Intellectual Property

Remember how we live in an individualized society where we’re taught that we all have to Make It On Our Own and can accumulate wealth to be passed on to our heirs so they Don’t Have To Work As Hard As We Did  etc etc. It’s about back there where intellectual property starts — the idea that a product of your brain is yours alone to monetize and no one else can get in there. Fast forward to fifteen years ago when the digital revolution made it possible to very easily copy things: documents, pictures…music files, computer programs, are you getting where we’re going?

The fact that we can make copies of things is a radical change in the way these assets are distributed, and has brought up a lot of ideas about how to preserve the monetization of these assets, and even more radically, how to make things that are intended to be copied without monetization. Copyright law is ever too complicated to go into here, so lets go to the entrance of copyleft and Creative Commons, and new laws extending copyright from 50 to 75 years+ and now it’s hard to download Adobe without paying.

BUT — some people like that their computer programs and art can be shared with other folks, tested and improved, and so we’ve got a whole world of software that is easily available…

Shareware vs Freeware vs Software

What the hell is going on here? The folks at netc.org have a great tech glossary, and break it down like this:

Freeware: Software distributed at no or neglible cost.

Shareware: Software you can use without paying for upfront. If you regularly use the software or want all the features you pay for it. Not necessarily open source. Not the same as freeware.

Open source software (OSS): Any computer program with accessible source code.

Mac Software That’s Not Audio-Related: Interesting/New/Useful Programs

It seems like every shareware out there is designed to somehow cut tracks out of youtube videos or pull audio off your windows-based cameraphone. Well, none of these do that. These are programs that connect via text and use new technologies for digital distribution. You can see my other posts if you’re interested in web programs or print design programs.

I find decent programs for my Mac on this shareware site.

RapidSMS is a free and open-source framework for dynamic data collection, logistics coordination and communication, leveraging basic short message service (SMS) mobile phone technology.

Flipbooks – freeware/open source
Mac – http://www.macshareware.com/software/digital_flip_books

CMS for images/portfolios
you might want to try Stacey, it’s a SUPER simple, you structure your site as a bunch of text files, images, etc in folders and it’s there. [Note: You need to have PHP5 on your server, but if you get a error message that you don't you can usually email/call your host and have them walk you through updating your PHP version. Don't let the jargon stress you out here.]

Top-Level Recommendations

•    Sometimes, brand counts. Not in pharmaceuticals, but yeah in electronics.
•    Buying from a place that lets you return something that doesn’t work for you is golden. B&H Photo Video in Manhattan was great. BestBuy wanted to charge a restocking fee so I didn’t buy from them. [So, not best.] Also that means that eBay or some guy on CL is not the best if you don’t know what you’re looking at.
•    Set yourself a price limit and prepare to adjust it by maybe $100. But don’t get crazy.
•    Buying the cheapest item means you get a dinky trifling chintzy piece of plastic. The bottom of the barrel is not a good place for electronics to be found. I hate this but it’s true.

Terminology Basics:

Consumer: The “low end” of video cameras where we will be loitering for much of this discussion. The cameras in the $100 – $1000 range. [All your bills for the month added up.]
Prosumer: A term which has the aura of relators’ ingenuity for making up words that mean “upsell.” Used for cameras that are fancier than point-and-shoot but not so fancy you could take them to Hollywood. Wait scratch that. In the $700 – $1500 range. [yes, that's a month's rent.]
Professional: Cameras over $2500 [and up to $60K] which I am entirely unqualified to use, let alone talk about. [All the money you'll make this year.]

Media Types:

MiniDV – The Old Guard of camcorders’ recording media, these are the tiny tapes you put into your camera that record analog which you then have to capture using final cut or another program. Just a note and thought, most Professional cameras still record to tape [or film, of course] and when you use tape, you are allowing

Mini DVD – A tiny DVD that you record onto in the camera. If you have a desktop computer/certain PC’s, then you can slap the little DVD into your computer and grab the video. I personally would be terrified to shove it into my MacBook, but I could be a priss.

