Typography is not just a function of design, but of time and context.  If an image with typography exists, the type can help one determine the age, country of origin, or the social, political and historical context of the image.  On the other hand, if one is examining typography for authenticity, it is often possible to determine that an image or document is a fake if the typography is wrong:  if an image of a 1938 advertisement uses text which is  exactly set in Robert Smith’s Brush Script, it’s a forgery, as the typeface wasn’t created until 1942.

Typography is often a vehicle for national and political zeal.  The Nazis embraced blackletter Fraktur until 1941, where it was determined that it was a “Jewish typeface”, and instead of requiring its use “Antiqua” or traditional Roman letterforms were mandated for new work.  In reality, it is not likely that Fraktur was actually considered “Jewish” by the Nazis, but was merely provided as a better-sounding reason (for the intended audience) than the actual reason.  It is far more likely that German publishers were running low on Fraktur type, and it was not worth diverting metal from the war effort to forge new type when perfectly usable Roman type was plentiful, and that it was a practical position given that the inhabitants of Nazi-occupied countries often found Fraktur difficult to read.

A Didot-style typeface is typical of 19th century French and Italian work, whereas the related Baskerville typeface was more typical of English output of the same period.  We take it for granted that “fonts” are “just there” in the age of digital desktop publishing, and plenty of books and a plethora of blog posts have been written about the enthusiasm novices exhibit for inappropriate type, or the overuse of many styles of type in a single document.  In his book “Just My Type”, Simon Garfield describes certain fonts such as Souvenir as “novice magnets” which have bold style that attracts the untrained eye.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at iconic images and documents deliberately rendered in the wrong type.  This is related to Comic Sans Project, but with a different goal:  I’m interested in the contextual and cultural loading of specific typefaces, and not trying to bury Comic Sans in irony (that’s too easy and it’s already been done well - if you care about design, you don’t need anyone else harping at you about Comic Sans, and if you like Comic Sans, no design crank is ever going to talk you out of it).  Some typefaces I’ve used are those which are most commonly used inappropriately, such as Algerian and Souvenir.  Others are typefaces which can be misused, but are often appreciated by many designers when used well, such as Gotham and Galliard.  I’ve generally steered clear of  typefaces which are unusual or of limited utility.

Many of the images use a typeface or technique considerably out of their time.  The Gutenberg Bible is presented as it were created in a typeface and technology from over 500 years later which suggests a science fiction time travel story.  Others are out of place, such as a French fashion magazine rendered in Fraktur, which one could read as an alternate history in which the main difference between that timeline and our own was the fate of Europe after World War II.

I hope you will enjoy some of these.  Click any image for a full-size version.

The Gutenberg Bible

Original image  credit:  Staatsbibliothek Berlin

The Gutenberg Bible is the first instance of movable type in Europe.  I have rendered it in ITC Galliard Std Bold, turning Gutenberg’s 40 line Bible into a 51 line Bible.  Gutenberg’s type is not readable to most untrained laymen, and by setting it in Galliard, it is made instantly readable, presuming one speaks Latin.  Galliard and other modern faces are smaller than the blackletter of Gutenberg, so I had to decide between keeping the same amount of lines in a much larger font size with less of the text, or add lines and alter the spacing.  I chose the latter, and spread the spacing out per-line to capture a bit of the original’s dense flow.  The elimination of the original type layer is far from perfect, but then again, I’m not attempting to create forgeries.  I discovered something interesting which hampered the execution of this a bit: there is no plain-text version of the text of the Gutenberg Bible out there, and to be fair, not every Gutenberg Bible is textually identical.  As a compromise, I have rendered the text of a later version of the Vulgate Bible than the one Gutenberg used, without the text abbreviations which were common in these printings.  Using an English translation would have changed far more than the typography, so I opted not to do that.  I have added a red duplicate underneath the caps to bring the look closer to the original’s use of red-ink rubrics.

The Constitution of the United States

Original image  credit:  National Archives

The beautiful manuscript of the Constitution of the United States opens with a dramatic “We the People”, which is an iconic, easily-recognized symbol of the nation in its original pen.  I have rendered it as if it were not penned in it’s final presentation form by Jacob Shallus, but rather as if it were the result of Shallus hunching over a typewriter in the early hours a September morning in 1787.  The quality is not consistent with an early typewriter, but a much later electric model, thus rendered in a suspiciously precise Courier New.  The flourish and grandeur of the first three words is gone, in its place is underlined text.  Though the original Constitution has an occasional overmarked correction, I chose not to simulate Whiteout and a manual proofreading mark, as this is more likely the result of one of those word processing typewriters common in the 1980s which allowed one to write and correct text before committing a line.

Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Original image credit: Cambridge University Library

The definitive statement of physical motion which largely stood unchallenged until relativity theory as rendered in the extremely modern and geometric Gotham family of type, from 2000.  The Principia described a world whose mechanics did not seem to leave a place for the hand of god constantly keeping everything in check, but only required him to start.  That Newton’s greatest work should have later been called “atheistic” would have angered Newton, a notorious Puritanical religious bigot and a generally disagreeable person to deal with.

Like many printed works of its time, there is a fussy use of various sizes and weights of type, so Gotham’s multiple weights and variants came in handy, as does its Æ ligature and italics.  Gotham’s geometric sense is most extreme in its capital forms, and I think there’s a good fit of subject matter to typeface here.  This copy of the Principia is fire-damaged, and I have kept that damage in place in the lower right of the title page.

Gotham seems to be taking the world by storm right now, due to a lot of high-profile designs, including the 2008 campaign of Barak Obama.  More on him later.  If you’re in design, this is a typeface you’re probably seeing overused recently, and there’s little sign of that trend stopping.

Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of  Species

Original image credit:  University of Sydney Library

An idea for our time in the typeface of our time?  A controversial idea  in a once-ubiquitous typeface whose popularity has made it controversial?  Both have inspired movies, at any rate.  This is set in Helvetica, the voice of the people, or the voice of authority, depending on the context and your point of view.  I’m going to avoid coming outright and making a pun about “accidental design” and some of Helvetica’s warts, such as its “R” and its “g”, but I’ll imply it instead.  Some of the stranger features of Helvetica almost humanize it in comparison to some of the more geometric faces such as Gotham or Futura.  Helvetica makes this text look suitably approachable.

Dewey Defeats Truman

Original image credit:  Original unknown

Possibly the most famous newspaper of all time, and almost certainly the most famous photograph of a newspaper of all time, rendered in Souvenir.  Though created in 1914, early enough for it to have actually been used in this photo, it was not until the 1970s that this typeface became prominent and overused.  In this photo, that resurgence took place about 25 years earlier.

New Alphabet, Kwadraat Blad

Original image credit:  Wim Crouwel

I have always loved this typeface and this design.  Originally printed for Kwadraat Blad in 1967, this is something between a magazine, a typographical experiment, and a design brochure.  Wim Crouwel considered the New Alphabet typeface to be an experiment too far-out for any real use, but the typeface does show its head from time to time, including on the cover of Joy Division’s 1988 anthology Substance and the 1988 re-release of their 1980 single Atmosphere.  On those covers, it’s actually used incorrectly - some letters are substituted for others, mostly due to how non-standard and difficult to read New Alphabet can be. I have a long-standing relationship to this typeface, and have actually created several OpenType instances of it for my own use, including variants which differ from it fairly dramatically.

New Alphabet was developed for the Hell Digiset digital photo-typesetting machine, a dot matrix lettersetting device from the era when computers were very rare and whose displays were frequently vector-based.  The angles show off their vector influences, but the extreme simplicity of the New Alphabet letter forms meant that when set in a dot matrix context, it could be used without degenerating into an unsatisfying blocky mess.  This was radically experimental, and served primarily as a thought exercise to consider the ramifications of digital typography many years earlier than when it became practical.

I have rendered this exercise in Garamond, the polar opposite of New Alphabet, as if Garamond were the radical departure from accepted letter forms of the day rather than some of the best-received instances of serif type..  Rather than overlay a block grid, as on the original, I have rendered “an introduction…” in a blocky anti-aliased text, which I think captures the spirit better than a more literal re-creation of the series of separated square dots of the original.  I imagine a world where Garamond looks as alien and peculiar compared to tradition as New Alphabet does in our own world.

General Post Office K6 Phone Box

Original image credit: Derek Quantrell

The iconic image of 1940s to 1980s telecommunications in the United Kingdom is of the red phone box, and the K6 is the most numerous and well-loved.  The K6, like most models, was very loud, visible, and decorative.  The typeface which labels it is probably one of the few utilitarian choices made in its design.  In its place I’ve put a typical example of an Art Deco typeface.  By the time the K6 was released, Art Deco was in decline.  This could have existed as-is when the K6 was commissioned, or by the time the K8 replaced it, but would have been quite an unlikely choice for text during the height of the K6’s popularity.

Space Shuttle Discovery

Original image credit: NASA

The first Space Shuttle design was the Enterprise, built as a test for the Space Shuttle program, finished in 1981.  Then as now, NASA was invested in Helvetica, used as a clear, culturally-neutral label for its spacecraft.  The details of these images are probably too small to see in the thumbnails, so please view the full-size versions.  What if, instead, NASA had chosen Algerian?  Algerian was created in 1988 based ultimate on old signage type, and is often used inappropriately and poorly.  I think Algerian in this context connotes a country whose typography is more consciously connected to its wood type days, and its appearance on a space age conveyance fails to inspire confidence, much like the notoriously cantankerous steampunk vessels common to that genre of writing and art.

Atari VCS (2600) Gaming Console

Original image credit:  David Dunfield

Atari’s second generation 2600 was a critical market success for the company, whose later years would see it hobble from one spectacular failure to the other, before being purchased by Jack Tramiel and seeing its ultimate demise in 1996.  The name was resurrected from time to time after that, but bears no relationship to the company founded by Nolan Bushnell.

