Discussion of all things related to Public Domain

[tom poe <tompoe AT amihost.com>]

OPEN STUDIOS: RUNNING BOARD 

Remember when cars sported running boards out of practical necessity? 
Most roads back then weren't paved like our roads, today. 

The Digital Age, still in its' infancy, requires the use of electronic
running boards.  People are out there that have never used a computer. 
Most people don't understand how computers work [I just raised my hand],
let alone how to make CD's, DVD's, MP3's, OGG, WAV, and the list goes
on. 

And, in the arts and sciences, from musicians to artists to authors, the
knowledge that recordings no longer requires an expensive recording
studio is restricted to just a few.  This newsletter intends to help
musicians, artists, and authors to step out and enter the Digital Age. 
We'll provide the running board to help you avoid the "mud".  If you're
involved in the arts, we hope you'll join us each month for: 
1]  Entertainment news 
2]  The Community Scene 
3]  How They Do It 
4]  Featured Artists, Musicians, and Authors 
5]  Columns 
         a] Anatoly Volynets - Culture vs. Copyright 
6]  Commons Gallery 
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"Trust everyone, but cut the cards"  -- Who said that? 
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Open Studios continues its registration process with states throughout
the country.  As a nonprofit organization, we seek donations and
contributions from the public.  Many states therefore, require that we
register with them.  Some five states permit registration without fees,
or don't require registration at all at this point.  The rest,
apparently, require fees of $10, $15, up to $80 USD or more.  We view
this process as an important and necessary, if not onerous, burden.  Can
you help?  The full story is at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/statereg.html .  We call it
our SPONSOR A STATE PROJECT. 
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ENTERTAINMENT NEWS: 
Each month, we'll highlight a few of the previous month's news articles
(hopefully with active links).  Subscribers and supporters are encouragd
to email us with links you found to be interesting.  We'll add them
here.  It's a good way for collecting an archive you can refer to when
you need it as part of your Internet business strategies. 
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www.nashvillecitypaper.com/index.cfm?section_id=10&screen=news&news_id=27074
Real estate on Music Row still sizzles    By Chris Lewis,
clewis AT nashvillecitypaper.com
October 02, 2003 
"After snapping pictures along 16th, 17th and 18th avenues, the
association said it found 100 signs advertising vacancies and buildings
for sale — an indication that downloading has hurt everyone on the
industry’s food chain, particularly publishers and writers who make
their living off royalties." 
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http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60639,00.html
The Incredible Shrinking Studio 
By Mark McClusky 
02:00 AM Oct. 02, 2003 PT 
"For instance, guitar hero Steve Vai recorded his Alive in an Ultra
World live album on location using an Apple PowerBook and Logic, a
multitrack recording program. "Technology changes, and you really have
to stay on top of it," Vai said." 
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http://www.afm.org/public/press/press_10-10-03.php
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 10th, 2003 
Contact: Honore Stockley (315) 422-4488 ext. 104 
>From the Office of Thomas F. Lee, President, American Federation of
Musicians: 

Musicians to Demonstrate in front of Record Label 
The artists, who irreverently refer to themselves as "The Green Linnet
Five," are planning to do a "sing-in" protest at the record label's
headquarters in Danbury, Connecticut. This will be the first protest
demonstration by recording artists against a label since the 1960's.
"This protest is not just about the five of us - it's also about the
countless other Irish artists who have also been stiffed but who can't
afford to sue a company with the financial resources of Green Linnet,"
said Mick Moloney, who is a professional musician, as well as a
professor of Irish music at New York University. "We will sing some
great old labor movement songs that were well known to the first
generation of Irish immigrants in America," Moloney added. "It will be a
great concert with an important message," Moloney said. 

"It would probably shock most Irish music fans to know that the artists
who recorded their favorite Green Linnet albums have not been paid a
dime for many years," said famed fiddle player Eileen Ivers. The Green
Linnet Five hopes that their protest will cause the company to account
and pay all of their artists the royalties, which are long overdue.
Cherish the Ladies lead musician Joanie Madden said, "Green Linnet has
gotten away with this outrageous behavior because Irish artists sat back
and did nothing … well those days are officially over!" 
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http://news.findlaw.com/ap/e/1403/10-21-2003/20031021101504_17.html
Producer Says Destiny's Child Stole Song 
By PAM EASTON Associated Press Writer 
Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003 
"Clarke admitted that when Robinson provided Matthew Knowles with his
song, it was not copyrighted but a copyright was later secured." [???] 
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THE COMMUNITY SCENE: 
Open Studios works with communities around the country and around the
world to build and operate community-based recording studios.  You can
keep up with the latest happenings by checking this section each month. 
Learn what others are doing, and get ideas for your community. 

Did you know that in the future, grandparents will have refrigerators
with computers on the side, the monitor stylishly displaying files from
the Internet?  Imagine the grandparents, each morning, walking over to
their refrigerator, loading up the day's drawing made by one of their
grandchildren?  Nice, eh? 

