Matt Haughey recounts how he almost lost the business he’d been running for over a decade due to a bogus copyright claim:
“The formal retraction took nearly two weeks to secure and convince lawyers for my host that it was adequate for removing the DMCA claim. That’s two weeks into a 30 day window before I lost my rack of servers and hosting account completely. I’ll never forget last year when I went through this because it was two of the stupidest weeks of my life, all because of some problematic laws granted new powers to copyright holders and I had to engage in a prolonged legal fight thanks to a mistake made by a bot.”
This is my personal nightmare scenario: I get slapped with a DMCA takedown because one of my song titles resembles another song title, or one of my legally licensed cover songs attracts the attention of some label’s lawyers (or worse, a web-crawling robot script they employ), and I’d have to make a difficult and/or expensive choice.
It seems that these US copyright bills always start with “protecting our intellectual property” and end with “keeping you from knowing, doing or saying things we don’t want you to know, do or say.”
I’d like to believe that the Stop Online Piracy (STOP) and Protect IP (PIPA) bills would only be used to target “rogue” “foreign” infringing websites, as the authors and supporters contend. But that’s naïve, because the copyright laws we have now are already being abused.
Seattle is currently under a sheet of snowy ice! The back door to my house is literally frozen shut and I’ve been housebound for three days. Luckily I have soup, grilled cheese, a couch-cushion fort to keep away the ice weasels, and the new Kin to Stars single cookin’ up. We’re performing our third-show ever at the newly-relocated Wayward Coffee in Seattle on January 28th. Details are here on the Facebooks. Hopefully we’ll all be thawed out by then.
In other news, I’m promoting snowgnarok as an alternative to snowpocalypse and snowmaggedon, which are both totally played. Please help draw attention to this campaign by changing your Twitter avatar to a light shade of completely white.
I’ve decided that I don’t hate the new Van Halen song and video. The song is 100% not-great VH but all the familiar elements are there, except for maybe Wolfgang.
Beyond the fact that I couldn’t stop singing “sexy dragon magiiic!” under my breath for a few hours, this song and video had very little impact on me, other than what I expect from any other viral media thing. I consumed it as I do all media these days: in front of a computer screen, with headphones on. I watched, I was amused, I moved on.
I was not sitting at a computer screen with headphones on when I first heard Van Halen’s “Summer Nights.” Instead, I was in a car with my high school buddies, on one of the last days of the school year. It was almost summer, finally warm enough to go without a jacket, and we were cruising around the sticks listening to FM radio. Van Halen had just released 5150, Sammy Hagar had replaced Diamond Dave and we were all LOSING OUR MINDS over it.
And when my buddy Jeff jammed the cassette of 5150 into the car’s stereo and the opening chords of “Summer Nights” started playing, we pulled up alongside another car at a red light and Pat began rolling the windows down so the occupants could see us stick our heads out just in time to shout out in goofy fist-pumping unison with Sammy:
UHN!
And then peel away, rolling the windows up like nothing happened.
I’m holding out hope that as digital music moves to mobile, away from screens and headphones, there’ll be more chances for things that are momentarily interesting to become really awesome moments for someone.