Originally rendered in Harry from 1970 by Visual Graphics Corporation, rendering it in Avant Garde makes it seem more modern, even though it was designed in the same year.  To be honest, the only place Avant Garde looks perfectly correct is when it is used to spell “Avant Garde”, whose logotype was the origin of the typeface.  Although Avant Garde has been woefully abused ever since, there are two things which make it seem more relevant than Harry:  Harry’s rounded shapes have not aged well, making it look soft, fluffy, and decidedly low-tech, and Avant Garde has benefited from time.  The backlash against overuse of Avant Garde was successful enough to put it under the radar for a while, and it has had a recent resurgence from use in contemporary videogames and advertising.  Its stark angularity and more less elliptical curves put it more in line with current ideas about what futurist design should entail, while Harry seems stuck in a past, a neighbor of MICR-inspired typography, only to be trotted out for nostalgic or ironic use.

Commodore 64 Start Screen

Original image credit:  Commodore Business Machines

In the history of 8-bit computing, most people designing character sets for computers and video game systems certainly didn’t consider themselves typographers, and it’s a safe bet to assume most of them wouldn’t have been familiar with the word, since this was before the era of affordable WYSIWYG editing and desktop publishing.  There wasn’t much concern, therefore, with intellectual property with regards to font design, and I believe this is why so much of this bitmapped typography was so daring and experimental—if you liked something, you could adapt it, and if you really wanted to stand out, you had to push the envelope quite a bit.

System-included character sets were generally not so daring, and with good reason:  they had to be functional.  But this lack of distinctive type on the interface itself (something Apple was to pioneer later with bitmapped fonts such as Chicago) resulted in some typefaces being used and re-used or slightly adapted over and over.  The Commodore 64 used a system font whose lowercase and most of its upper case were identical to the earlier Atari 400.  Today, this sort of thing would be called “branding” and jealously defended.

Re-enter Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet.  I don’t think this works too well here, but I find it interesting, as if Crouwel’s 1967 experiment had been a rousing success in digital typography.  Two of the reasons I re-cut New Alphabet and re-imagined a successor OpenType typeface based on New Alphabet was because I was sick of drawing the letter forms manually every time I needed them, and some of New Alphabet’s daring experimentalism needed to be toned down a bit.  This is the original, with shortened nubs for ascenders to accommodate an 8×8 character size.  My own variants of New Alphabet are informed by a simple desire to make some of the more radical letter forms such as “g”, “k”, “s”, and “x” and all of the numerals more legible.  The numbers are definitely a weak point for New Alphabet, as this modified screenshot demonstrates.  Other characters have been made more distinct in my variant, including “e” and “t”, both of which derive from where the cutting edge of bitmap typography lay:  videogames, crack group intros, and the demo scene.  This was second time I overhauled a writing system to take advantage of a “7″-style “t”, the first being my own handwriting, which was quite deliberately influenced by 8-bit videogame typography and Arabic calligraphy.

Vogue Paris

Original image credit:  Vogue Paris

The original magazine’s title is rendered in classic Didot, and the headline text is set in a typeface which was almost certainly created for Vogue specifically, and draws heavily on Didot and Bodoni.  The “e” character distinguishes it from either.  This is an issue from September 2009, and the modified version is a celebration of Fraktur.  Given the political and cultural load of Fraktur, I didn’t want to do too many pieces like this, lest it come off as political grandstanding - suggesting that maybe the Nazis weren’t a great historical development isn’t exactly controversial or a necessary statement to make to anyone other than white supremacists and radical nationalists, who are the least likely to listen to such an argument anyway.  Reading this as “Vogue Paris as imagined in a world where Hitler won World War II” would be silly, as it would have created a command economy to keep itself on a war footing somewhere between the Cold War and regional conflict (”We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”); “command economy” and “fashion” have never co-existed.

What if, instead, the Fraktur typeface and other blackletters had never been supplanted by Latin Antiqua-based letter forms throughout most of Europe?  Or perhaps they had remained strong in Germany but had not been embraced (intially, until they were banned in 1941) by the Nazis or any other political interest?  Without that baggage, it might have remained more widespread for decorative use.  Clarity, however, has always been a major concern.  Rendering “VOGUE Paris” in caps turns the title into a maze of illegible spiral swashes to the modern eye, and ends up looking more like “BOGUG PARTS”, so some accommodation must be made for modern post-Fraktur sensibilities.  With mixed case, most of the more bizarre Fraktur capital forms become obvious in context.

As with the Gutenberg Bible, no attempt is made to actually change the language here—it remains French.  This alternate history isn’t about empire, but rather textual taste and trend.

Barack Obama HOPE Poster

Image credit:  Shepard Fairey

Regardless of one’s feelings about Shepard Fairey or Barack Obama, the HOPE poster is an effective merger of pop art and political statement.  The power of Gotham’s geometric forms fist graced the cover of GQ, engaged in a frontal assault on New York City, and went about as viral as a typeface can get after the release of (and controversy about) this poster.  Like a sci-fi version of Futura (or perhaps “a more sci-fi version of Futura” would be more accurate), it reaches back toward earlier geometric sans serif faces, but captures something new which grounds it solidly in the 21st century.  Rosewood, by contrast is a relatively recent typeface from 1994 whose origins reach back unapologetically to the mid 19th century.  Rosewood is a decorated Clarendon typeface reminiscent of wood cut type commonly seen in advertising and catalogue posters of the period.  Most ornate woodcut type is so dated, that it’s making a comeback for retro-chic design, but it’s not the right way to sell most products, communicate with typical customers, or brand a politician.  It has a certain circus appeal, but is at odds with what people are trying to communicate in the political spectrum today, suggests an era long gone, a lack of media savvy, and outdated values and design sensibilities.

The Beatles Stereo Box Set

Original image credit: Apple Records

This logotype was hand lettered on Ringo Starr’s drum kit, first seen in this form in 1963.  It has cropped up in various Beatles products since, and was used extensively in the branding to the 2009 boxed sets.  The letter forms are similar to Latin Condensed, and originate from hand drawn signage text.  What I’ve done is to squeeze all the interest and style out of the logotype by presenting it in a few weights of stretched Futura.  Different weights were required to stetch it without grossly overweighting the horizontal strokes compared to the vertical.  It’s now a bad logotype which, by being stretched, is an example of one of the most annoying things one can do to a typeface.  It is now better-suited to selling a product nobody cares too greatly about than a rock band whose popularity is wide and whose cultural significance is huge.

I live in an apartment complex moderately close to civilization in Southeast Michigan.  Like many such apartments built a long time ago, the wiring is awful.  Fortunately, it’s not my problem.  Unfortunately, it became my problem.

Ever since moving into this apartment, I’ve had Comcast as my internet provider.  With a few minor blips, the service has been pretty solid, and I’m not losing service every time it snows or the winds get fierce, which has been the case in other places I’ve lived.

All was going well until Thursday, February 16 2012 at about 3 PM.

Part One, Day One

I sit down at the computer and every single piece of internet-dependent software I have is protesting, and I’m kicked out of IRC on eight networks and four clients at once.  The internet is down.  I look outside to notice a guy from AT&T walking out to his truck.  I wonder briefly if I should go out and ask him if he did anything which could have affected my service.  The timestamps say the connection has only been out for thirty minutes, so I decide it’s probably just a minor glitch, I put my feet up, and decide I’ll give Comcast a call if it doesn’t come back up in another thirty minutes.  I’m not usually That Guy who’s on the phone overreacting because of minor day-to-day issues.

I decide not to bother the guy from AT&T, and I have regretted this foolish decision for weeks.

At about 4 PM, I call Comcast and set up an appointment for the next day, Friday.  Annoyed at the minor inconvenience, I decide to do some file management work I’ve been putting off and make the most of my internet vacation.  I have a smartphone data plan, and that will have to do for minor stuff.

Part One, Day Two

On Friday the 17th, the Comcast techs come out.  Of course I have to guide them in the last mile or so because for whatever reason if you actually type in my address correctly, Google Maps sends you to a place about a mile away.  This happens every time someone gets here via Google, so by now I’m used to it.  To make matters worse, there are no numbers anywhere in the apartment complex that carry the number of the building my address represents.  I suppose I’m used to that, too.  My cable modem is working, the cable from the wall to the modem is fine, and the connection to the wiring box outside is working.  That leaves the connection from that box to the outlet on my wall.  The Comcast tech says that my cable most likely goes through the apartment below, and says that since this involves a non-customer, they have to escalate it to their supervisor and re-schedule the appointment.  I’m told someone will call me on Saturday.  I’m asked to talk to my neighbor and apartment management to make sure someone can access the unit below me.

Let me explain to you how apartment living works for those of you unclear on the concept:  the best way to live in an apartment is to stay out of everyone else’s business, not cause any issues that affect other people, and stay out of their lives to the fullest extent possible.  If I wanted to get chatty with the neighbors, I’d live in a house, attend weird homeowner association meetings or whatever, and gossip and lie about them my behind their backs like everyone else does, or say nothing, secure in the knowledge that everyone else was gossiping and lying about me.  I’ve owned a townhouse, I know the drill.  Proximity is not a useful basis for friendship.  So no, I will not discuss the matter with my neighbor, and I will not schedule a visit to that unit with apartment management.  That’s your job, Comcast, you’re paid to do it.  Deciding to be a little helpful after all, I relent and go over to apartment management and let them know that someone from Comcast will have to go into the apartment below mine to fix wiring that comes through that unit into mine.  The apartment manager asks me to talk to the neighbor and let him know.

“Umm, I’d really rather just stay out of his business.”

“Well, it would be neighborly to let him know what’s going on and just give him a heads up.”

Sigh.  I think about this for about half a minute and decide that honesty is the best policy.

