I picked up a copy of Cab’s autobiography, “Minnie the Moocher and Me,” last week, and have been dipping into it in the evenings. I had expected it to be a sanitized “aren’t I fabulous and interesting?” celeb bio, but it’s turned out to be a lot more than that — tales of illegitimate children, being managed by the mob, drinking and fighting, and cussing on every page. Which is all well and good, but as an IP geek, I find the following bit particularly interesting:

“Well, the Missourians became Cab Calloway’s Cotton Club Orchestra but we still didn’t have a real theme song. At the time, we were using St. James Infirmary, a traditional blues song that had been around for years. In the early twenties Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory made it famous, but nobody knows who wrote it.

One day Irving Mills came to me and said, “Cab, it’s about time you had a theme of your own. You’re on national radio, you’re doing national tours. The band needs a tune that it can be identified by.”

“The problem was that people were already identifying our band with “St. James Infirmary,” so we figured we ought to try to write something that would have the same feeling, and a melody that wasn’t too different. We first wrote a tune that was very similar to ‘St. James Infirmary.’ If you listen closely to Minnie, you’ll hear some of the same changes and harmonies. In fact the melody itself is pretty close in some sections. Then Mills and I got together on the lyrics. There was a song going around at that time called “Willie the Weeper.” I don’t know who wrote it, but it was pretty popular.

And there was another one called Minnie the Mermaid. They were both torch songs.

We combined our rendition of “Infirmary” with the basic concept of those two popular songs and called it “Minnie the Moocher.” We created her as a rough, tough character, but with a heart as big as a whale. Walter Thomas — Foots, as we called him — who had joined the Missourians in 1929 just before I took over, and who had previously played for two years with Jelly Roll Morton, did the first arrangement on “Minnie.” I hummed the tune we wanted and Foots put it down on paper with a little vamp before it; it became our first hit and the tune that I have become identified with personally.

The “hi-de-ho” part came later, and it was completely unexpected and unplanned. Scat singing was not new, of course. My favorite scat singer has always been Louis Armstrong, but there were many others… During one show that was being broadcast over nationwide radio in the spring of 1931, not long after we started using “Minnie the Moocher””as our theme song, I was singing, and in the middle of a verse, as it sometime happens, the damned lyrics went right out of my head. I forgot them completely. I couldn’t leave a blank there as I might have done if we weren’t on the air. I had to fill the space, so I just started to scat-sing the first thing that came into my mind.

“Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho. Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-hee. Oodlee-odlyee-odlyee-oodlee-doo. Hi-de-ho-de-ho-de-hee.” The crowd went crazy. And I went on with it – right over live radio – like it was written that way…

From that night on, “Minnie the Moocher” and “hi-de-ho”have been one and the same as far as most people are concerned. And Minnie, hi-de-ho, and Cab Calloway, too.

— Calloway, Cab, with Bryant Rollins. Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976. 111-112.

Posted at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As I worked, I soon realized that I was not able to foresee the best pictures and often could not identify the better negative until much later. This meant that in my future efforts there would be an element dedicated to what can't be foreseen—to risk and to chance. (It turns out that “The unknown is more friendly than we think,”; as D.H. Lawrence said, “Even an artist knows that his work was never in his mind, he could never have thought it before it happened.” Rarely am I tempted to speak of originality.) That simply means that I am responsible for it—that I accept the consequences. ... I had set out to describe the world within my domain, to live a quality with things. Enrichment, I saw, involves a willingness to accept a changing vision of the nature of things—which is to say, reality. Often I had thought that things teach me what to do. Now I would prefer to say: As things teach us what we already are, we gain a vision of the world.
— Emmet Gowin, Photographs, p.101

Posted at 6:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Clearing out stored links:

Good Copy, Bad Copy, which got boingboinged awhile back. I’ll be using it the next time I teach IP.

Dylan Hears a Who. When a musician recorded "Green Eggs and Ham" in the voice of vintage Bob Dylan and posted it online, the Grinch estate promptly replied: One fish, two fish, cease and desist.

London Review of Books piece on Disney's artistic limitations and personal practices of originality. Disney was not just an attention-hog but always irritable about the limitations of his own fakery: ‘Disney was continually, if mildly, irked because he could not draw Mickey or Donald or Pluto . . . Even more embarrassingly, he could not accurately duplicate the familiar “Walt Disney” signature that appeared as a trademark on all his products. As Mister Husband pointed out to me when he sent it, not only did the man sign everyone else’s hard work, he was signing with a signature he had asked a studio employee to redesign.

