Aram Sinnreich

Help me choose a cover for my new book, The Piracy Crusade

My new book The Piracy Crusade will be published this December, and I'm incredibly excited to have illustrator and comic journalist Josh Neufeld doing the cover art for me. Josh has now sent me initial sketches outlining a few cover ideas, and has consented to let me use the "wisdom of the crowd" to help develop the cover idea further, just as I did with the text of the book itself.

The book's basic premise is that "digital piracy" is a boogeyman promoted by legacy content cartels in order to justify increasingly draconian intellectual property laws, treaties and policies whose primary purpose is to bolster their (eroding) market dominance. Unfortunately, the secondary effects of this agenda (exemplified by initiatives such as PIPA, SOPA, ACTA and CISPA) is to undermine the foundations of democratic society by eliminating protections for free speech, privacy and market competition, while weakening checks and balances against corporate and governmental overreach.

Josh has sent me four cover ideas, and I'd love your help in choosing between them. The first is the one that I initially outlined for him -- in which two battleships, one flying the copyright flag and the other flying the copyleft flag, are engaged in a naval battle, and the resulting smoke creates the phantom of the Jolly Roger:

The second cover idea is very similar, but it eliminates the Jolly Roger smoke, which Josh says would give more prominence and detail to the ships, and unclutter the overall design:

The third concept also features the copyright and copyleft ships, but puts them in relation to each other along the Z-axis with foreshortening, rather than portraying them side-by-side:

Finally, the fourth cover idea is a radical departure from the nautical imagery, and just features a Jolly Roger with copyright and copyleft symbols for eyes:

I need to choose one of these ideas, or propose a new one, to Josh ASAP, so he can get to work on the art itself. I welcome your comments and suggestions!

MediaCon Panel with Trevor Pinch & DJ Spooky (audio)

This weekend, I was fortunate to host a keynote discussion between media theorist (and Moog afficionado) Trevor Pinch and DJ/author Paul D. Miller, a/k/a DJ Spooky. It was part of an excellent conference called "Extending Play" organized by the doctoral students at Rutgers SC&I. 

Our panel was a lot of fun -- a freewheeling discussion that ranged from music and tech geekery to broad social theory. You can listen to the audio transcript here:

ExtendingPlay_Keynote_Sinnreich_Pinch_Miller

 

 

Margaret Thatcher's Cultural Legacy

Yesterday, I contributed to an interesting story on Marketplace Radio regarding Margaret Thatcher's musical legacy. There's a lot to say on this subject, but my basic point was that Thatcherism catalyzed the punk movement, which was still largely regional, at exactly the moment that media deregulation in the US and elsewhere made British culture a hot export. In essence, Thatcherism ended up promoting its own critique abroad.

The text version of the story has more of my input than the audio version.

 

New album from my band Brave New Girl

My band Brave New Girl has released its first studio album in over a decade, called "Thanks for Being on the Show," under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike 3.0 license. You can stream the entire album for free on SoundCloud:

If you want to download the tracks and support the cause, please buy them from CD Baby:

You can also get the album almost anywhere else, including:

• iTunes
• Spotify
• Amazon

Stay tuned, we'll be doing more recording soon!

Aram talks Piracy Crusade at NYU (video)

Last month, I got a chance to give a talk based on my forthcoming book The Piracy Crusade at NYU, as part of the Computer Science department's Computers and Society lecture series. I always love talking to those folks, in large part because the guy who puts it together, Professor Evan Korth, is one of the coolest people I know. At a certain point, I just abandoned the presentation altogether and got into the nitty gritty. Fun ensued.

p.s. Big ups to Joly for recording and posting the video!