Update: A more condensed version of this post was published on Techdirt. Mike Masnick does a great job of explaining why some libertarian and “free market” types freak out when they see a zero dollar price tag. The concept of zero took ages for societies to even recognize, nevermind understand. […]
Music
130 posts
Last night, Victor Swift asked me to play a set at the first Hart House Open Stage event of the year at the U of T. As far as songwriting goes, I’ve been performing mostly solo lately, but last night was different: My good friend and co-writer, Alex Palmer, joined […]
I submitted the following to the Canadian Copyright Consultation, a little hastily as midnight approached on the initial deadline. It’s built off the same notes I used to speak from at the townhall. Copyright matters to me for a variety of reasons. I’m a musician, writer and programming. I was […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Last Thursday, I attended the Canadian Copyright Consultation Toronto Town Hall (video). Despite the stated intention of soliciting a “breadth of perspectives,” the record industry dominated the event. Michael Geist described it as the “Toronto Music Industry Town Hall” and a local publication called […]
Thursday night, I had a chance to speak at the government’s Copyright Consultation Toronto Townhall. I’ll post more detailed thoughts shortly, but in the meantime, Nick Dynice was kind enough to upload a video of my comments to YouTube. I wasn’t expecting a chance to speak and hadn’t prepared much, […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. When talking about the success of musicians adopting business models around the economics we discuss here, people often complain that it “only works for big artists” or “only works for the little guys,” so much so that someone dubbed the exceptionalism as “Masnick’s Law.” […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt When Joe Satriani sued Coldplay for copyright infringment last December, lots of people were quick to notice that a bunch of other songs shared the same melody, including some predating Satriani’s tune. Last month, Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) made headlines claiming […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Despite claiming to represent the interests of songwriters and composers, ASCAP has consistently provided bad advice on how they should respond to digital technology and the internet. For ASCAP and many other collection societies, anything that doesn’t involve royalties seems automatically bad (despite all […]
This post originally appeared on Techdirt. Howard Knopf, a well known Canadian copyright expert, recently took a look at some of the failed copyright levy proposals in Canada. The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) administers the tax levy on blank CDs, which now accounts for almost 90% of the price. […]