The Prince symbol has been salvaged from a 1993 floppy disk
cdm.link
cdm.link
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.
[0]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/48f880e8-d8b3-4e4f-9fa3...
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I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the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/
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
The specific wording of the US constitution was (is?) a nice little bit of fluff but it didn't really change the nature of copyright at all when it was published.
What's the music equivalent of abusive lootbox and gatcha mechanics? Those seem to drive a lot of the free-to-play profit..
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.
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"?
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.
Lots, particularly if your criteria is "big labels" and not just "labels":
https://www.complex.com/pigeons-and-planes/2017/07/independe...
You will never be played on the radio without a big label to pay off the programmers. Every single song you hear on the radio is bought and paid for.
Spotify and other streaming revenues are a joke for the vast majority of musicians. I personally own all my music and thanks to iTunes I know how many times every song has been played over the last 15 years (from when I got my first iPod and then my iPhone and migrated all my CDs to iTunes). My most-played track would have earned the artist $.53, the median would have yielded about $.05. (And remember this is over 15 years.) And discoverability is not necessarily that great. My wife pays for Amazon music that she and the kids listen to on Amazon Echoes and in my experience, the ability to get the specific song that you want to listen to is pretty hit or miss. I suspect that most people who are still in the discovering new music stage of their lives end up getting their music discovery happening through channels that are pretty much controlled by the majors.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/11/david-bow...
EDIT: seems to be available as a TTF here (but apparently under 'S' rather than 'P'): https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AADXW3RWGwgykj1mg...
> 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.)
> 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.)
Ƭ̵̬̊
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!
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...
But we're at least sure you can't patent "a procedure for producing ATP using O2 as catalyst and energy source", right?
Right?
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.)
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.
> 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.)
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.
*hits inhaler*
Everywhere I look something reminds me of her...
Sounds like the only documented use was a visual pun from 600 years ago.
Your Wikipedia article says “certain manuscripts”, not a single use. (It does say it is only ever used in one specific phrase, though,)
> Любопытно очное о в слове многоочитїи в псалтыри XV века Тр.-Серг. л. No 308, где о состоит из десяти Ꙩ, соединенных в виде орнамента
I'm watching you... ꙭ
I'll happily replace Ogham, in future rants, with that fucking multiocular O mentioned in a sibling to the parent.
Copyright issues seem to be a big factor there.
Also it's a business opportunity along the lines of the star name registry.
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....
> The label was reportedly after control of Prince's master tapes.
Edit: I’m guessing this refers to owning the right to copy a master rather than owning the physical tapes that the master is stored on.
Relevant quote from a 1996 NY Times article on Prince²
> If you don't own your masters, your master owns you.
When Prince changed his name to a symbol, I didn’t pay too much attention to pop or mainstream music so when I heard about it, I had assumed he was simply being pretentious. After hearing about his problems with Warner Brothers, I have a lot more sympathy for his actions and desire to have creative control over his own music.
¹ https://www.angelfire.com/wv/Royalbadness/bio.html
² https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/17/arts/a-re-inventor-of-his...
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.
- People's names aren't a non-unicode symbol that a person made up just to refer to themselves