Half-remembering something I had read about him once, I did some research on William Howard Russell, the man reputed to be the world’s first modern war correspondent. He was born in Jobstown, Tallaght in the 19th century and became famous for his telegraph despatches from the frontlines of the Crimean War. The Wikipedia article is smallish but it might be worth reading up more if I get time.

My research (and by ‘research’ I mean ‘reading Google and Wikipedia’) led me to this – PDFs from a book called All Roads Lead to Tallaght, a kind of local history of the area that I grew up in (and, indeed, still live near). It’s both interesting and sad to read about a Tallaght that existed before the name became a shorthand way of saying ‘anti-social behaviour’ in some circles.

IrishEyes has an article about some MPAA dude who wants certain restrictions imposed on digital radio/MP3 players including a maximum recording time of 30 minutes, no metadata and a limit of 50 hours worth of music before your tracks are deleted in a first-on-first-off basis.

OK, so on the one hand I’m reading this and I’m thinking (a) who on earth is Mitch Bainwol and where does he stand in the scheme of things and (b) what have MP3 players got to do with the MPAA anyway?

But on the other hand, this stuff is quite topical anyway so it’s probably worth talking about. I’ve been a fan of mashups for some time now, as anyone who has ever read any of my other posts will know (all, er, one of you). Mashups, for those that don’t know, are basically the vocals from one song welded to the music from another to make something new and – sometimes – better. It’s not really a new idea – people have been welding samples together for donkey’s ears and scamps like The KLF made their entire careers from this kind of cut-and-paste malarkey. However, modern production techniques mean that far more people can do it far more cheaply. A few of these mashups have been foxed lately by the RIAA and some of the big record labels. Let’s not forget, also, the ongoing saga of The Sony Rootkit.

Although the Sony Rootkit thing is undoubtedly extremely important for all sorts of reasons, the mashups thing is what really has me animated because it just seems to be such overkill. The vast majority of mashups are released gratis so there is no commercial gain on the part of the producer. There isn’t a single record company on earth that can claim that they are losing money due to the distribution of these tracks since they generally aren’t available ‘legitimately’ and there is only one situation that I can think of where someone thinks “I have American Edit so I don’t need to buy American Idiot“. That situation is where the person in question is a fan of dance but is not a fan of rock and, well, they were never going to buy Green Day’s original anyway, were they? And I’m steering well clear of the “actual sales losses versus potential sales losses” clusterfuck here.

And yeah, I understand that the record companies and the artists involved have to protect their copyrights but do they need to do it so aggressively and without any way to achieve a compromise?