Perhaps emboldened by "getting a judge to acknowledge his ownership in the legendary phrase, 'Bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay'..."

...  George Clinton has filed a lawsuit against the Black Eyed Peas.

"Honestly Monica, the web is considered 'public domain'..."

"... and you should be happy we just didn't 'lift' your whole article and put someone else's name on it!"

Via Instapundit.

The stolen article begins with the line: "'As American as apple pie' isn’t." Ah, funny! Just yesterday, I was saying: "Americans say: as American as apple pie."

IN THE COMMENTS: Paddy O says:

The Cooks Source Facebook page is hilarious now.

Ha! Poetic justice.

The Squirrel Rights Song.

"We didn't sign a release!"

"A group of Radiohead fans went to a recent show in Prague 'on a mission to capture the band playing using as many different angles as possible.'"

"Radiohead found out about this and provided the audio so that the fans could piece everything together into proper videos."

Beautiful! I love when artists respond to the work of their fans like this.

"Rand Paul can't play 'Tom Sawyer' on the campaign trail? Rush says no!"

There's a headline I completely misinterpreted. I imagined Rush Limbaugh had made some argument that Rand Paul can't behave like the Mark Twain character. Was Paul attempting to pass himself off as a good-hearted, mischievous boy? But no, "Rush" is the rock band Rush, and "Tom Sawyer" is one of their songs. Paul had been blasting the song at rallies and the band — which is Canadian, by the way — has objected, citing copyright law. The song, despite copyright law, is embedded at the link. Here are the lyrics. Sample:

Today's Tom Sawyer
He gets high on you
And the space he invades
He gets by on you

No his mind is not for rent
To any god or government
Always hopeful, yet discontent
He knows changes aren't permanent
But change is

Hmmph. Silly song. God rents? God owns.

"If you are building a business model that says that people can only copy things with your permission..."

"... your business is going to fail because whether or not you like it, people will be able to copy your product without your permission. The question is: what are you going to do about that? Are you going call them thieves or are you going to find a way to make money from them?"

"David Byrne Sues Florida Gov. Charlie Crist For $1 Million."

Crist used the song "Road to Nowhere," without permission, in a campaign ad.

"I was pretty upset by that," says Byrne, who had Warner Bros. Records contact the Crist campaign, which subsequently stopped using the ad. But, Byrne contends, "in my opinion the damage had already been done by it being out there. People that I knew had seen (the ad), so it had gotten around. The suit, he adds, "is not about politics...It's about copyright and about the fact that it does imply that I would have licensed it and endorsed him and whatever he stands for."

What makes anybody think that's okay? Byrne's lawyer noticed that Jackson Browne successfully sued John McCain in 2008 for using "Running on Empty."

Nowhere... Empty... funny what these politicians identify with.

Iggy Pop says law is for "for hideous bald fat dead people. The living dead."

"In America, in school... I learnt creative writing, I learnt advanced algebra and geometry, but I didn’t learn there was such a thing as intellectual property. I didn’t learn how to read a contract. And I didn’t care about those things. Those things were for hideous bald fat dead people. The living dead. They still are, but now I do my living-dead s***work every day. And I can feel the hair follicles reacting.”

Hey! Business Insider used my picture without attribution!

Look here! Scroll down. See?


(Enlarge.)

That is a picture of me working on my last law school exam. I've blogged about it before. My son John scanned it and uploaded it on his Flickr site here.



It has a Creative Commons license, reserving some rights, and there should be attribution to the photographer, Richard Lawrence Cohen, who was, back then, my husband.

That's not the first time I've seen the picture used like that. It's interesting to me that people see it as a generic hard-working student, since of course I see myself as completely specific. I had a Federal Courts exam to write, and I had a newborn baby a few feet away in our studio apartment. That baby, John, is now 29 years old.

Brandon Hardesty plays "Goodfellas" as Jimmy Stewart and Stephen Hawking.

It's #2 in a series that is up to #56. Why haven't I noticed this YouTube channel before? This adorable reenactment is quite brilliant (with the familiar "Goodfellas" language):



The video that got my attention is Hardesty's reenactment of the famous bunker scene from the movie "Downfall." This was embedded at BoingBoing a few days ago and linked in the NYT last night. There's that annoying German production company that got YouTube to take down all the "Downfall" parodies that used the original footage from their movie. I hope they don't come after this use of the script.

I'm not going to watch the other 54 videos all at once, but I'm going to get to all of them. I was going to watch the "Fight Club" one, but I see that it's the scene that reveals the key secret, and I can't play it while Meade is in the room. He's never watched "Fight Club," though we've started the DVD a couple times.

(How long is it supposed to take to get your new lover/spouse to get through all of the DVDs you deem essential? I don't think we're going to live that long.)

