Copywrong

The UK government is currently considering extending the life of copyright on musical works (currently 50 years) to be something closer to that for books (life plus 70 years). I think copyright should be kept fairly short – the idea is to encourage creative endeavours by, as the US Constitution puts it, “securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. I can well imagine someone not bothering to perform a song if they could only make money off it for 5 years (though given that scarcely any songs make money after their first year, even that’s questionable), but not bothering because you only get rewarded for 50 years instead of 60 is questionable.

You won’t be too surprised, however, that an extension is meeting with political approval, inspired in part by political stupidity:

“Given the strength and importance of the creative industries in the UK, it seems extraordinary that the protection of intellectual property rights should be weaker here than in many other countries whose creative industries are less successful,” the report said.

Traditionally the preferred tactic is to copy people who are better than you at something, not the ones who are worse.

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Death Metal

I’m a last.fm user, and inspired by a friend signing up I just checked my profile. At the moment the children’s compilation CD ‘Baby Genius’ is at number two for the week, thanks to my kids. On investigating I find that I could tag this artist. Interesting, thinks I, and presses the appropriate button. Here’s a screenshot of what came up:

Baby Genius Tagging

I couldn’t fault their reasoning, so of course I added it.

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Pachelbel

I wasn’t going to embed anything for a while to try and fix my layout, but I figure a picture is more likely to get you to watch this, so…

I didn’t play cello at school – unlike everyone else in the entire country who learned the recorder (a nasty instrument in a child’s hands if ever there was one), my school learned glockenspiel. It makes a great learning instrument because everything is labeled, and while you can play it badly it has a tendency to sound at least tolerable. But it has even less street-cred than the cello.

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