This month we feature a project of Open Studios.  A Memorial To Our
Precious Public Domain: 
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/memorial.html

This project is designed to promote the Public Domain, and, naturally,
to introduce communities to community-based recording studios.  Each
community that the traveling memorial visits will be able to "demo" what
a community-based recording studio looks and feels like, get the
public's reaction, and, when it leaves town, in almost every case, will
leave at least one community-based recording studio behind. 

This is an expensive project, one that requires a lot of money.  Too
bad!  Good idea though.  We thought at one point it might be interesting
to Brewster Kahle, who has a similar project for promoting the Gutenburg
book site, and emphasizing our precious Public Domain. Unfortunately,
Brewster ran like the wind, when I suggested we talk about combining the
projects.  We're looking at other options, now.  One is to try and sell
the marketing rights to a large corporation.  If you're running in a
crowd that comes in contact with large corporate executives, help us get
this idea in front of them. 

Maybe you have some ideas?   Let us know. 
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HOW THEY DO IT: 
This on-going series explores potential business strategies and ideas
for musicians, artists, and authors interested in pursuing careers
outside mainstream industry practices. 

A popular rapper musician recently did a radio telethon, reportedly
raising $250,000USD for children's charities.  This is called by some,
cause-related marketing.  Jerry Lewis is synonymous with Labor Day
Telethon for neuromuscular diseases, children, and charity.  Benefit
concerts for disaster victims, another cause-related marketing
strategy.  Most are special events, or so it seems.  It's not something
that the general public knows too much about, or at least this general
public person. 

The potential, though, is enormous.  Starting a music career is tough,
no matter what time in our history we consider.  Cause-related marketing
at the local level, with a long-term strategy spelled out will go a long
way towards hastening the building of an audience.  It is a topic that
should be high on the list of priorities for any musical endeavor,
regardless of genre. 

Can you think of other market strategies that are ideally suited for the
Digital Age?  Let us know. 
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FEATURED ARTISTS: 
Got a story to tell?  Want to expand your audience?  Help the world
discover you.  Contact us, today, and we'll feature you here.  

Our questions are too hard-driving.  No takers this month.  Send me
innocent questions for your favorite artist, and we'll go that route for
awhile. 
- - - 
COLUMNS: 
A]  Anatoly Volynets - Culture vs. Copyright 
What Is Culture? Specifics of Art. 

Synopsis of Previous Issues 

One of the basic points I stand for is that culture and 
copyright clash completely. To illustrate my 
understanding of culture I took arts as an example. A 
piece of art proves to be the representation of a new 
virtual world: one that is strange and, at the same 
time, important to us. As such, it is also a message 
that invokes a new alter ego in its author as well as 
its audience. 

4 Form and Content in a Work of Art 

Thus, a piece of art is a message from the author about 
some true feelings, ideas, projections, et cetera, 
important to him. How is this message built? We know 
the message presents a new virtual world, which is 
strange (and therefore interesting) and, at the same 
time, understandably touching (thus important) to us -- 
ours in a sense. 

What makes a piece of art a projection of a new world? 
The work consists of ideas which are organized and 
expressed in some aesthetic form. Obviously, if we have 
the ideas simply listed, they would attract only 
philosophers and would not necessarily invoke any 
feelings. On the other hand, I am sure that everybody 
can recall many examples of artwork which they found 
deeply involving, while those works bear almost no 
ideas, or bear ideas that are insignificant, or maybe 
important but not for us. Actually, art purifies some 
known matters or makes significant those, which used to 
be insignificant ones. How does art do this? 

We can assume that aesthetic form plays a major role 
here. Form organizes different details into related 
ones and ones tied to each other in virtual space-time. 
Thus, form comprises something whole, something total 
-- some kind of reality. Aesthetic form brings reality 
into the new world invented in a work of art. It is 
form that makes us feel that the virtual world is ours 
and at the same time strange. Form makes it touching 
and interesting. Thanks to form, ideas shows themselves 
and speak to us. 

On the other hand, some intrinsic feeling of the author 
must stand in the center of this imagined world to 
dictate to the author the form that he works on. But 
this has already been said. 

5 Art: Rules for Creator 

We started our deliberations with the question "what is 
culture?" Our first step was to scrutinize "what is 
art?" Is art something entirely comprised by works of 
art? Is there such a thing as "art itself?" 

The first thing I have to say is "yes and no." When we 
say "sculpture," this implies some general notion, 
which, in turn, makes a work of art be a sculpture in 
our eyes when we see it. More importantly, it makes it 
one in the eyes of its creator. Most importantly, it 
was a sculpture in the creator's mind before it was 
created. How about some other phenomena, reflected in 
such general terms as "Baroque," "comedy," "Antiquity," 
et cetera? Hence, there appear to be some kind of 
general patterns working beyond works of art, and thus, 
we can definitely state that art itself does exist. So 
it is "Yes." But, at the same time, said patterns do 
exist and develop in works of art only. While talking 
about art, we have no substance to look and point at 
other than works of art. Thus the answer is "No, art 
does not exist beyond works of art." 

Said patterns actually work like sets of more or less 
articulated rules that an artist has to obey. This 
observation points us to another question from the very 
beginning. The question asks whether there are some 
laws of culture to obey in order to make it work its 
best or not? Yes, there are some out there. Let us 
examine some laws for an artist. He obeys at least tree 
sets of rules at once. 

