The $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission imposed on CBS for Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during the 2004 Super Bowl was a serious setback to freedom of expression.

That’s the first sentence of the NYT’s editorial today on the Third Circuit Court of Appeal’s overturning of the FCC decision. I’m in the media and like the First Amendment as much as the next guy; but it’s hard to see where “Janet Jackson’s boob” and “freedom of expression” collide, other than in the great Big Lap Dance in the Boardroom of the Newspaper Company That Used to Own a Lot of TV Stations and Can’t Help Seeing Things From That Perspective in an Editorial about FCC Regulation of TV Stations. Jackson can flash her chest anytime she wants, and Justin Timberlake can arrange to flash hers or anyone else’s at will as well. The issue—and it really wasn’t the issue, actually, but more on that in a minute—was whether CBS should be penalized for broadcasting it.

What’s the free speech threat? In the You Tube Era, broadcast TV is the last place you’d want to flash your boobs if you really wanted to get that message out. Sure, it was the Super Bowl, but she only got to “speak” for a split second. As for CBS, it broadcasts over the public airwaves, and knew the rules when it got into the business. If Viacom wants to show flesh, it can do it on Showtime. Hitsville’s oft-stated position:

Presumably we all agree that there is some subject matter on the continuum of cultural products in the world ranging from “Bambi” on one end to actual filmed bestiality on the other beyond which we would not like to see beamed over the air for free viewing by anyone, particularly kids, at any hour of the day. At this point, given the technology we’re using, where that line is drawn on a medium I barely watch any more is, to me, a jejune discussion.

But no—here we have another editorial decrying “censorship.” The test of whether such commentaries are written in good faith is whether they lay out clearly the special status the broadcast media have and put the “speech” in question into context. (Indeed, twenty years ago celebrity boobs weren’t so prevalent and might have deserved some legal protection!) The decision was in some sense based on a technicality; the court didn’t say the commission couldn’t regulate such things, just that the ruling the commission made “failed to provide a reasoned explanation, and appropriate notice, for its change in policy.”

It’s hard to say why this is a issue. The networks can easily indemnify themselves from fines by contracting with celebrity hosts to provide services that don’t get the company or its affiliates fined for indecency. The trouble with allowing “fleeting” obscenity, from the commission’s view, is that it then creates a new celebrity game where any appearance on a broadcast variety show will be a new opportunity for a new “fleeting use,” with a corresponding new round of outrage coming from viewers—and the accompanying media coverage.

That’s what it’s really all about, and that’s the other aspect editorials on this subject should address. My disdain for this subject comes from years as a journalist having to watch coverage of such inanities. The Super Bowl scandal didn’t exactly have the desired effect on Jackson’s career—her CD sales have continued to tank since then—but you couldn’t blame the girl for trying. The poor thing, undeterred, has been gamely trying to play the sex card off and on ever since, notably on Discipline, her latest, which is full of wanly vulgar attempts to generate a little more naughty publicity. Sample lyric: “My swag is heavy / Heavy like a first-day period.” It’s a sad end for a once fairly classy pop artist.

—————–

Previously in Hitsville

The Supreme Court takes on an indecency case

With all the talk about MP3 sound quality, Cnet’s Crave blog turns to audio expert Steve Guttenberg, who offers up some audio-quality tips.

While a 192 kbps MP3 is not going to disappoint many listeners, as I’ve said before the growing use of a lossless format of one sort or another will resolve even the minor issues that remain. Guttenberg’s suggestions are all OK, but it’s suprising he didn’t articulate the most obvious one. If you’re still ripping your CDs to your computer, go inside the iTunes preferences and tweak your settings. If you’re importing as MP3s, make sure you’re bringing them in at 192 kbps.

Anyway, this was the most interesting suggestion:

 *Buy used CDs. Though CDs probably aren’t Neil Young-approved, it’s a vastly better quality experience than MP3s. Plus, it’s kind of a deal, Guttenberg says. “It’s cheaper than buying iTunes (songs) and certainly sounds a million times better.”

Leaving aside the audio-quality factors, this brings up an overlooked issue: Why buy catalog stuff on iTunes for $10 an album, when it might be available at your friendly neighborhood used-CD store for half that or less? You can rip it and pass it along to a friend.

Story idea: What’s the used-CD market like these days?

