Dear Lazyweb, is there yet anything better than PearLyrics for getting lyrics into your ID3 tags in bulk?

In case you don't remember, there was this handy program that would display the lyrics of the currently-playing track, and if it didn't have any, would do some searches.

Then, the author got a C+D from Warner and panicked.

Then, in a marketing coup, Warner sent and "apology" for the "tone" of their letter -- but, notably, never told him that he could continue distributing his program. So they got a lot of credulous good press from the bloggoweenies, and still got what they wanted: fewer people having easy access to lyrics.

(Yeah, I'm looking at you, Boing Boing: they didn't change their behavior one whit, and you passed along their insincere press-release apology anyway without ever noting the nakedness of that emperor.)

Anyway.

My copy of PearLyrics seems not to work so well any more, presumably because whatever hardcoded searches are built in to it have gone somewhat stale. Source was never made available, and the author hasn't stopped hiding under his rock.

Is there anything better?

(Yes, I know there are rumors of Apple building this into the iTunes store, but those rumors are two years old, so I'm not holding my breath. Also the current Yahoo offering is worse than useless, which does not bode well for that in any case.)

Elvis has left the building. Now 30,000 impersonators may have to go as well:

A New York businessman has bought the rights to Elvis's name and likeness and has threatened to ban "unauthorised" Elvis clones.

Robert Sillerman, a billionaire media entrepreneur who owns American Idol, paid $114 million last year for an 85 per cent stake in Elvis Presley Enterprises, which is run by the Presley family. He got control of Graceland, the King's home in Memphis, Tennessee, and control of his name and likeness, but not his music.

Of Elvis impersonators, he said ominously: "If we were going to do a show that was based on Elvis impersonators, then obviously it wouldn't make sense to have unauthorised Elvis impersonators."

Impersonators in America believe that it is inevitable that their industry -- which includes dwarf Elvises, Chinese Elvises and African-American Elvises -- is in for a cull.

Matt Lewis, another Elvis impersonator, said that his agents had been studying the legal ramifications of his status since Mr Sillerman acquired the rights. Some impersonators make $300,000 a year, and Mr Lewis acknowledged that he made "six figures" per annum.

"If they tried to stop me I'd figure out a way to keep going," he said. "We would band together. I have this image of old ladies going to underground shows and giving passwords at the door. There would be underground Elvis speakeasies. Honestly."

PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s.

It's very handy: I managed to use it to download the lyrics for almost half of my music collection in one fell swoop.

Except that the author got a "Cease and Desist" letter from Warner/Chappell Music, who seem to think that his program -- which is, basically, nothing more than a specialized web browser -- is somehow in violation of their copyrights.

But, the author doesn't have the time or money to risk a lawsuit, so he panicked and pulled it.

Update: fiyin has a mirror of it and a torrent on his site. There's another mirror at thock.com. And another here. Another list of mirrors here. If you know of more mirrors, please let me know.

Update 2: Some press (which is almost entirely cut-and-paste rephrasery from Pearworks -- a gem of journalism, really): Music giants bear down on lyric search apps.

Update 3: More press, mostly about the attack on the lyrics sites themselves:

"The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income," he said. "But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we're taking a more proactive stance."

Update 4: The PearLyrics site now says that Warner/Chappell has "apologized" for the "tone and substance" of their take-down letter. But that means nothing, because the software remains unavailable. Once you can again download PearLyrics from the developer's site, I'll believe that their apology means a damned thing.

The high cost of getting permission to use archival footage and photos threatens to put makers of documentaries out of business:

As Americans commemorate Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy today, no television channel will be broadcasting the documentary series Eyes on the Prize. Produced in the 1980s and widely considered the most important encapsulation of the American civil-rights movement on video, the documentary series can no longer be broadcast or sold anywhere.

Why? The makers of the series no longer have permission for the archival footage they previously used of such key events as the historic protest marches or the confrontations with Southern police. Given Eyes on the Prize's tight budget, typical of any documentary, its filmmakers could barely afford the minimum five-year rights for use of the clips. That permission has long since expired, and the $250,000 to $500,000 needed to clear the numerous copyrights involved is proving too expensive. [...]

"The owners of the libraries, which are now increasingly under corporate consolidation, see this as a ready source of income," Else says. "It has turned our history into a commodity. They might as well be selling underwear or gasoline." [...]