The first set of rules is always concerned with a 
certain canon. From ancient Greek tragedy and sculpture 
to Medieval poetry to Classical music and so on, arts 
have always been developed through cycles: invention of 
a canon, developing within the canon, offshoot of a new 
canon... You either learn an existing, set of rules 
(means of expression) invented by someone else, or 
invent some yourself. But you still have to follow the 
rules, so that your creation will fit into a cultural 
context. This makes your work readable, visible, 
understandable and thus influential. 

The second set of rules to obey is concerned with law 
of genre. You cannot just rewrite a book as a 
screenplay word-for-word: it will not work. Good 
examples of such questionable-in-terms-of-art works are 
movies based on the Bible (say, those I've watched). 
Each art form and each single genre has its own, more 
or less articulated set of rules to follow which and 
artist must follow to shape creation in some perfect form. 

The third one is the most mysterious. This set of rules 
represents that unique world, which is hidden in every 
single work of art. As we said, whatever it is: a 
novel, short story, song, drama, painting, poem, et 
cetera, any work of art is a whole different new world. 
To be precise, it's a seed of the world, a potential, 
which, generally speaking could be infinitely 
developed. To reiterate from before, it is new and it 
is real in some sense. It becomes real when all its 
elements sound together with not a single false note. 

We can always hear it, when a false note sounds, when a 
painter makes the wrong stroke, when an author breaks 
the rules of the world he created. I found a very 
compelling example of such a misdemeanor in Clive 
Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia." It happened in the 
very end, when, I think, Lewis started to worry that 
his message of Christian love was not clear. Hence, he 
actually turned to direct preaching. He destroyed that 
beautiful world he created; he raped it for the sake of 
morality. What should Lewis have done to keep Narnia 
alive? He should have followed its rules. He shouldn't 
have preached, but kept Narnia's form as perfect as it 
was. . . 

Now we can derive something for ourselves, for a 
society. God forgive me, but any author must be as free 
as God is, while creating. This demand is an obvious 
one. How can he create a truly new world otherwise? Any 
other rules, but those described above, will interfere 
with and thus undermine the author's creative abilities. 

The other side of the coin is, however, that the 
virtual world should be free to dictate these rules. 
The more talented an author is , the better he is able 
to follow the rules of the world of his creation. We 
can even put it this way: the more talented an author 
is, the more independently acts his creation. In fact, 
if we agree that an imagined world is, in a sense, a 
live one, then we see it as independent. 

To be continued. 

Topics to be covered: Creation as Dialogue, How Culture 
Grows? Culture and Freedom, Culture and Humanity, 
Reality of Art and Civilization, Culture and 
Creativity, Culture and Personality, Culture beyond 
Arts, and others. 

Anatoly Volynets, Board member of Open Studios, and President of
Total-knowledge.com, will continue his thoughts next month about the
copyright implications on culture.  You can contact Anatoly at: 
av AT total-knowledge.com
*** 
This article licensed under Authoright: 
http://www.culturedialogue.org/ 
*** 
Literary editing by Alexandra Volynets 
*** 
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COMMONS GALLERY BEST OF THE BEST: 
The Creative Commons Project offers musicians, artists, and authors a
nifty way to meet their legal needs for licensing their works for
distribution across the Internet.  If readers discover interesting
material that sports the Creative Commons tag, let us know, and we'll
link it here.  Attach your photo with your suggested link, to be added
to the gallery.  Let's spread the word! 

NO ENTRY THIS MONTH 
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OPEN STUDIOS:SONG STORM is now in alpha mode, scheduled for January 15,
2004 Launch.  You can take a look at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/php/testhomeplaylist.php  . 
Please visit soon, and comment on what features we should add.  SONG
STORM is a project designed to go straight at the RIAA.  Looking for a
fight?  Get on the winning side, OURS!  It's a playlist contest.  Submit
your favorite non-RIAA song sets, and win a prize.  Sound good?  Enjoy! 
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OPEN STUDIOS:RUNNING BOARD is available as a loose-leaf binder
subscription for your home or office.  Tastefully done, I might add, to
impress your friends and visitors, or to give as a lovely gift to
friends and relatives.  Help support Open Studios by ordering your
subscription, today.  Visit our online gift shop at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/onlineshop.html
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To subscribe or unsubscribe to Open Studios email list: 
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/community_studios
- - - 
To subscribe to RUNNING BOARD newsletter ONLY: 
send email to tompoe AT studioforrecording.org
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Open Studios home page: 
http://www.studioforrecording.org/
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We're looking for volunteers to work on the newsletter.  Send an email
and let us know what you'd like to do. 
- - - 
Won't you help support Open Studios, today?  Please visit our homepage
and click on the DONATE NOW link.  Or, if you prefer, send a check or
money order to: 
Open Studios 
241 Crampton 
Reno, NV 89502-2438 
NOTE:  Check our wish list for contributions we need:
http://www.ibiblio.org/studioforrecording/wishlist.html
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Licensed as Public Domain with the Creative Commons Project, August 1,
2003. 
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