keep getting calls from defense lawyers saying That kid’s the fucking devil, so you must be doing something right,’” Malofiy recalls.
During Malofiy’s tenure at Beasley, he took out a controversial full-page ad in this magazine that depicted him crashing through a courtroom in a hot rod, looking every bit James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. Many members of Philadelphia’s uptight, buttoned-down legal community thought it was disrespectful. “Everyone was outraged, but I thought it was funny,” says Beasley. “He has a pretty good ‘fuck you’ attitude that comes from an inner confidence. He might have had a little too much of that early on, but I think he’s throttled back a bit. So many of a judge’s decisions are ties and jump-balls that are not reversible, and if you piss the judge off with your pirate act, the judge can make it difficult for you. Sometimes you could avoid all that by not swinging your pirate sword around.”
Malofiy has learned this the hard way. In 2015, a three-judge panel voted to suspend his license to practice law in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for improper conduct in the Usher case — despite the fact that the special prosecutor recommended what amounted to a slap on the wrist: a reprimand.
“It’s highly unusual that they would disregard the disciplinary recommendations of the special prosecutor after he has heard the facts,” says Stretton. The matter is currently on appeal before the Third Circuit.
•
At Malofiy’s insistence, I’ve been tailing him for the better part of a month: from a big-dollar NDA’d settlement in a judge’s quarters, to a Port Richmond dive bar called Chuckles, to a Bucks County gun shop where he plunked down $1,729 for a handsome Benelli shotgun (a gift for his right-hand man Fluehr), to a back-alley strip bar in Center City and the disused factory under the Commodore Barry Bridge that he’s purchased and plans to renovate into office space, living quarters and a beer garden. I watched him hide his $82,000 Land Rover from the repo man (“It’s all a misunderstanding”) and then, days later, saw a pile of white letter-size envelopes stacked on his desk, each containing what looked to be thousands in cash. What I have come to learn is this: When you write about lawyers, there is so much you can’t write about lawyers.
Malofiy slowly, methodically and unflinchingly parceled out the most personal details of his backstory — the good, the bad and the ugly — as I incrementally earned his trust. But always on his timetable, not mine. It could be exasperating, but by the end, I discovered the method to his madness: He’d been pacing his revelations as he would a trial presentation. And now we’re reaching the crescendo of his closing argument — the big reveal.
Francis Malofiy. Photograph by Bryan Sheffield.It’s a few clicks shy of midnight at Malofiy’s house in Media on a Sunday night shortly before Christmas. In the morning, he’s jetting off to an auction in London to bid on the Helios recording console that captured “Stairway to Heaven” for the ages. (Malofiy, true to form, won’t confirm that he won or lost the auction.) Though he’s been locked in a nasty four-year legal fight with Led Zeppelin, they’re still his favorite band.
Malofiy called to insist that I come to his house tonight. “Why? What for?” I demanded. He said he wanted to show me something I could only see there. I begged off, explaining that this article was due in the morning and I already had more than I could use. But he insisted, promising it would be worth my while. He doesn’t disappoint. He tells me to open the freezer. There’s a bottle of Tito’s vodka, an ice tray, and half a lemon on a plate with a yellow plastic knife. “That’s the lemon Robert Plant squeezed into his tea when we deposed him in London back in 2016,” he claims. This is deeply ironic and, if you’re acquainted with the role lemons play in Plant’s legend, cosmically hilarious. One of Led Zeppelin’s most infamous tracks is “The Lemon Song,” a sultry blooze ramble from 1969’s deathless Led Zeppelin II stitched together from pieces of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor” and Robert Johnson’s “Travelling Riverside Blues.” (Zep settled a 1972 copyright suit over the Howlin’ Wolf portion of the song.) In the fifth verse, Plant sings:
Squeeze me baby, till the juice runs down my leg
The way you squeeze my lemon, ah
I’m gonna fall right out of bed
By swiping that lemon rind at the deposition, Malofiy stole Robert Plant’s metaphoric penis the way Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Zep famously invoked the mythic “Hammer of the Gods” from Norse legend. For Jimmy Page, that hammer was his guitar, but for Plant it was his, um, mighty lemon tree.
Incredible though it may seem, Malofiy says he’s kept the lemon on ice for the past three years and had it in his briefcase like a talisman when he gave oral arguments for what proved to be his successful appeal of the 2016 “Stairway” verdict. He has every intention of taking it to the retrial that will, barring unforeseen developments, commence in the next year.
“Robert Plant is always going on about his lemon, and at the deposition he made a big deal out of slicing it up and squeezing it into his tea and then sucking on the rind,” he says with a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. “Jimmy Page famously dabbled in black magic and was always going on about Aleister Crowley, and I said to myself, ‘If they are going to use black magic to try to beat me on technicalities — well, two can play at that game.’”
