Selection from "Free Culture"

(I of course enjoy the Pirates chapter, but feel like everyone and their mother would want to do the recording industry, so why not do the fleeing film makers and the creation of Hollywood?  That'd be fun too)

CHAPTER FOUR: “Pirates”

If “piracy” means using the creative property of others without their permission—if “if value, then right” is true—then the history of the content industry is a history of piracy. Every important sector of “big media” today—film, records, radio, and cable TV—was born of a kind of piracy so defined. The consistent story is how last generation’s pirates join this generation’s country club—until now.

Film

The film industry of Hollywood was built by fleeing pirates.1 Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that patents  granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through a  monopoly “trust,” the Motion Pictures Patents Company, and were based on Thomas Edison’s creative property—patents. Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property

gave him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded. As one commentator tells one part of the story, 

A January 1909 deadline was set for all companies to comply with the license. By February, unlicensed outlaws, who referred to themselves as independents protested the trust and carried on

business without submitting to the Edison monopoly. In the summer of 1909 the independent movement was in full-swing, with producers and theater owners using illegal equipment and

imported film stock to create their own underground market. With the country experiencing a tremendous expansion in the number of nickelodeons, the Patents Company reacted to the independent movement by forming a strong-arm subsidiary known as the General Film Company to block the entry of non-licensed independents.With coercive tactics that have become legendary,

General Film confiscated unlicensed equipment, discontinued product supply to theaters which showed unlicensed films, and effectively monopolized distribution with the acquisition of all

U.S. film exchanges, except for the one owned by the independent William Fox who defied the Trust even after his license was revoked. The Napsters of those days, the “independents,” were companies like Fox. And no less than today, these independents were vigorously resisted.

“Shooting was disrupted by machinery stolen, and ‘accidents’ resulting in loss of negatives, equipment, buildings and sometimes life and limb frequently occurred.”3 That led the independents to flee the East Coast. California was remote enough from Edison’s reach that filmmakers

there could pirate his inventions without fear of the law.And the leaders of Hollywood filmmaking, Fox most prominently, did just that. Of course, California grew quickly, and the effective enforcement of federal law eventually spread west. But because patents grant the

patent holder a truly “limited” monopoly (just seventeen years at that time), by the time enough federal marshals appeared, the patents had expired. A new industry had been born, in part from the piracy of Edison’s creative property.

Mash-Ups

"Videotapez"
This is probably my favorite mash-up.  I had heard it before the class heard it at the end of the Rip!
The mixer is Amp Live mashing up Radiohead and Del the Funky Homosapien.  I can probably rap this entire song.


The Cure vs. Peter Bjorn and John - "Young Folks Love Cats"
Who doesn't like the cure?  Seriously.  And "Young Folks" was a sleeper hit on the interwebs in 2008.  So this is nothing but goodness.

2nd Web Assignment Revision + ScreenCast

The Hype Machine: Helping Me Pirate Music and Find New Artists Since 2005

                So long as you don’t go and tell the RIAA on me, I will admit here and now in this essay that I rarely purchase music anymore.  I am a digital pirate.  Scoff at the now tired and egotistical sounding nomenclature if you will, but it is true.  Roughly 80% of the music I “own” has been downloaded via the internet.  I am not doing anything as sinister as raping, pillaging, or contracting scurvy like your regular pirate does.  The worst thing I do is use torrents to get full albums.  So maybe “aggressive downloader” is a better title than Internet Highwayman.  When I am not downloading full length albums, however, I am surfing the internet for new music that tickles my fancy.  And, while these fancies often lead me to want to illegally download their albums, the tools I use to find new music are not by any means sinister programs.  What is my main weapon in this scouting process?  A little website called The Hype Machine.  

