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Part of the dispute Prince was having with the label continues to this day and is why Taylor Swift has re-recorded all her albums. It is "standard practice" for the label to take ownership of the copyright on the recorded material (called phonographic copyright and indicated with â„—) while charging all the costs of recording against the artist's share of the royalties which can result in an artist owing the label money for a hit record.
Ray Charles was a pioneer in insisting that he own the phonographic copyright on his recordings when he moved from Atlantic to ABC-Paramount yet this remained something out of reach for most artists. Robert Fripp was engaged in a decades-long lawsuit against EG to regain control of the phonographic copyright on King Crimson material (as well as to recoup illegally withheld royalties). Squeeze is another artist who re-recorded their albums to reclaim the phonographic copyright.
It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps.
In the old world the business model made sense, it no longer does.
Part of what gets distorted by Taylor Swift and Dave Chappelle is the larger context. Similar to VC the vast majority of label supported musicians are economic failures. The big winners pay for the rest of the failures.
With modern distribution this is mostly a bad deal.
Since the 'Non Fungible Taylor Swift' [0] is really in control she can subvert this (until contracts get updated), but generally people can just go direct now and do their own marketing or negotiate better terms for investment.
I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the rare breakout artists is similarly warped and one-sided. You never hear from the failures the label funded that didn't make it.
[0]:
https://stratechery.com/2021/non-fungible-taylor-swift/
What is truly enraging in the story about major music labels and copyright is how they essentially pushed through massive law changes in many countries making breaking copyright crimes (not just civil cases) and going after some file sharers with absolutely outrages claims of lost earnings (and often won).
At the same time they got caught red handed disregarding copyright themselves multiple times (Sony's rootkit which used some linux copyright IIRC, or the case of several major record labels releasing compilation albums of music without artist consent and copyright in Canada are just two examples). By their own calculations used against file shares the damages should have amounted to billions, but they got away with not so much but a slap on the wrist. I wish some judge would have really made an example of some of them.
No disagreement with me there, the copyright laws are a disaster and have long lost their way from the 'means' to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for _limited Times_ to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The purpose is to incentivize creative works for the public benefit with the _limited time_ exclusive rights, not retroactively extend copyright years after the death of the author to enrich their rights-holders in perpetuity every time expiration comes up.
As it is, you can't even make something public domain yourself - the best you can do is add a permissive license since all rights are reserved by default without registration.
But this is getting somewhat off topic.
In France they managed to make the country pay for the hunt against P2P.
There was a governmental agency (Hadopi) that costed millions of euros and due to the stupid law managed to won I think one case for 2000€.
They got merged into another useless agency and was forgotten. I am not sure whether they still exist, nobody really cares.
This is how pay of our tax money is spent in France, on subsidized sandboxes for politicians.
I don't think it _ever_ made sense. Steve Albini wrote an article about how fucked up it all was back in 1993:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music
_"I prove to you that I am bad enough to get into hell, because I have been through it! I have seen it! It has happened to me! Remember: I was signed for Warner Brothers for eight fucking years!"_ - Zappa in '79
Not entirely related, but one doesn't necesarily use the advances as cash in the pocket -- you dump it into assets that pay you money (e.g. bonds).
Taken to an extreme, you see David Bowie who floated the royalties of all his records as a financial instrument that you can buy. [0]
[0]:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bowie-bond.asp
I think there's a reasonable argument there, but I can understand the model better before the internet (since distribution was way harder and more expensive). The terms were definitely bad for talent because early talent had no leverage before the internet (and couldn't coordinate).
After the internet whatever argument the record companies had was way weaker and their unwillingness to update (instead attempting to fight everything legally) cost them enormous returns.
During the Napster era Courtney Love made a similar argument that record labels are the real pirates. [0]
https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
> compare to free to play videogames
What's the music equivalent of abusive lootbox and gatcha mechanics? Those seem to drive a lot of the free-to-play profit..
In games its give away the game and pay for the skins, characters etc.
