Compared to ancestors in eras past, modern Americans are pikers when it comes to ritual. We tend not to like them when they’re formal, and we’ve gotten rid of most of them. But there are a few left, and of those there is one that is easily the most barbaric of all:
Funerals.
Continue reading ‘The Barbaric Ritual’
ITV in Britain is currently airing a show which, for my money, is one of the finest pieces of television going anywhere in the world right now. In fact, I’ll go one step further and say that it’s a show built entirely around the very best aspects of human nature, and is more entertaining than almost anything I’ve seen recently (and I’ve just finished watching The Tudors , which was a fine piece of drama).
But this show isn’t drama–it’s essentially a game show. Another foray into the genre–reality TV–which the Brits perfected and which is by far my least favorite form of entertainment, as it’s neither reality nor does it frequently feature anything interesting enough to be worthy of display on a television screen. But I digress.
So, what is this amazing, magical show?
Continue reading ‘Showcasing the Best in Human Culture’
Because this one deals a lot with the law again, the usual disclaimers apply: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. This is one man’s opinion on how business is done. Always consult a qualified legal professional when seeking legal advice.
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Previous chapter: Embrace Your Inner 2 Year-old
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It’s come to my attention that in some of my business posts I’ve inadvertently fed an unspoken, and erroneous, business assumption shared by many people in the arts (and, frankly, most people in society at large). It goes something like this:
“Corporations are all-powerful. They have bigger lawyers than you do. You’ll never find a lawyer to take your case if one rips you off, so you’re just going to have to roll with it if your record label cooks the books, your movie studio subjects you to creative bookkeeping, or your publishing house pads their returns. You’re only the talent–you should expect to be the victim. The talent always loses.”
In other words, you can’t fight City Hall.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a con. You CAN fight City Hall. And you can win. But you have to be savvy.
First Things First
When I say things like “You don’t want to be a test case,” as I did in my chapter on the Peggy Lee decision and its implications for artist contracts everywhere, it’s easy to hear that as reinforcing the erroneous idea I’ve delineated above–an impression for which I owe some of you an apology. It’s true that in untested areas of law, a dispute on a point that’s not entirely clear is a test case, by definition, and that these kinds of cases are a pain in the ass. It’s also true that these kinds of cases are, by their nature, uncertain in their outcome. However, by stating that being a test case is a pain, I don’t mean to advocate fear of lawsuits, or a strategy of folding before parties who have bigger lawyers than you do. Not at all.
What I meant to advocate, and what that chapter will more clearly advocate when these chapters are edited and collected in a book, is a basic principle which I’ll call “Defensive Business.”
“Defensive Business” has its analog in “Defensive Driving” rather than in “paranoia” or “social defensiveness.” You don’t have to be paranoid or live in fear to practice defensive business–in fact, paranoia will usually lead you to rash behavior that can get you into trouble.
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: You CAN Fight City Hall’
You hear a lot of talk of “discovery writers” and “outliners” in the writing world. The “pantsers” and the “plotters,” respectively. It’s true that there are a lot of people that fall into both categories–including many of my friends–and human nature loves dichotomies, but I’ve never fit comfortably either, and I suspect I’m not alone.
Last night, I had occasion to have a long conversation with a new writer who’s vexed and confused by the options before him when it comes to writing process, and saying “you have to find your own way” only left him more despondent. I know that look–I’ve been there many times when faced with a new field of endeavor with so many options that at once feel constraining and non-specific. So, in the hope of letting those new writers who don’t comfortably fit a category know that they’re not alone, I’m going to describe my method.
Continue reading ‘Playing Jazz With Words’
I saw Star Wars for the first time when I was four year’s old. I’d been a fan long before, thanks to the read-along books and the action figures, but actually seeing the film mad equite an impression on me. One of the things that bugged me, though, were the references to the off-screen “Clone Wars.”
I did not, after all, have the faintest clue what a “clone” was.
