One topic my post from yesterday did not specifically address was music. Coincidentally, Andy Baio recently posted a thorough investigation of cover songs on YouTube that speaks to many of the issues on both sides of the intellectual property debate.

We all break laws. Every day, millions of people jaywalk, download music, and drive above the speed limit. Some laws are obscure, others are inconvenient, and others are just fun to break.

There are millions of cover songs on YouTube, with around 12,000 new covers uploaded in the last 24 hours…

Until recently, all but a sliver were illegal, considered infringement under current copyright law. Nearly all were non-commercial, created out of love by fans of the source material, with no negative impact on the market value of the original.

This is creativity criminalized, quite possibly the most popular creative act that’s against the law.

I don’t think it’s an act of civil disobedience; nobody’s making a statement. Most people don’t know that cover songs need a synchronization license, and even if they did, trying to get one is a confusing and expensive proposition…

This week, I set out to answer a seemingly simple question: when are YouTube cover songs legal, and how can we do this better?

If this subject interests you at all, the post is well worth your time.

This is where I must admit I have used both legal and illegal music in YouTube videos, while playing gigs and even on one of the records I’ve released. I’ve had videos blocked and un-blocked by YouTube, in fact I have two currently blocked “in some countries.” Here’s one with two different songs, only one of which seems to have been identified by YouTube (and IIRC, caused it to be removed for a while).

Here’s one that uses a cover song as its soundtrack (double jeopardy!?) that hasn’t been identified by YouTube. This one is a questionable use of video (found on archive.org IIRC) mashed up with someone else’s music, and was taken down by YouTube until the publisher reached some kind of agreement with them, then it was magically legal.

Finally, there is this video of me performing a cover song. This is the very case addressed in Andy’s piece. It gets even more interesting, though, as the original venue I performed this piece in was responsible for the legality of my original live performance, and I have my doubts as to their fulfillment of that responsibility. Further, this is the song that I did not obtain a license for in the first place! I tried, desperately, going so far as to contact the band’s management, but was unable to secure a license through the channels offered me (mentioned in a post I linked to yesterday). (The two songs not performed by their respective copyright holders on the Memorial record, on the other hand, were relatively easy to obtain rights for, in fact licenses for digital downloads had been established by the rights administrator.)

image by flickr user qthomasbower

Me ranting about intellectual property rights is not new in any way but I wrote this in an email to my Extra Sauce coworkers after some confusion about what images they could use when posting to social networks on our clients’ behalf and it seems like a reasonable summary of the subject and unfortunately still timely given the amount of copyright infringement sites like Tumblr and Pinterest engender.

Take-away: unless a photo or other piece of IP is specifically licensed as public domain or Creative Commons licensed, we cannot use it without permission of the original creator. If you cannot track down the license or the original creator then that content is off limits for professional use. With Creative Commons, things get a little tricky. Almost all CC licenses require attribution–that is straight forward enough–you need to include text in the post with the original creator’s name and a link to the original content. Many also require that the CC license be extended, in which case you also must include text and a link to the original CC license. Most importantly, some (or maybe most) CC licensed content specifically prohibits commercial use, in which case it is still off limits for us to use for our commercial clients (you can use it on your personal sites with a clear conscience, however).

Here are some places to find CC content:

• compfight
• flickr advanced search
• search.creativecommons.org

We looked at istockphoto.com as a place to find images to buy on the cheap, but their prices have gone up significantly in the last couple years. We tried one other stock photo site advertising free images and the results were, as expected, abysmal.

Yes, a lot less content comes up when you specify CC. But remember if you do find something that is copyrighted that you do want to use, permission to use that content might be a quick email away.

Videos and music are often embedded in a player that either allows or disallows use on other websites. YouTube and Vimeo for example both allow a content owner to prohibit the embedding of their content in other sites, so if it IS allowed, it is implied that you have permission to embed (but not download, redistribute, or re-use) the content. Similar grey-area rules-of-thumb apply when posting a link to Facebook or Twitter where a thumbnail or other linked copy of the image is used along with the link. In those cases Facebook and Twitter have set the precedent of what’s acceptable. In the case of Tumblr and Pinterest, they are really off center when it comes to respecting IP law and so we have to be careful as their TOS’s are carefully worded to pass all the legal responsibility onto you, the user. Remember what’s just questionable (while still illegal) for an individual to post is very dangerous, murky legal water for a company to wade into.