In music its give away the songs and pay for the merch, shows, access to artist, etc.
The market for the latter is huge. The music is the viral hook you can use to take advantage of the internet's distribution in order to get the attention to create fans and drive them towards the other stuff.
With the internet you don't even need to rely on mega-pop stars, there's enough people at scale for a lot of niche audiences.
"Oh, you need to sign over the copyright to us so we can legally make and distribute copies." I think that's approximately the line of bullshit they give. No, by default creators own their copyright and can license that on terms they allow. Once you sign that over it's just not your material anymore.
"It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps."
Is there any indication how this is working for them and their artists? I would think given the massive publicity that the Taylor Swift effort has received, it would be quite the other way, with more artists insisting on getting those rights upfront. I know they're typically young and desperate/powerless when these things are being negotiated, but I would think the "go it yourself" route is if anything more robust now than ever before— no one cares about physical distribution, there are many paths to getting your stuff on Spotify and iTunes, and most small-time artists I know are doing the publicity/engagement side themselves with some combination of regular video content on YouTube and streaming mini-concerts.
What can WB or any other major label offer an artist like this in exchange for the gigantic ask that is "we own all your stuff forever and btw we also own any re-recordings of these songs"?
> with more artists insisting on getting those rights upfront
I doubt that unknown artist can negotiate anything. What you are offered is better than nothing. Big corporations abuse their position all the time, individuals can not realistically opt out. The only option is regulations and law enforcement.
> What can WB or any other major label offer an artist like this in exchange for the gigantic ask that is "we own all your stuff forever and btw we also own any re-recordings of these songs"?
Advertisement, legal protection (mainly from themselves), access to traditional media, and distribution in general. How many artist make it out of the big labels system? There is a reason for that.
"How many artist make it out of the big labels system?"
Lots, particularly if your criteria is "big labels" and not just "labels":
https://www.complex.com/pigeons-and-planes/2017/07/independe...
Prince's struggles with Warner bore other wonderful fruit, as well. Emancipation, Prince's first album after casting off the metaphorical shackles of Warner, is a superb album. It has 36 songs and spans 180 minutes, to give you a sense of the amount of artistic freedom that Prince must have been feeling at the time. Highly recommended listening for any casual Prince fan who wants to expand their knowledge of his repertoire. The man was an unqualified musical genius.
He was also way ahead of the curve connecting directly with fans. He had a BBS/forum/something that a friend of mine who was a huge Prince fan was a member of. As a member, they got early access to new tracks. I don't remember how much it was, but my friend loved it.
David Bowie was a pioneer in this space as well -- he had his own ISP, BowieNet:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bow...
I personally like his stuff from before Diamonds and Pearls, mostly. After that I think he got further and further removed from his original funk roots, and I think he sort of drifted off into a sea of wishy-washy new age stuff that he never fully re-emerged from. I know his later stuff will, still, be endorsed by hardcore fans, but I do not think it's for the casual listener.
Not snarky at all, but this would be great as an SVG - which could then be turned into a proper TTF using the private-use area.
EDIT: seems to be available as a TTF here (but apparently under 'S' rather than 'P'):
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mg...
If it was part of a font, then I would think that the logo was in vector form. (It could have been a bitmap font, of course, but if you're sending the font to magazines and publishers, a postscript or TueType font would have been more appropriate.) If it did exist in the font as a vector based image, it seems strange to upload a rasterized version to archive.org. It wouldn't have been too hard to upload it as an svg or eps and maintain its quality regardless of its size/resolution.
The article says the Mac version was a bmapfile which is a rasterized image format, not vector form. That said, they really should have uploaded the original files to archive.org, in addition to the conversion to a more common format.
