Lily Allen's anti-piracy rant has made her notorious among copyfighters, who have subjected her site and her words to close scrutiny, discovering that Allen's website is chock-a-block with infringing scans of newspaper articles, infringing mix-tapes (even the rant she posted was lifted from Techdirt). Her all-caps responses ("I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.") are the kind of nutty, defensive shouty words that chum the water online.

It's tempting to count coup here and write Allen off as a hypocrite, but there's a more important story here. Allen just hasn't thought this through. Copyright is problematic for everyone: musicians, fans, bloggers. The absence of clear affirmative rights to make personal copies, to share with your friends, to copy for the purposes of discussion and commentary (as opposed to the fuzzy and difficult-to-interpret fair use guidelines, which have been further confused by the entertainment industry's bold attempts to convince us all that they don't matter and can't be relied upon) means that we're all in a state of constant infringement.

A law that no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all. Parts of copyright -- the right to regulate how commercial licenses with industrial entities work -- are really important to me and to all working artists. But if we continue to try to expand copyright to cover everything, every interaction that involves a copy (which is every interaction these days), then the broad consensus that copyright is nonsense will continue to grow, and we'll lose the good stuff as well as the ridiculous stuff.

For the record, I am a small-time Lily Allen fan, and I bought her latest CD after hearing it for free, when a friend emailed me some tracks. If Ms Allen would prefer, I can stop buying and listening to her music, given that I discovered it through "piracy."

Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she's trying to point out how much damage 'pirates' do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

Lily Allen Pirates Music, Is Clueless About Copyright

David "Everything is Miscellaneous/Small Pieces Loosely Joined" Weinberger sez, "I've started a series of video interviews with FCC Broadband Strategy folks (and others) about the process and its progress. The first is with Blair Levin, director of the initiative. He explains the value of broadband; confirms that broadband means access to the open, neutral network; defends the impartiality of the initiative's process; and talks about the causes of the U.S.'s low ranking when it comes to broadband access, prices, and speeds."

He's also posted interviews with Sascha Meinrath on mesh networking, and Clay Shirky on why freedom ought to be a part of the infrastructure.

Broadband Strategy Week (Thanks, David!)

Nelson C sez, "Daryl Cunningham (a student mental health nurse based in London) is working on a comic book called Psychiatric Tales, due out in early 2010. On his LJ he posts a chapter on schizophrenia."

Schizophrenia (Thanks, Nelson!)

Mike Thompson's "Blood Lamp" is a single-use lantern that draws its energy from a drop of your blood, making you consider the cost of energy in a uniquely personal way.

For the lamp to work one breaks the top off, dissolves the tablet, and uses their own blood to power a simple light. By creating a lamp that can only be used once, the user must consider when light is needed the most, forcing them to rethink how wasteful they are with energy, and how precious it is.

Blood Lamp (via Cribcandy)

Sneakey is a project from Benjamin Laxton, Kai Wang, and Stefan Savage at the UCSD vision lab that has shown that it is possible to duplicate keys from photos taken at a distance and/or an angle. They've published a paper and are offering to release their code if there is "sufficient interest."

The access control provided by a physical lock is based on the assumption that the information content of the corresponding key is private --- that duplication should require either possession of the key or a priori knowledge of how it was cut. However, the ever-increasing capabilities and prevalence of digital imaging technologies present a fundamental challenge to this privacy assumption. Using modest imaging equipment and standard computer vision algorithms, we demonstrate the effectiveness of physical key teleduplication --- extracting a key's complete and precise bitting code at a distance via optical decoding and then cutting precise duplicates. We describe our prototype system, Sneakey, and evaluate its effectiveness, in both laboratory and real-world settings, using the most popular residential key types in the U.S.