Before the digital and documentary explosion, a clip of President Nixon speaking, for instance, usually could be licensed "in perpetuity," meaning that the film could continue to use the footage indefinitely. Now the incentive is for copyright owners to grant only limited permission. "Increasingly, it's harder and harder to get 'in perpetuity,' because rights-holders realize that somebody will have to come back in five years or 10 years and pay more money," Flahive says. [...]

"Why do you think the History Channel is what it is? Why do you think it's all World War II documentaries? It's because it's public-domain footage. So the history we're seeing is being skewed towards what's fallen into public domain," says filmmaker Robert Stone in the American University study.

Associate Member Referral: "For every three new members who name you as their inspiration for joining, your choice of FSF founder and president Richard Stallman or FSF counsel and scholar Eben Moglen will record a personalized greeting ready for use on your answering machine. Greet your callers with a prominent voice of software freedom."

Senate May Ram Copyright Bill: Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law [...] which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week.

The bill lumps together several pending copyright bills [...] which would criminally punish a person who "infringes a copyright by ... offering for distribution to the public by electronic means, with reckless disregard of the risk of further infringement."

The bill would also permit people to use technology to skip objectionable content -- like a gory or sexually explicit scene -- in films, a right that consumers already have. However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited.

Court Rules That All Musical Samples Must Be Paid For

The case at the crux of this new ruling focuses on the 1990 N.W.A song "100 Miles and Runnin'." The track samples a three-note guitar riff from a 1975 Funkadelic track, "Get Off Your Ass and Jam." The sample, in which the pitch has been lowered, is only two seconds long but is looped to extend to 16 beats and appears five times throughout the track.

In 2002, a lower court said that although the Clinton riff was in fact entitled to copyright protection, the specific sample "did not rise to the level of legally cognizable appropriation," according to the AP. The appeals court opposed that decision, explaining that an artist who acknowledges that they made use of another artist's work may be liable, and sent the case back to the lower court.

"Get a license or do not sample," the court said Tuesday. "We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way."

Penguin and the great katie.com hijack.

Slashdot summarizes: "The gist of the story is that Katie Tarbox became a victim of an online sexual predator when she was 13. She wrote a book about it in 2000 and Penguin Putnam made the title of the book 'Katie.Com', which unfortunately was a domain name owned by Katie Jones since 1996. Now Tarbox's lawyer is demanding that Jones turn over the domain name. Penguin refuses to apologize, saying that it would be a violation of their free speech to re-title the book and that Jones never trademarked katie.com, so they can do what they want with the words."

My favorite bit: "Katie Jones points out that the book was originally to be titled 'girl.com' but the name was changed before publication, quite possibly because "girl.com" is a porn site."

Update: Cool, they caved.

"Any text containing vulgar or offensive words or expressions; any text that might be slanderous or libelous to individuals and/or institutions."

An interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee:

Chuck D: Public Enemy's music was affected [by copyright lawsuits] more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything -- they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

Now, aside from the fact that it would be Illegal And Wrong, I'm kind of surprised to find no evidence that someone has yet taken MAME and every ROM, and burned a PS2 DVD that contains the entire output of the arcade industry in a Playstationable form (it would all fit, or nearly.)

Is this because it's nightmarishly hard to author PS2 discs? Or do I just not travel in the right circles to have heard about this artifact?

When I first read this quote, I was sure it was a gag. But it's real!
Mary Bono, speaking to the House of Representatives:

"Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress."

7 Oct 1998 Congressional Record, Vol. 144, page H9952.

blackboxvoting.org, the site that has been publishing evidence that Diebold's election machines are trivially riggable, has been shut down, Scientology-style:

NOTICE

Due to a dispute with Diebold, Incorporated, and its wholly owned subsidiary Diebold Election Systems, Inc. (collectively "Diebold"), which is claiming links to certain materials that do not reside on the blackboxvoting.org website constitute copyright infringement, blackboxvoting.org has been temporarily disabled.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause visitors and journalists to the blackboxvoting.org site and hope to have this matter resolved shortly.

Google has a cache. The Wayback Machine does not.

Jono Bacon has done a Death Metal cover of the Stallman classic. (I assume you have already experienced the 1998 Matt Loper techno remix.)