I took a look at Amazon, to see what the market was like. Why are people buying digital albums, when a hard copy in many cases is so much cheaper? Examples:

Dark Side of the Moon for $7. (With shipping, this is close to being a wash.)

Steel Wheels for 98 cents! *

Their Greatest Hits by the Eagles, $3.99

Pearl Jam’s Ten for $1.49. (Insanely, Amazon’s offering Ten as an $8.99 download as well!)

Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory for $2.23.

Kingdom Come by Jay-Z for 1.69! (Here too, Amazon’s selling a digital version for $9.29.)

Blonde on Blonde for $6.29. (It was a two-record set, back in the day, but a single CD now.)

From the WSJ:

Sharp-eared pop-music fans may have noticed a brief reference to an old chewing-gum jingle buried in “Forever,” Chris Brown’s top-10 hit. “Double your pleasure/double your fun,” the R&B singer croons in the chorus.

What listeners don’t know — and what Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. planned to reveal Tuesday — is that the song is a commercial.

“Forever” is an extended version of a new Doublemint jingle written by Mr. Brown and scheduled to begin airing next month in 30-second spots for Wrigley’s green-packaged chewing gum.

Two other acts—Ne-Yo and Julianne Hough—are doing commercials for the gum company as well.

But Brown is a special case. He was commissioned by the gum company to write a song that updated one of its silly jingles. Brown’s label, Jive, sent it to radio and then, once it became a hit, they added it to his last album and re-released it:

Tom Carrabba, executive vice president and general manager of the Zomba Label Group, which includes Jive, says label executives initially had qualms about releasing and promoting a song recorded at an advertiser’s behest. “But the song was so potent and strong. That overruled us being maybe a little hesitant,” he adds.

It’s kind of an interesting issue: In most cases, a company will buy a song after it’s a hit. Wrigley paid for the song’s production, so in a way it was taking a risk.

But the bigger issue is the deception. Shouldn’t Brown and his record company have revealed the source of the song to consumers? Shouldn’t there be a label on the CD? “Contains the hit song ‘Forever,’ which was paid for by a chewing gum company.”

The only person in the entertainment industry who gets better press than Mick Jagger is Steven Spielberg. For weeks we’ve been hearing about his big-money deal with an Indian company called Reliance, which is going to be giving Spielberg and David Geffen a half a billion dollars to make movies any day now.

The patsy, according to the stories, is Paramount, which has Mssrs. Spielberg and Geffen’s company, DreamWorks SKG, under its roof, having bought it for $1.6 billion three years ago. Spielberg and Geffen have been complaining ever since, and now they are leaving Paramount high and dry.

But like the stories about the Stones leaving EMI this weekend, it’s hard to see why Paramount is the only loser. It’s possible that it overpaid for DreamWorks. But after watching Spielberg operate DreamWorks for fifteen years or so, it’s plain that the other studios are now onto his game, and that’s why he turned to India.

But that’s not how the papers look at it.

The latest is a story in the NYT today, which asked the only-in-Hollywood question, “Why did Saint Steven have to go to India for money?”  The tone of the story is slightly incredulous:

That Mr. Spielberg and his business partner David Geffen had found an investor wasn’t surprising. Mr. Spielberg is a superstar. DreamWorks had made it clear for months — via public comments and private grousing fed into the Hollywood grapevine — that they hated being part of Paramount and were going elsewhere as soon as it was contractually allowed.

But there was still an element of shock: Hollywood could not come up with a rich enough deal for Mr. Spielberg, the most bankable director in the business and a “national treasure”? His last movie alone, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” has sold $743 million in tickets and is still playing in theaters around the world.

And actually, as you can tell from the emphasized passage, the story was extremely incredulous.

The pair had to sell DreamWorks because it wasn’t a successful operation. So they did what smart business people would do. Their animation arm, led by Jeffrey Katzenberg, was successful; they spun that off as a public company and cashed in there.

The slightly mangy beast that was left didn’t have too much appeal in the industry.But wait—what about those big ol’ blockbuster films by Mr. National Treasure, the superstar?

A lot of them were either done for other studios, or were done as co-productions with other studios. DreamWorks didn’t see any of that Lost World or Indiana Jones money, and only part of the take from Saving Private Ryan and War of the Worlds.

Spielberg reportedly wanted to take the company to his second home, Universal, but Universal offered only $1.2 billion.

