Clara Raubertas // Freelance Web Design, Web Development, and Web Consulting // Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts clara raubertas design. development. consulting.

Some of you may be aware that some friends and I started a band this year, and so far, it is awesome!

Well, actually, several of the same people had a previous incarnation of the band last year, but it never really went anywhere. The version we (re-)started in January has accomplished much more, for a handful of reasons:

• I have a real electronic drumset, rather than just a bucket to bang on!
• Meeting on Sunday afternoons rather than on weekday evenings gives us more time to practice
• Meeting on the same day every week rather than “when people are free” makes sure we’re rehearsing together regularly and frequently
• Not breaking out the beer at the beginning of practice keeps us focused :)
• Keeping our playing-together practice and writing-music sessions separate also improves our focus (in our previous incarnation, we often spent the whole practice thinking about a song idea someone had had instead of playing together; this time, we’re restricting our Sunday practices to songs that are ready to play, and scheduling optional weekday meetings to work on turning song ideas into playable songs)
• We’ve also tried recording some of our songs as we practice — most of the recordings aren’t fit for public consumption, but they’re helpful to practice to and to listen and critique to see what we need to improve

This has been a really fun project so far! We’re so put-together that we even have a name (The Moral Hazards), a website (themoralhazards.com), and a myspace, where you can hear a jam session we had last weekend based on one of the original songs we’re working on.

Now that allofmp3 is no longer available, I don’t know where to buy new music. Allofmp3 was perfect — inexpensive, DRM-free, convenient to download, and it even let me buy music in my favorite non-proprietary format. But alas, such perfection went hand-in-hand with questionable legality, and US users can no longer add money to their accounts.

Since I manage my music collection on a computer, buying music on CD would require tedious additional steps of ripping the music to my hard drive and leave me with an inconvenient physical artifact. The iTunes store isn’t compatible with my computers’ software or the OS I prefer to run on my iPod — I refuse to by any kind of DRM’d music, anyway, since DRM means you don’t really own your music. I tried eMusic, which is where I got most of the new songs on this mix, but their selection was constrictingly small, and their pricing scheme (different subscription levels get you different numbers of per-month downloads, that expire at the end of the month) created some perverse incentives. Amazon and Yahoo! sell DRM-free music, but at $1+ a song it’s a bit pricey for me (perhaps the conclusion to this dilemma is that I can’t actually afford to buy much new music!).

Mostly I’ve been listening to Pandora and music I already have lately, but if anyone knows of an alternative place to buy music that doesn’t have the issues outlined above, let me know!

Article I of the US Constitution describes the purpose of copyright as follows:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

But as Lawrence Lessig argues in his fascinating, provocative, and well-researched text, Free Culture, the scope of copyright has changed drastically since the framers of the Constitution initially supported it. Now, copyright’s reach is much farther than it needs to be to promote the progress of the arts — in several ways, notably in the length of its term. When copyright was first established, a work was protected only if the author registered it as copyrighted — and then only for 14 years, with an option (that most copyright holders declined) to renew it for an additional 14 years. Now, all creative works are copyrighted by default — the only way to avoid it is to specifically release your work into the public domain or under another license. In 1973, when extending the term of your copyright was still an option, more than 85% of copyright holders didn’t renew past the initial term, and the average term of copyright was 32.2 years — in 1998, not only was the term of copyright extended to 95 years, but all current copyrights were retroactively renewed. That doesn’t sound like “limited Times” to me!

Copyright’s extension beyond the length that is useful in most cases leads to situations like this one, quoted from the FAQ of one of my favorite bands:

I really want a copy of Lolita Nation / Tinker to Evers to Chance / some other long out of print Game Theory album. Where can I get them, and will they ever be back in print?

This is the most frequently asked question of them all, and sadly, the answer is: the only way you’ll be able to get a copy of Lolita Nation nowadays is by paying lots of money for the CD on eBay, or by stumbling across one in a used record store (which may take incredible persistence, since they’re awfully scarce). [...] Since Scott Miller’s music has never exactly caught on with the general public, it’s unlikely there will be a full-scale reissue program in the future, but one never knows. (By the way, Scott Miller does not own the rights to Game Theory’s recordings, so it’s not up to him.)

