Snarkout Announcements

Akin Fernandez clarifies

One of the nice things about having a website with a modest amount of Google juice is that people occasionally come across what I've written about them, either through vanity searches or checking their referrer logs. (Occasionally what I've written is not nice, and I feel bad. This is another reason why I would be a very poor journalist.) Andrew Plotkin, one of the legends of the current interactive fiction revival, wrote in with some comments about interactive fiction, and recently my post about randomness and "numbers stations" prompted some feedback from Akin Fernandez the man behind the Conet Project (CDs still available) that I thought I'd pass on. Outside web application development and a few specialized facts about mathematics that I still recall from my undergraduate education, I'm not really an expert on anything; I'm someone who reads widely and has access to Google and a good memory for weird anecdotes. I try to get the facts right, but I occasionally print the legend. When I wrote that Satchel Paige integrated the American League a helpful reader wrote in to remind me of Hall of Famer Larry Doby, who I certainly shouldn't be expected to remember, because it's not like he's a Hall of Famer who led the A.L. in home runs twice or anything. If you ever run across something that seems gratuitously incorrect, please send me a note, and I'll fix it.

eventually sparking a legal battle with Akin Fernandez...

Irdial-Discs sued WEA International, the label that sold the infringing copies. Jeff Tweedy had to pay the bill because the contract he has with his label says that he has to pay in the case that his work infringes copyright. WEA keeps the lions share of the royalties, and gets to release an infringing CD scott free.

Fernandez makes low-fidelity MP3s of the Conet recordings available for free on the Internet...

Not so, we allow anyone to rip our CDs at any quality they desire, and then share them with whomever they want. We have done this since 1999. Irdial-Discs, is the record label that allows this, and is the label that released TCP.

but objected to the band using a sample from his CD without authorization...

We objected to WEA International selling almost one million copies of a CD that had sound from our release on it. We allow people to sample from our works, and the majority of time we do not charge.

his ownership of something recorded off of shortwave radio is an open question...

This is not the case. In UK copyright law, a person that creates a recording owns the copyright in it. This copyright is separate from the copyright that covers the content of the recording. For example, if you make a recording of "Born in the USA" by Springsteen while you sing in the shower, the copyright in that tape belongs to you, and no one may make a copy of it without your permission. Springsteen still owns his song, and that is covered by a different copyright. It is the same area of copyright law that protects nature recordings; you can own the copyright in a tape of birdsong, while not owning the birdsong. WEA would never have settled if they did not understand perfectly that we had an iron clad case.

but the real copyright owners of the numbers transmissions aren't likely to complain and Wilco settled out of court.

In this case, we ARE the real owners of the copyright in the tape, and so we are protected by copyright law. You are right in saying that the owners of the transmission on the tape aren't likely to come forward. If they dare to, we will take them to court to make them demonstrate that they are indeed the makers of the transmissions, and then the secret of the "Mossad" stations will be in the open. In other words, representatives of Mossad itself will have to arrive at the High Court of Justice in the Strand and give evidence in open court.

Unlikely is too soft a word for the probability of this occurance happening.

So, from this we have learned that UK copyright law has at least one interesting difference from US copyright law (beyond the Peter Pan thing), that you should go download Conet Project MP3s right now, and that Akin Fernandez's opinion of record labels live somewhere in the same neighborhood as Steve Albini's. Corrections are educational.