Part of the dispute Prince was having with the label continues to this day and is why Taylor Swift has re-recorded all her albums. It is "standard practice" for the label to take ownership of the copyright on the recorded material (called phonographic copyright and indicated with ℗) while charging all the costs of recording against the artist's share of the royalties which can result in an artist owing the label money for a hit record.
Ray Charles was a pioneer in insisting that he own the phonographic copyright on his recordings when he moved from Atlantic to ABC-Paramount yet this remained something out of reach for most artists. Robert Fripp was engaged in a decades-long lawsuit against EG to regain control of the phonographic copyright on King Crimson material (as well as to recoup illegally withheld royalties). Squeeze is another artist who re-recorded their albums to reclaim the phonographic copyright.
It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps.
In the old world the business model made sense, it no longer does.
Part of what gets distorted by Taylor Swift and Dave Chappelle is the larger context. Similar to VC the vast majority of label supported musicians are economic failures. The big winners pay for the rest of the failures.
With modern distribution this is mostly a bad deal.
Since the 'Non Fungible Taylor Swift' [0] is really in control she can subvert this (until contracts get updated), but generally people can just go direct now and do their own marketing or negotiate better terms for investment.
I'm not fan of the music labels or how their clinging to an outdated business model for decades has set back their market cap by probably billions (compare to free to play videogames), but the way this is often portrayed by the rare breakout artists is similarly warped and one-sided. You never hear from the failures the label funded that didn't make it.
What is truly enraging in the story about major music labels and copyright is how they essentially pushed through massive law changes in many countries making breaking copyright crimes (not just civil cases) and going after some file sharers with absolutely outrages claims of lost earnings (and often won).
At the same time they got caught red handed disregarding copyright themselves multiple times (Sony's rootkit which used some linux copyright IIRC, or the case of several major record labels releasing compilation albums of music without artist consent and copyright in Canada are just two examples). By their own calculations used against file shares the damages should have amounted to billions, but they got away with not so much but a slap on the wrist. I wish some judge would have really made an example of some of them.
No disagreement with me there, the copyright laws are a disaster and have long lost their way from the 'means' to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The purpose is to incentivize creative works for the public benefit with the limited time exclusive rights, not retroactively extend copyright years after the death of the author to enrich their rights-holders in perpetuity every time expiration comes up.
As it is, you can't even make something public domain yourself - the best you can do is add a permissive license since all rights are reserved by default without registration.
Copyright has always been a means of control by publishers, stretching right back to mid 1600s.
The specific wording of the US constitution was (is?) a nice little bit of fluff but it didn't really change the nature of copyright at all when it was published.
Interestingly, I had a CD that I owned go bad. I found it on a torrent and started downloading it on my laptop. It was taking weeks to finish. I forgot that it was running and then went on vacation to Paris, taking my laptop with me. Within the first hour at our AirBNB the torrent finished.
"I prove to you that I am bad enough to get into hell, because I have been through it! I have seen it! It has happened to me! Remember: I was signed for Warner Brothers for eight fucking years!" - Zappa in '79
I think there's a reasonable argument there, but I can understand the model better before the internet (since distribution was way harder and more expensive). The terms were definitely bad for talent because early talent had no leverage before the internet (and couldn't coordinate).
After the internet whatever argument the record companies had was way weaker and their unwillingness to update (instead attempting to fight everything legally) cost them enormous returns.
In games its give away the game and pay for the skins, characters etc.
In music its give away the songs and pay for the merch, shows, access to artist, etc.
The market for the latter is huge. The music is the viral hook you can use to take advantage of the internet's distribution in order to get the attention to create fans and drive them towards the other stuff.
With the internet you don't even need to rely on mega-pop stars, there's enough people at scale for a lot of niche audiences.
"Oh, you need to sign over the copyright to us so we can legally make and distribute copies." I think that's approximately the line of bullshit they give. No, by default creators own their copyright and can license that on terms they allow. Once you sign that over it's just not your material anymore.
That's what Daft Punk did in 1997: "The deal they struck with Virgin at the outset of their career - essentially licensing music to Virgin from their own company, Daft Trax - was pioneering." [0]
"It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps."
Is there any indication how this is working for them and their artists? I would think given the massive publicity that the Taylor Swift effort has received, it would be quite the other way, with more artists insisting on getting those rights upfront. I know they're typically young and desperate/powerless when these things are being negotiated, but I would think the "go it yourself" route is if anything more robust now than ever before— no one cares about physical distribution, there are many paths to getting your stuff on Spotify and iTunes, and most small-time artists I know are doing the publicity/engagement side themselves with some combination of regular video content on YouTube and streaming mini-concerts.
