Aram Squalls

Moderately funny "Internet party" video ably anthropomorphizes foibles of Web 2.0 sites

Back when I was a dot-com guru-in-training a little over a decade ago, one of the analysts at my consultancy sent around an email to the entire office describing her vision of the Internet: it wasn't an information super-highway, or the world's largest library, or a virtual shopping mall -- it was a giant party, and when you walked in, what you needed most was someone to play host, introducing you to the people you'd most like to meet. That was the gist of it, anyway.

The analyst was promptly laughed out of her job, and five years later, veterans of the early days would still derisively reference the infamous "Internet party" email, in their best "gee whiz" voices. The tacit message was that anyone naive enough to think of the web as something as frivolous as a party (as opposed to a more functional metaphor) lacked the skepticism, savvy and intellectual rigor to offer valuable advice to our clientele. A party, indeed -- what was this, 1995?!?

Well, in the days of 4chan and lolcats, the metaphor seems a bit more apt. In fact, the enterprising yucksters at Cracked.com have put together a pretty funny little video in which a bunch of Web 2.0 sites stage an "intervention" party for MySpace, which doesn't realize it's become obsolete. Worth a viewing, if you follow this stuff at all -- if nothing else, I think it aptly catches the mood of contemporary social network migrants, weary of jumping from roost to roost (or maybe I'm just projecting -- I've got to move into a new apartment on Friday).

UPDATE: The video was set to play instantly when the page loaded, and I don't want to inflict that on my readers, so if you'd like to see it, the link is HERE.

My new webcomic in the Vilage Voice: Liberty

Those of you who know me (and a very few others) know I've been drawing comix on and off since the puberty years. I just started a new strip, called "Liberty," on the Village Voice website. It'll be a weekly (we're not sure what day yet, so stay tuned).

Below is the first panel of the first strip:

(thanks for the hook-up, Mike!)

UPDATE: There's a bit of a political struggle at the Voice site over whether this strip will continue to run. How very exciting. Either way, I'll let you know.

Forget Marvel vs. Capcom -- how about Anyone vs. Anyone?

Ever want to see Ronald McDonald and Hitler go at it head-to-head? Or how about God vs. a killer whale? Back when I was a bored teen, we could only fantasize about our ideal deathmatches. These days, if you can think it, you can make it happen.

Chris, a student in my Videogames class at NYU, recently hipped us to M.U.G.E.N., a free platform for creating characters and boards to use in a 2D, 2-player fighter. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of MUGEN characters available for free download from sites like this and this. Or, if that's not enough for you, you can make your own (just start with this video tutorial).

Below: Morrigan from Darkstalkers vs. Ronald McDonald (fighting in a BK parking lot).

NYU-area cafe kiboshes charity concert for no reason

Over at the blog for my copyright class at NYU, a musician student of mine posted a horrific story. The managers at Think Coffee, a "socially conscious" cafe catering to the university crowd (it's practically my second office) interrupted her band during a charity show, making the absurd claim that the band was not allowed to play cover songs (never mind that the other bands on the roster had, and that Think plays commercial music over their speakers all day every day).

It's worth reading the whole post, not only for my student's story, but also for her excellent analysis about the chilling effects of copyright ignorance and overcaution.

Click "forward" to show the world you're a n00b

One of the nice things about having worked in the media/tech industry for so long is that I know a lot of interesting people who have done a lot of interesting things. One of the interesting things I often do with these interesting people is get together and bemoan the fact that the whole world isn't as "media literate" as we are, and discuss ways in which we can remedy the problem/exploit the remedy.

Therefore, it's been absolutely incredible to me what a large percentage of my Facebook friends who rank among the media- and techno-elite (including CEOs, heads of major trade organizations, tech gurus for international conglomerates, etc.) fall for stupid gags, especially the funwall rich media messages that say "Click Forward to See What Happen" [sic] or some variant thereof. Many of these folks are 40+, making me wonder whether subtle generational digital divides persist despite professional expertise.

Just for the record, guys:

NOTHING HAPPENS WHEN YOU CLICK FORWARD!

There, I've said it. Now stop forwarding me all that crap. You're only polluting an otherwise surprisingly functional communications platform.

Jay-Z and I on Reuters TV

I was on Reuters TV a day or two ago, discussing the all-encompassing, $150 million deal that Jay-Z cut with LiveNation. Here's the clip:

Whoa, oh, oh, oh, on the radio

I was interviewed on KCBS radio twice this week, opining first on the impending satellite radio merger ("creates a monopoly in a doomed industry"), and then on the subject of Elvis Costello's new vinyl+download album release (in which I summon the ghost of Walter Benjamin).

