On the road from futuristic instrumental concept to real-world product, the Yamaha Tenori-On as shipped lacked some of the functionality its creator, gifted media artist Toshio Iwai, originally imagined. Notably, wireless networking, which promised social music-making with other devices, was gone, replaced with a more-limited MIDI connector.

Now, in a surprisingly literal translation from the hardware to iPad, it appears the Tenori-On has added that feature – but lost some of its charm. An iOS developer notes to me that pitches don’t sound when you tap the screen, only when they are played in the sequence. That fundamentally changes the interaction with the sequencer: you can’t hear notes until they’re sequenced, and you would presumably lose the sense of playing an instrument. That report is happily incorrect; both the developer and I were mistaken from our video impressions. That makes this far more useful.

My reaction here should be taken with a grain of salt – this is only a demo video. But in observing what is new (networked features look terrific), it’s likewise worth saying that something is lost when you move to tangible hardware. To me, a lot of the appeal of the Tenori-On was tangible: the machined metal case, with curved edges designed to be comfortable to hold, and the feeling of running your fingers against discrete, round keys on the array of buttons. Those are lost by necessity. Yet, oddly, some of the Tenori-On’s features designed primarily for hardware – the menu system and navigation keys – are reproduced here, features necessary on a hardware design but not a tablet.

Yamaha Japan, apologies for going on a rant on a product I haven’t yet used, but I’m concerned at what seems to be a missed opportunity. And designer Toshio Iwai has already conceived imaginative touch-based interfaces that are designed for a screen, in works before iOS had even been announced, like ElectroPlankton for the Nintendo DS and interactive installation work going back some 15 years or so.

Simply translating hardware designs to a screen is novel, but rarely usable. Just ask Tascam, who were roundly (and rightly) criticized for making a Portastudio app for iPad that required you rewind every single time.

At least the good news is, some of the musical personality of Toshio Iwai’s work remains, and in a form that doesn’t require a costly hardware investment. Updated – also, via readers, there’s evidence of MIDI support.You’ll find other videos on Yamaha’s official Japanese channel.

Just mark my words: the hardware is still cooler, and there’s a lot of potential in hardware and software sequencers alike beyond this yet to be realized, whether by Yamaha or by someone else.

Updated: I want to re-emphasize that there appears to be auditory feedback as you press buttons for sequences, which is great news and vastly improves usability. And while I stand by some of what’s advantageous in hardware, I’m excited to learn that we may get both networked and MIDI functions here, as we’ve seen in apps from makers like KORG.

Reader comments are very positive, so amidst this hopefully constructive criticism, I think it’s encouraging that the software looks promising and people are eager to try it! (And being critical of some features does not mean you can’t eventually like the product – part of why I tend not to shy away from criticism.)

http://www.youtube.com/user/yamahajp

Sampling and online reuse are enormously common in our culture today. But if you really believe in making some of that culture freely accessible, it follows you must also make free licenses explicit. Simply taking something because it’s there isn’t fair to the person who created the content, whose rights should come first, and it doesn’t help advance the cause of free content. If we want content to be more freely accessible, we need to give first priority to those materials explicitly licensed for free use.

All of that is to say, we need to obey the law. And that’s generally been the goal on CDM.

Here’s the rub: while Creative Commons licenses show a lot of promise, they also have occasionally run up against vague definitions or not-quite-airtight license variants. Case in point: the “non-commercial” restriction commonly used by creators. Let’s say you upload an image to Flickr. Adding a “non-commercial” restriction seems logical enough as a way to protect yourself against your image being abused, right?

The problem is, when looking at the actual language of the license, the definition of non-commercial use is not clear. Here’s what the license says:

“You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. “

Source: the current full text of the license (3.0)

Is CDM’s usage of Flickr images with non-commercial Creative Commons licenses a violation of that license? It’s not entirely clear. While the site uses those images for illustrative purposes, and while the site carries ads from which we gather revenue, it’d be a stretch to say the use of the images themselves was directed toward monetary gain.

Ultimately, though, an ambiguous license isn’t good enough. To be able to use images without contacting photographers for their permission, we need confidence that the license is clear. And even if we were on legally good standing – and it’s unclear that we are – we would want to obey the intentions of the content creators.

The question of commercial status and the Creative Commons license led to a prolonged Twitter discussion between me and Chris Randall of Analog Industries and plug-in maker Audio Damage. Unlike CDM, the Analog Industries blog is copyrighted, not under a Creative Commons license, but Chris has used CC licenses in the past for his music. Chris’ argument was, in short, that CDM was in violation of the CC-NC license as the use constituted a commercial use. The obligation lies with me to prove otherwise, and based on the survey results, I don’t think I can.

I’m not the only person bothered by the ambiguity. Creative Commons has conceded that questions about commercial or non-commercial are some of the most common queries they receive. And the situation was ambiguous enough for CC to undertake a full survey of CC users and creators.

The results of this survey were published in September:
Defining Noncommercial

Read through the complete results, however, and the question of non-commercial status is murkier than ever. The most significant question for publishers (and many content creators) is at what point a site with ads becomes a commercial use. You’ll see the answers can vary wildly depending on how the question is asked, and what the respondent understands to be the usage case.

That said, now having fully read through the results, I think I have to change the policy on CDM. Having some people disagree isn’t good enough, and no matter how you ask the question, a significant number of content creators view sites with ads as commercial – no discussion. (Some even would classify sites by non-profits using ads to recoup hosting costs in this way!)