Before we get back to the drama, let me tell you, dear reader, about my neighbor.  Or rather, his dog.  This dog is a beagle or beagle mix or some other sort of dog thing.  Normally this is my favourite kind of dog — not beagles, but “other peoples’ dogs”.  Dogs I can greet on the street, pet, and then walk away from.  The problem with dogs and me is that if you don’t have a pretty regular schedule, you put them in an unfair situation.  You can’t call your dog at 5 PM, let him know that you’re going to be out and that you’ll be home at 9 PM, therefore please learn to shit in the toilet and not piss on the floor.  Dogs need a reliable schedule at least, or someone around most of the time at best.  A cat, on the other hand, misses you when you’re gone, but if you stay out four hours later than usual, it’s not an exhausted nervous wreck having held its bladder for three hours and then finally given up on you.  It uses the litter box, makes some sand castles, rakes it like a zen garden, contemplates its dignity, and then goes to the bookcase, pulls out a book from the lowest bookshelf with its cute stumpy kitty paws that the previous owner de-clawed, and sits on it, purring.  At least that’s what happens in my personal experience.

I don’t know my neighbor’s schedule.  See “staying out of my neighbor’s business” for further details.  What I do know however, is that this dog barks.  He barks a lot.  He barks all the goddamn time.  When he starts barking, he keeps barking for hours.  The only time he shuts his goddamn mouth is when my neighbor walks into his apartment.  The dog does not bark when his owner is home.  Only every other time, except when he’s not barking, but yowling.  That’s a refreshing change that really breaks up the routine.

Back to the matter at hand, I’m in the apartment manager’s office, and I decide to tell her the truth.

“One of these days, I’m going to come into your office and we’re going to have a conversation about my neighbor’s dog.  I want to be very clear that today is not that day, and this is not that conversation.  However, you know that dog barks all day long and any time the neighbor is gone.  I’m sure that since I keep weird hours that he can probably occasionally hear me walking around at 4 AM and using the sink, but I think overall I’m getting the worse end of the deal.  My goal is to have as little interaction with him as possible because I don’t want to say something to escalate this situation and then all of a sudden we have a Neighbor Problem instead of a Dog Problem.  I just want to stay out of his business, and try my damnedest to ignore that ignorant dog to the best of my ability, and not get involved with him any more than I have to.  That way this conversation about the dog can be put off as long as possible, hopefully until either I move or he moves, and I never have to call the police for a noise complaint.”

In my experience, noise complaints always lead to petty nonsense.  So yeah, how about someone from apartment management deals with their tenants and I do not.  Yes, I will be happy to tape that note she’s writing to the door, however.

If having a day without the sweet creamy filling of the internet was bad, having two without it is awful.  Fortunately, I have enough plans that would either keep me out of the house or having people over to keep me busy the rest of Friday and Saturday.  The problem is that nobody ends up calling me on Saturday.  I resign myself to the fact that nothing is going to get done until Monday.

Part One, Day Five

On Monday, I get a call bright and early from ACI, a contractor that Comcast uses in this area.  Unfortunately, the call comes as I’m getting dressed, and I miss the call.  I spend the rest of the day trying to return the call six times, leaving a quick voice mail twice.  On Tuesday, I call Comcast and explain the situation thus far, and I’m told they were probably out for the holiday.  There are two problems with this.  First, they called me on Monday, it was returning their call which seemed to be the problem, and their call system was an irritating maze of phone menu nonsense.  Second, what the hell kind of holiday is President’s Day? Seriously?  How do we celebrate that holiday, by putting a cute mini Abe Lincoln top hat on a groundhog, place him in front of a Washington Monument replica, and if he flees in terror, we delay the next presidential election a month, and if he doesn’t, we cram him full of stuffing and serve him next to a bowl of cranberry sauce?  I’m confused.

About thirty minutes after calling Comcast on Tuesday, ACI finally returns my call, and schedules me for an appointment on Thursday, explaining that they’ve only got three guys available.  Thursday the 23rd, an entire WEEK after the outage began because I foolishly decided to give Comcast and AT&T the benefit of the doubt and refused to be paranoid enough to think the AT&T service tech could have done anything so dumb as assuming a stray cable in a customer’s closet wasn’t important and needed to be disconnected.  Experienced cable techs know how awful the wiring is in apartment complexes that were built before the widespread availability of cable television and broadband internet access, and to presume an extra cable that is connected which has no effect on the service they’re installing is somehow “spare” is absolutely stupid.

Part One, Day Eight

So on Thursday, the ACI tech comes out, steps out of the apartment, and five minutes later IRC is going nuts on a beeping connection-spree.  He comes back up and tells me he went to the apartment below mine, the neighbor let him in (which was fortunate since he wasn’t a Comcast customer, and would not have been obligated to without apartment management sending someone over), had a look around the living room closet, and sure enough, the AT&T tech had simply disconnected the cable for no reason whatsoever.

I don’t consider myself a paranoid person or prone to conspiracy theories, but I do have to wonder whether this was incompetence or deliberate, as a way to drum up business from people irritated at their competitors inability to provide consistent service by “accidentally” disconnecting them.  Either scenario is truly awful, and I just can’t come up with a third scenario which makes better sense.

After getting service reconnected, I go on a holy quest to download All The Things.  In fact, I have to make up for lost time, so I download All The Things, delete them, and re-download them just to be sure they stay downloaded.  Really.  (No, not really.)

Service is back a full week after disconnection, life is good, and my girlfriend and I can stop saying “Comcast” and “AT&T” followed by a sighing contest.  For the record, we’re both getting very good at the theatrical sigh after so much practice.  Everything is back to normal…

Part Two, Day One

…until Wednesday, February 29th.  I turn on the computer to check All The Things, and notice I’ve been down since 9 AM.  Brilliant.  I give Comcast another call, explain to them that my internet service is out again, and that they need to send someone out again, and explain what happened the week before.

Part Two, Day Two

On Thursday, the Comcast tech comes out, checks all the bits he can, and they’re all good, which leaves the same bits which caused a problem the last time, the link that goes through my neighbor’s apartment.  I’m asked if I could see if the guy’s home and talk to him and … wait we’re on this again?  What is it with everyone thinking it’s my job to tell my neighbors who to let into their home? No, I most certainly will not, but I will walk over to apartment management (again) and talk to them (again) about having maintenance go over there and supervise while the Comcast guy tries to fix my situation (again).

I present this issue to apartment management and…

“I’m going to have to say probably not, we’ve only got one guy doing maintenance and …”

Yeah, let me interrupt this right here.  Ever since we moved in last fall, every conversation about maintenance has started with excuses about how they only have one guy right now.  Totally Not My Fucking Problem.  And I’m not going to wait another goddamn week to get internet back until the right people are here at the right time at the same time my neighbor just happens to be home during whatever we’re calling business hours.  Explaining this in a more polite manner than I’ve presented it here, I tell them they need to contact the guy to get permission or whatever because this is a five minute fix and I shouldn’t have to wait days for the stars to align to get this resolved.  Why does everyone seem to need to tell me their fucking staffing issues?  I don’t care if apartment management has one guy, I don’t care if ACI has three guys.  NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM.  If you’re understaffed, fix it.  Grow the economy.

“… he’s busy in another unit.  I’ll have him come over when he’s done.”

Fine.  Whatever.  I talk to the Comcast tech and tell him the situation.  He’s a pretty easy guy to work with, so he waits until the maintenance person gets over to open the downstairs unit…

…and the dog is having none of this.  I’m an animal lover, but I’m going to be honest here, I have had fantasies about punting that beagle through the air like it was a football.  I’m not proud of this, and I’m not bragging, but I’m being honest:  I’ve thought Dark Thoughts about that beagle.  So this tiny dog “looked like it was about to rip my hand off” from the maintenance guy’s point of view, and the Comcast guy had no alternative other than leaving.  We talked for a while, because I think we both knew that if he left right then, the neighbor was going to magically show up five minutes later.

The Comcast guy says it wouldn’t surprise him if the second disconnection was from the neighbor cancelling AT&T and having someone come out, as apparently they have a habit of offering service they don’t have the signal strength to provide in this area, and then AT&T ends up losing customers a week after they start service.  While he’s talking to one of his supervisors about a close-out code, I suggest that he find out if my neighbor is a Comcast customer now, riffing on the idea that he may have cancelled AT&T and re-established connection with Comcast again.  This conversation can only go on so long, though, as the guy’s probably pretty tightly scheduled, so after a while the Comcast tech gets ready to leave.  While looking up the account, however, he says the previous guy (the guy who fixed my issue last week) closed the call out with a “customer education” code, which is billable.  Brilliant!  So I call up Comcast, and with his help, we resolve that issue.  The guy heads out.

And five minutes later?  You guessed it.  The neighbor gets home.  This is like a poorly written sitcom whose timing is so unbelievably convenient to the plot that it strains credulity.  And yet, this happened.  Breaking every rule I have about Apartment Living, I walk downstairs and as my neighbor is getting his mail, I ask him if he had anyone from a cable company out here at about 9 AM the previous day.  Sure enough, he did:  he cancelled AT&T.  He’s back with Comcast now.  At this point, I don’t have enough faces or enough palms to properly express my frustration.

It’s 4 PM, so immediately after this exchange, I hike back upstairs in a rush to see if I can get Comcast to turn their guy around and come back (he’s probably like ten to fifteen minutes out by then).  I’m told Comcast will have dispatch call me in fifteen minutes to an hour.  At 5 PM I call again, explain the situation again for what feels like the hundredth time but is probably only the sixth, and I am assured that someone will call be back that night.  Of course, I do not get a call that night.

