The Blog That Goes Ping

Mash The Planet:

citizen engineers,

each week i do a series of how-tos here and there about getting more out of the technology we all have, the content we all create and the ways we can use them, share them and learn from them.

now i need your help, you see, lots of record companies like emi, disney and many others are sending cease and desist letters when people take music they listen to and mash it up for their own pleasure, not selling this music, just mixing it, just listening it to they way they want to and creating new works.

awhile ago, dj danger mouse mashed up the beatles’ “white album” with jay-zee’s “black album” and called the result the “grey album.”

anyone who hosted the files, or even “wanted to” was threatened with legal action, now disney wants sent a cease and desist to waxy.org for just linking to the kleptones - a night at the hip hopera - mash ups using music from queen and ton of other sources.

the solution to end this madness?

more mash ups. millions of them. a digital, creative protest.

this is where you come in, i’m going start a how-to series on making your own mash ups, so if you make these, please drop a note on how you do it, what software you use and all that.

let’s unleash a flood of millions of mash ups. with podcasting really taking off, p2p networks, mp3 players everywhere and the nature of music always wanting to be sample, mixed and heard it’ll be hard to stop everyone turning on, tuning in and mashing up.

Gosh, was I ahead of the curve or what?

I know that even those people who kindly read my blog depsite disagreeing with me vehemently on most left-right political issues tend to agree with me on intellectual property issues.

There is yet another in a series of “gigantic expansion of industry intellectual property rights at the expense of the individual citizen consumer” bills being pushed through Congress right now.

PLEASE go to this page and read the text of the “please oppose this” letter and send it to your Senators if you agree with it.

There’s a war on our intellectual property rights, as consumers, going on in the legislature, and the huge media conglomerates have just fired another salvo and are hoping to catch us napping.

Via private email from Pferdzwackür, this paper gives the best summary yet of the reason this exit poll thing has to be looked into.

Basically it lays down the case that exit polls being this systematically flawed, on the face of it, is about a 1 in 250,000,000 longshot. It may be that the exit polls were that flawed for some reason, but in the absence of a complete demonstration of exactly how they were flawed and why (involving the complete release of their data), the notion that the election was stolen is actually the likeliest hypothesis, despite a lot of pooh-poohing by the media.

I’d quote more but I don’t feel like navigating my way around the annoying “copy and paste disabling” DRM mechanism in the PDF file, or typing it all out by hand. Stupid proprietary software.

Boing Boing: Apple to iPod owners: “Eat shit and die” expresses very clearly the things that occasionally drive me away from OS X to Linux. Unfortunately, a lot of things about Linux (and a Free-Software-hating world) invariably drive me back.