Pirates win

I've been keeping an eye out for this ruling and here it is: Men at Work have lost their appeal of a copyright infringement suit and must pay 5% of the all the royalties they have ever earned, or ever will earn, from their terrific song "Down Under," because it contained a 2-bar riff from the children's song "Kookaburra." In the name of promoting creativity, an Australian court is now punishing a remarkably creative work by transferring a huge sum of money from the creative people to the non-creators who did nothing but purchase privileges. This is not what copyright is supposed to be about.

Big Rock Candy Mountain

I composed these lyrics a few years ago, but since Republicans make such a virtue of their inability to learn, the words still fit.*


Big Rock Candy Mountain (Republican Version)

On a summer day in the month of May
I met a Republican drivin'.
He was going down from his hometown
‘Cause the riffraff were arrivin'.
As he drove along he sang a song
Of a land of milk and honey,
Where a man can’t stay a single day
If he don’t have any money.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain you never pay no tax
And all the schemes of government get stopped right in their tracks.
The market keeps on rising and the bubble never pops.
The stocks stay high and the wages low;
Your portfolio just grows and grows
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain the poor stay out of sight.
They just show up for work each day and disappear at night.
They never ask for raises, short hours, or minimum wage.
They’ll do their task and never ask
For a bigger share than you care to spare
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain you always have a maid
Who’s working far too hard to pause and say she's underpaid.
Your nanny works on weekends and your gardener takes no breaks.
They’re never seen, but your house is clean;
It looks just like a picture in a magazine
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain they attend church every day.
There’s a Bible in each classroom and they stop each hour to pray.
They don’t allow no atheists and the Darwinists get hung.
They'll slit the wrists of the scientists
Who deny the Earth its recent birth
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountain there’s a cop by every door,
And every prison cell is full and they’re willing to build more.
You’ll never see treehuggers, no hippies, French, or gays.
Oh, I want to be where they look like me,
Where the weirdoes know that they shouldn’t go,
In the Big Rock Candy Mountain.




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*Admittedly, the French have fallen off the radar lately.

Friday photo

Emerald Lake, Superior National Forest, Minnesota. July 2010

Last week was vacation time, a proper get-out-of-town-for-at-least-several-days-and-go-someplace-special type of vacation, where James and I spent three and a half days canoing some of the lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. This is the land of the French voyageurs, trappers and traders plying the waters and dealing with the local Ojibwa tribes for access to beaver pelts. With just a little imagination, the recreational paddler can put himself in their shoes, perhaps pretending that his Tevas are moccasins; the canoe may not be made of birchbark, but surely it was hand-assembled from locally grown Kevlar.

We had been on the water less than fifteen minutes when James called my attention to a certain bird call, which he nominated as the emblematic call of the Boundary Waters. I listened to it a few times, and finally realized, "That's a chickadee!" Except it's a long-winded type of chickadee.

The normal chickadee call, which you can hear here, is a slow, two-note whistle known as the fee-bee, like so:
or sometimes with a repeat of the bottom note:
Chickadees are common here in SE Michigan, and they were common in Yellowstone. In both locations, the calls were the same. But up in Minnesota, the calls were more verbose, invariably ending with a dotted-rhythm extension:
I've never heard this version of the fee-bee call anywhere else. But as we moved from lake to lake, I began to hear even more variants. There was the "Three Blind Mice" version, which began with two prefix notes:
And then there was the even stranger version, which began by jumping up a fourth:
I call this one strange, because of the ascending prefix. The others seem like smaller modifications of the base call - repeating the final notes, or adding another note in sequence. But adding a big step, when all other versions involve no more than a single full-tone step at a time, is a more radical departure.

I have no idea how that developed. But there you have it: a species displaying regional variations in vocalizations, which can fairly be called culture. I think the idea of culture in animals is no longer controversial among biologists, but it's still remarkable enough to be worth dwelling upon.

Also remarkable: the chickadee's fee-bee call is so musical that it can be rendered in our musical notation with pretty fair accuracy. The dotted rhythm I've noted above* is exactly as I heard it: in just as perfect time as a musician would perform it. The second note is almost exactly a full tone, and the unusual ascending prefix was almost exactly a perfect fourth. The reason you don't see bird calls rendered this way is because it's usually impossible. You won't hear many (if any) other birds that seem to have studied Western music.


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* Using a program called LilyPond, which describes most of the lakes where I heard these calls. The actual call is at least an octave higher than I've indicted.

Kookaburra loot downsized

New developments in the Men at Work case, where the poor Aussies were being plundered of their earnings by a bunch of lawyers whose only creative act was to purchase an old copyright. The pirates, AKA Larrikin Music, were demanding 50% of their revenue of "Down Under" for a 4-second reference to a children's song. They won; EMI Records appealed; the appellate judge has ruled.

The result: yes, it's infringement, but Larrikin can only get 5%, apparently the lowest rate the judge can set. The judge found the claim for 50% to be "overreaching, excessive and in my view unrealistic".