Published as “The Devil’s Advocate” in the February 2019 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
Digitized images of works in the public domain: what rights vest in them? Analysis of the recent BGH Reiss-Engelhorn judgment - Part 1 - The IPKat
▻http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/02/digitized-images-of-works-in-public.html?m=1
The German Federal Court of Justice recently published the full version of its highly-anticipated decision on the publication of photographs of paintings held by a group of German museums on Wikimedia Commons. The case had raised several unresolved questions of German copyright law with regard to works in the public domain.
The courts of first and second instance had given favourable decisions to the claimant group of museums. The Federal Court’s judgment confirms these decisions and seems to strengthen the legal position of the owners of paintings in the public domain. But as it refuses to address the most controversial aspect of the decision in appeal, the decision seems to leave the door wide open for future reconsideration of the latter.
Digitized images of works in the public domain: what rights vest in them? Analysis of the recent BGH Reiss-Engelhorn judgment - Part 2
▻http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2019/02/digitized-images-of-works-in-public_19.html
The only positive feature of the judgment is what makes Tobias call this a pyrrhic victory in his above contribution. The judgment does not reinforce tendencies by the Fifth Senate of the Court to develop a kind of depiction right in property (which in German would be called “Recht am Bild der eigenen Sache”). Such an IP position would wreak havoc in today’s visual public sphere. It would, of course, have been better still, had this judgment sided with scholarship and actively countered those tendencies. That, however, would have put the First Senate in open opposition to the Fifth Senate, which would have called for putting the matter before the Court’s Great Senate, being the forum to solve contradictions between Senates. And there, in the Great Senate, the golden rule is: The Senate that puts the matter forward will lose. So, it’s probably for the better that the First Senate didn’t take this road."
#propriété_intellectuelle #Allemagne #droit #domaine_public #Urbildtheorie
EU hijacking: self-driving car data will be copyrighted...by the manufacturer / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/10/10/corporate-kitts.html
The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that “data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are by nature not creative, thus making copyright protection or the right on databases inapplicable.”
This is pretty inoffensive stuff. Copyright protects creative work, not factual data, and the telemetry generated by your car — self-driving or not — is not copyrighted.
But just before the vote, members of the European Peoples’ Party (the same bloc that pushed through the catastrophic new Copyright Directive) stopped the proceedings with a rare “roll call” and voted down the clause.
In other words, they’ve snuck in a space for the telemetry generated by autonomous vehicles to become someone’s property. This is data that we will need to evaluate the safety of autonomous vehicles, to fine-tune their performance, to ensure that they are working as the manufacturer claims — data that will not be public domain (as copyright law dictates), but will instead be someone’s exclusive purview, to release or withhold as they see fit.
Who will own this data? It’s unlikely that it will be the owners of the vehicles. Just look at the data generated by farmers who own John Deere tractors. These tractors create a wealth of soil data, thanks to humidity sensors, location sensors and torque sensors — a centimeter-accurate grid of soil conditions in the farmer’s own field.
Sony Finally Admits It Doesn’t Own Bach and It Only Took a Bunch of Public Pressure | Electronic Frontier Foundation
▻https://www.eff.org/takedowns/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it-only-took-public-pressure
Toujours plus fabuleux le copyfraud...
Here’s the thing about different people playing the same piece of music: sometimes, they’re going to sound similar. And when music is by a composer who died 268 years ago, putting his music in the public domain, a bunch of people might record it and some of them might put it online. In this situation, a combination of copyright bots and corporate intransigence led to a Kafkaesque attack on music.
Musician James Rhodes put a video of himself playing Bach on Facebook. Sony Music Entertainment claimed that 47 seconds of that performance belonged to them. Facebook muted the video as a result.
So far, this is stupid but not unusually stupid in the world of takedowns. It’s what happened after Rhodes got Sony’s notice that earned it a place in the Hall of Shame.
One argument in favor of this process is that there are supposed to be checks and balances. Takedown notices are supposed to only be sent by someone who owns the copyright in the material and actually believes that copyright’s been infringed. And if a takedown notice is wrong, a counter-notice can be sent by someone explaining that they own the work or that it’s not infringement.
Counter-notices have a lot of problems, not the least of which is that the requirements are onerous for small-time creators, requiring a fair bit of personal information. There’s always the fear that, even for someone who knows they own the work, that the other side will sue them anyway, which they cannot afford.
Rhodes did dispute the claim, explaining that “this is my own performance of Bach. Who died 300 years ago. I own all the rights.” Sony rejected this reasoning.
While we don’t know for sure what Sony’s process is, we can guess that a copyright bot, or a human acting just as mechanically, was at the center of this mess. A human doing actual analysis would have looked at a video of a man playing a piece of music older than American copyright law and determined that it was not something they owned. It almost feels like an automatic response also rejected Rhodes’ appeal, because we certainly hope a thoughtful person would have received his notice and accepted it.
