Biography
Sandor was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1974, but grew up mostly in the Philadelphia area. He studied painting at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York, but dropped out of art school shortly thereafter. He has since studied psychology, education, addiction and sociology. Sandor has lived in Portland, Oregon, as well as various cities in Florida. He currently resides in Philadelphia.
Identifying with social movements such as the free culture movement and anarchism, Sandor is philosophically opposed to copyright laws. He remains a staunch advocate of DIY production, as well as the Internet, and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks as a means for the creative community to bypass the RIAA and corporate influence over music production and distribution.
Employing a creative commons license, he has published most of his music in an open source format, whereby a song is treated as a work-in-progress; revisions are allowed (and encouraged) by anyone who wishes to collaborate on the work, so long as these adaptations remain open content. Leader Clears the Lunar aims to take this further by donating to, and adapting works from, the public domain. Through the collaborative efforts of the collective's artists, songs are designed to be "written but never finished".
Criticism of copyright, perhaps outright anti-copyright sentiment, is a dissenting view of the current state of copyright law or copyright as a concept. Critical groups often discuss philosophical, economical, or social rationales of such laws and the laws' implementations, the benefits of which they claim do not justify the policy's costs to society. They advocate for changing the current system, though different groups have different ideas of what that change should be. Some call for remission of the policies to a previous state—copyright once covered few categories of things and had shorter term limits—or they may seek to expand concepts like fair use that allow permissionless copying. Others seek the abolition of copyright itself.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a non-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland and founded in Italy in 1933. It operates a secretariat based in London, with regional offices in Brussels, Hong Kong, Miami and Nairobi.
A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. CC provides an author flexibility and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.
Music Canada is a non-profit trade organization that was founded 9 April 1963 to represent the interests of companies that record, manufacture, produce, and distribute music in Canada. It also offers benefits to some of Canada's leading independent record labels and distributors.
Remix culture, sometimes read-write culture, is a term describing a society that allows and encourages derivative works by combining or editing existing materials to produce a new creative work or product. A remix culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. While combining elements has always been a common practice of artists of all domains throughout human history, the growth of exclusive copyright restrictions in the last several decades limits this practice more and more by the legal chilling effect. In reaction, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who considers remixing a desirable concept for human creativity, has worked since the early 2000s on a transfer of the remixing concept into the digital age. Lessig founded the Creative Commons in 2001, which released Licenses as tools to enable remix culture again, as remixing is legally prevented by the default exclusive copyright regime applied currently on intellectual property. The remix culture for cultural works is related to and inspired by the earlier Free and open-source software for software movement, which encourages the reuse and remixing of software works.
The free-culture movement is a social movement that promotes the freedom to distribute and modify the creative works of others in the form of free content or open content without compensation to, or the consent of, the work's original creators, by using the Internet and other forms of media.
Peer production is a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the labor of many people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.
Mass collaboration is a form of collective action that occurs when large numbers of people work independently on a single project, often modular in its nature. Such projects typically take place on the internet using social software and computer-supported collaboration tools such as wiki technologies, which provide a potentially infinite hypertextual substrate within which the collaboration may be situated. Open source software such as Linux was developed via mass collaboration.
Peer-to-peer file sharing is the distribution and sharing of digital media using peer-to-peer (P2P) networking technology. P2P file sharing allows users to access media files such as books, music, movies, and games using a P2P software program that searches for other connected computers on a P2P network to locate the desired content. The nodes (peers) of such networks are end-user computers and distribution servers.
Various copyright alternatives in an alternative compensation systems (ACS) have been proposed as ways to allow the widespread reproduction of digital copyrighted works while still paying the authors and copyright owners of those works. This article only discusses those proposals which involve some form of government intervention. Other models, such as the street performer protocol or voluntary collective licenses, could arguably be called "alternative compensation systems" although they are very different and generally less effective at solving the free rider problem.
Good Copy Bad Copy is a 2007 documentary film about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, peer-to-peer file sharing and other technological advances, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers, producers, artists and filesharing service providers.
A free content, libre content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.
The open-source model is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. A main principle of open-source software development is peer production, with products such as source code, blueprints, and documentation freely available to the public. The open-source movement in software began as a response to the limitations of proprietary code. The model is used for projects such as in open-source appropriate technology, and open-source drug discovery.
File sharing is the practice of distributing or providing access to digital media, such as computer programs, multimedia, documents or electronic books. File sharing may be achieved in a number of ways. Common methods of storage, transmission and dispersion include manual sharing utilizing removable media, centralized servers on computer networks, World Wide Web-based hyperlinked documents, and the use of distributed peer-to-peer networking.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a trade organization that represents the recording industry in the United States. Its members consist of record labels and distributors, which the RIAA says "create, manufacture, and/or distribute approximately 85% of all legally sold recorded music in the United States". The RIAA headquarters is in Washington, D.C.
Brian Fitzgerald is an Australian legal academic and barrister. He is an intellectual property and information technology/internet lawyer who has pioneered the teaching of internet/cyber law in Australia. Fitzgerald was a specialist research professor at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) until February 2012, when he became the inaugural executive dean of law at the Australian Catholic University's Faculty of Law and Business.
The Copyright Alliance is a nonprofit, nonpartisan 501(c)(4) organization representing artistic creators across a broad range of copyright disciplines.
The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created.
Participants in an online music scene who rearrange spliced parts of musical pieces form mashup culture. The audio-files are normally in MP3 format and spliced with audio-editing software online. The new, edited song is called mashup. The expression mashup culture is also strongly connected to mashup in music. Even though it was not originally a political community, the production of mash-up music is related to the issue of copyright. Mashup Culture is even regarded as "a response to larger technological, institutional, and social contexts".
Corey Michael Mixter known professionally under his pseudonym Titanic Sinclair, is an American director, and internet personality. He was previously one-half of the indie pop duo Mars Argo and a creative collaborator of American singer and YouTube personality Poppy.