The title is a bit hyperbolic. Although it's cool to secure an original diskette and read it, archived versions were already available online.
yea I wish they went into a bit more detail on _how_ they extracted it, so the next person who needs to dump an unarchived floppy can follow their steps
Prince's name change reminds me of that Bit of Fry and Laurie police station sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nq-dchJPXGA
This could be solved today with a short application to the Unicode consortium and a few OS updates, so I guess we made progress :)
From the article:
> _Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)_
Argh, I'm sorry. And that's why one should always read the article fully before commenting...
Apparently some fans proposed a combining-character representation though:
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML...
Ƭ̵̬̊
The Unicode consortium is generally quite resistant to this sort of thing; I think you'd probably have to establish more use than just "one person uses this as a name".
Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon.
>Notoriously, they won't even allow Klingon.
I can't resist, gotta agitate about this. Unicode allocated space for the legendarily-untranslated Minoan script _Linear A_, for fuck's sake! Unicode allocated space for fucking _Ogham script_ -- not that that's inappropriate, but it's unlikely to be used by the vast majority of people, now or in future, simply as a consequence of its antiquity and obsolescence.
Of course I'm revealing my 90s-trek power level here, but it's seriously puzzling (shading all the way up into quietly infuriating) that these dead languages' scripts are welcomed, while an, er, conlang that has actual _living speakers_ can't have any of the frankly voluminous Unicodespace. _QI'yaH_!
My pet peeve is U+A66E (CYRILLIC LETTER MULTIOCULAR O, ę™®) [0], a glyph that had literally been used _once only in history_ by a 15-century scribe before making its way into Unicode. And when it did, the reference rendering (7-eyed) is different from the one originally used by that scribe (10-eyed).
[0]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O
There's also plenty of "ghost" kanji which first appeared in a dictionary with no evidence for use and some which have been positively identified to a single source as a mistaken/sloppy handwritten attempt at a different real kanji character.
They better have an i with a heart replacing the dot...
You may be looking for
https://www.evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/n258a-heartd...
> a glyph that had literally been used once only in history by a 15-century scribe before making its way into Unicode.
Your Wikipedia article says “certain manuscripts”, not a single use. (It does say it is only ever used in one specific _phrase_, though,)
well, that's definitely going into all my future Call of Cthlhu games whenever a shę™®ggę™®th is mentioned...
It's even funnier, the one use of the multi-ocular o was in a text referring to many-eyed (i.e. multi-ocular) seraphims.
Sounds like the only documented use was a visual pun from 600 years ago.
Anyone have a curated list of cool Unicode shapes?
The Unicode symbol preceding the topic of discussion, "Cyrillic letter Double Monocular O", has a rather suggestive shape: ę™
Everywhere I look something reminds me of her...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5OQMoSCrqw
Having been involved in archival projects including archaic scripts, I can tell you that academics feel a similar that the Unicode consortium seems to be prioritizing rafts of new emojis over texts that would be useful to academics. Let alone trekkie fanservice. Just use the PUA, if you really feel that strongly about it.
AIUI emoji are a different working group to languages (also I _think_ languages of academic interest might be a different group to languages in current use).
I am guessing that the big difference here is that ogham and linear A are public domain, while Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon.
>Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon
Well, _sorta_. Not according to the Language Creation Society! From the fallout of the case where Paramount/CBS sued the Axenar guys for the temerity to make a fan film without paying them for it comes this Washington Post opinion [0] (I've added the links found in the text at [1] and [2]):
>It seemed a stretch to suggest that the plaintiffs were claiming copyright in the Klingon language itself, and the court agreed, taking the somewhat unusual step of denying LCS’s motion to file its brief [1], on the grounds that the court didn’t have to “reach the issue of whether languages, and specifically the Klingon language, are copyrightable” in ruling on the case.
>The LCS has declared victory — at least to the extent that the final ruling in the case will not hold that the Klingon language is protected by copyright. Its statement — with a translation into Klingon, for those of you who read Klingon — is posted here [2].
The situation doesn't seem as rosy as the LCS' statement suggests, but as a consequence, I feel comfortable in claiming that Paramount does not currently, successfully, claim copyright ownership of Klingon. That said, "not getting sued by Paramount in future" is a pretty good reason for Unicode to exclude anything.
