In the old days we were sure that, no matter how perfectly we created a ‘virtual experience’, there would always be a lack—an absence that we would naturally notice—because nothing is as real as reality.
It was sickening, in a way, to discover just how easily we can be confused in our senses—that not only was it eminently doable, but that digital electronics could, without any strain, reproduce sounds and sights with far greater precision than was perceptible by the human ear or eye. ‘Sniffer’ technology, too, is being digitized into a sensor that can sample the ‘air’ environment more sensitively than the nose of a hound dog (which, let me tell you, is no small achievement).
Taste—I dunno—or Texture, Motion, Heat, Balance, Time—our bodies’ sensations of the relative values of these environmental data are still enough of a mystery that we aren’t yet capable of reproducing them. Indeed, we are still trying to understand the connection between our sensoria and our brains’ processing of sensorium-input. At present, no technologies can synthesize even a rough approximation of such sensations as Inertia or Uprightness . So we are not quite ready to fool the human brain.
But, I should think that if we can conquer vision, acoustics, and smell, the rest is just a matter of time. How much time could be counted in years or centuries—I’m no expert—but the tempo of Biomedical Research (and Physics Research) is in high gear. Not only do we build on nearly-daily discoveries, but we build on daily improving electronics and miniaturization. Not only have we made a good start on decoding the Human Genome, but we make progress in nanotechnology—an applied science that could make our bodies self-monitoring, self-repairing, and make it possible to tailor antiviral-or-cancer medicines to the individual patient’s DNA.
I saw a TV show yesterday—researchers tailored a goat-ovum with silkworm genes—the grown goats give milk that is 2% silk. The TV program went on to describe the extraction of silk from the goat-milk and its subsequent drawing-out and production of the first man-made silk thread. I don’t know about you, but that blows my mind. For millennia, up until just this year (or maybe last year—mox-nix) the world has depended on silkworms exclusively for the material in silk threads and the woven-silk cloth that is highly valued for items of clothing and for tremendously strong, lightweight fibers such as those used in parachutes. It made a segment on the science channel or learning channel or NatGeo (who knows?). But fifty years ago it would have been front page news.
That is what makes my jaw drop about the present—so many new things, so often—and many of those are innovations that would have been world-changing, front-page news in its own right. A stereo with no moving parts—smaller than a wallet? No big deal?
While these advances percolate away in the field of medicine, physical therapy, and entertainment, other digital changes occur. We find that robotics is also chugging away. Self-steering, adaptive-pressure gripping, vocal recognition, and exoskeletal-support hardwares/softwares are finding new ways to take over for both the disabled and the automotively challenged. Just think—a few more decades and “DWI” will become an antique term that harkens back to the day when people still drove their own cars. Less frivolously—synthetic limb or organ replacements are proceeding apace. One veteran who had lost both legs was fitted with these new springy synthetics that allow him to run—and it works so well, his eligibility for participation in the London Olympics was seriously debated.
“We can rebuild you—we have the technology!” –well, not quite—the Six-Million Dollar Man is still fiction. But not for much longer—and we know now that prosthetics can be more than replacements—they can be enhancements.
But even beyond these macro-innovations, there are more and more devices that do what electronics do best—they shrink down until they’re miniaturized so small as to fit inside a capsule which a patient can swallow, or into a chip in one’s brain that allows mouse-pointer-control without physical motion. Having gotten proof-of-concept, I seriously doubt that full, brain-only computer interaction will take more than a few more years. How nice it would be for any future ‘Stephen Hawkings’ to have a full Exoskeleton in place of a Wheelchair, to have the ability to type on a Keyboard in his (or hers—let’s not forget the future ‘Stephany Hawkingses’!) Mind. A time will come when healthy people will start to envy some of the prosthetics of the future—then we’ll all be brain-typing, with airbags built into our belts (in case we fall off a building) and cars that read our minds to determine where we want to be driven.
The proximity of our ‘future’ is so close that it has businesses rising and falling as each new thing obsoletes each old thing. And worst of all is always the newest-of-the-old—the i-Phone 5 release is a current news topic and fodder for late-night comics because it made the i-Phone 4 obsolete in less than a year from its own debut. So while bookstores, record stores, gas-only-fueled cars, and ‘landline’ home phones begin their shuffle off to the inevitable, they are being elbowed aside by last year’s cars, last year’s games, last year’s business paradigm—all marching double-time to the scrap heap.
But this is no novel—no Tom Clancy thriller—no Dickens tale of good vs. evil—this is the world, in real life. The wave of the New isn’t a sheet of water so smooth as to reflect our images—it is a thundering crash with all the attendant splashing and spilling.
