Trippy
Old news, but if I haven’t seen it, it’s new to me: Barney vs. 2Pac
Thing a Week 13 – Drive
I don’t know what’s going on here, other to say that the gentleman in this song likes his car very much and doesn’t speak English that well. This is mostly a sketch at this point, it could stand to be dressed up quite a bit, but studio time was hard to come by this week so you’re going to have to suffer. I’m assuming that all the car companies will want to license it immediately for their commercials about people who LOVE TO DRIVE, especially if the car in the commercial is a Scion xB. All pimped out and phat. As they used to say in my day, “a bad ride.”
Here is the song: Drive
Illegal Lyrics
From Billboard via BoingBoing, a little good news from the front. A guy named Walter Ritter created a free application called Pearlyrics, which displays the lyrics of the song that’s currently playing in iTunes. If there are lyrics in the mp3, it displays those, otherwise it searches a few lyrics websites and saves what it finds. It’s a pretty good idea, and it certainly doesn’t sound like it should be illegal. Nonetheless, Warner/Chappell sent a cease and desist letter, and Ritter pulled it from the site to avoid any legal entanglements.
The EFF posted an open letter to Warner/Chappell, pointing out that since the software is only doing what any user could legally do with their hands and an internet browser, it’s not in fact an infringement of US copyright law. They also suggest that making legal threats against the makers of such software might expose Warner/Chappell to federal liability. Yesterday Warner/Chappell apologized to Walter Ritter, who has a nice post on the Pearlyrics site about it.
I’m so happy I could buy a CD. I think the high-profile Sony disaster has made content owners a little more careful about throwing their weight around – nobody wants to come across as dumb and anti-consumer as Sony did. It’s also nice to know that some actual grown-up lawyers like the ones at EFF are looking out for our interests.
Onion AV
The bigtime has finally found me – a couple of people have written to tell me that Baby Got Back got a nice mention in the Onion AV Club this week, under Great Cover Songs of 2005. Thanks Onion! I like the designation “humorist,” I’m going to start putting that on business cards.
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