Sneakey (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

As part of the ongoing serialization of my forthcoming novel MAKERS, Tor.com has commissioned Idiots' Books to produce 81 CC-licensed, interlocking illustrations, one for each installment. Periodically, Tor is adding these to a little Flash-toy that lets you rotate and realign the images like tiles (each has edge-elements that matches up with the others). They've just put up the 5X5 grid, which I'm finding addictively fun.

Makers Tile Game 5x5

How much design goodness can be packed onto a bottle cap? Judge for yourself.

Soda Caps Unused & Cork Lined

David and I love the 1979 movie Over the Edge, about youth run wild in a suburban cultural wasteland. The (out-of-print) soundtrack is terrific, and so were the kids in the movie (most were not professional actors).

On the 30th anniversary of the movie, Mike Sacks of Vice magazine put together an oral history of the movie with comments from 20 members of the cast and crew.

Jonathan Kaplan (director): I was only 30 when I was hired to do Over the Edge, but I had some unique experience, which helped. I had studied with Martin Scorsese when I was younger. And I had been the director of an infamous Sex Pistols movie called Who Killed Bambi?

What I took away from that experience was the spark and the truth that I saw in the punk aesthetic. And I saw that same spark and truth in the Over the Edge script. I thought, These kids are American punks. They’re not as articulate as the English punks, but they’re also in a rage.

With that in mind, I decided to attack Over the Edge from a punk angle: keep it simple. No fancy camera moves, visual effects, nothing fancy. I remember when I first saw Super Fly. There were boom shadows, badly shot scenes, and mistakes. But there was a simplicity and an authenticity to it that I really appreciated.

When it came time to cast Over the Edge, we tried to go for that same authenticity. We wanted real teens, as opposed to professional actors—and kids who were also age-appropriate. No twenty-somethings playing 14-year-olds.

Here's the Over the Edge trailer.

OVER THE EDGE: An Oral History of the Greatest Teen Rebellion Movie of All Time

Bassam Tariq resides in New York City. He is the co-author of the blog 30 Mosques which celebrated the NYC mosques during the blessed Islamic month of Ramadan


Iqbal Hussain is a controversial painter based in Pakistan. Not controversial in the Western sense - he's no Dash Snow or Andres Serrano - Iqbal showcases a side of Pakistan that many Pakistani's would rather not acknowledge.

I'm no expert on Hussain's work, so I'll quote excerpts from a fine article on All Things Pakistan written by Pervaiz Munir Alvi.

Iqbal's women are not nude or semi-naked or involved in some illicit acts as their profession might suggest. They are mostly some unknown and unremarkable women of modest looks and appearance.

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

Michael Massing of the Columbia Journalism Review digs up some startling info that helps explain why network TV news is knee-deep in FAIL while National Public Radio thrives:

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news. (link)

It also captures a hard reality that news folk should keep in mind as they protest the collapse of their industry: most money in journalism, isn't spent on journalism.

Thanks, Cyrus

Aman Ali, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the co-author of 30 Mosques, a Ramadan adventure taking him to a different mosque in New York City every day for a month. Leaders from around the world are meeting in New York City this week for the United Nations summit, and nothing could be more entertaining than residents in a ritzy NYC suburb protesting Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi staying in a tent on Donald Trump's estate. My co-workers and I today were trying to figure out who Gadhafi looks like. I won by saying he looked like Mickey Rourke, but in second place was pro-wrestling legend Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. Can you guys think of any other Gadhafi look-alikes?

A 6-year-old girl very narrowly misses getting squashed by an out of control car.

Alex sez, "In a first for Orbit, we're serializing the abridged audio edition of Transition by Iain M. Banks as a podcast., starting today. For free. New chapters launched Tuesday and Friday. This is the abridged edition -- the full book is available in hardcover, audio, and ebook editions today. The Independent says: 'TRANSITION is a book that makes you think, one that makes you look at the world around you in a different light, and it's also a properly thrilling read. If only more contemporary fiction was like it.'"

I'm a huge fan of Banks's thrillers; I like them even better than his science fiction.