Tengwar, the script used to write Quenya and Sindarin, however...
[0]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
[1]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzmetJxi-p0VN0t5MWNPOTZ4SU0...
[2]
https://conlang.org/axanar/#updates
There is a difference between the copyright standard of the language itself (which may not be a copyrightable thing, though the court left that for future courts to decide in the given case) and the copyright standard of custom glyphs used by that language though. The custom glyphs themselves to "write" the language are artistic design elements usually recognized to have some copyright protections as with any works of art. (There's also further protections in they way they are often used that sometimes trademark protections also may be applied and looser defined "trade dress" protections as well. Aurebesh, the custom glyphs of Star Wars is pretty heavily defended by such protections in commercial projects.) Unfortunately, the sources for the Klingon glyphs are copyrighted movies and fonts owned or commissioned by ViacomCBS and there's not much of an argument to be made that they aren't art designs they own.
I believe the same applies to Tengwar that too much of comes from artistic work written and/or commissioned for books still in copyright and owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Perhaps when more of the copyrights expire on these originating works Unicode can revisit them. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen soon. (Even Tengwar isn't expected to expire until 2044, 70 years after JRR Tolkien's death.)
That, and it sounds like this is only covering a case in US copyright law. Unicode potentially has to worry about the rest of the world as well.
I can imagine that the Unicode Consortium's general feeling on the subject is outside the scope of their mission, and that pleasing a sci-fi fandom just isn't really worth the potential for headaches, and that it's better to let them continue to rely on ConScript.
Ok, my takeaway is that the question "can you copyright languages in the US copyright system?" currently sits at "maybe".
But we're at least sure you can't patent "a procedure for producing ATP using O2 as catalyst and energy source", right?
Right?
> >Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon
> Well, sorta.
Paramount definitely claims copyright on the “Klingon” glyphs from various ST properties that fans have mapped to the language described in _The Klingon Dictionary_ (which is newer than the glyphs), so as far as those glyphs and any derivative works are concerned – what both the Unicode Consortium _and_ any font makers would be concerned with – Paramount’s copyrights are a problem.
Whether they own the language beyond that may be a murky legal question, but it is also beside the point.
(And, actually, what your source supports is that Paramount definitely claims ownership of Klingon, the other party in the case disputed it, and the court found that they didn’t need to decide the issue to resolve the case. That is in no way a “sorta” on “Paramount claims copyright ownership on Klingon”. That a third-party seeking to file an amicus brief against Paramount’s claim on that point chose to do a victory dance because they were told to go away because the issue they were concerned with was ultimately not material to the resolution of the case is…interesting spin, but not much else.)
>That is in no way a “sorta” on “Paramount claims copyright ownership on Klingon”
I see the problem. IANAL, but I take "Paramount claims copyright" to mean something legally enforceable; an uncontroversial legal right that they are claiming [0]. As suggested by both parent and the sources further above, that matter has yet to be settled, and wasn't addressed in the decision. The statement "Paramount claims that it has the copyright to the Klingon language" I wholeheartedly agree with (and disagree, obviously, on the ability of Paramount to claim copyright on a collaborative intellectual effort between James Doohan, Marc Okrand, and others, both due to nerd fervour and a bunch of hand-waving about the intersection of IP and morality that are beyond the scope of this tangent).
[0] Possibly this is due to the ubiquity of the phrase "copyright claim", deployed to describe the monetization of someone else's intellectual property. The uh claimant is presumed to have a legal right to the material being claimed, but it's not clear that Paramount has that legal right.
Voynichese script is public domain but there's no Unicode for that either. You can get a font for it though, but people studying the Voynich Manuscript usually make do with a transcription based on the Roman alphabet + Arabic numerals (e.g. EVA). Unlike Linear A (or Ogham), there's no consensus that Voynichese means anything, and there's only one book written in it.