I'm seeing the verdict spun in different ways - victory for Larrikin, because they still get money, or victory for EMI and Men at Work because they don't have to pay as much. I lean toward the former view, as I said previously: this is piracy, "Old School, let's sail around and find someone productive to plunder piracy." They likely didn't expect to get the 50% they asked for, but loot is still loot.

To cement the image of Larrikin as sanctimonious assholes, their lawyer actually said, "It's just really a pity that Marion Sinclair, the lady who wrote it, didn't participate in income from the song when the song was at its height in the early 80s," even though Larrikin only bought the copyright after Sinclair's death and probably has no intention of sharing their booty with her estate.

It may not be over: EMI is planning to appeal this ruling as well.

Healthy music

At History News Network, Iliana Alanís notes this about the Texas SBOE's new education curriculum:

Not even music was immune to the chopping block. The Board removed hip-hop and Tejano music and replaced them with country music, justifying it as the genre for family values.

I'm guessing they had David Allan Coe in mind.

Pirates!

I've been catching up on a truly horrendous copyright judgment out of Australia a couple weeks ago: Colin Hay, Ron Strykert, and EMI records were found guilty of plagiarism for borrowing a couple of bars from a children's song in Men at Work's iconic "Down Under."

Here is the song in question, "Kookaburra."

If you can already place that in "Down Under," then congratulations, go to the head of the class, you are a world class expert on 1980's popular music. For the rest of us, listen to Men at Work and try to spot the borrowing: "Down Under"

Did you catch it? It's in the flute riff at 0:53. Eleven entire notes, not even part of the song's melody. For that, the Larrikin Music Publishing firm claims they're entitled to $33,000,000, despite having had nothing to do with writing or publishing those notes in the first place. Marion Sinclair, the woman who wrote "Kookaburra" for the Girl Guides in 1935, never even bothered filing on the copyright until decades later. After she died in 1990, Larrikin acquired the copyright and started looking for people they could enforce it upon:.

The company has hit the jackpot since buying the rights to Kookaburra in 1990 for just $6100. Mr Lurie estimates Larrikin has netted "hundreds of thousands’’ of dollars from licensing agreements with publishers and authors around the world, who had always considered it to be in the public domain.

"It’s earnt a hell of a lot of money for us since we’ve bought it," Mr Lurie said.

Lurie also says,

"Of course it would be disengenuous for me to say that there wasn’t a financial aspect involved, (but) you could just as easily say what has won out today is the importance of checking before using other people’s copyrights."

Did you hear that last line in the faux-innocent voice of Eric Cartman? I did. Publishers like to talk about piracy, but this is piracy! Not that petty shoplifting stuff that the RIAA likes to complain about - I'm talking Old School, let's sail around and find someone productive to plunder piracy.

Now, Larriken are music publishers, not musicians, but I'll bet they know the difference between musical borrowing and musical referencing, and that this incident is clearly the latter, placed in the accompaniment not because they couldn't think up their own tune, but because of the Australian flavor it would evoke. Never mind; they found a judge who doesn't understand that and they can laugh like Kookaburra all the way to the bank.

Copyright is supposed to encourage creative production by ensuring that the creator profits from his creation. Fair enough. But this copyright trolling - a close cousin to patent trolling - does the opposite. Of the three parties involved - Hay & Strykert, Sinclair, and Larriken - clearly the most creative are being pillaged by the least creative.


[PS. Forgot to mention that the parties are supposed to appear before the judge again this week after negotiating damages. I'll have the update as soon as I see it.]

[Update: The decision is now under appeal.]
[Update 2011: The appeal has been lost]

Happy Birthday, Frederic Chopin!

Still soundin' good at 200 years!

Patricia sent me this link of Ohio as a piano. Andy Woodruff at the Cartogrammer.com blog has seized on the coincidence that there is exactly one Ohio county for each key on a piano and mapped the sounds to the map so that clicking or mousing over a county plays that note.

Where it gets interesting is that you can remap the sounds, according to the available GIS data. Low values play low notes, high values play high notes. Most of the music is too John Cagish for my taste, but I liked the Crop Acr97 mapping, where you can literally hear Ohio grow more farmable as you move southeast - northwest.

Talent in unexpected places

This video, besides being entertaining, just might make you want to treat that fast food worker with more respect - he could be smarter and more talented than you suspect.

IP and OLD technology meeting a changed culture

James asked for a post on the pending legislation that would require radio stations to compensate performers for playing their music on the air. So here goes.

The crux of the issue is this: when a radio station broadcasts a song, they have to pay royalties. But those royalties are due only to the composer of the song, not the performer. I'm not sure entirely why, other than that this arrangement dates back to the early 1920's when it was more common to identify a song by the composer than by the performer. Few composers would ever sing their own tunes and, for example, a Gershwin tune would remain a Gershwin tune regardless of who sang it. The notion of a "cover," have to acknowledge the fact that you're not the first to sing this song, would have generally been a redundancy.*

Well, times have changed and people care more about who sang the song than they do about who wrote it (if they're not the same person). A lot of folk won't recognize the names Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, but they can't help but think of Elvis Presley if they hear "Hound Dog" (most won't know that he didn't sing the real lyrics, either). Does it make a difference to heavy metal fans whether "You've Got Another Thing Comin'" is performed by Judas Priest or Pat Boone? You better believe it. Performers have eclipsed composers in the public's mind when they think of musical creativity.