                The Hype Machine is a popular blog aggregator (an aggregator collects information from a set kind of website, for instance, blogs).  More specifically, The Hype Machine is an MP3 blog aggregator.  It searches all blogs on the internet for downloadable MP3 content and collects the information for you to view on its site.  The more a song or artist is blogged about on the web with a specific song of theirs, the more frequently they will appear on The Hype Machine, just like any search engine.  If you are interested in looking up a specific artist for upcoming album news or tour dates or even the rare cover song they have recorded, The Hype Machine can give you all of that and more through every single blogger that talks about it on the web.  Each search will provide you with all the resulted MP3s found and a play button beside each so you may listen to it as much as you like through the site.  Also, because the site searches for MP3s on blogs, each search result will give you a link to the specific blog that is hosting the MP3 for download more often than not.  There are also often links for Amazon and iTunes if you are an honest person.

                Now I know what you are thinking.  This doesn’t sound like the same kind of social media website as Facebook or Twitter.  And you are right.  It is not.  The interactions between users are much more subtle.  But they are there nonetheless.  Just like other sites, you can create a user account and favorite the songs you find while you search and explore new music or old music you have yet to find on the internet.  You can link up with another famous music website, last.fm, and whenever you listen to songs on The Hype Machine, just like when you listen to music on last.fm’s website or iTunes, it will “scrobble” that song onto your profile there.  Users can also explore The Hype Machine for the most “favorited” music in the past 3 days by other users.  This is the site’s own way of trending music just how Twitter trends topics.  It isn’t based on what is the most blogged about (which, can still affect the amount of people who select to “like” the song) but instead, it has a different purpose.  This is The Hype Machine helping spread new and popular music to other users across the web.  

                Think you know the most blogged about songs from 2009?  Or maybe you want to know what some of your favorite music blogs like Stereogum or I Guess I’m Floating thought were the best songs from last year?  The Hype Machine can help you there as well.  All of these different features to the website have one massive upside to them that protects The Hype Machine from the RIAA’s legal reach.  No matter what you click on at The Hype Machine, in the end you will end up at a blog with only one MP3 to download.  Very rarely will you find full-length albums available through the site.  There is no harm in hosting just one MP3 to your blog for download (or even one MP3 per post as many sites do).  

                In terms of Ethan Zuckerman’s “Cute Cat Theory” uniting activists with casual browsers, the players here are a bit different from activists and cute cat viewers.  Take for example, me – the proverbial internet downloader.  If I can find it online for free, I will do my best to make it mine.  I use Hype Machine to find new and upcoming music, but my main purpose for it is to scout blogs that can lead me to free albums.  Meanwhile, next to me is you, the casual music listener.  While I hide behind the guise that The Hype Machine creates for me in searching for music here and downloading sample songs from albums and rare covers and b-sides, you, the casual music listener will go to The Hype Machine to see what cool new music is available and maybe even blog about it.  You can tweet about it, and when you post the song you found on your tumblr or facebook, your friends will see it and either like the song or reblog it themselves, passing it further down the line.  Now, if the RIAA found reason to come after me because of my uses of The Hype Machine in downloading music illegally alongside of using torrents and zipfiles, you, the casual music listener will also suddenly come up in arms to protect your wonderful music browsing website.  Music is an incredibly powerful tool on the internet today.  It unites people very quickly and very vehemently because we all love a good jam and we’re willing to fight to protect said jams.  Unlike “Cute Cat Theory”, however, where governments block websites that also are used in some form of dissidence, The Hype Machine does not really have such traffic.  If this website were ever blocked for any reason, it would be the government blocking a website thanks to a corporation’s attempts at stopping free media traffic.  Conflicts of interest like this often do not succeed.  So for now, we are safe to enjoy our domain among the internet, sharing music with one another.

