While it’s really hard to describe and summarize such a complex performance, a section I particularly loved had them doing a somewhat traditional dance to a large chunk of the audio from the video below. The video is of an art installation by Nate Harrison where the viewer listens to the audio on an LP, where Harrison discusses how a drum break from the The Winston’s 1969 B-side “Amen, brother” (often referred to now as the “Amen break”) has been sampled, re-used, and deconstructed in hip-hop and commercial advertising. Harrison’s discussion is a really nice piece of cultural history and analysis, although I confess it was perhaps more compelling with casebolt and smith dancing at the same time.

It would have been interesting in its own right if casebolt and smith had simply danced with Harrison’s commentary. They took it up a notch, however, by following it up with a really interesting dance/discussion of how dancers use and re-appropriate moves and steps they learn in classes and see in performance, effectively “sampling” movements much like a hip-hop artist samples beats. She demonstrated various moves and styles, and he then grilled her about where she learned the moves, and on the appropriateness of re-using these moves without credit or payment. This quickly borders on the absurd, which is of course the point. The courts have allowed labels to charge for re-use of tiny fragments of recordings, where there are no such expectations in dance. Presumably a key piece of this is the ability to record (either on paper or as an audio recording) and distribute music, where dance can’t be recorded and copied in the same way.

In short, it was a cool, funny, intelligent performance. We had a great time, and highly recommend the show.

I found it really interesting to find that the YouTube version of the video above was in fact lifted from Harrison’s web site without his permission, although he says in the comments that he doesn’t care (search for “nkhstudio” in the full comments). So you have Harrison making a commentary on copyright and intellectual property, which is then appropriated by someone else and turned into a YouTube video. Then casebolt and smith use it in their performance, without ever telling us where that audio comes from, as a starting point for a great conversation about intellectual property. And while it’s possible they knew about the Harrison piece before it showed up on YouTube (Harrison was a friend from college for all I know), the odds favor them discovering the piece via YouTube, where it has over 2 million views.

So…

• Now I’ve listened to “Amen, brother” (a song I’d never heard of)
• because of a dance performance
• borrowing parts of an audio track
• which I was able to find via Google
• as a YouTube video
• generated (without permission) from a video by a performance artist commenting on intellectual property and copyright
• using as a springboard the extended and repeated use of a 6 second drum break from The Winston’s “Amen, brother” in hip-hop and advertising

What a wonderful example of how re-appropriation can enrich the world, especially if we worry less about profit and more about gain.

While I realize that this is little more than incoherent link propagation (unlike my normally focussed prose-o-wonderment), hopefully pulling some of this fluff from the mighty tubes that connect us all will help clarify our various connections and communications.

A couple that our amazing progeny sent my way:

• How I failed the Turing test: How would you convince a random new IM contact that you were a person and not a bot? (Of course might wonder why you’d bother, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
• RIAA Declares Using Brain to Remember Songs is Criminal Copyright Infringement (satire): Fairly amusing piece on the “Music industry moguls remain willfully clueless” thread. I love how the authors felt the need to include “satire” in the title. Are we really that dim?

I’m not sure where I got this pointer from, but Bruce Schneier is exhorting people to “Steal This Wi-Fi” over on Wired. In a world where people expend tons of energy securing their wireless networks (and ISPs often require it of their customers), one of our major security experts chooses to keep his home wireless open. “To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.”

And in a vaguely related piece on security, a post from John Naughton on the dangers of publishing your bank details. Jeremy Clarkson, arch-conservative, petrol head, and (much to my dismay) highly amusing Top Gear presenter decided that the woo-haa was way overblown regarding the recent loss by British government officials of financial details of millions of people. So he published his bank details in his Sun column. According to the BBC, however, “Clarkson admitted he was ‘wrong’ after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.” Oops.

Well, my tubes are definitely clearer. Thanks for the Q-tip.

Kid #2: So to recap, what you’ve got here is a system that makes people leave their house in order to download music at their house, and makes them go to a store to get music that they could get at the store, somewhere else.

Sony BMG dude: Er.

Come on – you know you don’t really have anything important to do. Go treat yourself (to the post, not one of their stupid cards).

Now we have this amazing paper by John Tehranian that makes it clear that this really isn’t just a problem for “the kids” (whatever that meant anyway). We are all up to our necks in this stuff, and it just isn’t pretty. Tehranian estimates that he personally racks up $12.45 million of potential liability every day! And this isn’t due to some crazy P2P spree, this is just living his life. Most of it is extraordinarily common everyday activities like reading e-mail:

In the morning, John checks his email, and, in so doing, begins to tally up the liability. Following common practice, he has set his mail browser to automatically reproduce the text to which he is responding in any email he drafts. Each unauthorized reproduction of someone else’s copyrighted text—their email—represents a separate act of brazen infringement, as does each instance of email forwarding. Within an hour, the twenty reply and forward emails sent by John have exposed him to $3 million in statutory damages.

It would appear that I potentially bankrupted myself and my family this morning, and all I was trying to do was clear our some of my e-mail.

Damn.

There’s also a dark moral here about the dangers of tattoos, but not the one that parents usually wave around when their kids threaten to get inked:

In the late afternoon, John takes his daily swim at the university pool. Before he jumps into the water, he discards his T-shirt, revealing a Captain Caveman tattoo on his right shoulder. Not only did he violate Hanna-Barbera’s copyright when he got the tattoo—after all, it is an unauthorized reproduction of a copyrighted work—he has now engaged in a unauthorized public display of the animated character. More ominously, the Copyright Act allows for the “impounding” and “destruction or other reasonable disposition” of any infringing work. Sporting the tattoo, John has become the infringing work. At best, therefore, he will have to undergo court-mandated laser tattoo removal. At worst, he faces imminent “destruction.”

(Flashbacks to when a few people were tattooing themselves the barcode version of RSA encryption algorithm, thereby turning their bodies into munitions in the eyes of the U.S. government.)

Yeah, things are definitely messed up.

And these are problems of potentially profound consequence. What are the long-term implications of all of us living in a constant state of infringement? What happens when our children grow up assuming that copyright and intellectual property laws are so horribly broken that the best response is to simply ignore them?

But these are not the issues that come up in the presidential debates, or really anywhere outside of a certainly kind of nerdly circle on-line. Worse, there are powerful forces working to entrench and extend the (broken) status quo.

It seems that a little education and some well-placed questions are in order. The idea of copyright has merit and value, but it’s clear that our increasingly narrow sense of what constitues fair use, combined with the repeated extensions of the life of a copyright, have moved us well into the absurd.

Tehranian’s paper (here, in PDF form) has the obligatory blizzard of footnotes, listing all the relevant laws and such. Thanks to M J M for providing the cool photo under a Creative Commons license so I could legally use it here without adding to my no doubt massive potential liability. And big ups to the mighty Bill Tozier for pointing me this direction.