Check 'em out, they were both fun little interviews.

My exam, your take: Copyright expansion

Today, I gave the students in my Copyright class their second take-home exam (due next week). I don't really need any more grading work than I already have, but I'd be curious to see your responses and feedback. So have at it.

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Congress has just passed new intellectual property legislation, containing the following stipulations:

- Copyright terms have been extended to author's life +100 years (or 150 years, in the case of works for hire)

- Copyright protection has been granted for the following:
    - apparel designs
    - interior design concepts
    - myspace/"pimp my site" templates
    - movie/tv/book/game plots
    - databases
    - recipes for food and drinks
    - funny walks
    - swimming styles
    - new instrumental timbres
    - public documents, such as laws and election tallies

- Possession of "infringing" copyrighted material, in any quantity, is a federal criminal offense, punishable by up to $200,000 and 9 months in jail per infringing item

- IP owners are permitted to engage in liability-free "limited surveillance" and "proactive neutralization of pirating tools and materials" if they have a reasonable suspicion of piracy.

President Rice has yet to sign the bill, although she is expected to make a decision any day. She can approve it, exercise a "line item veto" over certain elements, or veto the bill in full.

Please write two letters to the editor of your local newspaper, one explaining why it's imperative that Rice sign the bill, and one explaining why it's imperative that she veto it in part or in whole. Each letter should be approximately 800-1000 words long.

Music software I want to develop: "Algo-rhythmic" evolutionary composition

I've got an idea for a piece of music software, and I'd love to collaborate with an interested programmer (my inability to code has long been one of my greatest Achilles' heels).

The basic pitch is: random mutations in musical information are voted on collectively by thousands of Internet users, and those that benefit the music are kept, while those that hurt it are abandoned. In essence, each composition "evolves" within the ecology of the taste-universe comprised by listeners.

Here's the basic mechanism:

- Visitors to a web site are played a short clip of audio, and they rank how "beautiful" or "funky" (or any other qualitative assessment) that audio clip is, along a Likert scale (e.g. 1-7).

- The software aggregates a "beauty" or "funkiness" quotient for that given clip, based on a predetermined n number of scores.

- The software then mutates the audio clip, within a range of pre-set parameters (e.g. changing or reordering the pitches or drum samples).

- A new score is established for the mutated clip. If it's higher, the mutation is retained. If it's lower, the mutation is abandoned.

- Either way, another random mutation is applied, and the process repeats algorithmically, until such a time as the experimenters/composers deem the process over, or until the software meets some predetermined definition of immutability or some predetermined average score.

Obviously, there are a lot of potential questions here. What kind of seeds do we begin with? How many parameters will be varied, and by what amounts? What mechanism will establish the right number of user inputs per score? Etc.

I'm really curious to see what would happen. Would each composition evolve differently, or would taste-patterns emerge? How would minor changes in operating instructions emerge into major changes in the net product? Would it be possible to reproduce known styles, and if so, what would the constituent algorithms tell us about the industrial or productive processes underpinning those styles? As people who know me or my work no doubt remember, I basically think of the music industry as a highly stylized algorithm in the first place...

I'm serious. If you're interested in working on this (or funding this), contact me.

Copyfight fatigue?

So I'm getting ready to teach today's copyright class at NYU. The tentative subject for this week is "the birth of copyfight." I came up with a few interesting milestones:

1998: DMCA, CTEA
1999: grassroots reaction to works-for-hire clause
2000: Future of Music Coalition founded
2001: Creative Commons founded
2003: RIAA lawsuits commence
2003: Downhill Battle founded
2005: Participatory Culture Foundation founded

So then I decided to check out my favorite cultural divining rod, Google Trends, to see whether I could show that popular interest in copyright as a subject has also been on the rise. Much to my surprise, the opposite was the case: since 2004 (the first year Google started to compile this data), search volume on the term "copyright" has consistently shrunk. Eyeballing it, it looks like total search volume is down by about 50% over 4 years (unless that's a logarithmic scale they use).

Can it be that the post-DMCA foment of internet-fueled interest in the social role of intellectual property is dying down? Or are we simply a more educated world, and fewer of us need to understand what this word "copyright" is all about? It's not like the news pegs have gone away -- to the contrary, according to the chart, news volume on the subject of copyright has soared, maybe tripling in the same period (except for a sudden, vertiginous dip in 2008, which I'll chalk up to preemption by the primaries and the general presidential race).

Maybe Lessig was right to bail when he did.

What do you think?

UPDATE: exactly the same trends apply to searches for "intellectual property" (see second chart below)