“OK let’s get this straight, I’m not here to defend piracy. On the contrary, I believe wholeheartedly in the sanctity of copyright. I’m here to tell you why SOPA is so fundamentally flawed that it risks compromising not only the freedom of expression of the individual, but also the very existence of the kind of modern, dynamic businesses that are vital in this new economy. I’m here to tell you why another way must be found.

“Before getting neck deep in the really scary, dystopian swamp of subterfuge, let’s tread surefootedly through the blatant flaws in the act related to its primary purpose. It’s yet another case of reactionary, blanket measures in response to a specific threat; the bill has as much precision as rooting out the bad eggs by bulldozing the barn. The chief folly in this lazy legislation is the principal that “the site” is responsible for all of its content. Considering the current proliferation of user generated sites, this makes half the internet liable for shutting down. Sites such as Youtube, Facebook, Flickr and Vimeo all would regularly breach the legislation and run the risk of being shut down if the letter of the law were to apply. The difficulty of such sites’ ability to police themselves appropriately should be obvious to all; if half the world is on facebook, you’d need the other half to police it!

“Now let’s move onto swampier, murkier ground. I may have given the impression that this bill as subtle as a clown at a funeral, but I should give it more credit. In fact, parts of it are positively machiavellian in their shadowy purposes to keep the lawmakers hands clean, while leaning heavily behind the scenes on ISPs and intermediaries to do the dirty work. The “vigilante position” allows significant immunity for ISPs, if they are willing to “overblock” – potentially blacklisting innocent users. This government sponsored protection racket empowers ISPs to act on their own discretion, effectively without any legal oversight at all. One day you might just wake up with your website blocked, without even having to be found guilty of anything!

“So now we find ourselves really bogged down in the mire, and as promised, here comes the really insidious stuff. The stuff that doesn’t get talked about by the guys pushing the bill – they’re happily hiding behind the copyright issue as a distraction from what many would argue is the real purpose of the bill – quashing dissent.

“Governments are beginning to understand the potential threat of the new social internet. The US may have quietly and distantly supported the Arab Spring, but they have also been nervously monitoring the Occupy movement, as well as Anonymous and even Twitter in order to gauge the potential threat posed by the online perpetuation of the idea the American Way isn’t necessarily the right way.

“Section 103 of the bill effectively states that, to be blacklisted, a Web site must be “directed” at the U.S. and also that the owner “has promoted” acts that can infringe copyright. This can be taken to mean that if the government wants a site blacklisted, for whatever reason, it shouldn’t have to look too hard to find something incriminating, especially if the site is relatively large and also contains a lot of user generated content. Too much anti U.S. sentiment on Twitter? Hey look! That guy @hoxtonhero333 just put a link to a Twin Peaks torrent. Shut it down! SHUT IT ALL DOWN!!! U.S.A! U.S.A! U.S.A!

“Now, as I said before, I’m in no way in favour of piracy, in fact I believe it’s such an important issue that it shouldn’t be used as a smokescreen for legislation intended for an ulterior purpose. I believe that piracy should be tackled, and should be legislated against. But we need to tear up this bill and start over again.”

Lead Singer of Howl Griff, Gary Parkinson was around to pick out the winner from probabaly the coolest hat we’ve ever seen!!

February Competition Draw from thefoldstudios on Vimeo.

To WIN this great prize all you need to do is find the answer to the following question hidden in one of the archived BLOGS we have posted on the website.

Q: Who did we catch up with in 2010 and ask if they had any regrets???

To ENTER you must submit the correct answer via the website BOOKING FORM, stating your name and leaving a correct email address. The winner will be picked on the 10th March.

Firstly, a brief explanation… SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a piece of American legislation currently being batted about the House of Representatives. I won’t waste too much time explaining its primary purpose thanks to the Ronseal-esque quality of its title; suffice it to say that it’s caused a rather large hullaballoo over recent weeks, with wikipedia and other major sites staging blackouts last month in protest at the proposed bill.

Secondly, to pre-empt the question “If this is an American issue, what does it have to do with us?”, well, as with most blanket internet legal issues, SOPA has real international implications. One of the main aspects of the act is to target non-US based websites by forcing American ISPs, search engines and payment sites to block those international sites found to be hosting illegal content.

