First day out of the cage, and the day showed no mercy. Yes, it was sunny in between, that was while I sat at work in front of the computer

Anyway. This image is of one short moment in the morning, when I saw the reflection of a milky sun in a window. I tried my best, even shot a bracketed sequence, combined the exposures in Photomatix Pro, but really, I would have despaired without Photoshop. Two hours and many layers later I am not pleased with the image, but not disgusted either. I guess it’s OK, but then …

I’d probably have liked a dog in the foreground to the right, on a major diagonal, opposed to the light patch of the reflection, although, even if I had had a dog in the frame, it would have probably been the wrong pose and certainly a problem with the bracketed exposures. Well, this is an image where I woudl even copy a dog in, but alas, my dog library is rather scarcely populated

The Song of the Day is “Shine On” from James Blunt’s 2007 album “All The Lost Souls”. See a live version on YouTube.

What’s a bicycle? It’s simply some lines. I’m not attached to bicycles more than to any other kind of object, it’s just that they have so useful lines

I don’t ride bicycles. No more. I did it ten, fifteen years ago, and then I decided it’s too dangerous. Well, you can let traffic regulations penalize you, keep to bicycle lanes that were obviously always an afterthought, can fight pedestrians and dogs, unable to overtake slow riders on those narrow lanes, always in danger of getting killed by careless car drivers anyway.

Or else you play the real game, ride fast, ride on car lanes, are part of the traffic. That’s what I used to do. This way the bike was an incomparably fast means of transport, winning effortlessly against cars or public transport, at least in a city. The problem is, using car lanes is forbidden now, at least where there are bike lanes. Sounds reasonable, would be reasonable, but only if the bike lanes were actually constructed for fast riding, allowing for overtaking, and wouldn’t constantly change sides for no reason, every time with a low priority semaphore.

But even if I had my way, it would still be dangerous. I stopped using the bike when I had an accident, about ten years ago. It was entirely my fault. I had stopped at a semaphore, second behind a small red car. I knew I had to be fast to get over the next few crossings without having to stop, thus when the car in front of me accelerated quickly, so did I. While switching gears I viewed down to the chain for only a split-second. I had had problems with the chain not changing gears properly some weeks before. Bad habit, I know. Just at that moment the car suddenly stopped, as sudden as its acceleration had been. The driver wanted to turn to the right into a garage. Oh dear. I’m not sure if I had been able to stop if I had not looked down. Maybe yes, maybe no. I was slightly too near in any case. As it was, I had no chance. I managed to slow down almost to a halt, but only almost, and the result were two dents from my handle bar on the car’s back door and a damaged helmet of mine.

Nothing bad did happen, I felt a little dizzy, the bike was OK, and I drove on to work. The problem is another one:

I know I made some mistakes, and the car driver behaved strangely, first starting like for a race, and then only two seconds later braking hard, but the problem is, this can happen anytime again. If I want to make sure that nothing like that can ever happen again, I have to drive in a way that would make me crazy. It’s no fun. I hate it.

Or else I don’t ride bicycles at all. That’s what I did since. But then, photographing and riding bicycles, that’s probably pretty incompatible anyway

By the way, this image is from January 26, and tomorrow I’ll go working again. The snow is not at all inappropriate. Most of today it was snowing lightly.

The Song of the Day is “Simply” from Sara Hickman’s 1989 album “Equal Scary People”. It’s not a really good match for the image, in fact it’s a lousy match. It’s a love song, but as a love song it is so beautiful, that I just had to have it here today.

Sara Hickman is great. I have two of her albums, both quite old now. I had not followed her career since, but when I looked today, I found that she has made quite some albums since, almost one per year – and almost nothing is available as digital downloads, many not even as CD any more.

Interestingly enough I found a beautiful, private live performance of this song on YouTube. Imagine, you’re invited by friends for Thanksgiving, by chance Sara Hickman is there as well, and she even sings a few songs for you. How much luck is that?

