Copying Is Not Theft is the first meme in the Minute Memes series, and was supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Animation, lyrics, and tune by Nina Paley. Music arranged by Nik Phelps; vocals by Connie Champagne. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Lyrics:
Copying is not theft.
Stealing a thing leaves one less left
Copying it makes one thing more;
that’s what copying’s for.

Copying is not theft.
If I copy yours you have it too
One for me and one for you
That’s what copies can do

If I steal your bicycle
you have to take the bus,
but if I just copy it
there’s one for each of us!

Making more of a thing,
that is what we call “copying”
Sharing ideas with everyone
That’s why copying
is
FUN!

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Check out the film trailer:

You can watch the film on DVD or VOD.

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For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Oh snap!

To fully understand the absurdity of all this you might want to check out my post titled Gaining Better Understanding of Our Digital Age.
I’ll let Professor Lawrence Lessig summarize:

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Home taping is killing music
Like how the the gramophone stopped us from grooving
Home taping is killing music
And if we don’t stop now we’re going to lose it

Before the 1990s
So put down that C90
Next time we won’t ask nicely
You’re killing music
Hey you, don’t be naughty
Don’t use that cassette to tape the top forty
People work hard to produce music
But can’t carry on if you continue to abuse it
Make a tape of a Duran Duran track
They’ll fade away, and never come back
Kylie’ll be a one hit one wonder,
Dropped from Top of the Pops, back down under
And if you copy a song done by Madonna,
How’s she ever going to make another number one
I don’t know the solution but I do know this:
Home taping’s killing music

Home taping is killing music
Just like the jukebox stopped us moving units
Home taping is killing music
And if we don’t stop now we’re going to lose it

Our popstars need to get paid
So that they can buy jet planes
And kilograms of cocaine
You’re killing music

Listen, mate: if you’ve ever made a mixtape
Then I’m afraid that you’ve made a mistake
You may claim it’s a blatant pssstake
But it isn’t, it’s a major risk, face it:
If you listen to Rick Astley and don’t pay him
How’s he ever gonna maintain fame
He’ll have to give it up, and you’ll be let down
When Rick rolls out of town
And obviously Morrissey
Needs to be paid to be played
Thank the DJ, thank the DJ
But never make a tape of the tracks he plays

Home taping is killing music
Like when the radio came and detuned it
Home taping is killing music
And if we don’t stop now we’re going to lose it

Home sewing’s killing fashion
Home cooking’s killing fast food
Home sleeping’s killing hotels
And peace time’s killing the arms trade

Home taping killed the radio star
After radio topped off the album charts
Like when gramophones killed the publisher
Once publishing had done it to the orchestra

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Of course ‘all rights reserved’ and ‘public domain’ are not the only options. The Creative Commons initiative enables anyone to choose just the right license for their work and allow certain uses of it while forbidding certain others. Unfortunately, while the president across the pond clearly shows 21st century mentality when it comes to sharing, most people around here do not – and apparently this goes up to Israel’s number one citizen.

P.S.
Another major difference between the Israeli President and his American counterpart, is that while Obama knows enough not to wing it and almost always works off a script – Peres apparently ad-libs his messages. This results in his Hanukkah video containing the following phrase: “There are many dangers, like the Iranians”.
While the Iranian regime might be harmful, the Iranians people are clearly not. In fact we were BFFs back in the days.

Update: You can read this post in Hebrew here.

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Well, I am so very happy to announce that as of this week, the album is indeed available online and for free. You can still purchase the physical CD, booklet and all, for 40NIS, but if you just want the MP3 files, they are now legally available on WarRockOpera.com. You can still watch the show live in its acoustic version. Check the website for details.

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Via TorrentFreak. Lyrics after the jump:

Dear Lily -- by Dan Bull -- Lyrics

Dear Lily Allen,

Remember when you pretended, Lily, that you were truly independent, Lily? Faking like you made it all alone but you were legally with Regal, part of Parlophone -- oh yes. So when you lectured me, I thought I’d fileshare my thoughts on your mp3, Lily.

Now first I must sing your praises -- I love your singing but I’ll just say this: I saw on your MySpace pages saying filesharing’s a new ice age, but the industry’s a recent innovation -- music’s been alive, thriving since cavemen. Folk songs so long have had a place in communities that you should be amazed at it. Then one day came intellectual property, meaning if I think a thought, you can’t copy me. And if honesty’s the best policy, I’d say songs are better off without this monopoly. It’d blatantly be a major fail if they’d patented the major scale. And downloads don’t equate to sales, so taking them away won’t make me pay up -- just procludes me from sending your tunes to my friends, so we all lose in the end. You lose potential fans and we lose respect for the fact that you’re desperate for cash. But what do you expect from the lass who’s collecting a fat bank cheque from the man, while her fans are collecting the glasses for minimum wage they’ll spend on her tracks?