Thirdly and finally, let me just stress that this is a very complicated issue so I will be doing my best Keanu Reeves impression as I play Devil’s Advocate over the course of two articles. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which side is Al Pacino.

So, without further ado, let’s get into the case. So, keep your ears open, your mouth shut, and ready yourselves for the case for the defence…

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, today you are going to hear from my esteemed colleague for the prosecution all manner of talk about censorship, freedom of speech, freedom of information and inalienable rights and I want to clear something up right now. What he will be talking about is nothing short of the freedom to steal, the freedom to cheat and the right to defraud some of our greatest, but also most fragile and vulnerable industries without fear of punishment. It is true that these freedoms and right have come to be thought of as inalienable to a great swathe of the general public over the past 15 years or so, but the failure of legislation to keep up with the greatest and fastest technological advance of our time does not make those abuses right any more than it is right to fly tip or vandalise, or to shoplift or defraud just because the laws against such behaviours are not effectively enforced.

“The fact is that the internet is less regulated than any aspect of the offline world and many people would like to keep it that way. But public opinion is so malleable on the issue it’s difficult to know what the general consensus is. Let’s take an imaginary poll with one simple question:

“Given the threat to major film studios from online piracy, would you like to see more international regulation on the internet?”

YES
NO
NO OPINION

Now let’s ask the same question again, with a different precursor:

“Given the widespread availability of child pornography on the internet, would you like to see more international regulation on the internet?”

YES
NO
NO OPINION

“Now it’s fair to say that I can’t prove anything with a hypothetical survey but it is also by no means wild conjecture to assume that they would be likely to produce markedly different results. Given the fact that the essential question is the same, it’s really all down to the difference in people’s attitudes towards the context.

“Of course everyone is only too happy to condemn selfish behaviour when it is put away inside a neat little box of old-fashioned pre-digital definitions. But their reluctance to accept that these moral codes are equally important in the anonymous world of cyberspace is symptomatic of two factors prevalent in our society today.

“Firstly the fact that we are all somehow entitled to have whatever we want for free if we have easy access to it and no direct or immediate threat of consequences and secondly the misconception that because major movie stars and the most successful musicians and authors make huge amounts of money we don’t need to pay for enjoying their output. The reality is that these few individuals are responsible for bringing in the revenues that go to support whole industries.

“Taking the film industry as an example, if any of you have the patience to sit through the credits at the end of a movie, you could spare a thought for the thousands of hardworking men and women who make each one of these minor miracles happen. Legions of sound designers, set designers, gaffers, grips best boys, body doubles and stunt doubles, extras and editors, dancers, drivers, carpenters, cameramen, caterers, choreographers and composers all depend on their industry bringing in money from legitimate sales.

“I believe that there is a future for quality, professional entertainment in the digital age, but to have free and easy access to copyright protected material is unsustainable in the long-term. For the unscrupulous consumer (which is a significantly greater proportion of us when we can maintain our anonymity) the current state of affairs is akin to there being a giant illegal supermarket in every town with all the latest music, films, books, tv shows and newspaper and magazine articles in unlimited supply and completely free with a few signs posted up around town reading:

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, please be aware that shopping in Free4all is illegal and puts many thousands of jobs at risk, as well as driving down the quality of output in the entertainment industries. However, for now we see no reason to go any further than to ask you politely to consider shopping at your nearest legal and legitimate retailer instead.’

“This example may seem absurd but it translates almost exactly to what is going on online when it comes to the protection of intellectual property and shows up our already existing laws for just how hopelessly impotent they are in this quickly changing world. They need that little blue pill, and it comes in the shape of SOPA. All SOPA is proposing is that these illegal operations are not allowed to carry on, well, breaking the law. It really is as simple as that.”

1967 Akai portable ‘reel to reel’ tape recorder:

& A proper doper coffee machine, whoo hoo!

But there is a silver lining to this most towering of cumulonimbi, a light at the end of this most Tokeinesque of dark places. The light is music… Or at least it should be.

