Patenting the use of all episodic media on the Web might sound absurd, but the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted just such a patent, to a company called VoloMedia. It’s a significant issue, one that could threaten the freedom of all media distribution online. Wherever you are in the world, you can help.

Intellectual property law was created in order to protect genuine inventions and innovation from exploitation. But predatory patents, based on bogus claims and attempting to stake out broad rights, threaten to do just the opposite.

Here’s a new idea: fight back.

Lawyers are the heroes this time. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s patent-busting project aims to take down unfair patents that threaten common-sense uses of technology. A number of these have applied to music and audio. The EFF has already won a big victory against what had been the worst offender – media giant Clear Channel actually successfully patented recording live shows. (No, really — recording a live gig, then burning them on the spot. The EFF was able to bust that patent.) The advocacy group also scored significant victories against patents on sending and receiving online streams and encoding media. (If someone thought they could patent your ears and charge you royalties for hearing, they probably would.)

Lawyers alone haven’t won these battles. The EFF’s clever twist is to crowd-source its case, by getting people like you to help the group document “prior art” – in plain English, to prove that something existed before the patent. (Without basic chronology, I could claim to have discovered electricity.)

In short, you can help save the freedom of online content.

Digital technology has the power to transmit information more efficiently, to make the invisible visible, and to express new things. It can also be pushed so far to the limits of actually transmitting information to be meaningless. It can push well beyond what we can even perceive in a useful way. What’s bizarre and wonderful about Johannes Kreidler’s work is that he’s not afraid of pushing toward that boundary. The results may have only a shred of remaining meaning, or be intentionally, comically meaningless. But he’s nothing if not inventive.

Compression Sound Art (2009) [“Comments on Music – Musical Zip-Files … Time is relative!”

The video above, politically speaking, is Not Safe For Anything – where else can you bring up Hitler and Britney Spears and condoms? But the only visually tantalizing information is the brief view of a condom speaker membrane and a chest with pasties.

The creations range from:

An oven pipe imported in 1972 from Alaska to New Zealand, vibrated at 574 cycles per second using a gasoline motor. Then, in 2003, this recording was manipulated and filtered on an old atari computer using hacked software.

…to:

Immanuel Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, played 22,000 times in one second (audible only to bats).

The controversial nods and humor aside, I think this really does say something about time and data. I could tell you, but I’d need a microsecond. Let’s just avoid any mention of datamosh.

Johannes Kreidler does know how to encode information in useful, accessible ways, too, however. He’s done just that with a terrific book on Pd (Pure Data), the open source, visual programming environment in which he created works like the one above. Can’t dance to it? You can do other things with Pd, too. You can dance to it? Then, by all means, go for it:

Be a Music Geek Ninja with Electronic Music Programming in Pd: New Book

Previous Kreidler sightings:

A song made from 70,2000 samples

The stock market declines, as a song

Here in the US, Congressional Democrats have reversed not one but both bad decisions on the role of the arts in the economic stimulus package. Provisions that would have blocked any stimulus funds from reaching arts centers, museums, and theaters have been dropped. (Golf courses and casinos are still in the ban. Maybe this time, someone read the actual legislation.) And the US$50 million (out of some $800 billion) that would go to the National Endowment for the Arts, dropped from a Senate version, has been restored to the bill. It appears both of those changes not only cleared the House but are part of the Senate version that’s in votes as I write this.

If you believe artists shouldn’t rely exclusively on government funding, you can still celebrate. The arts will receive far less of a handout than a lot of other industries — and do more with it. Arts advocacy groups estimate that for every dollar of the NEA money, another seven dollars will come from public and private supporters. What the tiny amount of federal spending does is make up for shortfalls in lean times, protecting an arts sphere that depends on a variety of sources for revenue. Nearly 15,000 real jobs could be saved by those same estimates. That means an arts infrastructure in the US that can remain healthy and independent.

But the important story here has nothing to do with the stimulus bill, or even the US. It’s that public outcry from people like you rescued this legislation. And if public support can do that, it can do a lot more for the arts, not only in federal spending but other key areas.

Americans for the Arts says supporters from its organization alone sent some 100,000 messages and letters to their Members of Congress. That’s not counting the many more letters and phone calls from constituents, not to mention letters to the editor and press attention.

Here’s one example from CDM comments, by Dartanyan Brown:

I heard the congressman from Nashville (!) talking down the $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. I immediately called his office and let his staffers know that (blue dog democrat Cooper) was full of hot air on this issue. As a synthesist, jazz musician and former NEA artist-in-residence I had the facts and anecdotes to make my points clear.
If Rush Limbaugh can get his folks to call, we can at least counteract them with some facts and persistence.
Call them, they listen, they respond to numbers.

