We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A small independent label in Great Britain, Loca Records, is reversing the traditional record industry business model. It is giving the rights to the artists – and anyone else who wants to use the music, too.
The idea is to foster experimentation and freedom in music by building a stable of free music which can be shared, remixed and manipulated by anyone. Songs are not locked by digital rights management technology.
Artists earn a percentage of any record sales; Loca Records makes its money through record sales, gigs it promotes and merchandise. David Berry, managing director of Loca Records and an artist himself, known as Meme says:
You’re free to copy it, give it to your friends and you can play it. If you’re really interested, you can sample it and then re-release it. Because at the end of the day, if you sample the work and create a fantastic remix, we think you’re entitled to try and make some money from it.
Loca Records licenses its music using Creative Commons and offers free copyright licenses to anyone who wants to share his work with the public while reserving some rights. Using these licenses, Loca Records permits anyone to copy and distribute the content, make derivative works and sell it, as long as they attribute the work to the original creator and distribute it under the same “share alike” license.
I do worry that copyright is getting out of control. This gives us an opportunity to create a new culture and a new sound. If we are greedy and we lock down our culture now, there will be nothing for the next generation.
Apparently, some artists at first do not know what to make of the new type of contract, but once they understand how it works, their response turns to positive.
There are others that are experimenting with new forms of music distribution and collaboration. Magnatune, an independent label in Berkeley, California, also offers music for download and sharing, and Opsound invites any musician to submit songs to its website, where others can listen, share and remix them. Both labels license the music using Creative Commons.
As David Kusek of the Berklee College of Music points out, historically, building upon one another’s music was common. Jazz, in particular, was based on improvisation, theme and variation and “who could outdo each other” with each interpretation of a piece.
It was the differences that were more interesting. We lost a lot of the spontaneity that was inherent in music when it became a package that could be stamped a million times and resold. The existing labels of the last 50 or 60 years have been all about controlling the expression, the packaging, the distribution and the scarcity of the music in order to turn a profit. That forced music to be defined as a product. It can be a product, but in its pure form it’s entertainment.
I am all in favour of new business model for the record industry. The reason for the falling profits is not just by-passing of copyright and licenses by their customers but ridiculous pricing and distribution of their product. Let’s hope artists take notice.
RFID coverage from ZDNet UK:
A global alliance of opponents to the rollout of radio frequency identification tagging systems are demanding that companies stop deploying them until crucial issues such as privacy are addressed.
Over 30 civil liberties and privacy groups have demanded a suspension to the deployment of radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging systems until a number of issues surrounding the controversial technology have been addressed.
These organisations, including Britain’s Foundation for Information Policy Reseach and Privacy International, have backed a position statement on the use of RFID on consumer products that was issued on Thursday.
It claims that RFID, if used improperly, represents a major threat to consumer privacy and civil liberties. This follows earlier protests against RFID by campaigners, and is thought to be the first formal global alliance against the technology.
I am pleased to offer a shout-out for a dandy new informational website, the Bellicose Women’s Brigade, put together in part by regular Samizdata commenter analog kid. The term was originated, I believe, by the Ubiquitous One in response to the decidedly militant response to the 9/11 attacks by women in the US. One interesting side effect of this attack on American soil was a change in the attitude of many women towards aggressive self-defense, both in the international and domestic spheres. Women began buying guns and taking self-defense classes in unprecedented numbers.
This is where the BWB website comes in. It is a resource for people who are new to the self-defense and guns thing. My quick review of its contents shows a nice selection of accessible essays on the essential topics (gun safety, gun selection, and so forth). Gun geekery is kept firmly in the background.
Sadly, this information is mostly academic for our British cousins currently laboring under a most atrocious denial of their right to own and use guns for self-defense. Still, for those of us living in more enlightened realms, this looks like a good place to send someone who is thinking about buying a gun for their own security, but wants good information they can review in the privacy of their own home.
Exactly a week ago, last Friday evening, I attended a discussion at the home of CNE boss Tim Evans, one of his Putney Debates. Alex Singleton spoke eloquently about what a fine thing free markets are and how difficult it is for the government to do as well.
Also present at the discussion was a long-time friend of London libertarianism by the name of Bruce. Bruce has been living in Spain for the last decade or so, but is now back in London, and during the discussion he said something very interesting which stuck in my mind, and which I now realise deserves the attention of this blog.
