Essay Prize & World IP Day

The Australian Copyright Council has just announced that submissions are now being accepted for the GC O'Donnell Essay Prize. The winner, who is to write a paper of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, is to demonstrate original thinking as to the protection of the interests of authors. A prize of $3,500 will be presented to the winner on the 15 October 2009 with entry to the competition closing on 30 September 2009.

On a separate note, Sunday 26th April 2009, is World Intellectual Property Day. The theme for this year is 'green innovation as the keys to a secure future'. A number of countries around the world (with, it seems, the exception of Australia) have organised events to promote innovation and the role of IP law in encouraging investment and creating the momentum and market for development.

There is currently a review going on in Australia regarding much needed changes to the patent system. Those that are interested should visit the IP Australia website and download the relevant documents with a view to making a written submission by Friday 8 May 2009.

The patent system in Australia, and indeed in many parts of the world, is often blamed for inhibiting innovation rather than encouraging it. This is particularly apparent with respect to software and hardware and has a flow on effect to the production and reception of digital music as well as many other creative and intellectual pursuits.

More Information
Australian Copyright Council, GC O'Donnell biennial essay prize (24 April 2009) <http://www.copyright.org.au/publications/essayprize> at 26 April 2009

WIPO, World Intellectual Property Day (2009) <http://www.wipo.int/ip-outreach/en/ipday/2009/> at 26 April 2009

IP Australia, Public Consultation on IP Rights Reforms - Call for submissions on proposed reforms to the IP system (27 March 2009) <http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/resources/news_new.shtml#21> at 26 April 2009

Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (2002) <http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/> at 26 April 2009

Byron Bay Blues Festival

I was very lucky to attend the Byron Bay Blues Festival yesterday - I had a great time seeing a whole range of different musicians play. Some of the artists I saw included Watermelon Slim, Tony Joe White, Eugene "Hideaway" Bridges, Tom Freund, Luka Bloom, Jackson Firebird, The Stiff Gins, Paul Patten and Paul Kelly.

I was also very excited to see the Saltwater Band play. This is a great Indigenous Australian band with a glorious sound highlighting the true beauty of their culture and who kept us dancing for over an hour.





















Later in the evening I was thrilled to see Blue King Brown's set. They are a truly amazing band and their live show is even better than their album. The level of musicianship was astonishing and as always they were very political. Their lead singer, Natalie, spoke of the changes that are taking place at present with respect to global consciousness and the emergence of a global community.


















The last show I saw for the night was the John Butler Trio who were awesome. They were very entertaining and they played some of my favorite songs including Treat Yo Mama and The Gov Did Nothing. John Butler also spoke at length about a movement to save the Kimberley and plans to construct a gas plant in Broome with particular concerns for Indigenous land rights as well as the impact on the environment. You can find out more information here.

(They were so popular and I was getting very squashed near the front so as you can see I ended up near a big screen.)















I really had a great day as did around 17,000 others who braved the rain and mud to see some excellent artists.

Ethan Zuckerman on the benefit concerts of the '80s

I was just reading a very interesting blog post by Ethan Zuckerman titled "From protest to collaboration: Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and lessons for xenophiles" in which he gives background information on the benefit concerts held in the mid 1980's. Here is an extract:

A memetic virus gripped the world of popular music in late 1984 and 1985: the superstar benefit single. The phenomenon of superstar benefits can be traced back through George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 and The Secret Policeman’s Balls organized by Amnesty International throughout the 1970s. But the epidemic of benefit singles that paralyzed the music scene in 1985 can be traced directly to Bob Geldof and the 1984 Christmas hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas”. (Video here. God help us all.)

In 1984, Geldof’s band The Boomtown Rats was lurching towards irrelevance and dissolution. He was depressed: ““We did the drugs, did the girls… And then we didn’t. In late October 1984, I was sitting at home. Rock stars don’t sit at home - they tour, they record.” Sitting at home, Geldof watched a documentary by Michael Buerk on famine in Ethiopia. Geldof was stunned that in a decade characterized by excess and consumption in the UK, acute famine was killing hundreds of thousands in Ethiopia. Geldof organized friends in the UK and Irish music scene to record a benefit single, donating the proceeds to famine relief.