Part Two, Day Three

Early on Friday, March 2, I wait for reasonable office hours and give Comcast a call.  I explain this situation again, going back to the 16th so that the ridiculousness of this situation can be made apparent, my outrage is so extreme that it has sent me into a tone of voice which is eerily calm and almost sweet.  I’m fucking livid.  I’m told that dispatch will call me sometime before 8 PM.  Wait wait, hold the fucking bus.  I explain ever so nicely how explaining things ever so nicely has failed to work so far, and that a callback by 8 PM is absolutely not an acceptable time frame, that I need a call within the hour about scheduling a fix today.  I’ve gone most of ten days without service since the 16th, and being reasonable hasn’t worked, and I explain that I’m going to try being an annoyance instead and we’ll see how that works.  I’ll be calling back if I don’t hear from dispatch within the hour.

A little over an hour later, I haven’t gotten a call back, and I’m on the phone to Comcast yet again, diving through their phone menu maze.  Just as I’m about to get in line to talk to a rep, I get a second call coming in, I take it, and it’s dispatch.  They’d like to schedule someone out the next day, on Saturday.  No no no no no no NO!  I explain the entire situation from the 16th on, and explain that being patient and reasonable hasn’t worked.  I don’t need someone on Saturday, I need someone today to fix the problem today.  Then I hear about how he’s only got three people out in the field and …

WHAT THE FLYING FUCK?  SERIOUSLY?  DEAR COMCAST, APARTMENT MANAGEMENT, ACI, AND ANYONE ELSE OUT THERE IN CORPORATE AMERICA:  YOUR STAFFING ISSUES ARE NOT MY PROBLEM.  I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR STAFFING ISSUES.  I HAVE MY OWN PRIORITIES IN LIFE, AND CONFUSING YOUR PROBLEMS WITH MINE IS NOT ONE OF THEM.  IF YOU DON’T HAVE ENOUGH STAFF TO PROVIDE THE SERVICES I PAY FOR, HIRE MORE STAFF OR LOWER YOUR RATES IN COMPENSATION.  DO NOT FUCKING TELL ME YOU ONLY HAVE ONE GUY, THAT YOU ONLY HAVE THREE GUYS, THAT YOU ONLY HAVE TWO GUYS AND A HALF-TRAINED GOAT WHO IS PRONE TO CHEWING ON PAPERWORK AND SHITTING IN THE LOBBY.

I DO NOT CARE.  I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT CARE.  Actually, if you have a goat chewing on paperwork, take a photo, it might be amusing to view if I ever get internet back before the invention of faster-than-light travel.

Rather than that rampage, instead I tell him that I’ve been without service for ten days since the 16th, and I’m completely sick of being put off.  I don’t need this taken care of on Saturday, I need it taken care of today, Friday.  I’m sick of putting things off because my only internet is through the slow trickle of my Sprint phone connection.  You know those Sprint 4G commercials that advertise the speed of their unlimited network?  Well, it turns out that network doesn’t exist in Southeastern Michigan, but they still charge you for a 4G fee.  I don’t have a lot of rage to spare for Sprint in this tirade, however, so I’ll settle for this:  Sprint, suck it.  I’ve got things I need to work on and all this month’s internet drama is doing is making people think I’m unreliable.  After some more conversation about how trucks being in Birmingham, Ann Arbor, West Some Silly Name Lake, he says he’ll finish up some scheduling and try to come out himself that day.

At the end of this ordeal (assuming it doesn’t crop up again), it turns out that the Comcast people who came to my neighbor’s place to re-instate his service ended up using the connection from the network interface that my connection had previously used, which seems like a bizarrely novice mistake to make.  So now I’m going to download All The Things.  Four times, deleting the first three.  Really.  (No, not really.)

(Well, maybe.)

Part Three, Day One…

… No.  Just, no.

Copyright is profoundly broken. Before making the moral case for “piracy”, it’s important to consider where we are now in terms of legislation and public response.

SOPA is probably dead, why does this still matter?

Congress, apparently, was surprised when the American public reacted so poorly and so loudly to SOPA in January 2012. Normally, when Congress is paid by lobbyists to write laws friendly to the intellectual property (IP) cartel, these laws pass without much public comment or interest, so when 7 million people signed the most prominent of many anti-SOPA web petitions, it was clear that if the IP lobby got its way, Americans might actually have the audacity to vote for Congressmen and Senators who actually opposed it.

This means the internet is safe, and everything is back to normal, right?

Not by a long shot. Many of the anti-SOPA press releases, videos, blogs, and testimony focuses on the fact that while everyone agrees that piracy must be combated, SOPA did much more than this by making having accurate search engines that might point to infringing content a crime, and making linking to infringing content a crime. Most of these anti-SOPA crusaders—and probably all of the commercial crusaders like Google, Reddit and Facebook—were not fighting to preserve a right to pirate, they were fighting to preserve a right to link or index without fear that someone, some day, might use their platform to link to infringing content that the owner of the website didn’t filter out. This is a good and reasonable stance to take for those involved, and it seems that as a result of this very public fight, SOPA is doomed to wander Congress until it finds the exit and is unceremoniously pushed out.

There is a big problem here, though, and it’s that everyone does not agree that piracy must be combated. For those who wish to make a practical or moral argument in defense of piracy, they’ve got a large problem on their hands: SOPA/PIPA aren’t the last act in this play. The OPEN Act is being offered as a substitute for the failures and overreaching of SOPA. Where SOPA was censorious and overbearing, and involved a lot of things other than internet piracy such as physical merchandise and prescription drug counterfeiting, the OPEN Act attempts to restrict itself to a smaller set of activities that are aimed at fighting piracy and those who engage in it.

When SOPA became big news at the end of 2011, several enthusiastic corporate supporters testified before Congress, and wrote in favour of SOPA on their blogs and press releases, and spoke in favour of it in interviews. Some such as NVIDIA and GoDaddy were publicly shamed for doing so, and forced to “retract” their support for SOPA. With the OPEN Act, the battle for passage is going to be different. Many companies who are wary of the public backlash of GoDaddy and other SOPA supporters are going to do exactly what they did in the SOPA battle when the OPEN Act gains steam: support it, keep their CEOs from cheering it on in their company blogs, and continue to financially support the political campaigns of those politicians who are friendly to the OPEN Act. There’s going to be less or at least different public companies talking about the OPEN Act, and they’re going probably not going to be sending out self-pitying protests like the MPAA’s CEO and former Senator Chris Dodd in response to the SOPA blackouts.

Worst of all, rather than Google and Facebook and a small army of graphic designers and video directors working on behalf of the side of the fight that piracy is on, they’re going to be working against these interests in the OPEN Act, unless a particularly rash Congressman successfully adds a particularly problematic modification. They’ve got a better name, too, and will be fighting to “keep the web open”. This raises the question, however, of who was trying to close it in the first place: the same Congress trying to “keep it open” with the OPEN Act. It’s a much more politically useful acronym than a lot of the mishmash Congress comes up with.

What is the OPEN Act?

The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act (OPEN Act) is a proposed alternative to the SOPA and PROTECT-IP acts. It is very much a work in progress, and a response to the more restrictive and punitive powers granted by SOPA and PROTECT-IP.

While certainly less authoritarian than SOPA and PROTECT-IP, it is still concerned with backing up the intellectual property regime with a set of tools to allow copyrights to be upheld internationally according to US laws, including dictating to financial transactions facilitators (like PayPal and Flattr) who it may and may not do business with, punishing advertisers, punishing any stakeholder for not fully cooperating with kangaroo court investigations, and then sending them the bill for the investigation. Rather than block access to websites, OPEN Act seeks to eliminate them by tying them up in protracted legal fights that they cannot afford to defend themselves properly from. This is justice only for those with the cash reserves to afford it. To top it off, any action the International Trade Commission takes can be vetoed by the US president.

Can you afford to be on the “wrong” side of the OPEN Act?

No. The IP cartel can afford to “donate to the election campaign” (bribe) US Senators and Congressmen, and you can not. They have the massed political clout of Hollywood, Wall Street and Main Street paying them to write the best legislation money can buy, and you do not. Most of the web’s opposition to SOPA is going to rally to the side of the OPEN Act, seeing it as better legislation and just as importantly, seeing it as legislation that will put the Congressional legislative itch to fight piracy at ease without affecting their users to the degree SOPA would.

The OPEN Act is bad legislation, and it represents a bad precedent. We cannot afford to have another DMCA-like bill pass. These bills exist to defend the intellectual property cartel against its own failing business models. The music establishment fought the introduction of consumer Digital Audio Tape and won, they fought the introduction of the hardware MP3 player and lost. But when the RIAA loses, it can still win: Diamond Multimedia won the lawsuit at a crippling price, and it cost the company its market share, tying down its cash reserves to its legal defense rather than developing its product lines.

We filed this lawsuit because unchecked piracy on the Internet threatens the development of a legitimate marketplace that consumers want. - RIAA statement, 1999

History has shown, however, in both the case of legal music downloading, streaming, and in the case of piracy, that the Internet is the marketplace that the consumers want. The RIAA isn’t merely at war with pirates or its customers, it’s a victim of its own business model which views the world of 2011 in terms of 1997.

What is piracy? Is it just stealing? Is it worth defending?

In order to understand the culture of piracy, it is crucial to understand that there are many reasons why piracy occurs, why people feel it is justified, and why people call certain activities “piracy”. No one answer captures the reasons piracy occurs, and this is often lost in IP-friendly media discussions of the sort that take place on news shows. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and certain high profile artists working for them have nearly monopolized public expression of the debate in popular media. I therefore don’t need to re-iterate their arguments against piracy. Instead, I will describe a series of arguments for piracy as promoted by people who actually engage in it.

Greed And Thrift

People want something for free. In this economy, even people who are willing to buy music often feel they don’t have the disposable income to do so, or they want more music than they can reasonably afford. For many people who pirate for this reason, it becomes difficult to get back into the habit of paying for content after becoming used to getting it for free. At least one study has shown that there is significant overlap between the people who buy much more music than average and the people who pirate more music than average. Collectors collect, after all.

