Great disappearing record collection

Along with my books, a bunch of records arrived here last week, including the vinyl I purchased back in the 80s. I’ve not hooked up my turntable to my desktop Mac yet, so I’ve no way of digitising my albums; plus a few things have gone missing. So I thought I’d see if could get these missing greats on mp3 download anywhere. I was listening to a lot of African music at the time, which if you remember was undergoing a wave of popularity as a refreshing change from the plastic pop we were being served as a musical staple at the time.

Philip Tabane and Malombo: Malombo

Out of print, no downloads available

Tabane is now an honorary Doctor, awarded for his contributions to South African music. He plays a mad combination of traditional African, jive and jazz, producing especially powerful live performances. Yet his albums (one of which I’ve lost) are almost all unavailable. If you’re a fan, a concert from the 1980s is about to be released in South Africa as a DVD.

Bhundu Boys Shabini and Tsvimbodzemoto

Out of print, no downloads available

One of John Peel’s favourite bands, Bhundu Boys produced two albums before being signed to Warner, with less satisfactory results. Neither of the African albums, Shabini and Tsvimbodzemoto – yes, they are the decent ones – are available. Yet they are a seminal band for the UK’s understanding of African music.

Touré Kunda: Karandindi

Out of print, no downloads available

These funksters played a sort of ultra-trendy 80s Afro-poptrash rather like an even more poppy Salif Keïta. Touré Kunda toured with Carlos Santana. The very trashy album I have, Karandindi is not available, although there is a ‘best of’ compilation. I’d have thought Karandindi would be ideal for remixes, DJs and others looking for a bit of 80s irony.

Sidiki Diabaté, Toumani Diabaté: et al: Ba Togoma

Out of print, no downloads available

Toumani Diabaté is of course very famous among African music afficionados, but this first recorded appearance, recorded with his father’s ensemble, is not available, and seems almost forgotten. Calm, unaffacted traditional griot music if you can find it.

I could go on, and on. The point is, though, this is the digital age, distribution is no problem, there’s almost certainly a market for this material, but there’s no means of getting hold of it. Why is that? From what I know, it’ll be a combination of unclear rights, lack of interest from the commercial rights owners and even a desire not to flood the market with old material.

I am sure these albums are far from the only items to be unavailable, but they illustrate the cultural deficit that results from failures in our copyright system. Copyright-protected recordings cannot be distributed without the permission of their rights-holders, who will nearly always be the record company. Swathes of culture are placed off-limits. People cannot easily learn from, experience, or reuse these works, yet none of this is technologically necessary. Where we may have understood back in the 80s that reissuing old vinyl on tape or CD would be expensive and difficult, this is simply no longer the case.

On one level, this lack of availability is a personal inconvenience, but on another, we are being denied access to large chunks of world culture. To make matters worse, the industry continues to lobby for an extension to copyright term for sound recordings.

Currently, once we reach the 2030s, these recordings would enter the ‘public domain’ and once again be available for republishing and distribution by anyone, albeit with small royalties to be given to the songwriters, who are paid via collecting societies. (You don't have to ask the songwriter if the record can be distributed, but they do have to be paid.)

But, under plans promoted by record companies that may soon become law, copyright term could be extended to 70 years, pushing the date back to the 2050s for our 1980s records to become available again. 

Reunited with my books

When I moved to London, I arrived with very little of my stuff, as I didn’t have anywhere permanent to live: and as a result my books have been in boxes for a serious while. I’ve just got them back. Here’s a few of the things I’ve been living without:

Steve Bell’s If... from the early and mid-80s. 

Steve Bell needs no introduction, but these early volumes were very influential for me. Do cartoons change politics? Maybe not, but they can certainly turn the unpalatable into genuine entertainment. Didn't you realise how much you’d miss Norman Tebbit once he left the front bench?

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future: Rogue Planet

These almost cinematographic drawings fascinated me as a child. Frank Hampson’s vision of the future as seen by a 1950s Briton is both retro and compelling. Stunning architecture too.

Egil’s Saga and Njal’s Saga

Iceland is best known for bank failures and fish, and Magnus Magnusson best known for Mastermind; but Magnusson is also a translator of these early medieval sagas. Their form is prose in chapters, much like a novel. The stories are exciting and bloody, yet these fishermen, farmers and raiders are poets and philosophers too.

Caradoc Evans: My People

Dear old Caradoc’s books were burnt by his outraged fellow countrymen for insulting the religious, non-conformist communities of Wales. His portrayal of Welsh-speaking Cardiganshire as vindictive, petty and impoverished with chapels leaching off their congregations is sharp and entertaining.

