Been reading through a number of the published responses to the a recent EU study on a community initiative on the cross-border collective management copyright for the on-line distribution of musical works. This is part of a collaborative effort by a number people associated with Creative Commons who are looking into the compatibility between CC and Collective Rights Management (as it is practiced in Europe).

Reading through the responses i had been assigned has made me even more skeptical of aligning us with these attempts of the EU to break open the monopolies of the Collecting Societies. The attempts of the Commission seem to get us closer to a situation where members of collecting societies can actually use Creative Commons licenses for some of their works. But at the same time this means moving with big media companies which are more than eager to get rid of the collecting societies all together (as they increase bargaining position of individual artists vis a vis commercial users of their works and make artists generally less vulnerable to pressure from them). The reactions of O2, Deutsche Telkom and the EBU which i tried to summarize below clearly show that we are standing on an extremely slippery slope indeed:

O2 (the UK based mobile phone operator): O2 is really, really pissed by the paper. (and by the fact that they only had 3 weeks to react but so were we when we found out). first of all the commission does not propose to disband collective management, which is unacceptable to o2 as this means they actually have to pay authors if the distribute their music. my favorite sentence:

Commercial users faces considerable difficulties in obtaining the rights to exploit material on-line, and especially on terms that allow them to offer consumers attractive and profitable services at commercially acceptable prices.

Translation: the prices need to go down so that we can sell music cheap while having huge profit margins. I guess they telcos have even less understanding of them internets than the music industry…

DEUTSCHE TELEKOM: same as o2 but their anger is hidden behind much better research (if someone is interested in the complexities of the whole question this paper is a nice read). It sure looks like as if the ex-monopolists are the ones who are most furious when they encounter monopolies (in German there is a fitting but untranslatable saying: ‘die schärfsten kritiker der Elche ware früher selber welche’) they also opt for option 2 with elements of option 3. these elements of option 3 do include the right of authors to give non-exclusive licenses to the collecting societies which would make the solution proposed by DT compatible with CC licenses.

EBU: the European Broadcasters Union is not pissed off. Rather it is disappointed that the commission has not come up with a solution that will give them world wide blanket licenses for all uses that come with legal guarantees for their members immediately (somehow it seems they forgot royalty free in their list). Further they do not mention authors at all (& they constantly refer to authors rights (as opposed to phonogram producers) as ‘petit droits’) except when they demand mandatory collective licensing of all rights needed by broadcasters to broadcast. Which would obviously be very bad for someone who wants to engage in individual rights management (e.g use an open content license for a broadcast-able work). But then what do you expect from the same people who think they should own everything they broadcast for 50 years (see the ongoing negotiations about the WIPO broadcasting treaty)

On saturdays there is a small and – due to the lack of clientele – pathetic food market on the street right in front of our place in berlin. when it started about a year ago it still had many more stalls then nowadays and one of them was offering a ‘juppy menu’ (referring i guess to the acronym for young urban professionals) that consisted of currywurst, cole-slaw, french fries & champagne:

As far as i can remember the stall lasted for 4 weeks or so. By now there are way fewer stalls (something like two vegetable, one bread, one flower, one meat and one fish-stall). Once in a while somebody new tries his luck and so today two nirvana-playing juvenile sidewalk musicians directed my gaze to the current dare-devil entrepreneur. Basically the long gone ‘juppy’ menu offering sans the curry and sans the french fries and sans the champagne:

Looks as if not only the market has suffered some decline, but there seems to be a corresponding decline in the perceptions of the economic opportunities as well. The whole thing kind of reminded me of last years visit to argentina where things are not much better but at least executed with impeccable style:

The MPA (Music Publishers Association) and the IFPI (International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers) have released a software called digital file check that can be used by usres to remove file sharing apps from computers.

It also contains a function to check ‘what files are in your “shared folders” – these files are likly to be illegal’. The app only runs on windows so i cannot test it right now, but i was wondering what happens when the app encounters a shared folder full of properly tagged Creative Commons licensed video and audio files. Has anybody tried this out yet?

It should be dirt cheap to implement a metadata check that results in a message that these files can be legally shared, but somehow i am suspecting that the programme will label them as probably illegal anyway. and i do not even want to get into the discussion of how stupid it is to call files ‘illegal’ certain uses of files may infringe on somebody else’s rights but the files themselves cannot be illegal.

