Thinkcage

I broke down and joined the head-bobbing, white-corded masses and bought an iPod a couple of months ago. There is little that I can say about this fantastic little device that hasn’t been said time and again. As a designer of user experiences, this is the holy grail from the tiny word “enjoy” greeting the purchaser as he opens the package to the way the backlight fades out instead of merely shutting off. Its a lovely piece of electronics that doesn’t feel technical or well, like electronics. It changes the way you listen to music.

An article in Wired News today captured my feelings on this device very accurately.

So, for example, music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.

It’s also very cinematic. The music allows you to construct narratives about what’s going on.

Its amazing the detachment, the feeling of being in a personal space, that one gets by putting on a pair of headphones and listening to music. I particularly enjoy listen to music while shopping—perfect for canceling-out the hubbub of a busy grocery store or mall. And, of course, the ability to tune out the periphery at work is another great use.

The iPod has liberated me from the mundane and given legs to portions of my music collection that I haven’t touched in years. Pretty powerful stuff.

Thinkcage has turned grey today, in support of Grey Tuesday.

Grey Tuesday is an online protest by people who support Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album and are concerned about the state of art and copyright law in the United States.

The album is an independent remix of Jay-Z’s The Black Album and The Beatles’ The White Album. EMI, the company who claims copyrights to The Beatles’ works has sent numerous cease and desist notices to stores and websites distributing this work. Despite the critical acclaim of this important work, EMI has only shown interest in the protection of profits, further demonstrating the stifling of art in the name of financial gain. In this case we see a viably marketable work that is denied sale due to the hoarding of copyrights by the big five record companies.

Opponents of current copyright law in the U.S., arguably the most stringent in the world, have shown time and again the foundation on derivative work that many of the current copyright proponents are built upon. Disney has long been one of the biggest lobbyists of increasing the reach of copyright law as noted by Lawrence Lessig in one of his numerous keynotes:

Here’s my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don’t recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, “stole” Willie from Buster Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill.”

It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years—just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. This was his character. Walt always parroted feature-length mainstream films to produce the Disney empire, and we see the product of this. This is the Disney Corporation: taking works in the public domain, and not even in the public domain, and turning them into vastly greater, new creativity. They took the works of this guy, these guys, the Brothers Grimm, who you think are probably great authors on their own. They produce these horrible stories, these fairy tales, which anybody should keep their children far from because they’re utterly bloody and moralistic stories, and are not the sort of thing that children should see, but they were retold for us by the Disney Corporation. Now the Disney Corporation could do this because that culture lived in a commons, an intellectual commons, a cultural commons, where people could freely take and build. It was a lawyer-free zone.

Transcript courtesy of O’Reilly Network

Disney built a media empire in the very type of culture that they, just like the big five, are now trying to destroy. Without the ability to make derivative work, Disney likely would not exist today. It is frightening to think of the art that will not exist tomorrow because it cannot be created to day.

Oh, and give The Grey Album a listen.

Yeah, I picked up the new Pearl Jam collection today, Lost Dogs, a collection of about 30 b-sides and unreleased tracks. But those aren’t really the lost dogs of which this entry refers.

Yesterday the company I work for laid off several of my co-workers. While I certainly understand that these things happen in the world of business, it still is difficult to stare at the empty desks of people with whom you used to work. It has been a rough couple of days and I find myself equally dispondent and grateful that I am still employed.

I wish each of them the very best.

Its odd outside today. I left the office at lunch to pickup my CD and it was suprisingly warm — nearly 70 degrees but it smelled of winter, of cold. Odd.

Finally, Apple has done it. They took their fantastic MP3 player/organizer/music store, iTunes, to Windows. I am user of both Mac and Windows computers — in fact I have both side-by-side at work and at home. I use each for its strengths, though the PC is getting used less and less each passing day. Music is one thing I do only on the Mac and iTunes is the reason.

Not only is it a fantastic MP3 player with neat playlist management, but iTunes also is great for organizing your collection. Using the MP3 format’s ID3 tags, iTunes automatically and behind the scenes organizes your music into folders on your hard drive based by artist and album. Change the artist field of a song within iTunes and it will automatically reorganize your music folder to reflect the change. This is a really under-discussed feature that is now available on Windows computers, too.

And of course having one-click access to hundreds of thousands of songs for $0.99 is great. Apple, combined with its marketing partners, AOL and Pepsi, is sure to own the online music download market.

After downloading the Windows version of iTunes I was thrilled to see it is a complete and identical port — feature-by-feature, the same user experience as the Mac version. Look for many shared playlists in the office very soon!

Now, if I only had an iPod.