Hacker News Reader

Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

That’s pretty funny, considering Gruber’s attitude toward other people’s intellectual property: https://lee-phillips.org/music/whoIsTheDick/

View on HN

I read that and thought to myself, “The only thing this Lee Phillips person is managing to convince me of is that Lee Phillips is a dick”. Then I came back here and realized that’s you.

I guess I’m the dick now.

You lost me.

It's quite the essay, defending a man who purchased a house for a low price and made a piece of art decades ago, and continues to extract value from both without making any additional meaningful contributions as regards either. It's almost... like he's seeking... rent. I wonder if there's an economic term for this behavior or any theory about whether or not it should be rewarded.

Peppered with Amazon referral links, too.

How is he extracting value from the house by living in it? As the market value goes up, it costs him more, as his property taxes will go up. As to the photograph, well, he owns the copyright. Period. You may not think we should have copyright, but that’s another conversation.

> As the market value goes up, it costs him more, as his property taxes will go up.

This is a hilarious way to look at it. Please, will the rich of the world burden me with their wealth so that I may pay the tax for them?

> As to the photograph, well, he owns the copyright. Period.

he owns the copyright to a piece of pixel art created as a tribute to his famous album cover photo?

Noooo....the photographer owns the copyright to his original photograph.

That's not what rent seeking is, though.

If only we'd have bots on here, I could post this comment automatically, as I haven't seen anyone use the term correctly in the say 2/3 years since it became hip to mention it every time someone makes money in a way someone else has an ideological problem with.

Who exactly is he seeking rent from when he is the one living in the house?

Not contributing anything? It says right there in the article that he is cleaning the graffiti and rehabbing the house.

You might find readers more sympathetic to your post if you spent more time on the copyright issues and less on telling us repeatedly that other people's taste in music is wrong

BTW, it's Wendy Carlos, not Walter.

I used the name as it was when he created the thing I was talking about. This is a problem that arises whenever a scholar or artist changes his or her name, say by getting married. If you use the new name, nobody will find the reference. So I’m not sure what’s correct in all cases.

Nitpick: when she created the thing.

That's not unreasonable, but she started transitioning over 50 years ago. I think it's appropriate to refer to her as Wendy now, as Wikipedia and all the online music stores I just peeked at do.

I didn’t know that. (But I just looked it up and you’re right.) At the time, it was a secret, so as far as the world new, “Switched on Bach” was created by a man named Walter Carlos. The public didn’t know about Wendy until many years later. But, from a scholarly point of view, you don’t go back in time and change the names of authors. You generally refer to the author’s name as it was at creation.

The writing style of your article seems more personal and narrative-oriented than scholarly, to be honest. It might be better to reword it if you want your personal blog to have a more academic perspective.

Oh fuck everything about that article you linked.

as a fan of the fair-use doctrine, pixel art and the whole chiptune genre I agree that article is the worst.

Wendy Carlos transitioned in 1979 and hasn't used her birth name since then, you might wanna fix that in your story.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the author of this article sounds pretty judgemental. To quote:

"The photographer happens to be the great Jay Maisel. I feel on fairly safe ground saying that any one of his photographs is worth more than all the “chiptune” ever produced."

Pretty judgemental? Give me some credit. I was extremely judgemental.

I haven't heard of the cover album before, but thanks for linking it. It doesn't sound the opening track is using actual hardware (such as a Ricoh 2A03 or a Konami VRC6), but the cover of All Blues almost has a Tim Follin feeling to it.

I think you missed the opportunity to re-enforce a few more times how much you dislike the genre of music in question. Just so the reader knows.

I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com