In this case, the longevity of copyright is hurting everyone involved. The record company isn’t benefiting from holding the copyright, since the band isn’t popular enough for them to profit from a re-release; the artist is losing out, since they aren’t legally permitted to fill the small but substantial demand for their music; and I’m losing out, since I can’t legally purchase and listen to their albums.

Like Lessig, I don’t want to abolish copyright, and I agree that artists need to retain some rights to compensate them for their efforts and encourage them to produce more. But the current lengthy term of copyright is overkill. Most artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers would have plenty of incentive to keep producing creative work even if they only held the term of copyright for 10 or 20 years. Extending copyright by decades is profiting a few big franchises, but depriving the public of exactly the thing copyright is supposed to promote — access to creative work. A copyright term closer to the original would protect artists’ rights and profits while still allowing later archivists and derivative artists access to perpetuate the creative work’s legacy.

If you haven’t checked out Pandora yet, you really should. Their tagline is “Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music”, and that’s exactly what it is — and the music it plays is uncannily well-tailored to whatever inputs (mostly song/artist names and up/down votes) you give it. You can store a lot of stations when you log in — I have one for almost every mood.

Here’s an early summer playlist (well, it’s going to be a CD for the car), composed from both new music I found on Pandora and music I already knew about:

1. Cake - Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle
2. Girl Talk - Bounce That
3. Spoon - Don’t You Evah
4. The Presidents of the United States - Peaches
5. Maritime - Don’t Say You Don’t
6. Delays - Too Much in Your Life
7. Led Zeppelin - Fool in the Rain
8. Of Montreal - Oslo in the Summertime
9. Mark Sandman - Patience
10. Delays - Long Time Coming
11. Field Music - You Can Decide
12. !!! - Intensify
13. Steve Miller Band - The Joker
14. Belle and Sebastian - Step Into My Office, Baby
15. Tortoise - Peering
16. Paul Simon - Graceland
17. Broken Social Scene - Stars and Sons
18. Goldfrapp - Fly Me Away

In my never-ending quest to free myself from the fetters of non-free software and to amuse myself by putting new operating systems on things I find in my house, I installed Rockbox on my iPod nano recently.

It was essentially pretty easy. The hardest part was actually figuring out the difference between Rockbox and iPod Linux. It turns out that Rockbox is a music player, like the original Apple firmware, and iPod Linux is a Linux that runs Linux programs. I toyed around with iPod Linux (played some Tetris!), but since my goal was to have a music player, I moved on.

First step: converting my MacPod (HFS+, which Linux hates) to a WinPod (FAT32, a more widely supported filesystem). Interestingly, Mac OS, Windows, and Linux all recognize the WinPod, while only Mac OS and some subset of Linuxes recognize the MacPod. To convert a MacPod to a WinPod, just plug it into a computer that’s running Windows (if you can find such a thing!); you’ll automatically be prompted to reformat. You lose all the data on the iPod when you do this, so back up first if it’s anything important. After that, it’s just a matter of following the instructions here.

So now my iPod dual-boots, just like my laptop — and just like my laptop, it will rarely if ever see the Apple OS boot up again. There’s nothing that Apple’s iPod software did that I preferred to Rockbox, and plenty of things Rockbox does that I like better. To name a few: it’s free as in speech; it plays .ogg files (the .ogg standard is also free as in speech!); it lets me choose to keep my existing filetree organization, or use its ID3-based database, or both; it lets me put (any kind of!) files on it and then retrieve them on any computer under the same name and format; it’s highly skinnable, so I can get it to look more attractive than the original Apple look; and it allows finer tuning of settings (for example, I can choose whether or not it stops playing when headphones are unplugged, set how long it waits before going to sleep, &c). Using it under Linux (or any OS) is simply a matter of mounting it as a drive and then copying files directly to its filetree, rather than using a specific piece of software. Without a doubt, Rockbox has increased my ability to use this piece of hardware the way I want to.