Learning by Doing

The Pirate Bay, those naughty Swedes that continually thumb their noses at the recording industry, have set up a blog hosting service. For little effort, and no money, you can have your very own *.baywords.com blog. When I checked a few minutes ago, there were 6 such blogs, a second later there were 7. Watch the search “site:baywords.com” to find more as they show up. Most seemed like normal moronic blogs, but there was one containing the links to the booty that The Pirate Bay so often plunders and distributes, Robin Hood fashion, and there was another with links to traditional hacking information.

I’m glad there’s another option for those people who have things to say that wouldn’t be allowed on US soil. The major class I’m thinking of are those people who face legal threats from corporations like Monster Cables, known for their bullying of critics.

via The Register

UPDATE 4/18/2008: Google now shows “about 141″ sites on baywords.com.

Brian Flemming said,” The World is Copyrighted. Do Not Make Art of It.”

He’s referring to his feelings after seeing a sadly funny training film for commercial photographers on what not to film or take pictures of. Link via LessigBlog.

I understand that artists need to eat too. I am a willing and paying consumer of media and the arts. Make content available in the manner in which I want to receive it and I am too happy to have the opportunity to get it. Just accept that if it moves or inspires other people, they are going to want to make more art from that inspiration, not just hang it on their wall. This exposes your work to more people, and you’ll very likely have more people that become consumers of your work.

Maybe it’s all the fault of our educational system, separating the Arts and Sciences. Artists wouldn’t know an exponential growth curve if they sat on a really pointy one. The intellectual bar to become an artist has become so low that we have a whole bunch of really dumb people who are being taken advantage of by publishers and recording companies. This is what has allowed the RIAA to become so powerful. Get a whole bunch of dumb people to sign their lives over to you for a relatively paltry sum, then market their tripe to a equally dumb TV narcotized audience. I guess I can’t blame even some of the smart artists for realizing that the way to a quick buck lies in the fact that there will always be more sheep than shepherds, but I can’t help thinking that the situation would be different if we had started requiring even art majors to take and pass organic chemistry and molecular biology many years ago.