Puck

A follow up to my previous post: Fred Wilhelms reports in CounterPunch that “if SoundExchange had exploited [the] sense of community that music creates, I doubt there would be more than a handful of artists left on the list, and those would be ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be found.” Wilhelms has been receiving reports from folks all over the planet: they’ve been googling “lost” musicians, calling friends of friends and, by goddess, the unpaid musicians are signing up with SoundExchange in order to be paid. | In addition to the What is DRM? faq, there’s the Set-Top Cop blog created by Cory Doctorow’s USC students that is chock full of interesting news, opinions and links. | Along these same lines–that is, the open source and creative commons lines–Odiyya, over at the David Suzuki Foundation (O, Canada!), writes, “For the reckless capitalists and right wing pundits of our culture, nothing is more fearsome than confronting the fact that we as people are indeed a part of the natural systems of this planet, and in the long run, our society will ultimately be accountable to the measure of its sustainability. To them I say, get ready for the reckoning. There’s a lot more to come.” The occasion for this comment was the “theft” (as some would view it) of research published by the Foundation. Problem is, as David Suzuki says, the Foundation wants its research used in any way, shape or fashion people see fit. Scientists (and others) jockeying for academic or corporate position, take heed: if you don’t share it, we’ll steal it. And if we don’t steal it, it wasn’t worth shit to begin with.