__November got lots of mash notes __gushing about the righteous new kind of copyright - and cool free music - on The Wired CD. Other readers ripped us a new one. "It's stealing!" cried the old regime's defenders. (Steal a moment to read the fine print.) "I'm waiting," wrote a typically plaintive musician, "for the part that explains how the artist makes money???" (Actually, the full creative license lets you sell samples of other artists' music.) Some folks attacked the tunes - "This is a celebration of mass production and depersonalization" - while some just got personal: "The Beasties and Chuck D are hypocritical blowhards, aging pirates who want to reminisce about the good old days of pillaging and plundering, but sit in mansions protecting all the gold doubloons they claim not to have 'stolen' in the first place." (Hello, nasty!) Then there was the clever but slightly confused fella who promised to "fight for my ought-to-be-right to get my money back." Free your mind - the rest will follow.
Rip. Sample. Mash. Share.
The Wired CD was a great idea ("Sample the Future," 12.11). I'm glad some musicians recognize that file-sharing can be used to an advantage. The CD exposed me to several artists I had never heard of. Now I'll be buying a couple of CDs this week. I hope the artists who were hesitant to submit a song will change their minds and use this as a means to introduce others to their music. I totally agree with "Give up a little to get back a lot."
John Barrington
Petersburg, Virginia
I read the article about Creative Commons licensing, and then visited Creativecommons.org and looked at the various options available to publishers. I liked what I saw so much that now all three of my CDs (self-published) carry Creative Commons licenses. Thank you for bringing this system to my attention!
Jack Farnsworth III
Spanaway, Washington
The Creative Commons license is nothing new. It has always been legal to share music if the copyright owners give you permission. Almost unanimously, they choose not to. You think the reason is because they don't have a well-worded license? Wired acts like the Creative Commons license is some profound revolutionary shift in copyright management, but all you're doing is begging artists to give their music away for free.
Evan Jacover
Chicago, Illinois
Wired paints a rosy picture of the creative freedom offered by digital sampling and remixing and compares it to the tradition of musicians borrowing riffs from their forebears. But there's an enormous difference between hearing a Muddy Waters riff, picking up a guitar to learn to play it, and merely sampling the recording itself. The former encourages creativity. But with digital sampling, there's no need for any learning to take place. Thus a key step in the creative process is lost, and along with it the originality that makes music meaningful. One need only listen to the CD that accompanies this issue to hear the discouraging, depressing results of this loss.
Andrew Samet
Roselle Park, New Jersey
Any point that you try to make about the nobility of free music exchange is negated by the disclaimer on page 26: "Reproduction without permission is prohibited." Even the Rants + Raves disclaimer states "Submissions become the property of the publication." Share the wealth, indeed.
Scott Neal
Portland, Oregon
Rosen-Colored Glasses
Like Hilary Rosen, I find Creative Commons' ideas interesting and provocative ("How I Learned to Love Larry," 12.11). But if it took a full year for Wired magazine to pull together 16 songs under a CC license - even with your promotional power to persuade artists to contribute. Forgive me if I remain unconvinced of its commercial potential.
Kurt Wimmer
Washington, DC
The New Coke
Regarding "The Mystery of the Coca Plant That Wouldn't Die" (12.11): great article. The fact that Joshua Davis even considered going to Bogot� for research - let alone actually hiking in the hills in rural coca-farming Colombia and smuggling the leaves back on a plane - marks him as a torrential badass in my book.
Michael Frumin
Brooklyn, New York
The Unreal Thing
How nice that the creators of the latest batch of virtual women have moved beyond the more-bits-for-bigger-tits obsession exemplified by Lara Croft. However, of the five "models" profiled in "Don't Hate Me Because I'm Digital" (12.11), Kaya is the only one who falls within the healthy-weight range established by the American Medical Association. According to their charts, the other four "weigh" 10 to 20 pounds less than the lowest healthy amount for a woman that height. In other words, they still represent a distorted ideal that could not be met by a live, healthy woman. Then again, perhaps they're more real than we think, and they all just lied about their weight.
Judy Nollet
Eagan, Minnesota
Brand on the Run
The fact that brand loyalty is shrinking as enlightened consumers shop for bargains should come as no surprise to anyone ("The Decline of Brands," 12.11).
It wasn't long ago that marketers lauded the emergence of the Web, as it allowed them to reach more consumers. Now marketers are seeing those savvy, educated consumers flee in droves toward the competition's lower-priced products. As it turns out, capitalism is one of the few institutions that adapts well to technological shifts, even though these shifts often seem to threaten its very existence.
James W. Gabberty
New York, New York
The explanation that the decline of brands is due to competition, informed consumers, and constant innovation is insufficient. There's another factor wreaking havoc. Over the years, brands have lost their meaning because advertising campaigns developed by creative types have been clever and witty, but often not relevant.
Once, brands defined the meaning and mode of civilization: fresher-smelling laundry, tastier tuna, et cetera. Tide used to "get dirt out." Now it "works wonders," a vacuous, unprovable claim. Do Tide customers think that getting their laundry clean is a miracle? Do they have an unmet psychological need to deify their detergent? Of course not. Creative-led marketing has wrought the empty brand.
Brian Gibbs
Bellevue, Washington
Deus Ex Machina
"The Geek Guide to Kosher Machines" (12.11) is essentially all about cheating. I don't get it. Why would an Orthodox Jew like Jonah Ottensaser help other Jews skirt around laws they're supposed to follow? Do they really think God won't notice?
Matthew Savard
Evanston, Illinois
Where's the Al Gore-ithm?
In "How Pong Invented the Internet" (Start, 12.11), you show the relationships between people and companies and how they correlate to the invention of the Internet. I did not see Al Gore in there anywhere. This must be some kind of misprint, right?
Travis Opheim
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Fight for Your Right to TiVo
Matthew Zinn's comment about consumers voting with their feet is disingenuous ("Has TiVo Forsaken Us?," View, 12.11). I purchased my TiVo months ago. Now it's sending a download that changes the rules. Zinn's claim that I can refuse to buy TiVo is a pat public relations answer. Will Zinn refund my money? More important, I travel a lot. I like to record programs to DVD so that I can watch my favorite shows on planes or in hotel rooms. TiVo is moving away from giving me that flexibility.
Eugene Y. Chang
Lexington, Massachusetts
Undo
• The Cool and the Uncool: In "If You Secretly Like Michael Bolton, We'll Know" (12.11), Wired should have indicated that Steven Quartz of Caltech's Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab disputes writer Jennifer Kahn's assertion that his changing the names of personality categories constituted a "revised assessment" of the experiment. Also, the article should have credited Quartz as the source of the story's analysis of the relationship between a subject's personality and his results in the experiment.
• Tipping the Scales: The Samsung YP-T5H MP3 player weighs 0.85 ounce (Test, 12.11).