Lack of Availability And Historic Preservation

Some music isn’t available commercially. Albums go out of print, and can be difficult or impossible to find because record labels go out of business, or because the band considers them embarrassing compared to their later output; Tori Amos, Pantera, and Björk all have early albums that they feel aren’t relevant to their later careers and successes (and in those three cases, they’re certainly right). In many areas of the country, music store options have become very limited in the last ten years, which can make getting obscure and small-label releases nearly impossible in these markets. Many albums are only distributed in specific countries. Some are so rare they’re bought as collector items rather than as music. A $200 vinyl record is too valuable to play. A lot of music was never distributed for profit in the first place, including white label releases, demos and bootlegs.

Music that is out of print—historically, this is most recorded music ever available commercially—isn’t available unless it is pirated and will only survive if the people to whom it means the most preserve it themselves. There is often no corporate interest in preserving the catalog of some legacy artists whose popularity or impact has never been notable. Currently, many businesses in the music industry have no commercial interest in preserving their own archives beyond that which they believe can be sold profitably.

Resentment Of Middlemen

The commercial interest of record labels often runs counter to the interests of music lovers, particularly those fans who are most invested in the music they listen to. Artists traditionally receive an absurdly tiny fraction of album sales. Many “pirates” are aware that the difference paid to the artist between buying an album and downloading an album illegally is often about $0.15 - $0.75 per album, and are therefore morally opposed to the system for this reason. Many pirates will still buy music directly from the artist, online or at shows, because the artist gets a much larger percentage of the profit. Large record labels don’t serve a valuable function anymore - less people than ever need a record label picking and choosing which artists are valid or interesting, and don’t believe that the label does enough work for the artists to justify 98-99% of the revenue of a record’s sale.

Some established artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have even come out against the current royalty system in a way that up-and-coming artists often can’t afford to risk. The system is unfriendly toward artists, and many pirates and artists choose to subvert it specifically for this reason, agreeing that the artist creating the recording has a lot more to do with its artistic value than those people at the record label who are involved with the album strictly as product. This isn’t to suggest that people employed by record labels should be working for free, but they’re also not creating 98% of the recording’s value.

Folk Law

People sometimes believe that copyright violation isn’t illegal because no money is being transferred. In the history of online computing, copyright violation has always been accompanied by a healthy dose of “folk law”, which describes justifications that appear to be more legally sound than they are to people who are not familiar with the law. While many of the other justifications for piracy detailed here describe philosophical, moral, or legal perspectives, the “folk law” defenses are quite simply factually incorrect.

One folk law defense is as old as organized computer piracy itself, the idea usually expressed as “you may use this content for 24 hours, after that, you are legally required to delete the content or purchase it”. Copyright law, as one might expect, does not include a provision in which piracy is defined by the duration for which it occurs.

“You may only download this content if you own it” is often used to excuse people from downloading music, video or entertainment content they’ve already purchased. Under US law, there is no grant of license for you to download, much less provide content to others, on the basis that you already paid for it in some instance. When one purchases an album, one does not own the music, they own a right to play it for their own non-commercial pleasure. The fact that you have an album in your home and have downloaded it because it is easier to do than to find and play the CD or encode it to a different format is not a legal justification. One has a right to create a backup of one’s own media, but not to download someone else’s backup of that person’s media, even if you own it as well. Even if this right did exist, it would not apply to different versions of an album, and many albums go through many releases, often in editions which are almost completely identical to one another, differing in minor details.

“The BitTorrent files on this server are meant for the distribution of backups which are not hosted on this server.” This defense has actually held up in a couple of cases, but usually because the judge or jury didn’t understand the technology; existing law makes it fairly clear that you are not permitted to knowingly facilitate the piracy of others. This very tenuous loophole is being closed through precedent of existing law as well as specific provisions of the OPEN Act. One is not given a pass for downloading someone else’s backup, as described in the previous paragraph.

“If you are a member of a law enforcement agency or an employee of a business affiliated with the RIAA, you may not use this service and MUST disconnect immediately.” Legal precedent does not allow for the enforcement of illegal contracts, and a contract that specifically prohibits the enforcement of applicable laws is not valid.

Most of these formations of folk law were first formulated decades ago by people—usually teenage operators of stand-alone computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) used for software piracy—as a sort of disclaimer to eliminate the provider’s legal liability. It should be noted that it is completely ineffective in doing so.

Opposition to Intellectual Property Law

Many pirates willing to make a moral defense of copyright infringement take issue with the length and degree of protection that current copyright law offers. To them, piracy is not the problem, but a work-around to the problem of a legal framework which they oppose.

Piracy Is Not the Problem, Copyright and Other Intellectual Property Laws Are the Problem

Many intellectual property mechanisms, including copyrights, were originally meant to facilitate the creation of new content to enter the public domain, but are now used to prevent new content from ever getting to the public domain. Copyright law in the US was originally proposed to last 7 years, written into law as 14, and eventually doubled to 28 years. Through a series of extensions, the copyright protection of recorded music published for consumers lasts until 70 years after the death of the author, or if work of corporate authorship, the shorter of 95 years from publication, or 120 years from creation. The net effect is that something recorded and first sold for the public this year will only enter the public domain in 2082, if the creator is dead, or dies in 2012. If Miley Cyrus is fortunate enough to live until she’s 90, her 2010 album Can’t Be Tamed will enter the public domain in 2152.

The original function of the copyright law was not to protect “intellectual property holders”, it was to provide a monopoly incentive to distribute new works for a limited period of time, after which they would be public domain in order to promote the arts and sciences. The goal of new content entering the public domain after allowing a short period of monopoly distribution is to encourage new works will be made, and that the public has access to them in a reasonable period of time. Now, the only way content enters the public domain is either by accident or neglect. Assuming the law is not extended further - and this is a ridiculous assumption - Can’t Be Tamed will be released into the public domain in 2152. While one could certainly argue that the album is not culturally relevant today, the idea of it being culturally relevant in 140 years defies belief.

The net result of nothing new entering the public domain, and what little that does enter it does so long after it’s culturally relevant is this: the culture we participate in as citizens is a culture we’re prevented from participating in unless we pay a “toll” at every opportunity. By allowing the monopoly distribution rights to be extended indefinitely, what we’ve done is prevent people from participating in their own culture. The sampling movement and the legal actions against it is a good demonstration, as is the ability of the RIAA to make Internet distribution fees for music so expensive that it forces people out of the game, even if they’re only interested in being a non-profit organization. Is sampling an art form? Is copying an entire song and singing or rapping over it worthy of protecting? That’s the wrong question. Here’s the right one: is it part of our culture, and should we pay a penalty for participating in it?

Consider these albums that would have never been made in their existing forms had sampling other works been prevented:

Grandmaster Flash - The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel (1981)
Negativland - Escape from Noise (1987)
Public Enemy - It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)
Skinny Puppy - Last Rights (1992)
Portishead - Dummy (1994)
The Beastie Boys - Ill Communication (1994)
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing (1996)
2 Many DJ’s - As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2 (2001)
Danger Mouse - The Grey Album (2004)
Kanye West - Graduation (2007)
Girl Talk - Feed The Animals (2008)

Should we be willing to throw all this music under the bus just because it shares a technique in common with the lazy sort of sampling used by Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer? Should a video of a teenager singing a pop song in her bedroom be subject to the concentrated attention of the intellectual property rights cartel?

The attack of non-commercial use isn’t incidental. Having originally been given 14 (then 28, then more) years to profit from copyright monopoly protection, current intellectual property owners are now legally entitled to profit from work which none of the creators are alive to enjoy the fruits of. Most records do not enjoy a shelf life of 38 years and counting, such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Most albums make the bulk of their original sales in the first five years of their release. For the intellectual property owners, this simply isn’t enough, and often results in countless releases and re-releases of those albums that do stand the test of time, and the abandonment of those which don’t. Much like George Lucas and Star Wars, subsequent re-releases are often nothing more than a cash grab, subject to whatever whims of popular music mastering are in play at the time, including “brickwalling” the audio so that the only volume in a given track is “loud”.

This is a deliberate privation of the public commons, and it’s not limited to the distribution of albums: even our freedoms of speech are at risk. These companies that enjoy unprecedented copyright protection for the products of our culture try to shut down those few exceptions to the copyright rules by fighting against parody, satire, commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library use, and scholarship. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and successor bills, the penalties for some copyright protection are so severe that even a simple take-down notice is sufficient to remove most content from the Internet. Even if the material does not infringe on copyright due to Fair Use or other considerations, it is usually enough to scare the accused into compliance with the issuer’s wishes. This has been used to silence satire and parody, sampling, and critical review. It has been used to silence protest.

Copyright: The Five Year Plan

The founders of the United States of America felt that fourteen years was good enough when cultural trends changed slowly, and culture traveled at the speed of horseback. It would follow that five years is much more than sufficient copyright protection when cultural trends change with the season and when culture travels at the speed of light. But five years isn’t good enough for the intellectual property cartel: it wants exclusive rights forever and it’s getting them in the form of never-expiring extensions. A system of intellectual property laws that errs too far in favour of the original copyright holder at the expense of the original goal of getting content into the public domain is not a system worth preserving; the monetary, political, and social costs are simply too great.

Support a five year, non-renewable copyright law, and the elimination of “idea” patents, both of which slow innovation and serve to separate us from the culture we’re entitled to participate in. This would be a five year non-renewable copyright from the first date of publication. “Publication” refers to the public distribution, performance, or sale of a work. This five years of copyright is a protected monopoly on publication, similar to existing copyright law. After this non-renewable five year copyright protection has expired, the work can be used for any purpose, commercial or private, by any person. The only caveat is that reasonable efforts must be made to credit the original sources of content where such content comprises a significant portion of a derivative product, similar in spirit to the Creative Commons Attribution license requirement.