Eventually, after struggling mightily with the word to see if I could wrest meaning from it, I asked my Dad what clones were.
He said “It’s a process where you can make a copy of someone by taking a piece of their skin and turning it into a baby twin.”
I said “Wow, you can make a copy of me, just with a piece of skin?”
“Not really,” he said, “it’s just a cool idea for a story.”
Already having some idea of how science fiction worked, I asked the next logical question: “So…is it possible some day? Or is it just pretend?”
“It’s just pretend,” he said. “Some people think it might be possible in a hundred years, but that’s a long time–longer than you’ll be alive.”
In the intervening decades, cellular biologists have discovered a whole class of cells called “pluripotent stem cells.” These are cells that are created in the first generation of pregnancy–a zygote is a pluripotent stem cell at fertilization, and the first few generations of replication produce more pluripotent stem cells until the cells start differentiating.
Funny thing, though. In the last couple years induced pluripotent stem cells have been discovered, refined, and perfected–in Argentina they’re now using them to clone cows from the ear tissue of a parent cow. If that weren’t wild enough, how would you feel about turning your skin into brain tissue to cure you of Parkinson’s or other neurodegenerative diseases?
I love living in the future–it’s been a quick hundred years!
My gripe session about Dropbox’s new TOS and my presentation (wherein I all but came out and shouted that it’s stupid to use a free cloud-based backup service) understandably rankled a healthy percentage of the commenters. My fellows in the hacking community, who eat, sleep, and breathe security issues, described my post as a “breathless rant,” an “overreaction,” etc. And what’s more, if my post were written up for LinuxJournal or for an IT rag, they’d be right.
But it wasn’t. It was written with writers, musicians, and other creatives squarely in mind–an audience that, by and large, is not highly conversant with all the ways around lawyers and moronic service providers that we hackers and power users have built up into a reflex. When you tell a writer who only uses a mac (who’s not otherwise a computer geek) that they need to encrypt their backups, they’re likely to look at you like you’re speaking Latin, then shake you off and continue right on doing whatever gets in their way least.
So, in the interest of being part of the solution rather than just part of the agitation camp, I’m now going to get into the things about cloud-based computing that, if you don’t know them, can make the whole enterprise very hazardous. I’ll also suggest a few ways to minimize these hazards and the hazards it can pose–and the benefits it can offer–for writers and other creative non-hacker types who use it.
So, here are some things you need to know about using any cloud-based computing service:
If The Service is Free, You Are Not The Customer
If you’re using a service, it’s natural to assume that you’re the customer and the service provider is the vendor–and there are a lot of companies (like that book about the fronts of peoples heads) that count on the fact that you’ll continue to think that.
Why? Well, if you assume that, you’re going to be inclined to several reflexes–you’ll assume that the vendor will try to treat you well, for example, and you’ll be more likely develop brand loyalty to an insane degree, because we’ve been trained to think that “the customer is always right.”
The trouble is, with these services, you’re not the customer. You (and your data) are the product.
The customers are other parties–in some cases, they’re advertising, demographics, and political firms. In other cases, the free service is a test bed for a commercial product and you’re essentially an unpaid QC person.
If this is sounding negative, it’s not because I don’t approve of the business model–if you understand what you’re getting into I’ve got no problem with such things. The trouble is that the Internet is full of people who think that that nice guy from Nigeria really does need help, and it’s not because they’re stupid, it’s because they don’t have any idea about how the economic situation works on the net. People (like me) who’ve literally been on the Internet since before it was the Internet tend to forget about that.
What this all means is that the service provider has a lot less incentive to keep you happy, and a lot more incentive to do things that annoy you while advancing their own interests with regards to serving their primary customer base. These things that annoy you often turn up as rights grabs for your data, sudden changes in Terms of Service, sudden discontinuance of a service you’re relying on–and, when there’s a big public outcry, sometimes a marginal backing off combined with very loud self-flagellating apologies and protestations about how important their customers are to them (which is true–but the customer isn’t you. A fact they usually fail to mention).