This post reminded me to change my default copyright notice to a Creative Commons license.

Intention

I secretly hate this word. Most of the time I see it used it is referring to some ideal where every decision is cognitively aligned with some higher purpose, those decisions are always correct and time is never wasted.

Additionally, intentionality and attention are closely related and frequently conflated.

For my purposes what I mean by intentionality is most closely related to will. We intend to do something and we do that thing, as opposed to the easier thing, or the more short-sighted thing, or the more immediately gratifying thing.

It’s important to remember that we wouldn’t behave in certain ways if we didn’t secretly enjoy it. Be it stuffing our face with unhealthy foods or getting involved in a dramatic Facebook thread, it takes a strong will (or a life changing experience) to overcome behaviors that are contrary to our intent. (However I will be the first to advocate for a healthy hedonism in life.)

There are a lot of biological reasons for this and I don’t really want to explore them right now. From a more philosophical perspective, Viktor Frankl would say that our will to pleasure and our will power come from a frustrated will to meaning, which I frequently conflate with intentionality for my own purposes.

Meaning/calling/will/intentionality…they all describe different characteristics of the self that we all accept as existent¹ but have a hard time capturing practically either emotionally or intellectually. But it is the kind of thing we know when we see it.

Habit

Eventually, if we will ourselves to do something long enough, it becomes habit and our tired will can take a breather (before starting in on the next thing). I have a long-standing and slightly overly-obsessive interest in meaning and identity formation, but also with habit formation and behavior modification; and specifically in regards to the latter, technological tools that intend to help us change.

Before tools², however, are simply techniques.

The first is quantification; keeping track of the behavior you want to change. It works for a variety of reasons–by drawing our attention to the issue in question, by illuminating facts about ourselves we otherwise would not see–and it probably works for a variety of non-obvious reasons as well.

I will point you to the Quantified Self website as a rather complete and always expanding compendium of information on the subject. I will also point you to this video, which has a much more personal take on the same subject:

The other really important technique is accountability. This one is well known, but I have found this one thing to be helpful: don’t bother setting up accountability agreements with people particularly close to you³ and, if possible, arrange to be held accountable by a person whose primary interaction with you is around said accountability. Trainer, coach, therapist, pastor.

Another form of accountability is the use of a commitment device, however I find they are best used in conjunction with–not as a replacement for–good old-fashioned human accountability.

Other techniques include a Ulysses pact (really a specific kind of commitment device) (refer also to this commentary), aversion therapy and a host of others. In fact there are tons of good books on this subject that I should probably have read before writing a few paragraphs on the subject.

Previously: Hard Work

Next up: Trust, Humility, Balance and Sleep

…managed to crawl out of bed in time to make the morning ride and I never regret it when I do. I pieced together a few different routes and we ended up with a really pleasant 54 miles. The temperature was pretty perfect (about 70F), the legs felt good, clouds protected us from the Texas sun (now they’re watering our [still] parched land, which makes me even happier to have gotten a ride in early) and there were no flats or any other types of trouble.

When I got home Lucy was all smiles and chatty, too. She’s becoming more delightful by the day. I sat on the kitchen floor and soaked it in while I ate and drank.

Then I watched Tom Boonen dominate Paris-Roubaix on the DVR.

Now I have to work. Hopefully that doesn’t ruin everything.

Aftermath:

I ended up visiting a neighborhood in Lancaster that got pretty torn up and walked through the neighborhood shooting and helping people where i could. The general consensus of those i spoke with was one of gratitude to be alive and that most of what was lost was replaceable. It is sobering and makes me realize that the good and bad things that shape my life are on their way. I don’t get to choose what day they get here. They are just coming.

I often ride my bike through this area that was hit by one of the tornados that rolled through DFW on Tuesday. My friend Dylan chased the tornados and his thoughts afterwards resonated with me.

Her red hair is still red. In the sunlight it is extravagant. A shiny decadent red. It’s growing longer and it’s all coming in red. Passers by will comment and friends want to know where it comes from. It is a force and, as far as we know, she’s the only red head in either of our families. Sure, maybe Cousin So and So was kind of red or Daniel has a red beard, but this! This is different. Exceptional.