                In the same vein, Wesch’s “An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube” shows us that, just like Gary Brolsma and a Moldovan pop song called “Numa Numa” brought millions of people together through video and song; The Hype Machine attempts to bring people together through music.  As more and more people visit The Hype Machine and more and more people blog about music they find, they begin to feed their own searches causing more people to find it via the most blogged about or most “favorite” pages.  The Hype Machine takes user content and uses it to help attract people to more music so that they can post about it as well and create even more user content.  As this recycling effect continues to grow and expand, more and more music that was once trapped in regional bubbles prior to the internet, or merely prior to a band’s ability to get their Myspace page up, can now be heard all around the world and even become blogged enough to gather fans and support to attempt tours and record deals.  One such example is youtube musician, Kiersten Holine.  Holine’s many covers of famous songs she uploaded onto YouTube helped her reach internet stardom.  She now has well followed Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Facebook, and Last.fm accounts all thanks to the grass roots movement people did with her music.  Once people heard her do songs on YouTube, they went searching for the song, The Hype Machine was a more than willing participant in fueling her success.  The networking of all these sites in one can be a powerful tool, not only in someone’s career as a musician or band, but also in their lives in general.  These ultimate ways of connecting and reconnecting and reblogging and retweeting spin an almost uncountable amount of free advertising for someone who maybe just likes to sing their favorite Bob Marley song.  One day, you’re singing into your webcam, the next you’re singing into a microphone on stage next to Ben Folds.

Also being incredibly beautiful doesn't hurt either.

                All in all, The Hype Machine is in no way a sinister website out to take musicians’ money.  If anything, it helps to spread the diversity of music that often times is not popular enough to make it out of their garage, let alone attempt to take on top 40 songs and artists.  The Hype Machine is a website for the underdog and already established artist alike, just as it is for me, the aggressive downloader and you, the casual listener.  If the worst thing this website does is fuel someone’s want for more music in their life, then The Hype Machine can be nothing short of good for all the world.

The Hype Machine: Helping Me Pirate Music & Find Great New Artists Since 2005

                So long as you don’t go and tell the RIAA on me, I will admit here and now in this essay that I rarely purchase music anymore.  I am a digital pirate.  Scoff at the now tired and egotistical sounding nomenclature if you will, but it is true.  Roughly 80% of the music I “own” has been downloaded via the internet.  I am not doing anything as sinister as raping, pillaging, or contracting scurvy like your regular pirate does however.  The worst thing I do is use torrents to get full albums.  So maybe “aggressive downloader” is a better title.  When I am not downloading full length albums, however, I am surfing the internet for new music that tickles my fancy and leads me to want to illegally download their albums as well.  My main weapon in that scouting process?  A little website called The Hype Machine.  