Montaillou

In 1318, the Inquisition comes to a small French town to rid the locals of the rather sensible-seeming Cathar heresy, in which good and evil are balanced forces. Ambitious inquisitor Jacques Fournier makes an impressive effort to interview everyone to understand their attitudes and beliefs, before executing those who do not repent.

Later, the fellow becomes Pope Benedict XII, and his detailed notes are preserved for posterity. 1970s historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie creates this picture of French peasant life from the notes, including their affairs, alliances, betrayals and beliefs, much of it in the words of the heretics themselves.

Your Money or you life

Jaques Le Goff illustrates the power of ideas to constrain and transform, by detailing the medieval Church’s attitude to usury. As time belonged to God, interest charged on money was theft of that which belongs to God. So usurers were doomed to Hell as thieves. Le Goff argues that the invention of purgatory, as an escape from the inevitability of hell, eased the transition to capitalism, as it allowed userers to hope for something other than eternal damnation.

Don't look to me for elucidation, though, read the books yourself! Ask me if you want to borrow them.

Architectural disgrace: Victoria Dock Caernarfon

Anger and shock combined with a flood of sympathy for Prince Charles wouldn’t be the reactions I’d normally expect on a brief visit to north Wales, but that’s exactly what I felt when I arrived in Caernarfon with my girlfriend Siân last week.

What prompted this was Watkin Jones’ latest architectural scandal, these blocks of expensive flats, which have been placed right on the seafront, on the edge of the Menai Strait.

They will be visible for miles around. They dwarf the castle and dominate the skyline from Ynys Môn. The castle was the site of Prince Charles’ investiture, so you might presume he will be seething. It’d be interesting to know.

The Victoria Dock’s site was sold to Watkin Jones for £1, presumably because there were decontamination costs. I’ve not been able to find any further reference to this beyond a comment from an irate councillor, so if you know any more, please do let me know.

These flats are hardly ‘Tai lleol i bobl lleol’, (local houses for local people) but presumably investments and holiday flats for the rich and tasteless.

Gwynedd Council has in my view a pretty dismal record in architecture and town planning. This isn’t aided by the culture around ‘declarations of interest’ whereby local councillors are kept away from participating in planning applications. While this might stop some whiffs of corruption, it also when applied too strictly can stop the people who have some idea of controversy from intervening, and places too much power in the hands of officers.

Officials – at least when I was living in Gwynedd – also gained from the lack of any serious opposition to the ruling Plaid Cymru council group. While I’ve nothing against Plaid Cymru, the indefinite office of any political party can only lead to close collusion between paid officials and the top level of the ruling group; and to complacency and arrogance from councillors wielding power.

As a result, it’s often only when things go seriously wrong that people start noticing. This time round, Gwynedd has allowed a project that will, I am sure, produce cringes and dismay from around the world. 

Resuming blogging

It’s been a while since I blogged last, having spent a very busy year and a half at the Open Rights Group. I’m enjoying it very much, but hopefully things are a little easier now, with two full time campaigners other than myself. So I think it’s time I started writing again.

You’ll notice that I didn’t keep my old blog archive, for which I apologise, nor any of the comments. I hadn’t intended to migrate the content at all, but rather start again: and then found an RSS feed of some of the more recent articles. So I’ve migrated those at least.

Statebook: because knowledge is power

I just wanted to post about this, because the Open Rights Group’s new site Statebook, seems to be hitting a nerve, judging by the interest the site is getting in the first two days of this bank holiday.

You may have seen the extensive coverage of the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust’s Database State report a couple of weeks a go. Our new site tries to make the information in that report easily accessible, and to highlight the new concerns around “Intercept Modernisation”. These are the government’s new plans for snooping on our internet communications.

Take a look, email your MP, and spread the word.

One computer to rule them all

What a frightening thought the idea of Stalinist regimes running a microchipped society might be. Holding all your data, recording your votes, perfect surveillance …

Some bright individual in Hackney however thinks this is a real goer, and has launched the Direct Democracy (Communist) Party, believing that perfect planning could be achieved by computer based distribution networks. This party wants “the control of production and distribution by all the workers through the networking of their computers to the central computer.”

Meanwhile the Stalinists will guarantee “the direct participation of all workers in administration of the state”. Or vice-versa, maybe.

The party has a website. Perhaps in a sign of things to come, it isn’t working.

Update on video take down

I have to wait for a response from the copyright claimants, say Youtube. They have 14 working days to respond, which ends next week.