I don’t want to talk about our beloved Margot in posts about Lucy. I don’t want to spend too much time comparing, even though I know, for at least a year, we will compare. As Lucy grows and her cheeks fill out and her thighs gain an extra roll, she looks more and more like her sister. She makes expressions or looks at me and they are the spitting image of one another. Except for the hair. So sometimes I think that crazy red hair is a wonderful force that lets Lucy be herself.

Carissa Byers

Industry¹

It’s somewhat obvious when sitting at one’s computer writing or reading a blog post but much harder to own in a way that matters when making moment-by-moment decisions about how to spend one’s time and structure one’s life: industry is the key to most measurements of success or even lasting, life-affirming change. I haven’t figured out exactly how to magically make my incredibly lazy bones start working hard every day, but I’ve come across a few concepts that seem to be key. I’m not sure this post has it just right, but these parts rang true:

Self-help books and workshops arm us with ways to trick ourselves into doing things we perhaps should, but generally don’t want, to do. I ask whether this lack of will might actually be the universe trying to tell us something? What if the missing part of the puzzle is not a lack of willpower, but instead a lack of love?

The same blog later observes:

If you want to find something you love, you may need to change your search criteria.

Finding an endeavor that fulfills you, is like finding a good friend or life-partner. It doesn’t “happen” to you, nor does it arrive with an announcement. Instead, it presents itself quietly and develops over time.

Fellow Dallas technology entreprenaur Garrett Dimon recently referred to tenacity:

The problem is that on the surface, we only see the success. We don’t see the work that went into achieving the success. We see the culmination rather than the 10 or even 20 years that went into getting there.

The hours they put in. The family events they missed. The vacations cut short. The travel. The times they were borderline bankrupt. The career-ending injuries that didn’t end their career. The nights they were homeless. The amount of bet-the-company decisions they made. The uncertainty they live through. The fear of letting down hundreds or thousands of employees. The mornings of waking up at 5am and practicing in freezing cold weather.

Attention

The ability to focus on the task at hand is vitally important to industry and increasingly difficult to achieve in our ever-connected, distractions-at-our-fingertips world. My inspiration in this area is my grandfather.

I’ve thought often about how he was able to maintain focus the way he did. I’ve blamed the internet and other circumstances for my own focus issues. But in the end I think he really was simply that enthralled and engaged with the things he worked on.

It’s interesting to observe how my focus changes as I context switch between the (still far too many) things I have chosen to do: cycling, music, coding, writing. Sunday I was in the studio and this week I find myself stopping to more intentionally listen to the music I normally play just to drown out my coworker’s conversations. I find myself contemplating my next record, what songs need to be learned, which people need to be recruited. I find myself blown away by new music that–mysteriously–crosses my desk during this time.

It seems that one of the ways to succeed despite all the distractions and context-switching required by modern, connected life is to be able to focus quickly, and on the right things. I feel like I’ve said this exact thing before, and while I couldn’t find that post in the archives, I have quoted and written a lot about attention in the past.

But John Lilly recently stated something close to what I’m thinking:

I’m coming to view intentionality, depth of thought and connection, and the power to focus as the central developmental challenges of our society today. We’re going through an incredibly rapid transformation into an always connected, real-time, perma-entertained, ever stimulated world–and it’s becoming clear to me that, somewhat ironically, it’s the people who can take advantage of all of that, while also ultimately staying within themselves, will be the ones who make the most profound and positive changes in our world.

Most of us, however, especially those who were not born into the Internet age, will continue to struggle with the many tools of distraction at our fingertips, particularly when we find so many things so very interesting:

We now inhabit an environment (at least in much of the developed world) of abundant options and boundless, inexpensive information. That has triggered our dopamine-seeking instincts to pile too much onto our professional plates — which in turn has produced an entire infrastructure to help us avoid gorging ourselves.

But maybe the trick is to just relax and somehow find ways to be productive despite ourselves. Web and game developer extroidinare Shaun Inman recently confessed:

I’m not sure that I [stay focused]. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions. I’m not especially disciplined. I use plain old text files for todo lists. I try to limit my time on Twitter and in my inbox. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane.