In some cases, it can get worse than that. Some companies have (or believe they have) the incentive to use your intellectual property free of charge to make money. Facebook, for example, uses your user pictures in their advertising, and they don’t pay a dime for it. You’re obligated to let them unless you specifically opt-out every time they change their TOS. They’ve also, from time to time, tried to claim copyright or free license to all the text posted on their site (your words) and to all the text linked to from their site (which will never stand up in court).
Which brings me to the court test and the other reason you actually need to read your TOS: A lot of them disallow court cases. In them, you agree to binding arbitration in some po-dunk jurisdiction that doesn’t have robust laws regarding intellectual property or Internet business–a jurisdiction often pre-selected because of its statutory or cultural bias against consumer protection, in favor of enforcing binding arbitration, or of not enforcing claims of individuals against corporations. Get screwed over by a company that does this, and you have two court cases in front of you: first, to get the binding arbitration clause ruled out of order, and second to actually pursue action against the company.
On Putting Things In The Cloud
When you park your car on the street. It’s possible that someone might come along and make off with it. Two things protect people in such situations:
1) They lock their cars (which makes stealing them inconvenient–but not impossible)
2) They have cars that are unremarkable
The same holds true for your data. Most of the time, if you post your work online for free nobody’s going to steal it–frankly, most work isn’t special enough to be worth the bother. Most work is the Yugo of online car theft. And the other kinds of data that some sites collect–the demographic, behavioral, large-scale statistical data for resale to advertisers–isn’t individuated enough to worry many people.
The story changes a bit, though, with things like financial data, or unpublished manuscripts, or raw tracks. Stuff that either has intrinsic value (all financial data does, even if you personally don’t have any money) or statutory value (intellectual property).
Unfortunately, even people who are driving the Internet-equivalent of expensive cars tend not to lock them, unless they’re people who are otherwise interested in hacking and security for its own sake, and this is where you get into trouble.
When you use a cloud-based backup service, you’re gaining some useful things: data portability and off-site fire protection spring to mind. But you’re also putting your data on someone else’s server–you’re trusting your intellectual property to the good graces of an organization whose interests might not align with your own tomorrow, even if they do today–which means that if you want to keep yourself safe, you’re going to have to be checking the service’s user relations blog and TOS pretty regularly–and that’s a headache.
You’re also trusting your data security to a corporation whose security practices you can’t practically audit (and, in the case of a new company, whose practices aren’t well-established enough to have earned them a reputation you can check). The company might respect its users privacy, but if they don’t have their servers secure, then Lulzhack or Anonymous or the Russian Mob or an overzealous high schooler can waltz in and have their pick of what’s there.
VW or Aston Martin, Use A Kill Switch
So, say you need the benefits of a cloud-based data service, what are you going to do? There are a few things that can make the enterprise a not-entirely-foolhardy one:
1) Encrypt your data using the strongest available encryption
This is non-trivial if you’re not in the habit, but it is actually the only way to secure your data against most attacks. GPG, and TrueCrypt are both open-source, community enterprises and are the gold standard in data encryption. PGP has several commercial implementations of the same encryption schemes and algorithms GPG uses, and they have some slick front-ends that make it easier to use. There is a learning curve here, but it’s worth it.
2) Select a data service provider that does not have access to your data
This is the standard of professional practice in the data services industry–your data is stored on a TrueCrypt-style drive to which the hosting company doesn’t hold the keys. They can delete it, but they can’t read it. Since this claim is difficult to verify, though, you should also encrypt the data you upload.
3) Select a data service provider that does not share data
You basically want a company that won’t allow anyone–including the FBI–to access your data without a court order.