Paramount eventually bought the company for $1.6 billion. Note the word “bought,” which doesn’t turn up in much of the reporting on Spielberg. He sold his company.

Now he’s unhappy about it. So he’s leaving DreamWorks behind and looking for new deep pockets. He couldn’t get the money he wanted from anyone else in Hollywood not because, as the Times has it, the companies can’t afford him—he’s an extraordinarily prolific filmmaker. Studios “afford” him an average of once a year. It’s because he’s not worth the money he wanted to do boutique stuff while he did the blockbuster projects elsewhere. But he, like Jagger, has cachet to sell, which is a lot more valuable to a company from India with designs on Hollywood.

Paramount isn’t unculpable, of course: It probably paid too much for Spielberg and his cachet. (The company doesn’t even owe the big latest Indiana Jones movie to Spielberg; Paramount had released the previous ones.) What’s not surprising now is that no other Hollywood studio wants to buy what Spielberg is selling. Why don’t the papers say that?

___________

Previously in Hitsville:

Return to “The Spielberg Zone”
Indiana Jones Agonistes
Scary Steven Spielberg!

While the digital era has compromised the music labels’ ability to resell their catalogs in new physical formats, there is the opportunity for at least one such iteration going forward.

It might seem that once you’ve bought a song digitally, that’s it—why would anyone buy it again? But most people don’t really understand what they are getting when they buy an MP3 or its rough equivalent, like the AAC format you get on iTunes.

At some point, the labels will make the judgment that they have reached a critical mass in unloading those catalogs once again as MP3s. Then, I am sure, will come a new PR campaign.

We’ll be told that MP3s are an inferior audio product!

But the labels will have a solution for us: It is called “Lossless.”

Boilerplate background:

• The genius of the MP3 was that it could compress a large audio file down to a fraction of its normal size.
• It did this partly by losing some—not a great deal, but some—audio quality.
• In very crude terms, an MP3 is about a tenth the size of a CD-quality audio file, coming out to about one MB per minute.
• It’s pretty easy to compress a song down to half its digital size and lose no audio quality; that’s what Apple’s “Apple Lossless” codec claims to do.
• The size of iPod storage, leaving aside computer hard drives, has grown exponentially
• A casual music fan can now store a very large collection of music on her 160-gig classic—nearly 1000 albums in lossless format.

I think the labels themselves aren’t ready to embark on this stategy yet, because the digital sales market isn’t close to tapping out. (The trick, remember, is not sales, but re-sales!) But some artists are already looking at the future, among them T-Bone Burnett and Neil Young, who has been talking about bringing his long-delayed Archive project out on Blu-ray discs, which are large enough to contain an enormous quantity of CD-quality sound.

Anyway, there’s an interesting post here detailing some of the treats in store. Blu-rays hold 80 gigs of data, it says:

But Hollywood has seen the light and is putting lossless audio formats on Blu-ray. The HD video contained on a Blu-ray Disc is still massively compressed (in a lossy kind of way). How massively? It would take about 21 Blu-ray discs to store an uncompressed two-hour film. The soundtracks are actually getting a pretty good deal, since their compression is at least lossless. DTS-HD Master Audio is a lossless format that’s a bit-for-bit match of the original audio track, and Dolby TrueHD is also a 100% lossless coding technology. Of course, these formats are still compressed — they save space compared to WAV files — but the compression doesn’t affect audio quality.

But a column on Wired News is moving to debunk lossless fetishism before it even gets started! Writes Eliot Van Buskirk about the above commentary:

According to the article, lossless codecs will “destroy” the MP3 format because hard drive and media capacities are on the rise, Blu-Ray movie soundtracks are encoded losslessly, iPod docks are showing up in high-end home stereos and Apple could flick a switch and have iTunes start encoding into Apple Lossless by default. Balderdash, I say!

He’s got five reasons, Nos. one and five have some validity, I think, but he’s still far too ahead of the game. You can’t start debunking lossless unil it gets a seat at the table, and it’s not there yet.

If I were writing the story, it would read like this:

EMI walked away from its long-term relationship with the Rolling Stones today, showing how little force the band retains in the retail marketplace. While the Stones remains rock’s touring kings—their last tour grossed more than half a billion dollars—EMI was selling only about a million copies a year in total of the two-dozen or so albums it distributed, or about as much as The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits sells annually alone.

