Thanks Merchies
Thanks for stepping up everyone – merch tables are covered for all the west coast shows (though I’m still looking for someone at the Knitting Factory show this Friday – nobody’s coming, right? It’s going to be an empty house?). Also, the San Francisco show is sold out, which is just crazy. Bunch of geeks out there.
To Recap
In case you missed it the first time around when I didn’t have all the details, here are the shows for the rest of February. I’m looking for merch table volunteers for New York, San Francisco, San Diego and Portland – you’ll get in for free, score some merch, and also get one overnight cuddle with me (not really). Send me an email if you’re interested and promise not to steal from me.
More detail and tickets available through the links on the Shows page, but here’s the executive summary:
Feb 16, 2007 8:00pm New York, NY Knitting Factory
Jim Boggia featuring Jonathan Coulton / Vinyl Addicts
Feb 18, 2007 8:00pm San Francisco, CA Cafe du Nord
Jonathan Coulton plus Mark Silverman
Feb 20, 2007 7:00pm San Diego, CA House of Blues San Diego
Feb 21, 2007 11:00pm Los Angeles, CA Hotel Cafe
Feb 23, 2007 9:00pm Portland, OR White Eagle Saloon and Hotel
Feb 24, 2007 7:00pm Seattle, WA Tractor
Come on out and rock.
Brains Video Returns
Spiffs Re: Your Brains video is back up on YouTube – he sent them a “put back up” notice through official channels and after a few days they did it, so I guess technically the system works, kind of. A lot has been said about this incident already, so I will say two more things and then stop talking about it.
I agree that intellectual property should be protected, and I think that if a copyright holder does not want their stuff to be used on YouTube for free, there should be a way for them to get that stuff taken down. Obviously the problem here is that in this case they took down stuff that didn’t belong to them. Now, I wouldn’t quite say that Spiff and I and others have a “right” to put our stuff on YouTube but it certainly is pretty great that we have the option – places like YouTube are wonderful tools for commerce, self-expression and generally making everybody’s world a little more awesome. And while I wouldn’t argue that any serious harm has been done, I would definitely say that worldwide average awesomeness levels have dropped a tiny bit, which is a shame. I believe that both Viacom and YouTube have a responsibility, if not an obligation, to protect the rest of us from less than optimum awesomeness levels – in this case they failed.
Which brings me to the other thing. I know we were all on the cover of Time Magazine, and it’s our user-created Web 2.0 internet and everything, but we really do have to pay attention to this stuff. Think carefully about who’s displaying your photos, streaming your music, hosting your blog, etc., because they can stop any time they want to. YouTube could shut down tomorrow just for the heck of it, or they could suddenly decide to stop hosting videos with cats in them. Or they could decide that maintaining high average awesomeness levels is just not that important, and suddenly disappear a bunch of stuff that belongs to you and me and Spiff and the rest of us. It’s events like this that remind me: the internet doesn’t belong to the people who make the content, it belongs to the people who make the login pages.
Steve Jobs on DRM
An interesting open letter from Steve Jobs about DRM was posted yesterday on the Apple site, in which he explains some of the reasoning behind why Apple hasn’t licensed their FairPlay scheme to anyone, and why he thinks that DRM is stupid. He’s right – it’s never worked, and it will never work. As he says, record companies sell much more unprotected music on CDs than they do protected music online, so what’s the big deal? There’s also talk (I hear things) that some of the major labels may be considering a move to plain old, unprotected mp3 format instead of locking everything up so that consumers can’t do what they want with the music they buy. Great idea major labels! Keep this up and you may one day catch up with old Coulton.
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