“Armchair activists now have a tool that can transport their SOPA protestations into the real world: Boycott SOPA, an Android app that scans barcodes and tells you whether an object’s manufacturer/publisher is a supporter of the much maligned Stop Online Piracy Act.

…You could even take it one step further and make Boycott the one-stop-shop for all of your political needs. Imagine if you could scan a cereal box and find out that the company’s CEO likes to hunt rhinos, ride elephants, and eat shark fin soup — at the same time. Imagine if you could scan a video game box and immediately see all of the active legislation, the Representative sponsors and supporters, and how much money they’ve received from industry lobbying. You could even go as far as equipping the app with facial recognition, so that you can point your phone at a Senator’s face on the TV and quickly find out whether what he’s saying actually jibes with his real world behavior and voting record. This isn’t a futuristic concept; we could do this right now with the tech we have.

“Not only has the net left its Wild West days; it’s entered the era of the gated suburban subdivision. As part of this trend, the open, html-based website is being replaced, or at least supplemented, by the proprietary app. In app stores, the already blurry line between software and media disappears altogether. Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will.”

Our central Database includes 1,300 entries covering 2,400 court opinions (including over 30,000 pieces of data) spanning almost 200 years, fully summarized and searchable by numerous variables, featuring nearly every artist you’ll think of (many you won’t), covering copyrights and contracts, trusts, torts and more. There’s also a Blog and up-to-date legal music News to boot. The Discography: Legal Encyclopedia of Popular Music has arrived.

Personally, I would kill for a sister site dealing with art-related cases.

I won’t try to explain, I’ll let Edward Lee do the excellent job he does of that in the article here.

The interesting part is that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case (Golan v. Holder) and delve into the whole Public Domain …domain, and that the whole idea of extending or not extending copyright terms will again be explored.

This should be an interesting case for those of us who deal with those never-answered questions about copyright in designed objects. Lucas won his $20 million infringement suit against Ainsworth in the US in 2004. But the UK courts have held that the helmets are not works of art, and therefore not protected by copyright in the UK.

More from The Guardian here.

The proof is no longer in the pudding. It’s in the search results. And baked into those results are the biases, ideologies, and business interests of the people running the search engines. The code is not neutral.

How’s that for so In it’s Out?

*We were on our way to a performance of Asaf Avidan and the Mojos and a local symphony orchestra. Another weird combination, equally delicious.

A 12-YEAR-OLD EXPLAINS THE INFORMATION AGE’S FACTS OF LIFE
TO HER MOTHER

(From the indispensibly wonderful McSweeneys.)

I once found a little excerpt from Balzac. He speaks about a young writer who stole some of his prose. The thing that almost made me weep, he said, “I was so happy when this young person took from me.” Because that’s what we want. We want you to take from us. We want you, at first, to steal from us, because you can’t steal. You will take what we give you and you will put it in your own voice and that’s how you will find your voice.

And that’s how you begin. And then one day someone will steal from you. And Balzac said that in his book: It makes me so happy because it makes me immortal because I know that 200 years from now there will be people doing things that somehow I am part of. So the answer to your question is: Don’t worry about whether it’s appropriate to borrow or to take or do something like someone you admire because that’s only the first step and you have to take the first step.

It’s the “standing on the shoulders of giants” argument, of course, and it’s nice to see it used in such distinguished company. The rest of the interview with Coppola from which this is taken is available here. It’s actually about “Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration”. There are some other, more startling comments about why artists don’t necessarily have to make money — but that’s another whole gig altogether.