"Rock group Pearl Jam left Sony's Epic label as soon as its contract was up, and now is a prominent member of the independent music scene with no other means of distribution right now than the Internet. The heavy metal band Metallica, whose members once were vocal opponents of online music piracy, have surprised many by recently releasing some songs for free online. "
Interesting article in the Washington Post. I can't wait for more musicians to go indie, and for services like iTunes to evolve into a viable distribution channel for independent artists.
I'm not a big fan of Courtney Love, but as I recall she was doing some pretty good math about three years ago. The bottom line? More money needs to be put in the hands of artists because they are doing the work. The distribution channel shouldn't be a major expense item.
Actually, that's Professor Lessig, and he has some wonderful news:
"I have just arrived in DC, where I was planning on meeting with staffers on the Hill tomorrow to drum up support for the Public Domain Enhancement Act. We've got CD's of all 15k+ of the signatures on our Reclaim the Public Domain petition to hand out. It was going to be a fun day (as fun as any DC day gets) in DC. But we've now learned that Congresswoman Lofgren (D-CA) and Congressman Dolittle (R-CA) have agreed to introduce the bill into Congress. We're having an event at 1pm tomorrow at the Capital to announce this first step on a long road to Reclaiming the Public Domain. Count this as great news, and spread the word: there are two great souls on Capital Hill. I'll see if I can find some more." [via Lessig Blog]
I wish him the best, and hope that his encounters with the members of Congress are fruitful. If he runs into Dick Gephardt, I know he'll have the good sense not to mention the phrase "Executive Orders."
I had forgotten to mention that Howard Bashman's site is looking particularly appealing after his recent makeover. Both of the aforementioned sites are staple sources of high-grade legal information.
Today, shortly after I got to work, someone brought me two notepads that had a "From the Desk of Ernest Svenson..." logo at the top. Along the bottom was the name of our lawfirm and our firm's address, below which appeared the name of the copy company that wanted to benefit from their notepad largess.
I tossed them in the trash without looking at them because the pads looked hokey and I already have plenty of scratch pads. Much later when I checked my emails I noticed a bunch of messages discussing the topic of "scratch pads." The first E-mail was from the person in charge of ordering supplies, which responded to an E-mail from someone who wanted to know why the firm had ordered scratch pads with the firm's name misspelled. Our supply room person explained that she hadn't ordered them, and noted that the pads were provided by [Name Witheld] Copy Company.
A few more emails bounced around, further drilling into people's consciousness the name of the hapless copy company, and ridiculing their poor proofreading skills. Someone pointed out that "New Orleans" was misspelled in the address line of the scrach pad (you can almost understand not catching a misspelling in a surname, but apparently they didn't even know how to spell the very city in which they do business). A member of the firm's management committee, who may not have known the name of the company before today, made a comment in an E-mail which indicated that he wouldn't ever use their services and would strongly discourage anyone else in the firm from doing so.
So, basically, if the hapless copy company had done nothing they might have continued to draw business from our firm. But by affirmatively sending us scratch pads with multiple misspellings they completely torpedoed the possibility that they will ever get any business from our firm in the future.
Now that's what you call a poor marketing campaign.
Genie Tyburski's Virtual Chase now offers a new section of the Legal Research Guide entitled RSS Feeds for Law. You'll definitely want to bookmark this page. If you don't know what RSS is then read this.
10:59:55 AM