Personal anecdote, but since Ogham has been available in Unicode, I've seen the odd person start being interested in it to write out names, exclamations, etc. It feels like a small previously-closed gate has been opened for a nice little way for people to connect and engage with an old part of our culture.
Oh, that's wonderful, actually! Between my perception of its rarity, and the seeming ability to easily represent it with vector graphics of straight lines, I figured it was a laudable target but I see that it isn't. After all, the idea of a niche script getting more attention because of its inclusion in Unicode is exactly what I'm all excited about.
I'll happily replace Ogham, in future rants, with that fucking multiocular O mentioned in a sibling to the parent.
So I think the main excuse at the time was that people usually use latin for Klingon. Which honestly feels like a bit of a chicken and an egg problem to me...
Exactly! The Latin character set is used precisely because _Klingon fonts aren't standardized_!! Nnh!
*hits inhaler*
Also, how are we read Shakespeare in the original Klingon on the internet?
Dead languages and scripts are studied, though. The Unicode is there for them so that scholars can type and print what was actually written/carved, instead of a Roman alphabet transcription. The problem with Klingon is it's a conlang, and anyone can design a new script for their conlang and demand a Unicode block.
Their thinking is too small.. I mean why shouldn't everyone on earth be able to have their own personal symbol? The technical challenge does not seem that insurmountable.
Also it's a business opportunity along the lines of the star name registry.
> Notoriously, they won’t even allow Klingon.
Copyright issues seem to be a big factor there.
No Tengwar, either.
Well, no -- that's discussed in the article:
> Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
watch it become part of a future version of fontawesome
CompuServe. That's a name I forgot I used to know so well!
Nice that their legacy lives on, thrives really, in GIFs.
I still have a freebie shirt they gave me in like 1994. Who knew it would outlast them
I have a Sun Microsystems shirt from the same era. It still fits!
I was given a Sun t-shirt that had been compressed into a surfboard shape at a conference. Unfortunately they gave me a size that could probably have fitted three of me in, so it got worn a couple of times and then used for painting until it wore out.
After all that, they uploaded it to the archive as an image rather than as a font or vector file!?
Limor Fried continues to be a hero.
I came across Limor's Minty MP3 player when I was young, broke, and looking for an open alternative to an ipod. It was back before Adafruit existed as a web store. Minty was just an open PCB design hosted on a single page with a parts list and a link to a forum where people would help each other source parts and assemble the thing.
I have very fond memories of this because it changed the trajectory of my life. It showed me how powerful a tool the internet could be for organizing people around ideas, many of which sought to improve people's lives through free and open technology.
The other thing this experience did was to make me feel safe tinkering with hardware and electronic circuits. Consumer devices had felt like mystical black boxes that could never be understood, much less re-created by me. After Minty, I was empowered to take things apart and learn how they worked. I grew an appetite for technical knowledge that hasn't slowed down to this day.
EDIT: Found a capture. It's slightly different than I remember it but it's a nice little snapshot of Adafruit's origin story.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media....
This was around the time Prince was sending out cease and disease letters to people hosting Prince midi files.
Losing it would be a minor problem, when could had been redone easily in metafont from any of the millions of singles of the most beautiful girl in the world available.
We have a scientific symbol yet for the representation of both sexes, hermaphrodyte. Is in unicode yet (if I'm not wrong) so there is not a real need to use this. Would start a war for every artist and band in the planet asking for their personal symbol in unicode. Rolling stones tongue should be for example. Is as much iconic than the trumpet key, if not more.
I guess add one more falsehood programmers believe about names:
- People's names aren't a non-unicode symbol that a person made up just to refer to themselves
The name doesn't matter to me. I would like to hear these five hundred songs
Hmmm... Prince, not Prince of Persia.
Some muppet will give you a million dollar if you say its an NFT
Lol sex is binary, anyone who thinks otherwise is utterly delusional
This article grossly understates how much Anil Dash adores Prince! Anyone who's followed Anil knows it goes quite deep.