"Edith started screaming, 'Stop the car, let me out!' [Jackson Pollock] put his foot all the way to the floor. He was speeding wildly."

The Oldsmobile 88 convertible threw Ruth Kligman clear of the death wreck and back into a long life, in which she was not only able to write that description of how her lover Pollack killed himself and her friend Edith Metzger, but she got to paint her own abstract expressionist paintings and to become — if I am to believe this NYT obituary — a great muse:

Irving Penn and Robert Mapplethorpe made portraits of her; Willem de Kooning, with whom she was romantically involved, titled a 1957 painting “Ruth’s Zowie,” supposedly after she made that exclamation upon seeing it...

"It" being the painting, right? Or are these buried sex jokes? "Ms. Kligman said that de Kooning had called her 'his sponge'" — supposedly because she absorbed so much learning about art from him. I'm thinking a man calling a woman "his sponge" — presumably the quote is "my sponge" — is thinking about spewing something other than information.

Andy Warhol mentions her in his diaries several times, and she wrote that they “had a terrific crush on each other” for many years; she was friendly with Jasper Johns, to whom she once proposed, and with Franz Kline, whose former studio on 14th Street became her home and the studio where she continued to paint almost to the end of her life.

The full text of Andy Warhol's diaries ought to be on line.  That's what the internet is for. But you can go to Amazon and do a "search inside the book" for Kligman. So let's check out the substance of that terrific crush. Page 7:

I read the Ruth Kligman book Love Affair about her "love affair" with Jackson Pollock — and that's in quotes. It's so bad — how could you ever make a movie of it without making it a whole new story? Ruth told me she wants me to produce it and Jack Nicholson to star.

In the book she says something like, "I had to get away from Jackson and I ran as far as possible." So do you know where she went? (laughs) Sag Harbor. He lived in Springs. So that's — what? Six miles? And she was making it like she went to the other side of the world. And then she said, "The phone rang — how oh how did he ever find me?" I'm sure she called hundreds of people to give them the number in case he asked them. 

Ha. Terrific crush. Page 17:

Read the Ruth Kligman book again, she was driving Jackson Pollock crazy in the car and that's when he ran into the pole.

Page 19:

Ruth Kligman had called me that afternoon and I told her I was seeing Jack Nicholson and I would talk to him about starring in the Jackson Pollock movie. She asked me if I would take her to meet Jack and I said no. (laughs) I wouldn't take her anywhere after reading her book. She killed Pollock, she was driving him so nuts.

Terrific crush. Terrific crash.

Page 35:

Ruth Kligman kissed me and I didn't know what she was doing, she started talking all about a love affair she and we had had together, apologizing for breaking it off, kissing me, and it was all a fantasy, so I thought if she could do that with me, then she probably never had a love affair with Pollock. She looked good. She was in a velvet Halston. 

Terrific crush. Can I bitch about the accuracy of the journalism in the New York Times when it's the lady's obituary? She died at — not 88, like the Oldsmobile — 80.

She never got her book made into a movie, but they did eventually make a movie "Pollock" — and Kligman sued the filmmakers for ripping off her memoir. The obit doesn't say if she won, lost, or settled. (And I'm not seeing a reported case.) Jack Nicholson never played the role. It was Ed Harris. Kligman — who looked, it was written,  like one of those "earthy, voluptuous movie stars of the era, such as Elizabeth Taylor or Sophia Loren" — was played by Jennifer Connelly:

"You're looking like a fool" is not the same "message" as "What kind of message is that sending?"

Did Larry "Pants on the Ground" Platt rip off "Pockets on the Floor" by The Green Brothers? (Videos of the songs at the link.)

Certainly, the artists are working the same theme of the proximity of inappropriate pants to the plane upon which the pants-wearer is standing. But I find The Green Brothers' complaint — "The General's song have the same intent, idea and in part the same message" — unpersuasive, though I appreciate the subtlety of "in part."

Surely, the part of the message that is the simple disapproval of giant, saggy pants is the same, but other than that, Platt heads straight for mockery aimed at the pride of the individual. The Green Brothers are imploring young men to become upstanding members of the community, with pants-improvement being merely the beginning or the symbol of an extensive self-betterment project that ought to be undertaken not for the psychological boon to the individual but for the benefit of society.

Platt is an excitable old guy squealing with comic outrage: "You're looking like a fool with your pants on the ground." The Green Brothers, by contrast, sound more like community leaders the public school brought in to lecture to the kids in a musical style the authorities think might reach them about the importance of taking responsibility in all aspects of life to send a message to others about how to be a good role model in the community. The Green Brothers mean well and have come to help, while Larry Platt is mad and venting.

In short, Platt wins in the battle of the pants songs. (And I'm not talking about copyright law. You can't copyright ideas, and even if you could, how could anyone claim to have originated the idea of disapproving of oversized pants?) Platt is more entertaining because he's all about expressing himself, whereas The Green Brothers are earnestly trying to tell other people what to do. And Platt's concern is the dignity of the individual, whereas The Green Brothers want the individual to assume the proper role for the good of the whole.