Rhodes took his story to Twitter, where it picked up some steam, and emailed the heads of Sony Classical and Sony’s public relations, eventually getting his audio restored. He tweeted “What about the thousands of other musicians without that reach…?” He raises a good point.
None of the supposed checks worked. Public pressure and the persistence of Rhodes was the only reason this complaint went away, despite how the rules are supposed to protect fair use and the public domain.
How many more ways do we need to say that copyright bots and filters don’t work? That mandating them, as the European Union is poised to do, is dangerous and shortsighted? We hear about these misfires roughly the same way they get resolved: because they generate enough noise. How many more lead to a creator’s work being taken down with no recourse?
Original Title of Threatened Content:
Bach! From his 1st Partita
Original location:
▻https://www.facebook.com/jamesrhodespiano/videos/232063150806956
Date of threat or takedown:
September 4, 2018
Plagiarists or innovators ? The Led Zeppelin paradox endures
▻https://theconversation.com/plagiarists-or-innovators-the-led-zeppelin-paradox-endures-102368
La musique entre usage des communs et plagiat, entre appropriation et « just have fun ». Superbe article.
Fifty years ago – in September 1968 – the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin first performed together, kicking off a Scandinavian tour billed as the New Yardbirds.
The new, better name would come later that fall, while drummer John Bonham’s death in 1980 effectively ended their decade-defining reign. But to this day, the band retains the same iconic status it held back in the 1970s: It ranks as one of the best-selling music acts of all time and continues to shape the sounds of new and emerging groups young enough to be the band members’ grandchildren.
Yet, even after all this time – when every note, riff and growl of Zeppelin’s nine-album catalog has been pored over by fans, cover artists and musicologists – a dark paradox still lurks at the heart of its mystique. How can a band so slavishly derivative – and sometimes downright plagiaristic – be simultaneously considered so innovative and influential?
How, in other words, did it get to have its custard pie and eat it, too?
As a scholar who researches the subtle complexities of musical style and originality as well as the legal mechanisms that police and enforce them, such as copyright law, I find this a particularly devilish conundrum. The fact that I’m also a bassist in a band that fuses multiple styles of music makes it personal.
A pattern of ‘borrowing’
For anyone who quests after the holy grail of creative success, Led Zeppelin has achieved something mythical in stature: a place in the musical firmament, on its own terms, outside of the rules and without compromise.
When Led Zeppelin debuted its eponymous first album in 1969, there’s no question that it sounded new and exciting. My father, a baby boomer and dedicated Beatles fan, remembers his chagrin that year when his middle school math students threw over the Fab Four for Zeppelin, seemingly overnight. Even the stodgy New York Times, which decried the band’s “plastic sexual superficiality,” felt compelled, in the same article, to acknowledge its “enormously successful … electronically intense blending” of musical styles.
Yet, from the very beginning, the band was also dogged with accusations of musical pilfering, plagiarism and copyright infringement – often justifiably.
The band’s first album, “Led Zeppelin,” contained several songs that drew from earlier compositions, arrangements and recordings, sometimes with attribution and often without. It included two Willie Dixon songs, and the band credited both to the influential Chicago blues composer. But it didn’t credit Anne Bredon when it covered her song “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.”
The hit “Dazed and Confused,” also from that first album, was originally attributed to Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. However in 2010, songwriter Jake Holmes filed a lawsuit claiming that he’d written and recorded it in 1967. After the lawsuit was settled out of court, the song is now credited in the liner notes of re-releases as “inspired by” Holmes.
‘Dazed and Confused’ by Jake Holmes.
The band’s second album, “Led Zeppelin II,” picked up where the first left off. Following a series of lawsuits, the band agreed to list Dixon as a previously uncredited author on two of the tracks, including its first hit single, “Whole Lotta Love.” An additional lawsuit established that blues legend Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett was a previously uncredited author on another track called “The Lemon Song.”
Musical copyright infringement is notoriously challenging to establish in court, hence the settlements. But there’s no question the band engaged in what musicologists typically call “borrowing.” Any blues fan, for instance, would have recognized the lyrics of Dixon’s “You Need Love” – as recorded by Muddy Waters – on a first listen of “Whole Lotta Love.”
Dipping into the commons or appropriation?
Should the band be condemned for taking other people’s songs and fusing them into its own style?
Or should this actually be a point of celebration?
The answer is a matter of perspective. In Zeppelin’s defense, the band is hardly alone in the practice. The 1960s folk music revival movement, which was central to the careers of Baez, Holmes, Bredon, Dixon and Burnett, was rooted in an ethic that typically treated musical material as a “commons” – a wellspring of shared culture from which all may draw, and to which all may contribute.