I say should be because history has taught us that economic crises around the world have inspired some of the most enduring music of all time, and it’s because music has the ability to bind us as a society. No matter how often David and George tell us we’re “all in it together”, nobody’s buying it; as satisfying as it is to picture dear old Fred Goodwin rooting through the reduced section in his local LIDL, before switching the heating off and huddling round the oven while he cooks his 99p cheese and tomato pizza, we’re all aware of the reality.

Music however, is something can bring us together. So where is our recession music this time?!

The great depression patiently mused for Woodie Guthrie. The second world war brought to prominence the Andrews Sisters, Dame Vera Lyne and Edith Piaf. The recession in the mid-70′s conspired to bring us punk music and Thatcher’s controversially polarizing regime in the 80′s served up that most quintessential of recession songs, “Ghost Town” by The Specials.

So I ask you… Where’s our recession music now? It must be out there somewhere. Surely labels are missing a trick here. We all know that themes we can all relate to sell records by the busload, and there doesn’t seem to be a much more ubiquitous subject right now than our being hung out dry by the powers that be… AGAIN.

Maybe I haven’t had my ear close enough to the ground. Perhaps you can help me. Let’s have your suggestions for our Lehman Brothers award for “Best recession anthem 2008-2011″. Answers on a postcard please (or in a comment would do just fine).

PS. Our more curious of subscribers can find some further reading of the great history of recession music here.

While I admit it’s a long way from some kind of Phillip K. Dick-esque dystopian future – human beings, stripped of the ability to think for themselves and question authority, are subjugated under the all powerful control of the “Pear Shiny and Ingenious Little Gadget Company” – there is an undeniable trend towards the “bare minimum” approach to anything that requires the engaging of intellectual effort.

Don’t get me wrong; that we live in an age when we have a whole world of information at our fingertips is truly a blessing. We have a portal of learning available to all such as has never been seen in the history of mankind. But perversely, the thing that makes this virtual wonderworld so golden is also its Achilles heal… The whole internet is, for the most part, unregulated and often unsubstantiated.

These days you could be forgiven for thinking that you can skip out years of learning, training and experience and become whatever you want to be simply be absorbing reams of opinionated ravings masquerading as informed debate on discussion forums and digesting hours of “how to“ videos by self-styled “experts” on Youtube.

Want to know the definitive answer (compete with scientific proof and technical expertise) to that most persistent of nagging questions: “which is best, analog or digital?”… Just search it in gearslutz or soundonsound for the conclusive answer. See you next year!

Want to learn how to mix a Hip Hop track? You could start at the bottom, working for months and months as a teaboy to get your foot in the door at a studio, making sure you spend all your time paying attention to what the engineer is doing, until one day you seize your opportunity with the appropriate zeal when the assistant goes sick. You impress the engineer so much with your professional attitude and unexpected aptitude for the job, you find you’ve somehow worked your way to a paid position as assistant. Hungry for more you spend hours and hours in the studio on downtime, applying what you’ve learned to mixing the studio’s current projects simply for yourself, until one day, years later, a big client hears your mix accidentally and is so blown away they insist on it being picked for the track’s release. Congratulations! You are now a mix engineer!

Or you could just do what this bloke says:

How to mix a rap vocal from "expert" village

Of course, on the internet, everyone’s an expert, and although there are sites out there that offer fantastic in depth advice and expertise (see Matthew Weiss’ fantastic article http://theproaudiofiles.com/mixing-rap-vocals/ for a much better example) the fact is that without a basic grounding through education and/or real life experience, it’s difficult for the enthusiastic novice to know where to turn and who to trust. When the SatNav tells you to drive into the North Sea to get from Croydon to Nunhead, common sense usually kicks back in, and this is something we must apply to information from the internet also, but telling the charlatans apart from the bona fide guru’s is a job in itself, and those looking for miraculous short cuts are likely to find themselves ill-equipped for the future.