Podcast feed

Transition hardcover (US)

Transition hardcover (UK)

Christian Ristow made a giant-sized hand that drummed its fingers that I saw years ago (its metal fingers banged on a metal plate), but this tabletop model designed by Nik Ramage is equally cool.

Drumming fingers

Cool Tools reviewed these cool food-grade silicone bowls and cups from Guyot Designs.

They can be baked, boiled and frozen without ill effect... Guyot’s bowls are entirely pliable, and eating out of a bowl without structural rigidity can be a strange experience the first time. Their flexing and bulging when holding liquids does take some getting used to. But I’ve never had a problem eating out of them. This amorphousness comes in handy when you want to slurp back the rest of your milk or finish off the end of your camp stew, as you can squish the side of the bowl into a convenient spout.

Cool Tools

Topping our list of anticipated Xbox Live Arcade games but still off too many radars elsewhere, Offworld returns from a day at Scotland-based Denki with a behind the scenes look at the making of their upcoming word-battler Quarrel (above), from its cardboard and tiddly-wink origins to the 'magic wool' now running underneath.

Elsewhere we saw the Tri-Islands of Monkey Island rendered in the hyper-poly pushing engine behind Crysis and early PC transforming robo-shooter Thexder coming to the PSP, and got a glimpse into the art and design behind the fantastical heavy-metal world of Brutal Legend.

We also saw the wickedly blood-drenched pixels of Cactus's low-bit Life/Death/Island and Valve's amazing/ly swift response to a fan-made Team Fortress 2 canine class, shoes fit for Okami and high concept Pac-Man and Tetris wearables, and purchased a two-disc collection of Blip Fest 2008 performances -- possibly the best catalog of the top chiptune players released to date.

And our 'one shot's: Bioshock 2's Mr. Bubbles meets Mary Blair, and 40 artists collaborate on a magic-mile-long mega-Mario Kart illustration.

Waze is a free navigation application for GPS-enabled phones that uses data from users to generate turn-by-turn routes and provide other information such as traffic conditions, faulty traffic lights, and accidents. I just downloaded it for my iPhone.

What's most interesting about Waze is how it uses the power of the crowd to build its map database. Just by driving along with the application open, users are contributing data to Waze. Although this does make the service somewhat dependent on building critical mass in order to be successful, the company is confident they can do so. That's because Waze originally launched in Israel and in less than a year's time, they already have 91% of the country mapped. Here in the U.S., that process will obviously take longer, but Waze believes they'll have at least one metropolitan area completed in the next three months - the San Francisco Bay area, of course.

Waze: Free Turn-by-Turn Directions for Mobile Users

The MAKE interns tested Steven Lemos' wildly fun little R/C hovercraft in the O'Reilly parking lot.

The hovercraft took one month to design using Autodesk Inventor software, two months to build working mostly on weekends and some school nights -- and 1 afternoon with the MAKE interns to wreck!

Intern's Corner: My R/C hovercraft

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

The best part of making 500 Pound Planet was that it turned life into a big scavenger hunt. Our mashup style let us animate using clay, stop motion puppets, photo montage- anything! In this chapter, we actually manipulated a piece of raw chicken.

As a result, wherever we went we were always collecting material. We drove from Montreal to New Orleans and sifted through dozens of thrift stores along the way, two grown men searching for Barbie clothes. Josh voraciously photographed Montreal for our backgrounds (much of what he captured is now gone). Even conversations were useful- we'd secretly record our friends talking and then beg them to let us "sample" the best parts in our cartoon.

Previously:

500 Pound Planet: Prelude (link)

500 Pound Planet: Chapter One (link)

Bassam Tariq resides in New York City. He is the co-author of the blog 30 Mosques which celebrated the NYC mosques during the blessed Islamic month of Ramadan.