I was back in bruxelles yesterday after a way to lo long time. This city is definitely my favorite city in Europe as it manages to surprise me every time i am there, even if it is only for one rainy evening spent in an restaurant waiting for the night train to berlin (of course the fact that there actually is a night train connection to berlin makes Bruxelles stand out above such mediocre places as Amsterdam!). On the way from the restaurant to the Gare de midi i came across two remarkable things the first being a little store specialized in plastic model sets that proudly displayed a 1/35 reenactment of belgium’s not-so-glorious colonial past (please excuse the shitty quality of the night time phone cam pic):

The second was the etablissement that i entered in order to get one last drink before boarding the train. by the outside of it (and i could not see much as it rained and my glasses were totally covered with spray water) it looked like some upscale minimalist bar: big steel framed glass windows, neutral withe lightening shining from a clean white interior with some kind of expressionistic painting on the long wall. once inside i realized that i had totally mistaken the place. instead of a bar i had entered a north african tea house and now i was getting confused and slightly hostile looks from the all male patrons. the place was unlike every tea house i have been to before. the interior design was straight from bauhaus, the espresso machines would make every coffee shop owner in berlin-mitte become jealous and there was indeed a more or less expressionist mural with a middle eastern or north african market scene on the wall facing the bar.

So instead of another drink i settled for a delicious peppermint tea had a chat with mohammed who would not believe my age and of whom in turn i would not believe that he was a student and watched a bit of al-jazeerha on the giant flat screen TV’s before heading out to catchmy train.

This is exactly why i love bruxelles so much: more often than not the visual representation of things completely defies what the way i am (we are?) conditioned….

update [27.05.06]: here is another shot of the (now slightly rearranged) window display that i took this morning:

Good news coming from the mysterious world of online banking. According to my bank (Rabobank in the Netherlands) it is again safe enough to transfer money to Afghanistan. Don’t really know what they were worrying about before? Me giving osama a little bit of pocket money? Or them war lords hijacking my transactions? In any case this is an important step towards fully computerized opium ordering…

Been following the coverage about the aftermath of hurricane Katrina for the last couple of days and the whole thing has brought a lot of issues to the surface. (Boing boing has been an incredibly valuable source of information, jamie has written a nice summary mid last week and i also have rediscovered tomdispatch (they should fix their rss feed though). Now it seems that the situation is loosening up a bit, and it looks like there will be much less casualties than feared earlier (the total will stay well under 1000 if you ask me).

To me the most insane aspect of the whole story is the incredibly militarized reaction to this catastrophe. While there have been countless reports of armed gangs that supposedly have been looting killing and raping i have yet to see something that convinces me that these things have actually taken place on a larger scale than ususal: most of the stories have been based on hearsay and i have not come across one report that presented actual victims. Would be interesting to know if there are statistics about fire-arms-related casualties and injuries. Given the fact that almost every official involved in the rescue operation now seems to wear a kevlar vest and an assault rifle and half of them seem to be riding around in armoured personal carriers, one might assume that there must have been heavy losses among the rescue crews in the first 4 or 5 days which forced them to rund around as if they wehere in an actual war. But given the fact that there haven been no dead-hero stories about killed rescue workers i guess it is safe to assume that none of them got hurt, which makes the whole assault rifle carrying business pretty hard to understand (unless one assumes that rescue crews are mainly white and are just scared to to venture into a city populated by impoverished Africans Americans).

The insanity of this situation was best captured in a picture i saw a couple of days ago (i tried to find it back but image search on the net is still a pretty hopeless affair): a bunch of white males in civilian clothes with assault rifles, body armor and ridiculous sun glasses on the back of a pickup truck riding through a submerged street. the caption said something like ‘Police officers patrolling in New Orleans’. If the their vests would not have had ‘police’ and ‘sheriff’ written all over them one might have taken them for private contractors a.k.a mercenaries. The whole scene reminded me of Mogadishu during the height of the civil(?) war in the early nineties. the imagery of that conflict was more or less dominated by technicals: modified pickup trucks with groups of armed – in this case black – males on them. Back then the technicals were the most visible symbol of the ‘failed state’ in Somalia. It is rather ironic that the same configuration is supposed to be ensuring law and order in the US now.

Update (11.09.05): internet image search might be a hopeless affair, but nevertheless it can unearth little gems: there seems to be a plastic model set to build your own technical in 1/35.