More background on today’s developments:
House passes stimulus bill with $50 million for artists [Los Angeles Times]
U.S. Senate Begins Voting on Obama’s $787 Billion Stimulus Plan [Bloomberg, including various other details]

To all of you who were active, and to our elected representatives who got this right, thanks.

Targeting the arts in this way may have backfired for those elements seeking to vilify it. Instead, it caused thousands of people to rally to the cause. Here’s an example of organizing meetings in Chicago – and a renewed sense that the arts could be part of the economic solution, not the “costly distraction” so many try to make it out to be.
Organizing around art [Chicago Tribune]

Folks, we have a lot of work ahead of us.

To wrap up the thread I started, the plot in US politics, in the space of a few short weeks, has gone something like this:

1. A new Administration could bring new vision to making the arts part of the economy.
2. Arts spending is wasteful.
3. Any spending on anything should be specifically prohibited from reaching the arts, as that would be wasteful and evil, and the arts are the best symbol of Waste itself.

I live on Wall Street (technically, on the corner of Pine). I guess we’ve now forgotten about them.

As digital musicians and visualists, relevancy to the rest of the people around us is important. What we do can be meaningful to people, and it can pay for our health care and our loved ones and our kids. It’s often not a life or death thing – but then, neither are many jobs. It’s a gig. Heck, even if it’s a hobby, it supports someone else’s gig.

So that raises some really deep questions about what’s going on with our society when arts-related jobs are singled out above nearly every other sector as meaningless or “wasteful” or not “real jobs.” This stimulus bill will pass, but that fundamental misunderstanding isn’t going anywhere – and it’s time to recognize there’s a problem, and start to work to set it right.

Roughly half of one one hundredth of one percent of the US economic stimulus plan was slated to support job protection in the arts — US$50 million. Meanwhile, we’ve just passed one trillion-dollar bailout of finance and are told another trillion is needed.

You might expect anger to be directed at finance, given their industry was at the heart of the problem. Instead, legislators single out — the arts?

In last-minute negotiations in the US Senate, legislators — including key liberal Democrats — have gone still further to ban any use of stimulus funds for the arts (”museums,” “theaters,” and “arts centers” get singled out). The move was largely symbolically-motivated, not fiscally-motivated. Adding insult to injury, arts institutions are lumped together with casinos and golf courses – literally.

U.S. Senate votes against arts [Chicago Examiner]

Arts Bashing [Center for American Progress]

Some of those Democrats, incidentally, are now pleading ignorance – including my own Senator Schumer:
UPDATE: Senator Charles Schumer in Hot Water With Local Arts Organizations [New York Magazine]

While I’m discussing the potential to take new directions in the arts and technology worldwide, and about ways in which creative technology can help repair the global economy, I’d be remiss if I didn’t make one sobering concession:

To many policy makers, the “arts” don’t count as the economy. If you’re employed as an artist, (and by extension in creative fields), you’re not a worker. Um… thanks?

Never mind that in the US alone, nearly 6 million people are employed in the arts – or that that figure itself is  probably wildly conservative, compared to the many more creative freelancers and the economies around them. (Ask companies like Yamaha, Roland, Korg, Avid, and Apple, who then sell products to musicians, many of them pros.)

It’s not just a US problem, either. The Dutch government – just the kind of liberal European government decried by American conservatives – had to be convinced of the value of its music technology research center in 2008.

To me, this shouldn’t be an issue that pits liberals versus conservatives. In fact, important issues around the economy have always been solved by cooperation between people of different political persuasions and parties. Unfortunately, conservatives have decided to declare the arts “liberal.”

The Heritage Foundation claims funding for the arts amounts to “pork.” Leading Republican Jeff Flake, when asked for an example of pork in the current proposed economic stimulus bill, replies:

"For example, $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts," Flake says. "There’s no better example than that. How that stimulates the economy, I don’t know."

Does ‘Pork-Less’ Stimulus Bear Porcine Whiff? [NPR]

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some pork in there – but the NEA funding is all Rep. Flake can come up with? This seems to be less about policy and more about reigniting culture wars.

Specifically, the conservative talking point is to focus on “productivity” and producing goods. The implication: if your job involves the arts, you’re not a “productive” member of society. (I’ll have to scratch my head to work out just what “goods” the financiers buying up bundled debt were producing. I’ll get back to you on that one.)