HDD/Flash Memory – any of the growing number of devices that burn the digital encoding of the video directly to the camera’s memory. Sometimes you have to buy an additional memory card sometimes the camera has a ton of internal memory [our friend RAM!] Remember that 20 mins = 1 Gigabyte of data, so if you want to record an hour you’ll need 3Gigs+ [the more stopping and starting you do, the less time you can use, as the memory gets cut up for your little recordings].

Recording Formats:

DEFINITION
HD – High-definition images, 1920 x 1080 pixels, generally widescreen, the newest of the new in video reccording. You know how when you take a photo/video of your TV or old-tyme giant computer monitor, and all these horizontal lines were showing up? In HD there are twice as many of those lines, thus getting about double the image info — and taking up double the digital storage space. “We all survived fine without HD until a few years ago, so…?” the video guy at B&H said to me leadingly. Unless you have a HD TV or plan to make videos for the big screen HD might be overkill. Then again – many of the HDD/Flash consumer cameras out there ONLY record in HD. It’s an improvement, of course, and a recent shoot I did in HD got me beautiful footage — that took up 6G for 15mins. Ouch. Also, not yet common in Europe.

AVCHD – Sony/Panasonic’s extra high-def HD format. If you really want to try to capture for Blu-ray, maybe low-end video camera’s aren’t right for you anyway? I feel this is the end result of people thinking they need to see JOhnny’s every pimple in their home movies. But maybe I judge?

SD – Standard Definition. 720×480 pixels* is the NTSC [N America] screen size. What everything tv/video was produced as since TV started being in color in, oh, 1951. Has the benefit of the fact that everything pre 2004ish is in SD, so anything public domain you pick up on Archive.org to mashup, will be produced in SD.

FILE TYPES
Tape – If you record to tape, you set the file type according to your capture program. [Final Cut makes my videos into happy QuickTime .mov files.]

If you use a DVD/HD/Flash Memory device, there are a few formats, and not all of them play nicely with each other or with all the other programs or platforms out there. Listing all thevariations is a statistical impossibility, so this is really a word of attention needed here: You might be on a Mac and find that all the Sony software is only for PC and be frustrated. My friends’ Flip recorded in .avi and that needed to be rendered every time I moved it a touch in Final Cut. You might have to convert your footage before you throw it in your editing program.

Converting Among File Types – You recorded in MPEG and you want to edit in MOV. Try ffdshow if you’re on a PC, Any Video Converter for PC or on your Mac! Or you can get QuickTime Pro for $25 [as opposed to QuickTime Regular Normal, which is probably already on your computer].

Bells and Whistles

What is the Image Capture rate? Does it zoom? Can it make sepia tone?

• Zoom: Optical [what the lens does], Digital [what the camera makes up for you] – listen; fuck digital zoom. It’s like when you ask Photoshop to resize a web image to print quality, the camera/program makes up the missing pixel image data, and it never looks right. Just worry about what the optical zoom is, k?
• Image sensor – 1/4″, 1/6″, 1CCD, 3CCD
• Microphone terminal mini-jack – this is a really nice bonus that a lot of Canon [and a fair amount of JVC] camera’s have. Plug in a mic and you can get better sound quality from your tiny camera!

Lastly, follow my above directives, hewn from the pain of researching and being forced to separate from money I made doing something that was not living the dream, with these words of sage advice: time is not just money, it’s much more valuable than money can be. Get your tools and go make your art!

*did you know the origin of the term: PIcture(X) ELement

woohoo narcissism!

ONE So every once in a while I’ll google my name[s] to see what comes up. And this time around I learned that you can get two songs from Ice 9 and two tracks from Exquisite Witness on the illustriously sketchy beemp3.com. This is surely payment for all the [legal, ahem] files I have gotten from that site…

TWO My friend plays a game whereupon you try to google a phrase that gets as few hits as possible, while still getting some kind of hits. I once got only two hits by combining “troubadour” with something I now can’t remember.