Remember that interview on women and blogs that I did a year ago and then forgot about? I was doing some vanity googling, and found the article in the Hindu Business Online and Domains Magazine. The latter wins for most misogynist title. Since when does representing half of anything count as ‘hogging’? Only when women do it, apparently.

The new journal Writing Technologies looks promising.

The Encyclopedia of Life aims to provide a free, public electronic page for each species of organism on Earth. There's some things to be said here about why this project should or shouldn't be rolled into other major digital encyclopedic projects like Wikipedia. Personally, I think a unified project has the most value.

QB discusses Doing Time, Doing Vipassana

Aaand a note-to-self to retrieve "Law Booksellers and Printers As Agents of Unchange" (2007) Cambridge Law Journal, vol 66, issue 2, p 389. Also Katharina de la Durantaye, "Origins of the Protection of Literary Authorship in Ancient Rome". Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 07-139. Boston University International Law Journal, Spring 2007.

Posted at 10:56 AM | Permalink

I’m usually barefoot as much as possible in the summer, but today was chilly enough that I put on some socks. I hadn’t seen these since I bought them and filed them in the sock drawer. They have Mighty Mouse on the top, and this on the bottom. The copyright notice is actually bigger than the artwork.

Posted at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Logie’s new book, Peers, Piracy and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-to-Peer Debates, is now out from Parlor Press. I’m interested to see that the author and publisher have chosen to carry on Lessig’s publication model from Free Culture: the book is licensed under a Creative Commons license and available simultaneously in capitalist paperback and free PDF. Bravo. The difference, though, is in the combination of licenses: this one is Attribution-NoCommercial-NoDerivs, which would preclude the audio book transformation project that worked so well for Free Culture.

That’s a small quibble, though. This work is a needful thing: the first book-length analysis of how we talk about peer-to-peer culture and how this talk shapes policy. One of the major problems in the copyfight has been the polarized rhetoric of the discussions, an issue that John’s treated before in A Copyright Cold War. Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion extends those comments productively. Here, John offers an examination of the metaphoric frames which cast the slant of the popular and juridical discussion on p2p: are we sharing or stealing? Are we engaging in dialogue or warfare?

Jessica Litman has also alluded to this issue in previous articles: see The Demonization of Piracy and Sharing and Stealing, among other pieces. Her work is, of course, from a legal perspective. I’ll be interested to see how John engages with her commentary.

Clancy’s proposed a group discussion of the book, and I’m definitely in. Who else is?

Posted at 10:36 AM | Permalink

Oh, the blessing and curse that is the "keep new" feature in Bloglines. It means that I’ve cluttered up that place with all sorts of good stuff, some of it a year old now. It’s all links that I meant to do something with or save for some wonderful future purpose, but never deployed. The end of the year compels me to clean some of it out, so I’m moving it over here where it can go safely into the archives of oblivion for future reference. (Am I the only one who still likes storing links in the same place I keep everything else instead of keeping them in deli.cio.us?)

New Media
Andrew Lih on How Wikipedia Ranks
danah boyd on making net neutrality relevant and writing community into being on social network sites
The blogging special issue of Reconstruction
Media from Johndan’s old blog: the Eames’ Information Machine and the original iPod launch video
Via Infocult: timeline of the Wikipedia/Britannica controversy, a history of FaceBook, the Foucault-Chomsky debates on YouTube, and frightening instructional AT&T videos.
Information Aesthetics spotlights email thread visualizations, blogosphere linkology, and treemaps
Clay Shirky argues that news of Wikipedia’s death is greatly exaggerated
Anne Galloway’s working bib on The Internet of Things

Fodder for Teaching Presentation Skills
Guy Kawasaki on the art of panels
Dean Dad’s interesting threads on grading group presentations and ">handling difficult classmates

Academic Whatnot
50 ways to take notes

Book History
From Old Books: images from, um, old books
Jill points out material aspects of the original publication of “Death of the Author”

Professionalization
Via Prolurker: The Academic Departments: Home Base for Doctoral Students and the Center of the Graduate Mission of the Institution and Thinking Beyond the Dissertation
AKMA on productively structuring argument in academic writing
Sherry on study breaks (I’d send this to new grad students if I were putting together a comprehensive advice file.)