4) Select a data service provider with decent lawyers
The shitstorm over last weekend was, on the most charitable reading, caused by bad lawyers. So to be very clear: what you store on a server is no more business to your hosting provider than what you keep in a rental house–and I’m sticking to that unless and until the law says otherwise (which, at the moment, it doesn’t). When you upload to a server, you are granting the implicit right to archive, store, back up (which involves making copies) and display your data to the extent (and only to the extent) required by normal data management operations–these are all technical tasks. You are not implicitly granting the right to create derivative works, to publish, to distribute, or to sublicense the content (and if you’re looking at a service that demands that right because they use a subcontractor to handle their data farms, avoid them.
5) Pay for it
You’re going to be in a much better position if you’re using a paid service, and the paid services are not expensive. You spend more at Starbucks every month, even if you don’t drink coffee. This puts the customer/vendor relationship on the proper footing. Don’t, however, neglect points 1-4 just because you’ve paid.
6) Notice of changes to TOS
Always select a service provider that gives at least a billing-cycle’s worth of notice to changes of their TOS. This is something Dropbox did right, and with all the grousing I’ve been doing about them it’s only fair to give kudos where they’re due.
Blessed Are The Pessimists, for They Have Made Backups
The best solution of all, though, is to do it yourself. There are a number of programs available, such as PogoPlug, which make it easy to set up your own cloud-drive that you can access from anywhere. A lot of NAS appliances also include web servers that let you access your files from anywhere. Get something like this, set it up in a friend’s closet (so you have the “off-site” part of your backups covered–important in case of flood or fire), and you’re miles ahead of using a cloud-based service from a company whose politics and business incentives you have no control over.
Of course, doing this, you are parking your Aston Martin on the street, which means you need both a lock (a good firewall) and a very good kill switch (encrypt everything on that shared drive)–and if you have any sense at all, your cloud drive must be on a dedicated appliance or computer, not on your desktop or laptop machine. Isolating it from the rest of your network protects the rest of your network from the Internet, exposing only your (encrypted, right?) cloud drive on its own well-secured machine (device, spare computer, whatever).
Concluding Thoughts
I got a LOT of comments, and a lot of blog posts, commenting on the panicky, breathless nature of my initial post about the Dropbox debacle by people who figured I ought to “know better.” Those people were all either 1) hackers who already know how to navigate this weird world, or 2) people with a good understanding of cyberlaw but a poor understanding of copyright law. Most of them were very intelligent and the comment stream (and cross-linked posts) are well worth reading–but this post is not for them. The first group are already well-equipped to take care of themselves, because they have the “informed” part of “informed consent” nailed. The second group are intelligent enough that they’ll likely be fine too, though I’m nervous about the folks who take advice from them.
If you’re a creative type, your work is your livelihood. You need to be fully conversant in Copyright law, or you’re gonna get fucked. You also need to be moderately conversant in security–i.e. you need to understand the basic concepts, even if you don’t understand the technical details. And you need to apply both to the way you deal with data you put online.
This is a world of informed consent, and most people on the net are consenting without understanding the paradigm or the implications. For most people, the worst that will happen to them from operating uninformed on the net is a little identity theft. Occasionally, one of them might get implicated in a crime through no fault of their own–annoying and unlikely, but possible. But for creatives who are using the net for business, the ballgame is different–if a creative walks through this world as a naive, he risks a lot more headache and wallet ache. It really is worth the time to get savvy.
If you find this post useful or thought provoking, please consider donating to the tip jar at the top right of this site, or buying a copy of any of the books you’ll find listed in the right sidebar. Writing is how I make my living–I enjoy it and would like to keep it up!
Neurological pharmacology–a fancy way of saying “what drugs do to brains”–is a subject with which I have a special fascination. Some of them accentuate specific aspects of personality, some create hallucinations and religious experience, some relieve depression, some kick the sex drive or the bonding drive into high gear. In a lot of ways, though, for my money, I’d nominate alcohol as the most interesting for one reason:
In vino, veritas. Pliny the Elder nailed it: Wine tells the truth. It doesn’t make you do things so much as it lets you do things. You can learn a lot about yourself, and about your friends, by watching what happens when they’re well-buzzed.
