I haven’t blogged in quite some time now, so I thought it would be nice to share at least something while my new hard disk is being formatted. One of my favorite songs recently has been 비와 당신 (The Rain and You). It was originally in the movie 라디오 스타 (Radio Star), which is a really good movie, by the way — everybody should see it — and one of my favorite Korean bands, Rumble Fish, released a cover of it on their album Memory for You last year.

It’s a nice song, so besides being able to sing it, I thought it’d be fun to play it on a keyboard/piano. The chords are pretty straightforward. Here they are:

C G F E | F G C (G/C)

They’re all major chords, and they’re each one measure long, except the final G can sometimes be just C major for another measure (like at the end of the song). The | is just to divide the eight measures into groups of four so that it’s easier to read. Those chords are repeated the whole song. The melody is pretty easy as well, especially once you have those chords down. If you play the Rumble Fish intro, the melody begins as ABCD|E with E being played at the same time as the chords begin playing. The actual melody (the singing part) begins on E.

That’s the Rumble Fish version. The original is in G major, with the sung melody beginning on B, and with the following chords:

G D C B | C D G (D/G)

Anyway, for those who find this useful, enjoy playing the song!

Many of you know that last Friday, the people who run The Pirate Bay were convicted for “assisting copyright infringement” and faced a pretty big fine and a year of jail time. Many of us also believed the sudden outcome was a bit outrageous because TPB really seemed to be doing pretty well during the trial—the prosecution didn’t seem to stand a chance, and the whole thing just brought positive attention to TPB.

But earlier this week, the Swedish media reported new information that the judge who decided the case is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association, an organization of industry people fighting against “piracy,” along with—surprise!—the people who represented the recording industry in the case against The Pirate Bay. Knowing this, it’s definitely hard to see that judge ruling in favor of TPB. I guess we were onto something when we thought it was weird that they’d been convicted so easily. The defendants are now planning a retrial. (via Ars)

Slightly unrelated to this latest bit of news, this short post at brokep’s blog sums up what’s going on here. This is why more people like you and me should become lawyers.

A week ago, I finally finished Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Everybody should read it. In the meantime, everybody should read these passages I’ve excerpted—bold emphasis mine—courtesy of the book’s Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

From pages 249-250:

Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.

To resist this threat, we need specific changes to reestablish a balance between control and creativity. Our aim should be a system of sufficient control to give artists enough incentive to produce, while leaving free as much as we can for others to build upon and create.

In setting this balance, there are a few ideas to keep in mind. First, we live in a world with “free” content, and this freedom is not an imperfection. We listen to the radio without paying for the songs we hear; we hear friends humming tunes that they have not licensed. We refer to plots in movies to tell jokes without the permission of the director. We read books to our children borrowed from a library without any payment for performance rights to the original copyright holder. The fact that content at any particular time is free tells us nothing about whether using that content is “theft.” Similarly, an argument for increasing control by content owners needs more than “they didn’t pay for this use” to back it up.

Second, and related, the reason perfect control is not our aim is that creation is always the building upon something else. There is no art that doesn’t reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the earlier appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free society; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Finally, while control is needed, and perfectly justifiable, our bias should be clear up front: Monopolies are not justified by theory; they should be permitted only when justified by facts. If there is no solid basis for extending a certain monopoly protection, then we should not extend that protection… Before the monopoly should be permitted, there should be reason to believe it will do some good—for society, and not just for monopoly holders.

And from page 265:

The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution is undone. And since we barely understand how the technologists built this revolution, we don’t even see when the lawyers take it away. As activist and technologist John Gilmore has put it, in a line that captures the puzzle of this book: “[W]e have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. . . . I think,” Gilmore continues, “we should embrace the era of plenty, and work out how to mutually live in it.”

Finally, this last paragraph of the book is compelling:

We move through this moment of an architecture of innovation to, once again, embrace an architecture of control—without noticing, without resistance, without so much as a question. Those threatened by this technology of freedom have learned how to turn the technology off. The switch is now being thrown. We are doing nothing about it.

Time to begin Free Culture.