Most performers in the era routinely covered “authorless” traditional and blues songs, and the movement’s shining star, Bob Dylan, used lyrical and musical pastiche as a badge of pride and display of erudition – “Look how many old songs I can cram into this new song!” – rather than as a guilty, secret crutch to hold up his own compositions.
Why shouldn’t Zeppelin be able to do the same?
Willie Dixon’s imprint can be found on a number of Led Zeppelin songs. Brianmcmillen, CC BY-SA
On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the racial dynamics inherent in Led Zeppelin’s borrowing. Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf were African-Americans, members of a subjugated minority who were – especially back then – excluded from reaping their fair share of the enormous profits they generated for music labels, publishers and other artists.
Like their English countrymen Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones, Zeppelin’s attitude toward black culture seems eerily reminiscent of Lord Elgin’s approach to the marble statues of the Parthenon and Queen Victoria’s policy on the Koh-i-Noor diamond: Take what you can and don’t ask permission; if you get caught, apologize without ceding ownership.
Led Zeppelin was also accused of lifting from white artists such as Bredon and the band Spirit, the aggrieved party in a recent lawsuit over the rights to Zeppelin’s signature song “Stairway to Heaven.” Even in these cases, the power dynamics were iffy.
Bredon and Spirit are lesser-known composers with lower profiles and shallower pockets. Neither has benefited from the glow of Zeppelin’s glory, which has only grown over the decades despite the accusations and lawsuits leveled against them.
A matter of motives
So how did the band pull it off, when so many of its contemporaries have been forgotten or diminished? How did it find and keep the holy grail? What makes Led Zeppelin so special?
I could speculate about its cultural status as an avatar of trans-Atlantic, post-hippie self-indulgence and “me generation” rebellion. I could wax poetic about its musical fusion of pre-Baroque and non-Western harmonies with blues rhythms and Celtic timbres. I could even accuse it, as many have over the years, of cutting a deal with the devil.
Instead, I’ll simply relate a personal anecdote from almost 20 years ago. I actually met frontman Robert Plant. I was waiting in line at a lower Manhattan bodega around 2 a.m. and suddenly realized Plant was waiting in front of me. A classic Chuck Berry song was playing on the overhead speakers. Plant turned to look at me and mused, “I wonder what he’s up to now?” We chatted about Berry for a few moments, then paid and went our separate ways.
Brief and banal though it was, I think this little interlude – more than the reams of music scholarship and journalism I’ve read and written – might hold the key to solving the paradox.
Maybe Led Zeppelin is worthy because, like Sir Galahad, the knight who finally gets the holy grail, its members’ hearts were pure.
During our brief exchange, it was clear Plant didn’t want to be adulated – he didn’t need his ego stroked by a fawning fan. Furthermore, he and his bandmates were never even in it for the money. In fact, for decades, Zeppelin refused to license its songs for television commercials. In Plant’s own words, “I only wanted to have some fun.”
Maybe the band retained its fame because it lived, loved and embodied rock and roll so absolutely and totally – to the degree that Plant would start a conversation with a total stranger in the middle of the night just to chat about one of his heroes.
This love, this purity of focus, comes out in its music, and for this, we can forgive Led Zeppelin’s many trespasses.
Why Sci-Hub is illegal, and what you can do about it | engineuring
▻https://engineuring.wordpress.com/2018/07/07/why-sci-hub-is-illegal-and-what-you-can-do-about-it
Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.
To help Sci-Hub get legal, you can support these fight, for example by joining the local Pirate Party.
par Alexandra Elbakyan
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=KoyEfw_gwFY
67 millions d’articles dans sa base, et 1 à 2 millions de téléchargements par jour.
▻https://www.leafscience.org/alexandra-elbakyan-2
au-delà de la question de l’#open-access, sa réflexion sur la #recherche est intéressante
EU copyright reform is coming. Is your startup ready?
▻https://medium.com/silicon-allee/eu-copyright-reform-is-coming-is-your-startup-ready-4be81a5fabf7?source=user
Last Friday, members of Berlin’s startup community gathered at Silicon Allee for a copyright policy roundtable discussion hosted by Allied for Startups. The event sparked debate and elicited feedback surrounding the European Commission’s complex drafted legislation that would have significant impact on startups in the EU. Our Editor-in-Chief, Julia Neuman, gives you the rundown here — along with all the details you should know about the proposed reform.
‘Disruption’ in the startup world isn’t always a good thing — especially when it involves challenging legislation. Over the past five years, as big data and user-generated content began to play an increasing role in our society, startups have worked tirelessly to navigate laws regarding privacy and security in order to go about business as usual. Now, they may soon be adding copyright concerns to their list of potential roadblocks.
The forthcoming copyright reform proposed by the European Commission severely threatens the success and momentum that startups have gained in the EU, and it’s being introduced under the guise of “a more modern, more European copyright framework.”