I regularly infuriate Ted Byrne when I post images like this, and in a way I can understand it, imagining him scrubbing graffiti from his house’s walls. Yup, it’s destruction of private property, and especially, but that won’t make a difference to Ted, when it’s not even remotely artistic.

Yet I can’t imagine a city without these marks. No, I can’t even wish for it. It wouldn’t feel natural. You can threaten, you can punish, doesn’t matter. It still happens. You can’t prevent it – and that’s good. Look at that image, look at the layers. This is the closest our cities get to being natural, fractal, organic, aging, decaying. It’s not always nice, but neither is a carcass in the wilderness.

I’m still at home, still sick, still posting past images. This is from March, 1^st and though I hope to be out again sometime this week, we could go on like that for a few hundred days. It’s interesting plundering the archives.

The Song of the Day is “Dirty Old Town“. We had a song of that title in “739 – Dirty Old Town“, but that were The Pogues. This time it’s David Byrne with a completely different Song from his landmark latin/crossover album “Rei Momo”. See a rare live performance, David Byrne some 20 years ago, on YouTube. A real gem.

I’m back in Vienna, but I’m sick and at home. I’ve slept most of the day, and although I made a few images out of the window this morning, I’ll spare you the results.

These two images were both taken last week on the same day as “1237 – I’m Gonna Lock My Heart“. The first image is actually a failure. I probably should go back and try it again. The problem is, that I took two exposures with that walking man in the frame, one too early and the other, this one, too late. I’d have liked to have him a little bit more to the left, the scene less condensed, and then I would not have been forced to crop so much in from the left.

I’ve also played with some alternative crops, for instance a square that comes in even more from the left and that also cuts part of the scribble from the right, and although it is in some ways better, it does not satisfy me in the end. So this is a failure, but it is the kind of failure that interests me.

The Image of the Day was the other option from the same day, and I’m actually glad that I could finally use it. I would have forgotten it, but I really like the various strong lines in different directions, and the feeling of depth that they create.

Other than that, I’ve learned something. You know, here in the heart of Europe we have a political and social system that is very different from that in the US, and we tend to see the Republicans as evil, as being against freedom. Part of that is a fact that we’ve talked about often with Ted Byrne, namely that we associate completely different things with “left” and “right”, but especially with the political right. For me a Nazi is right, for him a Nazi fights for a system with tight governmental control, thus in his view Nazis are essentially left. Well, whatever. I guess in the meantime we have learned to appreciate each other’s positions.

But that’s something I had to think about, when I saw the recent TEDx talk by Lawrence Lessig. I really urge you to view this talk for three reasons:

First, I believe it carries an important message. I simply like what he says and I believe it’s true.

Second, it is enlightening on a completely different level, because it shreds some of my deeply ingrained prejudices. Unfortunately it also proves that politics are a damn complicated field. Well, and

Third, it is just an incredibly clever presentation. This man can really talk and this man really knows how to make a point. I heard it with interest and pleasure, hope you like it too.

The Song of the Day is one of my recent Sinatra acquisitions, the Johnny Burke / Jimmy Van Heusen composition “It Could Happen To You“. Hear it on YouTube.

That’s gonna be a short one, promised

The image is one more from yesterday morning. Actually, yesterday’s two images and today’s one were taken in sequence.

Hmm … why this image? Don’t ask me. It somehow appeals to me. Maybe it tells a story. Maybe not. You decide

The Song of the Day is “Don’t Ask Me Why” from the 1989 Eurythmics album “We Too Are One”. YouTube has the video.

What do you do when you can’t decide between two pictures? Well, of course I use both. See “slightly below” for #2

Today winter was back again, but at the same time it was a wonderfully sunny morning. I rose early, left home shortly after 7 am, and when I went down Lerchenfelder Straße, I was walking directly into gleaming sunlight. As you can see, both images were taken in roughly the same place. Originally I wanted to take an image of the sun together with its many reflections, but when the woman passed by and the traffic lined up nicely, I made one more image, and that ended up as the Image of the Day.