National holidays can do the same thing to people–and not just because of the amount of alcohol people tend to consume given half an excuse. Like all things, love of one’s country can come in a lot of flavors. Soviet dissidents, for example, loved their country while hating its system–they loved its culture, its geography, its weather, the shared history in which their identity was rooted. Members of totalitarian systems, on the other hand, are trained to identify the system with the country, and to see non-conformity as so unpatriotic as to deserve death. Some people are patriotic about countries where they’ve never lived, so much so that they’ll move across the world to live in them, because they’ve fallen in love with the ideology, or the people, or the culture of that country. You can learn a lot about a person by watching the flavor of their patriotism.
Writing a political thriller series these last few years, I’ve carefully watched the political micro-climates around the world and studied how they relate to the version of love of country I carry around in my own psyche. Call it a love affair with the Jeffersonian vision of freedom: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
This year has been an amazing year around the world for the struggle against different forms of tyranny, and as an Americans it’s been more exciting than I can say to watch the most action-packed year of calculated struggles against tyranny since the late 80s and early 90s (it’s also more than a little embarrassing how little my home culture seems interested in carrying on their struggle on the home front, but that’s a topic for another time). It’s quite possible that the Arab Spring, the Iranian struggles, and the other protests and revolutions around the world will all come to bad ends in the same way that the revolutions of the twentieth century almost all ended in dictatorship, civil war, and genocide; still, I have a thin hope that some of the people who are laying down their lives–for reasons as simple as the next loaf of bread or as idealistic as bringing democracy and universal suffrage to cultures where such notions are without precedent–may have read history and learned from the missteps of the last hundred years.
Because of that, in celebration of the first revolution that actually worked (if imperfectly), I’ve dedicated Free Will (my new book about revolution) as follows:
This volume is dedicated to the men and women
Who sat in Tahrir
Who crossed the Wall in Berlin
Who fell at Tiananmen Square
Who bled in the streets of Tehran
Who lost their lives in Boston
And all those like them before and since.
To them we owe a debt we cannot repay
Save that we make their dream come true
For Everyone
Forever.
I’ll be seeing you soon, with the rest of the book. Have a safe weekend–and spend it however you want to. The ability to make that choice is a remarkable thing in the history of the world.
Writing fiction in the age of the Internet can be fraught for the author who values authenticity–particularly if you write historical or technical fiction. Since the glorious thing about writing fiction is that you essentially make shit up to entertain other people, there are a range of opinions about the technical rigor to which writers should aspire.
I’m one of those poor tortured souls who is a stickler for detail, to the point where I’m rarely able to meet my own standards when I write–but, let’s face it. If anyone wrote like that, they’d either write only in their area of historical specialty or after years of research. The trick with writing is to create a successful illusion, not a master’s thesis. Besides, the vast majority of readers aren’t the kind of obsessive compulsive pain in the ass that I am–a lucky thing!–so there’s a certain amount we authors can count on getting away with.
Still, I can’t help but think there’s some level of rigor that one ought to aspire to. Some minimal standard–particularly since the stories we professional liars tell often form people’s view of the past long after their high school and college history classes are long-forgotten–must surely be in order. Something that we can at least hold up to keep ourselves from being embarrassed at conventions when a fan calls us out on an obvious boneheaded anachronism?
There might just be one. Let’s call it “The Wikipedia Test.” Continue reading ‘Failing the Wikipedia Test’
Even if I’m lucky enough to be in that generation that gets to live past a hundred and twenty, I doubt I will ever reconcile myself to fonts. I love fonts–I’ve been doing graphic design now for the better part of a decade. Titles, book covers, book layouts, pamphlets, movie posters–you can’t get away from fonts for defining the look and feel of something with words on it.
So, fonts are cool.
Except…
Well, fonts are weird. I laid out a cover for a short story earlier this week, and this particular story needed a different font-ish approach than I normally take with the covers for my short stories. Finding the right font involved typing the relevant text at the appropriate sizes, and then cycling through my font database.
