<"Yukun">

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Any Given Sunday

22 August 2007 - Private Reserve (Show 70)
LUSH 99.5FM, 8pm.

01. ROSIE GAINES – My Man
02. SIAM SOUL – Break East
03. GREEN EMPATHY – Café Talah
04. SVEN VAN HEES – Bypass By Birth
05. FETILE GROUND – Take Me Higher
06. CECELIA DE CRUZ – With Or Without You
07. MONTA & ROSSINI – From Day Into Night
08. MONOPOLY – Sobre La Amistad
09. GREYBOY with BART DAVENPORT – Genevieve
10. SOFA SURFERS – Sofa Rockers (Richard Dorfmeister Remix)
11. DAVID VISAN & CARLOS CAMPOS – Indra Story
12. PLANETTS – Klub Kola (Uptight Remix)
13. STEPHAN GRAF HADIK WILDNER – Rolf Royce

"Where music becomes art..."

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Yukun feat. Ultramagnetic MC's - Smack My Bitch Up
(PC users, right click and save as)
NOTE : The original sample is not by Prodigy.
********************

Woke up. Turn on the Mac. Started up Ableton. Stared at it blankly for 10 minutes. Complete blank. Shut down. Not inspired or the very least bothered to do anything, especially after last night's "stale gig". Everything sounds so goddamn utterly stagnant. Try again tomorrow... as IF!

It's raining now and it's putting me in a melancholic mood. Slapped myself back out of it with a hot cup of coffee. I think I'm allegic to mornings.

Don't know what to do. Don't want to do anything that's got to do with ANY music at all. I think I'll go rent some DVDs and laze around a bit. But "birthday boy" is hogging the TV with his punting on horse races. Damn, I really need a place of my own! Hmm... guess I'll go watch the past few episodes of WWE Raw and Smackdown on the CPU... as they called it... real-time wrestling soup-opera.

Thankfully there's EPL tonight...
Manchester City vs Manchester Utd (derby so it can go either way)
Blackburn vs Arsenal (I'll skip this one)
Liverpool vs Chelsea (this one is going to be a feast)

And so begins my 3-day break from work. Tra-la-la! Maybe I'll have time to like expose even more stupidity... for example :

If you actually have the ability to see inbetween the lines instead of being PAWNED like the rest of the general Singapore public by the media's play of words... What has the release of anime episodes got to do with DVD sales? Read carefully again. Still don't get it? It's counter-intuitive. Odex saw a dramatic dip in sales because of the global trend in the drop of anime releases. The lesser titles you release, the lesser sales. Ain't it? Also, certain of these "best-selling" titles will never be released here due to censorship and other territorial technicalities.

Anyway, if the demand / trend for anime is no longer popular, isn't it obvious sales will drop? What to do next? Just like the music industry (which has still yet to grasp the full extent of the digital realm), go after the fans. Blame those anime downloaders, some of which happen to download stuff that are not licensed by Odex. Anyway, since I've a degree in legal matters pertaining to intellectual property rights, let me shed some light. The problem lies with the law enforcement system.

Under Singapore's law, copying is permitted for educational and news reporting purposes. In 2004, an amendment was made to include an open-ended exception to make it possible for copying - in whole or part - to be construed as fair use depending on five consideration factors.

1. The work copied is creative in nature or not.
2. How much is copied?
3. Copying for profit? (i.e. piracy)
4. Is the work obtainable within a reasonable time at an ordinary commercial price?
5. The effect of copying upon the work's potential market here.

If I was a full-fleged lawyer, I would present the case as such. Anime is considered creative work and fans copy the whole work, but they don't do it for profit. Article 38 of Japan's own copyright law allows parties to "distribute by wire a work already broadcast for non-profit purposes". Also, most popular anime titles take about half a year to be released locally and by then, they would have appeared on the internet via portals like YouTube (for a limited time), podcasts or the usual P2P networks. Uploaded by fans, obviously. And for NON-PROFIT PURPOSES! Also, by the time those titles are made available here, most of these anime fans would have either bought the imported copies from online distributors. These factors are consideration points for the poor sales as well. Point is, even if a particular title was downloaded, was it done so before the distribution rights was actually signed for the territory of Singapore? If it was before you actually owned the rights, technically the downloader(s) did not infringed on YOUR intellectual property!