On September 14, 2016, the European Commission tabled its Proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (commonly referred to as the “Copyright Directive”) — a piece of draft legislation that would have significant impact on a wide variety of modern copyrighted content. Consequently, it poses a direct threat to startups.
Members of the startup community are now coming together, unwilling to accept these measures without a fight. On Friday, members of Allied for Startups and Silicon Allee — alongside copyright experts and Berlin-based entrepreneurs and investors — met at Silicon Allee’s new campus in Mitte for a policy roundtable discussion. Additional workshop discussions are taking place this week in Warsaw, Madrid and Paris. The ultimate goal? To get startups’ voices heard in front of policymakers and counter this legislation.
Sparking conversation at Silicon Allee
Bird & Bird Copyright Lawyer and IP Professor Martin Senftleben led the roundtable discussions in Berlin, outlining key clauses and offering clarifying commentary. He then invited conversation from guests — which included representatives from content-rich startups such as Fanmiles, Videopath, and Ubermetrics. The result was a well-balanced input of perspectives and testimonials that sparked an increased desire to fight back. The roundtable covered the three main areas affected by the proposed reforms: user-generated content, text and data mining, and the neighboring right for press publishers.
User-generated content
The internet has allowed us all to become content creators with an equal opportunity to make our voices heard around the world. With this transition comes evolving personal responsibilities. Whereas in the past, copyright law only concerned a small percentage of society — today it concerns anyone posting to social media, uploading unique content, or founding a company that relies on user-generated content as part of its business model.
The proposed EU copyright reform shifts copyright burden to content providers, making them liable for user content and forcing them to apply content filtering technology to their platforms. As it stands now, management of copyright infringement is a passive process. Companies are not required to monitor or police user-generated content, instead waiting for infringement notices to initiate relevant takedowns.
New laws imply that companies would have to constantly police their platforms. As you can imagine, this would quickly rack up operating costs — not to mention deter investors from committing if there’s such a inherently persistent and high legal risk for copyright infringement. Furthermore, filtering technology would not exactly promote public interest or media plurality, as an efficiency-based filtering system would be more likely to result in overblocking and censoring (even if unintentional). This result is counter to the expressed aims of the reform.
“Having this necessity to add filtering technology from the start would kill any innovation for new startups, which is the reason why we’re all here and this economy is booming and creating jobs,” said Fabian Schmidt, Founder of Fanmiles. “The small companies suddenly cannot innovate and compete anymore.”
Text and data mining
The proposed reform also blocks startups from using text and data mining technology, consequently preventing the rich kind of data analysis that has added value and yielded deeper insights for growing startups. Copyright law today accounts for lawful access and consultation, however not for the automated process of reading and drawing conclusions. The scraping and mining of freely available texts could give rise to complex, costly legal problems from the get-go — problems that not even the most prudent founder teams could navigate (unless they work to the benefit of research institutions, which are exempt from the measure).
What kind of message does this send out to new startups? As with laws dealing with user-generated content, these measures don’t entice entrepreneurs to turn their seeds of ideas into profitable companies. Nor do they get VCs jumping to invest. Data input from mining and scraping suddenly gives rise to a huge legal issue that certainly does not benefit the public interest.
Senftleben reminded the group in Berlin that these types of legislation normally take several years to implement, and that the proposed policy could have amplified effects down the road as the role of data mining increases. “If this legislation is already limiting now, who knows what kind of text and data mining will be used in ten years and how it will play in,” he said.
Neighboring right for press publishers
The third and final point discussed at the roundtable has gathered the most media attention thus far. It’s the “elephant in the room,” unjustly pitting established publishers against startups. Proposed legislation creates an exclusive right for publishers that protects their content for digital use in order to “to ensure quality journalism and citizens’ access to information.”
Sure, this reasoning sounds like a positive contribution to a free and democratic society. But closer examination reveals that these publishers’ outdated and financially unviable business models are being grandfathered in for protection at the expense of more innovative content models.
It’s not hard to see why this is happening. Publishers have lobbying power, and they are bleeding money in today’s digital climate. “I work a lot with publishers. Their position here in Europe is a little more old school,” said one of the founders present at the discussion. “Their business model and revenues are going down, so they’re going to fight hard.”
Axel Springer, for example, is lobbying for greater protection; they want a piece of Google’s success. But the most interesting aspect of this measure is that it’s unclear how much value it would add for publishers, who already have rights to digital reproduction from the individual content creators employed under contract with their firms. A freelance journalist contributing to Die Zeit, for example, is already transferring digital reproduction rights to the newspaper just by agreeing to publish.
The drafted legislation makes it pretty clear that content aggregating search engines would take a big hit when they would inevitably have to pay content reproduction fees to publishers. But the interdependent relationship between publishers and online search aggregation services makes this legislation unlikely to generate a meaningful revenue stream for publishers anyway: Publishers want compensation for snippets of articles that show up on search engines, and search engines want compensation for bringing attention to them in the first place. In the end, content aggregators would likely just stop their use of content fragments instead of resorting to pay license fees to publishers.