Let me give an example of one of the little details that we use to cobble together our future-shock-wave. This is a true story—it happened to me just as I describe, and all text has been cut-and-pasted from the original web-page or e-mail. I call it “I’m Going To Jail—But The Internet Made Me Do It!”
There are some oddities about online activity that show the unfair choices forced upon the Webbity-Web, now that it’s been ‘mostly’ commercialized. But please don’t think me dense enough to expect any change in the corporate-ization of onlineTown, USA—if any one person could change the nature of the internet, it wouldn’t be the ‘robust defense measure for national communication’ it was originally designed to be during the Cold War. No, these are just little things now—but I foresee some legal activity on this sort of thing, sooner or later.
To begin with, the internet—or, to be clear, a person’s Internet Service Provider (ISP)—is like automotive insurance—even if someone else is behind your keyboard, you’re still liable for any illegal activity. This is also true of one’s ‘social media’-site accounts, especially YouTube. There are concessions YouTube has been forced to make to stay in business. These concessions apparently include ceding all legal oversight to the owners of copyrights—either Collective Copyright Administrators or the Media Corporation itself.
How does this affect me? Well, the uploads I send to my YouTube account are sometimes titled “Bach Partita No. 1” or “Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers”, because these are the piano pieces I had played on my videos.
The YouTube ‘copyright filter’ only looks at the title of the piece and if it matches by 90% or more, I am told that my upload “violates copyright protection laws”. It assumes that I am pirating Glenn Gould’s, or Peter Serkin’s, or Ruth Laredo’s, virtuoso recording—rather than having played the music myself. I know that the ‘amateur-pianist’-demographic is no huge chunk of internet activity, but this is tantamount to saying that such a thing NEVER happens.
But that’s not all the liberty being taken in this situation. There is a ‘copyright claim disputed’ option in YouTube’s ‘notification’ pages—it is quite a winding way for a newcomer (I have had cause to become familiar) but one is finally given a text box wherein the ‘reason’ should be typed. I have done this several times—and I have gotten the status changed to OK for most classical pieces.
But what really gets my goat is the final text display before the text box in which belongs ‘your full name (as signature)’—and that is over and above the fact that I’m being forced to ‘sign’ a legal agreement online by a faceless corporate app. What it says basically is that ‘I understand that if I’m making a false claim I will lose my YouTube account’.
So, to sum up, I am erroneously accused of piracy. I’m asked to plead guilty by clicking on ‘claim recognized’—or—to send in an explanation why I shouldn’t be prosecuted (but only at the risk of losing my YouTube account, if they disagree with my claim).
My YouTube account is several years old—I’ve uploaded over 900 piano videos and am looking at hitting one thousand recordings uploaded sometime early in 2013. That’s a lot riding on fighting off some underdeveloped ‘copyright-app’ every time I play Beethoven!
Below are a few examples of this practice, including my somewhat irritated responses to them—
Three (3) from “Musicke’s Handmaid” (2012Sep22)
Please verify the following information:
Claims to dispute
“A New Ground in E minor Z 682”, musical composition administered by:
One or more music publishing rights collecting societies
Reason for dispute
This video contains the material at issue, but the material is in the public domain or is not eligible for copyright protection.
Explanation
This music is from the Seventeenth Century. If my performance of it violates anyone’s rights, they would be those of Henry Purcell–an Englishman who died before the American Revolutionary War! This business of claiming copyright on ancient pieces of classical music which are clearly in the Public Domain, simply because a single artist’s recording of the piece is uniquely copyrighted by the performer’s representative–is unethical. Please bring this to the attention of whoever is in charge of ethics over there.
I have a good faith belief that the claim(s) described above have been made in error, and that I have the right(s) necessary to use the contents of my video for the reasons I have stated. I have not knowingly made any false statements, nor am I intentionally abusing this dispute process in order to interfere with the rights of others. I understand that filing fraudulent disputes may result in termination of my YouTube account.
Signature
Chris Dunn (xperdunn)
********
YouTube channel Xperdunn copyright infringement claim:
Video Title- Tchaikovsky: “Andante Cantabile” (2011Mar02)
Claims to dispute
“String Quartet No. 1 in D major Op. 11 (version for cello and string orchestra) String Quartet No. 1 in D major Op. 11: II. Andante cantabile (arr. for orchestra)”, musical composition administered by:
One or more music publishing rights collecting societies
“ANDANTE CANTABILE”, musical composition administered by:
One or more music publishing rights collecting societies
UMPG Publishing
Reason for dispute
This video contains the material at issue, but the material is in the public domain or is not eligible for copyright protection.