So, if radio stations have to pay the composers when they broadcast music, why shouldn't they have to pay performers, too? Indeed, why not? I can't think of any good reason at all.**

Of course, the broadcasters can think up one really good reason why they don't want to, and plenty of weaker reasons why they shouldn't. To my mind, almost none of them fly.

First off, let's dispense with the BS about royalty fees representing a "tax." Royalties aren't taxes; people just hate the word more. That's just faster-than-78-rpm spin.

Nor will it drive radio stations out of business, or force them all to become talk radio stations (surely that market is already saturated!). We've heard it all before, every time the minimum wage goes up or automobile fuel efficiency standards are raised. "Can't be done! We'll all go out of business!" Nonsense. Remember how you used to see McDonald's and Burger King on every street corner, until they raised the minimum wage in 1993? And now you just can't find a fast food res - yeah, right.

You have to try to pass the cost on to your customers, but so do all your competitors. Unless the customers stop patronizing all of you, they end up paying the cost and everything goes on as before. Unless advertisers desert radio altogether, they'll just have to make their contribution to paying those royalties.***

The broadcasters do have one true argument. It's not really a legal argument, but they simply point out how much musicians benefit from having their music on the radio. And indeed they do. The payola scandals of the 1950's prove it - it was considered cheating for a record label to pay the radio stations to play certain artists. This wouldn't make any sense if they thought of that broadcast as a rip-off, but is perfectly sensible if they viewed it as advertising that boosted their overall revenue. Follow the money, if you want to know what they really believe.

Here's my take. Demanding revenues for the performers is perfectly fair and justified. However, it might be short sighted, especially if the fees are too hefty. So let's do this: let's let someone muscular, like Clear Channel, refuse to broadcast any music unless the performers pay for the advertisement. The market can be the referee and we'll see who really had whom by the balls all along.



[PS. The ringtone post was already getting long, or I would have discussed the performance-as-advertising aspect of that case. There should certainly be some awareness that selling ringtones has increased the market for popular music, to the artists' advantage. They deserve their cut, but trying to milk it that hard just shows a certain lack of respect for how little they directly contributed to expanding their own market.]

[PPS. It occurs to me (soemtime later) that composers for theater still enjoy preeminence over the performers. For example, Andrew Lloyd Weber enjoys a tighter association with his music more than any singer ever will, not even Sarah Brightman. I presume this reflects the difference between a transitory stage performance vs. the "imperishable" recorded performance.]


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* This may have much to do with the relative infancy of the recording business, too. In the age of live music, the performance was transitory and only the composition could have any permanence.

** In fact, internet radio - under more recent legislation - is already doing just that and would like to see the playing field leveled.

*** The broadcasters do point out that advertising receipts are down, but that can mean one of only two things: everything will be fine once the economy improves, or else radio is a failing industry anyway. Either way, special protections don't make long term sense.

Song, memory, and DON'T be still, my beating heart

One of our staff members emailed this article from CNN:

"Disco Tune Saves Man's Life"

A couple are out hiking, the man suddenly drops to the ground without a heartbeat, and his wife recalls hearing an American Heart Association public service announcement about giving chest compressions to the beat of the Bee Gees song, "Stayin' Alive." She does, and her husband lives.

What's special about the song? Just the fact that it's sung at about 100 beats per minute, which happens to be just how frequently you want to apply your chest compressions. The article quotes another doctor who states that Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" works just as well, but for some reason the AHA preferred the other title.

The magic here, of course, is that incredible power that music has to be memorable. Anyone who knows the Bee Gees song will readily remember the correct tempo. Songs are so memorable that most people would probably notice if the same band sang it in a different key, even if they couldn't quite place what was different. Lesson for today - if you need to remember something, set it to music.

Lost Mozart music

Unknown Mozart fragment found in French library

Lost Beethoven music?

Scholar finds 'Beethoven's last piano work' in library

Once upon a time in Ann Arbor

"Free John Sinclair!"

The hand is quicker than the eye

And more accurate, too. A researcher at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev has found that fingers correctly anticipate the length of a line, even when presented as an illusion that misleads the brain. Their is a hypothesis that the brain actually has two parallel visual systems, one for perception and one for coordinating movement and action.

However it arises, I'm not all that surprised at the result of the study. I have noted that, when playing the piano, I usually play more accurately when I can anticipate the feel of the chord I am about to play, imagining the position of the hand and fingers before they actually hit the keys. Looking at the keyboard is much less helpful, except when first learning unusual passages.

Bach's face

This is just cool.