What can WB or any other major label offer an artist like this in exchange for the gigantic ask that is "we own all your stuff forever and btw we also own any re-recordings of these songs"?
> with more artists insisting on getting those rights upfront
I doubt that unknown artist can negotiate anything. What you are offered is better than nothing. Big corporations abuse their position all the time, individuals can not realistically opt out. The only option is regulations and law enforcement.
> What can WB or any other major label offer an artist like this in exchange for the gigantic ask that is "we own all your stuff forever and btw we also own any re-recordings of these songs"?
Advertisement, legal protection (mainly from themselves), access to traditional media, and distribution in general. How many artist make it out of the big labels system? There is a reason for that.
>What can WB or any other major label offer an artist like this in exchange for the gigantic ask that is "we own all your stuff forever and btw we also own any re-recordings of these songs"?
You will never be played on the radio without a big label to pay off the programmers. Every single song you hear on the radio is bought and paid for.
Spotify and other streaming revenues are a joke for the vast majority of musicians. I personally own all my music and thanks to iTunes I know how many times every song has been played over the last 15 years (from when I got my first iPod and then my iPhone and migrated all my CDs to iTunes). My most-played track would have earned the artist $.53, the median would have yielded about $.05. (And remember this is over 15 years.) And discoverability is not necessarily that great. My wife pays for Amazon music that she and the kids listen to on Amazon Echoes and in my experience, the ability to get the specific song that you want to listen to is pretty hit or miss. I suspect that most people who are still in the discovering new music stage of their lives end up getting their music discovery happening through channels that are pretty much controlled by the majors.
Prince's struggles with Warner bore other wonderful fruit, as well. Emancipation, Prince's first album after casting off the metaphorical shackles of Warner, is a superb album. It has 36 songs and spans 180 minutes, to give you a sense of the amount of artistic freedom that Prince must have been feeling at the time. Highly recommended listening for any casual Prince fan who wants to expand their knowledge of his repertoire. The man was an unqualified musical genius.
He was also way ahead of the curve connecting directly with fans. He had a BBS/forum/something that a friend of mine who was a huge Prince fan was a member of. As a member, they got early access to new tracks. I don't remember how much it was, but my friend loved it.
I personally like his stuff from before Diamonds and Pearls, mostly. After that I think he got further and further removed from his original funk roots, and I think he sort of drifted off into a sea of wishy-washy new age stuff that he never fully re-emerged from. I know his later stuff will, still, be endorsed by hardcore fans, but I do not think it's for the casual listener.
If it was part of a font, then I would think that the logo was in vector form. (It could have been a bitmap font, of course, but if you're sending the font to magazines and publishers, a postscript or TueType font would have been more appropriate.) If it did exist in the font as a vector based image, it seems strange to upload a rasterized version to archive.org. It wouldn't have been too hard to upload it as an svg or eps and maintain its quality regardless of its size/resolution.
The article says the Mac version was a bmapfile which is a rasterized image format, not vector form. That said, they really should have uploaded the original files to archive.org, in addition to the conversion to a more common format.
yea I wish they went into a bit more detail on _how_ they extracted it, so the next person who needs to dump an unarchived floppy can follow their steps
> Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
The Unicode consortium is generally quite resistant to this sort of thing; I think you'd probably have to establish more use than just "one person uses this as a name".
I can't resist, gotta agitate about this. Unicode allocated space for the legendarily-untranslated Minoan script Linear A, for fuck's sake! Unicode allocated space for fucking Ogham script -- not that that's inappropriate, but it's unlikely to be used by the vast majority of people, now or in future, simply as a consequence of its antiquity and obsolescence.
Of course I'm revealing my 90s-trek power level here, but it's seriously puzzling (shading all the way up into quietly infuriating) that these dead languages' scripts are welcomed, while an, er, conlang that has actual living speakers can't have any of the frankly voluminous Unicodespace. QI'yaH!
My pet peeve is U+A66E (CYRILLIC LETTER MULTIOCULAR O, ꙮ) [0], a glyph that had literally been used once only in history by a 15-century scribe before making its way into Unicode. And when it did, the reference rendering (7-eyed) is different from the one originally used by that scribe (10-eyed).
There's also plenty of "ghost" kanji which first appeared in a dictionary with no evidence for use and some which have been positively identified to a single source as a mistaken/sloppy handwritten attempt at a different real kanji character.
That plural seems to be an addition of the Wikipedia editors. If you look at Karsky 1979 (page 197), there’s just one known manuscript that exhibits the phrase:
> Любопытно очное о в слове многоочитїи в псалтыри XV века Тр.-Серг. л. No 308, где о состоит из десяти Ꙩ, соединенных в виде орнамента
Having been involved in archival projects including archaic scripts, I can tell you that academics feel a similar that the Unicode consortium seems to be prioritizing rafts of new emojis over texts that would be useful to academics. Let alone trekkie fanservice. Just use the PUA, if you really feel that strongly about it.