The Stones moved to Universal, which talked bravely about revamping the band’s digital catalog. But the group’s work has been on iTunes for years …..

This is a band that hardly sells records. Why does anyone care? Why the big play for the articles? Says the NYT, in a story that ledes the arts section today and features a photograph with a cutline that calls the band a “commercial powerhouse“:

Ending months of speculation in the music industry, the Rolling Stones have left EMI, the record label that has released the group’s music since the early 1990s, and signed a long-term recording deal with the Universal Music Group, the company announced on Friday.

The worldwide contract covers three new albums and the rights to release the band’s valuable catalog of music recorded since 1971 for about five years.

Similarly, Billboard says:

Ending months of speculation, the Rolling Stones have split with longtime label EMI and inked a new deal with the Universal Music Group. The pact covers not only future studio albums but the band’s lucrative back catalog from 1971’s “Sticky Fingers” onward.

All emphases added. Billboard is a sober outfit, but this is typical of the hyperbole surrounding the band. The force of those words “valuable” and “lucrative” is highly relative. The Stones catalog from 1971 on is worth more than, say, Hall & Oates’. Still, the band sells total perhaps a million and a half CDs per year. About a million of those are the post-1971 releases.

The third or fourth biggest name in rock—and the most aggressively promoted. They’ve been touring almost constantly or ten years. And that’s what they sell? And note that those averages include the sales boost they got during the CD era, when fans rebought the albums.

(Some of the post-’71 work —Tattoo You, Some Girls, and the latter-day greatest hits Forty Licks—are among their biggest-selling albums. On the other hand, the three studio releases the band has managed to get off its collective sorry ass to record in the post-’91 SoundScan era have mustered only a little bit more than a million in sales each, Billboard reports, this despite the fact that each in turn is heralded as the band’s “return to top rock ‘n’ roll form” by most reviewers.)

The papers get around to giving some hint of these facts deep down in the pieces, but casual readers are given what the Stones and Universal want—a big PR shot. Is that really the papers’ job?

Only the WSJ hints at the obvious—in the antepenultimate graf:

Despite the Stones’ stature, it is unclear how severe a financial blow their exit actually represents for EMI, which is owned by private-equity group Terra Firma Capital Partners Ltd. “Shine a Light” has sold about 106,000 copies in the U.S. since its release in April; a person close to Universal estimated the album has sold 645,000 copies world-wide. Universal in a statement called the older titles covered by the deal “the most iconic catalog” in rock ‘n’ roll. The bestseller in that catalog, “Sticky Fingers,” sold just 48,000 copies last year in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.

All the band really has to sell is cachet. Doug Morris and the Universal boys just want to get their picture taken with the Stones. When he writes his memoir, Morris can say, “When I signed the Stones….” Unwritten will be the qualifying phrase, “… 45 years into their career…”

p.s. This Wired News blog item, particularly, is entirely unsupported in its bad-for-EMI thesis:

Before taking over major-label behemoth EMI last year, the private equity player got the gas face from top-shelf British acts like Radiohead and Paul McCartney, who walked away from EMI the minute they could. On Friday, Terra Firma scored the humiliation hat trick when The Rolling Stones, the planet’s highest-earning act of 2007, defected to Universal Vivendi.

McCartney, like the Stones, does not sell records any more. (And whaddaya think albums like Back to the Egg or Flaming Pile Pie sell a year?) Now, any of these acts would be nice to have on a roster. EMI is making a judgment that it couldn’t make money from the terms the Stones were offering. It doesn’t matter if the Stones make a lot of money touring. EMI’s a record company, and the Stones don’t sell records.

What the Stones and McCartney do have to sell is that cachet—but EMI already bought that once.

p.p.s. Universal’s also getting the rights to “two or three” (the WSJ) or “three” (NYT)  or “future” (Billboard) Stones studio albums. Second prize would be four or five! Bridges to Babylon sold 160K its first week in 1997; Voodoo Lounge sold 154K in ‘94. The latest, A Bigger Bang, debuted with 127K. Those figures, given the band’s name, the crazily hyperbolic reviews (”The band’s best album since Some Girls!”) and the vast sums that went to promoting the albums, are humiliating.

