Hello, World!

I just did a quick check of my Internet service provider’s web server logs, and it looks as though I’m getting a large number of new visitors. Welcome, everyone! Just leave your shoes at the door and c’mon in. If you’re coming here for the first time, here are some parts of kode-fu.com that you might want to check out…

The obligatory biographical information is on the home page of this site, and the explanation as to why I do the accordion thing is here.

Stories in this blog: There’s the one about the con man who swindled our house twice (see Breach of Security and The Con Man from Another World!), a piece about a spammer who wanted help from a time traveller, a couple of stories about the many offices I’ve worked in this year, and my rant about copyright.

It looks as though I have a lot of accordion gigs coming up in the new year. Here are some photos from my last really big gig.

Upcoming stories: I’ve been working on some goodies, including:

• How my accordion saved me from a mugging in Prague
• My list of New Year’s Resolutions and why Nigella Lawson figures so heavily in my plans for 2002
• How to defuse ethnic tensions at a New Year’s party in New York City
• My response to Neal Stephenson’s Essay, In the Beginning was the Command Line
• Lessons I Have Learned Just By Watching Apollo 13
• …and the usual things that happen to a charming man who wanders around the city with an accordion on his back.

I’d like to thank Blogger for making weblogging so easy, The Ricebowl Journals for letting me join their club, Cory Doctorow for pointing a lot of people to this weblog and you, for actually reading all this stuff.

Once again, welcome, and happy reading!

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Holiday Reading

Yup, I’ve been delinquent with the postinfs, but that’s because I’ve been taking care of a few things that I’ve been letting slide for far too long. More stuff this weekend, I promise — a whole mess of New Year’s stories, and some New Year’s Resolutions to boot!

In the meantime, may I recommend:

Small Stories. Derek Kirk (a.k.a. Gim Ji-Hoon) makes such wonderfully woe-filled cartoons. Taste the Korean Gen-X angst. Ai-goo! Ai-goo!*

* Ai-goo is a Korean cry of lamentation.

What I’ve been up to. I’ll do the writeup later, but in the meantime, enjoy these photos that my housemate Paul took. Crazed co-workers looking for loose women, Japanese exchange students hanging out at the house all night, accordion gigs, and celebrating Christmas when you don’t celebrate Christmas — all photographed and put online for your pleasure.

Other Asians’ weblogs. I’m now part of The Ricebowl Journals. Your tiger blogging style is no match for my dragon blogging style!

Sitting one row ahead of the shoe-bomber. The December 24th entry in acme’s blog on the use perl site is a first-hand account of what happened with the shoe-bomber on American Airlines flight 66.

Logrolling. Claire Berlinski knows how to write. The first line in the body of her e-mail to me reads:

I’m a big fan of yours. Really, I am.

Hey, Claire, Merci beaucoup!

She’s asked me, as a loyal reader of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century, to check out her roman à clef (I think that’s the correct term — it’s not a roman policier since it’s really about spies, not detectives), Loose Lips. It’s a novel about a young CIA recruit, her experiences at “The Farm” (their training facility) and sexual intrigue at “The Company”. Loose Lips has already been published in France — en Français, of course — and Claire’s publishing the English version as an e-book to test the response. She’s made the first chapter available for free online; the rest of the book is available for a mere $5.95. I found the first chapter intriguing, but then again, I’m a sucker for a good espionage yarn.

Speaking of France, here’s my most favourite 24-hour restaurant in the world. I also like this place, even though it’s touristy as hell.

Special message to Paul: foie gras is pronounced “fwah grah”, not “foy grass”. It’s French for goose-liver pate, and you missed out by not trying it. (Our neighbours gave us some aas a Christmas present. If only they’d given us some sauternes to go with it.) Paul, check out this little guide to French cuisine.

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Some other stuff, before I return to my copyrant

I’ll continue talking about copyright and the entertainment industry in my next update. Promise.

The Randroid Who Stole Christmas

It is time to take the Christ out of Christmas, and turn the holiday into a guiltlessly egoistic, pro-reason, this-worldly, commercial celebration.

That’s the closing line of Leonard Peikoff’s essay, Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial, courtesy of the Ayn Rand site.

Phrase of the Day

“Grated Umbrella Handle”: this is what my co-worker Mike Skeet’s wife calls Kraft Parmesan Cheese.

The site that goes up to eleven

Guitar Geek. No, I’m not a guitar player, but I’ve always had a little bit of guitar envy. This site documents the equipment setups of various rock guitarists and bassists with beautiful diagrams. See what monster rocker Tony Iommi (Black Sabbath, baby!) used in 1971 and see what’s he’s using today. See the rig of the man who died Rock’s silliest death and the rig of the man who died Rock’s most Hemingway-like death (What? Hemingway was killed by his wife?).

The site’s collection is far from complete — for example, there’s no coverage of any members of my favourite cock-rock archetype band AC/DC (members…cock-rock…heh) — but it’s growing by the day, and you can suggest guitarists and bassists for inclusion in the list.

Did I mention how lovely the diagrams were? Pictured below is an example — the charmingly Zen-like rig of Joey Santiago, the other Filipino rock and roller named Joey, formerly of The Pixies…

Choose Your Own Adventure

Alter Ego. A very intriguing game where you start as a baby and make choices throughout your life that affect it until you’ve lived out your allotted span. Why does that sound so familiar?

If you like “choose your own adventure” games but find Alter Ego too existential crisis-inducing, may I suggest Choose Your Own Hemingway Adventure by the Ernest Hemingway Denigration Society or the really twisted game called Brad, the Game?