AIUI emoji are a different working group to languages (also I _think_ languages of academic interest might be a different group to languages in current use).
Well, sorta. Not according to the Language Creation Society! From the fallout of the case where Paramount/CBS sued the Axenar guys for the temerity to make a fan film without paying them for it comes this Washington Post opinion [0] (I've added the links found in the text at [1] and [2]):
>It seemed a stretch to suggest that the plaintiffs were claiming copyright in the Klingon language itself, and the court agreed, taking the somewhat unusual step of denying LCS’s motion to file its brief [1], on the grounds that the court didn’t have to “reach the issue of whether languages, and specifically the Klingon language, are copyrightable” in ruling on the case.
>The LCS has declared victory — at least to the extent that the final ruling in the case will not hold that the Klingon language is protected by copyright. Its statement — with a translation into Klingon, for those of you who read Klingon — is posted here [2].
The situation doesn't seem as rosy as the LCS' statement suggests, but as a consequence, I feel comfortable in claiming that Paramount does not currently, successfully, claim copyright ownership of Klingon. That said, "not getting sued by Paramount in future" is a pretty good reason for Unicode to exclude anything.
Tengwar, the script used to write Quenya and Sindarin, however...
There is a difference between the copyright standard of the language itself (which may not be a copyrightable thing, though the court left that for future courts to decide in the given case) and the copyright standard of custom glyphs used by that language though. The custom glyphs themselves to "write" the language are artistic design elements usually recognized to have some copyright protections as with any works of art. (There's also further protections in they way they are often used that sometimes trademark protections also may be applied and looser defined "trade dress" protections as well. Aurebesh, the custom glyphs of Star Wars is pretty heavily defended by such protections in commercial projects.) Unfortunately, the sources for the Klingon glyphs are copyrighted movies and fonts owned or commissioned by ViacomCBS and there's not much of an argument to be made that they aren't art designs they own.
I believe the same applies to Tengwar that too much of comes from artistic work written and/or commissioned for books still in copyright and owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Perhaps when more of the copyrights expire on these originating works Unicode can revisit them. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen soon. (Even Tengwar isn't expected to expire until 2044, 70 years after JRR Tolkien's death.)
That, and it sounds like this is only covering a case in US copyright law. Unicode potentially has to worry about the rest of the world as well.
I can imagine that the Unicode Consortium's general feeling on the subject is outside the scope of their mission, and that pleasing a sci-fi fandom just isn't really worth the potential for headaches, and that it's better to let them continue to rely on ConScript.
My impression is that once the Astral Plane opened up, there's enough academic reason to want to encode those glyphs as there are certainly some really interesting academic work already using Klingon glyphs or Tengwar or others (I don't know if it is more or less than say Linear A, but it's not a contest), and we do risk losing some of that academic discussion if it isn't reliably encoded in something like Unicode. Academic papers are very clearly carved out in copyright laws as "fair use". Unfortunately to protect fonts as copyrightable a lot of the similar carve outs that should make any and all Unicode encoding of glyphs "fair use" are something of a swiss cheese at the moment, and yeah I don't blame Unicode for feeling that their mission definitely does not include fighting the definition of what should be "fair use" in most of the world.
> >Paramount claims copyright ownership of Klingon
> Well, sorta.
Paramount definitely claims copyright on the “Klingon” glyphs from various ST properties that fans have mapped to the language described in The Klingon Dictionary (which is newer than the glyphs), so as far as those glyphs and any derivative works are concerned – what both the Unicode Consortium and any font makers would be concerned with – Paramount’s copyrights are a problem.
Whether they own the language beyond that may be a murky legal question, but it is also beside the point.
(And, actually, what your source supports is that Paramount definitely claims ownership of Klingon, the other party in the case disputed it, and the court found that they didn’t need to decide the issue to resolve the case. That is in no way a “sorta” on “Paramount claims copyright ownership on Klingon”. That a third-party seeking to file an amicus brief against Paramount’s claim on that point chose to do a victory dance because they were told to go away because the issue they were concerned with was ultimately not material to the resolution of the case is…interesting spin, but not much else.)
>That is in no way a “sorta” on “Paramount claims copyright ownership on Klingon”
I see the problem. IANAL, but I take "Paramount claims copyright" to mean something legally enforceable; an uncontroversial legal right that they are claiming [0]. As suggested by both parent and the sources further above, that matter has yet to be settled, and wasn't addressed in the decision. The statement "Paramount claims that it has the copyright to the Klingon language" I wholeheartedly agree with (and disagree, obviously, on the ability of Paramount to claim copyright on a collaborative intellectual effort between James Doohan, Marc Okrand, and others, both due to nerd fervour and a bunch of hand-waving about the intersection of IP and morality that are beyond the scope of this tangent).