If this were politics — and it kind of is — we'd characterize Platt as right-wing and The Green Brothers as left-wing. The Green Brothers are kind of Obama, while Platt is McCain.

"Sealing an online product off from the core online experience seems to me to be a medium at war with itself and a business not fully aware of the actual product it is creating."

"[The New York Times is] having a hell of a time monetizing [the web] because it is too vast, too borderless, too fluid to carve out property on it. It's like trying to make a profit in a communist state.... [Bloggers have] feel optimistic... because we've tried to take advantage of this new dimension, by being a totally open source portal, a hub, a node of conversation and argument. This brings in readers and advertizers. Are the advertizers enough to finance a news organization? Not yet, and maybe never.... The NYT may be smart in doing what it's doing... but it may lead to even greater traffic for blogs that can merely cite or summarize NYT pieces and have small excerpts as fair use as well..."

So writes Andrew Sullivan, who seems to be overcorrecting his tendency toward British spelling.

That time Glenn Reynolds reacted to me with an "arrogant sneer and a coiled physicality."

And purportedly thought "Now get your fuckin' shinebox," according to this blog, which Glenn likes/pretends to like, but which fails to comply with Flickr terms of service — by not linking to the photo page — and my Creative Commons license — by not giving me credit for the photograph I took.

I think it's very funny blog too, actually. I'm not even sure what I want more, credit for the photograph of mine that it used or an Althouse-focused equivalent of Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language. I mean if Charles Johnson is going to say "Glenn Reynolds is ... engaging in political analysis via Flickr. And Ann Althouse, too!" and then direct readers to the Analyze Glenn Reynolds’ Body Language blog, where's the parity?

"J.D. Salinger invented blogs, according to a federal judge..."

"... who granted a temporary injunction yesterday against John David California's planned 'parody' of Catcher in the Rye."

That's Gawker's take on the judicial opinion that said:

Both narratives are told from the first-person point of view of a sarcastic, often uncouth protagonist who relies heavily on slang, euphemisms and colloquialisms, makes constant digression and asides, refers to readers in the second person, constantly assures the reader that he is being honest and that he is giving them the truth.

[Insert you own slangy, sarcastic, digressive aside against the judge... who is probably a phony.]

Found guilty of downloading 24 songs, a woman is fined $1,900,000.

In federal court in Minnesota. That's $80,000 for each of her selections, works by Linkin Park, Gloria Estafan and so forth.

IN THE COMMENTS: Marcia said:

Now you see why we need empathetic judges.

To rein in the heartless corporate thugs that we call jurors.

The most pirated movie of the week is... what?!

"He's Just Not That Into You."

What sort of people pirate?

My theory: It's just a great, great title.

"Exceptionally nonsensical bounteousness" confuses David Post.

Why? Isn't it obvious? The internet is written for robots.

"If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree."

Early peaches, this morning:



Peaches on a peach tree naturally makes me think of song lyrics, and I found this on Wikipedia:

The ‘peaches’ verse ["If you don't like my peaches/Don't you shake my tree/'n Get out of my orchard/Let my peaches be," in "Sitting on Top of the World"] has a long history in popular music. It appears as the chorus of an unpublished song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches / You'd better stop shaking my tree.” The song "Mamma's Got the Blues", written by Clarence Williams and S. Martin and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1923, has the line: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be". In her version of "St. Louis Blues", Ella Fitzgerald sang, "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? / Stay out of my orchard, and let my peach tree be". In 1929 Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded “Peach Orchard Mama” ("... you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me / I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). In later years lines using similar imagery were used in “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins and “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. Ahmet Ertegun was able to convince Miller to pay him US$50,000, claiming authorship of the line in his song "Lovey Dovey". This verse and its ubiquitous usage is an example of the tradition of ‘floating lyrics’ (also called 'maverick stanzas') in folk-music tradition.

In "The Joker," it's "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree." Video.

"Matchbox" is the most familiar one to me, and it's the version I've put in the post title: "If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree." (Here's Carl Perkins, performing the song I learned from The Beatles.) Though the history of the "floating lyric" suggests the opposite, Carl is talking about the masculine anatomy.

"Founding Bloggers' incorporation of the CNN footage was clearly for the purpose of criticizing and commenting on Roesgen's reporting..."

"... which has come under heavy fire in the conservative blogosphere (and even from a former CNN reporter) for her hostile interactions with tea-partiers."

Ah! A perfect copyright vs. fair use fight. Go to the link for a crisp, clear explanation of the law and the DMCA procedures.

And let's all enjoy the CNN-embarrassing video one more time:



(Via Instapundit.)