It’s unclear how the proposed legislation could promote media plurality and freedom; instead, it seems to promote market concentration and monopolization of content publishing, potentially stifling free and open access to information.
“I know two small aggregators here in Germany that have given up because of this,” said Tobias Schwarz, Coworking Manager at Sankt Oberholz in Berlin.
What comes next? Turning discussion into action
What is clear now is that copyright law has potential to affect anyone. Startups in Europe, especially, are at risk with these new reforms. As players in the European economy, they have not been present in the policy debate so far. Allied for Startups and Silicon Allee are inviting founders, entrepreneurs, and interested members in the tech community to come forward and make their voices heard. They invite contributions to an open letter to the European Parliament which dives into this topic in more detail, explaining how toxic the Copyright Directive is for companies who are trying to stay alive without incurring €60 million in development costs.
“A lot of startup leaders have their heads down working on their next feature, without realizing policymakers are also creating something that can instantly kill it,” said Silicon Allee co-founder Travis Todd. “But if more startups come to the table and tell others what they learned, they will become more aware of these potential roadblocks and ultimately help change them.”
To find out more information, participate at the next discussion, or share your ideas and testimonials on this policy discussion, please get in touch! Drop a line to hello@alliedforstartups.org, tweet to @allied4startups, or join the online conversation using #copyright4startups.
Préparez vos ... serviettes - après-demains sera le jour de la serviette !
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
Towel Day is celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams by his fans. On this day, fans openly carry a towel with them, as described in Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author. The commemoration was first held 25 May, 2001, two weeks after Adams’ death on 11 May.
Douglas a publié un livre qui devrait intéresser chaque éditeur qu’il publie des livres, de la musique, des logiciels de navigation, de bureautique ou de comptabilité. Voici un extrait qui montre pourquoi.
It is also the story of a book, a book called The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - not an Earth book, never published on Earth, and until the terrible catastrophe occurred, never seen or heard of by any Earthman.
Nevertheless, a wholly remarkable book.
In fact it was probably the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor - of which no Earthman had ever heard either.
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one - more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid’s trilogy of philosophical blockbusters Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitch Hiker’s Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover.
...
It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words Don’t Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.
...
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels.
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
...
There is only one city on Ursa Minor Beta, and that is only called a city because the swimming pools are slightly thicker on the ground there than elsewhere.
...
Most particularly it shines on a building, a tall beautiful building consisting of two thirty-storey white towers connected by a bridge half-way up their length.
The building is the home of a book, and was built here on the proceeds of an extraordinary copyright law suit fought between the book’s editors and a breakfast cereal company.
The book is a guide book, a travel book.
... in many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, it has long surplanted the great Encyclopaedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older and more pedestrian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper, and secondly it has the words DON’T PANIC printed in large friendly letters on its cover.
...
It is of course that invaluable companion for all those who want to see the marvels of the known Universe for less than thirty Altairan Dollars a day - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .
...
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed to do the work of a man. The marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation defines a robot as “Your Plastic Pal Who’s Fun To Be With.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as “a bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes,” with a footnote to the effect that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking over the post of robotics correspondent.
Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
▻https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy
Si l’extrait vous a plu j’ai une copie du livre que je peux vous prêter :-)
Les autres références à Douglas Adams et son oeuvre sur #seenthis :
Does Stress Speed Up Evolution ?
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/475240
Toutes les épisodes de la série télévisée The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy de 1981.
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/422856
Quand une comédie galactique réinventait la fiction radio
►http://seenthis.net/messages/339645
Tu connais peut-être la réponse à la grande question sur la vie, l’univers et le reste
►http://seenthis.net/messages/327674
Emplois foireux (bullshit jobs)
▻http://seenthis.net/messages/166910#message167250
Corporate Inequality Is the Defining Fact of Business Today
▻https://hbr.org/2016/05/corporate-inequality-is-the-defining-fact-of-business-today
Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research has suggested that patents and copyright law are skewing corporate returns, a possibility Criscuolo mentioned to me as well.
“One problem with American capitalism has been overlooked: a corrosive lack of #competition,” wrote The Economist in March, summing up these concerns. “America is meant to be a temple of free enterprise. It isn’t.”
Ignorance isn’t Bliss: Rights Holders Threatening Lawsuits against Refugees in Germany | c’t Magazin
▻http://m.heise.de/ct/artikel/Ignorance-isn-t-Bliss-Rights-Holders-Threatening-Lawsuits-against-Refugees-i
A neighbour has opened his wifi network to Mohamad, so that the Syrian refugee can stay in touch with family and friends back at home. Mohamad did use that network access to download movies. His software of choice was based on the BitTorrent protocol. BitTorrent downloads files, immediately sharing them with other BitTorrent users.