A few months ago, MSN shut down its music service. It was called, creatively, “MSN Music.” Microsoft wanted to consolidate its music services around the Zune and a new music service called the “Zune Marketplace.” Because the company had the music it sold people DRM’ed within an inch of its life, the shutting down of the store made the customers’ hold on their music iffy.

DRM, which stands for “digital rights management,” means that there is secret programming inside the digital products you buy that gives the company that sold it to you various kinds of control over them even after they are purchased.

You can imagine the use being innocuous. There’s nothing wrong with renting a movie for a modest fee, downloading it to your computer, and then having it disappear after a week.

But there are obvious potentials for abuse from two sources—Microsoft and the music industry—that have never been good at customer care.

So anyway, people who’d been buying (not renting or subscribing to) music from the MSN store were told earlier this year that the store was going away. More than that, Microsoft also told people that, basically, it was not going to put any more resources into doing the behind-the-scenes housekeeping that kept the DRM going after August.

It didn’t mean that the music was going to go away from customers right away; just that they wouldn’t be able, most importantly, to move the music to new computers. (In Microsoft Corporatespeak, the company said it would no longer “authorize” the new computers.)

Now we’re seeing a version of the same thing happen with Yahoo music.

LA Times blog on the story here:

This afternoon, Yahoo alerted customers of its erstwhile downloadable music store that it would no longer provide support after Sept. 30 […]. The upshot: starting Oct. 1, said customers won’t be able to revive frozen tracks or move working ones onto new hard drives or computers, because Yahoo won’t be providing any more keys to the songs’ DRM wrappers. But hey, they can always buy MP3 versions from Yahoo’s new partner Rhapsody!

Among the many consumer-unfriendly things about this is that the companies involved don’t even bother to couch what they are doing in plain terms; all of a sudden one company has to “authorize” your computer. Yahoo’s note to customers is even worse:

After the Store closes, Yahoo! will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for music purchased from Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and Yahoo! will no longer be able to authorize song playback on additional computers.

“Retrieval of license keys”!

There’s a way in which all of this is good, in heightening-the-contradictions terms. Each time customers are screwed over in this fashion, there’s a whole new class of people who’ve been given an object lesson in both DRM and also the way these companies play the game.

Back to Microsoft. After the company started getting screamed at for the MSN Store’s shuttering, the company backed down and said it wouldn’t start screwing over its former customers for another year and a half. One of the Cnet bloggers talked with the Microsoft guy who was responsible for the debacle. He makes a point that, if you think about it for a second, makes a little bit of sense:

[M’soft marketing director Rob] Bennett defended Microsoft. He said the company never wanted DRM on its songs.

“Had we had the ability to deliver DRM-free tracks at the time, we absolutely would have done that,” Bennett said. “We talked to the labels at the time about that. As a company, we have continued to push for this. Zune has a subset in their catalog of DRM-free MP3s. Now, the industry is making progress. The labels are understanding the downside of DRM when its used the way they wanted to use it, they end up punishing the users who bought music legally more than those who want to circumvent the system.”

… but if you think about it for more than a second, you think—wait, but wasn’t Microsoft the company that’s been aggressively marketing DRM to Big Content all these years?

What these moves force consumers to do in the event is the final insult. They have to burn their DRM’ed songs to a normal CD … and then rip them back into their computers as MP3s. The point being that the DRM offered the companies involved no real protection in the first place.

The entire British broadband infrastructure has buckled under to the international music industry and will will join with them to police file-sharing, the British press is reporting. They apparently did this to stave off the threat of legislation, which means that by their calculations the music industry had the British Parliament in its pocket.

This is the most outlandish development yet in the music industry’s insane, debilitating, destructive, petulant and useless campaign against its customers around the world:

As part of the memorandum of understanding—signed by BT, Virgin, Carphone Warehouse, Orange, Tiscali and BSkyB—a pilot three-step process will be used to identify repeat offenders.

The first step is a letter, “intended to be educational” to an internet user about the “account abuse”, the second a suspension of the account until the customers agrees in writing not to offend again, and the final step is cancelling an account.

While it’s unlikely the US would ever adopt such measures, the step shows that the industry will adopt whatever it can get away with overseas. The moves are pointless because the sheer volume of the file-sharing is impossible to stop; it’s dangerous because there’s no way to distinguish between legitimate and non-legitimate content, and policing will inevitably ensnare the innocent or disrupt their service; it promises an escalating, unwinnable arms race of technology to get around any measures the industry takes; it will leave some thousands of hapless casualties, just as the US drug war has; and for Britons it establishes a precedent where what should be a neutral information channel can be monitored for illegal activity

Slashdot discussion here.