Blu, the innovative street artist who brought us the viralicious wall-painted animation MUTO, is at it again. Just recently, Blu teamed up with David Ellis and together they made COMBO. This is a piece they did at the FAME festival After my first watch, I think I like MUTO better. What do you guys think? (via Wooster Collective)

Liam sez, "130 photos from in and around Edward Gorey's home. There was a book published a while back of his home that included a secret room through a small door at the back of a closet that housed his children's book collection that sadly is not in this set."

Edward Gorey Documentary (Thanks, Liam!)

Remember the screen printing system from the Boing Boing Video episode Mark and I shot at Maker Faire, the Yudu? Well, I wanted to make t-shirts for my personal blog, TokyoMango, so I went over to my friend Ben's house this past weekend to do a test run on the one he bought at the Faire. The Yudu, it turns out, is a great compact home printing machine as long as you don't have high expectations and are armed with mountains of patience.

First, Ben mocked up two versions of his design using Adobe Illustrator, one for dark ink and one for light. We printed these out on a vellum transparency using a regular inkjet printer, then put it aside to dry. It took us several attempts to get a perfectly un-smudged transparency, but we finally got one we could work with. (This obviously is no fault of Yudu — it's either the printer ink or the vellum or the compatibility of the two.)

Next step: prepare the screen. We put emulsion on the screen in a darkened room through a wet-and-stick-and-dry process to get it ready for exposure. We wet the screen with a spray bottle and then squeegeed the excess off. Then we put the screen on a drying rack in the Yudu machine. The drying is supposed to take 20 minutes, but we found it took a good hour of manual hairdryer heat in addition to the preset drying cycle. While we waited, we ate pizza and wings and playing Rock Band.

In earlier test runs with the Yudu, Ben claimed he had nightmarish troubles getting it to just the right wetness — the tutorials warn against making it too wet, but too dry was the bigger problem for him, leaving parts of the screen patchy and other parts just completely missing the emulsive layer. (Ben: "It was super annoying and I wanted to kill it.")

This breathtaking place is a former Dominican church that was converted into a new retail location for bookseller Selexyz Dominicanen. The architecture firm was Merkx+Girod. From Design Top News:

The store demanded 1,200 sq m of commercial area where only 750 were available.

The initial idea of the client to install a second floor within the church was rejected by the designers, because this would completely destroy the spatial qualities of the church. The solution was found in the creation of a monumental walk-in bookcase spanning several floors and situated a-symmetrically in the church. In doing so the left side of the church remained empty while on the other side customers are lead upstairs in the three- storey ‘Bookflat.’

The ground floor gives room to several different book displays, information desks, magazine-stands and cash registers, all made of standard sheet materials in different colours and surfaces.

Merkx+Girod Architects: Bookstore Selexyz Dominicanen in Netherlands (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

I dig this fellow's innovative hair hat. I also like the name "Mr. Hair Hat." (via Dangerous Minds)

BB readers may remember the Golden Mean, the incredible snail car that my friends Jon Sarriugarte and Kyrsten Mate made from an old VW Bug. They recently showed off their latest wheeled creation, the "Electrobyte: Sarriugarteis (Odontochile) trilobite." The hand-tooled exoskeleton is mounted on the drive mechanism of an old electric wheelchair. At night, undermounted blue lights give it an otherworldly glow. Jon says, "People would walk up and ask if it was remote controlled. When I pointed out the leather seat and the joy stick they couldn’t believe you could drive it. Lots of smiling faces when we let them try it out." In their, er, spare time, Jon is a blacksmith and Kyrsten is an Oscar-nominated sound effects designer for Hollywood films. Damn, they are a talented pair.

Electrobite at Burning Man
Electrobite set on Flickr

These cufflinks are working lighters -- just in case you ever want to use your sleeves to ignite something. The webstore bills them as "vintage" though it's not clear to me whether they are "vintage-shaped" or, you know, old.

Vintage Lighter Cufflinks (Thanks, Tim!)

street tests from Najork on Vimeo.