WELCOM 2 DUMPSVIL, POPULATN: U

The popular belief is that Muslim Law decrees that all you need to do to divorce your wife is to say “I divorce you” three times (Question 4 on this page says it’s not true and that you only have to say it once, as long as you’re doing so in a rational frame of mind). Singapore authorities have reversed their decision allowing men to send their wives divorce messages using SMS (text messaging on cell phones).

Here’s the sound file for the Homer Simpson quote from which I got the title for this story.

They hijacked my smelly old couch and flew it straight into the Kremlin!

Moscow is trying to expel the Salvation Army, claiming that they are a paramilitary group out to destroy the Russian state.

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“Hey, Accordion Boy,” you might say at this point, “in your last posting, you were trying to drive home a point about fair use and just went on about copyright instead!”

To which I would reply, “For starters, that’s Accordion Man, bucko, and you can’t talk about fair use without first defining copyright.”

In my last posting, I said that the idea behind copyright was to promote creativity by granting creators exclusive rights over their work. This control would grant creators the right to control the distribution of their work and to earn fair profit for their creativity by giving them a mechanism for charging a fee (called a royalty) for its use.

The problem with absolute copyright is that it’s too restrictive to be practical. You’d have to ask for the creator’s permission every time you wanted to use his or her work, no matter what (and if they did grant you permission, it would be their right to charge you a royalty fee). If you were writing a book report and wanted to quote passages from that book, you’d have to get permission from the author (and perhaps pay the author a fee). If you wanted to tape a television show that you’d otherwise miss, you would have to contact the studio that owned the show to see if it was okay with them (and perhaps pay them a fee). If you wanted to hum a tune by your favourite recording artist, you’d have to get the permission of the record company (and knowing record companies, you most certainly would have to pay them a fee).

Fair Use

The antitode to this ridiculous restrictiveness is the doctrine of fair use. Fair use is one of the exceptions to copyright, granting the public limited rights to the use of works without the permission of the copyright holder under certain circumstances. The idea behind fair use is to provide people the freedom to use and enjoy the works of creators while still honouring the intent of copyright.

The Legal Definition

Fair use is a fuzzy area of copyright law that’s open to interpretation. Rather than providing some hard-and-fast rules by which one can determine whether the use of a copyrighted work is fair use or not, section 107 of U.S. Copyright law defines four factors that determine when the use of copyrighted work can be considered fair use (the boldface stuff in quotes is from the actual legal doc itself, the indented stuff is mine):

“The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes”

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• it is being used for educational or non-profit purposes rather than for-profit purposes.
• it is more than a just a copy of the original — say, an alteration or enhancement.
• it is being used for a pupose different from the original
• it is being used for a different audience

“The nature of the copyrighted work”“

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• it is already published. A unpublished work has not yet been seen by the public, and may be considered private property — using it may be interpreted as theft.
• it is out of print
• if the work is factual rather than artistic (since facts belong to no one)

“The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole”

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• you use a small fraction of work rather than a significant portion of it
• the portion of the work you use is not the “meat” or “essence” — that is, its use does not adversely affect the creator’s ability to earn fair profit for his/her effort

“The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”

The use of a copyrighted work is more likely to be considered fair use if:

• your work differs from the original
• your work is aimed at a different audience
• your work contains some of your own original material

The Real World

As I mentioned earlier, the four factors in determining what is fair use are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules and regulations. They are open to legal interpretation. Here are some cases of the fair use of copyrighted works:

• Quoting passages from a work for criticism or review
• Teachers photocopying sections or chapters of books as handouts for their students
• Making a personal copy of a CD, making a “mixed tape” or “mixed CD” of tunes from my library of CDs or converting my CD-based music into MP3 files for playback on my computer or portable MP3 player. You can even make mixed tape/CDs for friends, accordiong to the Audio Home Recording Act
• “Time shifting” — videotaping a television show so that I can view it later (I can’t stay at home to catch SNL, I have a life, dammit!). This was established in a landmark trial often called the “Betamax Case”.
• Parody – the classic case where fair use doctrine protected a parodist is the 2 Live Crew case (yup, the Me So Horny guys) when they did a parody of Roy Orbison’s Pretty Woman.
• Editorial artwork. Here’s an example of fair use of Mickey Mouse.

Take a good look at these examples. Some of them may not apply in the future, if certain industry groups have their way.

Hillary, You Ignorant Slut

No, not Hillary Clinton. I’m referring to Hillary Rosen, president of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America). According to their site, the RIAA is “the trade group that represents the companies and people making creative works in the recording industry”. In my none-too-humble opinion, this is a half-truth.

In July 2000, the U.S. Government held a Senate Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on downloading and file trading chaired by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch. Mr. Hatch is both angel and devil, being a man who understands technology, music industry and fair use as well as being the principal architect behind the odious Digital Millenium Copyright Act (a subject for another essay). Hatch is also a recording artist whose songs have broken the top 10 on the Christian charts (not that it would take much, but that’s beside the point). At the hearing, he participated in a most telling exchange about fair use with Ms. Rosen. I hereby invoke fair use by quoting the following passage from Leflaw.net’s story on the hearing:

”Can I make a copy of a CD that I buy and put it into a car?” asked Hatch. When Rosen hemmed and hawed, Hatch muttered, ”The answer is yes.”

”Is it fair use to give the copy to my wife for her car?” Hatch continued. ”Is it fair use for me to rip a CD? Is it fair use if (a computer network) decides for efficiency reasons that one copy is sufficient to serve for storage, instead of keeping 200 separate copies, is that fair use?”

”None of these is fair use,” Rosen eventually replied. She argued that musicians’ willingness to ”tolerate” people making copies was an instance of ”no good deed goes unpunished.”

It would seem that the bad record industry execs are going unpunished.

Next: The technological angle.

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