Update (31.09.05): Todays International Herald Tribune runs a story (‘Rumors fueled tales of looting in New Orleans’) that seems to support both my assumptions made in this post. according to the article the total number of casualties stands at 845 and

a review of available evidence shows that some, though not all , of the most alarming stories where figments of frightened imagination […]. During six days when the Superdome was used as a shelter, the chief of the New Orleans Police Department’s sex crime unit, Lieutenant David Benelli sai he and his officers lived inside the dome and investigated every rumor of rape or atrocity. In the end they made two arrests for attempted sexual assault and concluded that the other attacks had not happened. “I think it was urban myth” Benelli said.

There are federal elections on the 18th in Germany. One of the parties contesting (and having a good chance of actually entering parliament) is the newly founded ‘Die Linke.PDS‘. This party is a merger of the PDS (which is the sucessor party to the former east German ruling party SED and the WASG which is a left wing split-off from the SPD. being a merger they have to leaders (Oskar Lafontaine & Gregor Gisi) and arguably the worst election poster so far:

That’s Lafontaine on the left and Gisi on the right. Its hard for me to imagine what went through the minds of the people who have come up with this arrangement. To me it looks like the guy on the left has died and the guy on the right is praising now dead leader for his wisdom and life time achievements. Now Oskar Lafontaine has not really died yet (although he has narrowly escaped an attempt on his life a couple of years ago) and Gisi has no real reason to kowtow to lafontaine like this (his PDS commands the bigger part of the potential electorate of the merged ‘Die Linke.PDS’) but maybe they have been inspired by the recent elections in Lebanon where having a dead godfather on your side (and lots of posters with him in the background hanging around town) has proven to be a decisive asset for the anti-syrian opposition. Speaking of Lebanon, they make much nicer posters with multiple politicians on them over there.

Update (10.09.05): Seems they have figured it out themselves and reverted to posters with single politicians on them: individual portraits of Oskar Lafontaine in West Germany and Gregor Gisy east Germany.

Couple of days ago spiegel online ran a story about how the insurgents in Iraq where now using dogs with explosives being strapped on to them to attack the occupying forces. While the article did not even bother to point to specific incidents or provide other proof for this claim it reminded me of two pictures of donkeys slummering on my hard-disk.

In late 2003 donkeys suddenly entered the stage of the global war on terror with incidents involving donkeys taking place in Bagdad …

Most people would never suspect the lowly donkey of being an instrument of terror – which is exactly why anti-U.S. insurgents used the beasts to launch rocket attacks Friday on two hotels and the Oil Ministry in Baghdad. […] Iraq’s donkey cart drivers now find themselves on the front-line of suspicion after insurgents used the traditional vehicles to launch rockets at the capital’s two main foreign media hotels on a major commercial street on Friday. (jordan times 23 november 2003)

… and Gaza:

Israel killed a senior Hamas militant with a helicopter missile strike on a donkey cart he was riding Thursday after his radical Islamic faction fired a rocket into a large Israeli city for the first time. […] Palestinian bystanders collected parts of Kalakh’s body from the ground, wrapped them in white cloth and carried them on a stretcher to a hospital in the Palestinian city of Khan Younis, in the south of the densely populated Gaza Strip. The donkey lay dead on the ground next to the smashed cart.

The picture from bagdad did not feature a dead donkey (which was kept alive but left other people wondering about his future) but perfectly expressed the helplessness of the US army in dealing with the situation in Iraq. You see two rather puzzled us soldiers calling home from the donkey cart.

Yesterday the Dutch conductor was wearing an orange wristband. When he was checking my ticket i could not help to wonder why he was wearing a wristband in support of the nutters that are currently occupying the gaza strip and resist the israeli disengagement plan. a young inter-railer (probably being israeli himself) two seats down the carriage actually asked him why and as a response got to hear that this actually had nothing to do with the gaza settlers but was in support for the respect2all campaign that was started after the assassination of Theo van Gogh.

It seems that this whole wristband business is out of control. A quick google search reveals that orange wristbands exist in support of juvenile diabetes patients, responsible gambling, cultural diversity, feral cats, hunger, leukemia, lupus, melanoma, motorcycle safety, racial tolerance, reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, and self injury. It might also be a good idea to have a wristband in support of the dutch royal family (house of orange) as they seem to struggle with their leadership role.

Saturday the 20th is the premiere of ‘no wonder‘ Constanza’s newest piece at the HAU1 in berlin. I have not seen much of the piece but if the one early run through i have had the chance to see is any indication it will be a great show. No wonder is directed by Constanza but more importantly she is also performs in the piece, which makes me pretty excited.

After the premiere ‘no wonder’ will play on Sunday the 21st and Monday the 22nd. tickets are available from the HAU box office.