Let me tell you, if you want to have a transcendental experience, there’s not a lot you could do that would be more effective than testing fonts.
Continue reading ‘The Fonthead (An Epic, of sorts)’
Disclaimer: What follows is a rant about something that can screw up the creative process. This post is more esoteric than is normal for this blog. It contains a lot of jargon, and talks a lot about academic politics and social history, and it won’t interest everybody. Don’t worry, though. It doesn’t signal a change of direction for the blog. I’ll be back on Monday with more stuff about contracts, stories, podcasting, and my general flavor of nutiness.
Last night on Dean Wesley Smith’s blog I made a snarky comment about the deleterious effect of a Literary Studies degree (or, in my case, 90% of a Lit degree) on creativity. The comment went something like this:
A Literary Studies course is the worst thing you can do for your creativity, other than bashing your skull in with a mallet while reciting the lyrics to “The Song That Never Ends”
Needless to say, this caused a minor row in the twitterverse among my fellow literati, and I received a few demands to justify myself (which is not easy to do on the best of days, let alone in 140 characters or less), so, in the name of entertainment, here goes, in no particular order:
Continue reading ‘Literary Studies, Anyone?’
A funny thing happens during times of great industrial upheaval: Everyone wants a piece of the new deal, but nobody wants to take what they perceive to be a risk. Most established players retrench, hold on to what’s familiar, and try to shout down anyone with a contravening opinion. It’s human nature to get defensive when one perceives a threat to one’s view of the universe.
In the midst of the upheaval in the publishing industry, I’m seeing this a lot. As agents are conning their clients into unethical business arrangements (and kudos to Peter Cox and Kristen Nelson for going on record about the danger this represents to writers), editors with excellent reputations are getting kicked off writing forums for providing data on the change, publishers are defrauding their authors and engaging in massive rights grabs, breaking the rules can earn you some pretty serious grief from other writers who are following the rules and hoping they’ll get reputation points for it.
Trouble is, this isn’t first grade. There are no gold stars for following the rules. And a lot of people are breaking the rules.
And they’re winning.
Continue reading ‘Who’s an Outlier, Again?’
So, Megan Cox Gurdon of the Wall Street Journal is concerned about the darkness in YA literature. It seems that such stories (written, as they are, for teenagers) might introduce unnecessary dreariness and misery into the otherwise sunny time of adolescence.
It raises the obvious question: At what age does an adult undergo a mandatory brain wipe and forget about what it’s like to be a teenager? Even teenagers with nothing evil happening in their lives directly know friends who have awful things going on. More than that, teenagers are coming to grips with mortality and sex in two important respects: in both cases, they are confronting both the knowledge that they can make decisions that will give them power over the death and over the sexuality of other people, and with the equally uncomfortable realization that other people can have that kind of power over them (and that, at least with death, there will eventually be nothing they can do to stop it). This is to say nothing about their own desire both for sexual gratification and for some (safe) experience of violence and danger. Sex and death, folks. It don’t get more real, or dark, than that.
Continue reading ‘Unsuitable for Children?’
Last time I talked about some of the things you want to look for when you’re shopping for a used car. There’s a lot more I have to share about this adventure that might help you the next time you’re buying a car, and I’ll get to that next time.
But this is not just a story about smart shopping. It’s also a romance–and a good romance needs a narrative. So, here’s the next part, as a kind of nonfiction short story:
Continue reading ‘Gearing Down, Trading Up pt5′
Today was a day for work away from the internet–working on Free Will pacing notes (a book this big? The pacing can get delicate), and finishing the buzz hunt in the studio.
About a year and a half ago, right toward the end of DF10, a nasty new buzz crept into my recording studio. Straight, evil, 60 cycle nastiness from hell. I got a couple of workarounds to finish DF10 and do the first few eps of Free Will, but the amount of time it was taking me drove me bonkers. All the other recording I did during this time wound up happening at other places, because trust me, you could *hear* this. Even if I buried it in background foley, it was nasty.
