Space Oddity – Featuring Andrew Kolb Illustrations
Artist Andrew Kolb made a beautiful children’s book based on the song Space Oddity by David Bowie. Unfortunately he got a cease and desist from the record company. He left some pictures from the book up on his site and here is a youtube video of the song with all the illustrations.
Great song, great art. Very nice work Mr. Kolb!
Take it easy, Don Henley
How crazy are things starting to get with IP? Companies suing every other company. Music industry trying to extort money from regular people. Basically, trying anything and everything OTHER than trying to solve issues using creative methods. It’s funny, but if it weren’t for Apple and iTunes, the music industry would have died a long time ago.
Now we have this beauty. According to a USA Today opinion piece from Eagles drummer and singer Don Henley, blocking and banning any site that breaks copyright laws (in this case, illegally downloading Henley songs) from Google and credit card payments is something that should be supported… and if you don’t supported, well you are either a terrorist or a criminal yourself. He is referring to the PROTECT IP Act.
Critics of this pending legislation need to be honest about the company they keep and why they essentially aid and abet these criminal endeavors. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a civil liberties group, claims such a bill would “break the Internet,” while Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt says it sets “a disastrous precedent” for freedom of speech. No one has the freedom to commit or abet crimes on the Internet. Stopping crime on the Internet is not, as EFF says, “censorship.” There is no First Amendment right to infringe intellectual property rights.
Luckily, EFF ( Electronic Frontier Foundation) board member Brad Templeton (yes, brother of famous Canadian comic artist/writer Ty Templeton, whom I mention often in this blog) wrote an amusing response to Don Henley:
Take it Easy, Don. There’s a New Kid in Town, and it’s called the Internet. Get Over It. I Can’t Tell you Why, but in The Long Run, there isn’t going to be a Heartache Tonight. One of these Nights I hope you’ll you understand that for search engines to Take it To the Limit, they can’t be forced to police every search result.
Internet companies only grow when living Life in the Fast Lane, able to operate, innovate and design products without needing to check for permission from the music industry. If every time you wrote a song you had to worry about what every user who plays it and every store that sells it might do with it, you would lose your Peaceful, Easy Feeling quickly. Big companies might run filters, but if the small ones had needed to they would be Already Gone.
When will the music industry learn?
Have a song stuck in your head?
Unhearit! Replace that bad song with a multitude of other bad songs!
How many times have you had a particularly bad song stuck in your head? I know that when I used to swim competitively (which afforded me a lot of alone time with just my brain) I would get many songs looping endless in my head as I swam laps. (One of the worst situations was when I had the Frosted Flakes commercial song stabbing my brain… “Show ‘em you’re a tiger! Show ‘em what you can do!”)
Fuck… it’s back… Off to Unhear It I go!
About Me
I created my first web site in 1994 and have been working full-time designing web sites since 1996. I currently work as an UX specialist and Information Architect.