As for the rest of this post, I’d like to clarify what I said in the last post regarding the need for “a system where you waive your rights by refusing to publish“. Flo reacted with a comment that made me realize how unspecific my rant had been, thus let me start by quoting her comment:

If you were a songwriter or composer of music, you’d feel just as proprietary about your hard work as photographers do about their images! It doesn’t matter whether an image has been printed, or if it exists as a film negative that has never been printed, or as a bunch of pixels/photons on a hard drive, that image represents a photographer’s hard work – and is given the same copyright protection as other property, such as paintings and sculptures, whether it ever is published or not. So I don’t understand why music should be any different.

All of us have seen paintings, sculptures, photo images, and other art work that we’d just love to be able to own – but we can’t just go and take them for our own use. But you want songwriters and composers to be willing to fork over their hard work to you for nothing, if they choose not to publish their work! I’m just not sure I understand what you mean by “publish or give it up.” You give something up only after you die, as you certainly can’t take it with you!

Should I give up all my images because I choose not to “publish” them, which means putting them on the internet or printing and hanging them in a gallery?

OK, I see, I should have been precise or shut up entirely I didn’t, so let me now try to do the second best thing, to try to explain what I really mean.

Oh, and one more thing before I begin: I am no lawyer, and even if I were, much brighter minds than mine have tried to solve those problems, so don’t expect me to succeed. Still, I’ll try to indicate a general direction.

There is no such thing as a “Natural Law”. Laws are agreements between influential forces in a society. In a democratic society, the agreeing parties can be thought of as rather broadly defined, ideally encompassing the society as a whole. In a totalitarian régime the participating forces represent only a small group, those who are in power, normally the ruling party and a group of wealthy supporters. I won’t speak of totalitarian systems here. I see totalitarian tendencies in our society, but I firmly believe that we still have a democratic consensus in what we frequently refer to as the “Western World”.

Modern democracy is firmly rooted in the philosophic system that developed in Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. One of the fundamental ideas of democracy is, that laws should be for the general good, not for the benefit of a certain group.

Just as there is no “Natural Law”, there is no “Natural Right” to enjoy unrestricted private property either. It’s all a matter of agreements. History saw systems that were vastly different from our current one, and even in the last 30 years we have seen many countries in Europe change from being oriented towards social welfare, to a system that more and more resembles that of the United States. There are many reasons for that. One is the complete failure and the demise of communism, another is the strong political influence of the US as the only remaining superpower. None of the political tendencies we see today is “just given”, nothing is an “only natural way”, everything is just as it currently is, and when anything of it turns out to work badly, to be inhuman, to be detrimental to the greater good of the society as a whole, there is nothing more natural than to think about changes.

Our system of “Intelectual Properties” is just that, a consensus, an agreement, and it has evolved a long time ago, well before the advent of computers, of digitalization, of the Internet, well before we learned to copy information in a completely lossless way. Flo writes about this matter in a very personal way, addressing it from the perspective of the creative artist. The problem is, that the current system does not exactly protect the interest of the artist, it protects the interest of the publisher.

Much of what is published, is not owned by its original creator. Contracts in the recording industry are normally much in favor of the corporations, not of the artists. Sure, some few artists get real rich, but this is not the rule. The rule is, that the recording industry takes most of the money, and normally they exercise their rights long after the artist has died. Ella Fitzgerald is long dead, but there is still a lot of money to be made with her work. Look at Billie Holiday: did she die incredibly rich? What did Vincent Van Gogh get from the billions of dollars that have since been paid for his paintings?

Again, I am not strictly against intellectual property, but I am strictly against the current trend to see it as god-given. The concept of “Intellectual Property” grants to the artist, the inventor, and to the one, who bought the work of art or the patent, a temporary monopoly. This is believed to foster creativity and to be in the best interest of an advancing culture. But still, this is meant to be a compromise. We make it easy for artists or inventors to profit from their work, and we do it in exchange for their increased output. It’s a deal. Society grants some privileges in order to get something back.

