A Tale Of Ill Will

Dear Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra,

You don’t get it, do you.

Earlier this week I got emails from You Tube informing me that your organization requested two very-low-fidelity excerpts of the 2008 Jazz Fest performance of Terence Blanchard’s A Tale of God’s Will be taken down.
Both ere posted there so that I could embed them in two blogs posts, one as an update to a post pimping Terence Blanchard’s performance with the LPO while I worked on a second post, a glowing personal review of the event.

It’s sad that an organization that has struggled terribly in the recent past would essentially waste time chasing down my crappy little camera videos, which I had put up on You Tube only so I could embed them in posts promoting and praising your collaboration with Terence Blanchard.

Some people just don’t get this new media thing, and cling to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other protections like someone cowering behind a triple locked door thinking that will solve the crime problem outside, thinking it will save their little corner of the music industry. It will not. Instead, you spurned my small act of promotion for your participation in this event.

Hell, you’re not even the copyright holder. If Terence Blanchard had complained, I would feel a bit better, but would probably write to ask him why. He probably has more sense that to yank my two tiny, tinny recordings out of what is otherwise a glowing review of the event.

If the Jazz & Heritage Festival had done it, well, I’ve said enough bad things about their management, and using my $100 camera to capture two minutes excerpts of Jazz Fest performances explicitly violates their policies. I would not be surprised even though they would also be spurning free publicity from the one part of the public media that is actually growing in reach year by year while television, radio and the prints shrivel.

Fine. I have removed the embeds for these, and I repeat myself, very low fidelity video excerpts (placed per my statement of Fair Use below on the right) from the posts We Will Drown the Bitch in Beauty and A Tale of God’s Will and replaced them with more of my own still photography which is explicitly allowed by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. And I will remove any references to the LPO from those posts, lest you come after me for the unauthorized reproduction of your name.

If you and the RIAA and others (the Associated Press comes to mind lately) think you can quash reasonable fair use by bloggers, good luck with that. The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. I think we can survive you.

Your’s Truly,

The Big Scary Blogger Trying To Steal Your Soul with a $100 Canon

About these ads