| Merry Christmas! | Posted by IH on Dec. 26
Hope everyone is having a Merry Christmas!
The forecast said we'll have snow today, but apparently not. No white Christmas this year, oh well.
And continuing on the topic of Creative Commons, here's some Christmas music from the fine folks at
Jamendo
(which is a CC oriented music sharing site):
http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=christmas+jamendo
To the crazy Boxing Day shoppers, good luck!
|
| ah.fm Countdown, Independent music, Ramblings on Creative Commons | Posted by IH on Dec. 7
This is what Dan of
ah.fm
has to say about their huge year end event:
| Dan wrote: |
What: AH.FM End of Year Countdown
When: Dec 24 - New Years
DJ's: 168
Contests: Daily contests to win AH shirts.
Promo video of the event
on Myspace |
Check it out and remember to tune in to
ah.fm
from Dec. 24!
For still more independent music, a fan of the indie band
Dissident Saint
has posted a release and torrent of their latest album
on isoHunt Releases
(with the band's permissions). Download away!
As a side note, with more and more artists embracing the internet as a new medium for marketing and distribution, I've been reading
Lessig's Free Culture.
The introduction so eloquently describes a major issue of our time: that of creativity and culture. The established industries has always resisted technological change - like the
17th century button makers
crying wolf at tailors making buttons out of cloth, like RCA resisting FM radio, like now,
big media declares their war on piracy, against us, against me.
But is it really just piracy they are fighting? With increasingly draconian DRM, copyright term extensions and copyright laws, we are heading towards more and more of what
Lessig describes
as a culture of permission, rather than the free culture we've always enjoyed before the internet.
Thou shalt not copy.
Thou shalt not share.
Why allow a culture of sharing, when one Britney Spears is so much more profitable than a thousand
Wil Deynes
or Radiohead or
168 DJ's on ah.fm
or Nine Inch Nails or hell,
183 Canadian musicians
who are already fairly famous (and Sarah McLachlan I'm a personal fan, great original music), all of which seem to have a predisposition against most of the major record labels and thus, pretty hard to control and
profit from?
The radio and tape swapping and Fair Use rights of the past be damned.
I've said this before and I'll say it again. I am not against copyright or laws. This is where some of you and ThePirateBay
don't seem to agree with me on
(this link includes some pretty out of context quotes of mine by the way, and perhaps some unobvious sarcasm), but oh well. Yes, even after being tortured by lawyers in 4 days of dispositions (I haven't told you that part haven't I, and I'm not going to), I still say that
you should not steal.
No, I'm not being hypocritical, and the MPAA didn't tell me so. Whether you take a Christian perspective on it like I do or not, artists deserve compensation for their arts, plain and simple. That's what the whole point of copyright laws was about, and I stress the "was". The problem is not with copyright, but it being lobbied and twisted and extended such that it no longer serves the interests of the public good, that of encouraging a free culture and creativity and production of arts and related "goods" thereof. A permission culture is what serves corporate interests at the expense of everyone else. Corporate interests to profit is all good, until the expense part. The balance has been broken at your expense.
This is why support and adoption of licensing like
Creative Commons
(also started by Lessig) is of greatest importance.
You want to save P2P?
BitTorrent? File sharing? isoHunt? Then take your anarchist sentiments and eat it, because all you will get is being labelled pirates and thieves and that's not cool. (the accuracy of the name calling is irrelevant) Instead, get as much adoption of Creative Commons licensing as possible, then we can all share our hearts out on more CC licensed materials on isoHunt and BitTorrent and P2P networks without legal repercussions or risk of starving your favorite artist or actor or film maker. Because the internet and P2P is so much more than just free for all. It is the greatest radio and TV on earth. Use it in a constructive way, for good of both producers and consumers. And with the internet, the line between the two is now none too clear. Because you are often both.
That was way longer than a sidenote. I'll write more as I read Lessig's book. And Creative Commons is isoHunt's future, you can interpret that however you like. More on that too as things develop. Next year you will see interesting things, I assure you.
And I should clarify on my Britney Spears reference. Just as the
good Ferguson says,
I'm not humiliating or making fun of her. It was just an example.
PS. if you read up to here, congratulations, you've made the first step in proving them wrong. Internet users like you are not attention deficit. I've put this post under the Debates forum as Creative Commons makes interesting debate material, so debate away!
|
| Forum login bug fixed | Posted by IH on Nov. 22
There's been random errors with logging into the forum/site, with invalid logins being redirected back to forum's index page. This was due to sporadic master/slave databases out of sync, and has been fixed now by forcing reads from the master db only (at cost of extra load on it obviously).
In most cases, clearing your cookies (in association with isohunt.com) would fix most browser side issues. Any more problems with logins that clearing your cookies won't fix however, please report here as those would be our servers related.
|
| P2P, isoHunt and Independent Music | Posted by IH on Nov. 7
First off, I'd like to highlight another up and coming artist,
Wil Deynes.
He is selling his tracks on iTunes, but also decided to promote his music for free
here
and Myspace. A torrent is attached to
his release page here.
It's good music so check it out!
On the topic of P2P and independent music, here's a
Slashdot article
on
The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada.
What the study found is that 'there is a positive correlation between peer-to-peer downloading and CD purchasing.' Food for thought.
And remember to support Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor in his next album,
The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!
under similarly liberal terms spearheaded by
Radiohead
and
Magnatune
before: pay $5 or $0 as you want for a download. And of course,
tune in to our Trance & Progressive radio over at AH.FM
and check out
their DJ's torrents.
And drop them a few bucks if you like their music. There's been long discussions on how P2P can work for artists; here's how.
And a related update to the
Radiohead story,
that according to Comscore,
38% of downloaders chose to pay for Radiohead album,
with a total estimate of $6-10 million in download sales.
|
| Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails) Mourns Oink! | Posted by SecretSquirrel on Oct. 31
| Quote: |
What do you think about OiNK being shut down?
Trent:
I'll admit I had an account there and frequented it quite often.
At the end of the day, what made OiNK a great place was that it was like the world's greatest record store. Pretty much anything you could ever imagine, it was there, and it was there in the format you wanted. If OiNK cost anything,
I would certainly have paid, but there isn't the equivalent of that in the retail space right now. iTunes kind of feels like Sam Goody to me.
I don't feel cool when I go there. I'm tired of seeing John Mayer's face pop up.
I feel like I'm being hustled when I visit there, and I don't think their product is that great. DRM, low bit rate, etc.
Amazon has potential, but none of them get around the issue of pre-release leaks. And that's what's such a difficult puzzle at the moment. If your favorite band in the world has a leaked record out, do you listen to it or do you not listen to it? People on those boards, they're grateful for the person that uploaded it — they're the hero.
They're not stealing it because they're going to make money off of it; they're stealing it because they love the band.
I'm not saying that I think OiNK is morally correct,
but I do know that it existed because it filled a void of what people want.
|
I normally wouldn't post something like this, but I think that this is really apt. (my bolds)
Feel free to digg the heck out of this:
DIGG IT!
|
-ADVERTISEMENT-
|
| Shout Box |
You have to login to post. Use your common sense.
For debates, go to the forum.
Post or ask for site invites and you get banned.
For real-time chat, come to irc.isohunt.com, #isoHunt
|
or chat with others live on IRC
|
|