Where people have looked at one of my websites from this week

THREE Lastly – are *you* tracking the stats* on your websites? You can use Google Analytics or Stat Counter or look up your stats via your server, but whatever you do, don’t deny yourself the pleasure of checking it every once in awhile to see where in the world people are checking *you* out from!

*”stats” are the statistics about/information on visitors to your website/blog. You just sign up for an account at one of the services I list above, enter your website domain name, and the service provides code you must copy and paste into your webpage’s HTML. Using that code the service can see when, where, using what keywords or referring sites and for how long visitors come to your site from! Narcisstically good and also useful if you want to see where you might want to advertise, or if your efforts to reach out into the world are working…

Programs

Audio on a PC has always been relatively easy because there are about a thousand good free programs out there for PC users to make music:

• Start –>Accessories –>Entertainment –>Sound Recorder–>talk — aaaand done.

• Being real, the last time I was on a PC [was when I made my first album using $40 of RAM I installed myself on a machine running Windows ME, but even though] my technology was crap, and I easily ran Modplug Tracker — great audio creation [not recording] software. So good and intuitive to use I sometimes bust out the PC virtualizer on my Mac so I can play with it.
• And you have Audacity…

Audio on a Mac has gotten basically awesome in the last few years, in part because of Garageband, yes, but also you’ve got:

• Audacity which is so perfect my friend who pays $$$ for techy grad school got taught it in class. It’s free and available for both Mac and PC and lets your record via your computer’s mic input and/or import all kinds of audio files to mashup and play with.

• and if you want to get cray* and record audio in other ways, say an interview via Skype, you can use Soundflower** [brought to you by the makers of Max/MSP/Jitter, the A/V program I want to marry*** and spend all my time with. Someone give me $$ so I can, please]. With Soundflower you can record any audio from one program to another: iTunes to Audacity, for example.

Hardware

RAM you probably have enough memory [RAM] on your computer to record sound without crashing the thing and frustrating the shit out of you. But just in case, do you?

Microphone You can get a mic at many dollar stores for $2. You can get a mic at radio shack for $15. You can get a mic at a pawn shop / on ebay for  $50-$100. You can afford it! Just make sure it has a 1/8″ stereo plug. If it has the common 1/4″ mono no problem – you’ll need to get two adapters at radio shack / your local electronics corner stort for $3 a pop. One will decrease the jack to 1/8″ and the next will go from mono to stereo.

1/8 - stereo, note the double black lines

1/4 - mono, note the one black line

*a familiar form of “crazy”
** thanks to Sébastien McLaughlin for pointing me to this software!
***maybe marriage is the right goal after all?

1. Pick a name[s]! Decide!
I know that picking a name is the hardest part, but luckily we live in a plentiful linguistic world — so you do that part and come back. Before you get soooooo excited please check that it’s not already registered to a real person or robot by typing it into your browser of choice or use a domain search tool.

2. Buy & Register it: Goooo creepy bueruacracy!
Get yourself* to godaddy.com or dotster.com [two larger domain registrant organizations] and search to see if your domain name was bought in the 2 days since you decided what to use. Go ahead and make an account and buy the name**. When it gets to checkout you can choose crazy hosting packages for your site, which are usually a little OOC and you can always buy them later, and you can also choose whether to pay more to make your registration private. If you don’t use privacy, people who creepily search WhoIs databases can see the last name, city and zip code of who each non-private URL is registered to. Sometimes that won’t bother you and sometimes you are freaked out by that and want to pay for the privacy – your call.

*my recommendation #1 – register it yourself. Don’t get your buddy who is helping you with your site to do it, because if tragedy befalls your buddy or your friendship, well then whoops – you can’t access your internet name when you need to update your site / it expires and a german porn site buys it.

**recommendation #2 – buy your government name, too: the one you pay taxes under, and for god measure the one you f*ck under/travel under. If you have the extra $10 each, do it! Otherwise someone else will.