Unfortunately there is a tendency of capitalism to favor the concentration of wealth, and with concentrated wealth comes increased political influence, which again tends to even increase this tendency, and so on. As a consequence, it is hardly important to concentrate on the protection of the rich, they can perfectly care for themselves (and they certainly do), no, the primary focus must be on protecting those who can not pay for their political influence, those who can not pay for laws in their favor.

In that light, let me clarify what I meant with “publish or give it up”.

First: If I create any kind of work and don’t publish it, it is entirely my decision. No one is or should be able to force me. For the general public, it is just the same as if I had never created it at all.

Second: If I have published my own work and want to stop its circulation, I am free to do so. I don’t waive any rights. I probably won’t be able to completely undo the effect of the prior publication though. People may have seen or heard it, they may have quoted it, and it would be unreasonable to expect the world to help me undo my work. After all, from the moment of publication, my work begins to influence others, begins to become part of our shared experience, part of our cultural heritage. Creation is communication. Once the word is out, it can’t be unsaid, the book can’t be made unread, the song can’t be made unsung. But still, if I believe it was an unworthy piece, I am free to try to unmake it as good as I can.

If you think of it, no harm to society is done by these premises. We can assume that artists in general want to publish their work. There may be exceptions, but there is no real need to force anybody. Artists give gladly and freely, to compensate them is in the best interest of any society.

This is not necessarily the case with derived rights, for example those of publishers or those of organizations that mainly trade intellectual property rights. Just look at the patent system: There are companies, so-called “patent trolls”, that do nothing but buying trivial, broadly formulated patents, and then look for someone who actually invents their “invention”, or at least something that is similar enough to take the case to court. They are a special kind of non-practicing entities. They have never ever invented anything. Those companies are nothing but a bunch of lawyers, their only purpose is to sue those who actually do the research. Normally their patents are not even strong enough to win an actual case. No, they get their money because real companies try to avoid litigation. Litigation can damage an actual product, can delay its introduction, can make for bad press, and so the parasites “earn” their money. It would obviously be in the best interest of our society to redefine the patent system, in order to make such parasitic behavior impossible.

Squatting on a work of art for financial reasons is a similar thing. It’s certainly not in the interest of the artist. Artists want to see their work published. The idea is not, as Flo has insinuated, for me to want something for free, is not to leave the artist uncompensated, not at all, the idea is to prevent publishers from hoarding music or other works of art.

Now, as we talk about other works of art, let’s think about paintings and sculptures. Are they the same? Would I want to see them exhibited, by force if need be? Mind please, I say exhibited, not published! There’s a difference: A painting cannot be published, it can only be exhibited. Why? Because it is unique. It’s not that it can’t possibly be reproduced in an almost perfect way, at least so well that practically nobody could see a difference, no, I don’t rule that out, but reproduction is not the usual way to enjoy a painting or a sculpture. We expect it to be unique and we enjoy that uniqueness. Copying simply makes no sense in that context.

A book or a music record is different. We don’t mind getting a copy. Normally nobody even gets to see any manuscripts. What we expect are industrially manudfactured copies.

Thus I’ll rephrase my request:

Any work of art that (a) is of a kind that is normally reproduced, and that (b) is not in the possession of its creator, and that (c) has already been published once for a minimum duration of, say, a month, and (d) has been published commercially, has to be held in publication perpetually, in order to retain its proprietor’s copyright.

Additionally I’d require a reasonable price. Publishing the works of Frank Sinatra as digital downloads at Amazon.com, that’s perfectly OK. A price of below $1 per song or around $10 per album, that’s OK, twice as much would probably be already frivolous.