I’ve found Flickr users have actually been really enthusiastic to discover their work on the site; those are the comments I’ve gotten. Unfortunately, I have to balance that enthusiasm against the larger perception of the policy.

In short, if you’re placing images under an NC license, don’t expect to see them on CDM any more.

New CDM policy

From here on out, I will only make use of images that fit one of the following conditions:

• Creative Commons licenses with BY, SA, or ND restrictions, but not NC
• Public domain images
• Images used as implied (such as press images, etc.)
• Images used by specific permission

Videos are, of course, a different story, as the ability to embed these materials is assumed to mean an implied license, and I’ve never seen otherwise. Likewise, it seems that the use of Flickr tag slideshows and badges containing images – even copyrighted images – does not violate Flickr’s terms of service or the wishes of the copyright holder; this is in essence a view of the Flickr site itself, and should not diminish the value of a photographer’s work nor conflict with their likely intentions when they upload to Flickr.

There’s really no way to operate on the Internet without coming across some of these gray areas, but to me the spirit of the law and the intentions of the creators remains paramount.

How to protect your work without Non-Commercial restrictions

This may raise the question, how do you prevent your work from being exploited while at the same time allowing a site like CDM to republish it? One of the “commercial” uses cited in the survey results is the rather nasty scenario of the spam blog re-purposing stories via RSS. There have been cases of CC-licensed Flickr images being used for ads in bus stops. (See the instance of Virgin’s ads, taken from CC-licensed Flickr images. Note, however, the controversy there – aside from whether they actually complied with the CC licenses – was whether they had the rights to the likenesses of people in those images, which is a different legal area.)

My answer, and the answer on which I’ve settled for CDM’s content: use a ShareAlike license.

What makes ShareAlike unique is that it requires any distribution or repurposing of your content to have the “resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.” That means you couldn’t, say, make an ad out of your photo without placing the ad under the same license — effectively preventing some of the more nefarious uses of CC-licensed works.

I do think that Creative Commons needs to present more explicit, clear, legally-binding documentation for the Non-Commercial restriction in the actual license. But until then, if you’re bothered by this ambiguity, you can resort to the more unambiguous ShareAlike license term.

Note that CDM itself is under a ShareAlike license. Because it’s compatible with any of the other CC SA licenses, that also gives us the right to use SA-licensed content – and, incidentally, were we not licensed that way, we should not have that ability.

HELP US!

To bring CDM into compliance with the non-commercial license, I need your help.

Got some regex skills? A regular expression should be able to purge all the images in CDM’s story database with non-commercial CC licenses, because images link to the specific license used. It’s simply a matter of then pulling the img src, anchor, and image caption div code around that license link.

Get in touch or respond in comments.

Got an image you don’t want to see lost? You can search CDM easily by your name and/or Flickr userid and find your image. Then let us know:

Provide permissions for a CC-NC-licensed image [Google Docs form]

Correction: I can actually observe a number of images I’ve used over the years with links back to CDM from the Flickr pages. So this would actually be the worst possible thing I could do, to remove those images. Obviously, the better solution is to wait and see if someone requests that an archived image be taken down. The Creative Commons license itself is non-revocable, but since this falls into a gray area in which we may not even been in compliance with someone’s license, that’s a moot point. And since those images are clearly marked by license, any derivative work based on them could check first if the license permits derivations. (That’s something you’d have to do anyway, as some images on CDM are copyrighted and used exclusively on CDM by permission.)

As a separate note, I’m now going to go through my own Flickr accounts and remove the non-commercial requirement, because my sense is that ShareAlike will prevent the unlikely event of them being abused within the license terms.

Disclaimer: This story is an editorial, an opinion piece. It does not constitute a legal statement (I’m not a lawyer) or official, binding statement of Create Digital Music’s policy. It expresses only the opinions of its author.

audnoyz – 36 – Male – UK [MySpace.com]

I submit in this age of “in the box” for some, where all is manipulatable and nothing is beyond reproach, the same holds true for noise found or contrived. All is art, all is beauty. ode to aud :-/ More Musings: The pub landlord rules! -Pro Tools: the mix bus sounds great through my Neve -Steinberg: what the fuck happened to you? -Sonar: time has been good to you -Live: awesome, awesome, awesome -DP: don’t get the respect it deserves- -Props for props- -Dangerous: now that’s some good noise- -Korg: CHAOS rules! -Adams: the best!- -Saxonia: German precision- Go SPL before play with your big knob- Liquid channel:too much- Duende:the sound is classic the UI could use some modernization- -RME: worth the extra quid- -64bit don’t mean shit on the dance floor- -Wavelab rules- Focusrite: RED!- TOFT: great stuff- Apogee:little brittle w/o nuts- Benchmark:solid-*** Wedlock is like a dongle*** +Mac still got it over PC+ Macbooks awesome, and you can you warm your tea on them too–Windows: why can’t you remember I already installed via that USB port already!- Mac towers: what you say I did not catch that, the fan is ON…- Robin Trower deserves more!- Jobs: Brilliant! Create a culture that hates Gates, that pays a premium for superior technology? while YOU profit from the biggest proprietary scheme ever devised…. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE my mac, I just hate Apple!– Ipod: freepass on this one… wait a minute, I got rid of my vinal for cassette because it was better, then to CD cuz it sounds better, now you want me to drop my CDs for inferior sound quality… BRILLIANT!

“Wedlock is like a dongle”, appearing on a t-shirt near you. (Perhaps for some it’s more like challenge-response authorization. Well, unless you pirated your significant other.)