(Via Dose Nation)

BB code hacker Dean Putney spotted this wonderful site "Inside Bill Moorier's Head" in which Moorier created an interactive viewer of his own MRI data. From the site:

In September 2009 my doctor recommended an MRI to rule-out a couple of potential conditions. The scan came back completely normal, which was a great relief! As a kind of cathartic exercise, and inspired by Dustin Curtis's brain tour I decided to do something with the images. I spent most of a fun weekend writing this MRI explorer. I hope you enjoy playing with it!

Inside Bill Moorier's Brain

Now this should be deeply weird... BB pal Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis and Visionary State, wrote the libretto for a rock opera about Burning Man. "How to Survive the Apocalypse: A Burning Opera" will be staged at the Teatro ZinZanni cabaret and circus tent on San Francisco's waterfront October 5-7 and 12-14. Here's what Erik says about the opera:

Designed to communicate the transformational madness of the playa to the "Burning curious" as well as the experienced (or jaded) playa faithful, "How to Survive the Apocalyse" follows three newbies as they stumble through the erotic, psychological, and visionary minefield of the festival. Scored by Mark Nichols, with libretto by yours truly (who also plays a wise-cracking bunny with a bullhorn), the show is appropriate both for Burning Man veterans looking for a familiar boost, and for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to enjoy the Burner mystique without the dust and brain-bubbling sun. Bring your neighbor, your Mom, your co-workers: all those folks in your life who've been wondering what you're up to every August but aren't willing to trek to Nevada to find out.

And from the opera Web site:

“How to Survive the Apocalypse” is a Burning Man-inspired theatrical freak-out that combines rock opera, vaudeville, and a Dionysian revival show that is just as inspired and terrified by current events as you are. Part mutant mystery play, part crash-course in proactive future culture, we welcome you to an ambitious and ferociously inventive radically-altered evening of musical theater,  scored by Mark Nichols with libretto by counterculture writer Erik Davis.  Prepare to Participate!

How To Survive The Apocalypse

Thanks to Frank and Save vs. Death for uncovering this high quality video of Paul Revere & The Raiders performing "Him or Me." As Frank writes, "It's a mistake to categorize them as bubble gum- despite the gimmicky costumes and choreographed dance moves- their songs have a lot of proto garage/ hard rock rumble to them."

Paul Revere & the Raiders - "Him or Me"

This amazing image shows the apocalyptic look of Sydney, Australia this morning due to a massive storm of red dust. (Click image to see Hooper's full photo.) From ABC News Australia:

The dust reduced visibility across the city and large parts of the state, with callers to ABC Radio saying the scene looked like something from the end of the world...

Karen from Dulwich Hill, in Sydney's inner west, says she woke up to find the red dust had covered her floors and birds had been blown out of their nests.

"It did feel like Armageddon because when I was in the kitchen looking out the skylight, there was this red, red glow coming through," she said.

Dust storm chokes Sydney

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

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Adam Shecter makes whimsical, clever, stupid, pretty little blips of cartoons. He's been doing it for a while and has slowly amassed a fantastic Saturday Morning Cartoon broadcast from another planet. Have a look!

Adam's website (link)

Germans! Adam Shecter is exhibiting right now at the Bielefelder Kunstverein (link). UPDATE: New Yorkers! Adam is also exhibiting right now at Eleven Rivington (link).

If you've always wondered how AES -- the Advanced Encryption Standard, the gold-standard for crypto -- works, and if you enjoy explanations in stick-figure cartoon form, you are in luck, for Moserware's "A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)" is funny, lucid and fascinating.

Moserware: A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) (via Links)

17 year old Phan Van Mam 19 year old Vu Van Thang is a prizewinning Vietnamese roboticist who builds beautiful working junkbots from household trash:

- Vu Van Thang, 19, from Thai Binh province has won one of the five top prizes at the National Creativeness Competition for Children and Youth 2009 for his robot made entirely from items found in the trash.

Recycled robot wins top honor (Thanks, Samiksha!)