3. Be like a Domme and Direct It
Since you have control over your Domain name, you can log into the account you bought it under and either:

- Direct the “namservers” of the domain name to point to server space you bought or your friend is giving you [the server space will have this information]
OR
- Direct the domain name to a free or other servive you are using, such as blogger, wordpress, freewebs, etc. You have two options

1. Forwarding – someone types in yourdomain.com and wordpress.yourwordpressname.com comes up in the address bar of the browser
2. Masking – someone types in yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com remains in the address bar. This is good if you have some janky-looking free service name [www.cheapofreebizsite.com/damienluxe] and want to appear more professional than that. Bad because people will not ever be able to get directly to a page on your site because the address bar is masked with just your domain name.

4. Mom…I changed my name/I have six names
That’s ok. The internet will never judge, it’s just a series of 1′s and 0′s electromagnetically linked. Some of us like naming, it’s cool. You just need to go through steps one and two above and then…

a. Move your existing site/blog to your new URL [that's a whole other post].
b. Keep your “old name”/URL site active, but just have one index.html page instead of all your content
c. Automatically redirect visitors from the “old name” site to your “new name site” by placing the following HTML in the index page of your “old” site in between the <head></head> tags of your web pages or blog:

<META
     HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh"
     CONTENT="1; URL=autoforward_target.html">
So 1 is the amount of wait time before the viewer is forwarded and the ...html is the page the browser takes the viewer to.

Today, we look at file sharing. Getting a large media file from my computer/camera/etc. to your email/social network/website/etc.

1. Email that sucker! Is it a sample of a picture for your CD cover or a draft of your latest song?? It’s probably small enough to email.

+ fast and dirty
- giant files clog up people’s email *especially* if their email runs off their website [me@mywebstie.com] and not giant email metropolises like gmail.
- now you have a hundred copies of your image/song/video out there, and maybe you don’t want that because it was a draft or a version that will be changed and that gets confusing [this is called version control! by the way].

2. use yousendit.com – it’s like a single-use email account for really big files, where you set up an account and people use yousendit to create a link that the reciever can click to download the big file.

+ send up to 100MB files
- only 100MB [not great for video]
- you have the file-duplication problem from email, though at least not in your email
- links you send people only last for one week unless you sign up for an account [$]

3. Use a server and FTP software to transfer the file, then send a link - doing this you basically make a “webpage” that is only the media item you want to share [the "page" is an automatically embedded  image, song or video file].  For example: http://www.hadassahsbizzare.com/mp3/Craigslist.mp3. That page is just the song, and I can send the link to people to say, “hey! isn’t Craigslist dating tragic? Listen!”

+ upload any size file and send people a URL [web address, readable in a browser]
- you need to have your own website server space**
- uses your servers’ bandwith
+/- You’ll need FTP [File Transfer Protcol] software. Your server might have a WebFTP or httpFTP [which might limit the size of files you can upload to 5 ot 10MB, smaller than gmail, so check  it out]

FTP software looks like this

. You can download Cyberduck FTP software, it’s free+ great if you’re on a Mac, or try download.com for free PC FTP software.

**You can get a free website account, however, and just use it for files that you need to share. A bit annoying because of all the sign-up time? Sure. Free. Oh heck, yeah.

4. burn a DVD/CD or use a portable drive

+ maybe the cheapest method
- you have to physically hand it off [with the drive, anyway] or mail it.

If any of you have better or other suggestions, I’d love to hear them! In short, it’s so awesome that we have videos and songs and giant pictures to share, but does get a little sticky when our work gets large.

My new post: “I did it!”

Customizing a blog to look almost exactly like an existing site is no small feat. And what, I did it, after several annoying hours with PHP and CSS and the DIY attitude that got me here in the first place – yay for DIY!!

This got me thinking on other things that I cast in my skill set net which are special: parallel parking a conversion van, customized rope body harnesses, troubleshooting the A/V, designing/producing print media for the revolution. And that was just today. What kinds of things are *you* especially good at – and when do you use them?