In February, the neighbour received a cease and desist letter: It demanded payment of Euro 815 for an alleged copyright infringement. Apparently, Mohamad had downloaded the US-made comedy-drama “Paper Towns”. The letter threatened Mohamad’s neighbour with further legal action, since he was the subscriber of the internet acess point used. The choice given was to pay Euro 815 Euro or face a lawsuit.
...
German copyright law for refugees and helpers
By Joerg Heidrich.
Anyone seeking refuge and using the internet in Germany should heed the following basic guidelines. If you are giving refugees access to your own internet connection, you should inform them about this aspect of German law.
German copyright law prohibits the sharing of works without express permission by the rightsholder. If you download files (movies, TV shows, music, software or ebooks) over file-sharing networks such as BitTorrent, you automatically also share them. The internet connection that is used can be discovered by rightsholders by the associated IP address which enables them to serve cease and desist letters to its owner. Even this initial notification carries heavy fees.
Programs that look like streaming clients but which use BitTorrent in the background pose an especially big danger. They distribute parts of the stream to other users. A popular app of this ilk is Popcorn Time which is available on PCs and Android smartphones. Other examples are apps like Vuze and the browser plugin WebTorrent.
Common sense goes a long way. Especially when it comes to movies, a long time will pass in Germany between a flick opening in the cinemas and it being available on the net. It is very unlikely that a well known movie should be legally available as a download a few months after it opened in cinemas – and it’s even more unlikely that it would be available free of charge.
A special aspect of German law is that the operator of a wifi network is legally responsible for illegal actions that are perpetrated by the users of the network. This applies to strangers as well as members of the same family. To retain a minimum of protection against lawsuits, the operator should at least inform his guests about the risks inherent in using file-sharing networks – providing them with this article is a good start. Signing an informal statement that explains the dangers of using the wifi network together with the guest would probably indemnify the wifi operator. But they would have to name the perpetrator of the copyright infringement which would open up the person in question to claims from rights holders.
Why You Can’t Trust #GPS in China
One of the most interesting, if unanticipated, side effects of modern copyright law is the practice by which cartographic companies will introduce a fake street—a road, lane, or throughway that does not, in fact, exist on the ground—into their maps. If that street later shows up on a rival company’s products, then they have all the proof they need for a case of copyright infringement. Known as trap streets, these imaginary roads exist purely as figments of an overactive legal imagination.
►http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/digital-maps-skewed-china
Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry – in full
The music producer, Shellac frontman and author of seminal 1993 essay, The Problem with Music, spoke in Melbourne about the advantages of the internet, the death of the major label system, copyright law and that ‘purple dwarf in assless chaps’
▻http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/17/steve-albinis-keynote-address-at-face-the-music-in-full
J’arrive pas à extraire une citation de ce texte, tellement je le trouve excellent !
From my part, I believe the very concept of exclusive intellectual property with respect to recorded music has come to a natural end, or something like an end. Technology has brought to a head a need to embrace the meaning of the word “release”, as in bird or fart. It is no longer possible to maintain control over digitised material and I don’t believe the public good is served by trying to.
London School of Economics: piracy isn’t killing big content; government needs to be skeptical of entertainment industry claims
►http://boingboing.net/2013/10/03/london-school-of-economics-pi.html#more-259378
Copyright and Creation, a policy brief from a collection of respected scholars at the rock-ribbed London School of Economics, argues that the evidence shows that piracy isn’t causing any grave harm to the entertainment industry, and that anti-piracy measures like the three-strikes provision in Britain’s Digital Economy Act don’t work. They call on lawmakers to take an evidence-led approach to Internet and copyright law, and to consider the interests of the public and not just big entertainment companies looking for legal backstops to their profit-maximisation strategies.
Finnish #Copyright law proposal
▻https://docs.google.com/document/d/18zS033-AYFgkiD421lVZymVFd2uxML_urd3zIoZ14Iw/edit
Finland will be the first country in the world where the Parliament is forced to process a copyright law proposal that was crowdsourced by the public. The proposal aims to change file-sharing into a misdemeanor, to legalize the copying of items that people already own and allowing the use of copyrighted material in classrooms for teaching purposes.
Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megaupload and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here | TechPresident
►http://techpresident.com/news/21680/seven-lessons-sopapipamegauplaod-and-four-proposals-where-we-go-here
Copyright seems to be too balanced for the industry’s taste. Traditional copyright law has too many balances; too many reasons judges might prevent Hollywood from just shutting the whole thing down so people can be made to sit quietly on their couches and pay up. The bills were designed to try to create new pressure points that would allow either copyright owners or their associated functionaries at the Justice Department to kill threatening sites, without having to go to the trouble of identifying specific infringements or proving anything to a court.