The Guardian also has a rough transcript of a conference call on the subject with the president of British Phonographic Industry, the equivalent of the RIAA. Here’s his triumphant statement:

All major ISPs in the UK now recognise that they have responsibility to deal with illegal file sharing on their networks.

The trouble with this—and why presumably it won’t happen over here—is that it puts the ISPs in the position of policing the content of the internet traffic.

The show really ended when Ebert stopped appearing, but now, with Richard Roeper, who’d grown into the position, leaving as well, all connection to its founders will be gone. There’s no reason to think that the named replacements, guys from E! and TCM, will be worth thinking about at all. The LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein writes:

The future of criticism, be it reviews of movies, pop music, theater, dance or video games, is not inextricably linked to television. In fact, the success of the original “Siskel and Ebert at the Movies” was a fluke, owing more to the engaging personalities of the two critics than their actual opinions. Siskel and Ebert, though trained as ink-stained wretch newspaper men, turned out to be a great showbiz buddy team, the film-critic version of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. They had a chemistry on screen that transcended critical heft.

Goldstein has a couple of classic clips from the show, too.

Girl Talk is the name sampler extraordinaire Greg Gillis works under; his songs are either sheer genius or the cheapest of tricks. When sampling began to take center stage in the hip hop world, long ago, the best examples of it were revelatory and thrilling all at once; recontextualized riffs and hooks that both made something new and changed your understanding of the originals. The practice at once grew more sophisticated (with the collagist work of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production team) and cheesier (MC Hammer, Puffy).

Girl Talk takes it all to a new extreme; his works are entirely collages, but collages made up almost entirely of recognizable choruses and central riffs of other recordings. They are at once impressive and irritating, ineffable but somehow suspect.

Sure the guy puts a lot of work into constructing the things, but in the end the main pleasures you get from them come not from his work, but the riffs themselves. A typical example is the song “Once Again,” the beginning of which has Ludacris rapping over a sample from an old Boston rock track. But the samples aren’t quick; they are long. And, particularly with the Boston part, the force of the song comes not from Gillis’s creative sampling, but the dynamics of the original. The song continues, and then we get another long sample, this from the Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony.”

Anyway, I was thinking about all of this because the Daily Swarm linked to a NY Magazine’s web site interview with Gillis. Gillis doesn’t clear his samples; the legal dynamite he’s playing with is obvious. The strategy he and his label, Illegal Art, have adopted has two parts. The first is mumbling something about fair use:

 You sample some of the biggest artists in music on this record. How concerned are you about getting sued by one of them?
I feel morally sound that we shouldn’t be sued — I feel like the music’s transformative; it doesn’t negatively impact anyone. And there’s a thing called Fair Use that protects work like that. It’s definitely a concern, especially with the increased level of press this album is getting, but I feel sound about it and I think there’s a whole academic and legal movement supporting more creative and open exchange of culture and ideas.

There’re a lot of movements out there doing a lot of things that have no legal basis, and this is one of them. The courts have repeatedly said that samples need to be cleared with rights holders, period. And I think Gillis is going to find that Allen B. Klein isn’t going to be impressed with the moral soundness of his convictions.

Their second gambit is talking about how they aren’t making much money from the recordings; here’s the head of Illegal Art, who goes by the name “Philo T. Farnsworth,” making his case to Billboard:

What money Illegal Art has made in the last few years is reinvested into the operation. “It’s very similar to a typical book publisher,” Farnsworth says. “They’ll make money off one book but lose money on four others. We kind of operate the same way. We’ll make money on Girl Talk, but we reinvest everything we make. We’re interested in promoting what we do rather than pocketing money.”

Gillis, too, talks about how he doesn’t look after his business affairs very well. This isn’t going to get either of them anywhere in court. (And the Billboard story notes in any case he’s pulling in $25,000 a night for his shows, which consist of him and a laptop playing his songs, though he’s not required to get licenses to perform the samples publicly.)