I’m always astonished at the amount of genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres that seem to exist within popular music. It makes sense that popular music will spread out stylistically over time. Think of it like a family tree in which every generation spawns ever more offspring – the growth rate is exponential. So it comes as no surprise that all of a sudden there seems to be almost as many genres as there are bands and artists. It was whilst leisurely perusing through a genealogy of popular music I stumbled (through dream pop, neo-pysychedelia, noise pop, post punk and space rock) upon shoegaze. This caught my interest as one of the more (though by far not the most) bizarre names so I had a little nose around. It turns out to be a small sub-genre of alternative rock, so-called because the artists’ static and sullen disposition on stage, often staring at their own shoes or the stage as they performed. It was then when I had my sudden sociological epiphany.

Over recent years, social historians have noticed that people growing up in the same time periods tend broadly to share cultural and historical experiences, resulting in distinct generations types across the years. It leads one to ponder the defining characteristics of our generation. We’ve had the “Silent Generation”, the “Baby Boom Generation” and of course “Generation X”. But what of the current crop of young adults born since 1982 (apparently the end of Generation X)?

The “Fat Generation” perhaps? the “Cyber generation” if we wanted to be a bit less self-deprecating. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe (authors of the book “Generations”) we are the “Millennial Generation”. This is a surely a massive copout. I demand a name for our generation that tells us more about ourselves than simply the rough time period in which we were born. So I have come up with an alternative.

It’s been building slowly since the 90’s thanks to SMS but has exploded with the advent of true smartphones with Email and 3G access near enough anywhere in the country and the effect has been noticeably devastating on our collective social skills. It’s somehow come to the point where it seems to be acceptable to break off a conversation with a real life human being, only to make them wait around twiddling their thumbs while you tap away at a tiny keyboard or touchscreen for 5 minutes before returning to the conversation without so much as an apology. I’ve been sat around a pub table with friends and noticed more than one of them who spent at least half the evening heads down, tapping away. If it had been anything other than a phone in their hands it would have been considered either plainly rude or extremely odd behaviour, possibly bordering on autistic.

With more and more of our lives being manifested as bytes invisibly shooting in and out of these tiny plastic handsets, one can only imagine it getting worse. Handsets will soon have to be fitted with cleverly angles mirrors or forward facing cameras that project into a section of the screen to allow people to see where they’re going without averting their gaze from their screens. Skype and Facetime will inevitably encroach on the necessity for real face-to-face socialisation. I don’t know what passes for family evening social time these days but I imagine the days of collectively screaming at the TV while a panic-crazed woman with a perm and a jumpsuit tries futilely to fit a square block through a round hole while Richard O’Brien gleefully pipes away at his harmonica are long past. As more and more advanced phones are becoming available for younger and younger children one can envisage the classic family scene of the not-so-distant future. So, without further prelude, I give you…

The Phonegaze Generation

It’s 8:30 in the evening. The TV is droning away inconsequentially in the background. Mother is stressed. She has been doing the weekly shop for two and a half hours. After half an hour fiddling around on the comparethepricecomparisonmarket.com, she managed to discover which price comparison site offered the best services this week for online grocery shopping. After logging onto the site in question it didn’t take too long to discover that Asda represented the best value for money for her weekly shop. However, Tesco had recently put out a nationwide twitter campaign (only double-glazing firms and used car showrooms bothered advertising on TV these days) promising customers double the difference if they could find their weekly shop cheaply elsewhere. Just as she was about to pay she read the small print on the offer:

This offer is not applicable anyone who’s registered handset has visited any price comparison site within the last 96 hrs.

Offer does not apply to online purchases

She sank back down in her chair. She knew that the Central Consumer Information Network instantly logged all consumer information. Data on Everything that people buy, sell, look at, search for is instantly assimilated by the systems of every company registered for internet-based trading. The Tesco mainframe would automatically disqualify her basket from the offer. She went back to the Asda website, did her shopping again and paid. Or rather, she tried to pay. After she’d entered her card details the Visa EAGLE BULLDOG PREMIUM PROTECTION SCHEME! website flashed up demanding the 4th and 9th letter of her primary password, the 7th and 10th character of her secondary password and the 7th and 19th letter of her tertiary password. She went back to the main menu of her handset and opened up her “Password Reminder” app, which stored password hints for the hundreds of passwords needed for day to day life to function. She found the hints for the relevant passwords and jotted them down on the notepad app so she could figure out the required characters. After entering them in and finishing the shop she was still seething about the Tesco offer. They had nationally advertised the offer knowing full well hardly anyone would take advantage of it. Nobody shops in store these days. It just takes too damn long!