Something around that. A customary price in that market, and to be precise, a customary price for new music, thus already a little high for remastered songs from the 1950s. The market may not buy at that price. I, for instance, have bought the digital downloads for a Frank Sinatra collection called “Concepts”, originally released in 1992 as a boxed set of 16 CDs, currently available in the Amazon marketplace, used from $175.98, new at $899.99. That’s frivolous.

The current price for digital downloads is $185.76. Still a tad high, but then, maybe not. It’s the customary price, a little below $1 per song. After all, there are 248 songs in this collection. I was particularly lucky though, because – for whatever reason – Amazon sold it for $5 in the US and for 5.98€ in Europe. Cool, huh? What a bargain!

It was completely by chance that I saw it. Would I have bought at the current, customary price? Hell, no. I already had some Sinatra collections, many of those songs are probably duplicates, but then, at that bargain price I did not care.

Thus, the normal price for new songs may be a little high for Sinatra songs, the average music buyer may find it too high, but even at this price, the music is available for everybody who is interested. Setting the price for the digital downloads at $1000 would be much too high. It would be so high, that practically nothing would be sold at all. The price would have been set as a means to induce artificial scarcity, making the price an equivalence to not selling at all. That’s what I want to avoid, and for that reason I would make this pricing illegal.

As a govenment, I would not force prices on you as a publisher of art, but I would have a law against artificial scarcity. Thus you would lose a lawsuit aganst you.

And if you refuse to sell? Well, that’s the “give it up” part of my original rant. Our legal system grants copyright holders a monopoly, and it does that, because we believe, that it is in the interest of our society. That monopoly could be revoked. Why not? You act egoistically, why should scoiety protect you? You could still keep it from being published, but the law would allow unrestricted copying of such works. Essentially you as the formerly exclusive publisher would have given up copyright.

That’s not at all unreasonable, not anti-capitalist, not against private property. Monopolies are a danger to free markets, and they have been fought even in the US. Think of IBM and AT&T.

Speaking of music, here the problem is the availability of a semi-public good. We as a society grant some publishers the exclusive rights to take money for what other people, long dead, have produced. There is no reason why we must do that. Copyright could end with the death of the holder. It could end ten years after the work has been created and even for the artist. Why not? Ten years should be sufficient time to monetize a good song.

Or there could be no copyright at all. Copyright is an invention of the 19^th century. The world has endured thousands of years before the invention of copyright, and we can’t say that it did not develop quite well, can we? The absence of copyright protection did not mean that there was no incentive to produce art either. So what?

But then again, that’s not what I would do. I would just prevent copyright holders, that are not the original artists, from taking works, that have already been published commercially, off the market, either by not selling at all, or by creating artificial scarcity via outrageous prices. Finally, I would do this only for works of a category, that is applicable to selling as digital downloads. This certainly encompasses music and movies.

Note that I have phrased it “published commercially”. Actually this is because I want to take most photography out of the equation. Not necessarily my own. I sell images via Imagekind and the Fine Art Photoblog. Theoretically at least

There are uses where photography is sold to a publisher and then given away as part of a product, for instance press photography. Digital downloads are not a customary distribution method for these kinds of photography, thus I would not want to force digital distribution upon it.

There may be many similar examples, there may be holes in my “legal” construction, but in general it would reach its goal, the availability of our cultural heritage, and it would do so without undue restrictions to current proprietors.

The Song of the Day is “Once I Walked In The Sun” from the 2002 Jane Monheit album “In The Sun”. Hear it on YouTube.

Didn’t I tell you there’s a pawnbroker in Josefstädter Straße, just for all those photographers in need? Well, yesterday I looked there again, and as always I found something. Lush and oriental. It’s not Easter yet, but the eggs are on the table

While I yesterday wondered if I should link to CDs or to digital downloads, today it is terrifyingly simple: I must take what I can get. In 1999 XTC, one of the best English bands of all times, returned with the album “Apple Venus Volume 1″, to be followed a year later by “Wasp Star (Apple Venus Volume 2)”, two extraordinarily good albums. When you look at Amazon today, you can get both via the marketplace, but both albums have been discontinued by the manufacturer, none can be had as digital downloads.