The song in question includes some of the most patronizing lines ever written about the African continent:

And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life
(Oooh) Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

But it was a great commercial success, topping the UK singles charts and raising $14 million and eventually earning Geldof a knighthood. It set the template for future benefit singles: recruit musicians based on their name recognition and fame, give each a single phrase to sing, and rely on their fanbases to purchase the single, the accompanying album and videocassettes. Geldof repeated the Band Aid model with Live Aid and recently, Live 8, a festival to raise “awareness” about Africa which, memorably, included so few Africans that Peter Gabriel felt compelled to hold a companion event called “Africa Calling”. (Geldof explained that he had invited U2, Elton John and Madonna because they’d attract large television audiences, while African artists presumably would not.)

In the wake of the Band Aid success, Michael Jackson organized a similar group called USA for Africa, which recorded “We Are the World” (Video - you’ve been warned.) Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp tried to bring the attention back to the US with a series of Farm Aid concerts. And Steven Van Zandt - Bruce Springstein’s guitar player and television mafioso Silvio Dante - weighed in with “Sun City”.

Van Zandt’s project, called Artists United Against Apartheid, was inspired by his trips to South Africa to research the similarities between Apartheid and Indian reservations in the US. He came away from his South African trips with a special distaste for Sun City, a resort casino created by South African hotelier Sol Kerzner in the bantustan of Boputhatswana, an easy drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. Gambling was illegal in South Africa, but in the allegedly independent Tswana “homeland”, authorities voted to legalize gambling and pornographic movies, creating the opportunity for Kerzner to create an easily accessible and legal “Las Vegas” for the enjoyment of white South Africans. (Kerzer used a similar strategy to develop the Mohegan Sun casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, making gambling easily accessible to my fellow New Englanders through a partnership with the Mohegan Indian tribe.)

Sun City recruited musicians from around the world to perform at the casino. Musicians who accepted the invitation were defying a long-standing cultural boycott of the Apartheid regime. Started in 1961 by the British Musicians Union, the boycott was managed by the UN Center Against Apartheid, which maintained a blacklist of artists who defied the boycott and played at Sun City. The Artists United Against Apartheid project sought to call attention to the boycott and to pressure artists not to accept South African invitations - it wasn’t an attempt to raise funds like many other benefit records, though Danny Schechter, an ABC journalist who helped coordinate the project, reports that funds were given to ANC activst Oliver Tambo to support a school in Tanzania.

This is a great post which goes on to discuss the circumstances and conflict that arose with Paul Simon's recording of the Graceland album. Read the rest of it here.

More Information

Ethan Zuckerman, From protest to collaboration: Paul Simon’s “Graceland” and lessons for xenophiles (2 April 2009) <http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2009/04/02/from-protest-to-collaboration-paul-simons-graceland-and-lessons-for-xenophiles/> at 5 April 2009

UncensoredInterview - Amy Ray & The Green Team

UncensoredInterview is a website which has recently licensed a number of interviews with musicians under Creative Commons licenses - the subtitle to the site reads "because music begins with a point of view".

I was particularly interested to see that one of the categories under which they list interviews is 'politics'. Here is an interview with Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls in which she discusses the bands perspective and efforts regarding environmental responsibility:

Amy Ray: Green Team.

Attribution: UncensoredInterview

She also talks about an initiative that they started called 'Honor the Earth'. Honor the Earth's mission statement describes the organisation's objectives as creating "awareness and support for Native environmental issues and to develop needed financial and political resources for the survival of sustainable Native communities. Honor the Earth develops these resources by using music, the arts, the media, and Indigenous wisdom to ask people to recognize our joint dependency on the Earth and be a voice for those not heard."

The Indigo Girls also have a fantastic website with an Activism section well worth a look. One of the projects they have recently supported was lobbying to ensure that money from the USA stimulus package was not directed to the nuclear power industry.

More Information
Uncensored Interview - polular interviews on politics
<http://www.uncensoredinterview.com/topics/politics?sort=popular> at 3 April 2009

Honor the Earth <http://www.honorearth.org/> at 3 April 2009

Indigo Girls <http://www.indigogirls.com/open.html> at 3 April 2009