After attending class this week I was all pumped up about researching into more of these music websites. I realized that I have a limited knowledge of copyright laws regarding music and have decided to pay closer attention to these details in the posts and reading. I’ve never really digested all the jargon and have only a superficial understanding. My major issue is that I cannot comprehend how ridiculous some of the laws are, especially with RIAA is suing 12 year olds and poor college students for illegally downloading music. All those efforts would be better spent trying to figure out a way to make digital music legal and profitable.
I actually have some experience in this issue. My junior year of college at FAU in Boca Raton I was living in the student apartments on-campus. We all shared music and downloaded like fiends from Kazaa and Limewire. I was quite tame with my downloading. To count, I had under 50 songs downloaded from the Internet. The majority of my music was copied from CDs checked out from the library! I woke up one morning and my internet was off. Heaps of my friends in the apartments reported the same incident. I called the campus IT and the guy named off a list of songs that I had downloaded and said that I was under prosecution for illegally downloading music that I did not own or have the rights to. I freaked out. I had no money and they advised us all to seek legal advising.
There was a huge uproar among students who were also part of the group of music criminals. One thing is for certain, Boca students have some power at getting their way … and wealthy parents with influence. A week later our Internet was turned back on and all the charges were dropped. We were let off with a warning and they said that they were monitoring our online activity. The whole investigation pissed me off beyond belief and turned me off from downloading music online. It did not seem worth it. So I stuck to music sharing with friends and the library collection. This whole incident did nothing but make me even more confused about copyright laws, and whether to take this whole lawsuit trend seriously. Really, can RIAA keep up with the masses in the digital revolution? Nope, they will have to sink or swim with the current.
On another note, I was also interested in MIR. I actually wish we could have discussed this more. I found the cataloging and retrieval of music information fascinating. Music truly is in a class of its own and almost defies a structured cataloguing and classification scheme. I decided to try a google search of MIR and social tagging to see what was going on when those forces combined. That’s when my memory was jogged … Last.fm offers an awesome tagging application for music. This seriously seems like the future of MIR. Already, libraries are using tagging and tag clouds (like aqua browser) as part of their OPAC. Tagging is an excellent way to involve the community in your music collection and market to patrons. While tagging any information items always incurs extraneous information and it’s not 100% effective. Yet, it is an excellent start to future research in making MIR more progressive and responsive to the digital revolution of music. I might consider this a possible topic to look into for a research paper.
Websites of interest:
ISMIR 2008 Tutorial: Social Tagging and MIR: http://mir-research.blogspot.com/2008/09/ismir-2008-tutorial-social-tags-and.html
MIR Research Blog: http://mir-research.blogspot.com/
An interesting thesis: http://thesis.flyingpudding.com/documents/Anita_FINAL_THESIS.pdf
Heaps of links to research about MIR and tagging: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SocTagsMIR/Social+Tags+and+Music+Information+Retrieval;jsessionid=DBDDAD5A38006FEF0CAB5EC9D7C91510
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