[0] Possibly this is due to the ubiquity of the phrase "copyright claim", deployed to describe the monetization of someone else's intellectual property. The uh claimant is presumed to have a legal right to the material being claimed, but it's not clear that Paramount has that legal right.
Voynichese script is public domain but there's no Unicode for that either. You can get a font for it though, but people studying the Voynich Manuscript usually make do with a transcription based on the Roman alphabet + Arabic numerals (e.g. EVA). Unlike Linear A (or Ogham), there's no consensus that Voynichese means anything, and there's only one book written in it.
Personal anecdote, but since Ogham has been available in Unicode, I've seen the odd person start being interested in it to write out names, exclamations, etc. It feels like a small previously-closed gate has been opened for a nice little way for people to connect and engage with an old part of our culture.
Oh, that's wonderful, actually! Between my perception of its rarity, and the seeming ability to easily represent it with vector graphics of straight lines, I figured it was a laudable target but I see that it isn't. After all, the idea of a niche script getting more attention because of its inclusion in Unicode is exactly what I'm all excited about.
I'll happily replace Ogham, in future rants, with that fucking multiocular O mentioned in a sibling to the parent.
So I think the main excuse at the time was that people usually use latin for Klingon. Which honestly feels like a bit of a chicken and an egg problem to me...
Dead languages and scripts are studied, though. The Unicode is there for them so that scholars can type and print what was actually written/carved, instead of a Roman alphabet transcription. The problem with Klingon is it's a conlang, and anyone can design a new script for their conlang and demand a Unicode block.
Their thinking is too small.. I mean why shouldn't everyone on earth be able to have their own personal symbol? The technical challenge does not seem that insurmountable.
Also it's a business opportunity along the lines of the star name registry.
Yeah. And the PUA where it tries to eke out it's meager existence seems to have been occupied by some squiggly drawing set (), at least on my system when looking at the wiki page.
> Parker Higgins investigated whether Prince could be honored in unicode with this symbol. (Answer – no, on three counts, as it’s personal, a logo, and protected intellectual property.)
I was given a Sun t-shirt that had been compressed into a surfboard shape at a conference. Unfortunately they gave me a size that could probably have fitted three of me in, so it got worn a couple of times and then used for painting until it wore out.
I came across Limor's Minty MP3 player when I was young, broke, and looking for an open alternative to an ipod. It was back before Adafruit existed as a web store. Minty was just an open PCB design hosted on a single page with a parts list and a link to a forum where people would help each other source parts and assemble the thing.
I have very fond memories of this because it changed the trajectory of my life. It showed me how powerful a tool the internet could be for organizing people around ideas, many of which sought to improve people's lives through free and open technology.
The other thing this experience did was to make me feel safe tinkering with hardware and electronic circuits. Consumer devices had felt like mystical black boxes that could never be understood, much less re-created by me. After Minty, I was empowered to take things apart and learn how they worked. I grew an appetite for technical knowledge that hasn't slowed down to this day.
EDIT: Found a capture. It's slightly different than I remember it but it's a nice little snapshot of Adafruit's origin story.
> The label was reportedly after control of Prince's master tapes.
Edit: I’m guessing this refers to owning the right to copy a master rather than owning the physical tapes that the master is stored on.
Relevant quote from a 1996 NY Times article on Prince²
> If you don't own your masters, your master owns you.
When Prince changed his name to a symbol, I didn’t pay too much attention to pop or mainstream music so when I heard about it, I had assumed he was simply being pretentious. After hearing about his problems with Warner Brothers, I have a lot more sympathy for his actions and desire to have creative control over his own music.
Losing it would be a minor problem, when could had been redone easily in metafont from any of the millions of singles of the most beautiful girl in the world available.
We have a scientific symbol yet for the representation of both sexes, hermaphrodyte. Is in unicode yet (if I'm not wrong) so there is not a real need to use this. Would start a war for every artist and band in the planet asking for their personal symbol in unicode. Rolling stones tongue should be for example. Is as much iconic than the trumpet key, if not more.
Ray Charles was a pioneer in insisting that he own the phonographic copyright on his recordings when he moved from Atlantic to ABC-Paramount yet this remained something out of reach for most artists. Robert Fripp was engaged in a decades-long lawsuit against EG to regain control of the phonographic copyright on King Crimson material (as well as to recoup illegally withheld royalties). Squeeze is another artist who re-recorded their albums to reclaim the phonographic copyright.
It's worth noting that Warner Brothers' response to Swift re-recording her albums was to update their contracts to prevent any other artist from following in her footsteps.