Now please don’t be offended, Lily; I think your new CD’s splendid, Lily. Everybody’s at It and it’s Not Fair, I Could Say, The Fear was Him but He wasn’t There so let’s go Back to the Start, before 22 -- all music’s in the public domain, so Fuck You.

It’s never the amateurs that’s reckon it’s damaging us, it’s the major labels saying it’s fatal; like when Napster had to pack up, wrecked by Metallica. The table’s turned now -- the labels churn out a new Jezebelinternetelevangelist -- and she’s fit -- with a manuscript that was actually written by Mr. Michael Masnick. Can you get the irony? And by the by, Lily, I like this beat -- I hope you don’t mind me thieving, ’cause even doing a cover song’s decried as stealing. But it’s alright, still, for you to plagiarise, and preach it -- Don’t you believe it’s maybe time to rethink, Lily?

Put music back in the hands of the people; make the majors and amateurs equal. If anything labels strangle the freedom you claim they’re saving by banning this evil. That’s the actual reason, you see; and please don’t compare sharing to stealing -- I’ve not took anything off you, I’m just spreading love for what you do. Downloaded your songs for free, then I bought my mom your CD. She likes it too, she keeps telling me, all because I pirated an mp3. Now I’ve got Matt Bellamy belling me, telling me I’m not a fan, I’m the enemy. That’s amusing, I’ve paid enough to see Muse in my time I could buy them a museum. Did you see them on that programme miming? Yeah, the pirates are killing live gigs. Maybe we should have a ban CDs appeal -- then people would pay to see bands for real. Dear Lily, why are you being this silly?

Yours sincerely,
Dan Bull

P.S. -- And I don’t mean any offence or anything, Lily. I just don’t think the issue’s as clear cut as you’re making out. And I know you’re going to carry on making music really. But when you’re between the devil and the deep blue sea, you need to stop worrying about pirates, and adjust your sails.

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In this atmosphere of 57 channels and nothin’ on, the one thing that almost never disappoints is nostalgia. Israel Educational Television (IETV) has just announced that its programs, both classic and new, will be made available for online viewing on its new website. Established in 1965, IETV has produced shows that taught us English, math, and road safety, and gave us our very own sitcom in Hebrew.

Since many of these modern classics are already available on YouTube, I guess the folks at IETV figured if they can’t beat them, might as well join them and make the materials legally available for free.

Since the website will not be launched until next week, here are two teaser ads to tickle your taste buds:

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For us Israelis this triggers a flashback to the Anti-Mehikon: up until the 1980′s the Israeli television broadcast was in black and white as the government thought this would bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots, those who can afford to buy a color TV set, and those who cannot. As idiotic as that plan sounds today, it worked for a few years until a device was invented to restore the color bursts that were deliberetly erased at the Israeli Broadcast Authority.

All this may have sounded like fun nostalgia, if only the people of yesterday would have given up on their futile attempt at stopping the natural evolution of technologies.

[See original post to listen to audio.]

Download some text2speech audio files (MP3 and WAV) of the phrases ‘Amazon sucks’ and ‘Amazon’s Kindle 2 sucks’

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Oren Lavie sounded like an Israeli name and so I was somewhat intrigued as I could not recall an Israeli video that ever went viral. Sure enough, it turns out that Lavie, an unknown Israeli singer, took a giant step towards fame by releasing a stop motion video last week. Within that short period of time, the video has been viewed almost 400,000 times, and was blogged about 1500 times (now 1501). Have a look-see:

Now, I know it is quite easy to dismiss this as one of the many viral videos that enter and exit our screens every week, but I think this is much more than that:
We live in an exciting period of time when new business models are developed and adopted right in front of our eyes and the very nature of art and commerce is evolving. Not everyone is excited about it, though: like the Luddites who destroyed mechanized looms in the early nineteenth century trying to resist the inevitability of the Industrial Revolution, the music industry had spent a decade trying to convince people that there is nothing wrong with the old business models and that sharing music is a crime. When everyone around you is committing an illegal act, including the kid next door and his father the policeman, it is quite difficult to treat piracy like the trouble it is made out to be. Home cooking is not killing the restaurant industry, and home taping is not killing the music industry -- it didn’t during the 1980′s when cassettes were used, and it is not killing it nowadays when peer-to-peer file sharing protocols are in use. In ten to twenty years, we would wonder what the fuss was all about, and would find it hard to believe that artists stubbornly refused to adopt new technologies, new ways of communicating and new ways of earning a living.
Allowing people to download your music for free? Of course! How else did you plan to make money?

Fill up your dosage of free culture here, here and here.

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