Also, most of these new anime titles, when broadcasted on Japan television networks, were taped off directly from the TV (also known as "screeners"). Since the birth of the VHS (video cassette recorder), huge archives of almost anything imaginable have been taped by users worldwide. And now that the medium (VHS) is almost non-existence, there has never really been a law to control home-taping or any prohibition of home users passing their home-recordings around to their friends and etc. Well, technically, that's unauthorized distribution.

Despite the medium, sales of movies on tape, VCDs and DVD were never impacted by VHS even those such recordings exchange hands and etc. No one bothered to persue it as it'll only end up with expensive legal fees and an open-ended exception.

As with music copyright, our Parliament added this "open-ended exception" for fair use only in 2004. This was put in place as part of the negotiations for the US bilateral free trade agreement. To harmonise Singapore law with US law which carried such an exception, it was decided to incorporate it in our Copyright Act. It exists to protect the American consumer, now it does the same for the Singapore consumer. Sadly, our courts have yet to fully understand how this EXCEPTION holds. As with the historical past, whoever has the financial capability to win the legal battle, can and will bend the supposed law into their favour.

As with the recent Odex case, I do not see the court weigh in the five consideration factors with regards to the anime downloaders. I'm not saying that downloading activity is legal or not. That's really questionable if you've the money to argue otherwise. I'm saying that some of these anime (or even music) downloaders may actually been not even guilty of copyright infringement. Especially if the works are NOT represented here. So at the end of it all, if you actually think about it, who actually makes financial gains out of these cases? The problem lies with the legal system that recognizes the word "download" as a dirty word. It's failed to realise that there's more to it than just "right click save as". The legal system here, is sadly, nothing but legal terrorism.

Damn, I should have fully pursue my degree instead of ending up playing music to a room of musically-retarded free-loading "beautiful" drunks.

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Here's an interesting dialogue I had with 3 foreign customers at the end of last night. Two of them being expats that have been here for almost 7 years.

Georgie : "We really loved the music tonight. Always loved this place when it was Liquid Room."

Me : "Thanks. I was with Liquid Room for a while too."

Georgie : "Oh yeah, I remember. No wonder you look familiar. You're... err... don't tell me. Yukun, right? Your Saturdays were mad! It was the talk of the town. We come here almost every week! But the club's a stark constrast now, comparing to what it was back then. It's really a damn shame."

Me : "What do you mean?"

Georgie : "I don't mean to sound rude but this freeflow for models really makes the club look desperate and cheap. It's obvious that they're here for the drinks and not the music. Back in Liquid Room, it was the other way round, wasn't it? The punters where more substantial."

Me : "Well, err..."

Georgie : "We did not know about this club. We happen to chance upon it! What's it called by the way?"

Me : "eM Studio."

Georgie : "Really, you people should get the word out because it's really such a crying shame! Great music but no one's around to enjoy it except the 3 of us. How do you keep your passion as a DJ, week in and out?"

Me : "Well, I try."

Georgie : "We had great nights with you back in Liquid Room. We had a good night despite the really dodgy crowd tonight. Fantastic music. But it's just such a waste, isn't it? Say, could we get you to play at some of our private parties?"

Truth be told, I don't really operate on PASSION anymore. Never did for a long time. I've stopped being passionate about it after join Onyx as the set-up / entertainment team. I'm just running on "second nature". Anyway, I thought it was really awkward for "outsiders" to have such an opinion. Then again, I'm not really that surprised because it's not the first time I've heard such sentiments from customers, as well as some local media people. Oh well, it's not that I haven't pointed out certain things before. Then again, to be completely honest, I've lost my self-coinfidence and belief in a lot of things. Even if the room is rammed, I doubt I have it anymore to deliver... me lost my mojo :(

*reminds self to remain under the radar*

2 Comments:

At 10:45 PM, Benesia said...: On Anime, not a big fan myself, but I just heard from my good friend tht he got FINE of abt $3k plus for DLing Anime...

Surprise surprise...
At 10:58 PM, Adminstrator said...: I've been downloading Spongebob Squarepants lately. How? Will get reprimanded? hahahahah!