stop. start. stutter.

So apparently we're having some problems with commenting here, which I am working on. (It's tough being your own IT department.) In the meantime, if it doesn't work here (though I think I might have fixed it) you can comment on the LJ feed, although entries there disappear after two weeks; I do read comments over there, too.

Speaking of comments on the LJ feed, infaile asked a question in the comments this morning, following up on the DMCA entry. Cutting it down to the barest essentials:

I am curious as to whether or not the DMCA applies to multiple countries, or just the States. Living in Australia, and having been quite active on deviantART for a few years now, I was always under the (admittedly, un-researched) impression that copyright in one country would be recognised by law courts in another. Recently, I had a chance to read [a friend's] dA journal about how one of her pieces was used without her permission in an advertising campaign. To my knowledge, she lives in Hong Kong (or somewhere else in Asia) and the offending party is based in the States. When pursuing legal action, she was told that she couldn't sue because the work in question wasn't copyrighted in the United States, and despite the picture being exactly the same as the one she'd posted in her dA gallery, she apparently couldn't "prove conclusively" that it was the exact same image.

Okay, as usual, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice; if you need legal advice, consult a lawyer who is licensed to practice in your jurisdiction.

That having been said, I'm afraid that your friend's getting a total runaround. International copyright is a tangled mess, but it's governed by the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, which states that copyright is applied to a work at the moment of its creation, and that you don't have to apply for a formal copyright in order to be protected by copyright laws and treaties. The Berne Convention also includes reciprocity of copyright: a copyright from any one signatory nation is honored in any other signatory nation. I know that Hong Kong's a signatory to the Berne Convention, even after reversion to China. I'm not sure which other Asian countries are, not without looking them up. International copyright law is overseen by the World Intellectual Property Organization these days, which specifically upholds Berne.

In other words, your friend's run into a bunch of assholes who think that the chances of some chick from Hong Kong bringing legal action against them are so small as to be an acceptable risk, and the legal advice she got is either from someone who doesn't know the law, or who wants to blow her off so she stops making trouble for them.

And, so that this entry isn't entirely composed of boring stuff, have a list of seven musicians or groups you might not know about, courtesy of the Internet Live Music Archive:

1. A Silver Mt. Zion: Side project of Godspeed You! Black Emperor; they're both haunting and spiritual and beautifully political at the same time. Good background writing music; I usually prefer background-writing music to be instrumental or in languages other than English, just so it doesn't interfere with my verbal centers, but for some reason, this doesn't trip me.

2. Cowboy Junkies: I like their earlier stuff better than what they're doing now, but they're still pretty fabulous. A little bit jazzy, a little bit bluegrassy, a little bit pop. I want to lick their lead singer's voice. (And possibly their lead singer, but I try not to say things like that in public too often.)

3. David Rovics: Just your good old-fashioned lefty political hippie guy-with-a-guitar folk protest music. Gotta love it!

4. Mike Doughty: Former frontman of Soul Coughing (see below!) who's reinvented both his life and his music when neither one was satisfying him anymore. Brilliant lyrics, amazing guitar work, and when he added in keyboard and drums, it didn't distract from the music or feel grafted on the way it so often does; it enhanced it. One of my favorite artists, ever, period-and-of-sentence.

5. Moxy Fruvous: Pretty much anything I could say about Fruvous would be inadequate, so I'll keep it to the bare minimum: four of the most musically-talented guys you could ever imagine, producing a sort of political street-theatre folk rock indie vibe that somehow manages to be outrageously funny and outrageously serious at the same time. Not to mention that their covers of various stuff will ruin you for ever hearing the original again. (I cannot hear "Dancing Queen" without singing "Angel of Harlem" along with it.) The day they stopped touring and recording together was a sad day indeed.

6. Rusted Root: ...Okay, about the only way I can describe them is sort of a fusion of bluegrass, zydeco, and tribal percussion. With a very high chair-wiggle factor.

7. Soul Coughing: Pretty much the quintessential late-90s New York cult band: a gleeful mixture of jazz groove, electronica, hip-hop, and slam poetry, with songs that make absolutely no sense when you see the lyrics written out, and cause you to go "Oh! I get it now!" when you hear Doughty singing (or speaking) them. Is Chicago! Is not Chicago! ...Yeah, the songs make more sense when you know that the band was usually drugged out of their minds when they were writing or performing them.