Musical gods among men.
Anchors Aweigh
My younger brother, Wilson, set sail on Monday for his first deployment as an officer in the United States Navy. Above is an image of his ship — the U.S.S. Makin Island (LH-8) — leaving San Diego. (Image captured from this impressive video of the ship leaving the port). The Makin Island is the first hybrid-power ship in the American Navy, and it also has a system to produce over 200,000 gallons per day of fresh water from an onboard desalination system. This is the ship’s maiden deployment, having been certified after a series of qualifying exercises over the past year.
Although his assigned “day job” is as a public affairs officer, he is one of the few officers on board qualified to serve as “Officer of the Deck” — that is, he has been certified by the captain and other executive officers to command the ship from the bridge when the executive officers are elsewhere. He does this for six hours or so each day. So, he is much more of a badass than me.
Stop SOPA. Save the Web.
Today, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). SOPA — along with its Senate counterpart, PROTECT-IP — is a disaster waiting to happen. Calling it a blunt instrument would be a compliment. Essentially, it gives private actors the extrajudicial power to cut off traffic and advertising money to sites that are 99.9% legitimate, but happen to have a few links or pages related to infringing materials. I’m not talking about random websites, either: Etsy. Flickr. Tumblr. All of them could face crippling liability that undercuts the existing DMCA notice-and-takedown system that — while most definitely imperfect — has enabled the birth and flourishing some of the most innovative websites we have today.
Here We Go: Copyright Issues Building in Campaign 2012
I just published a new post on William & Mary’s Student IP Society blog about the Romney campaign’s recent decision to pull down an attack ad from the Internet, after CNN approached them about the use of clips from their programming — specifically, the debate they hosted. Although the campaign maintained their use was protected “under the law,” it complied with CNN’s request as a courtesy. It seems likely the campaign’s use of the content is fair, but obviously the last thing they want is to waste resources on copyright issues.
Read more analysis in the full post.
More Awesome Tiny Desk Concerts
OK, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series is one of my favorite things ever. Here’s another great batch, featuring Wilco, Trombone Shorty, and Foster the People.
The Wilco drummer’s unplugged kit is so cool.