Modeled after the Copyright Act of 1790, but written in modern and relatively clear language devoid of some of the legal jargon, a new five year act would read something like this:

Universal Millennium Copyright Act (UMCA)

An Act for the encouragement of learning and the free flow of culture, by securing the expression of creative work to the authors and proprietors of such expressions for a specified period of time.

Section 1: Upon the passage of this act, the authors of any expression of work of writing, musical score, musical performance, dramatic performance, pictoral work, graphic work, sculptural work, audiovisual work, sound recordings, architectural work, and compilations or derivatives of these, published within the United States, being a citizen or citizens thereof, or resident within the same, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, who halt or have not transferred to any other person the copyright of such works, share or shares thereof; and any other person or persons, being a citizen or citizens of the United States, or residents of, his or their executors, administrators or assigns, who have purchased or legally acquired the copyright of any works, in order to publish via public distribution, public performance or sale of such works shall have the sole right and liberty of publishing such works, for the term of five years from the date of initial sale or public performance or public distribution, including works performed, distributed, or sold before the passage of this act. At the expiration of the said term, said term may not be renewed for the original instance of the work in question.

Section 2: If any other person or persons, from and after the first initial sale, public distribution or public performance of any work protected in Section 1, within the five year term of protection granted by this act, shall cause to be sold, publicly distributed or publicly performed any copy or copies of such works, without the legal consent of the author or proprietor thereof then such offender or offenders shall forfeit and destroy all and every copy of said work. Every such offender and offenders shall also forfeit and pay the existing reasonable sale value of the original work or the value of the unlawful sale, whichever is greater, for every instance of the work which has been sold, publicly distributed, or publicly performed to the author or proprietor or agent of said work contrary to the true intent and meaning of this act, plus additional reasonable punitive damages. Provided always that hat such action be commenced within one year after the end of the protections thus granted, and not afterwards.

Section 3: Protections and copyrights granted by states and foreign nations shall be considered legally binding only to the extent where they do not violate the federal United States laws of copyright. If there is any discrepancy between the laws of the United States and the laws of a foreign nation, the less restrictive of the two shall take precedence within the United States.

Section 4: After the expiration of the protections offered in this act, any persons within or outside the United States may use works which have expired from this protection for any reasons, commercial or non-commercial, public or private. Thereafter, a reasonable attempt must be made to attribute to the original authors those works which were created by them and either distributed by or used in the derivative works of others. The author’s previous copyright identification, if provided in the original, or at the very least author’s name and the name of the work if no other information is available, is required to be duplicated in a way that is reasonable to the medium in which the original author’s work is distributed or used.

Much like the Copyright Act of 1790, it’s not air-tight, and it’s subject to other considerations, but it lays a clear framework for a doctrine of a five year copyright protection. “Reasonable punitive damages” would have to be defined in a way where plaintiffs do not game the system, such as SCO’s claimed damages of $1.4 million in the case against Kevin Mitnick for violating their copyrights by unauthorized copying of software, something he never attempted to sell or distribute. SCO’s technique is typical in overzealous prosectution: the “cost” of this copyright violation included the entire development costs of the software, and not its $216 per-instance licensing fee. The RIAA’s claim of damages of $80,000 per song in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case is a more relevant example. More reasonable damages would have been ~$1 per song distributed plus punitive damages no more than double the total amount. Under this act, had it applied to Thomas-Rasset’s case, this would have been $24 to $72 for the 24 tracks the RIAA sought relief from if “song distributed” is counted as “songs downloaded”, or closer to $1,700 to a punitive maximum $5,100 if the plaintiffs had sought relief for all 1,700 tracks. I cannot tell from existing court documents how many people downloaded the songs from Thomas-Rasset, or if the plaintiff’s case was in any way related to those amounts.

The word “expression” is to offset it from “idea”, which copyrights do not cover, and which patents aren’t supposed to cover, but frequently do at the very least with regard to software. Fair Use is specified elsewhere in law, and should also be described in the text of the UMCA so as to make such Fair Use protections as strong as possible. What constitutes “publishing” would need to be expanded, too. Take for instance J. D. Salinger’s work “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls”, which is provided to the Princeton Library and may only be viewed under closely guarded conditions. The day this was viewable to those with access to the library would constitute its date of publication (public distribution), even though Salinger’s wishes are to have the content secured for 50 years after his death and not published until then, or 2060. Under the UCMA, this protection would be valid only until 2015, five years after the date of publication. Had Salinger wished his story to remain private until 2060, he would have had the option of not donating it to the Princeton Library, thus not publicly publishing it, and instructing his family or agents to release it to the public in 2060.

The result of this would not be to diminish the production of new media; the result would be an explosion of new additions to the public domain, and the public domain becoming the rich resource to the public which the authors of the original US copyright proposals intended it to be. While anyone would be free to distribute content over five years old, it’s often the case that the original commercial publishers will still be able to make money on existing content. A good example of this are the new editions of classic Pink Floyd albums such as Dark Side of the Moon. While under the UMCA, anyone would currently be able to distribute Dark Side of the Moon in any format released before 2007, EMI would still have been able to release the much vaunted 2011 Immersion Edition for five years after initial publication. As the original master tapes were never publicly published (and frankly rarely are in that they’re not a media relevant to most people), they still had access to unpublished originals which they were free to compile and expand. Under the UMCA, the Immersion Edition of Dark Side of the Moon would be under EMI’s exclusive rights until late 2016; you could freely distribute, sell or compile pre-2007 editions, but only EMI would have had access to content required to create the 2011 release. All those fans who take issue with George Lucas’s continued alteration of his original Star Wars films would, under the UMCA, have a perfectly reasonable alternative: they could have any incarnation of the series they wanted on any media, all the way back to the first commercially available format. As in EMI’s case, Lucasfilm would have access to originals which would give them a significant advantage for the creation of any future derivative works, as the original film negatives or the rights to them weren’t ever sold.

Artists and content creators deserve to get paid for the work they wish to sell or exhibit to the public, but everyone deserves to get rewarded fairly for their productive efforts. A copyright should be an incentive to publish, and not what effectively amounts to an heirloom that is passed from author to inheritor for 70 years. No more than I inherit the value of my great grandfather’s physical labour should the great grandson of a successful artist exclusively inherit the fruits of his ancestor’s artistic labour. After it enters the culture, a work’s copyright should be a ticking five-year clock, after which the work passes into the culture mostly unfettered, free, and open to derivative work. To deny the public the right to have a rich public domain is not merely commercial greed, it is detrimental to the culture, and represents a theft of the commons; this is our cultural heritage, not cheap property to be hidden away in a vault until a few special individuals figure out a way to generate another revenue stream from it.

This is not a partisan issue; both parties are paid to support a continuing copyright extension by powerful media lobbies. The degree of influence of the intellectual property cartel has nothing to do with party, it has to do with money, and the IP cartels judiciously support candidates in both parties to ensure that their interests are served at the expense of the interests of the public and the public domain itself.

This is not a fight against capitalism or corporatism. This is a fight against censorship and the right to participate in our own culture. From 1969 to 1995, the Internet existed as an expressly non-commercial space. Since 1995, the Internet has been open to more and more commercial activity. The amount of innovation, utility, commercial potential and opportunity for free expression has increased dramatically; this increase doesn’t become part of everyday life until after 1995. The OPEN Act does not support innovation, freedom, utility, or commerce, the support a backwards-looking Internet policy based on protecting the IP cartel from innovation, freedom, and utility. The OPEN Act and the current IP framework represents a desire for the US government to defend the cartels from their own business practices and a recent history of turning their customers into their enemies.

Many supporters of bills such as the OPEN Act portray piracy as if most sites were involved in profitable activity. These cases are the exception, and do not represent a large portion of private or public torrent trackers, nor of piracy more generally. By conflating piracy with counterfeiting and for-profit pay-for-play, the intellectual property cartel hopes to portray any organization which supports piracy and intellectual freedom as a siphon sucking out hard-earned money out of the mouths of people who work for a living. Challenge this straw man argument.

Intellectual property law is a pay-for-play scandal, and like most other scandals, can only occur in the absence of transparency and public attention. Let your government know what you expect and that you’re watching. Support a maximum five year non-renewable copyright; the UMCA is a simple example framework of this idea.

I wanted to get some perspective about data sizes for a project I’m working on.  I wanted to see what the 1968 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica had to say about computers—specifically RAM, tape, and disc storage issues.

Emphasis is mine, and my notes are in brackets.  I have converted their terms into modern SI terms (a million bytes = 1 megabyte, 1,024 bytes = 1 kibibyte, a word  = 36 bits).  The entry for “Computer” offers the following:

The size of core memories progressed from a maximum of 4,096 (2¹²) words of 36 bits each (a total of 147,456 cores [144 KiB]) in the early 1950s to as much as 131,072 words of 48 bits each (a total of 6,291,456 cores [6 MiB]) by the mid-1960s.  At the same time, speed increased from 100,000 read-write cycles per second to more than 1,000,000 and the cost per bit of storage capacity decreasing from more than $1 to about 20 cents.  [A $1/bit megabyte is $8 million; a 20 cents/bit megabyte = $1.6.  Converting those numbers from 1968 to 2011 dollars, those megabytes would have cost $52 million and $10 million, respectively.]  New techniques involving thin evaporated magnetic films have demonstrated speeds of 10,000,000 read-write cycles per second and offer hope of eventually reducing costs to 1 or 2 cents per bit.  [A megabyte in 2011 dollars would cost $520,000 - $1,040,000 in those projections.]  Because present costs of film memories are higher than those of core memories, they are now used only as small “scratch-pad” memories to speed up computer operations.