But because writing new material was higher priority, and all the voice work I had in the meantime was low key enough to do on my mobile rig at a friend’s house, I put off dealing with it.
Until today. I had some new equipment going in inline, and that’s as good a time as any to check every cable connection and power outlet in the place.
After going over everything, and finding no reason for the buzz, I had a friend over who’s done a good bit of electrical engineering. It took him about ten minutes to double-check my work and discover what I hadn’t: that on the high tension wire pole outside, an antique transformer had gone on the fritz, and it was throwing off EM like you wouldn’t believe.
I asked him “So, other than moving house, what can I do?”
He showed me a trick that is so head-smackingly simple, I figured I’d pass it on in case any of you are running into similar problems. He used one of my dynamic mics to map out the magnetic field. He hooked it up to the board, boosted the frequency with the buzz, and started sweeping it around the room. Once he got the shape of the field, he started twisting the microphone.
One of the things you look for in a good dynamic mic is excellent side and back rejection. Turns out this works for magnetic fields as well as for sound. Once he got the shape of the field (which confirmed his suspicion that it was coming from the transformer outside), he positioned the microphone so it’s hind end was pointing in the general direction of the transformer, then he handed me the headphones.
No buzz. Not even a little bit. He said “Now, if it bugs you again, check the orientation of the microphone, then just change the angle until you aren’t getting a buzz. This should work with just about any pro mic you’ve got.”
So, if you have ground buzz that you can’t identify, try looking out the window. Or, just try changing the angle on your mic. Sometimes, really really silly things can fix major problems.
Preface: I mentioned this in the first post in this series, but because I’m going to be talking about some specific points of law in this post, I need to reiterate: I am not a lawyer, am not qualified to dispense legal advice, and none of what follows should be considered as legal advice. All of what follows is opinion based on experience and on layperson’s research, and you should always consult a lawyer of an appropriate specialty when negotiating an IP-related contract (especially when dealing with a company that can afford bigger lawyers than you can).
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Previous chapter: Market Awareness
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If God had a lounge singer in the 40s, 50s, or 60s, I’d lay you even odds that it would have been Peggy Lee. Along with Etta James, Billie Holiday, and Rosemary Clooney, she had a glorious, smoky, rich alto that wrapped naturally around horns and clarinets to make sounds that were the aural equivalent of chocolate.
Peggy Lee had a good friend named Walter, and Walter need a singer/songwriter for his new project. Walter did good work, and he was a good friend, so Peggy gave him a good rate, and in 1955 the result of that project hit the country like Christmas. It was a little movie called Lady and the Tramp.
It was a great collaboration, and they had a good contract for the time (Peggy and her cowriter retained rights to “transcriptions” such as record albums and sheet music–a smart move). Everything might have been peachy for life, if Sony hadn’t screwed up the world with home video.
Videotapes have been around pretty much since the Big Bang (or at least since 1951) in broadcast, but nobody really expected that it would wind up being something people used at home any more than the early computer manufacturers thought that your phone would contain twice the computing power that sent men to the moon (which some of them now do). Even if it were technically possible, why would anyone want home video when they had, you know, lives? And television? A professional toy like video tape wouldn’t appeal to a mass market–or such was the thinking. Sony, by the 1970s the world leader in miniaturization, disagreed. In 1975 they introduced Betamax, the first home video format.
It took a few years for it to catch on, but (thanks largely to the porn industry) by the 1980s home video was THE thing (and in the years since, this trend has only deepened with more formats being released). Studios started making their bread-and-butter money from video rentals and sales, rather than from theatrical exhibition. The only people who had a problem with this were the artists who weren’t getting paid for the work they’d done for theatrical exhibition–but most of them just grumbled. Not Peggy Lee. Peggy Lee pulled out her lawyers and said “Sic ‘em.”
Continue reading ‘Principles of Contracts: Everybody Knows Peggy Lee (or should)’