Believe me, I’m not at all communist, I am not against private property, I am not even completely against intellectual property, but what we desperately need, what the world, what our culture needs, what society, what our species needs to further advance, is a return to the premises: Intellectual property is not property at all. You can’t own songs once they’ve been sung.

You can have a right to get paid for the publication or even the performance of these songs, that’s all well, but we need a system where you waive your rights by refusing to publish. I remember all those years when it was not possible to buy David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”. Someone kept it in his safe and waited for a time when he would make the most money by publishing it. That’s simply not acceptable. We can’t tolerate paintings by Van Gogh and movies by David Lynch to be locked away in safes.

Not publishing music was excusable in the age of vinyl, in the age of plastic, but now, with digital downloads, there is no excuse. Publish or give it up. You stifle our culture.

“Easter Theatre” is the song, YouTube has it.

Or maybe not, it’s just that I took a series of images of locks, with this one the best of the bunch

The Song of the Day is “I’m Gonna Lock My Heart” by Billie Holiday, and this presents me with a dilemma. Let me explain:

I normally link to CDs at Amazon. I don’t know, I am that way, I have always bought my music, and I liked to buy it in a way that gave me something to put on a shelf. No more so. I wrote about it recently, I have begun to buy digital downloads.

I have this song in a collection of ten CDs that are not available any more. I got them for 10€ sometime last year. On Amazon I found it in a single CD that’s only available via their marketplace, and in a collection of nine albums, “Good Morning Blues, The Complete Columbia Recordings 1933-1950″, that are currently only available as digital downloads and, as so often with digital downloads, you cannot buy them from Europe via this link. It’s not that I normally bought CDs from Amazon.com that often, I normally used their UK or German branch, but at least theoretically I could and sometimes I have.

Of course what I really recommend are the downloads. Go figure: 230 songs for $15.98, and you don’t even have to rip them! It’s a steal.

But then: in an age of digital downloads, this artificial market fragmentation created by a copyright system long gone crazy, a copyright system that is completely inadequate for world-wide digital distribution, in such an age I find it increasingly hard to link to something that all of you could possibly buy.

Well, it’s not all that bad, actually you get the same collection at Amazon.de as well, it’s even the same price (numerically, 15.98€, the straight conversion not considering taxes would be 11.71€, but we Europeans always like to pay some more ), but still, this is not always so and it’s still not the same link. It’s not even possible to take the Amazon.com link and exchange “.com” with “.de”. Amazon.de has it, but under a different link. Oh my!

Enough of the rant. What about you? Do you still buy plastic? Do you buy downloads? Or do you just download?

Oh, by the way, hear it on YouTube.

Giving titles. Even (or because of) my habit of using song titles, it can be really hard.

Sometimes it takes me as long as working on the image. Here I had three of them to choose, none of them a clear winner.

In the end I decided for the one that gave me a Song of the Day. Actually I would have rather taken this one: a damaged bicycle with an infinitely twisted wheel, but really, among 34000 songs, there is exactly not a single one called “Infinity”.

Or the other one. I would have expected “Obscure” (at least that’s what I read: “Obskur”) to be a word that occurs at least once in 34000 song titles. Nothing.

Of course “Blue” was the cheap way out. 1557 songs, most of them Blues

The Song of the Day is “Perfect Blue Buildings” from the 1993 Counting Crows album “August and Everything After”. Hear it on YouTube.

Funny guy, huh? Somehow reminds me of Achmed the Dead Terrorist, but instead he is mounted under the saddle of a bicycle that I found yesterday

The Song of the Day is “Death Don’t Have No Mercy” from the 1969 Grateful Dead album “Live / Dead”. YouTube has a version from a concert 20 years later. Not bad either