It's the same old song as everyone else has already sung, but man do I ever hate the Apple DRM junk in my trunk. I mean stabbity stab stab! I bought this damned album on vinyl once for 12.99 20 years ago, and then I bought it on CD, and the cd got stolen but luckily I had taped it on audiotape, and then I couldn't find it anywhere bcause it was out of print nad was deliriously happy I could find it and hear it again by clicking 99 cents thing on iTunes. And that was several years and several Macs ago and now the damned song doesn't work! For fuck's sake, how many more times do I have to buy this song before I get to archive it without a waste of the world's resources?
I was contemplating how very broken things are in music distribution. Books too. I want to own the electronic copy for whatever I buy, and then be able to get or make a physical copy of it. To record and manipulate music so I can hear it in my car. To print it or get print on demand in some graceful way. Whatever! But having just a book doesn't satisfy me either because I want to cut and paste and quote bits of the book, fair use style, or search the book, or index it or annotate it. Think of it this way. I am willing to do a fair amount of valuable cultural work -- FOR FREE -- which benefits us all. Art is a contribution to the world and all art builds on other art. We need to be able to expose the connections and references. It is not information I love best, though I do love it. It is meaning. Meaning created by context and for there to be context, people have to be able to access it.
This rant inspired by my resolve to get on line and buy all the CDs possible by Dressy Bessy. I got something by them on a mix CD, and then went and downloaded more, and now love them and feel a blinding loyalty. I would like to directly give that band the $12.99 and NOT buy a CD with packaging that I will likely ruin or lose anyway. Just make it so that somewhere, it is recorded on heaven's unchangeable heart (i.e. the motherfucking IN-ternets) that I bought this music and have the rights to mess with it under whatever nice license they like. Then, if I lose the CD or my hard drive crashes I will still have the rights to interact with the bit of cultural product that I gave currency to.
iTunes of course does NOT do this... but has planned obsolescence, which I consider one of the evils our species has unleashed on the world.
Where is the lovely open source non profit Registry of Cultural Production and Rights... or the international agency... even as a part of a government... a beautifully organized repository?
That would be my own killer app.
Where I could register my intent to translate something, and pay the original author of it... Pay them directly. And then translate and publish. Think how beautiful this killer app of copyright would be for translation as well as books and music.
Or genetic material, or whatever.
(Somehow I am thinking as I say this, on the back burner of my mind, about OLPC (which is lovely in many ways but I have a big BUT) and Dil's gold bangles from whichever Patrick O'Brian book that was. The same fallacy of physical objects and possessions and property, the same middle class assumption that the important things is STUFF.)
3 comments:
Excellent post.
I can't stand all the DRM crap either. Actually, I have found myself going out of the way to purchase music sans DRM and directly from the artist. This works fairly well most of the time because of the random offbeat indie stuff I listen to.
Have you looked into all the things available under creative commons?
I agree. People thing of digital downloading as being "progress", but until issues like DRM and audio quality improve, the CD is still the best in my opinion! :-)
lol, I meant "think". I guess I wasn't thinking!
:-)
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