But that key ingredient of love comes up again as he concludes:

Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.

The potential down side of extreme focus is the possibility of concentrating on the wrong things and missing out on what is truly important. More on that in future installments.

Previously: Contentment

Next up: Intention and Habit

We interrupt the series in progress to bring you this important announcement: I just discovered a newish Son Lux live album, available at a you-name-it price on Bandcamp:

I wish there was a better way to say my mind was blown. Flowers was a song I couldn’t listen to before (because the lyrics were too evocative); the live version somehow changes the song enough that I really enjoyed it (even though, obviously, the lyrics are the same). But the main thing that hit me about the live EP is that, if listened to with certain ears, it has the same narrative arc I am trying to achieve with my next record. To hear that arc, you might have to live a day in my shoes, but I hope you can believe me when I say this record affected me in a way very few have. Here is video from the session.

I started March out with great ambitions and plans, all of which I have failed at. I’ve been thinking about that failure and how to adjust–either my plans or my behavior. I started, but never finished, a blog post about those goals. It said:

The fact that [these goals] continued to come up as two things I wanted to do and deciding that I would commit the time and resources to doing them are two very different things. In addition, they are frequently at odds with one another, especially when fit in around established goals like maintaining a happy family life and supporting it through growing a new business. In fact those established goals could take all of my time if I allowed them to. I’ve alternatively viewed additional goals as selfish or as sanity-retention. I’m still not sure which they are.

Here I am two weeks later and not only did I not make any progress on either of those goals, but I’m doing less work towards them than I did in February, when I was just flirting with them while going about my everyday life. Always the armchair psychologist, I want to figure out why.

A Tale of Two Bike Commutes

When I bike commute to work–and my car battery died while we were in Oklahoma so I’ve taken it as opportunity to force the habit–I normally take one of two routes. One route involves riding down two of the most affluent streets in Dallas. A quick survey on Zillow indicates a median home price north of one million dollars. The other route (just a handful of blocks to the southeast) takes me through a more economically depressed and ethnically diverse part of town.

When riding the former route I frequently wonder, “What do these people do to make so much money?”¹ One time I arrived home and announced to Carissa, “I have a new goal to be eccentric and work from our house on Swiss.”

The latter route inspires me to be happy with less. I see people outside of their homes, talking with their neighbors. Old men give me puzzled looks from their front porch chairs. There are run-down houses and cluttered lawns, but there are also properties that are meticulously maintained. They communicate a level of care that doesn’t rely on financial agency. They have local markets they walk to. Their children play up and down the street. One time I arrived home and told Carissa, “All the stuff new urbanists are trying to create, these people have!”

While I covet the resources, space and comfort on display along the “rich” route, something deeper calls from the alternate.

Contentment

I’ve always struggled with the balance between contentment and drive. I spent so much of my life discontent and striving towards some unknowable happiness that when I arrived at it I didn’t know what to do. More recent events then threw all ideas about contentment and happiness–or even trust in a higher purpose–to the wind.

But lately I have felt like I’m getting closer to this content-but-improving way-of-being. I’ve always admired people who seem totally content and yet continue to work hard and produce amazing things or live notable lives. Wayne Coyne comes to mind. I love the documentary Fearless Freaks mostly because it highlights so clearly the character qualities he has that have made him so successful–mostly the ability and willingness to consistently work hard over a long period of time. My recent post about Stephen Wolfram’s personal data tracking also accents these qualities of hard work and consistency.

This was originally going to be one post, but as it became longer and longer I decided to break it up. Hopefully I continue with the rest of it. Next up: Industry.

Took a short family trip to Oklahoma. I flew Carissa’s brother Tyler down from Michigan, rented a van and took the five of us and two dogs to the country. Lucy met some extended family for the first time, Penn experienced the thrill of riding in the Polaris Ranger (time and time again), the dogs the thrill (and eventual agony) of running behind the Ranger (I would have to contain them on the patio to keep them from running far beyond what their little legs could handle). I had big plans for studying my iOS book and finishing the book I’m currently reading but as always I over-estimated the amount of free time I would experience during a family vacation (although I did get to read quite a bit in the evenings and early mornings). In the end the trip might have been a day too short but that is always preferable to a day too long.