Despite the progress in the random-access memories cited above, they will probably never be large enough (and inexpensive enough) to hold the tens of millions of words needed in many problems.  [50 million words = 225 MB.]  Data infrequently referred to can be stored in slower, less expensive types of memory and transferred to the high-speed memory only when needed.  [Magnetic hard drives were frequently referred to as another form of memory in the context of mid-century computing.]  Slow-access stores are typified by magnetic tapes; they use a wide (one-inch) tape similar in many ways to tape used on commercial magnetic-tape recorders.  [By the late 1960s and and 1970s, half-inch wide 9-track tape was prevalent.]  The digits to be stored are recorded as dots of magnetism.  There are commonly up to 16 separate tracks, laid parallel across the tape.  Although there are often as many as 1,000 bits per linear inch, the number of bits to be recorded and read is so high that tape speeds of 200 in. second are common.  [16.7 feet per second, 11.4 miles per hour, 200 KiB/second, which would require 40 seconds to transfer 1 MB uncompressed.  USB 1.1 had a maximum speed of 1,500 KiB/second.]  To read any particular entry on the tape it is necessary to be able to start and stop the tape in a few thousandths of a second, and the mechanical design of the tape-handling equipment is thus a major problem.  The capacity of such a store is virtually unlimited (up to 10,000,000 words per tape reel) [360 MB], and tapes of data or programs may be removed when not in use, freeing the tape mechanisms for other work.  The main problem with tapes is access time, since it may be necessary to traverse the whole tape (requiring a minute or more) to find a desired stored item.  Tape stores are generally only used for information that can be processed as it arises or for information that has been prestored in logical order, so that the tape handling unit does not spend most of its time searching for the required item.

Intermediate between these two types of storage are the magnetic drum and magnetic disc.  A drum can be considered as a wide magnetic tape, carrying from 1 to 200 tracks, wrapped around a drum rotating at about 3,000 rpm.  Each digit recorded comes around to the reading point every fiftieth of a second (which is the maximum access time), but the capacity of the store is limited to several tens of thousands of words, except on a few very large and expensive units.  [50,000 36-bit words = 225 KB]  The magnetic disc has proved to be a less expensive way of providing the very large, medium-speed stores needed in many applications (e.g., airline seat reservations).  A magnetic-disc store in a way resembles the familiar “juke-box” automatic record changer.  [Today, physical jukeboxes themselves are relegated to historical interest and kitsch.]  Up to 20 discs, coated on both sides with magnetic material, are rotated on a common shaft, and a servocontrolled reading head is positioned to read a desired track.  Because of this positioning, access time is somewhat longer than that of the drum, but capacities of up to 10,000,000 words per unit are available.  [10 million 36-bit words = 45 MB]  Removable discs are also available.

Even larger capacities than those economically provided by discs are desired in some applications, (e.g., storing multilanguage dictionaries for language translation) [as a reference, not computer-mediated translation], and new types of stores based on photographically recorded spots read with light beams are now appearing.  These “read-only” stores (the computer cannot change the recorded data) have access times similar to magnetic discs, and capacities up to 10,000,000,000 words.  [10 billion 36-bit words = 45 GB]

Though any piece about computing from this era that uses the phrases “virtually unlimited” and “probably never be large enough” is almost sure to become out of date, it’s probably important to note that while they weren’t correct statements for 43 years, they were certainly accurate for a couple of decades.  I suspect that the article is written in a way where the word “word” moves around a bit.  ”Word” rather than byte was a more common way of referring to large amounts of data, and it’s almost always important to pin down exactly how many bytes per word they’re talking about, as this was often different from computer to computer, and between different technologies.  This would mean that in the context of tape, they’re probably referring to 8-bit or even 7-bit words, and not 36-bit words, which would reduce the tape capacity of a 10 million word reel from 360 MB to 80 MB.  Given that the IBM 3400 tape from 1970 had a capacity of  180 MB, this seems like a much safer assumption than a 36-bit word.  Disc capacities are likely to be referring to system-native word lengths, so those may be fairly close.  The 1961 Bryant 4000-series hard drive were about 4.5 feet tall, about 6 feet wide, and stored 205 MB.  The “removable” IBM Winchester drive stored 35 GB per platter stack in 1973, so I’m reasonably sure they’re referring to 36-bit (or 32-bit) words in that paragraph, which would put 10 billion words at 40-45 MB; this seems reasonable, historically.

Even in RAM today, we throw around 225 MB without even noticing, so we’re fairly far ahead of the future Britannica was envisioning, but Britannica was never prone to making wildly fantastic projections.  Moore’s Law entered the culture in 1970 based on a statement Moore himself wrote in 1965.  I don’t have it available for comparison, but I am reasonably sure the current edition of Britannica shies away from making even conservative estimates of computing power and storage speeds and capacities.  It’s interesting to see what is effectively a time capsule from when computers were removed from everyday life of the typical person, 7 short years before all the rules changed with the Altair 8800 home computer, a device which is unapproachably technical by today’s standards, but represented a major change in in its own era, and was the predecessor of more popular mass-marketed 8-bit computers.

And all I can say is thank you, it’s about time.

I’ve long lamented the lack of scientifically relevant programming on Discovery and TLC. Normally, when shows that address cosmology come up, the “standard approach” is taken, which is to have three different talking heads say, roughly “it happened mechanically, without god”, “it happened mechanically, but god was the mechanic” and “science and religion are about different things”. Not so with the premiere episode of Curiosity, which was unusual in that it was aired on every Discovery Networks International channel to which it was appropriate. The production values and the simulcasting makes it seem like Discovery is betting big on this show, which amazes me.

The reason it’s amazing is that there’s nobody chiming in to say “science and religion are about different things” or the new doctrine of non-overlapping magisteria. The thing about NOMA is that nobody really believes it. Scientists and populist writers about science employ NOMA to avoid religious criticism and to make their views appear more palatable to theists, and liberal theists use NOMA to assure non-theists that their faith doesn’t actually make statements about how the universe really works. Stephen Hawking hosts the first episode of Curiosity, and he talks about his personal views as well as the scientific consensus, without giving into NOMA. Though both a scientist and a populist writer about science, I’m glad to see he’s willing to ruffle a few feathers and avoid watering down the ramifications of modern cosmology - that proof of god does not exist, and that god does not need to exist in order to reconcile the existence of the universe. More importantly, I’m glad Discovery is willing to let him ruffle a few feathers without having someone follow him up with NOMA to sort of water down the message and fend off the detractors.

The thing about NOMA is that there are three groups who see it for exactly the nonsense it is: most scientists, most non-theists, and most theists who are serious about their religion. The only major group one appeases with NOMA is liberal theists, who are the least likely to be upset about the problems NOMA is supposed to address in the first place.

So, thank you Discovery for airing something that is intelligent and not watered down. Thank you for letting scientists talk about what scientists have discovered, and not pretending socially controversial topics are controversial within the scientific community when they’re not. This is a bold move, and I’m sure DCI will face protracted criticism about it from the usual suspects of social conservatives who think religion trumps science, and certain strain of social liberals who think that it’s more important to be inclusive than it is to represent scientific work as it exists within its own domain.

I have played Minecraft for a few months, and enjoy making monumental architecture.  Though I’ve mostly played on either a local world, or private servers, lately I’ve been giving Reddit’s Minecraft Public Creative Server a shot, where my username is ”Delusionn”. On these types of servers, items are created by commands, so having an item list is handy.

While Minecraft Wiki has a useful reference,  my girlfriend preferred to not switch away from movies she was watching on a second monitor, so she made herself a placemat-sized printed copy of an existing reference, which I later cleaned up significantly.  Eventually, when Minecraft Beta 1.2_02 came out, which made the reference obsolete, and she had decided an 8.5 x 11 inch double sided reference which was heavily laminated would be much more convenient.  It turns out, it was, so I use it, too.

Only the game icons are rasterized, so it’s easy to read and looks good.  I’ve made two versions, the second version includes a quick reference to Reddit Minecraft Public Creative Server commands, banned items, and URLs to Reddit’s wiki and current Creative map.  If you play on that server, you may find the additional information helpful if you are a new user.  If you don’t play there, or just want the raw item ID page, the first one will be more appropriate.

Minecraft Data Reference

Minecraft Data Reference - Reddit Public Creative Server

One evening, I was backing up data to Blu-ray, and while I was aware that “1x” means something different with regard to CD, DVD and Blu-ray, it occurred to me that I didn’t know the relationship between the speeds without looking them up.

I decided to make an infographic detailing the comparative speeds of various physical media, and to highlight the speeds that were still widely commercially available.  As the flash media “x” scale is the same as that of CD, it seemed to be an obvious inclusion.

Eventually, I wanted to compare broadband speeds, historical dialup speeds, hard drive interface speeds, and even RAM speeds, all of which are so different that it requires a log scale in order to compare them adequately.  I used a bit of color where the categories became crowded, but mostly kept it neutral and dark.

The project was primarily for my own use, and I’m pretty happy with it.  The image was designed with a 24 x 48 inch print in mind.  I may consider selling prints for this piece if there is any demand, but for now the image is linked to a full-size PDF if you’d like to print it yourself.

Thanks notcot!

In response to a great article on programming books written by Mike Taylor, I couldn’t resist writing a few thoughts on the subject. It often comes up in these days when writing video games and having the end result being unplayable on mid-range systems is seen as a good thing.

In some ways, the atrociousness of the Commodore 64’s BASIC was its best asset. The Atari 8-bit BASIC was useful, intelligent, and very well-designed (for the era). I remember just fuddling around with it. I could create drawing programs that used four joysticks for four different cursors, different functions, and could save the results to tape.

On the C64, none of this was possible in BASIC without throwing the whole thing to machine language subroutines. Certainly, this sort of non-BASIC BASIC was beyond my ability, but for people who actually could manage it, it made that sort of “deep knowing” you’re talking about not only relevant but necessary in a way it wouldn’t have been if the BASIC had been more accessible and powerful.

