I am back. Italy was beautiful. I ate at my first Michelin-bestarred restaurant, and it was jawdroppingly good; I can only imagine what it's like to hit one of the handful of places the Michelin reviewers think merit three stars. I was hailed on. Unlike one of my friends on the trip, Alitalia did not lose my luggage. I saw some famous (and often very good) art. I got sunburnt, but not badly. I bought a sweater, solely so I can sneeringly announce that I bought it at this super little shop off the Piazza d'Espagne in Roma. I drank a great deal of excellent red wine and ate a great deal of gelato. Everything was very nice.
Of course, my first major outage in three years occured while I was off enjoying myself; my beloved host had to switch ISPs, and I was not around to fiddle with my DNS registry. Sorry to go off the air; it won't happen again, be assured, until the universe realizes that I am again away from computers for an extended period.
Regular readers (thank you, everyone!) may have noticed that I've been posting less lately; things have been awfully busy, because I've been getting ready to go on vacation. Hallelujah, that day is finally here. I'm going to be away for two weeks, hopefully far away from a computer, drinking wine, eating good food, and pretending I'm in a neo-realist movie. Posting will resume in late September. In the meantime, please check out the links in my sidebar and bookmarks page. (They aren't highlighted in my sidebar, but I'll point out Ramage, Kempa, Bookninja, and Waxy (as well as the rest of the gang aggregated by the highly useful Upian Hotlinks page) as good sites to read and to borrow links from. Have a good time in my absence; I'm going to try to. Things should pick up a bit, including some movement on the Jumpcut front, some technical changes I'm thinking about making to the site, and some long-stilled projects, when I get back.
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.