Pop Culture
scribblingwoman rounds up Brokeback spoofs
The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time, with linked video for each. (High ratio of Warner Brothers, of course.)

Just Beautiful
Aunt B: Breathe In, Breathe Out.

Posted at 11:06 AM | Permalink

Back in the spring, John Logie, who’s been chairing the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee, proposed an annual series of briefs on major legal developments that impact the discipline. The briefs that Jim Porter, Martine Courant-Rife, Jessica Reyman, and I wrote this year are now available on the CCCC site as The Major Intellectual Property Developments of 2005 for Scholars of Composition and Communication. Jim and Martine offer an expansion of their WIDE paper on MGM v. Grokster, Jessica examines BMG v. Gonzalez, and I discuss the two major suits against the Google Print project.

Posted at 9:19 AM | Permalink

Since remix issues often get treated as a late 90's or even post-millennial phenomenon, I thought I'd link up a few sources on Plunderphonics for future reference:

Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Perogrative, presented by John Oswald to the Wired Society Electro-Acoustic Conference in 1985.

The Man Who Stole Michael Jackson’s Face from Wired 3.02.

The Wikipedia entry on John Oswald, which traces his remix work back to the 60s.

plunderphonics.com.

Posted at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When we teach intellectual property (and particularly copyright complements) in the Comp or Tech Comm classroom, it’s very easy to burble on about distributing knowledge and preservation of cultural heritage and open access/source/content and then play a couple of mash-ups and be done with it. I know, because I’ve done it. And I wonder, how much difference does this make to our students, really? Can they make a connection between the creativity on the screen and the real-world work they’re most likely going to set about doing the rest of their lives? Probably not.

I’m still going to use mash-ups for dramatic effect, but there’s going to be way less of them in the future, and a lot more concrete scientific, technical, and cultural examples.

I’ve used King v CBS before, but only in passing. My IP-minded readers will already be familiar with it because it’s become one of the textbook examples of general publication arguments. (William Patry has a nice, brief commentary on it here.) The King Estate’s copyright on and demands for extensive renumeration for use of the “I Have a Dream” speech has prevented civil rights documentaries from being made and kept permissions from being renewed on classic civil rights documentaries like Eyes on the Prize. The documentary’s producer currently has a $65,000 grant to assist with the renewal process. $500,000 is the amount that’s actually required. (The King permission isn’t the only one that has to be cleared, of course.) This is your cultural heritage being surpressed by copyright.

And those limited facts make a pretty good example. But there’s more, as evidenced in this month’s Vanity Fair. (I always claim my subscription constitutes research, and nobody ever believes me.) The edition features an extensive interview with Clarence Jones, King’s legal counsel from 1960 to 1968. And in it, he details the collaborative process of writing “I Have a Dream” and his pride in having taken measures to copyright it.

Continue reading "Teaching IP: Copyright, Civil Rights, Cultural Heritage" »

Posted at 8:20 AM | Permalink

I just scampered into the living room to inform Mister Husband that the Apple Corps v Apple Computer arguments* began this week in London, and oh my gosh, I had forgotten! And blah blah trademark interpretation! Questionable dilution of market! Blahdy IP blah!

In return, I got informed that I am being crushed under the weight of my own geekitude.

I don’t care. Imho, it’s a mostly meritless but ballsy suit that speaks badly of the surviving Beatles. It also has interesting implications for international trademark disputes. This is fascinating to me, although it might be because I study copyright, not trademark.

*For those not nearly so enraptured, here’s the short version: Apple Corps (shiny green apple) has long been disgruntled by Apple Computer’s trademark (white apple with bite out of side). In 1991 they signed a cease-fire that said no action would be taken if Apple Computer stayed out of the music business. Then iTunes launched and became a central revenue stream for Apple Computer, and there you go.

Posted at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's late for the Great Pumpkin, but this fan-fic marriage of Peanuts and H.P. Lovecraft is worth filing:

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin. For him, I cultivated an annual pumpkin patch—mostly Autumn Gold and Big Max, as I thought he would find the Atlantic Giants tacky. I also evangelized him in the community, relating the tale of how, every year on Hallowmas Eve, the day when the spiritual most strongly encroaches on the substantial, this mightiest of gourds would rise to revel across the world with the most sincere of his adorers. My neighbors were understandably skeptical; after all, not once had this superbeing ever chosen to grace my pumpkin patch or any other place in our town. I vowed that I would coax him into my backyard, and I set out in the manner of a learned man to discover how I might do this.