The pair are aware they are in a very grey area:

At first, Illegal Art and Gillis were mulling a sliding-scale royalty system, where sampled artists would receive a small percentage of revenue. One idea was to enact a system that mirrors the compulsory license fee for a cover version, where each track would earn 9.1 cents in royalties. Another was to open the whole thing up to fan voting to decide how much a given artist would receive. Should an act decide not to claim its royalty, Illegal Art would donate it to charity.

“One of the things we’re wrestling with is that if we were to put forward a royalty system, are we implying that the work isn’t or shouldn’t be classified as fair use?” Farnsworth asks. “If it is fair use, which has always been the ground we’ve stood on, then there is no need for a royalty system.”

But the whole concept was eventually scrapped, after Illegal Art’s lawyers “advised us that it would weaken our fair use position if someone took us to court,” according to Farnsworth. He still sees fair use protection as “a big deterrent” against potential legal action, but admits, “We’re a very small organization. If someone wanted to make our life miserable, they could.”

I’m in favor of sticking it to the man as much as the next guy, but I find Girl Talk’s work pretty exploitative. You’re not getting a new collagist creation; at best the effect is generally more like two radios scanning through various pop stations at the same time. And at worst it’s just like all those cheesy bubblegum rap songs, where some guy is rapping over an old pop hit. He does use snippets as well as longer samples; but in most of his tracks, the drive and attraction of them comes from the original songs, not his repurposing of them.

… but it is odd that this story is not major news.

The first Enquirer story raised odd questions about the behavior of Edwards and some of his staff. He was eventually asked at a news conference if he was having an affair. He vehemently denied it, a few mainstream news outlets reported the denial, and that was that.

Fair enough, but he’s still mentioned as a vice presidential possibility. But now, this new story has been up on Drudge since yesterday afternoon but isn’t turning up on Google News at any mainstream daily. This is the most outre part of it; the slightly odd punctuation and boldface are the Enquirer’s:

Edwards went out of the hotel briefly with Rielle, they were observed by the NATIONAL ENQUIRER and then went back to her room, where he stayed until attempting to sneak out of the hotel unseen at 2:40 a.m. (PST). But when he emerged alone from an elevator into the hotel basement he was greeted by several reporters from the NATIONAL ENQUIRER.

Senior NATIONAL ENQUIRER Reporter Alexander Hitchen asked Edwards why he was visiting Rielle and whether he was ready to confirm that he was the father of  her baby.

Shocked to see a reporter, and without saying anything, Edwards ran up the stairs leading from the hotel basement to the lobby. But, spotting a photographer, he doubled back into the basement. As he emerged from the stairwell, reporter Butterfield questioned him about his hookup with Rielle.

Edwards did not answer and then ran  into a nearby restroom.

I bring it up because this may be an example of the Ick Factor in action.

The Ick Factor, you will recall, is Hitsville’s formulation that, despite all the talk about the tabloid world we live in, some people, Roman Polanski, R. Kelly and, possibly, John Edwards among them, manage to operate in the face of overwhelming evidence of deplorable behavior, simply because the press doesn’t have the stomach to report the facts of their cases.

Love is being sued by a business and accounting firm that was apparently hired to help her monetize her interest in Kurt Cobain’s estate, the AP is reporting:

The five-page lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court Tuesday afternoon claims she sold a portion of [Cobain’s] share of Nirvana’s publishing catalog for $19.5 million.

Los Angeles-based London & Co. alleges Love broke an oral contract to share 5 percent of any of her earnings or those from her company, The End of Music.

That company, according to the lawsuit, was created to manage Cobain’s intellectual property, including his career with Nirvana.

Love was paid $50 million, it has been reported, in 2006 by Primary Wave for a 50 percent interest in Cobain’s publishing (i.e., songwriting royalties). Primary Wave is one of a new breed of publishing companies trying to specialize in novel ways of exploiting songwriting catalogs in the digital age.

Since the AP story refers to a different money figure, this seems to be a different deal. The End of Music, incidentally, was Cobain’s music publisher.

I’m sure this is intended to be a serious suit, but seeing the words “oral contract” and “Courtney Love” in the same sentence makes one smile. There aren’t enough courts in the world.

I don’t understand why the story refers to “Cobain’s share of the Nirvana publishing catalog.” He was the sole writer on the vast majority of the group’s material. But “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the notable exception—it’s credited to all three members of the band—so technically there is a small but significant non-Cobain “share” of that catalog.