The C64 was, to a very real degree, the last of the era of monolithic computing; a vast userbase whose machines were identical (or if not identical, extremely similar with any important differences fairly well-documented). There was a real payoff for efficient, ruthlessly optimized programming. Elements of this continued on in the 16-bit era with the Atari and Amiga machines, but after that, it was a-la-cart hardware.

Today, game developers in particular are at the opposite end of the spectrum; faced with slow, inefficient code, it’s usually just easier to wait for the next generation of videocard to make your bloated code run faster.

While I’m certainly not eager to return to the days of single-tasking, when “please stand by” actually meant “feel free to go make lunch”, when downloading a 64K program was a 30 minute experience (and, single tasking, meant you should go find something else to do for a while), and single-line BBSes whose email function was limited strictly to those users on that BBS, there was something lost in the process.

At the end of the C64’s mainstream life, the device was far better documented than any other comparable machine, and it was being used to do things that, quite frankly, the developers of it would have told you was impossible had you asked them at the end of the C64’s development cycle.

I can’t even imagine what today’s hardware would be capable of if that by-necessity ethos of coding efficiency was in vogue today.

There are so many literate, thoughtful, well-written music blogs out there that I don’t even have to look for good ones to follow, I just have to pick a few that align with my own interests and enjoy those. Then, one day, I saw an offer I couldn’t refuse.

There are a lot of music blogs operating in a grey area of legality. To be honest, it’s a pretty dark grey. While I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those now-consolidated major labels that comprise the bulk of popular music distribution in the US and international markets, the copyright laws are written with those in mind who can most afford to purchase the governance and legislation they desire, and they’re all members of the Recording Industry Association of America.

The most unfortunate aspect of these blogs is not that they’re operating with a wink-and-nod toward copyright law enforcement; to me, what’s truly unfortunate is that many of them don’t need to be. What they tend to do is to reference a few of the best private music trackers for content, then upload albums to file repository websites—none of which I care to name, but you probably know them and their shady practices to trick people into paying for memberships to get “free” files—and provide links to YouTube videos. The videos are usually one or two that are simple shots of the album cover with a standout track or two from the album. Many of the best provide good, useful links to sites with detailed band or album information (last.fm, discogs.com, myspace, allmusic.com, and others) as well as links where the album can be purchased, such as Amazon and a band’s site, or their label’s site.

Since many of these blogs are on blogspot.com or wordpress.com, all of them are just waiting for the other shoe to drop, whether they know it or not. The day any of the major free blogging sites decide that these blogs are too big a legal liability, or the day they get Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices, that’s the end of the road for them. Many of them specialize in labels not affiliated with the RIAA, but frankly, figuring out who is and isn’t represented by the RIAA’s bluster is difficult at best, since there are some labels which have fought the RIAA itself, but have distribution agreements with other labels that support or are members of the RIAA. There hasn’t been any legal action that I’m aware of against these, but that may merely mean I’m not aware of it, not that it hasn’t happened.

The shame of the matter isn’t merely that our copyright laws are hopelessly pitted against their original intent; when the fastest culture could travel was on horseback rather than on fiber optic cables, a 14-year copyright on content was considered a good compromise by fair-minded people between the content creator’s need to make a living off creative endeavours, and the public’s need to have access to its own culture. Today, copyright is an ever-extended right that keeps growing and growing in length faster than real time. Very little of our culture is in our own hands, legally speaking. The print, audio, and visual cartels control cultural discourse, and unlike anyone with the public interest at heart, they can use their fat coffers to fund lobbying firms until they get the legislation they feel best suits them.

No, the real shame is that some of these blogs are, as I said, so well-written that that alone should drive traffic to their site and ensure readership, without having to provide the content they’re writing about and putting their existence in jeopardy, and that they don’t even recognize this fact. Now, more than ever, the typical internet user doesn’t need to be provided links where to download music in violation of copyright legislation. Today, people are seeking taste makers and filters: websites and magazines and friends who they can trust to point them in the direction of new music they might be interested in. The active music listener is no longer well-served by radio, slick magazines whose interests may not align with that of their readers, and least of all major music labels, who in particular have fallen spectacularly from the days when a label needed to decide which artist to try to “break”. Today’s better music blogs are extremely well-positioned to take on that role of trusted trendsetter and taste-filter.

One of the best-written that has a large overlap with my musical tastes made a pitch for more writers, and I couldn’t pass it up. It wasn’t trying to be Pitchfork, which constantly hammers on the new new new to appease jaded hipsters who want to look good (and by good I mean foolish) pretending that the latest album from Animal Collective is the end-all, be-all of music. The blog in question was a great mix of new sounds, old favorites, and forgotten gems. I hammered out a review of a favorite album, Front Line Assembly’s classic Tactical Neural Implant, with an eye to increasing the voice of the blog’s industrial coverage. This review is provided at the end of this article, and I’m very happy with it.

What I wanted to do was write about music with an engaged group of music enthusiasts for an engaged audience of music enthusiasts on a site that someone else could worry about the administration of. But, as I thought more and more about the “value added” portion of the website (posting albums to file repository websites with the nod to civility that we would take down anything at a label or band’s request and creating and uploading audio-centric YouTube videos), I decided that that portion was the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I’d rather not paint a target on my chest, thanks. Others offered to do this portion of the work, but really, the problem for me was that the writing of the site stood on its own, and we didn’t need to peddle free downloads with a gauze-thin veneer of legitimacy.

I encouraged the administrators of the blog to focus on what we did best, the writing, and drop all the legal fictions about piracy that wouldn’t hold up in court or to a DCMA action anyway. The administrators, however, felt that their gauze was all the armor they needed, and that I was unnecessarily paranoid since they focused on “non-RIAA artists”. In my view, they missed the point entirely. I stepped away from the project until the issue was resolved, and since it wasn’t resolved to my satisfaction, I left altogether. The blog’s lead decided to stop the project for other reasons shortly thereafter, which is disappointing to me, as I still enjoyed reading it greatly.

One of the examples of the problem with the legal fictions regarding who is and isn’t represented with the RIAA has very much to do with Front Line Assembly itself. This album was released on a defunt label that had no association with the RIAA, but whose catalog was purchased by an indie which originally had no RIAA connections, but later entered a distribution agreement with an RIAA member, and eventually another RIAA member bought a majority stake in it. So even today’s artists which are clear of RIAA connections may not be so in the future, through no deliberate action of their own.

Not that the world has a pressing need of a review of an eighteen year old record, but again, pushing the new was not the site’s main function; it is, however, music I am passionate about, and if I can convince anyone to listen to this album with a review, that’s something I’m very interested in doing.

Front Line Assembly - Tactical Neural Implant
April 28, 1992 - Third Mind Records
industrial, industrial dance, ebm, electronic

In 1992, Trent Reznor observed in an interview with Spin Magazine: “For every band that I think has something to say, like Ministry, or Meat Beat Manifesto, there’s twice as many that have realized the formula for industrial music: repetitive 16th-note bass lines, snarling vocals–usually unintelligible screaming about the horrible condition of the planet or some kind of doomsday message about how shitty things are. Front Line Assembly is a textbook case of a band that—I can’t listen to a fucking song, let alone an album. Just monotonous, boring uninspired bullshit. And they’re far more traditional and far more exemplary of ‘industrial’ than NIN is.”

Tactical Neural Impact is exactly the sort of album Reznor was panning; it’s a cold album that lacks any of the uncomfortably plaintive frustration that makes Reznor’s own Pretty Hate Machine sound so dated. If this is music for machines, so be it. To be fair to Reznor, both bands arrived at the center of the industrial dance movement from different vectors. If Pretty Hate Machine shows its glam, funk, and “alternative” roots, it’s no accident. Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber arrived by another route altogether, and had plenty of outlets for their disparate influences—the most obvious example being the heavily Future Sound of London-influenced Delerium. Their influences weren’t Reznor’s: Kraftwerk, DAF, Clock DVA, and Cabaret Voltaire.

TNI came out at a very good time; the record labels were trying to anticipate the dominant trends that would replace the already-old-in-the-tooth 80s party metal sound. Many of them had engaged in bidding wars for new talent, and some of them had really pushed the new face of industrial dance and industrial metal. Of course, David Geffen would be the ultimate winner, and the success of Nirvana’s Nevermind ushered in a popular audience for Seattle grunge rock, and it was going to be very difficult to escape the underground nature of the genre of industrial dance. To do that, you had to add riffing guitars, and Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, Skinny Puppy and KMFDM did exactly that, along with Front Line Assembly with their next albums. Even so, the flirtation with mainstream appeal didn’t last much beyond 1995. For me, TNI represents the first steps of the road ultimately not taken.

The opening ambience that leads into “Final Impact” stresses that this is going to be an album that meanaces with a whisper rather than threatens with a scream. Some almost-trancey sounds enter the mix, as if they were curious neighbors visiting from a Delerium album. Unlike a lot of the early Front Line Assembly releases, the vocals are restrained and focused; instead of textural ambience, actual songs are allowed to develop. This is music for the dance floor.

Though they would predominate in a major way in 1994’s Millennium, there are guitars here. Many fans balked at their overpowering presence in that album, but in TNI they’re not there to drive a song but to add a layer to it, such as in “The Blade”, one of the singles, along with “Mindphaser” which is an EBM-influenced juggernaut. The closest to an emotional ballad is probably “Remorse”, but it’s extremely restrained—anyone expecting a synthpop ballad along the lines of Assemblage 23 or Syrian isn’t going to be well-served. I find the synthpop sound to be very unappealing when taken too far, but this track exists in that middle area, along with some of Haujobb’s better work. “Outcast” is an engaging mix of sampling, restrained guitar work, and a beat that’s a little heavier than the rest of the album. The album is one of those short albums that feels short; on Tactical Neural Implant, not a moment is wasted.

mindphaser.com

Front Line Assembly on:
last.fm
Discogs
MySpace.com

Buy Tactical Neural Imlpant on Amazon