• About a week ago, I gave another try to enabling anonymous posting with screening. So far there have been about 20 anonymous posts here, and I think I've only bothered to unscreen 1. An amazing number of them were of the "G1BB0R M3 WAR3Z" variety. (To be fair, without the 'l33tspeak, but still.)

• What's with all the people who suddenly seem to be thinking that light gray text on a white background is a good idea? Contrast, people. Look it up.

• Several times recently I've gone to an old URL, found a 404, then gone to the Wayback Machine to be denied again with "blocked by the site owner via robots.txt". Damn you all to hell! It makes me want to modify my browser to save a local copy of every page I've ever viewed.

  I really hope archive.org is ignoring robots.txt and saving everything anyway (and just not letting people view blocked documents.) It's a moral imperative: copyright laws change, but oblivion is forever.

• Corollary: Flash equals oblivion.

• I like this song. That is all.

Nicely done graph showing the effect of recent copyright changes on the public domain. The interactive Flash version is pretty well done, too.

Periodically I search Usenet for recent references to xscreensaver; that's how I decide what needs to go into the FAQ, and it's also the way I often learn about bugs (since lots of people prefer post to their favorite group instead of asking me, which is just fine.)

So I saw this message on who-knows-what group with a changelog that listed patches that had been made to various programs in the Debian distribution. There was a patch to xscreensaver on that list that I didn't recognise, and a little searching around didn't provide any clues, so I sent a three sentence message to the author of the changelog post asking what that patch was, and where to find it. (I didn't expect that he wrote the patch, but I did assume he'd know where to find it.)

Instead of just answering my question (e.g., "the patch is here" or, if he were feeling generous, "the patch is here, and it's not what you think") he took the opportunity to be a gigantic flaming dick about it.

I should be used to this by now, I really should. I should come to expect this kind of behavior from the poorly-socialized nerds who populate the software world; after all, they were a significant part of what sucked about my previous career. But I'm not used to it. It still sucks. Every time I have to deal with some ankle-biting needledick like this guy I ask myself, "why is it that I'm bothering to release this software at all? This is alegedly rewarding in some way?"

Look at the kind of shit I have to put up with:

(  --More--( 6%)  )

When I first subscribed to Adbusters, it was pretty informative: I used to learn things by reading it; it actually had articles. It had things like family trees showing corporate ownership; it was the place where I first learned how corporate personhood came about. They used to regularly run brilliant parodies of advertisements.

But for the last couple of years, it seems like they've totally run out of things to say: the magazine still looks good, and still contains interesting (and occasionally entertaining) pictures, but instead of articles, it seems to have become a hundred pages of navel-gazing: they no longer make arguments about anything, they just spend their time deconstructing the Nike logo or whatever. They no longer support their claims (when they get around to actually claiming anything, that is), they just assume you agree with them already.

Here's page six of the latest issue (I only know it's page six by counting, page numbers being a tool of oppression):

Where are we? The well-heeled experts answer: Globalization. Postmodernism. Communications Revolution. Economic Liberalism. The terms are tautological and evasive. To the anguished question of Where are we? the experts murmur: Nowhere. Might it not be better to see and declare that we are living through the most tyrannical -- because the most pervasive -- chaos that has ever existed?

It doesn't get any more coherent after that. After reading this, I was expecting to find a dry, crusty white powder on the magazine in my hands, because clearly someone had jerked off all over the page I was holding.

I washed my hands, just in case.

(Though, to be fair, I did get the ClearChannel quote via the latest issue.)

I'll probably renew my subscription anyway, as a way of donating to their TV commercial campaigns, but I wish the magazine itself was... less choir-oriented, I guess. Less shrill.

So, I wrote an xscreensaver hack that does Flying Toasters, using images which apparently trace their (heavily edited, converted and scaled) genealogy back to the original After Dark hack.

What do you think, if I released this in xscreensaver, would someone sue me? If so, who? Berkeley Systems doesn't exist any more (apparently having been gobbled up by Sierra Online in 1998 or so, who where then gobbled up by Flipside and/or Vivendi?) After Dark was officially discontinued in 1999.

I'd like to think that whoever owns the copyright on these images doesn't care, or perhaps doesn't even know that they do, but I can't really figure out who that might be.

The safe thing would be to re-draw (or re-render) the images from scratch, but I have not the artistic skill for that.