(via infocult)

Posted at 6:54 PM | Permalink

Johnnie Johnson died today.

I’ve recently been doing some research on his tempestuous longtime collaboration with Chuck Berry, which gave rise to numerous IP issues that are alluded to at the end of the above link. As much as I love and read rock history, I don’t really feel qualified to discuss his work since he did so much with so many different people. No doubt Johnnie Johnson gave a lot to rock and roll, but there’s no telling how much more he did that we’ll never really know about for sure.

Posted at 3:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Why on God’s green earth has Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll never been released on DVD? I neeeeeed it, and I don’t want no stinkin’ VHS.

Seriously, I want to teach with this thing. Collaboration, authorship, and derivation are all in there, along with the genius’ need to eat.

Posted at 6:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sometimes you read something that, while it doesn‛t say anything new, says something better than the stuff you‛ve read before. I‛ve been thinking a lot about oppositional copyfight discourse lately, and then I ran across this quote from John Blossom several days ago in Open Access News:

Copyright can be the starting point of a dialogue rather than an impermeable barrier, a concept promoted by the Creative Commons approach to content licensing. When copyright becomes viewed as a right to discuss a relationship on one‛s own terms rather than a demand to avoid relationships, copyrighted content will find its way into more useful venues more quickly - with monetization to follow....Copyright is a tool born of the industrial age that is struggling to find its place in a post-industrial era. Copyrighting has allowed intellectual property to flourish for centuries, but as the factors supporting the flourishing of intellectual property shift so must our approach to copyright management. It‛s a useful tool that has not outgrown its usefulness, but one whose core value is shifting rapidly in an era of open access to content.

Posted at 10:18 AM | Permalink

Tagging a couple of older things here so I won't lose them:

Collin on "Mecology Revisited"
Knowledge Management: Social Network Analysis (I'm not sure where this one came from, but I suspect I nabbed it from Ton Zijlstra.)
Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: A Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Statement of Bruce Lehman. Pointed out to me by John Logie.)

Update: Also Johndan Johnson-Eilola's After Hypertext.

Posted at 8:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My fellow Ethics seminarian Greg Schneider wrote a smart response to one of my questions about ethics and the commons that ties together the Bollier and Mill essays. It does a nice job of incorporating the notion of intellectual pleasure with the ethical problem of obligation to the commons. He doesn't blog, so I asked him if he'd like to post it up here - both because it should be shared and because I selfishly want to file it with the rest of my notes on this topic. So without further ado, here is Greg:

Apply the basic precepts of happiness in Mill's Utilitarianism to the academic commons

To get at how a theory that posits happiness as "pleasure and the absence of pain" can help us understand the information commons we must first explore Mill's definition a bit further. After all, the information commons doesn't seem all that pleasurable at first glance (well, it's pleasurable if you think of it THAT way, but come on, focus, we've got theory to discuss!).

Mill's Definition of Utilitarianism: "The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure" (448 in my edition).

But Mill goes out of his way in the second chapter of this short book to debunk the cliche arguments against his theory. Here we begin to see a subtle development of his notion of happiness. Indeed, one of Mill's oft quoted phrases states that "it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" (449). For Mill, happiness is not hedonism (as it could be argued it was for Bentham), and he takes pains to show this. There are differences in kinds of pleasure, Mill argues, and we can say that human pleasures are of an entirely different sort than the baser beasts. "Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification" (448). While this statement seems to include the love/hate power of addiction, and it also shows that humans have access to a higher quality of pleasure. Mill doesn't just want to count pleasure points (like some kind of fad diet), he wants to factor in the quality of this pleasure as well.

These qualitatively greater pleasures of the mind are the ones which provide the link to the information commons. The information commons refers to the creative space where intellectual property (music, art, film, advertising, poetry, novels, etc.), in effect digital everything, is created and disseminated. As digital technologies, which free information from physical recalcitrances that made mass dissemination more difficult, come into conflict with traditional market forces, the legal system has been harnessed to control and limit the development and dissemination of these works. Through the extension of copyright law and attendant legal arguments over fair use, Bollier worries that this space is being usurped by corporations and corporate power politics. All this, he argues, shuts down creativity by limiting creative fair use of artistic works for the sake of the corporate bottom line.

Continue reading "Guest Blogger: Greg on Utilitarianism, Happiness and the Commons" »

Posted at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)