For as along as I can remember, whenever we’ve met up, Bruce has been telling me that the Spaniards have had a much more sensible attitude towards the EU than the British, which is that if they don’t like any particular EUro-regulation or EUro-imposition, they just ignore it. Why, he would ask, can’t the British just learn to do the same? That’s a sentiment I think we’ve heard here quite a lot also, whenever we’ve been arguing about the nuances of the EU.
This time, however, he said something different. Apparently, in Spain, a class of pestilential busybodies who take EUro-stupidity seriously is starting to form and to make its pestilential presence felt, and the Spaniards are starting to notice this, and to get rather fidgety. To put it another way, instead of the sensible Spanish practice – of ignoring all this EUro-nonsense and just carrying on baking bread, fishing for fish, being a bit rude to the occasional ethnic minority, driving as they please, dodging VAT, and so on and so on, the way they always have – spreading to Britain, the British practice, of taking all such drivel seriously, on account of it being the law and all that, is now spreading to Spain. And my guess would be, this tendency isn’t confined to Spain.
This official bEUrocratic infestation process, if it is indeed happening, strikes me as a lot more significant than the grumbling that is now occurring throughout the Euro area about inflation, because this ‘inflation’ could just be a one-off effect from the switch from the local currencies to the Euro. Yes, prices have gone up a gut-wrenching amount, and a lot more than is being officially admitted, but presumably that effect will calm down, and in due course be forgotten. But this hideous tribe of meddling EUro-despots look like being a permanent and ever-growing presence, and the hatred of them seems likely only to grow and grow.
I don’t have any links to stories which might back up any of this, but of course commenters may well be able to correct that omission.
The conference of the Libertarian Alliance and Libertarian International will be in London starts tomorrow and it is not too late to come if you wish. It last from Saturday 22nd to Sunday 23rd November 2003. It is possible to register and pay on-line.
The speakers include fellow Samizdatista David Carr and serial Samizdata commenter Paul Coulam.
I hope to meet up with a few of you there.
This remark by ‘G’ posted by Iraqi blogger Salam Pax pretty much perfectly sums up why I have such contempt for most of the protestors:
[T]ell your friends in London that G in Baghdad would have appreciated them much more if they had demonstrated against the atrocities of saddam. And if you could ask them when will be the next demonstration to support the people of north Korea, the democratic republic of Congo and Iran?
Amen to that, Bro!
I did not see the spectacular solar storm last month. It turns out I was wrong inferring from my failure that there was no auroral display visible in Belfast. A week or so ago I was chatting with a fellow who worked for me in two different companies over the course of perhaps eight years… and found that not only did he see an auroral display – he photographed it!
I hope for the sake of his server the Samizdata effect is not quite so dire as the Reynolds Effect…
More news from the Independent concerning the globalisation of education, which is all mixed up with the global mega-success story that is the English language:
A successful Chinese industrialist was boasting proudly that his son was at a British educational institution, one of the best in the country. However, he couldn’t remember which. After racking his brains, he decided to call his wife on the mobile phone. But his wife couldn’t recall the name of the elite establishment either. In desperation, the entrepreneur had only one choice: he fast-dialled his son in the United Kingdom to ask where the boy was being educated.
This is a true story, illustrating not only the Chinese affection for mobile telephones, but also their enthusiasm for a foreign education. In China, to receive your schooling or your degree at an institution in Britain, or Australia, or the United States automatically puts you into the top league. The name of the university or school is not as important as the fact that you have tasted learning outside the People’s Republic. No wonder universities from the United Kingdom are falling over one another to meet this huge demand.
Last year, the number of Chinese students in the UK reached a new record – 25,000. But there are millions of people in China now who aspire to, and receive, a university education and would leap at the chance to get a degree from the UK. In the three years between 1997 and 2000, there was remarkable growth in student numbers within China, according to the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education. Numbers increased from 3.2 million students to a staggering seven million. (The government target is 15 million.)
Ironically, given China’s status as a Communist country, many of the new universities that are being set up to deal with this demand are private. There are 1,300 private institutions now in operation, and alliances between Chinese and foreign organisations are burgeoning.