Defending the Commons: banned by Youtube

Last year, I helped put together some videos, all using Creative Commons-licensed music. I was careful to do this, as I didn’t want to put the Greens in legal danger, and wanted to support the work of artists who wish to fully embrace the changes that the web is bringing on.

Now, one of these videos, featuring Siân Berry has been pulled because of an alleged copyright violation. The video features Siân working through a Subterranean Homesick Blues style scene where she presents a set of cards saying how CO2 emissions were being put in unreadably small type on car ads, or not at all. (Her campaign won the argument by the way)

Anyway, not wanting to annoy Bob, or break copyright law, we chose another track, by the very generous Paul Westerberg, who released his track Lookin up in Heaven under a Creative Commons License.

Then Youtube pulled the video last week after identifying the music rights as belonging to UMG. UMG are Westerberg’s publisher and they’ve identified the audio rights as belonging to them through Youtube’s audio and ‘Video identification tool’ which allows ‘content owners’ to submit their files for comparison with Youtube user content.

It looks clear to me that UMG have simply forgot that Paul Westerberg released his track for mashing up. I expect the same applies to quite a few other CC works that have otherwise been released by labels.

I’m thinking, if Youtube are prepared to defend labels’ use of copyrighted works, why shouldn’t they offer the same service to Creative Commons organisations? Paul’s work could easily be identified by the same system as having been released under a use it as you like license, and UMG could be told that this work cannot be the subject of an automated copyright claim.

I think this is quite important for Creative Commons to think about. The most popular works they release are often by published and popular artists, and lazy record companies are unlikely to be carefully noting where their rights have been relaxed.

And Creative Commons users are not likely to be too keen to get into copyright disputes with big labels: they are much more likely to drop the matter and let Youtube delete their work.

I however have supplied my contact details to Youtube and presumably UMG’s lawyers, and wait to see if I end up in court in California.

Welsh devolution should wait for the Tories

The Assembly it seems is still clamouring for a bit of substance to devolution, but as yet the Welsh people are rather divided about it.

A very slim majority would like more power, but under the pressure of a hard fought campaign, fears about taxes or raving nationalism could easily scare off enough voters to stop anything happening.

There is a simple answer, I believe, which is to wait for the Tories to win an election.

The impetus for devolution in Wales came from a sense of identity, albeit a sense that is somewhat contested. But what many of the opponents of further power for the Assembly share with those who want it is, I suspect, a left-leaning, socially-inclined politics.

The strongest opponents, after all, were from the Welsh valleys, many of whom were traditional Labour voters whose communities had consciously reconstructed the Welsh identity as one that looked to class rather than nation. I’ll spare readers the history lesson, and cut to the quick:

These people won’t like it when they have a Tory government. Suddenly, faced with cuts to the NHS, social services, education, you name it, devolution will make a lot of sense.

That’s when the pressure for the Assembly to stand up to Westminster bullies will build up. Political institutions need to stand up for their communities in order to create democratic legitimacy. While the Assembly has tried to do this in a small way, I think the divergence of UK and Welsh politics is likely to create a dynamic to make this much more obvious to many more people.

If I was in Welsh politics right now – which I am not any longer – that would be my advice to pro-devolutionists in Labour and Plaid Cymru.

Hold fire, see if the Tories win an election and have a fight with them. Only then will the whole of Wales have a chance to see why devolved politics makes sense, and that’s the time to ask for powers to protect Wales from the ravages of the Tories.

Moving on …

Well, I didn’t get elected as Chair, rather the very talented Mr James Humphreys did, which I am right now very pleased about. While losing an election is always a disappointment, I am certain that James is the right man for the job, with real top level political experience and a very tight organisational approach. And I’ll get a break.

Being on the executive is a double edged sword. Running a political party is a tremendous opportunity and responsibility, as your success or failure impacts both on all members of the party and the future of the politics of the nation. I know to some that might sound over the top, but the fact is that the Greens will before long be challenging the Lib Dems to be the third party in Britain.

I think we got a bit of taste of that this weekend. Caroline Lucas is a passionate and convincing communicator, and Adrian Ramsay is a politician with real commitment and understanding whose direct and down to earth street politics is already beginning to worry Charles Clarke. Both demonstrated that they are politicians of rank, more than worth electing to Westminster.

The other side of being on the Executive is that it can be thankless task. People are very ready to criticise and some people have a talent for assuming the worst motives of people.

I’ve no doubt that the next two years are going to be extremely challenging for the Greens, just as they will be for any small party, with two nation-wide elections to fight.

But we have a very talented Executive, and leaders, and I for one will be doing everything I can to help them succeed. I urge everyone else to do the same. The future of Britain, and the world, will be better or worse for how well we do.