Here’s general counsel Michael Fricklas defending Viacom’s decision to sue YouTube for giving their company tons of free publicity potential copyright violations under the DMCA:.

Is it fair to burden YouTube with finding content on its site that infringes others’ copyright? Putting the burden on the owners of creative works would require every copyright owner, big and small, to patrol the Web continually on an ever-burgeoning number of sites. That’s hardly a workable or equitable solution.

Come again? That seems like the only equitable solution to this problem. Otherwise YouTube’s entire operation would be centered around weeding out offending content, policing its users from committing a “crime” the company itself was not complicit in.

The magic of web 2.0 is entirely dependent on the concept of user generated content. That’s how these dominant post-bubble dotcom giants can run the most popular sites in the world with only a handful of employees. But I’m not convinced that simply by harnessing the power of the masses YouTube is now somehow responsible for everything they do; just because the technology YouTube developed can be used to violate DCMA rights protections doesn’t mean it’s YouTube’s fault when such violations occur.

It’s up to the owners of intellectual property to seek out violations of their ownership, not the companies who run the technology by which carefree users can commit (harmless) crimes.

In keeping with some “Best Alive” hyperbole, over the past couple years Minnesota rapper One Be Lo has somewhat quietly become the greatest rapper to walk the earth since March 9th, 1997.

Some evidence from “The Axis“:

Every night you hear the bullets blast / Even if you in the suburbs every night, you see the footage flash / across your screen, I’ll tell you my biggest pet peeve / You lookin at it thinkin like, “It don’t affect me” / You livin large I’m thinkin like, “It don’t impress me” / Rockin them chains, Sojourner Truth is tryin to set free

or

In this land of Pocahontas, natives lost to conquest / Your false gods get framed, buffed and polished / If you ask who the prophet, they say Nostradamas

The whole album is an absolute hip hop masterpiece.

UPDATE: His underground solo debut from 2002 just recently received an official release.

Actor in a quirky indie film just out of Sundance:

Lead singer/rapper in folk/pop/hip hop group:

Super Bowl pitchman for Outback Steakhouse:

Voice over artists of instructional Apple videos (??).

UPDATE: Ok so it’s very much not him in the Apple QuickTour. I am, however, somewhat interested in seeing the focus group results that led Apple to choose a guy with a slight Australian/Kiwi accent to voice their corporate videos. Perhaps it’s coincidental.

This is special:

I kind of liked that movie.

This incredible:

I’ve had a beat off of Dilla’s album “Donuts” set as my cell phone ring tone since sometime late last November. Every time my cell phone has rung over the course of the past five months, I have heard this song, usually in short, inconvenient snippets. This beat enters my life on a hyper-daily routine, interrupting me while I take a shower, while I’m scrambling to make dinner, while I’m trying to relax with my water colors.

And yet…

I still love this fucking song.

I’ve never had a cell phone ring work this way. The default Cingular ascending scale makes my spine crawl. Europe’s “Final Countdown” no longer reminds me of Gob Bluth’s prancing magic routines; it’s like prying off my fingernails with broken shards of chalkboard.

Yet not Dilla’s “Worikonit.” I pop in “Donuts,” perhaps the greatest collection of hip hop beats ever, and it gets my head bobbing in that special way hip hop heads bob heads; it can’t be helped, it’s too beautiful.

Here’s to you, Dilla.

I tried watching Fellini’s La Dolce Vita today but became insanely bored by the 7th minute. I shut it off. I’m slowly starting to come to the self-admittance (slowly starting to admit to myself?) that I don’t like old movies. Fuck it, I hate old movies. Fuck old movies. Alexander Payne did this special DVD introduction at the start of Dolce Vita that was so nauseatingly pretentious I had to shut THAT off in the 3rd minute.

I’ve always tried to assure myself that I love old movies because I’ve been spending all this time trying to get into filmmaking and I feel a certain degree of pressure to thus become a bit of a cinephile. All of my movie heroes appear to be big cinema buffs, spouting off references to countless old films I’ve never seen. So then I go to see them (thank you, Netflix), and they blow. They’re so agonizingly slow. I couldn’t bear to sit through the M. Hulot films (a Paul Thomas Anderson recommendation). Is it possible to be a devoted filmmaker/cinema buff if you can only get your head around and sit through contemporary films?

The oldest era I can get down with is the 70s––Network, The Graduate. Anything pre-Dick Nixon makes me want cut off my cinephellic nuts. I Love Cuba? The Last Picture Show? Could barely get through them. What gives?

People always lament the declining American attention span. But what if the phenomenon is really nothing more than the residual result of a ballooning American intelligence? A few months back I kept seeing stuff about that book “Everything Bad is Good For You,” about how pop culture has become increasingly more complex and, despite cries to the contrary, American IQ is on the rise. All these old folks keep complaining about how us youngins are going to hell in a hand-basket because of our shrinking attention spans, but maybe they’re really just jealous because we’re a lot smarter than they ever were. And as result of our increased intelligence, we thrive on our increased saturation in media and information.

Then again, I’m sure if it ever came up, my grandfather would probably tell me to actually read a book before using its thesis in an argument. I’d have to help him pee, but he’d probably be right.

I just came across a shit-ton of live albums by hippy jambamby shite-fest moe. at a local record spot. moe. drives me nuts; I saw them once in concert at Berkfest years ago, an outdoor summer music festival, and the pain-wrenching experience has stuck with me. Ever since that unfortunate patchouli-stenched evening, I’ve had this sneaky suspicion that the band is really nothing more than some huge sociological experiment being run by some sly-willick Grad Student (somewhere in the Northwest) looking to uncover the process by which loose hippy bitches become attached to certain bands/artists/decorative posters not because of personal taste but because of social group dynamics. moe. is the perfect vehicle by which one may determine the threshold of terribleness a band may approach before ceasing to be popular. I really can’t imagine moe.’s popularity being based on anything but the way in which the act of liking the band––going to shows, wearing the t-shirts––fits one into a pre-determined, pre-established group identity. There is no way people go to moe. concerts based on aesthetic choice. The legions of loose hippy bitches that flock to these shows do so out an innate inability to make their own aesthetic decisions, out of a desire to fit into the loose hippy bitch ideal.

Is aesthetic opinion innate, or is it really indistinguishable from the social dynamics of group association?