While English educators fret about whether English people are well enough behaved, Chinese educators worry that the Chinese are too well behaved. Too dutiful, obedient, conformist, uninventive, inflexible.
Seriously, one suspects that the real product here is not just Anglosphere education, but Anglosphere education plus a bit of that Anglosphere attitude, hence the indifference concerning exactly which University their children go to. It could be a winning combination. Although I reckon word will soon get around which universities are the best.
It makes you wonder what Mao would have thought about it all. “I ordered you to have a permanent revolution and challenge all authority, but I didn’t mean this!” Attitude!
And quite aside from the impact of all this on China, there is the interesting matter of how it will affect Britain. How long before someone uses the word ‘swamped’ to describe what is happening to higher education? All those foreigners, taking our children’s places. And working too hard.
As always, Glenn Reynolds is the first one on to a fascinating new blog.
The Counter Revolutionary is posting a series of New York Times articles from the period of months after the end of WWII. I suggest starting at the bottom and reading your way up to the top as he is posting them roughly in time sequence.
I think you will agree it sounds very, very familiar.
This is a classic weird trivia story, dug up (not to say exhumed) by one of Dave Barry‘s army of weird trivia searchers.
Marc Marchal, 32, died such a dreadful death that the undertakers advised his family that his coffin should be closed when they said their final farewells. But the undertakers forgot about one little thing:
The family of a dead motorcyclist are pressing charges against bungling Antwerp undertakers after the man’s mobile phone began ringing in his coffin as they sat beside it in a chapel of rest.
There is no answer to that. I am guessing there was not, anyway.
New Scientist has learned that the proposed system to introduce identity cards in the UK will do nothing to prevent fraudsters acquiring multiple identity cards.
Unveiling the proposals last week, the home secretary, David Blunkett, said they are necessary to prevent identity fraud. Every resident would have to carry an ID card containing biometric information, such as an iris scan. Cards could then be checked against a central database to confirm the holder’s identity.
But Simon Davies, an expert in information systems at the London School of Economics and director of Privacy International, says the system would not stop people getting extra cards under different names. If he is correct, it could have far-reaching implications.
The problem, says Davies, is the limited accuracy of biometric systems combined with the sheer number of people to be identified. The most optimistic claims for iris recognition systems are around 99 per cent accuracy – so for every 100 scans, there will be at least one false match.
Bill Perry, of the UK’s Association for Biometrics, agrees that there is an upper limit to the reliability of iris scans.
It’s not an exact science. People look at biometrics as being a total solution to all their problems, but it’s only part of the solution.
He added that using more than one biometric identifier – for example, iris scans and fingerprints together will also be considered. This would solve the accuracy problem, but vastly increase the cost.
Oh, jolly good. So scanned and finger-printed is the way to go…
Thanks to Groc’s Bloggette for the link.
Some literary wag (and I think it was Gore Vidal but I am sure I will corrected in short order if it wasn’t) once quipped that politics is showbusiness for ugly people. Regardless of the provenance of the quote, I am quite sure that it must have been coined in honour of the Stop the War Coalition. Never in all my days have I cast my gaze upon such a motley collection of bedraggled, unsightly, grotseque and snaggle-toothed specimens as gathered today in Central London. An alarmingly high number looked as if they had been dragged from the wreckage of a motorway pile-up.
I can attest to this first-hand because, as your intrepid Samizdata correspondent, I took it upon myself to get ‘down and dirty’ with the Anti-Bush protests this afternoon.
I took my camera along because, frankly, I was expecting sparks to fly but as I stepped out of Goodge Street Underground Station into the pre-demo melee, I detected an atmosphere that I judged to be disappointingly muted. Perhaps I had set the bar of my expectations too high. The gathering protestors seemed to me to be quite bouyant but way short of combustible. You don’t spend three decades attending soccer matches in England without developing a sense of smell for impending mob violence. There was not even a whiff of it here.
But there was a full compliment of ‘usual suspects’ complete with the by-now-ritual paraphernalia of street protest; whistles, drums, claxons, flags, banners, costumes, papier-mache puppets, rubber masks and pink cardboard tanks (I was sorely tempted to point out that it more closely resembled a half-track but I suspected that displaying even that rudimentary level of military knowledge would be sufficient to mark me out as an infiltrator). → Continue reading: “Bush, Blair, CIA… How many kids did you kill today?”
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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