Next to her, Father was also stressed. He had gone to bed at 3 in the morning after a long day’s work and was woken at 5AM by a UAR (Urgent Attention Requied) tone emitting from his handset.

UAR was an app built into almost all business handsets. It was not possible to deactivate the app and he was contractually obliged to keep the handset with him at all times – Not responding to a UAR was a disciplinable offence.

He was good at his job. In fact, he was great. He knew it and his boss knew it. 10 years ago he had been promoted to section manager in the Logistical Investigation department of a large global firm which made, sold and hired out robotics for the manufacture of cars, planes and ships, as well as increasingly for household machinery such as washing machines and dishwashers.

His team had been responsible for locating and cataloguing missing equipment. It never ceased to amaze him how month after month, year after year, millions of pounds worth of equipment ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time or simply went missing altogether. His team were charged with locating the equipment and getting it back to where it should be ASAP. The workload had been heavy but he had excelled and saved the company millions. Then 3 years ago he had been informed that his office would be closed down, his team would be cut back from 11 to 3 (including himself) and everyone would work from home. The fact that the work was now done on a handset or laptop rendered the office an “unnecessary departmental overhead” and improvements in efficiency of the company’s proprietary apps and software combined with his proven track record under pressure meant that a large team was also unnecessary. They had supplied him with a new handset (UAR app preinstalled, of course) and packed him on his way home.

He sighed to himself and took 2 minutes out to start up his BP app. He held the touchscreen to his wrist until it beeped 3 times. 170 over 105. He took another aspirin from the jar on the coffee table and swallowed it down without water. He sighed again before bringing up one of his current projects on the handset. He know he would not be finished until at least 2AM.

On the sofa across the room the 3 children were not stressed. Three boys, 13, 11 and seven hadn’t made a noise all evening. In fact they hadn’t taken their eyes off their respective screens. Each wearing in-ear headphones, each independently whiling away with a bewildering digital dance of social networking, online gaming, offline gaming, on demand TV and homework. They would each have at least two chat windows open connected to friends they rarely saw in real life. It would take between 4 and 7 seconds to assimilate the last part of the conversation and reply to it, then a swish of the fingers would open up an online strategy game. Recently turn-based strategy games had come back into fashion as it perfectly suited this kind of application juggling. They would take maybe 20 seconds to assess their opponent move, decide on their own counter and make the move. They might then move onto an offline game. Action games and shoot ‘em ups were more popular offline these days as they could be played in 20 or 30 second burst and paused in between. Finally if they had any homework to do, they would spend maybe a minute on googleplus+ getting to the heart of the matter and either copying various paragraphs from different sites or reformatting and rewording previously copied entries. Within 3 minutes they were back to their social networking chat windows before the other person (often their brothers sitting next to them) got bored and ended the chat. Throughout this whole process there would almost certainly have been a small window in the corner of the screen set to “float on top” showing some on demand TV program or another.

Their parents had long since given up trying to understand how they did it. They were not technophobes by any stretch of the imagination, but these kids had been born into this technology and had trained their brains from an early age to work in synch with it. It was cognitive evolution on an alarming scale. Darwin would certainly be fidgeting in his grave if not completely turning as he pondered how much one species could change and adapt within the space of 2 generations.
At 9:00PM Mother, from 10 feet away across the room, communicated with her children in the only way she knew how, sending out a UAR message to her 3 children (For children up to the age of 16, parents and legal guardians were legally allowed to have UAR installed on their children’s handsets. The license would expire on the child’s 16th birthday):

HI KIDS. HLF AN HR TIL BT OK? I DN WAN ANY ARGUEMENTS. MAKE SUR U FINISH WT U R DOING AND R IN BED BY 9:30. PLS REMEBER 2 CHARGE UR HANDSETS OVERNIGHT. UR TEACHER APP WILL WAKE YOU AT 8:00. LOVE U LOADS. MUM XX

In the first sign of life all evening from the sofa other than the pattering of fingers and thumbs, all three children digested the news with a perfectly synchronised groan.