                The Hype Machine is a popular blog aggregator (meaning it collects information from only blogs).  More specifically, The Hype Machine is an MP3 blog aggregator.  It searches all blogs on the internet for downloadable MP3 content and collects the information for you to view on its site.  The more a song or artist is blogged about on the web with a specific song of theirs, the more frequently they will appear on The Hype Machine, just like any search engine.  If you are interested in looking up a specific artist for upcoming album news or tour dates or even the rare cover song they have recorded, The Hype Machine can give you all of that and more through every single blogger that talks about it on the web.  Each search will provide you with all the resulted MP3s found and a play button beside each so you may listen to it as much as you like through the site.  Also, because the site searches for MP3s on blogs, each search result will give you a link to the specific blog that is hosting the MP3 for download more often than not.  There are also often links for Amazon and iTunes if you are an honest person.
                Now I know what you are thinking.  This doesn’t sound like the same kind of social media website as Facebook or Twitter.  And you are right.  It is not.  The interactions between users are much less subtle.  But they are there nonetheless.  Just like other sites, you can create a user account and favorite the songs you find while you search and explore new music or old music you have yet to find on the internet.  You can link up with another famous music website, last.fm, and whenever you listen to songs on The Hype Machine, just like when you listen to music on last.fm’s website or iTunes, it will “scrobble” that song onto your profile there.  Users can also explore The Hype Machine for the most “favorited” music in the past 3 days by other users.  This is the site’s own way of trending music just how Twitter trends topics.  It isn’t based on what is the most blogged about (which, can still affect the amount of people who select to “like” the song) but instead, it has a different purpose.  This is The Hype Machine helping spread new and popular music to other users across the web. 
                Think you know the most blogged about songs from 2009?  Or maybe you want to know what some of your favorite music blogs like Stereogum or I Guess I’m Floating thought were the best songs from last year?  The Hype Machine can help you there as well.  All of these different features to the website have one massive upside to them that protects The Hype Machine from the RIAA’s legal reach.  No matter what you click on at The Hype Machine, in the end you will end up at a blog with only one MP3 to download.  There are very rarely full-length albums available through the site.  There is no harm in hosting just one MP3 to your blog for download (or even one MP3 per post as many sites do). 
                In terms of Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory uniting activists with casual browsers, the players here are a bit different from activists and cute cat viewers.  Take for example, me – the proverbial internet downloader.  If I can find it online for free, I will do my best to make it mine.  I use Hype Machine to find new and upcoming music, but my main purpose for it is to scout blogs that can lead me to free albums.  Meanwhile, next to me is you, the casual music listener.  While I hide behind the guise that The Hype Machine creates for me in searching for music here and downloading sample songs from albums and rare covers and b-sides, you, the casual music listener will go to The Hype Machine to see what cool new music is available and maybe even blog about it.  You can tweet about it, and when you post the song you found on your tumblr or facebook, your friends will see it and either like the song or reblog it themselves, passing it further down the line.  Now, if the RIAA found reason to come after me because of my uses of The Hype Machine in downloading music illegally alongside of using torrents and zipfiles, you, the casual music listener will also suddenly come up in arms to protect your wonderful music browsing website.  Music is an incredibly powerful tool on the internet today.  It unites people very quickly because we all love a good jam.  In this case, however, the government would be blocking a website thanks to a corporation’s attempts at stopping free media traffic instead of dissidence towards the country.  Much less sinister, yet still a punishable crime. 
                In the same vein, Wesch’s “An Anthropological Introduction to Youtube” shows us that, just like Gary Brolsma and a Moldovan pop song called “Numa Numa” brought millions of people together through video and song; The Hype Machine attempts to bring people together through music.  As more and more people visit The Hype Machine and more and more people blog about music they find, they begin to feed their own searches causing more people to find it via the most blogged about or most “favorite” pages.  The Hype Machine takes user content and uses it to help attract people to more music so that they can post about it as well and create even more user content.  As this recycling effect continues to grow and expand, more and more music that was once trapped in regional bubbles prior to the internet, or merely prior to a band’s ability to get their Myspace page up, can now be heard all around the world and even become blogged enough to gather fans and support to attempt tours and record deals. 

this guy may have gotten help from people reblogging his music.

                All in all, The Hype Machine is in no way a sinister website out to take musicians’ money.  If anything, it helps to spread the diversity of music that often times is not popular enough to make it out of their garage, let alone attempt to take on top 40 songs and artists.  The Hype Machine is a website for the underdog and already established artist alike, just as it is for me, the aggressive downloader and you, the casual listener.  

Weird Facts About My Blog Traffic.

So in looking at the stats page of my blog, I learned that of the 115 views I've received all time:

- 108 are from America
- 3 are from Canada
- 2 are from Russia
- 1 is from Japan
- 1 is from Netherlands

I got some weird traffic, but I found the traffic out of Russia to be the weirdest.  Somehow, www.yandex.ru, a Russian search engine, found my blog via the following search engine queries:

- "the area of not"
- "the area of not blowing"

That is not a typo and I did not leave out "rock."

Also, Sunny D and Rum:

Revised First Web Assignment

Here it is. 

My Website....Is Wonderful

Seriously.  Try and watch this for longer than 3 minutes.  I dare you not to have a seizure...or start dancing.

The Internet Through The Eyes of a 12-Year Old Boy/22-Year Old Boy

                 In my younger years, I was a computer serial killer.  My penchant for downloading music illegally through LimeWire and Kazaa has put down several family desktop computers.  And, while my wisdom has grown in the area of not blowing up a computer, I still have chills and fears when I click on torrents for more illegally downloaded music now that the PC I’m putting at risk is my own.  But the allowing of Trojans and spyware and other malicious software onto my parents’ computers throughout my adolescent life was part of the first memories I had of the internet. 