As long as the copyright industries insist on trying to reshape the Internet to make it controllable in order to serve their interests, there effort will be fundamentally in conflict with Internet Freedom. To understand this, we need but quote Larry Lessig’s decade-old “code is law,” or Eben Moglen’s memorable “Freedom of the press, freedom of information, freedom of thought itself are now ’implemented’ rather than ’declared’, ’protected’ or ’guaranteed’.”
But coalitions are always a bit messy, and it is often hard to tell whose agenda is really gaining the upper hand. For now, at least, it seems that the interests of the core of the technology industry and the interests of individuals and communities that have come to rely on the Internet as their primary platform for freedom and creativity are sufficiently aligned that the coalition can hold for a while, on a range of issues, including all those I raise as targets for common action. But networked citizens cannot and should not be sanguine that the alliance will always be so smooth. Nor should the industry take support for granted, or assume that it can rely on its own power and lobbying.
Copyright law: Killing creativity | The Economist
IMAGINE that drug companies were so successful at lobbying governments that they won an extension of their patents from 20 years, as they are today, to 100 years; and that the scope of those rights was extended so that future medical discoveries were in effect blocked. The ensuing public outcry would almost certainly result in the law being rewritten in favour of scientific advancement.
Yet this is actually happening (and with little public scrutiny) in a different area of intellectual property: copyright law. As more and more forms of content go digital, the owners of that content are becoming more possessive and turning increasingly to the law for help. The result is a “permission culture”, argues Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School and a leading authority on internet law, where creators increasingly need legal approval for their works, not a “free culture” where creativity is presumptively allowed, as was the case in the past.
...
Instead of adapting to the internet, media companies are using the law to change the very features of the internet that make it so successful. Mr Lessig is no cyber-utopian promoting piracy or an end of copyright. Instead, he argues for a more reasonable balance, by redefining copyright law closer to the function that it served in the past. “A society that defends the ideals of free culture must preserve precisely the opportunity for new creativity to threaten the old,” he writes.
The author himself is a partisan. Seeing the deficiencies in copyright law, he co-founded an organisation in 2001 called Creative Commons to allow content-creators to license their works in ways that are open rather than restrictive. (Fittingly, “Free Culture” is available free online for non-commercial use under this system; within days of its release, the book was reproduced in numerous formats, including audio recordings.)
►http://www.economist.com/node/2592996
et c’est the economist qui le dit !
How The ’70s Majorly Screwed The Major Labels | TuneCorner Music Blog
►http://blog.tunecore.com/2011/09/how-the-70s-majorly-screwed-the-major-labels.html
Lava lamps, Happy Days, mood rings, MASH, and Jimmy Carter’s Playboy interview weren’t the only things to come out of the ’70s. In addition, copyright law was revised by the U.S. government granting artists and songwriters “termination rights.” This law states that 35 years after 1978 the recordings and songs “owned” by record labels or publishers would revert back to the artist or songwriter regardless of if the artist or songwriter was recouped, un-recouped, etc. In other words, the government said to the labels and publishers,“ 35 years is long enough. Times up, give them back control over their work.”
For those of you counting, 35 years from 1978 is 2013.
This means albums and songs from Cheap Trick, The Kinks, AC/DC, Kraftwerk, Carole King, Peter Gabriel, The Cars, The Buzzcocks, KC & the Sunshine Band, Kenny Rogers, David Bowie, Black Sabbath, Tom Waits, Yes, Sex Pistols, Boston, Ramones, Bryan Ferry, Heart, Uriah Heap, Neil Young, Aerosmith, Brian Eno, Hawkwind, Whitesnake, Queen, Kate Bush, and countless others are eligible to revert back to the artists. Which means that the record labels, in addition to losing control over distribution (think TuneCore) may now lose the rights to the only thing left keeping them alive, the recordings that they make money off of.
[..]
As you can imagine, the labels are fighting it.
Springsteen and Others Soon Eligible to Recover Song Rights - NYTimes.com (via @latrive)
►http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/arts/music/springsteen-and-others-soon-eligible-to-recover-song-rights.html?_r=1
Since their release in 1978, hit albums like Bruce Springsteen’s “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Billy Joel’s “52nd Street,” the Doobie Brothers’ “Minute by Minute,” Kenny Rogers’s “Gambler” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” have generated tens of millions of dollars for record companies. But thanks to a little-noted provision in United States copyright law, those artists — and thousands more — now have the right to reclaim ownership of their recordings, potentially leaving the labels out in the cold.
BDS Bieber on Vimeo
►http://vimeo.com/19406115
BDS Bieber is a video parody of Justin’s #1 youtube hit song ’Baby’ which calls on him to honour the boycott call of Palestinian civil society and cancel his planned April concert in Tel Aviv. (Despite efforts of the pro-Israel lobby to censor this video, it’s still available on youtube thanks to the fair use/fair comment provision of copyright law which protect parody.)