Please explain briefly:
“I find this completely unfair! These ‘rights collecting societies’ are perfectly well aware of the fact that classical compositions have a multitude of recorded performances.
The ridiculous claim that my piano performance video includes a performance by string quartet (Oh no, wait, it’s a string quartet piece ARRANGED for Orchestra!) is absurd.
But even the Andante Cantabile, which IS a piece for solo piano, is my original performance of the sheet music, not a bootleg of another performer’s recording.
The idea that these ‘rights-collectors’ can accuse me of video-and-audio-piracy just because they own the rights to One, Specific Artist’s performance of a classical work, is outrageous. Finding a 90% match in the Title-text is completely insufficient.
Can’t they be bothered to compare just a few seconds of the video’s audio to a few seconds of the copyrighted recordings which they oversee? Why is the entire onus dumped on a helpless amateur like myself?
It is completely unjust. And it isn’t as though there are a lot of videos out there where the Titles match and the videos don’t. Even a glance at the Duration of their recordings and mine should be enough to indicate that no piracy has occurred.”
I have a good faith belief that the claim(s) described above have been made in error, and that I have the right(s) necessary to use the contents of my video for the reasons I have stated. I have not knowingly made any false statements, nor am I intentionally abusing this dispute process in order to interfere with the rights of others. I understand that filing fraudulent disputes may result in termination of my YouTube account.
Type your full name to serve as your electronic signature
Christopher Dunn
Cancel Continue
Back Cancel Submit Dispute
Are you sure you want to dispute this claim?
OK Cancel
{Notice the unsubtle intimidation implied by the ‘good faith’ check-box.}
{Here’s another, but Kabalevsky, et. al. are modern enough for their compositions to still fall within the composer’s (or the composer’s estate’s) copyright claim.}
Video Title- More Kabalevsky and Others (2011Mar05)
Claims to dispute
Musical Composition administered by:
One or more music publishing rights collecting societies
Reason for dispute
This video uses copyrighted material in a manner that does not require approval of the copyright holder. It is a fair use under copyright law.
Please explain briefly:
“My video is my own, original performance of the works of Kabalevsky and other so-called ‘classical’ composers’ works. It is not a bootleg of an existing, copyrighted recording. Please inform me if I am accused of infringing the copyright of the sheet music or of infringing the copyright of a specific pre-existing, commercially-related recording.”
I don’t see why they publish the sheet music if it’s a crime to play the music in public for free, which is all I have done.”
And on and on:
“my video contains my own, original performance of the sheet music, not a bootleg of another performer’s commercially-available recording!”
And for Satie’s Gnossiennes:
“Only copyrighted in France, Spain, and Portugal”
So that’s what I consider a good-sized mess that will only grow larger with time. I am by no means an accomplished performer—in fact, I rather suck at it. But I approach these issues from the point of view of some future amateur whose own interpretations will be shut out due to increasingly troublesome corner-cutting by the copyright-collectives and big media corporations.
As regards the ISP, their purview includes monitoring my connection for illegal activity—or, to be more precise, they carry out notifications and penalties due to illegal activity as is policed by these same copyright-collectives and big media corporations.
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
RE: OPTIMUM’s “© infringement” email:
I’m not sure what I’m being accused of here. I have allowed my nephew to use this computer recently–maybe he did something. Could you be more specific about the action–did this PC download an mp3, post an mp3, or what? We don’t do that stuff. I don’t know what happened here, but I would not bootleg or pirate mp3s, or anything else for that matter.
Here’s part of the email message I got:
===
We regret having to send notices like this, and we do not wish to alarm you unnecessarily, but we believe it is important to advise you of any notices concerning your account.
Regards,
Ti Chas
Cablevision Registered Copyright Agent
Infringement Notice Details:
Complainant
ID#: 22259478673
Entity: Recording Industry Association of America Inc
Contact:Jeremy Landis
Address: 1025 F Street NW 10th Floor Washington DC 20004
Phone: 1-888-868-2124
Email:riaa.antipiracy@dtecnet.com
Source
Event Time: 2012-08-28 11:28:08.0
IP Address: null
Application: P2P
Username:
Number of Files1
Allegedly Infringed Material
Title: BROTHERS
Filename: The Black Keys – Brothers [2010-MP3-Cov][Bubanee]
URL: null
—Please let me know more about this, especially how I can fix or undo it.
Thanks in advance for your kind attention.
-Chris Dunn
So there you have it. I am innocent of all charges, yet I am harrassed for copyright-violation in page-error notices and property theft in ‘(NoReply)E-Mails’. I love it when I’m accused of a crime in an e-mail that specifically prevents a reply. That, in itself, should be worth a look-see by the legal profession–but what do I know?