                So far in this class, I have railed that my generation is the last to be privileged (or subjugated some might argue) to a world without the World Wide Web.  But I truly am of the last generation who lived before the internet was a monster gear turning the machine that is the world.  I remember days before my family even had a computer, and even then, we did not dial into the internet until 1998.  My earliest memory of computers was probably playing Wheel of Fortune via MS-DOS on my cousin’s computer or my very first game of solitaire, back when that was the only real form of entertainment via early Windows systems.  But when my parents decided to transform the old dry cleaners that had been in my family for nearly 60 years into an old-time soda shop, the need to hook up to the internet became apparent.  And my 10 year old world changed, just like many others my age. 
                We bought a Compaq desktop computer.  I cannot remember for the life of me the model or any of its specs.  It was a wonderfully low tech piece of machinery compared to today.  But it could play computers games like Riven and Myst with little difficulty so I was not too upset at the thing.  I did not know that it could get better.  My mother bought a subscription to Mindspring’s dial up service (We now know Mindspring as Earthlink).  We bought a second phone line that connected to a phone sitting in the kitchen of our soda shop and would yell and scratch over the line when someone picked up the phone while connected.  It was a horrible sound.  Almost as bad as the sound of dialing up in the first place.  I was always reminded of the old image of nails scratching against chalkboard as the signals bounced back and forth at each other trying to connect to the internet.  But honestly, the dial up noise may be worse.  The welcoming silence of the internet today almost scared the hell out of me the first time I logged on to find nothing happened in the sound department. 
                I was obsessed with music at an early age.  Part of it was making music; part of it was listening to music.  So the obvious choice of what to do with the internet became finding as much music as possible for as little work as possible.  Napster, by this time, had been forced into a pay service and torrents were still a few years off.  File sharing softwares like Kazaa and LimeWire were my only means of conveyance throughout the internet’s black market.  And, while I gained a vast bounty of albums and musicians I had never heard of, or had heard bits of and wanted more, Kazaa and LimeWire slowly got their payment from me.  By 2006, my family had been through three separate computers.  Kazaa killed the original Compaq desktop, and LimeWire finished off the next two E-Machines PCs.  I have learned from my mistakes now and am much more careful about the places I tread in the World Wide Web.  But I still remember those early days of waiting as kilobytes per second poured into my Compaq PC like sand dripping out of the top of an hourglass.
                Thinking about kids today, I am amazed at how easily I transform into a crotchety old man at the thought of cell phones and iPods in the hands of children, children who are well beyond adepts at using these devices.  I truly am reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s essay “Fire-Worship” in the sense that reading his article almost seemed nonsensical to me at the time.  A wood stove being seen as a powerful yet sinister device of technological advancement seemed ridiculous and farfetched from my vantage point this far into the future.  But now where I stand, looking at children who will live their entire lives knowing the internet and the nearly light speed advancement of technology, I find myself in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s place.  The poetry of the world was not in the least snuffed out when the wood stove came along.  However, with such towering progress in digital technology in the past few decades, what Hawthorne feared may, in fact, come to fruition.  Where is the beauty in a computer?  Where is nature in the internet?  Zeroes and ones are not poetic, but instead cold and lifeless.  When my generation is long dead, who will stop and say, “Remember watching videos on television and only television?”  No one, I fear.  The old guard will change some day, and when that day comes, I pray they don’t look down upon us for having lived without the internet.  Because before the internet, we at least knew what life was like without instant information gratification. And that is something that keeps us at least humbled by the power and reach of the internet.  Something, these young hooligans know nothing about.

Barack Obama, 44th Prankster of the United States

Enjoy my image macro.  Yep, even presidents have a sense of humor.

inaugural post with a video and a flash loop. Enjoy.

Hello.  I am Andrew Baker.  I am a senior creative writing major here at Appalachian.  I am originally from Apex, North Carolina and love this state maybe a little too much.  

My most recent favorite thing on the internet is from the 2010 BBC Eurovision Song Contest.  Moldova, a pretty unheard of country put out this song:



It screams 1980's electro-pop and its supremely catchy.  They didn't win.  Europe blows sometimes.  But the real reason I love it is for that beyond hip saxophonist.  Never before have I seen a man proudly and bravely hump dance while playing saxophone in blue pants.  not blue jeans. blue pants. To further enjoy him, click here.